‘Don’t get stressed, Alexandra,’ he said. I love the way he says my name, which he never shortens, pronouncing it with a soft ss, almost like Italian. ‘You know it’s not good for you. Everything’s going to be fine.’
He only knew his half of the story, of course, but how could he act as if nothing had changed? He wrapped me in his arms but it felt all wrong. The best thing about the two of us never was the sex – it was everything else. But now the trust was gone and I could no longer conveniently hold him accountable. Breaking away, I took a pack of dental floss from the cabinet and sawed away at my gums until they bled. It shouldn’t have taken me this long to ask myself if Philippe was unhappy with me. Maybe neither of us was suited to marriage after all – we weren’t making a very good job of it. I spat diluted blood into the sink and sluiced it away.
But if Philippe could be kind to me despite my tantrum, I owed him something in return. ‘How are things with you and Vanessa?’
‘Better than yesterday,’ he said, smiling. ‘We just got off on the wrong foot. Maybe I was expecting too much. She may come along to the launch – I thought it would give her a chance to show she can behave.’
Or not. My laugh sounded slightly hysterical even to me. He gave me an odd look. ‘Please tell me you’re joking.’
‘I see,’ he said. ‘You think she’s an embarrassment.’ His mouth hardened and it became apparent that I had yet another rival for his loyalty. He may not have raised Vanessa but she was still his daughter. He could say what he liked about her – I got no say at all.
‘That’s not it. I just think she’d be bored with nobody there of her own age.’
He accepted my hurriedly concocted explanation. The chances of Vanessa showing up seemed remote. She wouldn’t know an icon as anything other than a symbol on a device.
Replaying the call with Geneviève in my head was driving me crazy. Without any idea what Jean-Luc had told her, or if she even knew he’d come by the office, I had to pretend there was poor reception and immediately called Viane at the office to get a copy couriered to the Malavoines’ home. I had no idea whether Geneviève believed me but told myself she had no reason not to. I had said nothing to incriminate myself. I was sure of that. I hadn’t, had I?
As if my anxiety needed fuelling, my mother had Skyped me and insisted on seeing what I was going to wear. I’d picked a similar style to her red dress in a vibrant kingfisher blue but I wasn’t altogether happy with it, even less so after Mom had her say. The cut was less flattering than hers and I’d gone for the more generous of two sizes, mindful that any tightly encased flesh at the event would invite unwelcome comparisons with Suzanne, who had a ten year, twenty kilo advantage over me. Not that it was a competition.
Mindful of the tits or legs rule, I’d opted for the first, setting off the deep V neckline with a simple pendant on a long chain. I could have turned up wearing almost anything. It was my responsibility that everything should go well but I wasn’t the star of the show.
Laughing out loud is supposed to be a good way to reduce tension but Philippe would have thought I was off my rocker and nothing seemed remotely funny. I practised a welcoming smile in the mirror, wishing I was more in the mood. Alain and I weren’t the most charismatic party hosts: my accent made me self-conscious about public speaking in French, fraught with nerves until that part was over and unable to eat for hours before. Like Geneviève, Alain was posh and rather aloof, but being extremely well connected he could be relied on to steer Bernard around the room and make introductions. That left the dutiful mingling – two hours of the same minute-long conversation on repeat – and the dreaded opening speech to me as the editor. Since I knew so little about Romania I planned to keep it very short. Sometimes I am still that frightened little girl hiding behind the sofa. On such occasions I would look around me at the confident, vivacious people bonding and networking, and wonder if everyone has to live with this fear of being found out; wishing the inside matched up to the outside. It’s a comforting idea that at least half of us are faking it.
* * *
‘Do you need me there early?’ Philippe asked. When I assured him we didn’t he headed for the sofa and picked up his novel from the side table. I pushed away a memory of Jonathan’s bestselling début, in which a thinly disguised version of me plays the neurotic wife and mother.
