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‘What beans?’ She couldn’t help laughing. ‘Is it not entirely possible that I was cool enough to have discovered The Doors all by myself?’
He held the back of his fingers against her cheek. ‘Oh, wife of mine, that blush tells another story.’
She put her head down on his shoulder, avoiding eye contact. She opened her mouth to speak, to tell him about her teenage infatuation with Fergal O’Connor, but stopped. It was such a small thing, hardly a story at all, and too hard to explain why it mattered.
‘There are no beans,’ she said with finality.
The train rocked along the track, and she let her body lean further into his.
Mireille Delassus Checks In
Le Grand Hôtel was neither large nor grand, but it was conveniently located in the 11tharrondissement. It was, in fact, a mere sliver of a building pressed tightly on either side by a bar and a motorbike salesroom. The facade was sooty and the paint on the door was faded and flaking. The foyer was decorated with a style of red-flocked wallpaper Mireille remembered, without fondness, from the eighties, and a brown nylon carpet that was shamelessly bald in patches. The elevator was adorned with a handwritten sign declaring it out of service. The reception desk was, unsurprisingly, unattended.
Mireille tapped lightly on the service bell and waited.
She was disappointed. Faced with the task of booking a hotel in Paris, she had taken the easiest option. She had opened her address book to D – D for Delassus – to the page where she had long ago jotted down, in case of emergency, the name and telephone number of the hotel where Rémy habitually stayed on his monthly business trips. She had never once used the number; the long-feared emergency had not arisen. Furthermore, there was an unspoken understanding between them that Rémy’s time in Paris was time outside their marriage. So many things unspoken, she thought, and yet they had muddled through well enough.
She tapped the bell again, more forcefully this time.
The relief she had felt, the sense of rightness, at her discovery that Rémy’s hotel was still operational, was tainted now by a hint of guilt. Was this it? Was this the height of his escapism? Who could he have been meeting to have made this place worthwhile?
Mireille was sorry to have uncovered the shabbiness of his hideaway and ashamed to have followed him here, even now.
Impatiently, she gave the bell a third rap. She was beginning to wonder whether she should just take her bag and head directly to the cemetery, when a man appeared from an apartment at the back of the building. The unmistakable rise and fall of football commentary emanating from the doorway betrayed the cause of his delay.
‘Bonjour, madame,’ he said brightly. No apology, she noted.
‘Bonjour, monsieur.’ She gave her name and waited while he tapped the keys of a computer.
The man gave her a curious look. Perhaps it was the big yellow hat on her head, she thought, though surely, in an establishment such as this, he had seen stranger things.
‘Vous êtes seule, madame?’ Was she alone?
‘Oui,’ she said, feeling an anxious constriction of her chest. ‘Je suis seule.’
Mireille supplied the man with her identity card, and he gave her a key attached to a square of thick brown plastic engraved with the number 407. Mireille sighed. She had specifically asked for a room on the first floor. It was all well and good taking risks with her hip when she was at home, but not in Paris, not with so much at stake.
Mireille turned around to the reception desk to see if anything could be done, but the man had already disappeared. The door of his apartment was firmly closed. She contemplated ringing the bell but decided against it. She had no time to waste.
With a firm grip on Rémy’s bag, Mireille faced the stairs.
The Top Floor Flat, Above the Pizzeria
Olena was curled in a ball under the duvet, still sound asleep.
Yeva sat on the edge of the bed, letting her breathing settle. She felt rattled by both interactions at the train station. Her cloak of invisibility, like the rest of her clothes, seemed to have worn thin. The thing she liked about the old lady was that she had hardly looked at Yeva. She hadn’t been trying to assess her, like the nosy do-gooders at the Halte. She had treated Yeva like a normal person. Funny how she’d been there, at just the right moment, with her daft hat.
Yeva checked her phone. No messages.
It was only 10am. She’d give Olena a half hour longer in oblivion; then they could have the leftover cake for breakfast, wash, maybe go sit in the park for a while before she did what she was going to have to do.
She squeezed her left wrist, where her father’s watch should have been. She stretched her skin in one direction and then the other. She’d thought of the watch as a last resort, but the truth, she knew, was that she never could have brought herself to sell it.
* * *
They’d said their goodbyes, and she’d thought her father had already left. The engine was running, the carriage doors closed, the train and everybody on it gearing up to leave Mariupol. Daryna Kravet, having managed to find a seat for her elderly mother, was attempting to make a nest for her two small children amid the heaps of suitcases and bags. Yeva and Olena were standing in the space next to the door. Olena was humming a nursery rhyme, trying to soothe a ginger cat mewling at the gate of a pink pet carrier.
Then, all of a sudden, there was theirtato, their dad, rapping on the glass. Hurriedly, Yeva pushed down the window, imagining a reprieve. He’d changed his mind.
