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He put his hand on top of hers, and she looked down at their two hands lying there in her lap. Once again, like always, the decision was hers to make. She was finding it difficult to fill her lungs, and her head was getting heavy. She needed to be on her own.
She pulled her hand out from under his. ‘Can you leave me for a bit?’
He looked around the dingy bar.
‘I’m not leaving you here.’
She wanted to shout, to scream at him to go away. Instead, she wound her scarf around her neck, gathered up her bag and tossed her head to indicate that he needed to let her out from their vinyl booth. Like a gentleman, he stood up, making her feel all the more ungainly as she shuffled out from behind the table. Inwardly, she sighed at the pity of it all.
‘Tell you what.’ She adopted her most reasonable tone. ‘I’ll go for a walk around the market. I’ll meet you back here in a couple of hours.’
‘Make it one hour. Come back here in an hour.’ He spoke so quietly she could hardly hear him.
‘I think I’ll need the two.’
Notions
Edith West stood rummaging through a wooden crate on an unsteady trestle table at one of the myriad stalls of the Jules Vallès section of themarché aux puces. She’d been told to bypass this, the tatty bit, and head straight for the classier stalls of Vernaison or Biron. That was where she could expect to pick up an authentic Louis XIV chair that would be simplycharmantein her newBelle Maisonoffice. She was tired, however, and not much in the mood for making choices. An hour or two of browsing through dusty boxes seemed by far the more soothing option.
The stall was devoted to dressmaking supplies, fabrics and scraps salvaged from recycled garments. The wooden crate was filled to the brim with vintage trims. Wound around time-softened paper cards were narrow satin ribbons in elegant hues of dove grey and duck-egg blue. More cards held rows of tiny mother-of-pearl buttons. A wooden spool held an inch-wide trim of teal and gold jacquard. Edith held the spool between her thumb and middle finger, then let it rest in her palm. How right it felt, she thought. It must be as old as she was, and all that time, fifty-seven years or more, while she was growing up in America, this spool of ribbon had been a part of life here, in France.
While she was pondering whether it would be right or wrong to take it now and bring it home to New York, Edith’s eye was caught by a young woman standing very still at the opposite side of the table. Held across the splayed-open fingers of the woman’s hand was a small baby’s bonnet. It was made of plain white cotton, with a half-inch trim of delicate lace. Its ties were crossed over the woman’s wrist, as though she had made an attempt to tie a bow. The woman was unnaturally pale, and tears were streaming down her face.
Edith reached over the rows of adornments and put her hand over the woman’s wrist. ‘Are you alright dear?’
The fair-haired woman caught her breath and looked straight into Edith’s eyes. ‘Sorry. Oh yes. Thanks. I’m alright.’
‘Sure?’
Edith didn’t know why she held the woman’s gaze. She could have turned her attention to the piles of monogrammed linen on the next table, but she didn’t. Maybe some part of her felt she owed something, some return of karma, to the universe. Or maybe she saw a pain that she recognised. Whatever it was, she stayed the course until the social barrier fell.
‘My baby died,’ said the woman. Her voice was hoarse, the words barely audible.
Edith, wordlessly, took her hand and squeezed it. There wasn’t much you could say to such a statement that would have any real meaning or serve any real purpose. For ten seconds or more, these two women, strangers, held on to each other’s hands across a rickety table spread with vintage notions.
‘I met my birth mother yesterday,’ said Edith, ‘for the first time.’
The woman raised a wobbly smile. ‘Wow,’ she said, ‘that must have been a head-wrecker.’
Edith laughed out loud. ‘You’ve got that right, honey. I hope I didn’t startle you. It’s just .?.?. you seemed .?.?.’ Heartbroken: that was the word that came to Edith’s mind, but she thought better of using it.
‘Sorry. Oh God, the state of me,’ said the woman.
Edith pulled a packet of Kleenex from the front pocket of her purse and handed it across the table. The woman took one and moved to hand the packet back.
‘Keep it,’ said Edith. ‘I’ve got another pack.’
‘You came prepared.’
‘I suppose I did. Would you believe, we had a lovely day and hardly cried at all.’
‘Is your mother French?’
‘She is, yes. She speaks a little English.’
‘And you’re American.’
‘Yes. I like to think I’m also a little bit French.’
