13
Early on Wednesday morning we depart Berlin, and a few hours later we’re dragging our suitcases through Paris Orly airport. The early nights haven’t been helping: the jet lag just about wore off in London, but has now been replaced by a dull, constant headache. I move through the airport like a zombie, using all the faculties I have to keep us on schedule, figuring out which trains to get and double checking our hotel check-in time. Underneath it all, though, there’s a jolt of excitement. It’s my first time in Paris, and I can’t wait to experience what Sara calls ‘the Paris effect’ – the romanticism, the rose-tinted glasses. The joy of being in a city so historic and beautiful. If I weren’t so tired, I’d be buzzing with it. It’s incredibly cool that I’m here.
We take public transport this time, and I find the right line of the Paris metro, surprising myself with my enjoyment of the novelty of a new city’s transport system. The sight when we emerge from our stop takes my breath away momentarily: stunning architecture, balconies, café after café with patrons sitting outside and smoking, drinking wine and enjoying their day. We drag our luggage over cobblestones and through narrow streets to another beautiful hotel, tucked away in the Quartier de Louvre: centrally located, near all of the sights. There’s a café on the same street, mismatched colourful chairs and tables scattered over the cobbles, each adorned with a chess board. It’s delightful, but I’m too sweaty from the walk to dwell on it for too long.
Jack has an event and a few signings this afternoon, so after a quick shower and outfit change I make my way down to hotel reception and settle into a velvet armchair to wait for him, taking the opportunity to answer a few emails on my phone. The social media fire from last week has died down – the author took my advice and went underground for a few days, and it all seems to have blown over. I then pull out my personal phone and light up at the sight of a few texts from Sara. New York is still hot, she still misses me, she wishes she could be in Paris with me, right now. James is ‘fine’, which yet again gives me pause, sending a knot into my stomach – she’s usually much more effusive about her relationship with him. I don’t know why she’s shutting off about this – or, actually, I do: she doesn’t trust me. I can feel it, and it hurts. I text her back to let her know I’ve landed in Paris, covering my sadness with a million Eiffel tower emojis and twelve kisses to tell her how much I miss her. I feel it overwhelmingly in this moment: I miss her, I miss her, I miss her, thrumming through me like a heartbeat. Despite my excitement at being in Paris, I’d give anything to teleport back to New York in this moment and check that she’s okay – it seems weird to ask over text, when she hasn’t actually told me anything is wrong. I scroll down to see that my mum has also texted, which tightens the knot further:
Lovely to talk yesterday. Are you in Paris yet? Xxx
I reply immediately: Love you lots. And yes I am! Xxx I send her a picture of the hotel lobby, and some heart emojis. Another wave of sadness moves through me as I hit send, but I push it aside, forcing myself back into the present, and look around: I didn’t get a proper chance to take in my surroundings when we checked in earlier because I was in a rush to get showered and unpack. The hotel is beautifully decorated: ornate and Rococo-style, with gold trimming everywhere and delicate crown moulding on the ceiling. I feel pretty plain by comparison, in my jeans and white shirt, but Sara – who studied French, and did a year abroad in Paris – advised me that if you don’t want to be stared at too much by Parisians, it’s best to keep your outfit simple. Too much colourful clothing offends their sensibilities, apparently. I look up to see Jack coming down the stairs in an almost identical outfit: white shirt, blue jeans.
‘Great minds?’ he says, gesturing to our clothes.
‘Mm-hmm,’ I say, still not recovered from the thought I’ve just had – that we’re going to look like a matching couple.
He gestures towards the door of the hotel and I stand up and walk towards it, holding it open for him and stepping outside into the cobbled street below. It’s a gorgeous day: the sun is shining, and the street is full of tourists.
There are people of all descriptions sitting outside the next-door cafe, engaged in games of chess when we pass. At the sight of a little girl playing with her father, I’m transported suddenly to a memory of my dad, teaching me at seven years old. It stops me momentarily in my tracks, and I wait for the jolt of grief, like missing a step on a staircase, but it doesn’t come. Perhaps because I hadn’t remembered it until now, I haven’t had a chance to colour it with loss. I let it pass, enjoying its warmth for a moment, then turn my attention back to the day ahead.
