‘Did you keep in touch with the artist?’
‘Yes, we wrote to each other every year on our birthdays.’
I manage a soft little smile. ‘And did you ever see him again?’
The American chuckles into her salad. ‘Jack and I were married for forty years. Did it all properly you know – till death do us part – and then I was seventy sitting in a big house with more money than we ever needed and no one to pass it down to, so I did the first brave thing I had done since I was born: I booked a flight to Paris and made it my mission to find my artist.’
I imagine her navigating Charles de Gualle with a set of those antique trunks that wouldn’t be out of place on the Titanic. ‘And did you?’
‘Yes.’ She grins, her whole face lighting up. ‘I found them alright, here of all places, living in a tiny little attic apartment on Rue Saint Jacques.’
The name of the road. My road. ‘Wait…’ I screw up my face, trying to piece together the fragments of a story with the fragments of conversations we had had when we met. ‘Your artist’s name was…’
‘Hername was Bluette, yes.’ She knows she has floored me, knows that her story has destroyed the little picture I had been drawing in my head and replaced it instead with a million questions.
‘She was your “friend”.’I roll my eyes, frustrated that I hadn’t put two and two together before.
‘That’s what we called each other, it was ironic of course and true all at the same time. It was easier for two girls to co-exist together than it was for the boys, we just looked like companions who liked to eat dinner together a lot.’
‘So, you were together, eventually, after all that?’
She nods enthusiastically. ‘Yes. This place was a little too quiet for me back then so we only came back when we needed to have a little rest. We travelled together, visited museums and galleries in far-flung cities. We went everywhere: Egypt, Greece, Kenya, hell even Peru, and we did it all together.’ And then a sadness passes over her. ‘And then Blu got ill, four years ago, so we came back here to rest thinking that maybe she would get better but…’ Her eyes are glassy at the memories and I reach for her hand. She lets me and I squeeze it. ‘We were old ladies by the time we eventually got to it and it wasn’t fair because we had wasted so much of our lives on other people.’ She pauses, gathers herself. ‘So… you see, Ava, why I have such an issue with you saying that you can’t even try to be with Florian because there’s some imaginary moral compass that you are judging your actions by, because I used the same compass and it robbed me of a life that I so deserved and wanted.’
‘I’m so sorry.’ I know how empty and pointless those words are but sometimes there really isn’t anything else to say.
‘Don’t be sorry.’ She shakes her head. ‘We found each other at the end, when it mattered.’
‘When did she… pass?’ I find myself making the same face that people have made for me so many times over the years.
‘Oh, she hasn’t.’ The American pales a little, looks down at her bracelet and then when she looks back up at me she has readjusted, drawn back on her smile. ‘Alzheimer’s. She’s in a facility in Toulouse, near her nieces; they were close to her, like daughters really, wanted her near them. I couldn’t argue with that, considering I had missed so much. I couldn’t face being in that apartment, it didn’t make sense without her so I came up with my little arrangement here.’
We are silent for a moment. It’s like all the noise and bustle of the restaurant quietens as we try to find our way back to our conversation. ‘My point is, Ava, I know how it feels, to be on the precipice of something that scares you. And I think – no, I know – that you have been numbed to the possibility of feeling something other than sadness for far too long, and that you have told yourself, subconsciously or not, that this numbness is your last bastion of grief. But Florian has scuppered your plan because you do feel something with him, you feel everything with him. You said it before the last time you visited me, you said, “I just feel.” It wasn’t an unfinished sentence, it was everything you wanted to say: he makes you feel. And how utterly terrifying it is to feel again.’ The tears start to slip down my face and I let them go.
‘You’re rather wise, you know.’ I sniff back the sob.
‘I try my best.’
I shake away the emotion, steeling myself at the memory of how he looked when he left last night. ‘You should have seen his face yesterday, he’s done, I’ve ruined whatever it was that we had or could have had.’
She squeezes my hand again and I look at hers, her skin, the thickness of tracing paper, weighed down with a multitude of silver rings. ‘I don’t claim to know much about men but I do know, in my bones, that if you showed up at his exhibition tonight in a low-cut dress with a sort of sad little smile on your face then he would forget everything he said fairly quickly.’
‘And then what, what do we do after that?’
‘What’s with the labels, the destinations? You don’tdo, you justbe.’
Chapter 26
The American takes meto her room which on closer inspection is bigger than my entire apartment. She instructs me to sit at the desk with a large vanity mirror and then proceeds to hurl dresses out of her wardrobe trying to find something that ‘might work’. I have tried objecting, tried to say that I’m pretty sure I could just wear the same thing I wore at the last exhibition but she had looked mildly horrified, so I knew there was little point in objecting further.
‘You do your make-up.’ She gestures to the array of products neatly stacked around the vanity with labels like Chanel, Dior, Yves Saint Laurent.
‘Erm…’ I pick up a lipstick that’s probably worth more than my entire make-up bag contents combined. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Honey, just get to it. We don’t have the luxury of time here.’
I watch as she glides around her room, another tasselled sleeve billowing behind her. She moves effortlessly, quickly, with a new sense of purpose. She purses her lips at the hangers, holds dresses against shoes, bags, necklaces and then either adds them to the pile on the bed or discards them back to their hangers.
‘Now you’ve obviously got a bit more meat on your bones.’ She gestures to her very slim figure, to where her bosom probably used to be. ‘But these should do.’
