“I thought you’d be asleep.”
“Hang on.” I hear him get up from wherever he is and I hear the quiet closing of a door behind him. “That’s better,” he says, his voice only fractionally louder. “Are you OK? Everything all right?”
“More than all right; I played the cello. It’s perfect, it’s so beautiful.”
“Oh, my darling girl, I knew it would be great. What did you play?”
I love that David knows the things that matter to me, that he asks the right questions and listens—really listens—to the answer.
He hums the melody of “Libertango.” “Is that the one?”
“Yes. Love it.”
“Good choice.” He is still whispering.
“And then there’s more.” I need a run-up to tell him. “Can you talk? Where are you?”
“I’m in Paris. Things are difficult, really fucking difficult. I can’t talk for long.”
I hear a door open and shut in the background. Something moves and makes a scraping noise—a chair, a coffee table?
“Sorry,” he says, and I imagine him sitting back down, brushing his hair away from his eyes as he always does when he’s tired. He sighs as if he’s about to let go of a huge and heavy sentence of his horrors, but he doesn’t.
“Shall I come over?” Now is not the time to tell him about my triumph. It will be better in person.
“I don’t know when. Or where.” He sounds like someone else, someone smaller. “I’ve got a client here. I’m on the daybed.”
“I could book a hotel. Tell me the day.”
“I can’t do an overnight. It’s complicated, but I’ll tell you when I see you. I’m sorry, darling.” He sounds so desolate.
“Is everything OK? Really? Are you and your . . . ?”
I was about to ask him if he and his wife were making some kind of reconciliation but he interrupts.
“God, no, nothing like that. Jesus, that ship sailed a very long time ago.” He pauses and understands my silent worries. “Nothing’s changed between us, sweetheart. There’s just been a lot of mopping up to do.”
I throw myself onto the sofa. I have a small glass of wine still sitting on the side and I drink it while he speaks.
“Look, I could do tomorrow. Late lunch. Maybe into the evening. Can you get here? Could you bear to, just for one afternoon?”
I think quickly through the train timetable. “I can do that. I might look like shit after five hours’ sleep or something. Can you cope with that?”
“You’ll still be more beautiful than every other woman on the street.”
I smile. Even now, David manages to make everything about me. “OK, see you tomorrow.”
“I’ll book Le XVIII”—he actually says dix-huit—“for two at two o’clock?”
“You’re on,” I say, and smile.
“Love you, sweetheart, see you there.”
Le XVIII is our favorite restaurant in Paris, and full of memories and conversations. When we first met, we skulked around in less populated arrondissements while we found our feet. Bumping into someone he knew in those early days would have made us both feel so treacherous, so awkward. David meets a lot of clients, past and present, wandering around the streets near his apartment. Most of the American, Russian, and Middle Eastern businessmen he deals with stay near the Trocadéro in the tranche of five-star hotels running down towards the Arc de Triomphe.
On one of our first dates in Paris, when I was new to the city and even David was still exploring those outer reaches, was out to the Pont de Clichy. It’s an ugly area. The bridge itself—once you’ve navigated your way from the Metro and beneath a flyover, past cut-price supermarkets and grubby launderettes—is utilitarian. It isn’t, as one might imagine, a piece of tongue-in-cheek Brutalist architecture—it’s functional, grim, and ugly. The walkways of the bridge look more like something from an American movie about rail tracks than a pedestrian pavement: the water below is muddy, gray, and eddying.
But across the river are leafier boroughs, far more inviting, and in one of those streets, bordering the river, is Le XVIII. If the waiters there have any judgment about us—and I’m sure they’re well aware at least one of us is married to someone else—they are far too professional and old-school-Paris to say so.
Le XVIII is a lovely restaurant. I’m pleased to be going there. It has everything that impresses me about the formality of Paris. The waiters are aloof and handsome—there are rarely any women front-of-house—and the food is never disappointing. The decor and the smells and the slightly arrogant ambience come together to produce something so—totally—Parisian. No one could think they were in any other city in the world.
