‘You know, I really don’t,’ I said. ‘You’ve been very kind but could you possibly find someone else to hit on? How about her?’ I pointed as a toned twenty-something in tiny shorts passed us, a long blonde ponytail bouncing out the back of her baseball cap. Nobody raised an eyebrow about a man with a much younger woman. Barely a week had passed since the first time this guy tried it on with forty-year-old me, not setting his sights too high. Then I’d been offended that I could pass for a woman who might. Now I was a woman who had.
Philippe had left me a note on the dining table that read like a telegram.
REVIEW FIGARO BRAVO KISSES
If it hadn’t been for my injury I would have run to the nearest tabac for the newspaper, but I booted up my laptop and there it was: an impressive spread in the Littérature section, our biggest by far, complete with Bernard’s photo, the book jacket and another of the icons. Pierre de Longueville had struck exactly the right balance between aesthetics and religious significance. Lisette called to say she was fielding calls from journalists who suddenly wanted interviews with Bernard after ignoring our press releases for weeks. A TV arts channel was offering to pay for him to return to the monastery with a film crew. Turned out icons were about to become cool and we had absolutely no idea. ‘I thought we could set up the reception area as an interview room,’ Lisette suggested, since we couldn’t afford to do it in a hotel. ‘We’d have to station someone downstairs to make sure nobody barged in, but I think it could work.’
I told her I’d be at the office as soon as possible.
Extracting specks of dirt and grit from my skin with tweezers was a horrible job but I got through it, grateful that my tetanus shot was up to date. My wails must have been louder than I realised because Vanessa stumbled out of her room, glaring. ‘What the—?’ She saw my leg and screwed her face up. ‘Yuck!’ she said. ‘That is gross.’
‘Thanks for the sympathy, Vanessa. I didn’t set out to do this.’ The wound was finally clean and painted with iodine, which just left the rest of me. ‘Somehow I’ve got to wash – I can’t go to work in this state. Especially not today.’
I pulled my hair into a twist and fastened it. Not great but it would do. There was no way I could shower without getting my leg wet. Vanessa was chewing the inside of her mouth. ‘Take a bath and prop it up on the side,’ she said, before swanning out.
As I was in a hurry I only ran enough water to cover my body. Getting in wasn’t difficult but as soon as I did, I saw that getting out with my bad leg on the outer edge was going to be impossible. When Philippe and I had the bathroom remodelled we didn’t think we’d be needing grab rails any time soon.
I had just realised I was going to have to ask for Vanessa’s help when she walked back in without knocking. Irrationally, given that she was about to see me naked, I crossed my arms over my front. I’m not proud of this, but I was relieved she wasn’t a waif like the girl in the perfume ad.
‘I’ve come to wash your foot. This one,’ she touched my big toe. There was a pause long enough for me to know this was nothing to do with my injury.
‘What is it, Vanessa?’
‘I didn’t only come to the party for Dad, you know.’
‘I know, I was pleased you came. You coped really well – it’s not easy when you don’t know anyone.’
‘That was a good thing! It made a nice change from being slut-shamed. It’s all over Facebook what happened with Boris, but you’re the only one who knows the whole story. My mom didn’t want to know – she never has. But I can talk to you.’ Abandoning my modesty, I covered my face as my shoulders began to shake.
‘Oh, shit,’ she said. ‘Did I make it worse? If it hurts that badly you should really take something.’
Chapter Twenty Five
Normally I would have been delighted to see Emily in Paris but I’d never been good at hiding things from her. She’s been my only real confidante ever since I turned up at Coldwater twelve years old, foreign and friendless.
After several days my leg was still not in great shape. The grazes were itching as they began to heal and my ankle ached, although it hadn’t warranted a trip to the emergency room. Over the years I’d come to dislike hospitals more and more after having my pelvic organs scraped, lasered and unstuck in London, New York and twice in Paris.