The event is fairly standard – a short reading, followed by an author Q the sort of place you imagine when people talk about their dream of opening a bookshop one day. It’s tucked away in the corner of a street, with fairy lights strung up in front of it, and everything is perfectly shabby without looking too run-down. The outer wall to the right of the entrance doubles as a bookshelf, stuffed with books of all descriptions, surrounded by tables also piled high – you could choose a hundred books to buy before even entering the shop. The shopfront is a deep green, and ramshackle lettering above the front door spells out its name: Shakespeare and Company . A small bell of recognition goes off in the back of my mind – this place is famous.
I turn to Jack and find him totally lost in thought. The expression in his eyes is nostalgic but heavy, weighed down by something. I turn away, suddenly conscious that I’m intruding, and pretend to sift through a pile of books on the table in front of me until he resurfaces.
‘Sorry,’ he says, still looking up at the shop. ‘I haven’t been back here in a while. I didn’t realise it would be so—’ He stops himself, and turns towards me. ‘Find anything good?’
I shake my head, and he gestures towards the door. ‘All the best books are inside, anyway,’ he says.
He walks through the shop with the same attitude he had while guiding me through the streets a moment ago – of someone who knows what they’re doing, who has opened the door to this shop many times before. I follow him into an angular room which is just as perfectly lived in as its exterior, the wood of the shelved walls dark and well-worn. He leads me up some stairs which are the same green as the shopfront, each step painted with a line from a poem about finding light in loneliness, and through a small, cavernous stone corridor with a sign about being kind to strangers painted above the entrance. Eventually, we reach a quieter corner of the shop, not unlike the fantasy section where he found me in The Lost Bookshop in New York. There’s a door to my right, which is closed.
‘When I told you I lived in Paris, this is where I meant,’ he says. He points towards the door, looking at it with a gaze that’s somewhere between melancholy and fondness. ‘I lived through there, for a while.’
A memory floats to the top of my mind – the reason I’ve heard of this shop, the reason it’s famous. It hosts struggling writers, when they’re in need of a bed and time to focus on their book, in exchange for a few shifts in the shop. ‘Ah,’ I say, another element of Jack slotting into place.
He nods. ‘Mind if we sit for a minute?’ he asks, and I shrug and nod, sinking into the rickety armchair behind me. He follows, sitting in one with a view to the street below.
‘How did you end up here?’ I ask, curious, trying not to make any sudden movements for fear the chair will collapse under me.
‘When I was writing my first book,’ he replies, ‘I fell on hard times, sort of. My dad—’ he pauses, choosing his words carefully ‘—uh, he had promised he’d help me while I was writing, then he changed his mind.’ A shadow passes across his face, and I get the feeling that what happened was worse than his tone lets on. Flashes of the last few weeks run through my mind: clearly, Jack has a troubled relationship with his father. A wave of something like pity moves through me, suddenly. ‘I was living in New York, and wanted to get away for a while. I had heard they took writers as residents here, so I got in contact with the shop owners through a friend, and moved a few weeks later.’
‘I’ve always wanted to do something like that,’ I say, intensely jealous. Who wouldn’t dream of living in a bookshop in Paris, of all places?
‘Me too,’ he says, smiling wistfully. ‘Unfortunately, though, it was a bad decision on my part – my French was terrible and rusty, I didn’t know anyone in the city, and I had terrible writer’s block. And there were fleas, everywhere.’ I make a face, and he laughs. ‘I’m still so grateful to the shop owners for taking me in, but it was the loneliest I’ve ever been.’
Something twists in my chest: that feeling is familiar to me. I turn my gaze to the floor at my feet, examining the marks in the wood from thousands of shoes passing through this room, browsing for books. So this is why he doesn’t like being alone in Paris. In answer to my fairly innocuous question, he’s brought me to the epicentre of his loneliness. This feels wrong, sacred somehow. A privilege that should be reserved for a close friend, a girlfriend even. Not me.
‘Sorry if it’s weird that I brought you here,’ he continues, as if he’s read my mind. ‘There are no events here this week, and I wanted to visit before we leave. This seemed like a good opportunity. Plus – as a fellow fan of that corner of The Lost Bookshop , I thought you might like it here, too.’
