Paris Is Always a Good Idea (22 page)

Twenty-two

It was always astounding how blindly and carelessly you could overlook the obvious, thought Rosalie, as she watched Robert Sherman blanching beside her. Although they had so frequently talked about the dedication, attempting to find someone to fit the mysterious initial, it had obviously never ever occurred to him that his mother's first name began with the letter
R
.

Robert was so perplexed that he was unable to speak for a moment. And then when he was finally about to say something, they heard the noise.

It sounded like a key turning in a lock. Seconds later the front door opened, and then swung shut with a soft click.

Heavy footsteps crossed the hall. A rustling noise. A closet was being opened. Clothes hangers rattled against each other.

They stood frozen on the spot beside the cabinet and looked at each other. The steps approached the library, and Rosalie felt her heart beginning to race. Who was it, there in the hall? For one mad moment she thought it was not impossible that it could be Max returning—and that he would catch them red-handed. Then she heard a sniff, and the muttering of a deep but clearly female voice. The steps passed the living-room door and went into the kitchen, where something was put down.

In a panic, she reached for Robert's hand.

“Come on!” she hissed. “Upstairs!”

They heard clattering from the kitchen and hastily grabbed the two manuscripts, crept out of the library, and went up the staircase that led upward from the hall. “This way!” She led Robert into the bedroom where the cardboard box of letters and photographs was still standing in the middle of the floor. They listened in silence to the noises that came up to them from downstairs.

Who would come into Max Marchais's house in the evening? wondered Rosalie. A neighbor? The gardener? As far as she knew, the housekeeper was the only one who had a key, and she was far away in Provence with her daughter.

“Let's wait a moment. Whoever it is, they're sure to go away soon,” she whispered to Robert. He nodded, clutching the two manuscripts tightly.

“I can't understand why I didn't work it out for myself,” he said softly. “The ‘R' stands for ‘Ruth.' Ruth Sherman. How could I be so dumb?”

“You just couldn't see the forest for the trees,” she whispered back. “These things happen. And anyway, I'm sure you didn't call your mother Ruth.”

He nodded and then put his finger to his lips. “Damn! She's coming upstairs.”

They listened carefully to the creaking of the wooden stairs as they were trodden by a person of some weight. Rosalie looked around. In the open bedroom there were no real places where they could conceal themselves, and they would no longer be able to reach the little storeroom next to the bathroom. “Under the bed!” she hissed, dragging a surprised Sherman to the floor.

By the time the bedroom door opened and Madame Bonnier—Rosalie had no difficulty in recognizing the housekeeper—came panting in, they had disappeared from view. Hidden under a big, old, wooden bed, whose dark and dusty depths offered them a kindly refuge. Holding their breath and pressed so tightly together that barely a single manuscript page could be slipped between them, they looked into each other's eyes like a couple of conspirators, each listening to the other's heartbeat, which they were sure could be heard in this seemingly endless moment of suspended motion, danger, and intimacy. They listened to the housekeeper's footsteps and saw her flat-heeled sandals and meaty calves moving up and down beside the bed, as she began to smooth out the sheets and blankets and shake out the scatter cushions and pile them up at the head of the bed, grumbling as she did so.

Rosalie looked directly into Robert Sherman's azure-blue eyes, which were unsettlingly close to her, as too was his mouth, surprised once more (and totally inappropriately, given their current situation) at the extraordinary color of this man's eyes, which had struck her the first time that Robert had appeared outside her window display. She swallowed, feeling a tingling as if a thousand ants were walking over her.

She would surely have been somewhat surprised if she had known that the man from New York, who was pressed against her in complete silence in the deepest part of their hidey-hole, was at that very moment thinking something similar—that is, that he'd never looked into such midnight-blue eyes as Rosalie Laurent's.

And so it was no surprise that neither of them was able to work out what the humming, vibrating sound was that suddenly burst out between them.

