by Karen Swan
‘Bien sûr, chérie,’ he crooned, rubbing her arms lightly. ‘All the very best ideas spring from you.’
A stiff silence permeated the encompassing din, and Cassie saw for the first time that something about Anouk was ‘off’ tonight. There was a bitterness in her smile, a sour edge to her comments, a competitiveness in her dress sense that she rarely felt obliged to enter into. An air of desperation clung to her, Cassie realized. Anouk was making a point. She was being provocative, clearly trying to provoke some kind of reaction. But from whom? Pierre? He seemed as languid and unruffled as ever. Cassie noticed Guillaume’s eyes on Anouk as she looked around the room, but why would Anouk possibly want to provoke him?
‘Have you tried the sesame tuna canapés?’ Florence asked lightly.
The men shook their heads. ‘The waiters aren’t getting as far as us,’ Guillaume smiled. ‘We are too far from the kitchens.’
‘Well, you must. They’ve been such a hit. In fact, I shouldn’t say it because it’ll only confirm her decision to go, but they’re another of Cassie’s . . . suggestions,’ she said, trailing off as she realized she was complimenting Cassie again.
Everyone tried not to look at Anouk, who was rolling her eyes with unconcealed irritation.
‘Alors, I’ll go and find a waiter to bring some over to you,’ Florence said quickly, making her exit.
Anouk gave a heavy sigh. ‘Well, it really is your night, Cass,’ she said with a smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes, though the champagne clearly had.
‘I don’t think so, Nooks,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t have known about this place if it hadn’t been for Henry and Claude; and the same goes for the food. They’re the masterminds behind it all. I just implemented their ideas.’
‘To Henry and Claude then,’ Jacques said merrily, clasping a warm arm around her shoulders and toasting them jovially.
Anouk fidgeted with her clutch bag, swapping arms as a waiter sped over with the promised tray of canapés.
‘So this is your last day at Dior?’ Guillaume asked, changing the subject completely.
‘Yup. I was hired on a project basis really, and now that this is done . . .’ She shrugged.
‘I know Florence is desperate to keep you,’ Jacques interjected, and she noticed Anouk bristle again.
‘She did mention I could stay on,’ Cassie replied, keeping it light.
‘But you are determined to go?’ Pierre enquired.
‘Well . . .’
‘Oh yes. Everything’s sorted. Flat. Job. Cassie’s going to stay in Paris, but under her own steam from now on, isn’t that right?’ Anouk said with a brittle smile. From the way Anouk put it, she sounded delighted finally to be free of her.
Cassie paused. ‘Yes.’
‘Is that so? You are still going to work as a chef?’ Guillaume asked.
‘I’m not sure about that, actually. I need to sit down and really think things through. But whatever I decide workwise, I’ve found my own apartment and I’ll still be moving there at the weekend.’ She was packing tomorrow.
It was late now and the catacombs were very warm. Florence hadn’t returned and Anouk jiggled restlessly, fiddling with her dress, which seemed to get less saucy and more slutty the more everyone drank. Eyes were brazenly resting upon the intriguing lace spiral and the flashes of peachy flesh that winked from beneath. She tried smoothing the dress back over her hips, but it was difficult with a glass in one hand and a clutch bag pinned under one arm.
‘You look like you’re struggling,’ Cassie said, smiling sympathetically. ‘Why don’t I put your bag in the cloakroom for you?’
‘I’m fine,’ Anouk said tersely, just as the bag slipped from beneath her elbow.
Guillaume caught it gallantly and handed it back to her. They’d all had too much to drink, but whereas everyone else was feeling relaxed and loose-tongued, Anouk was getting more and more uptight. Pierre made a polite excuse and left the group, but Anouk didn’t seem to care as Jacques started regaling them with the story of how he’d almost induced a heart attack in an elderly lady earlier in the week when he’d moved the giant polar bear that stood in his gallery window.
