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‘Oui, madame?’ It was the same concierge, still on duty.
‘You did say “round the clock”, didn’t you?’ I whispered.
‘Oui, madame.’
‘Could you get me something then?’
‘Of course, madame. At the George V no request is too big, too small, or too unusual.’
‘In that case, can you get me a copy of Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. In English, please,’ I added.
‘And you would like this when, madame?’
‘Now.’
‘Eh, bien sur …we do have a small bibliothèque. I will ‘ave a look.’
‘Thank you.’
Five minutes later there was a knock on the door and a bellboy appeared, clutching a leather-bound copy of the book. I gave him twenty francs. Then I sat down in the sitting room and turned the thin pages until I found what I was looking for.
[Miss Havisham] was dressed in rich materials – satins, and lace, and silks – all of white. Her shoes were white. And she had a long white veil dependent from her hair, and she had bridal flowers in her hair, but her hair was white …But I saw that everything within my view which ought to be white, had been white long ago, and had lost its lustre, and was faded and yellow. I saw that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her sunken eyes. I saw that the dress had been put upon the rounded figure of a young woman, and that the figure upon which it now hung loose, had shrunk to skin and bone …
‘How are you feeling, Minty?’ I heard Helen say.
‘How do I feel? Well, just a bit pissed off.’ My new, ironic levity surprised me. ‘I’m going to design a new range of bridal wear,’ I added.
‘Really?’
‘Yes. I’m going to call it “Anti-Nuptia”.’
‘Oh, Minty.’
I looked round the dining room and felt sick. It was full of infatuated couples. Just what you need when you’ve been abandoned by your husband-to-be. They all looked sated with sex as they locked eyeballs, and tenderly rubbed ankles under the tables.
‘Why don’t you eat something?’ Helen said.
‘I can’t.’
‘Go on, try,’ she said, pushing a basket of croissants towards me.
‘Impossible,’ I said. And it was. I’ve never dieted. I’ve never really had to. But now it was as though someone had turned off the tap in my brain marked ‘Eat’. The petit pains might as well have been made of plastic for all the interest they aroused in me. All I could manage was a few sips of sugary tea.
‘What shall we do today?’ I said.
‘I don’t know,’ said Helen. ‘I haven’t been to Paris since I was twelve.’
‘I know it pretty well,’ I said. ‘In fact, I’ve been here eleven times.’
‘Minty,’ said Helen slowly, while she delicately chomped on a pain au chocolat. ‘Why did you choose Paris for your honeymoon when you’d already been here so often?’
‘I didn’t choose it,’ I replied. ‘Dominic did. I would have preferred Venice,’ I went on with a shrug, ‘but Dom said the train journey would take too long, and so Paris it was.’
‘I see,’ she said, archly. ‘That was nice of you.’
‘And of course Paris is a lovely city.’
‘Minty …’ said Helen, carefully. She was fiddling with her teaspoon.
‘Yes?’ Why on earth was she looking at me like that?
‘Minty,’ she began again, ‘I hope you don’t mind my saying this, but you often seemed to do what Dominic wanted.’
I thought about this for a few seconds.
‘Yes,’ I conceded. ‘I suppose I did.’
‘Why?’
‘Why?’ Why? God, why did she have to ask me that? ‘Because I loved him,’ I replied, ‘that’s why. And because …’ I felt my throat constrict ‘ …I just wanted him to be happy.’
She nodded. ‘Well, what shall we do today?’ she said, briskly changing the subject.
‘We can do whatever you like,’ I said, bleakly. ‘We’ll be tourists.’
And we were. That first morning we walked along the Seine then crossed the Jardin des Tuileries into the Rue de Rivoli. People strolled under the colonnaded passageways or sat outside, smoking in the warm sunlight. We crossed the Place du Carrousel and walked towards the Louvre. Helen gasped when she saw the glass pyramid, its triangular panes glinting and flashing in the midday sun.
‘It’s incredible!’ she said. ‘It’s like a gigantic diamond.’
‘Yes,’ I replied flatly. I fiddled with my engagement ring – a solitaire – which I still wore, on my right hand.
‘Let’s find the Mona Lisa,’ said Helen as we made our way inside. We walked up the wide balustraded stairway on to the first floor of the Denon Wing. We paused before paintings by Botticelli, Bellini and Caravaggio, and altarpieces by Giotto and Cimabue. In one gallery was a painting by Veronese, so vast it filled one wall.
