“If your family lives in the south of France, then where do you live?” I asked Gideon.
“In an apartment in Chelsea now, but I’m hardly there at all except to shower and sleep. If that.” He sighed. Over the last three days, he’d obviously had as little sleep as me. Maybe even less. “Before I got my own place, I lived with Uncle Falk in Greenwich since I was eleven. When my mother met Monsieur Po-Face and wanted to leave this country, of course the Guardians objected. After all, there were only a few years to go until my initiation journey, and I still had a lot to learn.”
“And your mother left you alone?” My mum could never have brought herself to do such a thing, I was sure of that.
Gideon shrugged his shoulders. “I like my uncle. He’s okay when he’s not putting on airs as Grand Master of the Lodge. Anyway, I’d a thousand times sooner be with him than my so-called stepfather.”
“But…” I hardly dared to ask, so I just whispered it. “But don’t you miss her?”
Another shrug of the shoulders. “Until I was fifteen, when I could still go away safely, I always spent the holidays in France with her. And my mother comes to London at least twice a year, officially to see me, but to spend Monsieur Bertelin’s money is more like it. She has a weakness for clothes and shoes and antique jewelry. And four-star macrobiotic restaurants.”
The woman sounded like a real cozy, picture-book mum. “What about your brother?”
“Raphael? He’s a real little Frenchman now. Calls Po-Face Papa and is going to inherit the platinum-parts empire someday. Although right now it looks as if he won’t even pass his final school exams, lazy kid. He’d rather hang out with girls than study.” Gideon put an arm on the back of the seat behind me, and my breathing frequency instantly stepped up. “Why are you looking so shocked? Not feeling sorry for me or anything, are you?”
“A bit,” I said honestly, thinking of an eleven-year-old boy left behind on his own in England. With mystery mongers who made him take fencing lessons and learn to play the violin. And polo! “Falk isn’t even your real uncle, just a distant relation.”
There was an angry hoot behind us. The taxi driver looked up only briefly to move the car on a yard or so, without taking much of his attention away from his book. I just hoped he wasn’t in the middle of a really exciting chapter.
Gideon seemed to take no notice of him. “Falk’s always been like a father to me,” he said. He looked sideways at me with a wry smile. “Really, you don’t have to look at me as if I were David Copperfield.”
What was that all about? Why would I think he was David Copperfield?
Gideon groaned. “I mean the character out of the Dickens novel, not the magician. Don’t you ever read a book?”
There he went again, the old supercilious Gideon. My head had been reeling with all those friendly confidences. Oddly enough, I was almost relieved to have my obnoxious traveling companion back. I looked as haughty as possible and moved slightly away from him. “To be honest, I prefer modern literature.”
“You do?” Gideon’s eyes were bright with amusement. “Like what, for example?”
He wasn’t to know that my cousin Charlotte had been regularly asking me the same question for years, and just as arrogantly. In fact I read quite a lot of books, and I’m always ready to talk about them, but as Charlotte always dismissed with contempt whatever I was reading as “undemanding” or “stupid girly stuff,” the time came when I’d had enough, and once and for all, I spoilt her fun. Sometimes you have to turn people’s own weapons against them. The trick of it is not to show any hesitation at all as you speak, and to weave in the name of at least one genuine, well-known, bestselling author, preferably if you’ve really read that author’s book. Oh, and in addition, the more exotic and outlandish the names, the better.
I raised my chin and looked Gideon right in the eye. “Well, for instance I like George Matussek, Wally Lamb, Pyotr Selvyeniki, Liisa Tikaanen—in fact, I think Finnish writers are great, they have their own special brand of humor—and then I read everything by Jack August Merrywether, although I was a little disappointed by his last book. I like Helen Marundi, of course, Tahuro Yashamoto, Lawrence Delaney, and then there’s Grimphood, Tcherkovsky, Maland, Pitt.…”
Gideon was looking totally taken aback.
I rolled my eyes. “Rudolf Pitt, of course, not Brad.”
The corners of his mouth were twitching slightly.
“Although I have to say I really didn’t much care for Amethyst Snow,” I quickly went on. “Too many high-flown metaphors, don’t you agree? All the time I was reading it, I kept thinking someone must have ghosted it for him.”
“Amethyst Snow?” repeated Gideon, and now he was definitely smiling. “Yes, right, I thought it was terribly pompous too. Although I considered The Amber Avalanche remarkably good.”
I couldn’t help it—I had to smile back. “Yes, he definitely deserved the Austrian State Prize for Literature for The Amber Avalanche. What do you think of Takoshi Mahuro?”
“His early work is okay, but I get rather tired of the way he keeps going back to his childhood traumas,” said Gideon. “When it comes to Japanese writers, I prefer Yamamoto Kawasaki or Haruki Murakami.”
I was giggling helplessly now. “But Murakami is real!”
“I know,” said Gideon. “Charlotte gave me one of his books. Next time we’re discussing literature, I’ll recommend her to read Amethyst Snow, by … what was his name again?”
“Rudolf Pitt.” So Charlotte had given him a book? How—er, how nice of her. Fancy thinking of that. And what else did they do together, besides discuss literature? My fit of the giggles had evaporated, just like that. How could I simply sit here talking away to Gideon as if nothing had happened between us? There were a few basic points we ought to have cleared up first. I stared at him and took a deep breath, without knowing exactly what I wanted to ask him.
Why did you kiss me?
“Here we are,” said Gideon.