Since Jean-Luc, it was impossible for me to be as angry as before with Philippe. I wanted to resolve the bad atmosphere between us before leaving, to go into my big night with the feeling of having my husband on my side, something I had never previously doubted. I gave Philippe a quick kiss, which turned into a long one, the kind that usually led to sex. He tried to pull me onto the sofa; I laughed and said he’d wrinkle my dress. He ignored me, threading his hand through the gap in the layers of fabric to caress my leg. ‘But you look so good,’ he said. It felt like a long time since he’d looked at me that way.
There’d been such tendresse between us that fall evening by the river, in knowing we were heading home to make love. I went over to the mirror above the fireplace and applied a coat of the deep red lipstick my mother had left behind, after Geneviève suggested she try a softer shade. I could see what Philippe meant. There was something new about me, something visible. I eyed myself suspiciously and received a knowing look in return.
Chapter Twenty
It was a good idea to stop micro-managing Suzanne and Lisette and let them get on with their job. The window display at the gallery was spectacular, drawing passers-by as the gold of the icons caught their attention. Inside, the loop of images from the monastery transformed the space, the brutal edges of Nasim Asradi’s pieces consigned to the background, plinths relegated to the corners to make it easier for the guests to circulate. I stood contemplating the unmistakably Middle Eastern features of the Orthodox Jesus and Mary, which made far more sense than the north European versions usually seen in France. Soon the chanting coming through the speakers would be drowned out by animated chatter but for now it had a heart-searing sweetness.
Suzanne and Lisette looked at me expectantly and I could feel myself beaming as I complimented them on their hard work. Behind the drinks table was a tall shaven-headed black guy I didn’t recognise, wearing a blinding white shirt and a long waiter’s apron. I drew closer to Lisette and said in a low voice, ‘Why are we using outside help? There was no budget for that.’
‘Dédé’s a friend,’ Suzanne said, far too loudly. ‘He offered to do it for the contacts.’
It was clear from the way Dédé was looking at Suzanne what kind of contact he was hoping for but I was happy that anyone considered this the place to be. All we needed now was a roomful of others who felt the same.
‘Philippe told me his daughter was staying with you,’ Suzanne said. ‘Is she coming tonight?’
‘Oh, I don’t think so. It’s not really her scene,’ I said, as if I had a clue what Vanessa’s scene was.
‘I never knew you had a stepdaughter, Alexandra!’ said Lisette, surprised that I could have kept this from her. ‘How old is she? Where does she live? What’s she like?’
I smiled at the questions. ‘Vanessa’s seventeen and she lives with her mother in Neuilly.’ I searched for the right words to describe her, recalling Philippe taking offence. ‘She’s got attitude. Very much her own person. You never know, maybe she will turn up and you’ll get to see for yourself.’
Lisette was satisfied. In her best dress, I noticed the telltale curve to her belly, just like the first time. She’d probably find it easier to tell me now she knew about Vanessa. My colleagues knew the reason for my absences and were no doubt capable of piecing it all together. When Lisette brought her firstborn into the office she didn’t tell anyone else, ‘You don’t have to hold him’. And once she’d said it – with the best intentions, I knew – I didn’t feel I could.
Suzanne was modelling a new hairdo with bright purple streaks in the front. Stunning, and didn’t she know it. With her figure it was never a choice
between tits and legs. She was wearing a high-necked, incredibly short silver tube dress with tiger-print Louboutins, which made her tan legs go on for ever. A familiar sight in Paris, the subtle ostentation of that red sole always amused me, the upmarket equivalent of leaving the price on. I had no idea how much they cost, only that she shouldn’t have been able to afford them on what Philippe paid her. The shoes I was wearing cost two hundred euros and the first few times I wore them it made me feel ill thinking about it. At eleven I wore the same shoes for over a year and by the time my mother noticed, they were three sizes too small.
A cab drew up and Alain and Bernard got out. Bernard surveyed the room with an air of satisfaction.
‘We’re all set,’ I told them.