I flinch at the memory of our meeting in that bookshop. The emotions he brought up then are no longer so pronounced – still there but dulled, a volcano now semi-dormant, its lava surging under a few layers of rock. We are silent for a moment. ‘I do,’ I say, quietly.
The air is still between us, broken only by the sound of our breath and the muffled noises of the customers downstairs. He looks around the room nostalgically, then moves as if he’s about to get up and lead me back downstairs. But before he can, for a reason that’s beyond my understanding, I start talking.
‘I know what that’s like,’ I say, my heart pounding in my chest, a heat creeping up the back of my neck and prickling over my ears. I glance over at him. He stops, still in his chair, his eyes on me. My body all of a sudden feels like it’s on fire. ‘The loneliness, I mean,’ I practically choke out, still not sure why I’m suddenly being so open with him. ‘When I first moved to New York, I was miserable. I’d moved an ocean away from my mum,’ I continue, ‘right after my dad—’ my breath catches, and I reroute, my stomach twisting in warning ‘—right after university, for an internship which paid horribly. I had no friends there, either. I used to sit in that chair in The Lost Bookshop for hours every weekend, wondering if I’d got everything wrong.’
He smiles at me, a sad smile of shared loneliness. I stand up and pretend to browse the books, moving from shelf to shelf, finding myself compelled to continue. ‘I always feel less lonely around books,’ I say, the words coming more easily than they should. ‘Does that sound insane?’
He laughs, softly, almost to himself. ‘No, Andie,’ he says. ‘It doesn’t.’
I keep my eyes firmly on the shelf in front of me, my back turned, but I can feel Jack’s gaze on me. It burns just like it did back then, a million years ago in his room in Edinburgh. Like a laser on my skin. I am suddenly aware of my breath, of my feet on the wooden floor. I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to push away the sensation, to come back to reality, but it doesn’t work. Jack is everywhere in this room: I can’t shut him out. His foot creaks on the floor behind me – he’s standing up. I turn abruptly towards him, my logical brain kicking in and overriding the sensations in my body. I have to dispel this, whatever it is.
‘Will you help me find a nice edition of Shakespeare?’ I ask quickly, keeping my tone even. ‘It feels fitting, given the name,’ I say, trying for a joke, hoping it’ll break up the atmosphere. He doesn’t laugh but looks at me for a moment, then shakes his head as if trying to dislodge a thought.
‘Sure,’ he says, his trademark Jack Carlson smile back on his face, all traces of the moment before gone.
He moves through the shop with expert skill, taking me back through the corridor, down the stairs and into another small, hidden nook in the back left corner of the ground floor. The strange electric charge between us dims but is still present as I follow him from room to room. I try hard to keep my head, focusing on my breath, on the other people milling around us, reading every sign carefully as I pass it – they’re all in English, which makes things easier: otherwise this would be a useless exercise. But even if they were in French, I’d be willing to do anything right now to keep my mind off Jack, and whatever just happened in that room. I am a publicist, and he is my author, and this is just a bookshop, I chant to myself in my head as he finds the right section and browses the shelves as if it’s his own personal library, his hand gently thumbing through the spines. Within moments he locates a beautiful, leather-bound complete edition of Shakespeare, then haggles in French with the young shopkeeper so well that I end up taking it away for the measly sum of fifteen euros. I do not allow myself to aim more than a small smile at him as he hands me the book, my heart still pounding as I all but push past him to get out of there.
As soon as we’re back in the fresh air, my heart rate starts to decrease slightly. I take in a few breaths, regaining a sense of my surroundings. Slowly, the feeling fades – Jack is next to me, and he’s looking at me, and it feels mostly normal and fine. No strange burning sensation, no energy between us. Just my heart, still stuttering against my chest, but slowing with every moment. Whatever that was, it’s now gone, left in the upstairs room of the shop.
‘Shall we find some dinner?’ he says. I nod, not trusting myself to speak.
Jack offers to show me his favourite spot for food in Paris, and I blanche, expecting some sort of candlelit restaurant – but instead he takes me to a bakery and instructs me to choose some bread, saying he’ll be right back. I pick out a baguette and find Jack outside holding some brie and a bottle of wine.
