Chapter 19
Nineteen
Audrey dressed carefully for her meeting with Alex, in flared jeans paired with a Kenzo top in light grey and, as it was a bit chilly, her favourite jacket in sky-blue suede.
She slipped on leather sneakers in the same colour as the top, put on a pair of turquoise drop earrings and tied her hair back loosely.
A touch of lipstick and mascara, a spray of Chanel’s Chance and she was done.
It was a look that proclaimed a casual, effortless chic, showing no trace of the time she had spent at it, changing outfits several times in front of the mirror.
She wanted to project a carefree confidence that she didn’t feel, for all the way to the Tuileries, there was nausea bubbling in her throat and panic building in her chest.
She was ten minutes early but he was already there, and she saw him before he’d seen her, as she approached the Jeu de Paume from a side path.
For a moment, she paused, taking him in, the way he carried himself, the set of his broad shoulders under the olive-green jumper he was wearing, the movement of a hand pushing back unruly hair, and she could see at once that he was as nervous as she’d been on her way here. And that suddenly made things easier.
‘Alex!’ she called out, and he turned and came towards her, his stride as loping and easy as it had always been.
Maybe she’d been mistaken about his state of mind.
But as he came closer, she could see the anxiety in his eyes and the way his Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat as he said, ‘Hello, Audrey,’ in a voice that shook a little, and she knew her first impression hadn’t been wrong.
‘Shall we walk?’ Her voice was steady as his hadn’t been, and he nodded.
They walked for a few minutes in silence, and though there were already quite a few people about, it felt to Audrey as if they were alone, intensely aware of each other’s presence and of the small details that surrounded them—the flowering plants, the crunch of their footsteps on the gravel path, a butterfly on a leaf, a beetle toiling up a blade of grass.
It was then she had a sudden, sharp memory of Alex, long ago, pointing out small details: a flower growing in a crack on a pavement, an odd shadow on a wall, motes of dust dancing in sunlight, the sheen of cherries in a bowl.
It had encouraged her, who up till then had gone about in something of a dedicated bookworm’s impressionistic blur, to really pay attention to the world around her.
And even afterwards that had stuck with her, allowing her to take pleasure and consolation in small things.
Because remembered pain wasn’t his only legacy to her, she realised that now.
That awareness, that ability to look closely, to take joy in little things, small moments, had also been woven into it, and had become part of her own outlook.
But glancing now at his drained, haunted expression, she thought, with a clench of the heart, that perhaps he didn’t have that solace anymore.
She hadn’t expected that, and it gave her the impetus to come out with exactly the right words to start.
No small talk, no introduction, just direct to the centre, without anger.
She stopped and looked him right in the eye. ‘Are you still married to her?’
He shook his head, knowing exactly who she meant. ‘We never did get married in the end.’
Her throat clenched. ‘Why not?’
He shrugged, but didn’t answer.
‘You are going to have to tell me, you know,’ she said. ‘Not why you didn’t get married. That’s your business. But why you let me fall in love with you when all along you knew that you were promised to someone else.’
There. She’d said it. The thing that hurt the most of all, the betrayal that cut so deep that even now it twisted in her gut.
That day twenty years ago when he’d told her the truth at last: that he was engaged to be married to a girl he’d known since high school, a girl whose parents were close friends and business associates of his own parents.
He’d been living apart from her for months, because she’d got a scholarship in a German university, and he didn’t fancy living there so had taken off to Paris instead, but they hadn’t broken off the engagement.
He’d met Audrey. They’d fallen in love—at least, she had.
And then his fiancée came back. That’s what he had told her, back then, the words like hammer blows, his face like stone, his eyes blank.
Her twenty-year-old self had looked at him, this cold stranger who had once been the beautiful man she loved so much, and couldn’t find any words.
Not one. But her body found its own answer, her legs rushing her away from there, away from him.
Yes, she had literally run. She hadn’t looked back.
She hadn’t waited for him to call after her.
But the fact was that he hadn’t even tried.
She had gone back to the apartment they shared, packed her things and left, never to return.
She went to a travel agent, booked a flight back home to Australia for the very next day and spent the rest of that day and the awful sleepless night in a soulless hotel near the airport.
He would have had no idea where she had gone, though he might have guessed.
In any case he had never tried to find her. Not then, not later.
‘I was promised,’ he said now, his voice almost a whisper so that she had to strain to hear it. ‘I suppose that’s what it was.’
She frowned. ‘No more riddles, Alex. It’s been twenty years. We’re both old enough to face the truth. And to tell it. So this is what I think. You enjoyed being with me. I was a holiday from your real life. But all along it was—’
‘No!’ he said, the word bursting out of him. ‘Sorry,’ he went on, miserably, pushing his hair back, and she saw his lip tremble, just for an instant. ‘Sorry, Audrey. I didn’t mean to shout. I …’
‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘But we do need to talk honestly. Without lies or excuses.’
He sighed. ‘I know. But what you said before, it wasn’t like that.
It wasn’t like that at all. I loved you, Audrey.
Loved you with everything in me. Loved you more than I thought was possible.
’ He looked at her as he spoke and what she saw in his eyes shook her.
He was telling the truth. But he couldn’t be. Because otherwise …
‘Then why?’ It was her turn to raise her voice. ‘I don’t understand. I know it was twenty years ago, but it wasn’t the nineteenth century, for God’s sake! You could have ended your engagement. Or at least told me from the start that you weren’t free, so that nothing would have happened between us.’
