ONE NIGHT IN PARIS
NINA GEORGE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE LITTLE PARIS BOOKSHOP
One Night in Paris
Translated by Sharon Howe
PENGUIN MICHAEL JOSEPH
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First published 2025
Copyright © Nina George, 2025
Translation copyright © Sharon Howe, 2025
The moral right of the author has been asserted ‘Ne me quitte pas’ Jacques Brel (lyrics) and Gérard Jouannest (composition), 1959 ‘A l’attaque!’ Miossec, 2014
‘Feeling Good’, lyrics and composition by Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse for the musical The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd, 1964
‘Our Love is Easy’, Melody Gardot and Jesse Harris, 2009 ‘Feelings’, Louis Gaste and Morris Albert, 1974 ‘Des Touristes’, Moissec, 2014 ‘Je m’en vais’, Moissec, 1964
‘I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to be Free’, Dick Dallas, 1966
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Tell me: what do you really want out of life?
For women’s freedom
It happened to people, this longing, emerging from an unknown void, grabbing the soul with a firm hand, the urge to simply let go and sink to the depths of the ocean. Deeper and deeper, without resistance, throwing away yourself and your life, as if you had come from the gorges of the sea and were destined to return there one day.
Vertigo marée, the old Breton fishermen called it, that desire that came from nowhere – to erase the self, to be free, free from everything. It usually came on the most beautiful of nights, that was why fishermen avoided looking into the deep, and hung thick curtains at their sea-facing windows when on dry land.
The thought of this occupied Claire as she dressed, and the stranger asked: ‘Will I see you again?’ He lay naked on the bed; the brass ceiling fan turned sluggishly, tracing a revolving star of shadowy stripes on his bare skin. The man stretched out an arm as Claire zipped up her pencil skirt at the back. He reached for her hand.
She knew he was asking whether they would do it again. Share a secret hour behind closed doors. Whether this would start to mean something, or end here and now, in Room 32 of the Hotel Langlois, Paris.
Claire looked into his eyes. Dark-blue eyes. It would have been easy to sink into their depths.
In every gaze, we seek the ocean. And in every ocean, that one gaze. His eyes were the ocean at Sanary-sur-Mer on a hot summer’s day, when the Mistral shakes the overripe figs from the trees and the dazzling white pavements are speckled with their purple juice and windswept blossoms. Eyes he had kept open the whole time, looking at Claire, holding her gaze as he moved inside her. The unfamiliar ocean of his eyes was one reason she had sought him out on the terrace of Galeries Lafayette. That, and the fact that he wore a wedding ring on his finger.
Just like her.
‘No,’ Claire said.
She had known that it would only happen once. No surnames. No exchange of telephone numbers. None of the intimacies of an all too banal conversation about their children, or shopping at the Marché d’Aligre, steak frites at Poulette, movies, travel plans and why they were doing this to each other. Why they had left their lives for an hour to press themselves against a stranger’s skin, trace unfamiliar body contours, enclose unfamiliar lips, before slipping back into the regular outline of their lives.
Claire knew her own reasons. His were none of her business. Their hands separated simultaneously. Slipped apart. The last touch and perhaps the tenderest. He didn’t ask why, he expressed no regret. He let Claire go just as she did him, a piece of flotsam on the tide of the day.
Claire picked up her open handbag, which had fallen from the cherrywood coffee table by the garret window earlier, when the man had pressed her gently against one
of the pillars and lifted the hem of her dress, feeling the silk edge of her hold-ups and smiling as he kissed her.
Claire had planned to seek out someone like him among the thousands of faces in Paris. The sudden vision of one’s own body pressing against the other. The same vision, mirrored in the other’s gaze.
After her last lecture before the two-month summer break, she had put the stockings on in her office at the university for that sole reason. And quietly slipped away from the obligatory end-of-term staff party after half a glass of icecold champagne. The other professors were used to Claire withdrawing discreetly from festivities. ‘Madame le Professeur always leaves before the moment normal people switch to first names,’ Claire had once heard a lecturer say to a new research assistant in the ladies’ room. Neither of them knew that Claire was in one of the cubicles. She had waited until the women were gone. Up till then, she hadn’t noticed that she wasn’t on first-name terms with any of her colleagues.