I’ll book a hotel as well, low-key but near the restaurant. David has already said that he can’t do an overnighter, but he may well be able to stay late into the evening.
I switch on the computer. I may be able to save a few pounds by booking my Eurostar ticket now instead of buying it at the desk in the morning. I can certainly look at the hotels since I’m far too excited to sleep.
I did promise Mr. Williams that I’d work on Alan’s violin over the next few days and I desperately need to keep playing the Cremona cello, but those things will have to wait. I could hear the tension and the stress in David’s voice tonight; I need to know he’s all right.
I will email Nadia and ask her to open the shop. She didn’t mention any plans for tomorrow.
In the shop inbox is an email from Dominique-Marie Martin. I know the name.
It takes three full seconds to realize that it is from David’s wife.
One, two, three.
I open it.
Dear Ms. Atherton, it begins, as harmless as any other.
Please forgive the intrusion of my writing to you—it is not something that I ever saw myself doing.
I have known about your affair with my husband, obviously, since the night you met. Meeting a pretty girl at a party and then not coming home that night is a constant giveaway with David.
While I am not minded to explain the nature of my marriage, I am sure it comes as no surprise to you to realize, or perhaps to have confirmed, that my husband and I enjoyed a very satisfactory, indeed mutually beneficial, arrangement. The only part of this that you need to know is that it exists to protect our children. Specifically, we had a firm agreement that David would have no further children.
My husband is now, to my and his own utter humiliation, having his vasectomy reversed. He believes himself to have found, and please rest assured that this is a direct quote, “true and everlasting love.” The object of his lust is a twenty-five-year-old “model” named Marie-Thérèse.
My husband’s recent “heroics” on the Paris underground prompted him into action when his girlfriend—an active Facebook user like most twenty-five-year-olds—watched the video of the two of you at Porte de Pantin Metro. As a consequence of this, he has left the family home and moved in with this girl in his Paris apartment.
I have no desire to enter into any dialogue on these matters. I have sent the same email to his PA—who has served him selflessly for twenty years—and a family friend in Germany. I have not bothered with any interim or unimportant girlfriends, and I did not want to humiliate any of you by putting you all on one email.
How you choose to continue your relationship with David is entirely your affair and absolutely none of my business. I do, however, need to point out that, should you and he also decide to have a child, I will do everything necessary to protect my own children’s inheritance, rights, and stability. That is my only concern.
At the bottom it is signed, simply, Dominique-Marie Martin.
* * *
I am nineteen. I am in the long corridor of the halls at music college. I am going up to the third floor where my best friend’s room is because I desperately need a shoulder to cry on and I can’t find my boyfriend.
My eyes are so blurred with tears that I cannot make out the color of the paint on the walls or the numbers o
n the doors.
My cello is in a case on my back; my poor, silenced, mistreated cello. I have come from Nikolai’s study where I had a tutorial. Nikolai has been warning me that if I do not practice, my position at the college would be in jeopardy. He has told me for weeks now that I am a disgrace to the beautiful instrument my parents saved so hard to buy for me, I am a liability in his quintet, and—worse—I have jeopardized Shota’s very career.
I have practiced. Practiced until my fingers bled. I get up in the night every hour, on the hour, to put more methylated spirits on the ends of my fingers to make them tougher. I book music rooms when it is dark, when everyone else is in the bar or at a club. I practice while they socialize.
Even when I am alone with my boyfriend I talk too much about music, ask him how he would play pieces, hum refrains under my breath. I am doing everything I can not to leave. I am trying harder than anyone can try.
Today Nikolai declared that it is not enough. I am leaving. He is going to the principal tomorrow to explain that he cannot teach me because I don’t have the talent. There is nothing more—or less—to it than that.
