The Daughter
Who Might
Have Been
Called Neferure
He spent the
night in the nearest hotel, rented a new apartment next morning on credit,
and sometime in the early evening set off round the cafés he had
visited the previous night. Nowhere was there a trace of his gift wrapped
in gold paper. Then he remembered the girl in the lingerie store. In the
first stationery store he came across he bought a paper gift bag, dark
blue dusted with gold stars, and placed inside it the nightdress he had
stolen the night before. Then he went to the lingerie store and, holding
out the gift, said to the salesgirl, “I’ve come to apologize,
Miss. Yesterday, I played a trick on you and that isn’t nice. I don’t
have a wife and I didn’t want to buy a nightdress. I just wanted
to see you in the nightdress. You looked so lovely in it that I couldn’t
sleep all night. I could hardly wait for the shops to open so I could
buy you an identical one as a present.”
“But it isn’t the same one,” the girl replied and laughed.
“This is a size 6.”
At these words the young man fell back into the armchair. He had been
found out.
Finally, he said in a despairing voice, “Can I ask you something,
by the way . . . ? Did I leave a little package wrapped
in gold paper here last night?”
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