The Little Paris Bookshop

by Nina George

  ‘Capitano. Mio caro Massimo. Dear Zelda, Javier, my friend. Little Elaia, dear little Elaia.’

  ‘And Lupo,’ the young woman whispered.

  ‘I too have a … confession to make.’

  His chin was resting on his bulky chest.

  ‘It’s like this … Ecco: Vivette is the girl I loved, and for the past twenty-one years, I’ve been scouring every river in France, every marina, every harbour for her.’

  Everyone nodded.

  ‘And?’ Max asked tentatively.

  ‘And … she’s married to the mayor of Latour and has been for twenty years. She has two sons and an unbelievable, gigantic triple backside. I found her fifteen years ago.’

  ‘Oh,’ Zelda sighed.

  ‘She remembered me, but only after she’d mistaken me for Mario, Giovanni and Arnaud in turn.’

  Javier leaned forward. His eyes flashed. He was now pulling very quietly on his cigarette.

  Zelda smiled nervously. ‘Surely you’re joking?’

  ‘No, Zelda. I carried on regardless, looking for the Vivette I’d met on the river one summer’s night many years ago. Even when I’d long since found the real Vivette. Because I’d found the real Vivette I had to carry on looking for her. It’s—’

  ‘Sick,’ Javier cut him off sharply.

  ‘Papa!’ cried Elaia in horror.

  ‘Javier, my friend, I’m so—’

  ‘Friend? You lied to me and to my wife! Here, in my house. You came to us seven years ago and served us up your … your pack of lies. We gave you work, we trusted you, for God’s sake!’

  ‘Let me explain why.’

  ‘You used your little romantic comedy to wheedle compassion out of us. It’s nauseating.’

  ‘Please stop shouting,’ Jean said sternly. ‘He certainly didn’t do it to spite you. Can’t you see how hard this is for him?’

  ‘I can shout as much as I like. And it’s no surprise you understand him. You don’t seem to be right in the head either, what with that dead woman of yours.’

  ‘You’ve gone too far, Monsieur,’ snapped Max.

  ‘I’d better leave.’

  ‘No, Cuneo, please. Javier’s on edge. We’re waiting for some laboratory results about Lupo.’

  ‘I’m not on edge, I’m disgusted, Zelda. Disgusted.’

  ‘The three of us are leaving. Right now,’ said Perdu.

  ‘Good riddance,’ hissed Javier.

  Jean stood up. So did Max.

  ‘Salvo?’

  Only now did Cuneo look up, streaming tears and bottomless sadness from his eyes.

  ‘Thank you very much for your hospitality, Madame Zelda,’ said Perdu.

  She gave him a thin, despairing smile.

  ‘Best of luck with Lupo, Mademoiselle Elaia. I am very, very sorry for what you’re going through. From the depths of my heart,’ he said, turning to the sick girl. ‘And I hope for your sake, Monsieur Javier, that your wonderful wife goes on loving you and that one day you realise how precious that is. Good-bye.’

  It was clear from Javier’s expression that he wanted to punch Perdu.

  Elaia ran after the men across the dark, silent garden. Her footsteps in the damp night-time grass were the only sound apart from the chirping of the crickets. Elaia walked alongside Max in her bare feet. He took her gently by the hand.

  As they stood by the boat, Cuneo said hoarsely: ‘Thanks for the … lift. With your permission, Giovanni Perduto, I’ll pack my stuff and leave.’

  ‘No need to stand on your dignity and slip off into the night, Salvo,’ Perdu replied serenely.

  He climbed up the ship’s ladder, and Cuneo followed him hesitantly.

  When they had struck the flag from the prow, Perdu asked with a little laugh: ‘A gigantic triple backside? What the hell’s that?’

  Cuneo answered uncertainly: ‘Well, imagine a triple chin … on someone’s backside.’

  ‘No, I’d rather not,’ snorted Perdu, barely stifling a chuckle.

  ‘You’re not taking this seriously,’ Cuneo complained. ‘Just imagine if the love of your life turned out to be an illusion. With a horse’s backside, a horse’s teeth and a brain that was presumably reeling from kenophobia.’

  ‘A fear of empty spaces? Scary.’

  They smiled shyly at each other.

  ‘Loving or not loving should be like coffee or tea; people should be allowed to decide. How else are we to get over all our dead and the women we’ve lost?’ Cuneo whispered dejectedly.

  ‘Maybe we shouldn’t.’

  ‘You think so? Not get over it, but … then? What then? What task do the departed want us to do?’

  That was the question that Jean Perdu had been unable to answer for all these years.

  Until now. Now he knew.

  ‘To carry them within us – that is our task. We carry them all inside us, all our dead and shattered loves. Only they make us whole. If we begin to forget or cast aside those we’ve lost, then … then we are no longer present either.’

  Jean looked at the Allier River, glittering in the moonlight.

  ‘All the love, all the dead, all the people we’ve known. They are the rivers that feed our sea of souls. If we refuse to remember them, that sea will dry up too.’