Madame Bonnier had heard it, too, because her sandals, which had moved away from the bed, stopped immediately, offering Rosalie an unencumbered view of the rosy backs of the housekeeper's knees.

Madame Bonnier listened intently; even the backs of her knees seemed to be listening as the constant humming tone pierced the silence like the buzzing of a particularly fat fly.

Rosalie breathed in inaudibly, staring reproachfully at Robert. Her lips soundlessly formed the word “idiot!” as he dumbly begged forgiveness with a guilty expression, because it was his cell phone: he had of course switched it to silent mode, but stupidly had not switched it off entirely. She realized that it was impossible for him to get it out of his pocket without making yet more unnecessary noise.

Fortunately it was beyond the bounds of Marie-Hélène Bonnier's imagination to think that there might be people of the kind who would hide themselves under Monsieur Marchais's wonderful Grange bed.

She stamped over to the reading lamp on the bedside table, examined it carefully, jiggled it about, and then switched it on and off a couple of times.

“Damn electricity! A good thing I came this evening to make sure everything was all right,” she muttered as the buzzing tone finally came to a stop. “Lights on all over the house, cardboard boxes on the floor, the whole place is going to the dogs.” She shook her head disapprovingly and switched the lamp off. “That gardener could at least have switched off the lights!”

She bent over to pick up the box of photos and letters, and for one terrible moment Rosalie was absolutely certain that the housekeeper would discover their hiding place under the bed.

She held her breath.

But Madame Bonnier had better things to do. She had to restore order. The housekeeper got a stepladder from the storeroom, took the box, and, with a groan, put it back where it belonged. On top of the wardrobe.

When she disappeared into the bathroom to dust the washbasin with scouring powder, they left their hiding place as if at a secret word of command and ran down the stairs in their stocking feet, their shoes in their hands.

“Wait a moment—my bag is still in the library,” whispered Robert softly as Rosalie headed for the front door.

“
Bon
. Let's escape through the garden.” They crept into the library past the wall of books and the two sofas, pushed the heavy glass door aside, and then closed it behind them from the outside.

As they ran through the garden seconds later like Bonnie and Clyde after a successful bank job and disappeared between the hydrangea bushes, Rosalie felt an overwhelming urge to laugh.

“‘Damn electricity!'” she burst out hilariously, fighting for breath as she leaned with her hand on the trunk of a cherry tree that overhung the old garden wall. Robert fell forward, his hands on his thighs, as he joined in her suppressed laughter.

And then—Rosalie could not afterward have said exactly how it happened—he kissed her.

That evening she wrote in her blue notebook:

The worst moment of the day:

Robert's damn cell phone begins to buzz as Madame Bonnier is standing beside the bed we are hiding under. I nearly wet myself with agitation. It doesn't bear thinking what would have happened if she'd found us!

The nicest moment of the day:

An evening kiss under a cherry tree that left us both a bit disconcerted.

“Sorry, I just couldn't help it,” says Robert. And I say, as my heart performs a backward somersault, “That's okay, it was probably the result of all that tension.” And laugh as if the kiss had been nothing.

During the ride home we continue to talk about our discovery, trying to puzzle out what it could mean. I talk and talk to cover up the beating of my heart. Then Robert makes a stupid remark, and we fall silent. The silence is embarrassing, almost unpleasant. A hasty parting outside the hotel. No further kiss. I'm relieved. And strangely also a bit disappointed.

René was still awake when I got home. He didn't notice anything—well, nothing had happened. A little slipup.
C'est tout!

 

Twenty-three

Something had happened.

And by that Robert Sherman did not mean the series of surprising events that had happened to him since, a good week before, he had made a remarkable discovery in the window of a store in the rue du Dragon. A discovery that had since proved to be somewhat confusing, had thrown him off balance, and had thrust the actual reason for his trip (clarity about his professional and private life) into the background.

He meant something else: he could not get that hasty, unexpected, completely irrational kiss in an enchanted garden in Le Vésinet out of his head.

