Love From Paris

by Alexandra Potter

  As he’s speaking any anger I had been feeling has trickled away and I’m hit with a double-edged sword of emotions: immense pride in Jack and incredible shame at myself. How could I have doubted him like this? How could I have jumped to such conclusions? I have a flashback to my meltdown at the airport.

  ‘—and it’s actually worse than I thought. There’s loads to do and it’s all volunteers, so I need to roll up my sleeves and get dirty—’

  Oh god, and now I feel terrible. To think I made such a fuss about my birthday when all the time he was flying thousands of miles to help those less fortunate.

  ‘Anyway, I’ll stop talking about me, what about you? What have you been doing?’

  Having lunch with handsome Frenchmen in Paris, drinking champagne, feeling sorry for myself. I feel a stab of guilt. Suddenly the tables have turned. And they’ve turned so fast I feel all in a spin.

  ‘Umm, not much . . .’ I say vaguely.

  ‘Where are you now? At your apartment?’

  Still, I have to tell him. It’s not as if I’ve done anything wrong by coming here. And it was still pretty crappy what happened. Charity or no charity.

  ‘Actually—’

  ‘Don’t tell me. It’s late, you’re curled up on the couch watching TV with Heathcliff, the lucky guy.’ He sighs deeply at the other end of the line. ‘Seriously Ruby, there’s nowhere I’d like to be more right now, than curled up with you.’

  I feel a pang of longing. ‘Me too,’ I reply. On second thoughts I’ll tell him later. Now’s not the right time.

  A passing boat goes by and gives a loud toot.

  ‘What was that?’ asks Jack.

  Oh fuck. ‘The TV,’ I fluster, playing along. ‘I’m watching a movie—’

  ‘Which movie?’

  His voice is drowned out as our boat suddenly gives another loud foghorn toot back.

  ‘Um, Titanic,’ I blurt, my mind scrambling.

  ‘For about the hundredth time, right?’ He laughs good-naturedly.

  ‘Ha, ha yes, something like that,’ I reply awkwardly. Oh god, what am I doing? Relationships are built on trust. It’s the bedrock of a strong relationship, along with honesty and integrity. When Sam cheated it wasn’t just the betrayal that broke my heart, it was the lies. I can’t lie to Jack. I have to tell the truth.

  ‘Look, Jack—’ I begin, but I’m interrupted by a loud crackle on the line.

  ‘Ruby? Are you still there?’ But his voice is so faint I can barely hear it.

  ‘Yes, I’m here,’ I say loudly, trying to make myself heard over the noisy hissing that’s started.

  ‘Hey, I can’t hear you, the line’s really bad . . .’

  ‘Can you hear me now?’

  But there’s nothing, just the sound of crackling and buzzing.

  ‘Hello, Jack?’ I press the phone to my ear, trying in vain to hear his voice, but nothing.

  Abruptly, the line goes dead.

  I snatch the phone from my ear and study my screen, but no, the connection has been lost. We barely had a chance to speak and now he’s gone again. Feeling a kick of disappointment, I look up and stare out across the Seine, gazing at the banks of the city as it floats by. A huge part of me feels so much better that he didn’t abandon me for any old work project, yet I wasn’t truthful. I never told him I was here in Paris. I never told him about being at this party, or staying with Harriet, or my lunch with Xavier. I never even told him about Madame Dumont’s apartment.

  A warm breeze catches the hem of my dress and I shiver, despite the balmy evening. In the past we’ve shared everything, but now there are all these secrets. All these things left unsaid. All this miscommunication and misunderstandings. When did it get so messy and complicated?

  Troubled, I turn away from the water and make my way back across the deck to find Harriet. I spot her chatting to a group of people and make a sort of waving gesture to avoid the inevitable round of introductions. Spotting me, she quickly excuses herself.

  ‘I was just about to come and find you,’ she says, wobbling over, her face flushed. ‘I tried calling, but my battery died.’ She waves her phone at me, tipsily.

  ‘Too much texting?’

  Her face flushes even deeper. ‘So are you enjoying yourself?’ she asks, swiftly changing the subject.