  He felt an overwhelming inner thirst to seize life with both hands before time sped past even faster. He didn’t want to die of thirst; he wanted to be as wide and free as the sea – full and deep. He longed for friends. He wanted to love. He wanted to feel the marks that Manon had left inside him. He still wanted to feel her coursing through him, mingling with him. Manon had changed him forever – why deny it? That was how he had become the man whom Catherine had allowed to approach her.

  Jean Perdu suddenly realised that Catherine could never take Manon’s place. She took her own place. No worse, no better: simply different.

  He longed to show Catherine the full expanse of his sea!

  The men watched Max and Elaia kiss.

  Jean knew they wouldn’t mention their lies and illusions again. The essential had been said.

  29

  A week had passed. Hesitantly, cautiously, they had confided the major events of their lives to each other: Salvatore was the ‘imposition’ of an ‘accident’ between his cleaning lady mother and a married teacher during a free period; Jean was the child of a quarrelsome relationship between an occasional craftsman and an aristocratic academic; Max, a final attempt by a chronic people pleaser and a pedant, worn down by expectation and disappointment, to save their sclerotic marriage.

  They had sold books, read to children and had the piano tuned in exchange for a few novels. They had sung and laughed. From a public telephone Jean had rung his parents – and number 27 too.

  No one had picked up, even though he had let it ring twenty-six times.

  He had asked his father what it had felt like to go all of a sudden from being a lover to a father.

  Joaquin Perdu had said nothing for an unusually long time, then Jean heard him sniff. ‘Well, Jeanno … having a child is like casting off your own childhood forever. It’s as if it’s only then that you really grasp what it means to be a man. You’re scared too that all your weaknesses will be laid bare, because fatherhood demands more than you can give … I always felt I had to earn your love, because I loved you so, so much.’

  At that they had both sniffed.

  ‘Why are you asking, Jeanno? Do you mean to say you—’

  ‘No.’

  Unfortunately. A Max and a daughter, a little Lady Defiance, would have been nice. Would, could, should.

  Jean felt as though the tears he had shed by the Allier had created some space inside him. He could fill those initial gaps with fragrances, caresses, his father’s love … and Catherine. He could also squeeze in his affection for Max and Cuneo as well as the beauty of the landscape; he had found beneath the sorrow a place where emotion and happiness could live alongside tenderness and the realisation that he was lovable after all.

  The
y reached the Saône via the Canal du Centre, and there they sailed into the eye of a storm. Between Dijon and Lyons, the Burgundy sky came crowding down, growling and black, repeatedly split by lightning.

  Tchaikovsky’s piano concertos illuminated the murky darkness in Lulu’s belly like a spark in the belly of Jonah’s whale. Max braced his feet resolutely against the frame of the piano, and conjured ballads, waltzes and scherzi from the keyboard while the boat careened along on the cresting waves of the Saône.

  Perdu had never heard Tchaikovsky like this: accompanied by the trumpets and violins of the storm and underpinned by the groaning and pumping of the engine, and the creaking of the timbers as the wind buffeted the boat’s vulnerable waist and tried to drive her against the bank. Books rained down from the bookcases, Lindgren lay under a screwed-down sofa, and through a tear in the armchair’s upholstery Kafka, ears flattened, observed the volumes slip-sliding around.

  As Jean Perdu navigated up the Seille, a tributary of the Saône, the view ahead was reminiscent of a giant steamed-up laundry. He could smell the air – it was electric; he could smell the foaming, green water; he could feel the wheel twisting in his calloused hands – and he was delighted to be alive. To be alive now, right now!

  He was even enjoying the storm, force 5 on the Beaufort scale.

  Out of the corner of his eye, as the boat bucked and dipped between two buffeting waves, he spied the woman.

  She was wearing a see-through plastic rain cape and carrying an umbrella like a London stockbroker’s. She was gazing out over reeds pressed low by the gusty wind. She raised her hand in greeting before (he could barely believe it, but it was actually happening) unzipping her cape, tossing it aside, turning around and spreading her arms, the open umbrella in her right hand.

  Then, arms outstretched like the statue of Christ on Rio de Janeiro’s Corcovado, she let herself topple backwards into the heaving river.

  ‘What the …?’ hissed Perdu. ‘Salvo! Woman overboard!’ he cried, and the Italian came barrelling out of the galley.

  ‘Che? What have you been drinking?’ he cried, but Perdu merely pointed to the body now rising and sinking in the whipped-up water. And to the umbrella.

  The Neapolitan stared at the foaming river. The umbrella sank.

  Cuneo’s teeth were grinding.

  He made a grab for the mooring lines and the lifebuoy.

  ‘Bring us in closer!’ he ordered. ‘Massimo!’ he called. ‘Get off the piano! I need you here, right now … subito!’

  While Perdu wrestled the book barge nearer to the bank, Cuneo took up a position beside the railing, tied the rope to the lifebelt and braced his short, pudgy legs against the boards. Then he hurled the lifebelt with all his might towards the bundle in the water. He handed the other end of the rope to the watching Max, who had turned as white as a sheet.

  ‘When I get hold of her, you pull. Pull like a carthorse, boy!’

