by Marc Levy
It was raining now, and she didn’t have an umbrella, but she noticed Daldry’s raincoat hanging on the coat hook. She threw it over her shoulders and headed out of the door.
The grocer was delighted to see her again. It had been months since she’d last been in the shop, and he had started to wonder what had become of her. As she filled her shopping basket, Alice told him about her trip to Turkey and that she would soon be returning there.
When the grocer handed her the bill, she began to go through the pockets of the raincoat, forgetting it wasn’t hers. She found a set of keys in one pocket and a scrap of paper in the other. She smiled when she recognized the ticket from the evening she and Daldry had gone to the carnival in Brighton. She paid and left with her basket full.
Back at home, Alice was putting away her shopping. She looked at the alarm clock and realized it was time to start getting ready. She was going to see Anton later in the evening. She closed the trumpet case and pondered what dress to wear.
As she was putting on her make-up in front of the little mirror that hung next to her door, Alice was overcome by a nagging doubt. A detail just didn’t make sense . . .
“The ticket counter was already closed that evening,” she said to herself out loud. She snapped shut the compact and checked the pockets of Daldry’s raincoat, but only found the keys. She ran down the stairs and back to the grocer’s.
“When I was here earlier,” she said, bursting into the shop, gasping for breath, “I think I dropped a scrap of paper on the floor. Have you seen it?”
The grocer replied that he kept a very tidy shop. If something had fallen on the floor, it had probably been swept up and thrown in the wastebasket.
“The wastebasket?” she asked, desperate.
“I just emptied it in the bin out the back—”
Before he had the time to finish his sentence, Alice had already run through the back door and started rummaging around in the bin. In a panic, he headed after her, wringing his hands in despair at the sight of his pretty customer kneeling in a pile of rubbish.
“What exactly are you looking for?” he asked, wondering if he should try to stop her.
“A ticket.”
“A lottery ticket, I hope.”
“No, just the stub for the carnival on Brighton Pier.”
“I suppose it must have a great sentimental value then.”
“It might,” said Alice, picking through the cabbage leaves and floor sweepings.
“You’re not even certain?” said the grocer, beside himself. “Couldn’t you make up your mind before emptying out all of my bins?”
Alice ignored him and kept rooting around. Suddenly, she saw it.
She picked up the ticket and unfolded it. At the sight of the date stamped on its end, she turned to the grocer and said, “I’m certain now. Immense sentimental value.”
17
Daldry crept up the stairs, trying to make as little noise as possible. On his doormat he found a little glass vial and an envelope. The bottle was labeled ISTANBUL and the card in the envelope read “At least I kept my promise . . .”
Daldry removed the cork, closed his eyes, and breathed in the perfume. The top note was perfect—he felt transported beneath the redbud trees planted along the Bosporus. He walked up the steep streets of Cihangir and could hear Alice’s voice calling over her shoulder because he wasn’t fast enough. Then came a smooth, earthy accord combining the fragrances of flowers, dust, and cool water trickling out of old stone fountains. He could hear children shouting as they played in shady courtyards, the foghorns of the ferries, and the screech of the trams rolling up and down Istiklal Avenue.
“You did it, my dear,” Daldry sighed as he unlocked his door and went into his flat.
He turned on the light and nearly jumped out of his skin when he saw Alice sitting in the armchair in the middle of his sitting room.
“What on earth are you doing here?” he asked, putting down his umbrella.
“What about you?”
“Well”—Daldry’s voice became strangely evasive—“as strange as it seems, I’m just coming home. To my flat.”
“You’re not on holiday?”
“I don’t really have a job, so you know for me, holidays . . .”
“Don’t take it as idle flattery, but that is much better than anything I see from my window,” said Alice, gesturing to the large painting on the easel across the room.
“Well, I’ll take it as a compliment then, coming, as it does, from a native of Istanbul. I don’t mean to change the subject, but how on earth did you get in here?”
“With the spare keys I found in your raincoat.”
“You found it? Oh good . . . I love that raincoat. I’ve been looking—”
“It was hanging in my flat.”
“I see. That makes sense.”
Alice got up from the armchair and walked over to Daldry.
“I have a question for you. But before I ask, you have to promise not to lie, for once in your life.”
“What are you implying?”
“Aren’t you supposed to be off cavorting around with some lady friend?”
“Things got canceled,” he grumbled.
“Did your traveling partner happen to be named Carol?”
“No, no. I only ran into Carol twice. The time that I came and interrupted your party, and again when you were sick in bed with a fever . . . And a third time at the pub on the corner, but she didn’t recognize me, so that doesn’t count.”
“I thought the two of you went to the movies together,” said Alice, taking a step closer.
“So, I do lie from time to time. But only when it’s strictly necessary.”
“It was necessary for you to pretend you’d started seeing my best friend?”
“I had my reasons.”
“And that piano against the wall over there. I thought you said that it was the woman downstairs.”
“That old thing? I wouldn’t call that a piano. What was the question you wanted to ask? I promise to tell the truth.”
“Were you on Brighton Pier the evening of December 23?”
“What makes you ask?”
“I also found this in your raincoat.” She held out the ticket stub.