  ‘It’s a great party,’ I say, deflecting the question, ‘but I’m actually pretty tired . . .’ As I’m talking, I can see we’re heading for the next dock at the Musée d’Orsay, and I realise this is my chance. ‘I was thinking I might head back to the apartment, if you don’t mind, that is,’ I add, hastily.

  Harriet’s face falls. ‘So soon?’

  I’m suddenly reminded of how vulnerable she’d sounded when she’d called me from Paris, and during our first night at the apartment, when she’d shared her true feelings over takeaway pizza. I quickly change my mind. ‘Actually you’re right, I’ll stay a bit longer.’

  ‘No, you go,’ she says, patting my arm, ‘It’s all boring work stuff anyway.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Absolutely. You’ve got your keys?’

  ‘Yes Mum.’ I grin and feel around in my bag for them, only after a few seconds of fruitless searching it dawns on me that they’re not there. ‘Damn, I must have left them in the apartment when I dropped off Heathcliff.’

  ‘Never mind, take mine.’ She fishes out a jumble of keys and hands me a set. ‘I’ll see you at home, I won’t be long. I just want to finish up this fascinating conversation about Bauhaus lamps . . .’

  She waves from the deck as I disembark and for a few minutes I watch her float away, before glancing at the keys in my hand. There’s a tag attached to the key ring and I notice something written in felt-tip.

  Madame Dumont.

  As I read Harriet’s handwriting, a pulse somewhere starts beating. She’s given me the wrong keys. These must be the keys for the mystery apartment. And as it registers, something flickers inside. No, that’s ridiculous, I can’t – can I? I stare at them for a moment, uncertain what to do. And yet, Harriet’s phone’s dead and who knows how long it’ll be before she gets home. I can’t just wander the streets.

  Plus, this is the perfect opportunity to put the letters back, I suddenly realise. I have them with me in my handbag. I can go there now and no one will ever be the wiser. It makes total sense.

  But as the idea hits, I feel a stab of disappointment. I haven’t finished reading them. I’ll never be able to find out what happens to Emmanuelle and Henry. I’ll never be able to unravel the mystery of the apartment—

  I quickly grab hold of myself. My whole life I’ve been fascinated by people’s stories of love and romance, but this time it doesn’t just involve me, it involves Harriet as well. I can’t risk getting her into trouble. So what if I never get to discover the ending to this love story or the reasons why an apartment in Paris was kept a secret for over seventy years? What does it matter?

  It’s all in the past now. Madame Dumont has died and it’s likely Henry has too. And with them, so has their love story. It’s not important any more.

  What’s important is that I took these letters and I have to put them back.

  17

  Just to clarify, it’s not breaking and entering if you have the keys, right?

  Twenty minutes later, I’m inside Madame Dumont’s building. Luckily, I remembered the passcode from when Xavier first passed me the slip of paper a few days ago. Except it wasn’t really luck; I had memorised the digits, almost as if I knew I’d be coming back here again. Travelling up in the lift, my heart flutters like a trapped bird. I don’t know whether it’s nerves or excitement, or both. I try to reassure myself it’s going to be just fine. I’ll only be a couple of minutes. I’ll put the letters back where I found them and then I’ll leave. No one will ever be any the wiser.

  As the lift reaches my floor, I pull back the metal concertina doors, and step out into the corridor. The whole building is quiet. It’s late; the other inhabitants are p
robably fast asleep. I check to make sure there’s no one around, then carefully slip the key into the lock. It’s still stiff and I have to jiggle it around a bit, but after a few moments the door releases and creaks quietly open.

  My breath catches and I have to steady my nerves. Now I’m here, I can’t quite believe it’s real. Slowly, I step through the doorway. It feels different this time. Before I was entering the apartment of a stranger, Madame Dumont, an old lady of ninety-five I knew nothing about. In my mind I’d imagined her as this white-haired pensioner in her nineties, a cranky, crooked Miss Havisham from Great Expectations.

  But now I’m entering the home of Emmanuelle. A flame-haired twenty-one-year-old with a passion for ballet, silk dresses and jazz. A young woman on the brink of a clandestine love affair with a young American writer called Henry. This is where they met in secret during that long, glorious summer before the war, in a city filled with artists, writers and musicians. Rubbing shoulders with such legendary names as Picasso, Henry Miller, Josephine Baker . . . It’s the stuff of dreams. Of a magical era long gone by.

