Sorrow and Bliss(29)
He watched as I sipped it, then said that although it pained him to say, I looked terminally ill. ‘Anyhow –’ he leaned back and steepled his fingers ‘– what are we doing next? Do you have a plan?’
I began to tell him that I was living with my parents and working at an organic supermarket but he shook his head. ‘That’s simply what you’re doing. It isn’t a plan and I would say you’re very unlikely to strike upon one, languishing in darkest W8.’
I touched the side of my glass. It sent a ribbon of condensation down the stem. I did not know what to say.
Peregrine put his palms on the table. He said Paris, Martha. ‘Please go to Paris.’
‘Why?’
‘Because when suffering is unavoidable, the only thing one gets to choose is the backdrop. Crying one’s eyes out beside the Seine is a different thing to crying one’s eyes out while traipsing around Hammersmith.’
I laughed and Peregrine looked unhappy. ‘I am not being whimsical, Martha. Short another, beauty is a reason to live.’
I told him that it was a lovely idea but I didn’t think I had the energy or money to go abroad.
He said first of all Paris is hardly abroad. ‘And secondly, I have a little pied-à-terre, purchased many years ago for the girls. I’d imagined them Zelda Fitzgeralding their way around Montparnasse or at the very least Jean Rhysing the time away in a darkened room, but the Beautiful and the Damned preferred the suburbs of Woking and so it sits, furnished and vacant.’
He told me that while it wasn’t in disrepair, the décor could only be described as character-building. ‘Still, it is yours, Martha. A home, for however long it is needed.’
I said it was so kind of him and I would absolutely think about it.
‘That is precisely what you shouldn’t do.’ Peregrine looked at the time. ‘I must get back to the factory but I will have the key bicycled over this afternoon.’ It was, he said, decided. Separating at the corner of the park, Peregrine kissed me on both cheeks and said, ‘The Germans have a word for heartbreak, Martha. Liebeskummer. Isn’t it awful?’
*
At home, I Googled my bank and proceeded through the Forgot Password? process until I was looking at how much money I had. As soon as we got engaged, Jonathan had started making weekly transfers into my account, which I had saved only because each amount was so ludicrous, I couldn’t spend it before the next one came. Somehow, while he was on his work trip, he’d spirited it all out again and when I came back to Goldhawk Road, my assets were held in wedding rings and a wardrobe I divested to the Hospice Shop. At the organic supermarket, I earned an hourly rate equivalent to a wheatgrass smoothie, small, with no additions. But I bought nothing – for months only ham sandwiches and sports drinks for my walks with Nicholas.
The key arrived mid-afternoon. The address was on a monogrammed card and written above it, ‘A Bride, Cruelly Dismissed, Experiences Felicity, Going Husbandless, In Jeans … etc. etc. and ring me up as soon as you arrive.’ I had enough money, so I went.
13
I LIVED IN Paris for four years and worked the whole time at an English language bookshop near the Notre Dame, selling Lonely Planets and paperback Hemingways to tourists who only wanted to take photographs of themselves inside the shop.
My boss was an American who lived in its converted attic. He was trying to be a playwright. On my first day he showed me where everything was, his tour culminating at the shelves nearest the door. He said, ‘And all the reputable authors are here.’ I asked him where the disreputable authors were and he clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth and said, ‘We’ve got ourselves a live one’ to a doleful Danish girl who was serving out her last day. I slept with him for three and a half years and never loved him.
Before he stuck up a sign banning le camera à l’intérieur, and subsequently le iPhone and encore plus, le baton de selfie, I was captured in the background of a thousand photographs, sitting behind the counter reading new releases or looking at the slice of the river visible between buildings if the only new releases were crime or magical realism.
*
Peregrine was the first person who visited me in Paris and, apart from Ingrid, the person who visited me most, only ever for the day, arriving before noon and leaving late. We would meet at a restaurant, Peregrine preferring one that had just lost a Michelin star because he considered it an easy form of charity, bucking someone up simply by lunching and, he said, in Paris it was the only guarantee of attentive service. Whatever time of year it was, we walked to the Tuileries afterwards and from there along the river and up into the Marais, avoiding the Centre Pompidou because the architecture depressed him, and on to the Picasso Museum, staying until Peregrine said it was time to find somewhere louche to drink Dubonnet before dinner.
I measured out my time in Paris by Peregrine’s visits. Probably he knew because he would never leave without telling me when he planned to return. And he always came in September, on what he called the anniversary of my sacking – by Jonathan, not by the magazine.
I was happy whenever I was with him, even on those anniversaries, except for the year I was about to turn thirty. Entering the forecourt of the museum, Peregrine said that he had been finding my behaviour all day somewhat challenging. Thus, instead of going inside, we were going to walk all the way back and he would describe his life at precisely my age; since I would find it a very grim picture, he said, I might stop feeling so despondent about mine and walking with dreadful rounded shoulders.