  He kicked off his shoes and dived headlong into the river. Streaks of lightning rent the sky.

  Max and Perdu watched Cuneo swim through the ravening water with powerful crawl strokes.

  ‘Shit, shit, shit!’ Max pulled his anorak sleeves well down over his hands and gripped the rope again.

  Perdu dropped anchor with a rattle. The barge pitched and tossed as if it were being thrown about inside a washing machine.

  Cuneo reached the woman and put his arms around her.

  Perdu and Max tugged on the rope and heaved them both aboard. Cuneo’s moustache was dripping; the woman’s heart-shaped face was framed by sopping, ruddy-brown hair like curly seaweed.

  Perdu dashed to the wheelhouse, but as he reached for the radio to call the emergency doctor, he felt Cuneo’s heavy wet hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Don’t! The woman doesn’t want you to. She’ll be all right as it is. I’ll take care of her – she needs drying off and warming up.’ Perdu trusted Cuneo’s words and asked no further questions.

  Sometime after they had hauled anchor, Perdu saw Cuisery marina emerge from the mist and steered Lulu into the harbour. Amid the lashing rain and waves Max and he tied boat to pontoon.

  ‘We’ve got to get off!’ cried Max over the whistling and wailing of the wind. ‘The boat’s going to take one hell of a battering!’

  ‘I’m not going to leave the books and the cats all alone!’ Perdu called back. The water was running into his ears, down his neck and up his sleeves. ‘And anyway, I’m the capitano, and a skipper doesn’t abandon his ship.’

  ‘Aye aye! Then I’m not going anywhere either.’

  The boat groaned, as though they both had a screw loose.

  Having set up camp in Perdu’s cabin, Cuneo had helped peel the castaway out of her clothes. The woman with the heart-shaped face was lying naked under a huge heap of blankets with a blissful expression on her face. The Italian had decked himself out in his white tracksuit, which made him look ever so slightly silly.

  He kneeled down beside her and fed her Provençal pistou. He spooned the garlic, basil and almond paste straight into a cup and diluted it with clear flavoursome vegetable broth.

  She smiled at him between two sips.

  ‘So it’s Salvo. Salvatore Cuneo, from Naples,’ she said.

  ‘Si.’

  ‘I’m Samantha.’

  ‘And you’re gorgeous,’ said Salvo.

  ‘Is it … is it not too bad out there?’ she asked. Her eyes were really very large and deepest, darkest blue.

  ‘Nah!’ Max shot back. ‘Huh, what do you mean?’

  ‘A light shower. There’s a little moisture about,’ Cuneo reassured her.

  ‘I could read something aloud,’ Perdu suggested.

  ‘Or we could sing a song,’ added Max. ‘In the round.’

  ‘Or cook,’ suggested Cuneo. ‘Do you like daube, a stew made with herbes de Provence?’

  She nodded. ‘And beef cheeks too, right?’

  ‘So what’s the problem?’ asked Max.

  ‘Life. The water. Tinned whorlfish.’

  The three men stared at her, completely baffled.

  On first appraisal Perdu thought that this Samantha might say and do some mad things, but she neither appeared nor was in fact mad. She was just … peculiar.

  ‘Three times nine, I’d say,’ he replied. ‘What are whorlfish, though?’

  ‘Did you fall into the water on purpose?’ asked Max.

  ‘On purpose? Yes, of course,’ Samantha answered. ‘Who goes for a walk on a day like today and accidentally falls in backwards? Now that would be stupid! No, you need to plan this kind of thing.’

  ‘So you were depressed, and you wanted to, um …?’

  ‘Oh no, is that how it looked?’

  Genuinely bewildered, she turned her heart-shaped face to each of the three men.

  ‘Practise pushing up the daisies? Send myself over the Styx? Die? Nooo. Why on earth would I do that? No, no. I like being alive, even if it’s occasionally a real struggle and fairly pointless in the grand scheme of things. No. I wanted to know what it felt like to jump into the river in this weather. The river looked so interesting, like soup gone wild. I wanted to know if I’d feel afraid in that soup or if my fear would tell me something important.’

  Cuneo nodded as if he understood exactly what she meant.

  ‘And what was it supposed to tell you?’ Max asked. ‘Something like God is dead, long live extreme sports?’

  ‘No, I merely wanted to see if a different way of living my life might occur to me. When it comes down to it, you only regret the things you didn’t do. That’s what they say, isn’t it?’

  The three men nodded.

  ‘Anyway, I didn’t want to wind up frustrated. I mean, who wants to bite the dust with the depressing thought that you’ve run out of time to do the really important things?’

  ‘All right,’ said Jean. ‘Naturally, we can bring our desires into sharper focus. But I’m not sure that really requires jumping into a river.’

  Cuneo gave S
amantha a rapturous smile, and ran his fingers repeatedly over the tips of his moustache.

  ‘Hallelujah,’ he muttered, and passed her the pistou.

  ‘And something important did occur to me as the waves tossed me about and I felt like the last raisin in the cake mix. I realised what I was missing,’ she announced.