  And it’s this apartment in Paris that connects the past to the present. Together with Emmanuelle’s letters it gives us the ability to time-travel, to step through some portal, I decide, with a tingle of anticipation.

  It’s dark inside but for a shaft of moonlight shining through a gap in the shutters, which have been left slightly ajar, casting everything in a pearlescent glow. Usually I’m a little afraid of the dark – it always feels slightly spooky – but tonight the moonlight makes it feel almost enchanted.

  Closing the door behind me, I make my way further inside the main drawing room, retracing the steps Emmanuelle would have taken after her first chance meeting with Henry at the café. My mind flashes back to the letters, how he talks about walking her home. After saying goodnight, maybe she even stood by this window and watched his departing figure, I reflect, glancing out at the street below, at the yellow circles of light being cast from the streetlamps onto the cobbles.

  It’s quiet, there’s no one around, apart from a stray cat that makes its way stealthily in and out of the shadows. I can picture Henry now, hands in his pockets, smile on his face as he walked home on air, bathed in that happy glow you get when you’ve met someone you’re crazy about. And Emmanuelle, intrigued by this writer from Brooklyn, secretly hoping he would contact her, gazing out into the night. Just like I’m doing now, over seventy years later.

  I turn away from the window. Here alone, without Harriet and Xavier, it’s just me and the ghosts of the past. Slipping off my shoes so I don’t make a noise on the parquet floors, I pad quietly through the rooms, careful not to disturb anything. I notice a few things have been moved and Harriet has left a few files, but mostly it’s still as it was.

  Overhead the chandelier rattles, the crystal droplets making a faint chinking as they swing back and forth, and my heart skips a beat. I glance around me, half expecting to see someone, but there’s nothing. It must be just the neighbours upstairs. Or maybe the rumble from a car on the street outside is making the building shake slightly. I feel faintly ridiculous. I’m being silly. There is no such thing as real ghosts, right?

  Shoving my childish fears down inside me, I walk into the bedroom where I first found the letters. It’s just as I remember, with the covers still thrown back and the dressing table filled with her things. Only now they’re not an old lady’s dusty possessions, they’re Emmanuelle’s and she used them to get ready to meet Henry at the jazz concert. This is her lipstick case and her mother-of-pearl hairbrush, a needle and thread used to mend a repair, or maybe sew on a button – and look, these are her bottles of perfume.

  As the moonlight squeezes through a crack in the shutters, catching the perfume bottles, one catches my eye. Made of delicate blue glass with faint silver stencilling around the neck, it casts coloured prisms against the wall. I gaze at it. I daren’t touch and yet . . .

  The temptation is too much. Carefully I pick it up, turning the smooth glass over in my hands and feeling the curved edges with my fingertips, before lifting it gingerly to my nostrils. After seventy years the scent is faded, but it’s still there. I dab a little on my wrist and as I inhale, I close my eyes, letting the aroma release my imagination.

  There’s something special about a scent. Something so powerful that it can transport you to another time and place. Seeing a photograph or listening to a song can remind you of the past, but the sense of smell has the ability to make you travel through time.

  The sweet scent of pipe smoke that takes you back to sitting on your grandfather’s knee as a child; an old suede coat that you discover in an attic, still smelling of youth clubs and sneaky cigarettes and long-spilled cider and suddenly you are fifteen again; the heady mix of the sea and fish and chips that transports you back to that old bus shelter in Cornwall where you had your first kiss.

  But it’s not just about revisiting your past; a scent can take you somewhere different entirely. It can conjure up a whole new world. Like a key unlocking a door, it can transport you into another place – like the one in which Emmanuelle was a young woman getting ready at her dressing table.

  I can picture her now, combing her hair and putting on her perfume, dabbing it on to the insides of her wrists and her neck with the delicate glass stopper. I can feel the anticipation of the evening ahead, imagine her excitement at seeing Henry again, see her in her yellow silk polka dot dress, the way it flares gently as she twirls excitedly from side to side in front of her mirror to gaze at herself—

  The loud creak of a floorboard jolts me back to the present.

