It Started With Paris

by Cathy Kelly

  Dedication

  For Matt, my godfather, with love.

  It Started With Paris

  Cathy Kelly

  Contents

  Cover

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Cathy Kelly

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing. GOETHE

  He had the engagement ring in his pocket. He was terrified it would fall out – all through the ride up in the Eiffel Tower lift, with people pressing against him, he thought of what he’d do if he lost it. Proposals on the Eiffel Tower should not be memorable because of the would-be groom crawling around on the floor feeling for a ring box.

  No, the memorability was the venue, with Paris sparkling around them, with other people smiling at the joy of it all. Paris was the city of love – not the city of I had the ring and it fell out someplace – let’s find it, for heaven’s sake!

  Ever since they had got out of the cab, smiling with relief because the Parisian cab drivers were all racing-car drivers at heart, he’d been clutching the box in a death grip, having secretly taken it from its hiding place in the camera holdall.

  Too distracted by the sights to notice, she kept beaming at him, her cheeks flushed the same colour as her peony-pink scarf. Even cold and with a runny nose that was taking a pack of tissues an hour, she was beautiful.

  Doe-eyed, his mother had called her, and as usual, his mother was right.

  She did have the look of a deer, but a happy deer. A deer who grazed in Santa’s paddock and who expected all things in life to be magical.

  Even among the Parisian beauties, with their hauteur and their chic clothes, people still looked at her admiringly: she wasn’t tall, but she was slender, with the bearing of someone who’d done ballet for years and still walked as if she was about to go on stage in her teenage dance school corps. And she was his. His girlfriend, his about-to-be fiancée …

  He said a fleeting prayer, something he hadn’t done in years, and asked for help. Let her say yes, please.

  He’d told nobody he was going to ask her to be his wife.

  Not his father, though he’d nearly said it to his mother, because he’d been sure she’d hug him and say, ‘Go ahead, I love her like a daughter, you know that.’

  His friends might say that he had loads of time to settle down, but then they’d have recalled how luminous she was, easy-going as a person and easy on the eye, and how clever she was yet never showing off her cleverness.

  None of those were the reasons he was asking her to be his wife. He simply loved her and had done ever since they’d met all those years before when they’d been put at the same table in junior infants school.

  Turning those big dark eyes on him, she’d shown him her new-fangled eraser with the strawberry scent and gravely told him he could borrow it any time because she liked the dots on his face.

  ‘Freckles,’ he’d informed her. ‘You get freckles when you’re special.’

  ‘My daddy says I’m special but I don’t have fleckles,’ she’d said, sounding shocked at this betrayal.

  ‘I’ll draw some on,’ he’d said, getting out his pencil.

  The first two freckles had hurt too much so he’d stopped and hugged her the way his mother hugged him.

  ‘Will you be my best friend?’ she’d asked him, sniffing.

  She’d had him at her feet then and ever since.

  The Eiffel Tower lift came to a discreet halt; holding the ring box in one hand as if it was a grenade, he managed with his height and big frame to make a space for her to get out without being squashed. The tourists in Paris were maniacs, he decided: all mad to see everything first.

  ‘Thanks, love,’ she said when they finally made it out of the lift. ‘I thought I was going to be flattened.’

  She hugged his arm and he felt the surge of protectiveness he always felt for her, even though she was anything but a fragile little flower of a person. Small or not, she had plenty of toughness in her.

  ‘Look,’ she said now, holding his free hand and racing over to the railings to gaze at Paris spread out in front of them. It was as if the tower were the centre of the universe.

  He looked and saw nothing.

  Let her say yes. Let it be like a movie where she loves it and says yes and the other tourists clap. She could say no, she might say we’re too young and we have plans and—

  A tour guide was pointing out the different arrondissements and areas of interest to a group, and she was listening in.

  A Spanish couple asked him if he’d take a photo of them with their camera. Looking over to where she was eavesdropping on the tour guide, he saw her grin and wink at him. This was always happening to him. With his tall frame, smiling, charming face and the chestnut hair that looked as if someone had just ruffled it, he was the picture of honesty.

  Afterwards they walked around the observation deck and she pointed out landmarks.

  ‘Do you think that’s where our hotel is?’ she asked, squinting.

  Their hotel wasn’t the bijou beauty near central Paris they’d been promised. The bedroom was bijou all right, so bijou it was easier to climb over the bed to get to the door than risk your kneecaps on the bed frame.

  And it was near central Paris only if you happened to be an Olympic athlete gearing up for a run. But now was not the moment to ruin things with such matters.

  Unable to take it any more, he grabbed her by the waist to stop her, turned her to face him, then sank to his knees. The box – thank you! – was now in his pocket and he pulled it out, held it up the way he’d seen it done in the movies a hundred times, and said, ‘My darling, will you—’

  ‘YES!’ she shrieked, throwing herself at him and hugging him. With him kneeling down, there was a reversal of their usual height difference and she had to angle her head to kiss him.

