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‘Right you are,’ he said, and wandered into the bar to order.
A handsome couple sat down at the next table. Father and daughter, Claire thought, not so much because of their respective ages – this was France after all – but because of their quiet manner, and something in the way the man held himself separate from the girl. They were speaking French, but she grasped that they were discussing train times.
To switch her brain from listening, Claire looked across to the opposite footpath and imagined James Joyce, with his stick and his hat and his patch, walking up the road for a drink, with bits ofUlyssesbobbing about in his head.
‘Would you take a photo of us, please?’ The man was holding his phone up.
‘Of course.’ Claire jumped up and obliged, stepping backwards into the road, doing her best to frame the café’s sign above their heads.
A cyclist rang his bell, and she leaped back to the footpath.
‘Merci,’ said the man, putting away his phone.
‘My pleasure.’ Claire smiled and took her seat, thinking how much it was exactly that: a pleasure, a cheering thing, to interact with people, to do something small for a stranger.
Ronan returned, followed closely by a waiter carrying a tray loaded with glasses and coffee cups.
‘I got both,’ said Ronan.
‘Good idea.’
She took a sip of coffee, put down her cup and lifted a glass. ‘Salut,’ she said drily, clinking her glass off the other on the table.
Ronan lifted it and looked her in the eye. ‘Salut.’
At a loss for anything further to say, they sat in silence.
The man and his daughter got up from their table. ‘Merci encore,’ said the man, tipping his imaginary hat to Claire.
She smiled and dipped her head in return.
Ronan gave her a questioning look. She pouted and shrugged, as though to imply she was inundated with advances from charming French men. Sitting back in her chair, she crossed one leg over the other and let him stew. It occurred to her that, all this time, she had felt like the one in the wrong, wrong for being distant with him, wrong for retreating into herself and wrong for withholding sex. Everything had been down to her: her body, her moods, her grief. It had been a weight on her to be the one who was supposed to decide how long their bereavement would be the central fact of their existence, to know when everything would go back to normal, to say when the grieving was complete, especially when she couldn’t see that things ever would feel normal or that the grieving ever could be fully done.
Always, he looked to her for answers. This time, she didn’t have them.
‘Do you still want to go to the bookshop this afternoon?’ he asked.
She sipped her drink. There was hardly much point in buying a book at this stage of the weekend. Then again, it would be a relief to go somewhere where she wouldn’t be expected to keep talking to Ronan.
‘Yeah, didn’t your man, what’s-his-name, say it was the best time?’
‘Dan. He did, yeah. I suppose it’s quiet on a Sunday.’
‘Quiet would be good.’
* * *
They walked past the Irish College and the Panthèon, arriving on the Quai de Montebello right in front of Shakespeare and Company. It seemed that the exact same crowd of people – or weirdly similar people – were still milling around the square, still in their cropped T-shirts, messy buns and ever-so-casually slung tote bags. The atmosphere, however, was subtly altered, subdued even. People were tired. Their mentions of jazz clubs were a tone lower, the pitch of excitement reduced to hoarse murmurs, and it seemed to Claire that they sipped their takeaway coffees with something closer to desperation. It took grit, Claire thought, to last through a long weekend in Paris.
Walking through the shop door, past the sign prohibiting photography, Claire felt something familiar in the air around her. The front tables were stacked with the same clean-cut paperback bestsellers, the same Sally Rooney, the same John Boyne that she’d seen at the airport in Cork, but, just like the library where she worked, the shop smelled of old books, not new. The air was weighted, dense with decades’ worth of dust shorn off the edges of flipping pages. The place smelled like home.
From the very centre of the main display table, she picked up a large book entitledShakespeare and Company, with a photo of the bookshop on the cover. It was a history, scrapbook-style, of the shop. Thumbing the pages, her heart caught on a quotation from Beckett.That’s just it, she thought.
Wrapping both arms around the book and holding it close, Claire drifted through the ground-floor rooms, looking for Ronan. She paused for a look at the cookbooks, turned on her heel at the entrance to the children’s section and climbed the wooden stairs. On the narrow landing, her way was blocked by a group of people huddled in a crooked doorway. There appeared to be a general reluctance to move forwards into the room they called Whitman’s library. Claire could hear a refined British voice, aged but lilting, floating over the gathered heads. The words ‘tea party’ and ‘everyone’s invited’ emerged, and were repeated, like Chinese whispers, but nobody moved. Claire had to choose between backing away or excusing herself a path through the crowd.
She hesitated. What exactly was it that was making everybody else stand stock still in the doorway? If she went in, and Ronan wasn’t there, she might not be able to get out again, but there was nowhere else he could be. Turning sideways, she tucked in her elbows and made her apologies.
‘Sorry there,excusez-moi, sorry, could I .?.?.?’
