Page 15 of The Paris Trip

‘Yes, she’s ninety-two. Can you believe it? Wait for me, Maman! Don’t try to manage the stairs alone…’ Madame Rémy gave a dry laugh, and touched her arm. ‘But you must be desperate for sleep. We’ll see you at breakfast, I hope?’

‘Yes, thank you again.’ Maeve closed the door and leant against it on the other side, listening as the two women made their slow way back through the honeycomb of passageways to who knows where.

Almost too tired to move, she bent again to remove her shoes and wiggle her poor aching toes about, and was just considering a much-needed expedition to locate the bathroom when someone else knocked at the door.

‘Oh my goodness, what now?’

Her nerves fraught, Maeve threw open the door and glared at her new visitor, half-expecting some other ancient member of the family come to impart wisdom in the middle of the night. But it was only Leo’s glowering sister, a stack of clothes huddled untidily in her arms, holding out a brand-new toothbrush still in its packet.

‘My brother asked me to bring you these. There’s toothpaste in the bathroom,’ Bernadette said sullenly, ‘and shampoo, of course.’

‘Merci,’ Maeve sighed, drumming up a weary smile. She really was very grateful. These people had been so kind to her and yet she could barely keep her eyes open.

Bernadette shrugged, handing her the bundle of clothes, and stomped back along the landing in the same direction her grandmother and great-grandmother had taken just minutes before.

Maeve peered up and down the passageway. ‘Anyone else want to come and speak to me?’

There was no reply.

Grabbing a clean towel, she staggered along the landing to the bathroom, which turned out to be huge, despite its low, sloping ceiling, with a freestanding antique bath with gold taps set on a raised platform, and an old-fashioned screen between the bath and the toilet.

There were no curtains at the window but the glass was frosted. She pushed it open, remembering what Leo had told her about the steam.

‘Ah, at last…’ Running herself a bath, she was delighted to find the water tolerably hot and climbed in for a quick dunk of her hair and an overall wash. Closing her eyes in the warm scented water after scrubbing all her bits, she allowed herself to soak for five minutes of pure unadulterated relaxation, and then jumped out, towelled herself off briskly and brushed her teeth with the new toothbrush.

Two and a half minutes of assiduous brushing, as was her twice-daily habit.

Being robbed in broad daylight and left stranded in a foreign country without a passport was no excuse for poor dental hygiene.

Bernadette’s night clothes were a little on the large side, but they were better than sleeping in the top she’d worn all day or, worse, in the all-together. There were limits, after all, and she was British.

Stumbling wearily back to her bedroom, she heard a strange cry from somewhere below her in the house and stopped dead, startled.

Was that a cat? Or perhaps a woman, crying?

Maybe she had been too brusque with the great-grandmother and upset the poor old lady. But her intuition told her it was somebody completely different. Nobody she had met so far in the Rémy family, she suspected, listening to the soft distant sound of sobbing.

As she got ready for bed, the crying continued, muffled but unmistakable. Sometime later, she heard footsteps, a rumble of voices, and the slamming of a door. Then silence.

At last she slept.

Maeve woke just after dawn and padded barefoot across to the tiny window in her fairy tale turret bedroom to stare out across Paris.

Last night, she had been too dazed to make much of the tiny lights dancing all over the city’s velvety glow. By daylight, the view was miraculous. Parisian roofs, balconies, office buildings and elegant apartments filled the skyline. The sky was a deep, gorgeous, shining blue. No clouds, very little wind, judging by the still treetops she could just see in the yard below.

A perfect summer's day, in fact.

She wiggled her toes and thought with brief longing of her absent suitcase. It would be back in England by now. Dear old Blighty. How they must have stared in astonishment when she failed to make the rendezvous and they had to leave France without her. Maeve, who did everything by the book, had missed the coach. And not even contacted Betsy or the tour company to explain why. In the end, they must have decided she was dead. Because absolutely no other explanation would fit…

What would happen to her luggage now? They would hold it for her at one of their offices, perhaps. She needed to look up the phone number of the coach tour company as soon as possible. Of course, she had the number in her rucksack. All the numbers she might need in the event of an emergency, along with names, websites, protocols. But she no longer had her rucksack. Or her smartphone, for that matter. It was all a bit of a disaster. But nothing that couldn’t be sorted out once she was given permission to travel back to the UK.

She hated the idea of everyone laughing at her, and almost wished she had died. Well, maybe that was a tiny bit extreme. Nobody wished they were dead just to avoid embarrassment. Especially when she would never be forced to hear their chuckles or witness their barely concealed smirks.

With any luck, she would never see any of her fellow travellers again. But it was still humiliating to imagine what they’d said behind her back…

Soon, she would be home again, checking through the book marking she still had to do before school started again in September, and perhaps eating a heart-healthy reduced sugar biscuit.

Except that her house keys had been in her rucksack too, she realised, her heart sinking even further. Her neighbour Mrs Fletcher always kept a spare set, of course. So she wouldn’t need to pay a locksmith to break in for her.

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