Paris Is Always a Good Idea

by Nicolas Barreau

  Rosalie looked directly into Robert Sherman’s azure-blue eyes, which were unsettlingly close to her, as too was his mouth, surprised once more (and totally inappropriately, given their current situation) at the extraordinary color of this man’s eyes, which had struck her the first time that Robert had appeared outside her window display. She swallowed, feeling a tingling as if a thousand ants were walking over her.

  She would surely have been somewhat surprised if she had known that the man from New York, who was pressed against her in complete silence in the deepest part of their hidey-hole, was at that very moment thinking something similar—that is, that he’d never looked into such midnight-blue eyes as Rosalie Laurent’s.

  And so it was no surprise that neither of them was able to work out what the humming, vibrating sound was that suddenly burst out between them.

  Madame Bonnier had heard it, too, because her sandals, which had moved away from the bed, stopped immediately, offering Rosalie an unencumbered view of the rosy backs of the housekeeper’s knees.

  Madame Bonnier listened intently; even the backs of her knees seemed to be listening as the constant humming tone pierced the silence like the buzzing of a particularly fat fly.

  Rosalie breathed in inaudibly, staring reproachfully at Robert. Her lips soundlessly formed the word “idiot!” as he dumbly begged forgiveness with a guilty expression, because it was his cell phone: he had of course switched it to silent mode, but stupidly had not switched it off entirely. She realized that it was impossible for him to get it out of his pocket without making yet more unnecessary noise.

  Fortunately it was beyond the bounds of Marie-Hélène Bonnier’s imagination to think that there might be people of the kind who would hide themselves under Monsieur Marchais’s wonderful Grange bed.

  She stamped over to the reading lamp on the bedside table, examined it carefully, jiggled it about, and then switched it on and off a couple of times.

  “Damn electricity! A good thing I came this evening to make sure everything was all right,” she muttered as the buzzing tone finally came to a stop. “Lights on all over the house, cardboard boxes on the floor, the whole place is going to the dogs.” She shook her head disapprovingly and switched the lamp off. “That gardener could at least have switched off the lights!”

  She bent over to pick up the box of photos and letters, and for one terrible moment Rosalie was absolutely certain that the housekeeper would discover their hiding place under the bed.

  She held her breath.

  But Madame Bonnier had better things to do. She had to restore order. The housekeeper got a stepladder from the storeroom, took the box, and, with a groan, put it back where it belonged. On top of the wardrobe.

  When she disappeared into the bathroom to dust the washbasin with scouring powder, they left their hiding place as if at a secret word of command and ran down the stairs in their stocking feet, their shoes in their hands.

  “Wait a moment—my bag is still in the library,” whispered Robert softly as Rosalie headed for the front door.

  “Bon. Let’s escape through the garden.” They crept into the library past the wall of books and the two sofas, pushed the heavy glass door aside, and then closed it behind them from the outside.

  As they ran through the garden seconds later like Bonnie and Clyde after a successful bank job and disappeared between the hydrangea bushes, Rosalie felt an overwhelming urge to laugh.

  “‘Damn electricity!’” she burst out hilariously, fighting for breath as she leaned with her hand on the trunk of a cherry tree that overhung the old garden wall. Robert fell forward, his hands on his thighs, as he joined in her suppressed laughter.

  And then—Rosalie could not afterward have said exactly how it happened—he kissed her.

  That evening she wrote in her blue notebook:

  The worst moment of the day:

  Robert’s damn cell phone begins to buzz as Madame Bonnier is standing beside the bed we are hiding under. I nearly wet myself with agitation. It doesn’t bear thinking what would have happened if she’d found us!

  The nicest moment of the day:

  An evening kiss under a cherry tree that left us both a bit disconcerted.

  “Sorry, I just couldn’t help it,” says Robert. And I say, as my heart performs a backward somersault, “That’s okay, it was probably the result of all that tension.” And laugh as if the kiss had been nothing.

  During the ride home we continue to talk about our discovery, trying to puzzle out what it could mean. I talk and talk to cover up the beating of my heart. Then Robert makes a stupid remark, and we fall silent. The silence is embarrassing, almost unpleasant. A hasty parting outside the hotel. No further kiss. I’m relieved. And strangely also a bit disappointed.

  René was still awake when I got home. He didn’t notice anything—well, nothing had happened. A little slipup. C’est tout!

  Twenty-three

  Something had happened.

  And by that Robert Sherman did not mean the series of surprising events that had happened to him since, a good week before, he had made a remarkable discovery in the window of a store in the rue du Dragon. A discovery that had since proved to be somewhat confusing, had thrown him off balance, and had thrust the actual reason for his trip (clarity about his professional and private life) into the background.

  He meant something else: he could not get that hasty, unexpected, completely irrational kiss in an enchanted garden in Le Vésinet out of his head.