  ‘Really?’ he said, hardly believing. He knew she loved him, but this – this was everything, and they were young and—

  ‘Yes, yes, yes!!!’ she said, and then kissed him as though he were dying and she needed to bring him back to life.

  He sank into the embrace and felt his heart pulse with sheer joy.

  She’d said yes.

  Touristy approval emanated from the crowd and people began to clap and shout approval. Someone was taking pictures, but he didn’t care at this intrusion into their moment.

  ‘You will?’

  ‘I will. Show me, show me.’

  He opened the box with its antique diamond ring inside: an emerald-cut diamond surrounded by two rows of tiny diamondettes or whatever they were called when they were incredibly small and probably not big enough to qualify as actual diamonds. He’d spent two months searching antique jewellery shops all over Waterford and even Cork, trying to find the perfect ring for the woman he loved.

  She breathed in and held out one small hand, and he slid the ring slowly on to her finger. It was the right size, he was sure; he’d m
easured one of her costume jewellery rings, and according to the ring guidelines it was a J. ‘Perfect for this delicate ring,’ the jeweller had said happily as he’d pushed it a quarter of the way down his own little finger and tried to see it through her eyes.

  ‘I love it,’ she said in wonder, one hand still on his shoulder, the other held aloft as the ring caught the Parisian sunshine.

  The Spanish couple came up and asked if they wanted them to take their photo.

  ‘You make a handsome pair,’ said the man.

  So they posed with the Parisian skyline in the background, arms around each other’s waists and her left hand held proudly out to the camera to show off her engagement ring.

  Other people looked on in approval at the tall, strong man with the messy hair and the slender girl in jeans and pristine white tennis shoes, her silky dark hair worn in a ponytail. They looked good together, they fitted somehow.

  ‘You will have beautiful children,’ said the Spanish man, smiling as he handed back the camera.

  They both laughed at the thought.

  Children!

  That was years off.

  ‘Who will we tell first?’ he asked, when the crowd had dwindled and it was just them again.

  She looked thoughtful. As he watched her, he realised he still had that gloriously joyous feeling inside. He’d known she’d say yes – he knew her so well – but even so … she’d said yes. Yes!

  He’d never forget this moment, ever.

  One

  Love is a flower which turns into fruit at marriage. FINNISH PROVERB

  At her desk on the fifth floor of the mermaid-green glass office block where Eclipse Films had their offices, Leila Martin sniffed the rose tea that her assistant Ilona had carried in for them both on a tray.

  It smelled beautiful; even the packaging was beautiful: 1940s pretty, with a china cup painted in watercolours on the front and swirls of steam emerging, tiny roses drawn in the swirls.

  ‘You’ll love it!’ said Ilona, arriving back in the modern office, this time with her arms full of notepad and tablet. Ilona was always bringing things in to her boss: chocolates, biscuits, a Hungarian herbal tea her mother swore by but that smelled like cat litter mixed with patio yard sweepings.

  If Leila didn’t know better, she’d swear Ilona was trying to cheer her up. But then Ilona knew – because Leila had told her firmly – that Leila had absolutely no need of cheering up.

  It was business as usual at Eclipse. Leila Martin wanted people to know that she didn’t do heartbreak or any of that type of thing. She was pretty sure she had them all fooled.

  She stared back at her rose tea.

  It was healthy, too. Probably lowered stress levels or boosted immune systems or did something proved in scientific tests by a fleet of people with PhDs coming out their ears. It just wasn’t coffee.

  Worse, it wasn’t coffee like Leila’s favourite cup of the day, which used to be the one her husband brought her in bed in the morning and which she could hear him brewing in the classic espresso maker that shook volcanically on the top of the stove and was probably the oldest thing in their apartment.

  Since Tynan had left, no coffee tasted right.

  Nothing tasted right.

  Six months of having to do it herself and Leila still couldn’t make it just the way he had. How could a person go their whole life making their own coffee, enjoying drinking it in trendy cafés, and then fall in love with their husband’s coffee, so that when he left her for another woman and another city, she was practically allergic to the taste of anything else? It made no sense at all.

  When she’d been fifteen and living in the country town of Bridgeport, she and her best friend, Katy, had adored the very concept of coffee, spending their pocket money ordering skinny cappuccinos and Americanos in the café near Poppy Lane, where Leila lived.

  Katy lived on the outskirts of Waterford city, a stone’s throw from Bridgeport. Leila hadn’t been able to wait to get out of what she considered a desperate backwater and live in the big city. Fifteen years later, both the city and coffee left a bitter taste in her mouth.

  ‘A flatte’s quite nice,’ Katy had urged the last time she’d been up in Dublin for a weekend with Leila. They’d found seats in a smart café and Katy was running a finger up and down the menu, dithering over syrups and double shots.

  ‘No,’ Leila said gloomily, ‘I hate flattes. All that milk. I don’t know what it was about that damn French coffee maker yoke, but it worked for him. Not for me. He jinxed it. I’m back on the tea. Builder’s tea, Earl Grey – you name it. Has anyone ever checked whether a marriage break-up has a chemical effect on your taste buds? That’s the only answer. Or else he’s got a wax dummy of me in London and he’s sticking pins into its mouth.’