“It’s not fair to ask questions when you already know the answer.”
“How long has this been going on?” asked Alice.
Daldry took a deep breath. “Since the day you moved into this house, and I saw you coming up the stairs. Things have become more complicated since then . . .”
“If you felt that way, why did you do everything in your power to send me away? The trip to Istanbul was just about putting distance between us, wasn’t it?”
“Well, let’s say that if the fortune-teller had told you to go to the moon, I would have been even happier. But you ask why . . . Can you imagine what it means to a man like myself to realize he has fallen madly in love? For all of my life, I’ve never feared anybody the way I feared you. The love I felt for you made me fear I was starting to resemble my father. I would never, for anything in the world, impose that kind of pain on the woman I love.” He paused. “I’d be especially appreciative if you could just forget everything I’ve just told you.”
Alice took one step closer, put her finger on his lips, and whispered in his ear, “Be quiet, and kiss me.”
The morning’s first rays of sunlight shining through the skylight woke both of them.
Alice made some tea, but Daldry refused to get out of bed.
Alice set the tray on the bed. As Daldry buttered a piece of toast, she asked mischievously, “The things you said yesterday, which I’ve already forgotten because I promised I would . . . You weren’t just trying to find a way to keep painting in my flat, were you?”
“If you doubted me for even an instant, I’d give up painting for the rest of my days.”
“That would be a terrible waste,” said Alice. “It was when you told me that you painted junctions that I really start
ed to fall for you.”
Epilogue
On December 24, 1951, Alice and Daldry returned to Brighton. The wind blew in from the north and made it particularly cold on the pier that afternoon. The stands in the carnival were open, with the exception of the fortune-teller’s caravan. It had disappeared.
Alice and Daldry learned that the fortune-teller had died a few months earlier, and that, according to her wishes, her ashes had been scattered over the water at the end of the pier.
Leaning against the barrier and looking out over the waves, Daldry pulled Alice close to him and hugged her.
“We’ll never know whether she was the sister of your Yaya,” he said pensively.
“No, but it doesn’t really matter anymore, does it?”
“I don’t agree. It does matter. If she was your nanny’s sister, she never really saw into your future at all, she just recognized you . . . It’s not the same thing.”
“I can’t believe you really think that. She saw that I was born in Istanbul, and she predicted that we’d make a long journey. She knew that I’d meet six people—Can, the consul, Mr. Zemirli, the teacher in Kadiköy, Mrs. Yilmaz, and my brother, Rafael—before finding the seventh person, the man who would matter most in my life: you.”
Daldry took out a cigarette but gave up the idea of trying to light it. The wind was blowing too hard. “The seventh person you say . . . If it lasts . . .”
Alice felt Daldry’s arms pull her in closer.
“Don’t you mean for it to last?” asked Alice.
“Of course I do, but do you? You don’t even know all of my bad habits. Maybe with time, you won’t put up with them anymore . . .”
“But I don’t know all of your good habits yet either.”
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to:
Pauline, Louis, and Georges, Raymond, Danièle, and Lorraine, Rafael, and Lucie.
Susanna Lea.
Emmanuelle Hardouin.
Nicole Lattès, Leonello Brandolini, Antoine Caro, Brigitte Lannaud, Élisabeth Villeneuve, Anne-Marie Lenfant, Arié Sberro, Sylvie Bardeau, Tine Gerber, Lydie Leroy, and the entire team at Éditions Robert Laffont.
Pauline Normand, Marie-Ève Provost.
Léonard Anthony, Sébastien Canot, Romain Ruetsch, Danielle Melconian, Katrin Hodapp, Laura Mamelok, Kerry Glencorse, Moïna Macé.
Brigitte and Sarah Forissier.
Véronique Peyraud-Damas and Renaud Leblanc in the archives department of the Air France Museum, Jim Davies at the British Airways Museum (BOAA).
And to Olivia Giacobetti, Pierre Brouwers, Laurence Jourdan, Ernest Mamboury, and Yves
Ternon, whose knowledge and work were essential to my research.
For the English translation, I’d like to thank Chris Murray, who translated the book, and Elizabeth DeNoma, who acquired it for AmazonCrossing and did the developmental edit, along with Kimberly Glyder, who designed the cover.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
With more than forty million books sold, Marc Levy is the most read French author alive today. He’s written nineteen novels to date, including The Last of the Stanfields, P.S. from Paris, All Those Things We Never Said, The Children of Freedom, and Replay.
Originally written for his son, his first novel, If Only It Were True, was later adapted for the big screen as Just Like Heaven, starring Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo. Since then, Levy has not only won the hearts of European readers, he’s won over audiences around the globe. More than one and a half million of his books have been sold in China alone, and his novels have been published in forty-nine languages. He lives in New York City. Readers can learn more about Levy and follow his work at www.marclevy.info.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
American-born musicologist and translator Chris Murray works in Paris and Brussels. Coauthor of Le modèle et l’invention: Messiaen et la technique de l’emprunt and coeditor of Musical Life in Belgium During the Second World War, he is also the translator of The Gardener of Versailles by Alain Baraton, American Lady by Sophie-Caroline de Margerie, and All Those Things We Never Said by Marc Levy.