‘. . . I had to give her a verre églomisé mirror to stop her from suing,’ he chuckled, but this time Cassie didn’t join in. The mention of the bear had made her think about Henry in the Arctic instead. He had been away for almost three weeks. She’d heard from a round-robin email Suzy had pinged through that they’d arrived at ‘base camp’ the previous Tuesday, and that aside from some frostnip to his little finger when he hadn’t got his gloves on quickly enough, all was progressing well. There were fourteen other scientists in the team, and they had a nine-week window in which to collect their data before the weather started to close in again and the ice floes made it impossible for them to get out.
Anouk’s bag slipped again and this time Guillaume nearly missed it.
‘Here, I insist,’ Cassie said, taking it from him. ‘It’ll only take a moment. I’ll put it with mine.’
‘Fine,’ Anouk snapped impatiently, as though it was the only way to stop Cassie going on.
Cassie raised her eyebrows at Jacques as she passed, sharing an ‘Oh lawd!’ moment.
It was slow-going through the crowd. There was very little available space in the main room – and absolutely nobody appeared to have left yet. She tried pushing through, but when one body moved over, another filled its place. Then she remembered the roped-off tunnel on her left that looped around in a long-cut back towards the main entrance. The waiters had been using it all night.
She slipped past the twisted red rope and made her way down the tunnel. It was darker down here, lit not by flashy Diptyque candles but by large yellow plastic torches positioned on their ends that cast unflattering white light up on to the walls. Underfoot, the pathway crunched slightly with shards of bone that hadn’t been swept back.
Ahead, in the gloom – the torches were spaced only every fifty metres – she thought she could see a junction. She moved nearer. There was movement ahead. Although only one of the paths was lit, a waiter was clearly going down the other one. She hesitated. She’d overheard some of the techies joking earlier about putting lighting down the wrong tunnels just for a laugh. They knew none of the guests would come down here, only staff, and she’d seen for herself earlier that it wasn’t beyond them to play a joke on the ‘pretty boys’ working here tonight.
She stood for a moment, trying to work out which way to go. It seemed more obvious to follow the torches, but this was the waiters’ tunnel and she’d seen one of them come down here. She listened for sounds. The music behind her was distant now, and she could clearly hear movement in the darker tunnel. It had to be this one.
She started walking down it. There was no light at all, and within a hundred metres she was in almost total darkness. Dammit! Wrong call! What had she been thinking? It seemed she couldn’t even trust her eyes and instinct any more.
Slowly, her senses began to attune to the darkness, and although there was nothing to see or hear, there was something to feel. Quite suddenly she knew she wasn’t alone.
‘Hello?’ she said quietly. She didn’t need to call out – the silence was resounding. There was nothing to hear – but not nothing at the same time. She could feel the person’s presence, the way she had felt Henry’s stare in the dark. She felt frightened immediately, sheer terror flooding her. Even her breath shivered.
She put her hands out to turn and get the hell out of there, but instead of the reassuring cold hardness of bone, she touched something much more terrifying, something soft and warm – flesh. She was about to scream when a hand went over her mouth, and an arm clasped her to the warm chest she’d just touched.
‘Sssssh!’ it whispered. ‘It’s okay, Cassie.’
He knew her name?
‘There is nothing to be frightened of. You have just taken a wrong turn, that is all.’
The hand was still over her mouth, and she was trembling all over
with fright, but the man rubbed his other hand down her arm in a comforting gesture, and she managed to give a little nod. He uncovered her mouth. ‘Ssssshhh,’ he said in the darkness.
‘Who are you?’ she asked, immediately taking a step back.
‘It doesn’t matter. Just go back,’ the voice said. ‘You should just go back.’
‘What are you doing down here?’ she asked, but as she said it, she heard another sound like someone fumbling behind them only a few feet away. ‘Who’s that? Who else is here?’ she asked, her voice rising again.
‘It is okay,’ the voice said, gripping her arm firmly again and forcing her to turn. ‘Just go back now.’
Pointlessly she nodded in the dark and turned round, treading carefully on the bone shards that littered the floor. It was easier now that she was following the light that shone dimly in the distance, and she began to calm down as she got closer to it. Her brain began to work again. He had known her name, this man. He must have seen her – been watching her – from the moment she’d stepped into the tunnel. And there was something about the way he’d rubbed her arm. She’d seen him do it before – just moments before, in fact, when Anouk had been upset.