‘Great,’ Bernard said. ‘Let’s just hope someone turns up.’ That was self-effacing from the man who’d taken umbrage when I mentioned his excessive use of semi-colons with all the tact I could muster.
The storms of the last few days had cleared the air and it was a glorious summer evening. A few people I recognised had walked past the window several times peering in, killing time. I went over to bid them come in and gave Dédé the signal to begin pouring. After all my doubts I was filled with a sense of belief: in Icons, in the future of Editions Gallici, in the future, period. I could do this.
The gallery began to fill, the noise level rising incrementally. When he arrived, Philippe smiled at me across the room, not wanting to interrupt me in work mode. Only he and Alain had any idea how much it mattered for this edition to be a success. The guests clutched their glasses and exclaimed at the icons flashing and lingering on the walls. Suzanne had curated film installations in her previous job and without me asking she had transformed a boring slide show into its own artwork. She grinned when I looked her way. I should have known if anyone could make icons sexy, she could.
You can say what you like about Parisians – and doesn’t everyone? – but I respect their dedication to beauty and pleasure. The talk was not of real estate and stock prices but colour, texture, technique; travels to the east, places you could see Byzantine-influenced sacred art in France such as the Sacré Cœur and the hilltop basilica in Marseille, where I barely lasted ten minutes because all around me were memorials to victims of shipwreck and drowning.
The pulse at the base of my throat wasn’t going to ease until I’d got the speech over with. I looked at my watch – we’d agreed seven o’clock and that left only five minutes. Bernard was deep in conversation, describing a shape with his hands, of a Romanian domed roof, at a guess. The thought of starting the official proceedings without Geneviève and Henri concerned me and I was about to ask Philippe if he knew where they were when they breezed in, with none other than critic Pierre de Longueville and an elegant woman with a silver-grey chignon.
I clasped my trembling hands together as I went to greet them. Geneviève’s smug expression suggested she regarded this as a personal victory – she had invited Longueville to every launch since she and I met, thus far without success. He was all charm as she introduced us, smiling modestly as I babbled about how delighted we were. Bernard’s face lit up like a child’s, knowing what this meant: Longueville had already been sent the book and he did not stoop to hatchet jobs. He either shone the light of his approval on a work or it passed unacknowledged. The woman was his wife, Marina, who was explaining her half-Romanian ancestry to me. Paris is full of people who are half this, half that – another reason I liked it.
‘How interesting that you have chosen Greek Orthodox chanting,’ she said, although by now the music was hard to hear. ‘You do realise this is not Romanian?’
Bernard hadn’t noticed anything amiss but I couldn’t blame him for our blunder. With the most impeccable timing, Dédé approached us with a tray of drinks. Marina took a glass and handed one to me as if she were the host, laughing in the same deep throaty way she spoke. ‘Look at your face! I am teasing about the music, can’t you tell? Such things do not matter. There is only one God.’
As she and her husband spotted people they knew and headed off to join them, Geneviève touched my shoulder and raised her eyebrows. ‘You’re welcome,’ she said, before I had a chance to speak, resentment making me clam up for longer than she was willing to wait. It was beneath her to take all the credit – they were here because of our book and their links to Romania. Did the woman think nothing was beyond her influence? If she did, she couldn’t have been more wrong.
Chapter Twenty One
Philippe is right: it’s never the things you fear that come to pass – so there’s really no point worrying about the future. For a time, I stopped, because the future itself had become inconceivable to me. When I started coming here I was doing well if I could imagine getting through the day.
I needn’t have worried about my speech for the launch of Icons. The great turnout made me rise to the occasion. Leaving the notes I had made in my bag, I made a virtue of not having been to Romania by saying how much Bernard’s book made me want to go, to a murmur of assenting voices. When I stepped away from the microphone a Romanian journalist was waiting to accost me, offering to personally escort me to his country whenever I wished.
