Soon after Saskia, the errant Dutch woman, had been ejected from Café Franck (not so much for spilling boiling mint tea over Mercedes but more for refusing to admit it was her fault), the Spanish quartet left too. Mercedes was still sore and in some shock but the hot water had now turned cold and the damp blouse was sticking uncomfortably against her skin. As he rose after her, Jordi considerately draped his own jacket round her shoulders.

Catrina felt at a bit of a loss. Her morning had seemed all very straightforward ten minutes earlier. Now she couldn’t decide whether to stay or leave too, whether somehow the fact that it was her tea that had been jolted over the Spanish girl’s back made her guilty by association. She stood at the bar and looked around. Nobody seemed to be staring at her now the drama was finished. The place looked much as it had done. New people – people who had seen nothing – were coming in and lining up for Patrice’s attention. Some nearby did glance at Catrina but only to find out whether she was being served. She rather wondered that herself.

The answer came swiftly and, like everything else that morning, seemed to have nothing to do with anything she had instigated. A new mint tea was placed in front of her on the bar and with it a glass – a flute. She looked up with a puzzled frown.

Patrice was grinning at her.

‘You wanted a mint tea, no?’ he asked in English.

‘Yes, I did. Thank you. But…’

‘Well there it is. And I feel you may be a little weak after our little incident.’

Catrina admitted that she was a touch wobbly.

‘Ah, wobbly!’ repeated Patrice with great solemnity. ‘I thought so. And when one is wobbly I find champagne is the only thing. But it is early still, so for you a Kir Royale.’

‘Are you sure? Isn’t it expensive?’

Patrice shrugged, ‘Not when it is from me,’ he said reasonably. ‘Where are you sitting?’

It was yet another issue that Catrina hadn’t settled at all. She searched the room for solutions. The café was almost full by now. Her original table for two just behind her was now firmly occupied by a couple in their fifties.

‘I don’t know,’ Catrina said lamely and felt it.

‘No matter,’ Patrice picked up her champagne flute with a flourish, ‘you will sit at our table.’

 Catrina found that 'our table' was the one at the end of the bar just by the food counter. It had a reserved sign firmly plonked in the middle and nobody had dared to disagree. Patrice placed the tea and aperitif so that Catrina would sit on the low bench that ran along the back wall but she preferred a more upright chair – she felt short and reaching up from the bench to the champagne had too many echoes of childhood and failing to touch the floor – so she moved one to the end of the table.

She watched Patrice as he slotted back behind the bar and whispered to one of the girls, pointing Catrina out. The girl nodded and passed the message along the line. Presumably the order was that the Englishwoman was accepted in the private enclave.

The Kir was delicious; she sipped hesitantly as if Patrice was really joking and it was just blackcurrant and tonic water.

The morning so far was becoming extraordinary. Catrina had a flat, or a room with a rudimentary cubicle for a bathroom and a cooking space squeezed unhygenically into a space against its wall, a few hundred metres to the east, away from the fashionable side of the square, in the dingy streets that sat in the basin between Flagey and the viaduct carrying the railway from Leopold station. She had no idea who Alfred Giron was but clearly the Belgians didn't think much of him either, given the street they had named after him.

She had been in Brussels for three months, ever since finding a job as second (i.e. horribly paid) assistant to an MEP whose politics she loathed but who had advertised in her local paper just as her MA in European Studies had been completed and she wondered what the hell she was going to do with it. She was still wondering but this interval of Brussels semi-poverty was a way of postponing a decision until after her twenty-fourth birthday while almost convincing her doubtful father in Derby, to whom only engineering was a real job, that she might one day be able to earn a living.

She had begun to adopt Café Franck as her Saturday morning hang-out only the week before, two days after being dumped for a fleshy Italian by the hooray Henry specimen who worked one tower in the Parliament away, a revolting creature (she now thought) called Bruno who had turned out to be even more Tory than her boss but who had seemed to offer the promised land in her first tentative weeks in the vast steel barns of European political chatter.

Freshly dumped, the last week had been salutary and lonely. She had come to the café that morning not just for the solace of mint and average music but to review her life. About the time the mint tea hit the floor that review was not reading too well. Now, kir at her lips and Patrice in her eye line, it was starting to shape up.

Ever the pessimist, Catrina wondered how long it could last.

In the corner behind her the customers were being politely shunted away and a dais was being set up for the mid morning live music. There didn't seem to be too many big speakers or drum kits, she was happy to see as she shifted round: just keyboard, guitar and voice so far by the look of it. Catrina relaxed and moved back onto the comfortable padded bench. From there she would have musicians to her left and the constantly moving vision of Patrice's bottom to her right. The kir was finished, she noted with a pang. She tried the cooling mint tea. Definitely not in the same class.

What were her prospects? Should she stay or should she go – not just in the Café Franck but in the European Parliament, in Brussels, in...? Only one thing was certain. To go back to Derby was the sort of slow death reserved for spinsters in a Victorian novel. Maybe she should go and volunteer in Malawi or somewhere, or Peru?

As the gloom descended and the indecision deepened Patrice appeared at the corner of the table, another Kir Royale in one hand and a beer in the other.

'So what shall I call you?' he asked, flopping onto the bench beside her.