She was only a few feet from the lit tunnel now. Everything was still silent in the blackness behind her, even though she knew there were two people still in there.
She turned.
‘Pierre?’
‘Oui?’ came the voice in the darkness, the small gasp of surprise that followed it audible even from where she was standing. He had responded to his name on impulse.
‘Merde!’ Another voice – male – hissed and then she heard the rustle of fabric, harried whispers as the lovers clashed in the dark.
‘Wait!’ Pierre cried. The clatter of loose bones falling to the floor echoed down to her, but Cassie had already fled. She was back in the light and running down the torch-lit passage.
She ran towards the cloakroom, out of breath and panicking. Would Pierre assume she’d run back into the party?
‘Hi, Stephanie,’ she said, her eyes darting up and down the corridor distractedly. ‘I’ll take over for you now.’
‘You are sure?’
‘Absolutely,’ Cassie assured her, nodding hurriedly, eager to get rid of her and just shut the door, shut the world out so that she could have a minute to think. How on earth could she tell Anouk what she’d just discovered? Was this what had been making her so unhappy?
She paced the room, her hand absent-mindedly brushing the furs as she deliberated how to tell her friend, for she instinctively knew she had to tell her. Anouk deserved to know the truth.
Cassie tried to consider the facts: she had just caught Pierre with another man. In the best-case scenario for Anouk, it meant he was bisexual. At the worst, it meant he was gay. But no, no . . . that didn’t make sense. Would he be able to hide his sexuality from her so convincingly? Anouk was highly tuned in to her sexuality, and they met up for rendezvous every afternoon. There was no way he could maintain that kind of pretence with her.
So then, if he was bi, did Anouk know about that? Were his affairs with men an agreement between them, or was it his secret?
Oh God, her head was spinning, and not just with what-ifs. Cocktails, secrets and shock were not a good combination. At the very least she was going to have to sober up before she said anything to Anouk.
She perched on the small table and took some deep breaths. Pierre would be desperate for her to keep his secret, at least for tonight, and the safest place for her to be, she realized, was back out there, in company. He couldn’t get to her with Anouk and the others around.
She opened the small drawer beneath the table to hide Anouk’s clutch bag, but the door opened in the same instant, and she looked up in alarm, sending the bag flying on to the floor.
‘Oh Jacques, thank God it’s only you!’ she exclaimed, slapping her hand across her chest as he peered round the doorway.
‘Thank you very much,’ he said, smiling wryly as he came in.
Cassie dropped to the floor and began picking up the contents as he leaned against the wall.
‘We were wondering where you had got to. Pierre thought you might have taken a wrong turn in the tunnels. I have been sent as the search party,’ he said as she retrieved a lipstick, an atomizer and a tube of Touche Éclat that had rolled under the tables.
‘Is she there?’
Cassie looked up as she heard Anouk’s voice coming down the hallway, and then saw her pretty toes by the door. She pulled back to get out from under the table when she saw a small hairbrush under the coats, as well as a small notebook. She felt the hairs on her arms stand on end as she picked it up. She didn’t even need to flick open the pages to know what was inside it. She’d have recognized it anywhere.
Suddenly, everything had changed again. She stood up slowly, like a sunflower stretching towards the light, the book resting on her open palms, and she saw that Jacques and Anouk were watching her in silence, a protective silence that was trying to pull itself like a sheet over what was really going on.
Cassie looked from Anouk to Jacques.
‘It was you at the park,’ she said to him. Not a question. A statement. A fact.
‘I don’t know what you—’ he began in protest, but his voice died away as Cassie looked back at Anouk, ashen-faced.
‘Him?’ Cassie was so shocked she could hardly speak.
‘No.’ Anouk shook her head firmly, walking further in to the room and shutting the door.