Some were afraid of her knowledge: as a behavioural biologist, she knew the anatomy of human emotions and actions. They feared her insights into volition and choice in the same way that many people fear psychologists, hoping the experts will see right through them to the very backbone of their being and understand what has made them what they are, with all their transgressions, compulsions and guiltless wounds, yet dreading what such a tomograph of the soul might uncover beneath the layers of good manners and secrets.
She wouldn’t put the stockings on again, but dump them straight in the black and gold waste bin in the small ensuite with its art deco tiles on her way out.
Claire gathered together her keys, mobile, leather notebook and university ID card, without which no one could get past the armed guards outside the Sorbonne and its associated institutes, and put them all back into the silk interior of her bag. She fastened it and twisted her darkblonde hair into a neat chignon at the nape of her neck.
‘You’re beautiful in the light from the window,’ the man said. ‘Stay like that for a minute. That’s how I’ll carry you around with me. Until we forget about each other.’
She obliged. He wanted to make it easy for them. He had tasted of milk and sugar, of coffee and desire.
The attic room, with the dark wood Provence dresser, the round white table, the dove-grey Versailles chairs, the bed with the summer linen, was now quite still, and the melody of Paris city life was stirring outside. The hum of air conditioners, fans, engines. As if she was emerging from a faraway sea after floating in a liquefied existence broken only by her own breath, and materialising into the old Claire, in the overheated intensity of a Parisian day.
She looked out over the roofs of Montmartre. At the rows of clay chimneys along their narrow ridges. It was after five in the afternoon, the June sun burning a cavity in time, making the roofs shimmer in the silvery grey that resembled the moment of awakening. When the dream ends and reality fades in, still blurred. The moment Spinoza once described as the ‘place of the one true freedom’.
Roofs like one of Erik Satie’s Gymnopédies.
That’s what Gilles would say. His observations on the world were always musical. He preferred hearing to seeing.
Opposite the hotel was a balcony terrace. A man was
laying the table with blue plates; a small boy clung to one of his legs, chuckling with delight as he rode on his papa’s foot.
Like Nicolas, Claire thought.
Her son, her child, back in the days when he was so small that her arms reached all the way round him, that little parcel of trust and curiosity, smelling of pancakes and untapped hope. Nowadays her arms barely reached to Nico’s broad shoulders.
What was she doing here?
Standing by the window of a run-down, mid-range hotel, her back to a strange man who still had her taste on his lips, thinking about her son, full of helpless, tender love, thinking of her husband, who used to sing when she entered the room until one day he stopped, thinking of his familiar face that she knew so well, in every variant. The lover’s face, the liar’s face.
Opposite, a woman in cut-off jeans and a strappy vest came out of the kitchen onto the terrace. She wrapped her arms around the child’s father from behind. He smiled and bent to kiss her hand.
Claire turned away from the window, stepped into her open-toe leather pumps, hung her bag over her shoulder, inhaled and straightened up, looking the man on the bed in the eye.
‘It’s a privilege,’ he said slowly, ‘to know you’re losing someone. That way you can remember the moment. Often, we lose someone without warning.’
A wordless minute passed, then she left Room 32.
She pressed the button for the old lift and deep below her it shuddered into life in its wrought-iron shaft. Too
slowly. She didn’t want to wait, just a few metres from the bed, from the man, from that moment of freedom.
Vertigo marée : it existed on land too; if she had looked into the depths of his eyes for too long, she would have let herself fall. First, they would have talked about their favourite markets and travel plans, and soon they would have begun to ask each other the dangerous questions: what do you dream about, what are you afraid of, haven’t you always wanted to . . .? They would have got to know each other. And they would have begun to hide from each other.
Claire walked briskly down the narrowly winding staircase of the Langlois with its worn red carpet, distancing herself from the room.
On the second floor, she heard the voice.
‘Ne me quitte pas,’ it whispered. It was coming from Number 22.
Ne me quitte pas. Don’t leave me.
‘Ne me quitte pas ,’ the voice sang pleadingly, carried away with the emotion of an inaudible soundtrack. It sang in a whisper, stopping Claire in her tracks; she had to lean against the wall.