His effusiveness was delaying the start of Bernard’s speech, which gave me a welcome excuse to disentangle myself. As soon as Bernard began I saw how he had won the monks over. He held the room rapt with his reverence for the icons, his respect and affection for their creators and guardians. When a photo of the mitred and heavily bearded monks came up on the wall his joke about them not being responsible for the angelic singing we had been listening to got a lot of laughs. He described bringing these little-known treasures to a wider audience as the high point of his career. He said some very generous things about me and even gave a mention to our next title on Baudelaire as art critic. This was a man I had worked with on and off for a year and had thought was an asshole. It was only later that I found out who my real friends were.
Bernard was drawing to a close when the raised voices of some teenagers on the street made him look toward the open door. Unfortunate timing for Jean-Luc Malavoine, who happened to step into the gallery at that precise moment. The only good thing was that nobody was looking at me. Fear and excitement share a lot of the symptoms brought on by seeing him again: racing heart, light head, clammy hands.
I’d been so anxious about seeing Geneviève that it hadn’t occurred to me that he would turn up uninvited. I’d been reenacting our encounter in my head but I hadn’t anticipated ever coming face to face with him again. Jean-Luc raised his hand, in apology for his lateness no doubt, but it was the gesture rock stars and big actors use to acknowledge adulation and there weren’t many ordinary people who could have pulled it off without appearing utterly ridiculous. Geneviève’s moue of mock disapproval turned into an indulgent maternal smile. Her boy was here.
But he looked right past her and Henri. As the gathering broke into applause at the end of Bernard’s speech Jean-Luc scanned the front of the room intently, not being very subtle about it. Before he had a chance to spot me, I headed to the drinks table to check that there was still plenty of wine left. It seemed we had a celebration on our hands.
The wine was there but it was Lisette being mother. ‘Where’s Dédé got to?’ I asked.
She went to reply then changed her mind, concentrating on pouring as if it were a life-or-death task. I didn’t need to ask where Suzanne was.
I slipped down the corridor to the kitchenette and beyond it the gallery’s only toilet, at some distance from the exhibition area. This was fortunate, as was the fact that nobody had needed to answer a call of nature during the speeches. From inside came the unmistakable sound of two people vigorously enjoying each other’s company.
I tapped on the door as loudly as I dared and rushed away, appalled to find myself feeling turned on as well as pissed off. I didn’t get five paltry minutes to relax and enjoy the unexpected success of the event. If there had been a rear exit it would have been tempting to m
ake a run for it. But there was no way out of this.
Dédé was back at his post when I returned after turning the music back on, Lisette now selling the book with the pile beside her shrinking fast. I hadn’t thought many guests would want to schlep something of that size to dinner but the heft and the hefty price tag were evidently worth it for a virtual visit to Romania, a feast for the eyes and a religious experience for those who so desired. There was a small line eager to get their copies signed by Bernard, who was wielding his Mont Blanc with a flourish.
Suzanne was willowing through the dense crowd with two wine bottles with cloth napkins tied round the necks, topping up glasses. When she shot me a glance I tried to smile naturally. Thank God she didn’t know who had caught them en flagrant délit. I didn’t want to be a hypocrite.
Philippe wound his arm around my waist, taking me doubly by surprise when I turned to him. ‘Look who’s here!’ he said, beaming at Vanessa beside him. Despite looking far from sure she wanted to be, she’d clearly made an effort. She’d washed her hair for once and was wearing heels and a tatty lace dress that was undeniably fetching despite being too small and revealing an amateurish tattoo on her upper arm.
‘It was so nice of you to come,’ I told her, hoping she got what I really meant: Thank you for doing this for him.
Philippe kissed me, whispering, ‘Congratulations! I told you everything would turn out well.’ Across the room, Jean-Luc had his back to us, talking with his parents and the Longuevilles. When Suzanne reached them, she seemed in no hurry to move on. Now that some of the guests had stepped out onto the street to smoke it was easier to hear the music and snatches of conversation.
Paris Mon Amour Page 9