I certainly couldn’t make it to our meeting place on foot. Walking around a city is like the movies: a million fleeting moments, there and gone. The Metro is more like the theatre: individuals sharing a confined space for different periods, their physical presence, expressions and silence as eloquent as anything they might say. Once on the train, I didn’t even consider getting the novel out of my bag, knowing that I’d only read the same line over and over. I’d recently purchased Grégoire Delacourt’s La liste de mes envies. How many times had I seen that title without it striking me in any way, the idea of listing one’s desires? I wasn’t sure I’d ever truly had any and now it wouldn’t be a list. There’d only be one entry.
Instead I looked at the people surrounding me: glued to their phones, staring into space, living their lives. I’ve always wondered what it must be like to be in someone else’s head, how it would feel to be a good person with a clear conscience, who’s never mean or bitter, who’s never caused anyone pain. There can’t be many people like that, can there? Or maybe I’m fooling myself. Maybe there are. Emily is like that.
I ask myself if, on average, other people are happier than me. I don’t mean since all this, of course, but in general. How joy feels to them. Sadness. Grief. We all have a pent-up invisible interior and yet we’re constantly taken aback when someone springs a breach and it comes flooding out, sometimes when it’s too late. Take my mom and me; nobody would have the faintest idea what we carry with us. Before I was old enough to want a child I’d seen what it was like to lose one. It’s still the worst thing I can imagine. I almost don’t have to.
As lost in rêverie as I was en réalité, I almost missed my stop. The restaurant where Emily and I were meeting for lunch was uncomfortably close to Malavoine territory; it wouldn’t have been my choice but she was on a tight schedule. With ten minutes to kill I lingered in front of the Wall of Peace at the south end of the Champ de Mars and looked at the forest of pillars, feeling empty of the reflections they were designed to inspire, for all that I was greatly in need of serenity. I’d been morphing into somebody new at such a rate that I hardly recognised myself. Sharing the blessing of a doting mother and two older sisters, it was Emily who initiated me into every aspect of being a woman – how could she fail to notice?
Ahead of me a man was walking a large white poodle which was oblivious that it was shitting within view of one of the world’s most famous landmarks. The owner didn’t stop to pick it up.
To my left a group of men in their early twenties were bantering and kicking a ball about like big kids. Anxious not to be caught staring, I snuck a few glances at them from behind my sunglasses, trying to establish whether I’d had a buried penchant for younger men all along. They were a typically Parisian mix: fair, dark, Arab, black, a couple of them very good-looking. The bare-chested ones with T-shirts hanging from their belt loops were honed and muscular. The Moroccan-looking one, the smallest, gave me a cheeky smile and apologised when the breeze sent the ball my way with a cloud of dust, making me leap sideways. They were full of energy and exuded a kind of brutish masculinity that I registered without being stirred by it. Before Jean-Luc I doubt I would have paid them any attention at all.
At the brasserie Emily had chosen there was one table left on the terrace and I was debating whether to take it when she appeared. My eyes pricked and I hugged her for so long she had to tell me to let go. ‘I hope your friends don’t mind me dragging you away,’ I said. It was a birthday trip for one of them who was turning forty.
‘Not at all. I’m relieved not to have to stand in that queue for the Eiffel Tower. They know I’ve done it before.’
Emily and I came to Paris togethe
r on a school trip in 1989, my first visit to France. The tower was brightly lit up for the bicentenary of the French Revolution and we were fifteen years old, the perfect age to appreciate such glitziness. Everything was as glamorous as we’d hoped and it made London seem so grey and drab. The language I’d loved already, but that was the day my love of the country took hold.
At Emily’s insistence, the waiter brought us two glasses of champagne and after he’d stopped by three times to take our order, we agreed to stop talking and concentrate. In the end we ordered four dishes that sounded good and I said Emily could take her pick when the food arrived. I’m not fussy – at school I would often finish hers.
As the menus were removed, I picked up my glass and realised I’d downed half of it in one. ‘So who are you here with, anyone I know?’