Words could lie.
But the voice, the body, never did, and the sound raining down on Claire from behind the closed door was the baring of a soul. Veiled in a breath that was like the moment before falling silent. Fear, and underneath: no fear at all.
She listened to this singing, Ne me quitte pas : the voice was raw, with a dark, warm clarity, and it was . . .
Like a woman dancing in the dark as if no one were watching. So much trapped within the voice. So much turmoil under the breath. And yet beneath the fear, that fearlessness.
How strange. How beautiful.
When the door of Room 22 opened and the singing stopped, it struck Claire that the voice is merely an acoustic outline of a person’s inner state: their outward appearance can be surprisingly different.
Emerging from the room was a young woman in her early twenties. She was carrying a caddy with cleaning utensils in one hand, while the thumb of her other hand turned the dial on an MP 3 player she was listening to through earphones. She had obviously been singing along to the music.
The singer wore black jeans and a ribbed black vest; her hair was pinned up sloppily and she had a pierced eyebrow. One of her shoulders and part of her left arm were tattooed with tribal motifs.
Her features reminded Claire of the fine lines of a vixen and the bold pen-and-ink drawings of Japanese artists. A delicate nose, strong eyebrows, a full, defiant mouth in a fair face, a resolute chin, and the faint suggestion of dimples at the corners of her mouth. Everything she would one day become was merely sketched out, yet at the same time already there.
But what took Claire by surprise was her gaze.
An old, dark gaze, out of young eyes.
It fell on Claire’s left hand, holding the strap of her classic red handbag. Alighted on her wedding ring. Flitted upwards, subconsciously yet unerringly, to Room 32, directly above 22. Then returned to her face.
‘Bonjour, Madame,’ the singer said. Her voice was different now, disguised, Claire thought: it was higher, softer, a cloak of modesty. The muted tone said: I am unimportant, ignore me.
But there was defiance in it, too.
‘Bonjour,’ Claire replied. ‘You have a lovely singing voice.’
‘I wasn’t singing—’ She paused ‘—Madame.’
The Madame an afterthought, presumably as she remembered her manners.
‘Pardon, Mademoiselle,’ Claire said pointedly. ‘I just assumed. My mistake.’
Two women’s secrets exposed, thought Claire, as they stood face to face, each suppressing their mutual discomfort.
There are lies that only betray the liar, Mademoiselle. She suddenly felt like saying this aloud, but what was the point?
They looked at each other, from two opposite edges of a droplet of time, in a hotel corridor, in the midst of the world, two out of 7 billion people, two out of 3.69 billion women.
‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ asked the young woman. ‘Would you like anything brought to your room?’
Again, that impatience behind the voice, like a penknife wrapped in a silk handkerchief.
‘No,’ said Claire. ‘Nothing else needed.’
The woman stood motionless, looking steadfastly at Claire. ‘Because?’ her look demanded.
This strange impulse to answer the question. To blurt out all that was left unspoken, directly into this intriguing, unfinished face.
This urge to explain why, in her own case, things weren’t what they seemed. It wasn’t about sex. Not primarily, at least. It was about the exquisitely painful surrender to a union in which everything is dissolved: all that you represent to others who know you well (or think they do); who define you and cast your personality in stone, as a mother, as the dependable hub of a family and all its organisational needs, as a career woman known for her intelligence, knowledge, prudence and restraint, a rational woman conveniently immune from emotional outbursts, a woman of good reputation.
Reputation! What good was such a reputation, for God’s sake? Did it console her, make her breathe easier, protect
her from the dreams she awoke from in tears or with a nagging, pale-blue melancholy? Did it mean anything, did it have anything to do with the person she really was?
When a stranger embraced her and knew nothing, expected nothing, and the absence of the Claire that others saw in her didn’t even bother him, then everything dissolved. Then she was just a body, an ego without a past in a body that yearned. Until the lips burned, until the muscles ached from the offering, the opening, until the tears flowed as all the shackles broke, once and for all.
Freedom.
Finding herself again, underneath it all, underneath everything.
