A Clean Pair of Hands by Oscar Reynard Page B

selective and internationally famous Institut d’Etudes Politiques, universally known as Sciences Po , in Paris. According to their publicity, Sciences Po’s undergraduate programme ‘…encourages intellectual courage and the ability to face adversity and cope with complexity’. The Paris campus is at St Germain des Près close to French government buildings. All the Bodins and extended family were very proud that Lydia had achieved recognition for her talent, and marvelled at this launch pad from which she could reach for the top in whatever career she chose.
    At this point Michel Bodin couldn’t resist forming an idea that he should identify an ideal husband for his daughter, or at least speculate on an acceptable profile.He would not, could not, go as far as to trying to arrange a marriage. His wife and daughter would laugh at him, but he would still act as a caring father and maybe make some suggestions or facilitate some introductions. When he started thinking about it, he realised that his problem was that none of his friends and acquaintances had sons who were good enough for Lydia. He consciously went through the list and dismissed them all on the grounds that Lydia would probably reject them anyway. He would have to give more thought to the matter. Meanwhile, he bought a small studio apartment near the campus, so that Lydia would not have to commute daily. It provided her with independence and the freedom to explore life in any way she liked beyond parental comment and control.
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    As George Milton had already heard, Michel’s close friend Johnny Mendes and his Haitian wife Ayida ran a hotel in the eastern suburbs of Paris. What he didn’t know then was its reputation as a hostel for what the French call ‘five to seven’ encounters (5pm to 7pm), allowing rooms to be let for a couple of hours for businessmen to entertain a partner on the way home, and over time, hotel owners had widened the range of personal services offered to this market. This particular hotel was one of the places where Michel entertained his clients, and as the facts seeped out later, they revealed that Johnny’s wife Ayida, and their daughter Beatrice, formed part of the personal services provision. When George once naively spoke admiringly of Beatrice and suggested to Estelle’s friend Zu that she would make a nice girlfriend for him he laughed loudly. “Oh yes,” he chuckled, “everybody’s been there.” George stopped and reflected on this revelation, slightly piqued that he was not ‘everybody’.
    He had met Beatrice once as he and Thérèse werearriving at a party that Michel and Charlotte were organising in a large Paris hotel, and for some reason Beatrice was on her way out. She was then about eighteen, dressed conservatively in a black overcoat, dark patterned tights and high boots, with a colourful neck scarf and tumbling black curly hair. George thought she was a bright, stylishly turned-out girl just as you would expect from a French middle-class family. He also noticed that she was taller and more voluptuously built than her mother, and her face was quite different. It was extraordinary and quite hard not to study it to a point of embarrassment. Beatrice had large pale grey slanting eyes, which she emphasised with make-up, high apparent cheek bones, and a natural pout, which she used to effect. George imagined that some women would spend a fortune on cosmetic surgery to try to get their faces to look remotely like this. As she spoke, Beatrice’s pout opened into a wide smile revealing perfectly even white teeth, an opportunity to advertise what corrective dentistry could achieve, except she had it naturally and she smiled a lot. George’s conclusion was that in some cultures where it is considered normal for men to have no self-control, and where men make up the rules, this young woman would definitely be covered in a black tent or punished