‘It’s the Wedding at Cana,’ said Helen, looking at the guide. ‘That was Christ’s first miracle, wasn’t it, when the wine ran out?’
I found myself wishing He could have performed a similar stunt for me when my husband-to-be ran out. We passed through a long, window-lined corridor, which glowed with rich paintings. Mantegna’s martyred St Sebastian, pierced with sharp arrows, couldn’t have been in more pain than I. My shards were psychological, but no less sharp for that.
We followed the signs and found the Mona Lisa behind bulletproof glass in Room 6. A bank of people stood in front of her, discussing her elusive smile.
‘– Oh, she’s so cute!’
‘– Che bella ragazza.’
‘– Sie ist so schone.’
‘– That’s real art, Art.’
‘– Elle est si mystérieuse, si triste.’
‘– her child had just died, you know.’
‘God, how awful,’ said Helen. Then she read from the entry in the guide:
“‘When Leonardo began this portrait, the young woman was in mourning for her baby daughter; this is why she wears a black veil over her head. To lift her spirits, Leonardo brought musicians and clowns into his studio. Their antics brought a smile to her lips, a smile of indefinable sadness and great gentleness which made the portrait famous.” So she was feeling terrible,’ Helen added. ‘And yet she managed to smile.’
That’s what I’ll do, I thought. I’ll erect my own bulletproof glass, and shield myself behind that. And I’ll wear a smile, so that no one will detect my pain. I decided to practise. I straightened my shoulders and raised my drooping head. I opened my eyes wider, and turned up the corners of my mouth. And it began to work, because as I looked up I caught the eye of a young man and, to my surprise, he smiled back. It reminded me of the lovely smile that Charlie had given me in church. And I suddenly remembered wishing that it had been Dominic who’d smiled. And now I knew why he hadn’t.
‘You’re well out of it,’ said Helen again, as we wandered downstairs. I was too weary to reply. In any case, I didn’t have the energy for anger – I was still anaesthetised by shock.
‘I mean, why go that far – that far – and then say “no”?’
‘He’s in the risk-business,’ I said bleakly. ‘He was unhappy with the small print so he decided not to close the deal. He exercised the ultimate get-out clause.’
‘Yes, but why was he unhappy?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘I don’t know.’
‘What a cad,’ said Helen. ‘You should sue him for breach of promise.’
‘It doesn’t exist in British law.’
‘Well, make him pay for the wedding, then.’
‘No – too undignified.’
‘If it were me, I’d be instructing solicitors,’ she said. ‘And fancy letting himself down like that in front of all his clients. I hope they all leave him,’ she exclaimed.
‘They won’t,’ I said. ‘And even if they did, he’d soon pick up new ones. He’s very persuasive.’ Dominic’s powers of persuasion were indeed legendary. He had once famously sold a Pet Protect policy to a woman who had no animals. Oh yes, Dominic would survive all right. The question was, would I?
The next two days passed in a blur as we wandered slowly around the city. We visited the Musée d’Orsay, the Bois de Boulogne and the cemetery at Père Lachaise. And I’d thought Père Lachaise would be too sad, but it wasn’t, it was a surprisingly happy place, like a friendly little citadel of the celebrated dead. We found Colette’s grave, and Balzac’s and Chopin’s and Oscar Wilde’s. And Jim Morrison’s, of course, which was strewn with red roses, candles and cigarette butts, and empty whisky bottles.
The next day, our last, we walked to the Eiffel Tower. We queued for an hour at the Pillier Ouest, while hawkers tried to sell us souvenirs. ‘To help you remember your stay in Paris,’ one of them pleaded.