  As he walked along the rue de l’Université early the next morning, heading for the Musée d’Orsay, where he wanted to see the Impressionists, images from the previous evening rolled up like the waves in a painting by Sorolla. He kept seeing Rosalie in her slim-waisted blue summer dress in front of him as she stood, laughing and breathless, her cheeks warm and rosy, under the cherry tree whose branches spread out over her like a roof. The air was full of the scent of lavender and twilight had fallen on the garden where the shapes of the bushes were becoming indistinct as the sky grew darker. Her hair had fallen loose, and her laugh, too, had something of a glorious release about it and for one intoxicating moment that knew neither day nor hour the woman with the lovely smile was for Robert the most desirable creature on earth.

  She had been too surprised to defend herself. He had caught her unawares and she had abandoned herself to that impetuous kiss which fired a thousand particles of light through his body and tasted as sweet as a wild strawberry.

  He instinctively ran his tongue over his lips and rubbed them briefly together as if that could bring back the taste of the kiss, which now seemed totally unreal to him, almost as if he had dreamt it. But he hadn’t been dreaming. It had happened, and then suddenly everything had gone wrong.

  Robert stuck his hands deep in his pockets and stamped along the narrow street with furrowed brow.

  It must have been unpleasant for her rather than the reverse—he shouldn’t pretend otherwise. After the moment had flown, he had sensed her pulling away from him in embarrassment. “It must have been the tension,” she’d said, and then laughed as if nothing had happened.

  His kiss had obviously not been exactly overwhelming, and she had obviously been kind enough to gloss over the embarrassing situation so that he wouldn’t feel like an idiot.

  He sighed deeply. On the other hand, when they’d been lying there together so silent and motionless under that bed, as if they were in a cocoon—hadn’t there been something in her eyes? Hadn’t he read a sudden attraction in her unwavering gaze? Hadn’t there unexpectedly been a closeness that made them completely oblivious to the hard parquet floor and the fear of being discovered?

  Had he really just imagined all that? Was it due to that special moment? He had no idea anymore.

  He just knew that he could have continued to lie under that bed forever. But then his cell phone had made its presence felt, and its low buzzing had rung in his ears like the trumpets at Jericho. They were within a hair’s breadth of being found ou
t.

  He grinned as he thought of the heavy footsteps of the housekeeper, and how she’d kept on shaking the bedside light suspiciously.

  The drive back to Paris had been peculiar. They’d hardly taken their seats in the little car when Rosalie began pouring out words like a waterfall, literally bombarding him with questions (“And you’re sure that your mother never mentioned the name Max Marchais? Perhaps he visited your mother in Mount Kisco sometime? But they must have known each other, since he obviously dedicated the story to her!”), had continued to address him formally as vous in spite of the kiss, and had gone on inventing new scenarios which ranged from Max Marchais as his mother’s long-lost brother to Max Marchais as her secret lover.

  Robert had begun to feel uncomfortable and had become quieter and quieter. All these discoveries and the questions they threw up were just too much for him. It would have been simpler to sue an ageing, somewhat arrogant French writer for plagiarism. But then Rosalie had found the manuscript in Marchais’s house and immediately everything became far less simple. It had then become clear—or at least seemed to be clear—that his mother had not made up the story of the blue tiger for Robert, but rather that it had been dedicated to her—as seemed very probable—by (of all people) a Frenchman, whom she had never mentioned (at least, not to him). All this made him uneasy, but he hadn’t begun to think deeply about it or, if he were honest, hadn’t wanted to start thinking about it.

  After all, it was a matter of his mother and his feelings, and whatever the background to this strange story was, it would affect him far more strongly than it would affect the blithely chattering woman behind the wheel, whom he found both annoying and baffling.

  Eventually it got too far-fetched for him.

  “Your speculation is all very fine, Rosalie, but it’s not taking us a single step forward. It’s about time we finally spoke to Max Marchais himself,” he had interrupted her harshly. “He’s not going to drop dead simply because we ask him a few questions.”

  “Oh, fine. Absolutely fine. Excuse me for trying to help you,” she had retorted. “Fine, then I’d better just keep my mouth shut.”

  Upset, she had fallen silent, even though he had immediately assured her that he hadn’t meant it like that, and finally a tense silence had filled the cramped space in the little car.

  When she later dropped him outside the hotel, he hadn’t dared to touch her again. They had parted with a brief nod of the head, and Rosalie had promised to call him as soon as Max Marchais was in a fit state to be asked certain questions.

  “We should at least wait until he’s back home,” she had said, and Robert had sighed inwardly. “Perhaps we could visit him together, I’m sure that would make things a lot easier, don’t you think?” She had looked at him with a hesitant smile.

  “As long as we don’t have to lie under a dusty bed again,” he had said, in a failed attempt to be funny. He could have immediately slapped himself for such a boneheaded remark.

  She had clammed up like an oyster. Of course. He looked unhappily at her pale face, which betrayed no emotion.

  “Well, then … I’ve got to go,” she had said finally, with a strange little smile, fiddling with her safety belt. “I’m sure René is waiting for me.”

  René! The thrust had hit home.

