Fanny has just told me that her most cherished lover, Lucia, told her a cat drowned yesterday in the Canal Saint-Martin. Apparently, it had one ear smaller than the other. She would get more information; in the meanwhile I was to tell Eva that Fanny would be doing a raclette at her place tomorrow night. ‘Don’t say anything about the drowned cat,’ Fanny insisted. And because I am from Britain, Fanny explained that Raclette is a semi-hard Alpine cheese known for its ability to melt. Yes, Raclette is promiscuous. It will melt for everyone. Right-wing, left-wing, it doesn’t care. Fanny owned a raclette electrique, which comes with a grill and individual pans so that each person can melt their slice of cheese. She also suggested that I donate my fur hat to a charitable organization and swap my Gertrude Stein books for a guide to essential French grammar. She wondered if she should include mushrooms on the menu for the raclette? Fanny and her third lover in the month of November, Nicole, had gathered a good haul of mushrooms on a foraging expedition to Normandy. Sometimes I called her Fanny the Third. Fanny had brought some of these mushrooms over for Eva and me. We laid them out on a sheet of paper in Eva’s studio, which had become our headquarters in Paris, but Eva wasn’t convinced that more than six of them could be safely identified. The weird thing was that Nicole, who had made an omelette for herself with her share of the haul, had thrown up two hours later, but Fanny, who had also made an omelette for herself and her most cherished lover, Lucia, said they were both more than okay and so was Martine, the second lover, who finished up the ceps (the six mushrooms Eva could identify) in a dish she had created with cream, mustard and Parmesan. Fanny required a nourishing menu to support her vigorous sex life, but really she was in love with Lucia. Deeply in love. The frantic pace of her erotic assignments seemed to give her the edge professionally. Fanny’s clients in the world of finance suddenly took investment risks they were not inclined to take. If she was persuasive with the more cautious of her clients, they did not understand that she was in a constant state of amorous flush. So far it had worked out for them, and for Fanny, who declared she despised her job. She often told Eva that she thought about capitalism in the same way Roland Barthes thought about language, ‘it wounds or seduces me’. Fanny had long glossy chestnut hair which she sometimes wore in a high ponytail. Eva, who was very interested in my research on Stein, wondered if Fanny washed her hair in sulphur water, like the poodles, Basket 1 and Basket 2. Gertrude and Alice were totally sexed up too, but I think Alice B. washed the poodles in sulphur water to tame the odour of the dogs. Sometimes, when I was deep in thought about Gertrude Stein, my neighbour would step on to his balcony and stand in the cold weather almost naked, apart from a small towel draped across his hips. Perhaps he was looking for the parakeet in the tree in the courtyard?Article continues after advertisement