Read Early One Morning for Free Online Page A

golden. The casino at Dieppe was finally completed, and so the twice weekly exodus from Paris began in earnest, Williams motoring Orpen and Eve plus their companions of the week up to Rouen, where they sometimes took lunch at La Toque, partly because it tickled Orpen to be dining overlooking the very spot where the English burned Joan of Arc, and partly because he was slowly reeling in the flamboyantly moustachioed chef as a model for a portrait he wanted to execute.
    Then it was an appearance, an entry, no less, in Dieppe, a long slow drive along the Esplanade, as if Orpen were royalty inspecting Dieppe’s parade of grand mansions and apartments, then a few hours at Charlie’s Bar, before the main business of the evening, a burst of intense gambling. Outside, as always, was Williams.
    That day, the entourage consisted of Orpen and Eve with Raymond Berri, the chemist, Nick Jessop, the saturnine American writer, and his rather fey friend Patrick, a professional hanger-on from Philadelphia who had managed to pick up Louisa, one of the half-starved, but fully drunk artists who hung around the Dome hoping to hitch their wagon to a passing patron.
    Jessop insisted that he was trying to pull himself away from the crowd that ricocheted from La Coupole to the Dome, Select, Falstaff’s and back He was complaining to whoever would listen that the scene was infected with a fatal lethargy. Except for those licking up what he called the ‘literary vomit’ at Gertrude Stein’s famous gatherings. Rather than worship at the foot of a grim old lesbian in a circus tent, Jessop declaimed, he wanted to write and he needed discipline. He had been in Paris fifty-eight weeks, he protested, and had written only two dozen words. Williams wasn’t sure that hooking up, as Jessop would have it, with Orpen was a passport to productivity.
    Williams watched them slowly crank up the alcohol levels between Café Pirouette and Charlie’s Bar, Orpen and Berri sticking to his habitual whisky and Eve to grenadine, the others moving through increasingly florid cocktails as they switchbacked from Sidecars to Cablegrams to Crystal Bronxes, Silk Ladies to Southsides, Picons to Ping-pongs.
    Williams took a light dinner at the Bistro du Pollet—the monkfish livers followed by a sea bream fillet—with a handful of other drivers and sat out a sudden summer shower by indulging in a rare after-dinner brandy. By the time he emerged to stroll back to the car the rain had left the streets of the port shiny and streaming, the last heat of the day making the atmosphere delightfully Turkish bath-thick.
    Williams took up his place at the car, lit a Salambo, cursing the useless French matches which were all spark and no flame, and read the latest issue of the Light Car , with its appreciation of Robert Benoist, starting with a smattering of war stories (including the time he was put on a charge for wearing a lavish foxfur collar while strolling down the Champs Elysées in full Air Force uniform) and a critique of his driving skills. Sphinx-like the author called him, a man difficult to read until it was too late and he had struck, leaving his opponent breathing in his benzol. A man who, the article concluded, was, above all, loathe to walk away from any challenge. Williams lit another cigarette, his last.
    He looked up as he heard a familiar clack of heels on the steps of the casino, heading down from the vast baroque doorway of the wedding-cake building towards him. Eve, hips swaggering, suggesting she’d moved from grenadine to something more potent.
    She crossed the street, stretched out her arms and did a little twirl on her gold-barred kid shoes, the scalloped hemline of her skirt lifting as she did so.
    ‘It’s so stuffy in there,’ she said by way of both greeting and exclamation. He could smell aniseed on her breath, which made it warm and intoxicating.
    ‘I would imagine, Miss.’
    ‘Have you never been in?’
    ‘Casinos, yes. Dieppe casino, no.’
    She