The Paris Secret

by Natasha Lester

  “Another secret. For now.” Celeste smiled at Kat. “I could be wrong. I’ll go back to Paris this weekend and see if I’m right. Then if I am, on Monday . . .”

  “We might solve our mystery,” Kat finished.

  And she might have the answer to one of her grandmother’s secrets.

  Kat placed the small square of fabric under the spectroscope, shone light onto it and watched molecules vibrate with energy. An idea pulsed with similar intensity in her mind. She texted Elliott.

  Are you able to check if there’s any connection between your Margaux Jourdan and the House of Dior? I know it’s a weird question but, depending on the answer, it might help rule my grandmother out or in pretty definitively.

  He replied almost immediately. No question is weird when you’re researching, I’ll check it out. Looking forward to seeing you tonight.

  And Kat realized she was looking forward to seeing him too.

  * * *

  Kat took off the dress, and put it on again. Three times. The evening was formal, Elliott had said, and the dress was formal. In fact it was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. She’d coveted it since it had sashayed along the runway at Raf Simons’s first show as creative director at the House of Dior. But now that she had it, did she have the guts to wear it?

  It was another of the dresses from her grandmother’s house, this time in a flame-colored scarlet: not a color to hide in. The skirt swept the floor and had been expertly designed so that it only began to flare out when it reached her hips rather than flaring from the waist—a trick that made it look sensuous rather than princessy. The bodice was strapless, or more than strapless; it was almost like a corset. The gown skimmed up and over her waist to a line just below her breasts, which were covered by shaped cups that certainly hid everything and were much less revealing than the plunging necklines favored by footballers’ wives but it was so much sexier than anything Kat had worn in a long time, or perhaps ever.

  Her phone buzzed. Elliott had arrived. There wasn’t time to change.

  She sent a text to her daughters—even though she’d already spoken to them that day—so they would have a message from her when they woke up. Then she checked to make sure her lipstick hadn’t smeared over her teeth, smoothed her dark brown hair, which she’d decided to wear long and straight so as not to overdo things, and caught the lift down to the lobby. She tried very hard not to fidget when she felt the other people in the lift staring at her bold red dress.

  She saw Elliott in the lobby straightaway, even though his back was to her. There was something about the way he stood—confidently, but not overconfident, as if he was happy in himself—that she admired and even envied. He definitely hadn’t taken his tuxedo on and off three times before coming here tonight.

  The sound of her heels on the tiled floor made him turn around. A smile crossed his face the moment he saw her. While he might have looked handsome in the moody lighting of the bar the other night, out here in the well-lit lobby he looked even more gorgeous. His tuxedo, which she realized as she drew closer wasn’t black but rather the darkest shade of midnight blue, deepened the color of his eyes still more—magnetically so. He leaned over to kiss her cheek and her breath caught.

  “You look stunning,” he said.

  “Anyone would look passable in this dress,” she said, deflecting the compliment and hoping her cheeks hadn’t flushed to match her dress. “But stunning might be extending your authorial license too far.”

  “It’s not just the dress,” he countered. “And I write nonfiction, which means I always tell the truth.”

  The truth. It was the only thing she wanted from people now that she knew how much lies could hurt. She decided to try simply accepting the compliment. “Thank you then.”

  He held the door open for her, one hand lightly on her back, as she stepped outside. The twilight was delightfully warm, the lights of the city sparkled as they began to turn on, and the evening lay before her like a red carpet ushering her onward to adventure. How nice it was to be unshackled, to be with a person who didn’t know her as mother, wife, conservator or any other label.

  “Do you want to walk there?” he asked. “It’s not far and the night is—”

  “Perfect for walking,” she finished. “Let’s.”

  They strolled along Pall Mall, attracting the glances of passersby, which Kat attributed to Elliott’s semi-celebrity.

  “See, I’m not the only one who thinks you look stunning,” he said.

  Kat blushed yet again. “Two compliments in the space of five minutes is a little too heady for someone who’s more used to a very biased five-year-old telling her she’s pretty.”