And because he looked at me: do you understand? Because he looked at me the whole time and didn’t close his eyes. Not when I undressed, not when I came to him, not when I left. He never left me alone as we lay naked. He wanted to see the real me.
The real me, do you hear, you strange Mademoiselle? Because if you hide it, how will anyone ever find it? If you always keep your feet on the ground, your head down, your eyes down, how can you truly live?
They continued to study each other, far too long and far too silently for a chance encounter.
Claire felt a pricking in her eyes.
It couldn’t be tears. She never cried.
Or hadn’t in a very long time.
The young woman was first to look away.
‘Bonne soirée,’ she said.
‘The same to you.’
Their curious moment of intimacy, in the half- light
between the stairhead and the windowless corridor, was over.
Claire carried on down the stairs, crossed the foyer and pushed open the heavy wrought-iron door.
Out in the sun, she wiped the bead of moisture from the edge of her eyelid, tasting the salt.
Claire decided against taking a taxi. She needed to walk, to move, to erase his movements inside her. She walked in the direction of the Marais, the district where she had lived over twenty years ago. Small, precise steps, green knee-length viscose skirt, white silk blouse, red belt, red handbag, the tarmac under her heels, her shadow shrinking and shortening, lengthening and stretching beneath her. She concentrated on maintaining her pace.
Heat lurked in the narrow streets. People stumbled out of the bright light into the shade of the building façades. Walls, everywhere, harshness – this was real life, and here she was in the midst of it, alive and free. In control. She kept walking.
It took her half an hour to reach the Rue de Beauce, where evening was inching its way into Paris, turning the Satie grey to blue-grey.
She still had time, at least another hour, to reset, before carefully rolling up the memory and locking it away so that it was no longer stored in her face, her gestures, or her voice.
It wasn’t until she was sitting under a blast of cool air in Le Sancerre, searching in her bag for her purse to pay for her glass of pepper-scented white wine, realising she’d forgotten to throw away the stockings and wondering why
she was still thinking about the singer’s voice and face, that she noticed.
Something was missing.
She felt for the hard lump in the inside pocket of the lining. Felt again. Nothing.
She picked up the bag, rummaged in it, emptied the contents onto the table in front of her.
When did she last have it? This morning, definitely. Did she leave it behind when she left the Institute? No . . . it must have fallen out, on the bus, or . . .
The open handbag falling off the table. In Room 32. No. Please. Not there. Anywhere but there.
Claire took a few deep breaths, stood up, pulled back her shoulder blades, lifted her chin and made for the bistro toilets. She bathed her wrists under the tap in the tiny washroom; the water wasn’t cold enough.
She looked at her face in the mirror: she found it impossible to read herself the way she always read others. The face she had grown into betrayed nothing. A fateful quirk of nature, or did it just become like that one day, petrified into unreadability?
‘Merde,’ she murmured.
The fact is: it’s just a pebble, a random whitish-grey fossil with a rust-red pattern, the remains of a five-legged, star-shaped scutella, a sea urchin, of the kind that’s washed up by the million onto beaches the world over, stirred up from unknown depths. Thirteen million years old. From a time when the European mainland was still in its infancy. Of no practical or monetary value whatsoever.
Just a stone with traces of a star-shaped fossil. That she had collected as an eleven-year-old, in her very first summer by the sea, on a beach at the beginning of the world. That
was what the Bretons called their proud, rugged coasts that once rose up out of the deep and turned into land. For thirty-three years, Claire had carried the bi-coloured fossil that felt like a smooth, heart-shaped stone from trouser pocket to handbag to briefcase to desk, as if by doing so she could carry the beginning of time around with her for ever. As a child, she had wished on this stone heart that she would never have to go back to the tiny flat in ParisBelleville; as a teenager, she had pressed all her pain and hunger for life into its surface; as a student, she had clasped it in her left hand while her right scribbled away for all she was worth on her dissertations and doctoral thesis; and as a professor, she placed it in the middle of her desk at the university every morning, next to the business card holder. Right in front of the few words that summed up everything she had strived for and continued to work for: Dr Claire Stéphenie Cousteau, Professeure de biologie et anthropologie, Institut d’études politiques de Saint-Germain-en-Layes.