‘Yes!’ Cassie contradicted. ‘No one else would give you a book like this,’ she said, flinging the emerald-green leather notebook on to the table. A loose black-and-white photo fluttered out from the pages and the naked woman within it stared up at them all from the floor – as much a player as any of them in this unfolding drama, as her spread legs and hungry eyes exposed the carnal intimacy between the two secret lovers in the room.
Anouk swallowed hard and fell back into her defensive silence. Disgust simmered in Cassie’s eyes as the parallels of the deception began to dawn on her.
‘To think that I trusted you,’ she muttered, her cheeks beginning to redden, her voice to thicken. ‘To think that I actually put myself in your hands, actively sought out your guidance, accepted your advice, happily remade myself in your image . . .’ She gave a small, bitter laugh . . . ‘When all along, you were doing exactly the same thing to your best friend as was done to me. You’re exactly the same as her. And I was trying to be you.’
She shook her head – incredulous, stunned, her eyes swimming with tears at the thought of being so close to that dreadful scenario all over again. She looked back at Anouk. ‘Do you have any idea what it’s taken for me to get through this? Of how tortured I’ve been by the lies and the not-knowing what was real and what wasn’t in my own marriage?’
Anouk only blinked.
‘I’ll tell you what’s been getting me through it – the complete and utter belief in our friendship. I looked at you and Suzy and Kelly and I saw these crazy, full, chaotic lives that were all about glamour and the right jeans and good haircuts, and I thought that’s where I’ve been going wrong. It’s my fault he looked elsewhere. I’m too dowdy, too parochial, too unsophisticated to keep a man. I need to be more exciting, more mysterious, more sexy . . . I need to be more like you, I thought to myself. So I left me behind that night. I’m still upstairs in the Faerie Room somewhere, wearing a Laura Ashley dress and a saggy grey bra. I’m not really standing here, in a bony crypt, wearing a dress that costs more than a car, with brown fucking hair! I mean, if only you’d told me that being like you would involve becoming an unscrupulous, conniving bitch, it would have saved me thousands in airfares.’
There was a heavy pause and Cassie realized she’d started to shake.
‘A bitch?’ Anouk whispered, her usual froideur replaced now by a white-hot anger. ‘After everything I’ve done for you, this is how you repay me? I have been nothing but a friend to you. My relationship with him
has nothing to do with you. How dare you stand in judgement of me! You know nothing about the situation.’
‘There’s nothing to know. You’re fucking your friend’s husband. It’s as simple and final as that. You chose him over her. You chose yourself over her.’
‘It is not like it is in—’
‘Oh, please – spare me!’ Cassie cried. ‘Don’t try to justify this with your crackpot explanation about how relaxed you all are about affairs over here, about how they don’t matter, they don’t mean anything.’
‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ Jacques interjected, a note of finality in his voice.
The makeshift room fell into a trembling silence and Cassie felt as if the walls might collapse in on them all, the opulence and extravagant excesses burying them alive.
‘It is merely a convenient arrangement, Cassie. Pierre has been very kind to step in and deflect attention away from us – and I pay him handsomely to do it – but nobody is going to get divorced as a result of this. Anouk knows I will never leave Florence, and if Florence knows about Anouk, well . . .’ He shrugged his huge shoulders. ‘She knows Anouk is no threat.’
Cassie looked between the two of them. Anouk was staring at him, her eyes unblinking.
‘Florence will feel as devastated about the affair as I did,’ Cassie said finally.
‘Peut-être,’ he conceded. ‘But only if she finds out.’ Jacques put his head to the side questioningly. ‘You know, when Anouk came back from staying with you last year, she asked me the same question. Should she tell you? But she said you seemed happy enough in your ignorance. There was no point in you being hurt needlessly.’
Cassie felt the walls shift, the floor begin to slide as she realized what he was saying. Anouk had known?
‘But even when you did find out, she said you could have carried on happily enough too. There was no reason for you to make such a fuss the way you did.’
‘A fuss?’ Cassie echoed, looking over towards Anouk, who had grown visibly paler throughout the conversation. ‘I don’t remember raising my voice, throwing anything, hurling an insult even.’