  “Two compliments in five minutes is less than you deserve, but if it makes you uncomfortable I promise to wait half an hour before delivering another one.” His voice was deadpan but he grinned at the end and Kat burst out laughing.

  “I’ll be sure to time you,” she said, tapping her watch before turning the conversation away from herself. “Tell me about being a writer. How often do you publish a book? I imagine it must take a bit of time to research and write the kinds of things you do.”

  He nodded. “I try to write one every couple of years. The publishers would like one a year but I’d rather take the time and know that I’m happy with the book—that it’s my best work.”

  “I’m lucky in that respect,” Kat said. “People seem to accept that museum artifacts deserve time and patience.”

  “Whereas anything contemporary needs to happen quicker than you can click your fingers. Fortunately the last couple of books have sold well enough that I don’t have to put out a book a year to keep my daughter in the manner to which she would like to become accustomed, or to pay the mortgage. Time really is the most precious and least treasured thing in the world, I sometimes think.”

  “You’re right,” Kat said somewhat wistfully. This past year, as she hurtled toward forty, all she’d felt were the pressures of time. That she would suddenly be eighty and alone because there wasn’t time in her life to meet and fall in love with a man. That her girls would grow up and have families of their own and Kat would become like her grandmother, living alone in a remote house, telling the world it was what she wanted but feeling always a lack.

  A car horn sounded on the street, returning Kat from the melancholic future and back to the present with Elliott. “How did you go from pop stars’ biographies to history?” she asked.

  He winced. “I was hoping you wouldn’t know about that.”

  She laughed. “I confess to googling you last night after you left. I know you said that I should, back when we first spoke on the phone, but I hadn’t got around to it. The fact that people actually stopped you in the lobby to get your autograph made me a little bit curious.”

  “Oh, brilliant,” Elliott said wryly. “I was hoping you hadn’t seen that either. I suppose now you know about my grubby past, you’ve decided not to tell me anything about your grandmother?” He ran a hand through his hair, the aura of self-assurance suddenly falling away. “You’re right to ask though. I’m asking you a lot of questions, so you should do the same. And if I wasn’t standing beside possibly the smartest woman I’ve ever met—I don’t know anyone who has both a degree in medicine and science, and who’s also studied at the Sorbonne—I mightn’t mind so much. But okay, here goes. I studied history and languages at college. Do you know how many jobs there are for twenty-something history and languages graduates?”

  “I suspect not that many,” she said.

  “Fewer than that. I took a writing job with Smash Hits magazine—I don’t know if you had that in Australia?”

  “Oh, yes,” Kat said nostalgically. “I used to pull out the posters of A-ha and hang them on my walls. See, now I’ve confessed that, you shouldn’t feel bad about telling me anything.”

  He laughed, and they crossed the road, heading toward Mayfair. “I wrote for them for a year or so, and then a mate of mine who was in a band had
a top ten hit. Women around the country were throwing their knickers at him at concerts and he asked me if I’d write something about him. It was the nineties and every pop star who’d ever had a hit was putting out coffee-table books heavy on photos and light on text. So I traveled around Europe with him and the band for three months, sending pieces back to Smash Hits and writing a kind of tour diary. I was lucky: he went through the stratosphere, so a publisher asked if I’d turn my articles into a book. It sold a lot of copies and suddenly every pop star in the country who didn’t already have a book wanted me to write one for them. I did two more and then I had to stop because I was becoming the world’s biggest pop star cliché—drinking too much, marrying women in intoxicated escapades—and I wasn’t even a pop star.”

  Kat couldn’t help smiling. He was a natural raconteur. “I did notice you’d practiced the art of marriage a few times.”

  “You saw that too? Excellent. Google is fantastic for research but an utter bastard when you’re trying to forget you ever had a past.”

  “Hey, I’m divorced too. I’m not criticizing you.”

  “Really?”

  She nodded.

