‘Can I help?’ came a voice, me on my haunches beside a flat front tyre.
‘Do you know how to fix a puncture?’ I asked,having never met anyone in publishing with a practical bone in their body.
‘Sure,’ he said, gallantly taking off his jacket and rolling up his sleeves. With surprise, I noticed the flex of his forearms.
Together we set about the repair, working effortlessly together.
‘Can I take you somewhere?’ I asked when the job was complete.
‘Maybe back to my hotel?’ he asked, and I agreed.
We drove the few miles saying very little other than how the evening had gone, with him offering the odd direction. And yet, despite our lack of conversation, I felt as if I knew him instantly inside and out. His peaceful energy seemed to radiate into me, slowly breathing me back to life.
My stomach tightened as he got out of the car, wondering how to ask for his number, if I could see him again, but I needn’t have worried. As I was about to say goodnight, resigned to not seeing him again, he leant into the car, his jacket flung over his shoulder, and said, ‘How can I reach you?’
‘At Henderson Books, Edinburgh,’ I told him, and he repeated it twice, me wanting to say he’d already reached me. I wanted to ask him to come home, allow the peace I hadn’t felt since my mother died to seep into me and the house for ever.
‘I’ll be seeing you then,’ he smiled, patting the sill, and I drove off, watching him in my rear-view mirror. He stood watching me too, until the car was out of sight.
Returning to the gallery space of the Pompidou, the painting in front of me, I see now in the bride and groom, not the fantasy or dream of marriage I saw with Alistair, but the profound beauty and ache of it, the highs and the lows, the sacrifice and devotion it inevitably commands.
‘Did you see what you wanted to see?’ asks Ginny, when I find her at a café on the edge of the piazza.
‘I did,’ I answer, and I tell her about the gallery pass that dropped fromNotre-Dame, and how I’ve an inkling, alongside the postcard, it might become part of the hook. ‘How about you?’
‘I found it all rather overwhelming, if I’m honest. I couldn’t take any of it in, hence the café and coffee.’
‘Would a stroll to Victor Hugo’s house be more in order?’ I ask, noticing that her eyes look heavy and her brow tight, and that perhaps a literary connection might put her at ease.
‘I think so,’ she says, finishing her drink.
We head east, walking quietly along a narrow, busy street full of clothing boutiques and fine patisseries, until it meets the open aspect of the Place des Vosges. We pause for a moment to take in the magnitude of the place, a perfect square surrounded by seventeenth-century red-brick and limestone buildings with curved arcades, making it look like an elaborately iced wedding cake.
‘I can hear myself again,’ Ginny says as we cut diagonally across the square, letting down her auburn hair, which she’d had pulled tight in a ponytail.
‘Space feels like a rarity these days, wherever one is,’ I say, admiring the symmetry of the square with its grass and gravel, fountains and immaculate topiary.
‘Tell me about it,’ she replies. ‘Do you remember when there was such a thing as balance in one’s life?’
I laugh. ‘I’m not sure I do!’
‘I used to sleep eight hours a night, find time to cook, go months at a time without a headache. I have distant memories of having weekends to myself.’
‘And now?’
‘Now I’m lucky to get five hours’ sleep, I survive on tea and left-over sandwiches from meetings, and seem to have a permanent ache somewhere in my body.’
‘It sounds as if you need to take some time off,’ I say, thinking of Robin and how if he sleeps five hours a night it’s been a good one.
‘Gone are the days where I thought I might be able to take some time off to travel for a year.’
‘You couldn’t work from the road?’ I ask, Robin and I having dreamt of doing this before the realities of life took over.
‘If I do, I imagine my job wouldn’t be there when I returned. There’s always someone younger and more energetic champing at the bit to rise up the ranks.’
Arriving at Maison Victor Hugo, I think of Robin and of how soundly he used to sleep in our early years together, when the bookshop was new and Carly, our ‘love child’, was young. I think of how vital he was, loving his new life in Edinburgh, having given up his successful job in publishing to turn Mum and Dad’s gallery into a neighbourhood bookshop and supportme as a writer. In those days he was healthy and fit and loved the routine of family and business life, and being part of a small slice of Edinburgh’s literary history.
What a contrast to now, I think, as we buy our tickets. Now he barely sleeps, has little interest in the business, himself or others, and is often angry and withdrawn, eating to allay his fears.
