AllFreeNovel
Share Us
PS. That blue dress went to Goodwill thirty years ago.
Christ, she hadn’t held back.With love?What was that, some watered down nicety?Jesus.He hated that. And using his name over and over, just like the doctors did when they imparted bad news.The thing is, Harry, it’s all over bar the wailing.
He turned the phone face down on the table. Dammit. Harry sat up straighter and shifted his weight to the back of his chair. He tossed his head back with an audibleharrumph, which he then attempted to disguise as clearing his throat. The waiter, who just at that moment arrived with his food, gave him a sharp look, and Harry readjusted his expression to one of polite patience.
‘Merci beaucoup,’ he said, and faced his plate.
A hefty fillet steak sat proudly at the centre of the dish, close to floating in a lake of shiny gravy. The side dish of pommes Pont-Neuf turned out to be chunky fries stacked high in the style of Lincoln logs. This is either going to cure me or kill me, he thought, picking a fry from the pile with his fingers and dipping it in the flood of peppery bourbon sauce. He licked salt from his fingertips, picked up his knife and fork and launched into the steak.
She figured she’d wasted her youth on him, did she? That wasn’t how he thought about it. They’d had good times, hadn’t they? Lots of good times. Like she said, they had been happy – the kind of happy that hardly ever happens in Hollywood. When he thought back to their first dates, their wedding night, the day Caroline took her first steps on the set ofHot Sauce, the day they moved into their home – Nancy’s face had been radiant. She’d been happy, and her happiness made him happy. They’d been good for each other. They could hardly have been happier. How could all that have been a waste?
Harry looked down at his plate and realised he’d eaten the entire steak.
‘Might as well be hanged for a buffalo,’ he muttered, thinking how he was going to suffer for this later but still using a final hunk of potato to mop up every remnant of whiskey sauce.
A waiter came and took his dessert order, then poured the last of the carafe of red wine into his glass. Harry took a bolstering sip. It was good, this wine. Like some sort of tonic, it made him feel stronger.
They’d been the poster couple. He’d been the good guy, the family man. With hindsight, Harry could see that people had thought more of him then, had even respected him for his simple, ordered life. Why hadn’t he seen that? Why hadn’t all that been enough?
The waiter returned with his dessert. A row of profiteroles stood to attention along the length of a rectangular plate, each one dripping with chocolate sauce.
He recalled the party where he’d met Rita, all glossy and spangled. He hadn’t planned it. He hadn’t gone out looking for more, but when it was offered to him, on a plate as it were, he didn’t even think about resistance. He just took what was right there in front of him. What man wouldn’t have done the same?
He licked chocolate from his lower lip and eyed up the second profiterole in the line of five. He was full, but not satisfied. He cut through the second ball with his spoon, ate half, then pushed the plate away.
‘Enough,’ he said out loud, and waved for the check.
Musée D’Orsay
The simplest subjects are the immortal ones.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Claire and Ronan were manoeuvring through the slew of tourists heading for the Renoir collection, but they’d stalled at a doorway where a stern museum employee was counting bodies with a clicker. They would have to wait for the large group ahead of them to clear the room.
‘Lunch was a real treat,’ Claire said, with a flirty smile. ‘That was a very romantic thought, Mr MacNamara.’
Ronan nudged his shoulder against hers. ‘As you well know, Mrs MacNamara, you married a very romantic man.’
All his banter at the graveyard about getting to lunch hadn’t been just Ronan’s stomach talking. He’d had a surprise up his sleeve: the Marchés des Enfants Rouges had been thronged when they got there, tourists and locals mingling in a feeding frenzy at what was essentially the chic Parisian version of a farmers’ market. Claire, instantly in danger of sensory overload, had stalled in the entranceway, but Ronan had wrapped his arm around her shoulder and steered her through the swarming crowd to a stall at the back of the square. A wooden board nailed to the end of the van advertisedCuisine Marocaine Authentique.
‘You’re a genius,’ she said.
He’d managed to remind her that the joy of their honeymoon hadn’t been confined to their queen-size bed. Eyes wide with glee, she delivered a quick kiss just below his ear, before turning to deliberate between a lamb tagine and pastilla aux pigeons.
* * *
They’d lingered too long over lunch and had needed to rush through the Métro system to get to the museum in time for their booked slot, though all the racing seemed pointless now that they were still standing in an impatient queue.
‘You have to tell me how you found out about that Moroccan stall,’ Claire said.
Ronan, thus far, has been coy about his source. ‘It was that waitress at the restaurant last night. She came over, all chatty, when you went downstairs, asking what plans we had for our visit, that sort of thing. And she said the Marché was a great place for lunch. It was a bit odd, actually – the way she said it. She said that if we went there, we’d find what we needed.’
‘Huh,’ said Claire. ‘She seemed very intense – maybe a bitwoo-woo, you know?’
Ronan raised an eyebrow. ‘Woo-woo?’
‘You know, witchy.’