And now it was gone.
So how could she be sure that she herself was still here?
Had she left herself behind, too, in that room?
You’re not thinking logically, Claire. You’re just feeling. Letting yourself be driven by fear and adrenalin. Think. Hypotheses and emotions are not a good basis for decision-making.
‘Of course I’m still here,’ she whispered.
She thought back to what she had said this morning, in her last lecture before the summer holidays. Stored at the edge of every human consciousness are emotions which are generally regarded as illogical: aggression, obsession, desire, fear. Hate.
Usually, these emotions don’t affect you adversely. Unless something happens. A rupture in the familiar fabric of your everyday life
and habits. A tiny crack, an element of uncertainty, of instability, a change in the normal routine – that’s all it takes to shake a person to their roots and drive them to actions that can affect them in ways they are powerless not only to explain, but also to control.
That was it. Just a rupture.
She stuffed the stockings deep into the waste bin.
A rationally meaningless rupture at the end of a salty, scorching afternoon in which she had been just – just? – a woman and no one else, desired, caressed, devoured, vibrant, alive; pure woman, and therefore whole and complete.
She would carefully heal the crack.
She dried her hands and left the washroom.
She finished her Sancerre, thinking with every sip about all the jobs still to be done and people to be called before she and her family left for their annual summer trip to Brittany. The piano tuner. The gardener. Remember to top up the oil in the Chubster, as they affectionately called their old Mercedes estate. Organising, putting things in order, smoothing over the wrinkles of everyday life like a bed – a marital one, not an illicit one.
Claire was aware that some of her male colleagues called her le glaçon. The ice cube. It summed up her ability to pay no attention to emotions, except in her scientific analyses. And it was also an allusion to the advances she had rejected, and the chill that men – and some women – felt in her presence. How strange that I allowed myself so readily to turn to ice in order to be someone, in a man’s world.
She swallowed the thought down resolutely with the last drop of Sancerre and gestured to the red-whiskered barman, who placed the bill in front of her with a nod.
The taxi arrived within three minutes and ferried her through a Paris from which the tourists had been lured away to overpriced restaurants, dull erotic shows and overcrowded sightseeing boats.
Claire asked the driver to stop just once more before taking her home.
Four kinds of salt. The salt of the ocean. The salt of tears. The salt of sweat. The salt of the ‘origin of the world’, as Gustave Courbet called a woman’s dark blossom. Claire reflected on this as the taxi battled its way through the evening rush hour.
This summer was different from the previous years. It was more oppressive, with only the occasional light wind blowing on faces, through hair, clothes and scarves, through three of the four kinds of salt.
Through the taxi window, Claire observed the women in the streets, in cafés and outside boutiques, at bus stops and fountains, and it was as if she were seeing them through two different pairs of eyes. Those of the behavioural biologist who read people’s gaits and postures, faces and gestures, noting tension, fear, distraction, and silent longing to be seen or overlooked. And another, new and unfamiliar pair that peered through the crack, the rupture in the fabric of Claire’s routine. How many secrets were each of these women harbouring? That one there, with the shopping bags? The sales assistant over there, having a cigarette break outside the shop, checking her silhouette in the window and pulling in her tummy? How many secrets, how many lovers, would-be or actual, how many unshed tears? How many unspoken, unrealised dreams? How many people filled that empty space, people to be cared
for: children, mothers, husbands, siblings? What space was left at the end of the day for their own thoughts: for the cyclist hiding her gaze behind sunglasses, the bus driver with her eye on the red light; what ambitions had the elderly lady in yellow fulfilled and what had she sacrificed for someone else, whether they were worth it or not? What kind of rupture would it take to turn these women’s lives, or any woman’s life for that matter, upside down? A man?
A song from behind a locked door?
A lost stone?
Claire felt close to these strange women, so close: here they were, in the world simultaneously, with all their hidden thoughts and unfulfilled desires behind their well-ordered lives, while the taxi sliced through time.
The thought of the summer ahead, eight weeks in Brittany, weighed on Claire. She would have preferred to stay in Paris – getting up each day, as always well before Gilles and Nicolas, going to the Sciences Po, working, lecturing, teaching, analysing, giving tutorials, then fitting in her thousand metres at the swimming pool. She already regretted throwing things out of kilter in Langlois, but it had been so necessary in order to breathe again.
