“A hundred! Fifty would have been plenty. But perhaps it is as well. Josette asks us to have a drink with her in her dressing-room. She is leaving Istanbul to-morrow, and does not wish to come out here. She will have to speak to so many people, and she has packing to do.”
“Shan’t we be rather a nuisance?”
“My dear fellow, she is anxious to meet you. She saw you while she was dancing. When I told her that you were an Englishman, she was delighted. We can leave these drinks here.”
Mademoiselle Josette’s dressing-room was a space about eight feet square, partitioned off from the other half of what appeared to be the proprietor’s office by a brown curtain. The three solid walls were covered with faded pink wall-paper with stripes of blue: there were greasy patches here and there where people had leaned against them. The room contained two bent-wood chairs and two rickety dressing tables littered with cream jars and dirty make-up towels. There was a mixed smell of stale cigarette smoke, face powder, and damp upholstery.
As they went in in response to a grunt of “Entrez” from the partner, José, he got up from his dressing table. Still wiping the grease paint from his face, he walked out without a glance at them. For some reason, Kopeikin winked at Graham. Josette was leaning forward in her chair dabbing intently at one of her eyebrows with a swab of damp cotton-wool. She had discarded her costume, and put on a rose velvet house-coat. Her hair hung down loosely about her head as if she had shaken it out and brushed it. It was really, Graham thought, very beautiful hair. She began to speak in slow, careful English, punctuating the words with dabs.
“Please excuse me. It is this filthy paint. It … Merde!”
She threw the swab down impatiently, stood up suddenly, and turned to face them.
In the hard light of the unshaded bulb above her head she looked smaller than she had looked on the dance floor; and a trifle haggard. Graham, thinking of his Stephanie’s rather buxom good looks, reflected that the woman before him would probably be quite plain in ten years’ time. He was in the habit of comparing other women with his wife. As a method of disguising from himself the fact that other women still interested him, it was usually effective. But Josette was unusual. What she might look like in ten years’ time was altogether beside the point. At that moment she was a very attractive, self-possessed woman with a soft, smiling mouth, slightly protuberant blue eyes, and a sleepy vitality that seemed to fill the room.
“This, my dear Josette,” said Kopeikin, “is Mr. Graham.”
“I enjoyed your dancing very much, Mademoiselle,” he said.