Page 12 of Thirty Days in Paris

When the chicken had been devoured, Jean Louis ordered a whole tarte Tatin. It arrived at the table, the upturned apple halves glistening with golden caramel, and the waiter cut it carefully into slices, plating up some for us and taking the rest away to be put into a box.

‘It’s Corinne’s favourite,’ Jean Louis explained, and I thought how lucky she was, to have a husband who thought to bring home her favourite dessert.

By the time we had finished the tart, I felt a bit woozy. The rich food, the wine, the heat in the restaurant, the concentration of trying to understand and speak French, yesterday’s travelling … my eyelids were almost too heavy to keep open. Jean Louis noticed and laughed.

‘You are like Arthur when he needs to sleep. We must get you both home.’

When we got back to the house, Corinne was up and dressed and seemed very composed, in jeans and a polo neck, her hair smoothed into a ponytail and her arms outstretched for Arthur. She seemed a different person as she sat the baby on her knee and listened to the children telling her what they’d had for lunch. She stroked Arthur’s cheek with the back of her hand and he leaned his head against hers, staring at me as if I was a perfect stranger and he hadn’t been eating crème fraîche from my spoon less than an hour ago.

‘You can go to your room, if you like,’ she said to me with a smile.

I understood I was being dismissed, like a parlourmaid, but I didn’t mind. The food and the wine were tugging at my eyelids. I curled up on my bed, intending to have a little snooze.

I didn’t wake until the next morning.

7

Juliet lifted her arms over her head and stretched out her shoulders. Darkness had crept in while she’d been writing, throwing pale grey shadows into the corners of the room. She’d paused only to snap on the lamp beside her desk so she could carry on. She loved it when that happened: when you got so absorbed in your work that time passed without you noticing. As a writer, you could never tell if the words were going to come easily or if they were going to be elusive and difficult to pin down, but today it had felt effortless. She’d written twice as much as she’d set as her target.

Now, she needed fresh air, and to stretch her legs. She pulled on her Skechers and headed out into the chill November night. She knew exactly where she was heading. It was less than a kilometre away. She knew the route like the back of her hand, for she’d taken the children to the Tuileries often enough, so it was a question of making her way back up towards the Opéra.

Whether she was right to go back was another question, but she wanted to see if her memory was accurate, or if there was some detail she was missing. Write about what you know, they said. But did she still know it or had her mind played tricks?

The street hadn’t changed an iota. It had a hushed air of quiet privilege and exclusivity that made you wonder who was lucky enough to live here. The stone was creamy and unblemished; the greenery on the balconies manicured; the paintwork gleamed. Not a single brick or windowpane seemed different.

She felt herself drawn towards the huge black door, as imposing now as it had been the night she’d arrived. What if she’d never stepped inside that courtyard? What route would her life have taken if she’d never seen the advert, never entered the Beaubois household?

And what if she stepped inside it now? She touched the handle for a moment, the metal so cold on her fingers, it felt like an electric shock. She could push it open and go in search of her past. Would they still be there? Would her ghost still be there, standing at the window, looking out at the same moon that was hanging overhead?

Emotions had memories just like muscles, she thought. It was more than just nostalgia. She was almost reliving every moment, her heart skittering and her pulse racing. She could feel the nerves she had felt that first night, her stomach raw and churning. And the turmoil of walking out for the very last time, hearing the door clang shut behind her. But she could also remember the times she had bounced through it, ready to embark on some new adventure, or pushed it open without a care in the world, a bag of croissants in her hand.

How had it all gone so wrong? Which tiny moment was the catalyst? What could she have done differently?

It all became too much. The feelings. The questions. Confronting her past in real life was so much more visceral than putting it on the page, and she felt vulnerable. She turned on her heel, hunching herself under her jacket, and walked away, angry with herself. Why had she come here? It was not as if she’d had any intention of causing a scene. It wasn’t her style.

