shirt, but she had said nothing, so he pressed on and asked if she could book him a room in a specific quarter.
The girl – she had been little more than that, for all her thin black suit and the slick vermilion smile painted onto her lips – had taken out a map. Daniel could have pointed to the street because he had looked it up to make sure it existed, but she had been absorbed in the mechanics of her own efficiency.
‘It must be an important occasion,’ she said, pecking at her computer. Her eyes flicked up, inviting him to explain, as if it were part of her job to offer curiosity so that travellers could talk about their plans and be admired for their adventurous spirits; or maybe so that they could be reassured they were doing the right thing.
‘It’s the right thing to do,’ he had said, and been startled to find he had spoken aloud.
‘I’m sure it is.’ The girl had smiled, offering the possibility of a week in Hong Kong or in Singapore as a stopover. Daniel had shaken his head, saying again that he only needed to go to Paris for one day and would like to return to Australia the next day.
She had regarded him with fleeting severity, as if she thought he was making some sort of joke.
‘I’m afraid that is not possible,’ she had said finally. She looked at her computer screen and began to type rapidly. Her face grew smooth and her expression bland, as if the computer had consumed her personality. Then the quick, slick smile again. ‘The soonest I can get you home is five days from the date you fly. There are already heavy bookings because it will be the European summer, and there is a World Cup game. If you could go on another date . . .’
‘No,’ he had said softly.
In the end, he had agreed to the extra days, but the decision had made him uneasy because it had been forced on him. The travel agent had explained that countries wanted more tourists, and there were various kinds of inducements and controls. But Daniel had felt that under the little pat of truth were the bones of something harder.
In the Roissybus, he took the back seat because it looked as if his long legs would fit better there. He found himself pressed between a teacher from a Friends school in Baltimore and a German geneticist. He was amazed at how easily and quickly they told their business to one another and to him.
‘What about you?’ the American teacher on his left asked with friendly insistence.
‘What is a jackaroo?’ the geneticist asked when Daniel had told them his job. The faint slurring of the edges of words that was her accent made her sound gentle, and she looked like someone’s elderly aunt, but Daniel reminded himself not to be taken in by appearances. He knew what a geneticist did.
‘Mess with the business of God, they do,’ Teatree had said wrathfully one night by the campfire when someone had started talking about the sheep they cloned. ‘Scientists think they can do anything. Splitting the atom and cloning Hitler. Growing crops of arms and legs and eyes,’ he had said indignantly.
‘A sort of Australian cowboy,’ the American told the geneticist.
Daniel struggled to think of a question to ask them, because his indifference seemed impolite. A teacher had once written on one of his reports that he had a lazy mind. He didn’t know if that was true or not. The geneticist told the American she had been presenting a paper at a conference in Brisbane on the future of corn and regretted there had been no time to visit the outback. Ouwtbeck, she said. The American teacher said he had been on a short exchange to an Australian Quaker school in Tasmania.
Daniel said he had a meeting in Paris. ‘Not a business meeting,’ he added, to short-circuit the questions.
‘Personal business.’ The geneticist smiled and the teacher fell silent. Abruptly Daniel decided to tell them the truth.
‘I’m going to meet someone in place of a man who died. I promised to go in his place and explain.’
‘How sad,’ the geneticist exclaimed softly. ‘He will come to meet his friend and learn that he is dead.’ Det, she said.
‘It’s a woman,’ he said.
The teacher gave Daniel a look of sober approval. ‘You are a good friend. To go all that way, instead of giving her the news over the