From the way Emily pressed her lips together I instantly knew that one of them was Jonathan’s sister. She and Emily were college friends and set me up with him when we were both living in New York. Abandoning my plans to become a real American, I’d moved back to England to be with him. He was so persuasive that I convinced myself it was romantic not to get married until we were expecting a baby, not realising he meant unless. He’d done me a favour in the long run. If there’s no love, there’s no point in pretending.
Before I could forget I handed Emily the gift for my goddaughter. It was a top from Zadig & Voltaire with the metallic rivet wings on the back, an extravagance, but one I knew she’d love. Cassie was born not long after Jonathan and I broke up and Emily knew I needed something in my life that stood a chance of working out. And it did; I adored Cassie, now eleven, visiting them in England at least once a year. And Cassie loved to show off about her American godmother who lived in Paris.
Emily chose the terrine with fig chutney, leaving me with six Cancale oysters. It would have been like her to crack an aphrodisiac joke, but I was spared. As I squeezed the half lemon wrapped in muslin, my mouth was watering already. The acidity of the Muscadet we’d chosen complemented the mineral saltiness of the oysters to perfection and a syllable of delight escaped me as I tipped my head back, feeling the sun on my face. These days I was more open to pleasure than I would ever have believed possible.
Chapter Twenty Six
It must have felt like twenty questions. I grilled Emily about her weekend in Paris, the children, her family, who took me in countless times in the school break when my mother didn’t come through with the plane tickets my father paid for.
At the time I just got on with it because that’s what kids do. But when I look back it’s like someone wrenched my heart out with their bare hands and pummelled it before putting it back. And although I got used to it, it never became my normal, not when we used to be a family who baked cookies and went to the beach and took long walks in the forest. The Olympics were held in Los Angeles in the summer of ’84 and as I danced and turned cartwheels along the trunks of fallen redwoods my dad put on his hopeless American accent: ‘Representing the United States of America, Alexandra Folgate of Crescent City, California.’ It’s rose tinted, I know, but I only remember good things from before.
Emily told me her husband was being made redundant but had some leads so they weren’t overly worried. My mouth pulled when she said, ‘life goes on.’
Well, yes, you can always fall back on that one. Except that it doesn’t, not always.
The chicken and the salmon both looked delicious, so we swapped plates halfway through, something I wouldn’t even have done with Philippe. We attracted one or two amused glances but I was past caring. It had taken me ten years to realise I was living in a city where beneath a veneer of conformity a lot of people did exactly what they pleased.
We were never going to get through the whole meal without Emily asking about me.
‘So are you feeling better after the operation?’
I was, so much so that I’d started to take it for granted. ‘The doctor said I’ll be fine for a while now. The new fish hook will help.’
Emily smiled – for different reasons we were both fans of the T-shape miracle gizmo. By this point I was desensitised to gynaecological indignities and having instruments and devices inserted into me, but it wasn’t a subject I cared to discuss over lunch.
There really are a lot of things I don’t like to talk about.
The book! I hadn’t mentioned Icons yet. The monastery were allegedly considering a documentary presented by Baptiste Genevois. He knew no more about icons than I did before editing the book but it wouldn’t occur to anyone to doubt his authority. Male TV presenters didn’t have to be young or attractive though he certainly was and very engaging with it; the ideal choice to bring a niche subject to life, with Bernard as the main expert interviewee. There was a growing hope that none of us at Editions Gallici was willing to admit to – that it might all work out. We could do a mass market tie-in and the effect on sales would be dramatic. Emily was smiling and nodding a lot. ‘And then are you off to Nice as usual?’
I hadn’t given our vacation a thought but the prospect of Philippe disappearing down south – hopefully taking Vanessa with him – flashed up in my mind first like a mirage, then something from which I needed to be rescued. Which was the lesser evil, to go or to stay behind?
‘Because of Icons we can’t shut up shop completely like we usually do – it’s unlikely anything will happen before September but someone should be in Paris just in case. It looks like I’m that someone.’
