Page 5 of The Paris Trip

Without waiting to make sure everyone got to where they wanted to go, Maeve slipped away towards the Louvre, which was thankfully so famous and well-signposted she couldn’t possibly miss it.

A group of giggling French girls swarmed past her and she stood aside for them, listening with a stab of curiosity to their swift rattling French.

French. Her mother’s native tongue.

Not having known her mother beyond the age of three, her grasp on that language had grown sadly more tenuous as the years passed. Of course she had taken French at school, but only to age sixteen, and had forgotten much of it since then, having concentrated on her favourite maths and science subjects after that.

Maybe after this holiday she could sign up for a French evening class. There had been some embarrassing moments over the past few days, struggling with a language she really ought to know better. Though her work at the school was so demanding, she didn’t have much free time for leisure pursuits. Perhaps after this trip, she could forget her obsession with her French legacy and focus on improving her teaching skills instead.

Still, she had enjoyed being on a coach tour with other people who were equally interested in Paris and its history. Much of her time at home was spent alone. But exploring the city on her own was also pleasurable.

The amazement on Mrs Endersley’s face came back to her as she joined the long, snaking queue for entrance to the Louvre.

Perhaps it was strange that she’d never visited France before, considering that Paris had been her birthplace. But her life was so busy…

And she had intended to visit the Parisian building where, according to a scribble on the back of a photograph, she had been born.

She’d found the photo in a dusty old album left behind by her mother and studied the smiling, fair-haired young woman cradling a baby – Maeve herself, her dad had confirmed – standing in front of a very French-looking apartment building. Her grandmother’s residence, apparently. She’d even managed to locate the address on a map of Paris. But she hadn’t plucked up courage to go there during this tour, and now it was too late…

Anyway, her mother had abandoned her and Dad to run off with another man. They had never heard from her again, and her father had raised her alone in London. So she didn’t owe her mother’s family anything.

Besides, she didn’t know if her grandmother was still in residence in that tall building with its white shutters and balconies with terracotta pots of colourful geraniums. She might have moved home or even died by now. People didn’t live forever. There might be strangers living at that address. It would have been too horribly embarrassing to knock at the door and be confronted with an uncomprehending French stranger.

This last-minute Paris coach tour had been an attempt to get back in touch with her roots, she suspected. But that side of it had been a bit half-hearted, which was unlike her. So she’d stuck to the itinerary like everyone else and tried to push those ideas of reconnecting aside.

It had been a silly notion anyway, looking up her long-lost French relatives, and she wasn’t generally given to frivolous ideas.

So that was that.

End of.

Maeve spent an exhausting but utterly marvellous few hours traipsing around the vast, echoing galleries of the Louvre, wandering beneath gloriously decorative ceilings that gave her a crick in the neck just staring up at them. She stood motionless for some time, ignoring the buffeting crowds all around her, to admire the Winged Victory of Samothrace on the Daru staircase and the beautiful, smooth-marbled Venus de Milo, apparently dating from one-hundred-and-fifty-years BCE. She studied the imposing Coronation of Napoleon with polite interest and bit her lip at Psyche Revived By Cupid’s Kiss, which made her feel very far from sensible for a moment.

And, of course, she diligently waited her turn to stand for a few dizzying seconds in front of the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci.

That beguiling smile…

After all the hype and dramatic build-up, she’d half-expected to find the world-famous painting ordinary. Too much of a fuss made about nothing. It was only a bit of paint daubed on a canvas, after all.

Instead, she was bowled over by the painting’s subtle, mysterious beauty and its air of undisclosed secrets. She came away from viewing the Mona Lisa with a sense of having had her world enlarged, even though she couldn’t say exactly how or why. But she was glad she’d taken the time to queue up and view da Vinci’s masterpiece.

She took lunch in one of the swish Louvre bistros, despite needing to use her credit card for the bill once again. This was what she’d been saving for, surely? The chance to treat herself after years of careful parsimony, mending rather than replacing, eating and living simply. Maeve wasn’t sure she believed in astrology one hundred percent, but she was a Virgo, and her general star sign description did tally with the way she preferred to live. Clean, careful, simple, thrifty. She wasn’t so keen on the idea of Virgos as fussy, nit-picking perfectionists. Yet, with a grin, she had to accept it wouldn’t be a totally unfounded accusation…

Lingering over coffee, since she still had a good hour before the coach was due to leave, she wrote a few chatty postcards to colleagues at the school – though to their home addresses, as school was out for summer. Finally, to her best friend Sally, she wrote more candidly of her odd reaction to the Mona Lisa portrait, and ended with a smiley face icon, finishing, Wish you were here!

Though she was rather enjoying being on her own, in fact.

School was a madly busy environment, and although she lived alone now that her father had passed away, the building that housed her small North London apartment was often noisy, with slamming doors and echoing footsteps in the stairwell, and always a child somewhere either shouting, laughing or crying. Every other flat in the building seem to house a family with children, many of them quite young. It was nice to be surrounded by so much vibrant life. But sometimes she longed for peace and quiet, and dreamed of a little cottage somewhere in the country, with a walled garden and perhaps a stream running through it. Ridiculous, really, as she knew it would never happen. Not on her salary as a teacher!

Finishing her postcards, she stuck a French stamp onto each one, double-checked the addresses, and then hurried round to a post box near the Louvre. She had politely enquired from a passer-by where she could post her letters and postcards, and marked the place on her little map. The road was busy but the pavement was thronging with tourists. She found herself constantly sidestepping or bumping into people, and was glad to turn a corner into a side street where it was relatively quiet.

The late afternoon sun beat down on her shoulders as she swung her rucksack off her back, rummaged inside for the postcards before slipping them into the postbox in the wall.

The sound of muted sobbing made her turn in surprise. An elderly lady, possibly in her late seventies and very elegantly dressed, was seated on the kerb a few feet away, clutching her ankle. Tourists will walking around her, paying no attention.

Still zipping up her rucksack, Maeve hurried over. ‘Excusez-moi, Madame… Est-ce que je peux vous aider?’ she stammered in her rusty French, though her language skills had much improved even on this short trip to France, words coming back to her that she hadn’t even realised she knew.

As the woman lifted a tear-stained face towards her, frowning into the sunshine without a word, Maeve tried again in English. ‘Erm, have you fallen? Can I help you?’

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