We walk for a while until we reach the river, and he directs me across a bridge to his favourite spot: sitting on the side of the Seine with a view of Notre Dame on the other side, our legs hanging over the edge to the river bank below.
‘So,’ I start, as he tears off a piece of bread and hands it to me, thinking to keep the conversation as professional as I am able, ‘why did you really make the switch to fiction?’
‘I heard there was a new publicist starting, and I wanted to terrorise her,’ he jokes, but it doesn’t quite land. My hand tightens around the bread, and I turn away and busy myself cutting a slice of the brie to my left so he can’t see my facial expression.
‘Sorry,’ he says, after a moment. ‘Bad joke. I’m avoiding answering your question.’ He sits back, leaning on the palms of his hands, and takes a deep breath, looking out over the water. ‘Put simply, my writing career up to this point has been a lie.’
I almost choke on the too-large bite of baguette I’ve taken. ‘Do explain,’ I say, once I’ve managed to swallow.
‘Sure it won’t bore you?’ he asks, and his tone is jovial but there’s a hint of seriousness in his expression which inexplicably makes my heart sink. I shake my head, gesturing for him to continue.
‘I’ll skim across the details but: my parents are divorced. Dad’s based in New York, so I didn’t see him much as a kid. When I did, history was sort of our thing. I’m not sure if you remember George mentioning at my London launch, but he’s a historian.’
‘I remember,’ I say. A vision of Jack leaving the room at his launch appears in my mind.
‘You can maybe see where this is going. Historian father, historian son. Not exactly original, right?’ He takes a breath – he’s started speaking fast, as if he wants to get the words out as quickly as possible. ‘He remarried a while ago, and sort of—’ Here he pauses, losing some momentum, and I watch his posture grow a little heavier. ‘—lost interest in our relationship.’ Oof. Poor Jack. He keeps his tone light, but there’s an undertone to it. A weight, that wasn’t there before. ‘I’ve realised recently that writing those books has been my way of reaching out to him, I guess.’ He looks at me with a self-deprecating smile, which doesn’t quite hide the sadness in his eyes. ‘Trying to start a conversation he didn’t really want to have.’
Suddenly I don’t feel so hungry anymore. I let the baguette fall into my lap, crumbs settling into the folds of my skirt. Jack’s expression is still carefully jovial, as if he’s about to give an interview, but I know this pain. I can see it, buried deep beneath the surface, beyond anyone else’s reach.
‘So I started writing fiction – so I could feel like my writing belonged to me, again. Like—’ he pauses, searching for the right words.
‘Like a conversation with yourself?’ I ask, finishing his thought.
He smiles, and this time some of the sadness seeps through. ‘Something like that,’ he says, and a knot begins to form in my stomach.
We move on to safer topics – like the best and least-toursity spots in Paris and the agenda for the following day – but I can’t shake the unease, growing more and more noticeable with every moment we spend together. It lasts through the wine, which we finish gradually, and the baguette, some of which I tear to pieces in my lap.
A few hours later, we make our way back to the hotel. The walk is long, and Jack points out a few tourist spots en route – the Eiffel Tower, which you can see when you look down certain streets. The Louvre, just round the corner from our hotel. And a few of the cafes and restaurants he used to frequent when he lived here.
We reach the hotel and Jack walks me back to my room. There’s a moment of slightly awkward silence, then as I’m turning to pull the door open he breaks it.
‘That was nice,’ he says, his voice low and quiet. A flash of the feeling I had earlier in the bookshop reappears. I push it away, forcing my walls back up.
‘It was,’ I agree, the knot tightening as a thrill moves up the back of my neck. ‘Thank you.’
A fold appears on his brow, like he’s thinking about something, but I don’t allow myself to consider what it might be.
‘See you tomorrow, Andie,’ he says, then turns to walk down the corridor, back to his room. I can feel my heartbeat in my throat as I watch him leave.
I keep the smile on my face until he’s reached his room, then disappear into mine and close the door. I lean against it, my breathing heavy, suddenly overwhelmed by the realisation that agreeing to spend the evening with Jack was a terrible idea. Not because of the bookshop, or the moment by the river, or the fact that I accidentally learned more about Jack in these last few hours than I ever did at university. But because, against my better judgement, against every fibre of rationality in my body, I enjoyed it. All of it.