‘So is Philippe going without you?’ Seeing my expression, Emily’s eyebrows dipped: it was a minute adjustment but I knew she was on to me. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Last time we spoke I thought there might be something wrong.’
She’d sprung her Paris trip on me the day after the launch and I’d had to deal with back to back conversations with her and my mother. In the circumstances it wasn’t surprising my behaviour seemed a little strange.
‘The atmosphere’s so tense with Vanessa staying,’ I said. ‘She and Philippe argue all the time and guess who ends up in the middle? He told her she reminds him of Brigitte, the way she’s always spoiling for a fight. She can’t stand her mother so that didn’t go down too well.’
‘Maybe that’s the only way she can deal with the whole situation. It’s never been easy on her, has it?’
I was quick to agree. I’m not sure any of us can help the way we are, especially at seventeen. ‘But Philippe’s right about how volatile she is, even with me. One minute she’s sharing very personal stuff and she was lovely when I hurt my foot. Then yesterday it was back to shouting and calling me an interfering control freak. She’s either really affectionate or really spiteful and I never know which it’s going to be. It’s like you used to say about yours when they were small – she’s desperate for attention and there are various ways of getting it.’
Emily listened knowingly. Though everything I’d said about Philippe and Vanessa was perfectly factual it made a liar of me. It was a reason, but it wasn’t the reason. The terrace was emptying around us in the lull between lunch and the exhausted tourists’ afternoon pit-stop, the tables a mess of balled-up napkins, breadcrumbs and red wine rings. I persuaded Emily we should order something sweet to follow.
‘Philippe and I are having problems,’ I blurted out before the dessert had time to arrive. ‘He’s having an affair.’
In our friendship it used to be Emily who said and did the unexpected. If we’d been in England or the States she would have known how to react: the way most people would react. Her hesitation didn’t surprise me – nobody ever really knew where I was coming from, and I wasn’t sure either: I’d never considered myself properly American or British, and I certainly wasn’t French. Emily looked around as if seeking confirmation of our whereabouts; a city with customs she didn’t understand. She was still a tourist here; God knows what I’d become.
‘Oh no, Alex,’ she said. ‘How did you find out?’
‘My mother helpfully pointed it out to me during her visit,’ I said. ‘Yo
u know how she is. But I’d had my suspicions for a while.’
‘Are you sure it’s true?’
‘Yes. Her name is Nicoletta. I called her number from the office – I don’t know what I was hoping to achieve. Anyway, thank God she didn’t pick up – there was a voicemail message in Italian and I could only make out a couple of words. She has a sexy voice, kind of husky,’ I added, piling my miseries high.
‘What are you going to do?’ Emily glanced at me. ‘I mean…’
‘Is it normal here? Are you asking if I’m okay with it?’
The muscles jumping on her forearms showed me Emily was making fists in her lap. Criticising someone’s partner – even your best friend’s – is a risky business. Loyalties are the joists hidden deep in a wall: where they lie and the direction they take invisible until you take a sledgehammer and see what’s holding the whole thing up.
But Emily was ever the diplomat. ‘I’ve always liked Philippe,’ she said, ‘I can’t believe he’d do this. You’re so good for each other. I thought you were happy together.’
‘I thought so too. I didn’t notice it had changed until it was too late.’
Emily came round to my side of the table and hugged me. That’s how we first became friends, when we had neighbouring beds in the dorm and she couldn’t stand to hear me cry at night. ‘You know how dreadful I was feeling last winter, and all the worry about work at the same time and then the surgery… All of that was tough on Philippe and he has problems of his own. There’s been a huge hike in the rent on the gallery and the gamble he took on that exhibition has paid off in some ways but not others. He’s been there for me more than I have for him.’
‘But that doesn’t make it okay to cheat on you! Why are you making excuses for him?’
Returning to her seat, Emily attacked a profiterole like she was spearing his balls. I could have left it at that but hypocrisy spoils the taste of chocolate and cream. One of the few people who really cared about me was about to question whether she knew me at all.
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