A Week in Paris (22 page)

‘It’s as though you have to revisit your whole life, I suppose. Reassess it.’

‘It is exactly that,’ she said, staring at him in gratitude. He had a faraway look in his eyes, and again, Fay received a sense of unplumbed depths. She was getting the impression that Adam was a much more complicated person than he appeared. Older than his years, she thought.

‘Adam,’ she said slowly. ‘When we first met, do you remember, I borrowed your handkerchief?’

‘Yes, I think I do.’

‘Well, I tried to give it back to you. And you said something about your father, that you’d inherited his handkerchiefs.’

‘Did I?’ He rested his knife and fork on the side of the plate in deliberate slow movements. ‘It’s simply that my father has a lot and I was given some of them.’

‘Oh, I see.’ She noticed that, after all, he spoke of his father in the present tense.

Their main course arrived, braised veal with beans and sautéd potatoes. They ate in silence for a while, then Fay said, ‘I haven’t asked you anything about your family. You seem to know a lot about mine.’

‘There’s not much to tell,’ he said in an offhand manner. ‘There’s myself and my little sister Tina. Not so little, as she got married last year. We were brought up mostly in London because of my father’s job, but when I was twelve we moved to the Welsh borders. That’s where my mother’s family is from.’

‘Are you close, you and your sister? You said you nearly drowned her once.’

Adam swallowed a mouthful and chuckled. ‘Yes, despite that despicable episode we are close.’ He glanced up at Fay. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but you remind me a little of her. Not in colouring, she’s very different. Here . . .’ He laid down his fork and, feeling inside his jacket for his wallet, brought out a tiny photograph. Fay angled it towards the candlelight until it came into focus. It was a picture of a young woman, dressed for tennis, by the look of it. She was fair like her brother, with a delicate pointed face and large eyes.

‘She’s very pretty,’ Fay said, handing it back to him. ‘But I’m afraid I can’t see any likeness to me.’

‘Well, the prettiness, of course, but it’s that look you have sometimes,’ he said, smiling at the photograph. ‘A bit fragile, but stubborn at the same time, as though you can look after yourself. Tina’s as tough as old boots.’

‘I’ll take that as a compliment,’ Fay said hotly. ‘I am quite capable, you know.’

‘Of course you are,’ he said, putting up the palms of his hands as though to fend her off. ‘Except for yesterday in the Champs-Élysées. Sorry, that was below the belt.’

A vision of breaking glass, voices filled with hate, the violence. Fay closed her eyes, then opened them again. ‘I was grateful to you then,’ she said humbly. ‘I still haven’t learned what that was about.’

‘Well, I had an idea and did a little research.’ Adam put away the photograph and instead brought out a piece of paper which he unfolded. ‘Or rather I asked our librarian to do it.’

‘Research? What is there to research?’ she said, through a mouthful of food.

‘There’s a book – a memoir – by a magazine editor who was on the balcony of his office in the Champs-Élysées at the time.’

‘What time do you mean?’ She stared at him uncomprehending.

‘September 1940, it was. Here.’ He read from his paper: ‘“A bunch of thugs shouting ‘Down with the Jews’ smashed shop windows in the Champs-Élysées.” Many of the shops at the time were owned by Jewish families. It must have been terrifying for them.’ He looked up, triumphant at his cleverness.

Fay tried to remember her experience of two days before. Ugly shouts and smashing of glass. Had she really been there when she was tiny, and witnessed the destruction?

‘It doesn’t seem believable, that I’d remember. I’d only have been a baby at the time, just one.’

‘It does seem unlikely, I suppose,’ he admitted, ‘but in the light of what you say about memories . . .’ He shrugged, then folded up the paper and tucked it back into his wallet.

‘And there is another example.’ She explained what Mme Ramond had recounted about the tolling bell of the little village church. ‘Perhaps some imprint is made on the mind even at that age,’ she pondered. ‘Or at least the emotion around it.’

Adam thought of something. ‘That was it. Someone dropped a bottle of wine when you and I were in the Champs-Élysées. Do you remember? It must have been that which set off the memory.’

She stared at him. ‘Of course!’ She noticed the look of warm concern on his face and smiled at him. ‘Anyway, I was glad that you were there to help. Thank you.’