As he walked along the rue de l'Université early the next morning, heading for the Musée d'Orsay, where he wanted to see the Impressionists, images from the previous evening rolled up like the waves in a painting by Sorolla. He kept seeing Rosalie in her slim-waisted blue summer dress in front of him as she stood, laughing and breathless, her cheeks warm and rosy, under the cherry tree whose branches spread out over her like a roof. The air was full of the scent of lavender and twilight had fallen on the garden where the shapes of the bushes were becoming indistinct as the sky grew darker. Her hair had fallen loose, and her laugh, too, had something of a glorious release about it and for one intoxicating moment that knew neither day nor hour the woman with the lovely smile was for Robert the most desirable creature on earth.

She had been too surprised to defend herself. He had caught her unawares and she had abandoned herself to that impetuous kiss which fired a thousand particles of light through his body and tasted as sweet as a wild strawberry.

He instinctively ran his tongue over his lips and rubbed them briefly together as if that could bring back the taste of the kiss, which now seemed totally unreal to him, almost as if he had dreamt it. But he hadn't been dreaming. It had happened, and then suddenly everything had gone wrong.

Robert stuck his hands deep in his pockets and stamped along the narrow street with furrowed brow.

It must have been unpleasant for her rather than the reverse—he shouldn't pretend otherwise. After the moment had flown, he had sensed her pulling away from him in embarrassment. “It must have been the tension,” she'd said, and then laughed as if nothing had happened.

His kiss had obviously not been exactly overwhelming, and she had obviously been kind enough to gloss over the embarrassing situation so that he wouldn't feel like an idiot.

He sighed deeply. On the other hand, when they'd been lying there together so silent and motionless under that bed, as if they were in a cocoon—hadn't there been something in her eyes? Hadn't he read a sudden attraction in her unwavering gaze? Hadn't there unexpectedly been a closeness that made them completely oblivious to the hard parquet floor and the fear of being discovered?

Had he really just imagined all that? Was it due to that special moment? He had no idea anymore.

He just knew that he could have continued to lie under that bed forever. But then his cell phone had made its presence felt, and its low buzzing had rung in his ears like the trumpets at Jericho. They were within a hair's breadth of being found out.

He grinned as he thought of the heavy footsteps of the housekeeper, and how she'd kept on shaking the bedside light suspiciously.

The drive back to Paris had been peculiar. They'd hardly taken their seats in the little car when Rosalie began pouring out words like a waterfall, literally bombarding him with questions (“And you're sure that your mother never mentioned the name Max Marchais? Perhaps he visited your mother in Mount Kisco sometime? But they must have known each other, since he obviously dedicated the story to her!”), had continued to address him formally as
vous
in spite of the kiss, and had gone on inventing new scenarios which ranged from Max Marchais as his mother's long-lost brother to Max Marchais as her secret lover.

Robert had begun to feel uncomfortable and had become quieter and quieter. All these discoveries and the questions they threw up were just too much for him. It would have been simpler to sue an ageing, somewhat arrogant French writer for plagiarism. But then Rosalie had found the manuscript in Marchais's house and immediately everything became far less simple. It had then become clear—or at least seemed to be clear—that his mother had not made up the story of the blue tiger for Robert, but rather that it had been dedicated to her—as seemed very probable—by (of all people) a Frenchman, whom she had never mentioned (at least, not to him). All this made him uneasy, but he hadn't begun to think deeply about it or, if he were honest, hadn't wanted to start thinking about it.

After all, it was a matter of
his
mother and
his
feelings, and whatever the background to this strange story was, it would affect him far more strongly than it would affect the blithely chattering woman behind the wheel, whom he found both annoying and baffling.

Eventually it got too far-fetched for him.

“Your speculation is all very fine, Rosalie, but it's not taking us a single step forward. It's about time we finally spoke to Max Marchais himself,” he had interrupted her harshly. “He's not going to drop dead simply because we ask him a few questions.”