  “But probably only once? Not three times.”

  “Only once. And never again.”

  “It’s not fun, is it?” he said quietly as they reached Piccadilly. Alongside them, Green Park glowed emerald beneath the last evening sunlight. “Especially when there are kids involved. I’m guessing from your comment about five-year-olds that you have kids?”

  “I do,” she said. “A three-year-old as well. They’re the loves of my life and probably the catalyst for the end of my marriage.”

  “I wish I could give such a reasonable explanation, but two of my marriages were in those awful years when I did anything that seemed like a lark and was usually anything but. The first time was literally a dare that I went through with to prove—I don’t even know what.” He grimaced. “That I was an idiot, I guess. The second was because my then girlfriend was pregnant, but as I’m sure you can well understand, a child is the last thing to bring together two people who aren’t really suited. I thought I’d better grow up and make a reasonable and considered choice about four years ago, but . . .” He shrugged. “I tipped the scales too far on the side of reasonableness and forgot about spark. It ended last year.”

  He stopped outside a brown brick building with a pillared portico, above which hung a flag. Windows bordered in white paraded regimentally across the facade.

  “This is us,” he said, indicating the building. “But now that I’ve filled you in on my sordid past, you might prefer to go back to the hotel. I can always email you the rest of my questions.”

  Kat offered him a smile. He’d made mistakes, but he genuinely sounded as if he regretted them. He’d obviously made himself a new life; he was the kind of father who’d leave a bar to help his daughter with her homework. And he’d been honest about his past failings.

  So she said, “It must be hard, having to be on show like that, knowing anyone can look you up online and form an opinion about you based on what they read there.”

  He shrugged. “I knew when I first met you at the Savoy that you had no idea who I was and it was great because it meant that I could tell you that you’re smart and beautiful. If you’d heard anything about me before we’d met, you’d have thought my compliments meant I was fitting my own stereotype. The thing is, it would have been fake if I hadn’t said it. And that’s what it’s like: so many people have a fixed idea of who I am, and I try so hard not to be that, which means I end up not being me either.”

  “You should be you all the time,” she said, then decided to try her own compliment. “I quite enjoy spending time with the real Elliott Beaufort.”

  Elliott touched her arm. “Thank you.”

  Somehow, even though they were standing in a street and people were stepping around them, all Kat could see in that moment was Elliott, looking at her with admiration in his eyes, and something more. Trust, she thought. It wasn’t something she’d seen in a man’s eyes for so long and she rather liked it, even though she knew it was a momentary dusting of magic prompted by her dress and the intimacy of the conversation they’d shared.

  A man clapped Elliott on the back as he passed by, saying hello, and the moment ended.

  Kat gestured to the stately mansion before them. “What is this place?”

  “This,” he said, “is the Arts Club.”

  “Wow,” Kat said as they followed a line of beautifully dressed people inside. “Is it one of those very British private clubs?”

  He laughed. “It is a private club. You’ll have to tell me how very British it is at the end of the night.”

  She laughed too. “I will. I’m hoping there’ll be no hunting souvenirs hanging on the walls.”

  “We’re down in the basement, at the supper club, where you’ll find enough plush curved sofas and low lighting and intimate booths to make you feel like you’ve just stepped into an episode of Mad Men.”

  “This is going to be fun, isn’t it?”

  He smiled at her. “You were doubting that before?”

  They passed through a fabulous hallway of rose-gold and smoky mirrors, and into a room that made Kat want to turn around, mouth open like one of her daughters, and drink it all in.

  * * *

  “Elliott!” a woman’s voice called, and then Elliott was engulfed in the woman’s arms and his cheeks were kissed. The man with her shook Elliott’s hand. Kat judged from the palpable feeling of goodwill that these were Elliott’s friends.

  “Sorry,” the woman said, beaming at Kat. “That was so rude of me—throwing myself on Elliott and not saying anything to you. I can throw myself on you too if you like, but Josh is always telling me I should save the kisses and hugs for people I actually know.” She grinned at the man beside her.