‘
I’m
glad I was there.’ They finished their meal and left, thanking the patron, who held the door open for them.

At the corner across the street, the soft lights of Les Deux Magots café gleamed invitingly. ‘I thought we might have a nightcap here,’ Adam was saying, but Fay’s attention was caught by the name of the street alongside.

She was sure Mme Ramond had mentioned it. It gave her a strange feeling to think she was so near. ‘Adam,’ she asked him, ‘can we go this way? It was round here that my parents had their apartment – on a street leading off this one, I think. Please?’

‘Of course,’ he said, a little hesitant. ‘Do you know the exact address?’

‘It was the Rue des Palmes des Martyrs, something like that. I don’t know the number of the building, but I remember Madame Ramond saying there was a big clock on the wall opposite, above a jeweller’s.’

They walked until they found the road in question and turned down it. It was a narrow street, not very long, which contained a mixture of shops and gloomy old apartment blocks. Unremarkable, really. Fay longed to feel some frisson of recognition, some sense of belonging, but was disappointed to feel nothing of the sort. The shops were all shut up, of course, and the street was silent, there being little traffic at this time of night. It was softly lit by streetlamps with round globes, making it easy to read the signs above the shops. And there was the clock Mme Ramond had mentioned, showing the correct hour, ten thirty, hanging above a sign upon which a ring and a watch were painted.

‘This must be it.’ Fay stared up at the apartment block opposite, wondering which had been her parents’ flat. The sixth floor, she thought Mme Ramond had said. She counted up and her gaze fixed upon a line of windows, from some of which light shone. Perhaps someone was in . . .

Just then, the main door of the building opened wide and a young man in an evening suit emerged and set off down the street the way they’d just come, whistling loudly.

‘Come on,’ Fay hissed to Adam, grabbing his arm. It was the matter of a moment to catch the door before it closed.

‘What are we doing?’ Adam said in alarm as they slipped into the building.

‘I want to see,’ she said.

‘You can’t just— I was right, you are stubborn,’ he said, his eyes glinting in the low lighting of the lobby. The concierge had obviously retired for the night and there was no one to stop them entering the tiny lift. Fay pressed the button for the sixth floor and closed her eyes as she breathed in a musty smell of oil and metal that was in some way familiar. She recognized, too, the peculiar sounds of the lift as it sighed and protested its way up.

When it jolted to a halt at the sixth floor she opened her eyes but did not move. Adam was watching her in the dim light. She gave a gesture of despair. ‘I don’t think I can, after all,’ she said and leaned back against the lift wall, holding her breath and looking back at him.

‘You might as well now,’ he said – and she let out her breath and nodded.

Adam slid back the doors and they stepped out into a corridor. Fay knew it at once, the scuffed lino with its grainy pattern, the colour of old cabbage. The half-moon shades on the wall casting their faint, eerie light. She turned right automatically, past first one closed door, then, more hesitantly, another. When she reached the third, she stopped, certain now. ‘This is it,’ she whispered, turning to Adam.

Apart from its number, 605, the door looked like all the others, made of solid wood, its dark varnish chipped and blistering in places. Fay knocked, and when no answer came, she grasped the worn brass door knob, set low on the door. Her hand knew the awkward oval shape of it, the bevelled edge that dug into her hand as she turned it and pushed.

‘Fay, no,’ Adam hissed, his hand on her arm, staying her. ‘You can’t simply walk in.’

‘It’s locked anyway. They must be out,’ she said, disappointed, and let go of the handle. For a moment she’d been a child again, a very small girl arriving home, but now the eerie light and the silence unsettled her. Twenty years separated her from that child. She stepped back from the door.

‘Let’s go,’ he said. ‘It’s late. You should come back in daylight.’

At that moment they heard muffled footsteps and the door to the next apartment opened. A middle-aged man appeared in the doorway. He was a short, stocky individual in a dressing gown, with a fine pair of moustaches and his hair oiled back. He blinked at them with suspicious, red-rimmed eyes.

‘
C’est inutile
,’ he said in a brisk tone. ‘
Ils ne sont pas là.
’

‘Do you know when they’ll be back?’ Adam replied smoothly in French.

‘Maybe tomorrow,’ said the man. ‘How did you get in? You should not be here.’