He has been pushing me more and more. I can no longer eat before Nikolai’s sessions, my throat tightening and my stomach shutting down. I have been required to stay behind after every rehearsal, and Shota and I argue about it more and more.
“Your relationship with that boy will cost him his career,” Nikolai told me tonight. “Pitching himself against me is a mistake. You only have one heart and it needs to belong to your cello, not to some stupid boy who thinks he can have you.”
My face burns with shame; the idea of Nikolai knowing about Shota and me at all leaves me more humiliated than ever.
Nikolai squats behind me, he pushes his palm flat against the small of my back. “Here,” he says, and presses against my spine. “This is the center of you; this is where you will generate the sound. This is near to your soul.”
I sit up as straight as I can. I’m dizzy from hunger and from Nikolai’s shouting.
He holds my bowing arm out straight with his right arm, and draws his fingers back until they circle my wrist. “Now,” he says, “draw the bow back and feel the song in your soul. Let go.”
But I just close in more tightly as the inside of his arm meets the back of mine, as his body makes another attempt to push me up straight, to give my arms and spine the combined power they need to make the sound he wants.
My posture solved for the moment, he moves to my left hand position, pressing my agonized fingers flatter—but not harder—onto the strings. The slide when we make the shift down the wound alloy strings feels like they will separate my flesh like cheese wire.
I cry out in pain, certain there will be blood streaming down the fingerboard. Nikolai covers my small hand with his, each of his fingers mapping mine like a glove, his cheek fleshy against mine, and I can smell his breath in the air in front of my mouth. “Once more,” he whispers, and his voice is uncharacteristically gentle against my neck.
“I can’t.” I pull away from him. I cannot get any closer to this man who pushes me and tries to teach me; this man I want to please more than almost any other, but whom I fail every day. “I just can’t.”
Nikolai shouts at me the whole time I am packing my cello away. As I slide in the spike and tighten the bolt, he tells me who I could have been. As I clip the case shut he lists the reasons that I will never be a player of any note at all. As I struggle my arms through the straps to get out of the room, he lays out—in pointed, painful detail—every fracture and crack that will tear across my parents’ hearts. The concert we have worked for months on is next week and I will not be playing in it. My parents will not be in the audience.
My time in the college is over.
I search out my boyfriend. I stumble up the stairs and into the corridor. His door is on the right. I knock on the door, wishing myself inside. There is no answer.
I know he isn’t there—it is too small to hide. Only a month ago, I left my virginity in Shota’s room, in that tiny bed. It was part of my effort to feel normal, to be like all the other students. It was my attempt at finding the passion that Nikolai says I will never have.
It didn’t work.
Shota has left his family in Japan to come here—he is alone. College means as much to him as it does to me. He is my kind of boy.
I pull myself down the corridor, crying so hard I feel sick. Catherine’s door is near the end, farthest away from the stairs. I get closer and her door opens. It is Shota who backs out of Catherine’s small room. It is Shota who pulls on his coat and blows a kiss back through the open door. It is Shota who isn’t carrying his viola, who wasn’t in Catherine’s room to practice music.
I turn and run. I call my mother and I leave.
I never ask Shota how long he has been seeing Catherine. I never question Catherine about what is really happening. I never speak to anyone from college again. It is years before I can even think about it without crying and decades until I will play the cello in front of anyone else.
* * *
I read and reread the email. I am not hysterical or naive. I am not, any longer, stupid. I breathe deeply and calmly and remember that this has been written by an angry wife, a betrayed spouse.
I concentrate on the things I was doing before it arrived. I know I can’t ring David—his phone will be on silent and he will be asleep now.
I book a hotel in Asnières-sur-Seine through an internet site. It is midrange—for Paris—and functional and a short walk from the restaurant. I book my ticket for the Eurostar and work out where I will leave my car and, therefore, what time I will need to leave home.