  Elliott laughed. “Kat, this is D’Arcy Hallworth and Josh Vaughn.”

  “Nice to meet you, Kat.” Josh, who had dark hair and beautiful blue eyes, held out his hand and Kat shook it.

  D’Arcy linked her arm through Kat’s and led her over to a curved banquette with the most incredible orb-shaped oriental paper lampshade above it, handprinted with a riot of flowers. Kat felt like she really had stepped onto the set of a terribly à la mode television program.

  “I had the waiter reserve this for us,” D’Arcy said. “We’ll be out of the way and Elliott can actually enjoy himself. Although this crowd is too suave to show that they care about celebrities.”

  “D’Arcy, I’m a long way from being a celebrity,” Elliott protested.

  “Too modest,” D’Arcy mock-whispered.

  “Is that an Ossie Clark?” Kat asked, indicating D’Arcy’s dress, which was also red but with bell sleeves and a low-cut neckline that looked sensational without being too much. In fact, D’Arcy was the one who should be called stunning: she had long blond hair in wild curls, and eyes that expressed everything she felt. It was impossible not to warm to her immediately.

  “It is,” D’Arcy said. “How could you tell? Although we both clearly have excellent taste. Your accent tells me you’re Australian too, we’ve both chosen red and your dress is, I know, a Dior that I’ve salivated over ever since it hit the runway.”

  Kat laughed. “I’m a fashion conservator at the Powerhouse Museum so I recognized the style of yours. It’s beautiful.”

  D’Arcy turned to Elliott. “A fashion conservator wearing my favorite Dior gown. It’s lucky I’m married to Josh otherwise I might have to marry her instead.”

  “Well, you seem to have more luck with marriage than I do,” Elliott quipped and everyone laughed.

  Josh slipped his arm around his wife, who leaned back into him with a honeymooner’s smile, as if she truly believed that she couldn’t possibly be happier. Kat stopped laughing, wanted to tell them to leave now, to go far away to a magical place where love survived.

  She realized she was staring as if she’d never seen a couple b
efore, so she asked, “How do you all know each other?”

  “We met Elliott a few years ago,” Josh said. “D’Arcy’s grandmother was Jessica May, the photographer?”

  Kat nodded. During an adulthood spent working at various museums, she’d certainly heard of Jessica May.

  “Elliott wanted to look at her war photography for a book he was working on, so he came to France for a couple of days to look through the archives,” Josh continued.

  “We had to throw him out after a fortnight,” D’Arcy finished with a smile.

  “Josh forgot to mention that the archives are kept in what used to be Jessica May’s chateau,” Elliott added. “And that he and D’Arcy live there. We had too much fun drinking calvados every night and eating amazing dinners in the gardens. It’s an extraordinary place. I forgot to go home.”

  “You’ll have to come with Elliott next time,” D’Arcy said, snuggling in even closer to her husband’s side.

  “Oh no,” Kat said, suddenly flustered. “Elliott and I aren’t . . . I’m just helping him with some research.”

  “Come anyway,” D’Arcy said mischievously. “Everyone who crosses the drawbridge at the chateau falls in love, don’t they?” she asked Josh.

  He smiled and took her hand. “We’re going to get drinks for everyone before D’Arcy completely embarrasses you, Kat. I’ll make sure she relocates her social graces while we’re gone. What would you like?”

  “Negroni?” Elliott asked Kat, which was just as well because she seemed to have lost the power of speech. Falling in love with Elliott was so far in the realms of fantasy that it belonged in the movies. She nodded.

  Josh and D’Arcy walked to the bar with their arms wrapped around one another, and their love and happiness was so obvious that Kat could almost see a cartoon heart draw itself above them.

  She heard herself exhale audibly.

  “See what I mean?” Elliott said. “Overwhelming.”

  “They are. If they weren’t so nice, you’d hate them. How long have they been married?”

  “Six years. And they have four-year-old twin boys.”