‘Someone let us in downstairs,’ Adam said. ‘I’m so sorry, we’ll go now.’

The man looked them over once more and nodded. ‘All right, you do that,’ he said, and after giving them a final glare, went back inside.

Adam said something to Fay, but she didn’t hear what it was. She was staring at the man’s closed door. She was thinking that it was the wrong man. Someone else used to live there, the thought of whom aroused in her a maelstrom of emotions. Sorrow, fear, happiness – all these filled her mind.

‘Fay?’ The mood evaporated and reality reasserted itself. Whatever it was that had happened twenty years ago was gone, lost to the past.

She lifted her eyes to Adam’s with a feeling of terrible desolation. ‘Yes, we should go,’ she said, and allowed him to lead her back to the lift.

Outside, she was glad to return to the life of the main street. They walked back to her hotel through an enchanted City of Light. On the bridge they paused to watch the silent river surge beneath, sparkling with points of silver. The trees in the Tuileries Gardens were garlanded with light, fountains gushed like Roman candles and the Louvre was bathed a soft yellow, as proud as though it were still a royal palace.

They walked side by side, mostly in silence, but it was an easy silence. On the bridge Adam removed his hat and leaned over the parapet to watch the water with the eagerness of a boy, his hair flopping across his face, his hands clutching the stone balustrade. They were strong hands with long fingers and bitten nails, the knuckles prominent. He’d loosened his tie, and standing beside him she was acutely aware of the pulse throbbing in the delicate niche between the tendons of his neck. He’d missed a little patch on his upper lip when he’d shaved, and the hairs there gleamed golden. She yearned to reach out and touch his hair, to find out if it was as soft as it looked.

Sometimes, as they walked, he glanced at her with such attention that she felt he was there for her alone, but sometimes his eyes flickered away, restless, and she sensed that he wasn’t thinking of her at all, but was somewhere else, somewhere troubling. Once he stopped to light a cigarette and frowned as though he were alone and deep in his own thoughts, and this was disconcerting.

They passed the cafés of Place de la Madeleine, packing up for the night now, and turned down the quiet street to the hotel. Adam slowed and gently touched her arm, causing her to turn towards him.

‘I’ve enjoyed this evening,’ he murmured, fully present for her now, his eyes scanning her face as though taking in every detail.

‘Me, too,’ Fay said, a little unsure, though she didn’t know why. ‘Thank you for dinner and everything, for putting up with my reckless ideas.’

‘Making me sneak about perfectly respectable people’s apartment blocks like a thief,’ he said, with a light laugh. ‘Perhaps that makes up for me being late in the first place.’

‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ she replied. ‘All forgotten.’ But it wasn’t quite. He’d never given a reason for his lateness.

‘You’re sweet.’ He stood somewhat hesitantly.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I ought to go in now. It won’t do to yawn all the way through the concert tomorrow.’

‘No, of course not.’

‘Well, goodbye then,’ she said.

‘Good luck with the performance. I may be busy tomorrow evening, but perhaps the following day?’

‘Perhaps.’ It felt like a rejection.

He must have seen her disappointment for when she put out her hand to shake his, he held on to it. ‘I really am sorry about tomorrow night. There’s a political meeting and I promised I would go to report on it. I really want to see you again, please be sure of that.’

‘Of course,’ she said, a little mollified. ‘I expect I ought to go out with the others tomorrow anyway.’

‘Good night,’ he said and watched her go inside.

Upstairs, she discovered that Sandra hadn’t returned, although it was getting on for midnight. The room looked bare and depressing under the faint brassy hue of the ceiling light, but when Fay switched it off in favour of the bedside light, and climbed into her narrow lumpy bed it felt cosier, the darkness around a welcome cocoon. She couldn’t settle though, her mind full of all that had happened that day. She was puzzled by Adam. She still felt about him as she had at their first time of meeting, that somehow they knew one another deep down, that some shared experience tied them together. She’d always believed this to stem from the fact that they’d both lost their fathers, but now it appeared that this wasn’t the case. His father was not dead. What she felt very certain about was that there were still things he was keeping from her. It occurred to her that perhaps she was only imagining this closeness, that he was merely being polite by seeing her, for old times’ sake maybe, or because she was a young English girl and he felt a responsibility to help her enjoy her visit.