  ‘Hello?’

  I snap open my eyes. Spooked, I glance around me, a shiver running down my spine. But the room’s empty. There’s no one here, I remind myself again firmly. Honestly, I’m so skittish, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. Next I’ll be thinking this place is haunted! Putting the perfume bottle back on the dressing table, I take a deep breath to calm myself.

  OK, I’m here to return the letters, remember?

  Reaching into my bag, I pull out the bundle. Then pause. I can’t leave without reading just one more. Glancing around the room, my eye is caught by an old leather club chair in the corner. A teddy bear is propped up against a cushion, a smile on his face, as if waiting for me to join him.

  Careful not to disturb anything, I gently sit down next to him, curling my dusty feet underneath me. The leather is surprisingly soft against my legs and I feel suddenly weary. I’m tired, it’s been a long day and the cocktails are weaving their drowsy path through my veins. I stifle a yawn and rub my eyes, then unfold the next letter.

  This is probably the same spot where Emmanuelle originally read this letter from Henry, I realise, goose bumps prickling on my arms as the moonlight catches the handwriting. And feeling an even closer connection, I begin reading:

  My darling Manu,

  Oh, how I love that we have secret names for each other. To the rest of the world you might be Emmanuelle Renoir, but to me you are my darling Manu and I am your darling H. It’s fitting don’t you think? If we are to keep our love a secret, then we should create our own special, secret world in your apartment. It can be our world where we laugh and dance freely, where we share our hopes and dreams without fear of reprisal.

  Who needs the jazz clubs of Stage B or Club Bobino or the late-night cabarets and bars of Montmartre and Montparnasse, when instead we can dance to jazz records on your gramophone? Who needs to dine in the finest restaurants of L’Ami Louis, Boeuf sur le Toit, or Le Vaudeville, when we can eat fresh moules and drink a fine Chablis at your table? Who needs to walk along the Seine in the bright, yellow sunshine when we can curl up on your chaise and watch the pale moon rise into the clear night sky?

  The real world outside no longer feels real to me. My reality is our world inside. A world without boundaries or rules, without threat of war or family traditions, without fear of reprisal. What can we call this new world, Manu? It needs a new name
for we have found a new world, like an astronomer when he has discovered a new planet. We have our own sun and stars and moon, and yet we are the only inhabitants.

  How lucky are we?

  Well, my darling, for now the other world beckons. I have lots to do, today I am moving out of my room at the hotel as they have raised the price to a silly number of francs. I didn’t tell you before, as I knew you would worry. I knew also that being such a sweet soul you would offer to help, which is something I could never allow. I am rich in pride, if not in wealth and your generosity would have caused me great heartache.

  Yet, there is nothing to worry about my darling, indeed you should be excited for me, as I am excited for myself. I have found new lodgings at Shakespeare & Company, a little bookstore not far from here on Rue de l’Odéon. Oh, it is such a wonderful place. Just imagine, I will be following in the footsteps of such luminaries as Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Joyce. I will be in the company of giants, Manu.

  So, from today you must write to me every day at that address. Several times a day if you would like, for I never tire of reading about what you are doing. I could read forever about your daily ballet practice and the shy piano player or your walk to the boulangerie with its moustachioed owner and his overfed cat.

  Oh, how I love your observations. To hear you describe how you wear my small gift of fragrance daily and breathe the scent of your wrist whenever you think of me makes me so very happy. (I thought the blue bottle was so pretty, it is the same color as your eyes.) As does your confession that you wear my necklace hidden beneath your dress and how you prefer it to any diamonds, which makes me smile as I doubt that very much, but I love you all the more for saying it.

  These are just small tokens of my affections my darling, mere trinkets to make you smile when I am not in your presence. I wish we could be together every minute of every day, I miss you when we are apart, and worry about you so, which is why I am sending you a teddy bear with this letter. He is to keep you company in my absence.

  Do you like him my love? I have named him Franklin, after my president, and he has a smile as big as mine when I see you. I have found him to be a very good listener. You can tell him anything, for I promise he will keep all our secrets.