The most awful thing that David’s wife has done is to pretend that he has had a vasectomy. It means, presumably, that she knows I am desperate for a baby. It also shows that she doesn’t know about our two precious miscarriages. They, the lost babies, are what we have that excludes his wife, and that is what I hold on to. I hear myself mutter, “I know something you don’t know,” to no one in my empty house. I go to bed.
* * *
I set my alarm for half past five but am awake, wide-awake, at four.
I am determined not to make the mistakes I made at college. I’m not going to jump to conclusions, conclusions that have painful, spiny echoes for years.
I have no reason to trust David’s wife and every reason to trust him. The logical conclusion, and the one I want to reach, is that she has seen the footage of the two of us together and needs to lash out. My email address is easily found—it is on my shop website. There aren’t many female violin makers in this end of the country, and even fewer who have their own shops. She would need little information about me to find me and I presume that little information was given up by David in response to the media sitting outside their house day and night.
At half past four, the birds start singing outside and the sun creaks slowly into life as if a hinge is lifting on the horizon. With it my spirits begin to rise. The daylight brings a rationality, some common sense. Perhaps David has told her that I am a twenty-five-year-old model called Marie-Thérèse; maybe he is deflecting blame from me. I am even more convinced when I google and find nothing but a maze of Picasso and perfume under that name. Maybe he wants to direct his wife’s vitriol at a cut-out image from a magazine, save himself from listening to her cursing me. I hope fervently that he has really moved out of his family home, even though it will hurt his children and even though it is not, strictly, in the rules.
For a moment I imagine the rest of his things here in this half-empty bedroom. We will have to share our time between here and Paris for a while but what utter bliss that will be.
I dress carefully. I want to look a little Parisian; as if I could fit in there, belong there, if need be. I want to look like I haven’t put too much effort into what I choose; David isn’t keen on high heels and too much makeup.
I choose a dress that is very short but balances out with sleeves, which are long a
nd slim, tapering tightly in at the wrists. It doesn’t need any jewelry; it is beautifully designed just as it is. It is enough. I don’t wear tights—my legs are brown from the summer—and I dig out the loafers I bought in Paris this spring.
I check myself in the hall mirror; I look good and it makes me feel confident.
I pick up my bag and check for passport, shop keys, money, and phone. With every mundane thought, everything is calming down, getting more normal. I will see David in just a few hours.
The last thing I pick up before I leave is the cello. I am taking it to the shop so that Nadia can play it if she wants to. She’s no cellist, but she is a capable string player who knows how to get a tune out of it and, more important, knows how to treat it well. Any practice at all will help the sound to open up.
* * *
By the time I get to the shop there are one or two lights on in shopwindows along the street. The butcher’s shop up the road keeps long hours, and the owner waves hello at me as he carries meat from the wagon parked outside. He doesn’t seem to think it odd that I’m standing outside my shop at six o’clock in the morning, dressed to kill and carrying a cello.
I daren’t leave the cello in the shop. It would only take one unsupervised child, one busybody father, to do something catastrophic to its perfect shine, its flawless varnish. I leave it out of the case so that it is obvious to Nadia but arrange it, safely, in the corner of the workshop where no accident could befall it.
Chapter Thirteen
I get to Paris far too early. I knew I would. I booked so late that I had to buy the most expensive ticket; the only upside is that it is completely flexible. I can stay over this evening or go back later on today. I squeeze my fingernails into the palms of my hands as I hope that I’ll stay, and David with me.
I try to doze on the train but I’m too tense. Instead I leaf through the paperwork for the competition. I have two weeks before the cello must be sent off. A month after that, David and I have twelve blissful nights booked in a beautiful hotel in Cremona. In the daytimes I will network and chat to makers and dealers from all over the world; David, of course, will do his part with translating for me and generally entertaining potential clients. In the evenings we will listen to world-class recitals from some incredibly big names. In the nighttime we will sleep curled up to each other and try to put all this anxiety behind us.
Goodbye, Paris Page 11