‘I could never forget it,’ I said. We bought our tickets then went clanking skywards in the lift. Up and up it went, the vast wheels turning and grinding like the wheels of a Victorian mine-shaft. We passed the first landing stage, then the second, our ears popping as we floated up through the elaborate iron fretwork to the top. We were nearly a thousand feet above ground as we stepped out on to the viewing platform, the wind snatching spitefully at our hair and clothes. Up here, a slightly hysterical atmosphere prevailed. People grinned and gasped as they took in the view. Their eyes popped in disbelief. A young couple laughed and hugged each other as they peered out through the suicide-inhibiting mesh. Below us, to the left, was a football pitch which looked as though it had been cut from green felt. The players scurried across it like ants, and we could hear the whistles and shouts of the fans. In front of us was the Palais de Chaillot, and the broad brown band of the Seine. Along its banks, barges rocked gently on their moorings, and the reflected ripples of the river dappled the windows nearby. Away to our right was Montmartre, and the slender white domes of Sacré-Coeur and, ahead of us, further off, the brutalist towers of La Defense. The whole city lay spread beneath our feet, topped by a pale miasma of carbon monoxide. We could hear nothing but the whistling wind, and the dull roar of a million cars.
‘Look how far we can see!’ Helen exclaimed. ‘It must be fifty miles or more!’
Indeed, the distance to the horizon made me feel strangely elated, intoxicated almost, and a poem by Emily Dickinson sprang into my mind: ‘As if the Sea should part/And show a further Sea/And that – a further …’ And I thought, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll go right to the horizon, to the circumference, far, far away from what happened to me in church. I refuse to let Dominic’s desertion become the defining event of my life. I refuse to let one man destroy my dignity and sense of self. I resolved in that instant to be the exact opposite of that sad old relic, Miss Havisham. She entombed herself in her house, and her silk wedding dress became her shroud. But my bridal gown would be a cocoon, from which I would emerge, reborn. I will recover from this, I vowed, as the wind whipped my face and made my eyes sting with tears. I’ll start again. I shall be reborn. Made new. New Mint. I shall turn my catastrophe into a catalyst for change. I shall …I shall …
All at once I felt dizzy. It might have been the height, or the strange perspective, or maybe it was lack of food. I clutched the rail, and shut my eyes. Then the squeak and shriek of the pulley announced the return of the lift. The doors drew back with a throaty click, and a new batch of tourists was disgorged. Helen and I stepped in and began our long descent to the ground.
‘Where now?’ she said, as we walked away, slightly unsteadily, through the milling crowd.
‘Latin Quarter?’
‘OK.’
‘A little stroll in the Jardins du Luxembourg?’
‘Fine. How do we get there?’
‘Let’s take the Metro,’ I said.
As we walked down the steps into the station at Champs de Mars, we were hit by the dank, oily aroma of the underground, and the sound of a violin. Its tone was rich and sweet, and as we entered the tunnel it grew louder. I found myself wanting to follow the sound as though it were Ariadne’s thread. Halfway down the main walkway we found its source. An old man in a shabby black coat was playing a honey-coloured violin. His hair was sparse and white. His hands were papery and thin, and the veins on them stood out like pale blue wires. He must have been in his late seventies, maybe more. He’d rigged up a portable cassette player to provide ad hoc accompaniment, and he was playing Schubert’s Ave Maria. We automatically slowed our steps. He drew to the end of the piece, lifted off the bow, paused for a second, then began to play an old, familiar song. And as we stopped to listen, the words ran through my mind.
I see trees of green, red roses too …
‘How lovely,’ said Helen.
I see them bloom, for me and you …
‘Lovely,’ she repeated.
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.
His violin case was open at his feet. A few coins shone brightly against the worn black felt.
I see skies of blue, and clouds of white …
I put my hands in my jacket pocket, and drew out a 50-centime piece. Not enough. Not nearly.
The bright blessed day, the dark sacred night …
I opened my bag for a note.
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.
Twenty francs? That would do. Or perhaps fifty. Or a hundred? It was only a tenner, after all.
I see friends shakin’ hands, sayin’, ‘How do you do?’ They’re really sayin’, ‘I love you.’
That’s what Dominic said to me, when he proposed. But it wasn’t true. I knew that now. I looked at my diamond ring, sparkling on my right hand. Its facets flashed like frost.
I hear babies cry, I watch them grow,
They’ll learn much more than I’ll ever know …
I hesitated for a second, then pulled it off, and placed it amongst the coins.
And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.
‘Merci, madame,’ I heard our busker say. ‘Merci, madame. Merci.’ He looked uncertain, so I smiled. Then we turned and walked away.
‘Are you sure?’ Helen said, handing me a tissue.
‘Yes,’ I said quietly. ‘I’m sure.’
And I think to myself …what a wonderful world.