When the taxi turned into her road, Rue Pierre Nicole, a few streets away from the banks of the Seine and NotreDame, and lined with typical five-storey Haussmann buildings, Claire collected herself. The way one collects oneself after a movie, before leaving the cocooning darkness and stepping out into the dazzling light of reality.
As she opened the door to their fifth-floor flat, her senses were enveloped by the strains of ‘Mr Bojangles’, an aroma of rosemary, freshly sliced honeydew melon and lightly
fried aubergines, and an indefinable undertone of simmering deliciousness. She laid her red bag on the console table and glanced in the oval mirror. She looked the same as when she’d set off at half six that morning, while Nico and Gilles were still asleep. Claire had left them coffee in a silver pot, as always.
‘Sammy Davis Junior, 1985, Berlin,’ Gilles said in lieu of a greeting, filling a wine glass with honey-white Savoie Apremont and handing it to Claire across the gas hob in the middle of the kitchen. On the laptop, positioned on the wide windowsill directly in front of the open casements, Sammy Davis was dancing in white shirt, black trousers and hat across a Berlin stage. Gilles loved this version, Claire knew that. And seeing her husband standing there looking at her like that, relaxed, enthusiastic, in his blue, slightly crumpled linen shirt over faded jeans, she felt a warm pang of emotion.
She took the glass, took a quick sniff of the wine and put it down.
‘I thought, as it’s a special occasion . . .’ She lifted the paper bag with the two bottles of chilled Ruinart champagne onto the big natural wood table; she had bought them from the wine and whisky shop next to the Marché des Enfants Rouges while the taxi waited. She placed the bunch of white roses beside them.
‘Champagne and fresh flowers? She’ll get a totally wrong impression of us,’ said Gilles.
Whistling along with Sammy to the finale of the live recording, he turned to the fridge, took four dark-red pieces of meat out of a yellow porcelain dish and placed them reverently on the chopping board in front of him.
He had bought the board in the Dordogne from a carpenter with only seven fingers left.
Claire sat down at the long table they had had for ever. Gilles had always wanted a big table. Big enough to eat around, with friends or children (he wanted three, Claire none, but . . . well, who was most to blame for the other’s sacrifice?), to work at and sit around, arguing, playing games, talking. ‘A table for life, that’s what I want, Claire, a heart: we need a big, strong heart of living wood.’
When they bought the flat in the Rue Pierre Nicole twenty years ago, shortly after Nicolas was born (they were actually still paying for it out of Claire’s regular professor’s salary, freelance composers like Gilles being viewed then as now as a credit risk), Gilles had had the wall between the lounge and kitchen knocked down. He had built the kitchen around the table, which he’d found in a former girls’ convent school in Picardy, and made it the centre of their home. And he’d insisted on doing it up the way he wanted: it was his territory – that and his soundproof, airconditioned music studio.
Unframed paintings. Driftwood shelves from Brittany filled with spices, a bunch of dried shallots, cinnamon sticks and nutmegs in chipped crystal glasses. Louis XV chairs decorated with bright linen cushions from the Luberon. The worn, brandy-coloured armchair by the window, salvaged from a British tearoom. Old black-and-white photographs of Parisian markets. A huge sideboard from Normandy, sporting earthenware plates, Moroccan tea glasses, dim-sum baskets Gilles had charmed out of the Vietnamese chef at Galeries Lafayette, half a dozen teapots, hundred-yearold ladles, copper pans, mussel sieves, an A–Z of French
cheeses, a Laguiole wine opener from Domme, a basket of salted almonds, a faded portrait of Anaïs Nin in a gold frame, a battery of Ricard, Gitanes and Le Monde branded ashtrays (from the days when Gilles and Claire still smoked), a harmonica (F major), another harmonica (A major), and an open copy of Paris Match featuring Macron and his wife Brigitte on the cover. The French media were highly exercised by the twenty-four-year age gap between the couple and, as the most famous behavioural biologist in Paris, Claire had been approached by a TV channel for an interview, in the hope that she would come out with some juicy Oedipal story. She had politely declined despite the generous fee: mon Dieu, how absurd that an older woman should be reproached for still having a love life!