  Grouchily, Robert kicked a pebble, which fell into the constantly running water of the Paris gutter. He had completely failed to remember that Rosalie had a boyfriend—the bodyguard, who was only too ready to defend her with his outsize fists. Robert smiled wryly, thinking of his first and hopefully last encounter with the French giant, who had already made it clear he wanted to beat him up because he had ostensibly insulted his girlfriend. A fitness trainer, well, well. (“He’s a sports graduate and yoga teacher,” Rosalie had explained to him earnestly that evening in the Marly. “He’s even worked as personal trainer for a famous French actress.”) So what? Admittedly the guy, thanks to his size and his velvet-brown eyes, was certainly not the kind of man women would fail to notice. Okay, he wasn’t bad-looking. But what else did he have to offer? thought Robert with a degree of defiant arrogance. He couldn’t quite work out what it was that Rosalie saw in the pragmatic René, and in fact he didn’t really even want to try—it was certainly not a union of kindred souls. It was as clear as daylight that the pair were not suited for each other.

  And then, strangely, he thought of Rachel.

  Rachel: sensible, efficient, assertive, slick as a fashion plate, gorgeous. It had been she who had called him a second time as he was hiding under the bed with Rosalie. At a really awkward moment. She hadn’t left a message, which made it clear that she was really displeased with him. He’d call her that afternoon when it was morning in New York.

  If he told her all about the manuscript and explained to her that he had crept into a stranger’s house to follow the trail of a mystery that closely concerned him, she’d surely understand why he had broken off her call to him. It would probably be better not to tell her that he’d been lying under a bed with Rosalie Laurent when she’d called the second time. And he wouldn’t mention the kiss either. The whole business was already complicated enough.

  He speeded up and arrived at the Quai d’Orsay. As he took his place in the line outside the museum and patiently edged forward bit by bit, he saw Rosalie once more in his mind’s eye, standing laughing under the tree like Shakespeare’s Titania. He tried to dismiss the vision and think about something else, but he couldn’t help asking himself if he’d ever seen Rachel laughing as uninhibitedly as that capricious, contrary, willful and—yes, he had to admit it—exceedingly enchanting woman, who was only linked to him, if you looked closely at it, by the story of the blue tiger.

  Was that a little or a lot? Or perhaps even everything? “How happy some o’er other some can be,” he thought briefly. Was this going to be his personal Midsummer Night’s Dream?

  The fact that, of all people, it was this young French graphic artist who had illustrated his favorite story and that he had only gotten to know her because of that seemed all at once to be a matter of fate.

  And, as they worked together to uncover the mystery of an old story, hadn’t a new story begun to develop—one that was far more exciting?

  Deep in thought he went up to the window in the entry hall of the museum and bought his ticket.

  As he put his wallet back in his bag, he came across the book, bound in red-and-white-striped leather, that he’d bought in Shakespeare and Company and completely forgotten. The Taming of the Shrew. The book was still in his shoulder bag.

  He’d wanted to hand it to Rosalie with a witty remark when the right moment arrived. But it seemed somehow not to want to arrive. Robert sighed. At that moment the omens were, it seemed, not looking too favorable for Petruchio.

  Twenty-four

  After more than two weeks in hospital, Max Marchais was exceedingly delighted to be back at home. He was so thankful that he even put up with Marie-Hélène Bonnier’s reproaches with a smile.

  “On a ladder with open leather slippers, really, Monsieur Marchais! How careless! You could have broken your neck.”

  “You’re right, as always, Marie-Hélène,” replied Max, happily cutting himself a slice of the crisp-roasted confit de canard that Madame Bonnier had prepared for him on a bed of salad.

  “Really delicious, the duck. No one does it better than you.” He thought of the tasteless health food he’d been served in hospital and relished the tasty, tender meat of the duck breast that his housekeeper had, as he well knew, bought fresh at the market in Le Vésinet. “Simply divine.” He swallowed the duck and took a great gulp of Saint-Émilion from his balloon glass.

  Madame Bonnier glowed red with pride. She didn’t often hear such hymns of praise from her employer. “Well, yes, I know it’s your favorite dish, Monsieur Marchais. And of course we’re all glad that you’re back here with us.”

  Somewhat flustered, Madame Bonnier retreated to the kitchen, while Max asked himself wi
th amusement who this “all” might actually be. It was not exactly the case that he knew hordes of people who had sorely missed him, old curmudgeon that he was.

  It had moved him to think that Marie-Hélène had insisted on returning early from her stay with her daughter and granddaughter in order to take care of the house and oversee some urgent building work. Now that it was really important she would not leave him in the lurch, she had said. And you couldn’t trust that gardener who had left all the lights in the house burning and hadn’t even locked the sliding door in the living room properly. Anyone could easily have broken in!

  That was rather strange, because Sebastiano swore to high heaven that he had locked all the doors properly—including of course the big sliding door in the living room. Now it could be that in all the upheaval he’d forgotten to, but even so Max would be eternally grateful to him, and not only because he kept the garden in impeccable order. It had also been Sebastiano who had picked him up at the hospital and driven him home.

  “Clément could just as well have done that,” Madame Bonnier had said, somewhat offended. Clément was her husband, and these minor hostilities that had flared up between the housekeeper and gardener both surprised Max and made him smile.

  When he got home, he found a bunch of flowers from Rosalie Laurent. How thoughtful. On the delightful get-well card she sent with it was a message: She was very much looking forward to visiting him in Le Vésinet very soon.