  It sounded so ridiculous, they both laughed: the thought of the slick, modern Tynan believing in any sort of religious practice, including voodoo. He was an atheist, believed in nothing but the dollar, he said, which used to annoy the hell out of Katy, given that the Irish currency was the euro.

  ‘If there’s any wax dummy to be made, you should be the one making it,’ Katy said.

  The two women had been best friends since they were in primary school. Both on the short side, one blonde, one brunette, and a force to be reckoned with when together, the partnership felt a bit lopsided to Leila these days. Katy was gloriously happy with her first love and Leila was very much unhappy.

  Worse, Leila knew Katy thought she should be rejoicing that someone as disloyal as Tynan had walked out of her life and their one-year marriage.

  Katy had said that – and more. The statute of limitations on criticising appalling husbands was somehow up now that six months had passed. Katy wanted her friend to move on. Unfortunately, moving on was proving harder than she had hoped, and both of them knew that Leila would take the cheating Tynan back in an instant should he turn up on her doorstep repentant.

  So Katy comforted during late-night phone calls, mopped up tears via supportive text messages and tried to hold off on criticising because the once-strong Leila Martin had been made vulnerable and fragile by love.

  That day, Leila ordered green tea and they settled in cosy coffee shop chairs to talk about the only thing Leila ever wanted to talk about.

  ‘I know this sounds ridiculous now, but when we got married, it felt safe, final. As if the years of dating all the wrong guys were over and at last I’d come home to Tynan. He was The One. And – this is almost the worst bit, Katy – I pushed him to get married. He’d have been happy the way things were, living together, no bit of paper to show we were officially man and wife.’

  Katy, who’d heard it all before, patted Leila’s knee in solidarity.

  ‘We all do dumb things for love,’ she said, a variation on her previous themes. ‘And he wasn’t The One. The One doesn’t dump you for a twenty-something with thighs skinnier than her knees.’

  Sometimes this made Leila laugh. Not today. She barely heard, lost in reliving her mistakes. It was such a relief to be able to talk about her pain. Pretending she was utterly fine when she was in work was making recovery even harder.

  ‘I rushed us both into it because I wanted to be with him so much. I wanted him to be mine. If only I’d taken it more slowly, waited …’

  She’d been sure that Tynan wanted the same things in life as she had: he’d swung her round on their wedding day with the band playing a cheesy version of ‘It Had To Be You’ and he’d had eyes for nobody but his blonde bride, whose face was lit up in a way that owed nothing to the careful application of cosmetics. They’d been so happy; she’d have bet her life on it.

  How had she not seen?

  ‘You OK, Leila?’ Katy said. ‘You’ve gone off into the Twilight Zone.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Leila nodded. She managed a half-smile for her best friend. ‘Thanks for listening. You should be charging. What’s the going rate for counselling these days? Sixty quid an hour? You deserve to be paid for sitting through this, bec
ause I can’t tell anyone else or they’d think I’d totally lost my marbles. This is not how people expect me to behave.’

  With everyone else – her colleagues, her mother, her sister Susie, who had enough on her own plate as it was – she smiled stoically and murmured that it was his decision and she was fine, really. It was what she thought people wanted to hear from a strong, ambitious woman of twenty-nine with a brilliant career.

  She couldn’t say that Tynan had made her feel like the crazy teenager she’d never been, and that she’d run blindly into his arms, convinced he was her destiny. He was loving, sexy, handsome, funny, kind – he’d even bought her the perfect coffee maker.

  ‘You should stop trying to pretend it doesn’t hurt,’ Katy said. ‘It doesn’t make you look weak to say you’re upset. I’m sure Bill Gates would cry if his wife dumped him.’

  ‘Bill Gates is far too smart to have married someone who’d dump him,’ Leila retorted. ‘I have never felt like a loser before, but I feel like one now. And I still want him. That makes it worse.’

  ‘Listen!’ said Katy sternly. ‘If Tynan could run out on you like that for some young hipster girl he met through work, then he wasn’t good enough for you in the first place. Better you find out now rather than ten years down the line. He’s done you a favour. In a few years, you’d be throwing him out.’

  Would she? Leila wondered sadly. She could never have seen a time when that would happen. He was like a force of nature, a passionate, devil-may-care man who’d come into her life like a tornado. She’d never have thrown him out. She loved him too much.

  He’d taken his stuff and nearly all of Leila’s self-confidence. Would she ever get it back? Who knew? But for now, she was off men. In fact, not just for now – for ever.

  A few weeks ago, on the six-month anniversary of Tynan’s leaving, Leila had thrown out the little French coffee maker and started on an odyssey into herbal teas. As grand gestures went, it wasn’t much, but it was a start.

  Now, at her desk, she stared at the rose tea whose virtues Ilona had extolled.

  ‘It’s my favourite,’ she’d said, a trace of her exotic Hungarian accent in her voice. ‘Jasmine is lovely, but the proper stuff is expensive and rose is calming, don’t you think?’