‘Faux filet?’ asked Claire.
She sat in her time-honoured place at the head of the table, from where she could watch Gilles cooking, singing or humming melodies which only existed because he gave birth to them. And which would sometimes be broadcast a few years later through the powerful loudspeakers of major cinemas. Though alas, not often enough. There was no existential security in his life: Claire was the financial mainstay of the family.
She tasted the wine.
‘Oui, Madame. And my original ratatouille, based on a closely guarded recipe from my Provençal grandmother.’
‘Oh? She’s a new one on me.’
‘She was my grandfather’s secret lover. They had a kind of ratatouille relationship.’
‘That would make a good topic of conversation for this evening. Secret lovers and their favourite recipes.’
Gilles cast a quick glance at Claire. His cheek muscles twitched imperceptibly. ‘Indeed,’ he replied airily. ‘And guaranteed to make Nico disown his parents.’
No, Claire wanted to correct herself, no, I didn’t mean it like that!
And it was true. She had never reproached Gilles for any of his affairs. Not even so much as hinted that she knew of at least four, despite the fact that he had never talked about them and had never been indiscreet.
Claire talked over the silence, pretending not to notice he had taken it the wrong way. ‘And the meat? From Desnoyer?’
‘You must be joking, at those eye-watering prices. Until the contract with Gaumont for the mini-series with Omar Sy is signed and sealed, it’s plain home cooking all the way. I’ve discovered an excellent butcher in the Marais. A tiny shop near Galeries Lafayette.’ Her husband concentrated on massaging the meat.
This time she took a large gulp of wine.
Galeries Lafayette was near the Langlois.
Then again, Galeries Lafayette was also near the Gaumont TV studios.
Come to think of it, half of Paris was near Galeries Lafayette.
Gilles was now stirring ingredients in a white porcelain bowl he usually used for his morning café au lait: sweet soy sauce, teriyaki, chopped garlic, sesame, homemade ketchup, honey and a splash of raspberry vinegar from Provence. Then he reached for the Laphroaig whisky Claire had brought back from her last work visit to Oxford (a six-week guest lectureship on ‘The Politics of Emotions: Media,
Manipulation and Opinion Leadership’; God, sometimes she was so sick of it all), and threw her a questioning glance.
‘Just in the marinade or in a glass? You’ve got eight weeks off from today. A thumbful?’
He extended his thumb, first horizontally, then vertically. A centimetre of whisky or a whole five?
It was an old routine of theirs, harking back to the first glass they ever drank together. They had learnt it from the bar tender at Le Mole, the century-old Breton bar in Lampaul-Plouarzel: a thumb’s width of whisky or a thumb’s height?
The same gesture for twenty-two years.
‘Later. And I’ll be taking a few exam scripts and books with me to Trévignon. We’ve got a new research project starting in the autumn.’
‘Suit yourself.’ Gilles’s shrug signalled resignation. Not because of the whisky. Because of her.
Claire could tell this tiny disappointment was the reason why Gilles didn’t ask what kind of research project it was. She could accept the whisky, then he would reciprocate by asking. A quid pro quo.
Little things. It was always just the little things.
Gilles poured a generous glug of the smoky Islay whisky into the marinade.
The playlist on the laptop switched to René Aubry. ‘Salento’. Gilles stirred the marinade in time to the steady guitar rhythm.
His steady, knowing hands.
His warm-hearted, affectionate nature, filling the whole kitchen, relaxing her. In spite of everything. Because Gilles was so much more than an unasked question about
her work. If Claire’s life were a tree, he would be all the growth rings. She knew Gilles’s affairs weren’t about her. They were about him. To broach the subject, to reveal that she knew about it, would mean bringing it into this kitchen. Into this life, her bed, her head.
A waste of resources. She hated wasting too much energy on emotions that couldn’t change the past.
‘I assume you know whether our guest is vegetarian, or a Jehovah’s Witness?’ Claire asked presently.