Juliet had never been confrontational. She wondered now if that was a good thing. Was lack of confrontation just cowardice? Did not standing up for yourself mean being a doormat? Or was not rocking the boat a sign of strength? Writing had always been her way of dealing with uncomfortable things: a diary, a letter, an article. And now a book.

Thirty-something years on, she was using words to make sense of her past so she could make sense of her future. But how far should she go? After all, you could tell lies as you wrote, edit out the bits that reflected badly on you, rebalancing things to create a narrative you felt comfortable with. She had to be honest with herself, she realised. She couldn’t skirt around the things she didn’t feel proud of. There was no point in an airbrushed reconstruction.

She turned left at the bottom of the street and quickened her step in her hurry to get away. The air temperature had dropped and the wind needled into her. Suddenly, Paris didn’t feel so welcoming. She was all alone in a strange city, without anyone to go back to. No husband; no children; no friends. None of the people she cared about were giving a second thought to her tonight. They were all getting on with their own lives. She had thought she could manage getting on with hers. She had thought she was tough and independent and resourceful and resilient. But, right now, she felt small and unloved.

She’d been putting a brave face on it all. She’d been fooling everyone, even herself. The bright voice she had used to her friends, to justify her and Stuart’s decision, had been a façade. The description of all the exciting plans she had was a mirage, a fantasy she had conjured up to paper over her fear. She had used Paris as a distraction, painting a picture of an exciting new chapter in her life, making herself an object of envy, whereas, really, she was to be pitied.

She shivered, but it wasn’t the wind. It was the chill of realising the bleakness of her situation. A foolish woman who had agreed to throw away her marriage because her husband seemed to love his new bicycle more than he loved her? She hadn’t paid him enough attention. If she had been a good wife, if she had been worth keeping, she should have taken an interest, shouldn’t she?

Panic was pooling in her stomach. She’d burnt her bridges. The house was gone. All she had was money in the bank – admittedly quite a lot, more than she ever thought she would have at her disposal – but what good was that when there was no one to make plans with?

She stopped at a red pedestrian light and looked around. She had no idea where she was. The street names were unfamiliar. She didn’t recognise the buildings, or remember passing them. Somehow, she must have taken a wrong turn. She pulled out her phone and pressed Google Maps, but just as the grid of streets began to fill the screen, it went black. Her phone was dead.

It was her own fault. She was useless at keeping her phone charged. It drove everyone mad: Stuart, the kids. But she wasn’t as obsessed with her phone as they were, so she didn’t notice when the battery was low. But suddenly she realised just how much she relied on it, even though she thought she didn’t. How was she going to find out where she was?

She carried on to the end of the road and found herself in a wide, noisy street full of jostling crowds, garish shops and noisy traffic. Car horns, loud music, laughing and shouting, the smell of fried onions and cheap oil. Crowds of youngsters in bright puffer jackets and ostentatious trainers trailed plumes of vape and sometimes something more exotic.

She wanted to find a map and get her bearings without looking too obvious. She sensed she looked out of place, a fish out of water. Exactly like a middle-aged English mum who’d got herself lost, not some streetwise Parisienne. She’d thought she was so cool, remembering her way without a map. But her mind was blank and she had lost all sense of direction. She felt as if there were eyes upon her, weighing her up.

She drew her coat around her and tried to look casual. If she’d still smoked, she’d have lit a cigarette, playing for time, but she and Stuart had given up long ago. No one she knew smoked anymore, which, by and large, was a good thing – until you needed a prop and to look as if you didn’t give a shit when actually you were bricking it.

She told herself to think. Visualise her internal map of Paris, work out where she had gone wrong. She must be in Les Halles, near the Forum des Halles, the old food market once known as the belly of Paris. It was a harmless enough area, with its huge chain stores and fast food, a magnet for the young who’d come in from the suburbs. If she kept her wits about her, she would come to no harm. She needed to head south, towards the river, and then loop round along the Seine until she was back in the Rue Saint-Honoré. But she felt as if she’d been blindfolded in a game of Grandmother’s Footsteps and turned around until she was dizzy and disorientated.

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