Gilles’s fork clattered against the bowl as he whisked. ‘Don’t tell me I’ve got to make a warm tofu salad with an orange marinade and plain strawberries for dessert? Without the Armagnac?’
His pained expression was so exaggerated, Claire couldn’t help laughing.
‘So, is Nico’s . . .?’ Hmm, what should she call her: his friend? There had been a dozen occasions since Nico’s sixteenth birthday where ‘just a friend’ had joined them at the long dining table, awkwardly squeezing her tender, hungry heart like a stress ball, but few had come a second time. Now Nicolas was nearly twenty-two and had announced the previous week that he wanted them to meet someone. Someone: not ‘just a friend ’.
Claire could tell from the way Nico said her name that her son loved to roll its soft, dancing, resonating sound around on his tongue. That it triggered a restless little surge in his heart, made him smile in the middle of the day, just looking out of the window.
Julie.
Claire smiled as she remembered. The spark in Nico’s light-brown eyes. His unaccustomed earnestness.
Love turned boys into men.
And heartache forged their personality.
That was something Nico had never yet experienced. He was a stranger to the wounds of love, having always been the one to leave. He knew nothing of the despair when desire subsided and friendship began to take the place of passion. When the other’s eyes no longer glowed, but drifted distractedly and eventually looked away. The sense of powerlessness. Followed by the realisation that you would survive this too, only as someone different, more cautious, more defiant, more judgemental. And it was only then, once the grand amour was over, once you’d been loved and left – and that could still happen even within an intact marriage, could it not? – that you became an adult.
Their son was named after Saint-Nicolas, one of the islands of Finistère’s Glénan archipelago. That was where they had conceived him, in a warm hollow in the sand under the Milky Way as it danced upside down on the black, murmuring water. The name had been Gilles’s choice.
Just as he had chosen the teapots, the Luberon tea towels, the corkscrew, Claire reflected; that deep-seated, pure and simple desire for something enduring, a mark on the imaginary map of our ceaselessly flowing existence. As if it somehow allowed the immortality of the moment to be preserved.
And yet, something was preserved. Claire still remembered what Gilles had felt like, his mouth inside her. It had tasted of sea salt. She knew that because he had kissed her afterwards, with two kinds of salt on his lips. How intoxicated, how embarrassed she had been. Too inwardly aroused and far too alert to let herself go. She had felt
pleasure, but no release. Gilles had kept his eyes closed throughout. He always closed them before and during lovemaking, and eventually Claire stopped undressing in front of him. So as not to see him not looking at her.
And she remembered how numb she had felt when, after that summer, back in Paris and bent over the books of Konrad Lorenz, Edward O. Wilson and Dian Fossey, she suddenly found herself expecting a child. A child – and she herself barely an adult! Just twenty-two, and in the first flower of womanhood. Nevertheless . . .
We had a child, then we got married, and afterwards, over time, we got to know each other.
And that’s where we are today.
This ‘us’ with its invisible gaps, its glassy silence that we knock against and pretend isn’t there.
‘Bonsoir, tout le monde! ’
Nico. Suddenly standing there in the kitchen, as suddenly as he had appeared inside her, in her life, tearing her youth and her body apart. His sports shirt was soaked with sweat; like half of Paris’s under-fifties, he went running every morning and evening by the Seine. Physically, Nicolas took after Claire’s father, who she only knew from photos.
He went over to the antique porcelain sink Gilles had collected from a farmhouse on the river Yonne (oh, how he loved things ! Indeed, Claire sometimes felt like asking her husband: ‘Are you as fond of me as you are your ladles, faux filets and teapots? Honestly? Will you add me to your collection of beloved old objects and look upon me with affection as I age?’). Taking off his shirt, Nico washed his face and tanned, well-toned arms.
His dripping wet face with its dark five o’clock shadow moved Claire. Half boy, half man.
The Centaurian age.
‘Is your visitor a vegetarian? Your mother wants to know,’ asked Gilles.
‘You’ve heard of the term “inferential beliefs”?’ Without waiting for a nod, Nico continued: ‘Exactly. I’m giving away nothing about Julie’s background, hobbies, appearance or eating and drinking habits. I’m afraid you’ll have to find that out for yourselves.’