‘And you would have wanted that?’ he asked. ‘You really would have preferred not to have ever experienced what we had, you and me?’
She swallowed. Looked away. Wanted to say yes, but couldn’t. Instead, she found herself whispering, ‘I don’t know.’
It was at that moment that his phone rang. Their eyes met and she said, ‘Take it. I—I need a moment.’ She walked a short distance away, gazing unseeingly at the carefree people strolling down the paths, her gut clenching, her mind spinning, trying to make sense of what she felt, and failing.
It only took a few seconds before he was back, his phone held away from his ear. ‘That was Romy. She’s with Isabelle. The Fontaine letter—it’s been stolen.’
‘What?’ Audrey stared at him.
‘That professor—Cazenave—it seems Isabelle left the letter at his place by mistake and he’s taken it to sell to an auction house in Toulouse.’
‘Oh my God,’ Audrey cried. Her thoughts instantly jerked away from her own problems to this stunning new development.
Not in a million years would she have imagined such a thing of the dapper, worldly academic she’d interviewed.
‘How can—’ she began, but Alex interrupted.
‘Romy’s got a plan to get the letter back and a friend of mine is going to fly them to Toulouse, but they want me to go with them as Cazenave hasn’t met me, unlike them.
’ He looked at her. ‘But maybe it should be you instead. You’ve been working with them on the identity of this mysterious Houssaye woman. You’d be—’
It was her turn to interrupt. ‘No, I interviewed him at the school, so he knows me too. You should go, Alex. You can help them.’
He glanced at her. ‘Maybe you could come too, then? I mean, I am more than happy to help, but you, Romy and Isabelle, you’ve been in this together, and you should all be there for this too.’
She surveyed him for a moment, her pulse racing. ‘Okay, then,’ she said with a faint smile. ‘I guess it could make a great chapter for my book.’
His expression lightened. ‘I am sure it would,’ he said, and then into the phone, ‘Okay. Go straight to Le Bourget. We will meet you there.’
On the way to Le Bourget airport, they didn’t speak any more about their past by mutual unspoken agreement.
But as they mounted the steps of the small jet plane, where Isabelle and Romy were already waiting, and Alex’s friend Youssef welcomed them, Audrey knew that was the real reason why she’d come along.
Not because she wanted to support her friends, though she absolutely did, or foil a brazen, treacherous attempt at taking the credit for someone else’s discovery, which she also totally did, but because she knew there was more to the story that Alex had started to tell her, and that they had to finish what they started this morning.
If she hadn’t come with him now, if they had decided to postpone the rest to another day, then she might have lost courage.
Or he might have lost his. Either of them could have run.
Either of them could have hidden. But not now.
This unexpected thing, this impulsive adventure they’d been roped into, had put paid to those options.
In the plane, with Youssef—a tall dark-haired man with a ready smile—at the controls, they strapped themselves in as the aircraft began taxiing down the runway. Isabelle, who had been silent, said, ‘I’m still trying to work out why he would do such a thing.’
They all knew who she meant by he. Romy said, ‘Maybe it’s simply about money.
I looked it up on the way to the airport and saw that a simple lease signed by Coco Chanel in 1927 had fetched eighteen thousand euros at auction recently.
And that was just an impersonal document, with her signature as the salient part.
So Fontaine’s letter would probably be worth much more, given the continuing curiosity about that legendary gown. ’
‘Okay. So let’s say it could be worth thirty thousand euros at the outside,’ Alex said. ‘A nice sum, sure, but to be worth taking a risk like that—it’s hardly like having a lost Vermeer to sell, is it?’
Romy laughed. ‘Never mind a Vermeer, not everyone is like you, dear uncle! I wouldn’t mind thirty thousand euros, and that’s the same for most people. And the risk—well, he did cover his tracks by not trying to sell it in Paris. How was he to know that Isabelle had an inside man in Toulouse?’
Audrey saw Isabelle’s colour rise at that. ‘Romy, did the prof ever seem like he was in need of money?’ she asked.
Romy shrugged. ‘No idea. But if not, why try to sell the letter?’
‘It does seem strange that he’d want to sell the letter rather than keep it to himself and trumpet it later as his own discovery,’ Audrey said. ‘After all, he’s very interested in Fontaine. And a discovery like this could earn him real kudos, maybe even a more lucrative job.’
‘When we talked that day, he did seem resentful about not being recognised enough in academia,’ Isabelle said grimly.
‘But maybe it’s about money too. Maybe he thinks he can have the butter and the money for the butter,’ she went on, referring to the French equivalent of having your cake and eating it too.
‘After all, he can still write about the letter as his discovery, even if he has sold the original. All he has to do is have it authenticated first and be documented as the original finder, and that would be enough.’
‘Well, he won’t be doing that now,’ Romy said firmly, ‘because we’re going to stop him.
’ And she outlined the plan for the retrieval of the letter.
‘It’s pretty simple. Alex will go in first, and he’ll pretend to be a collector that Madame Diop has called—it’s been cleared with her, of course—and then once Cazenave is there, we three will go in and confront him.
He’ll have nowhere to go, no leg to stand on.
He’ll have to give back the letter.’ She looked around at them. ‘Are you all okay with that?’
Isabelle said, ‘I’m not sure if okay is the right word, but yes, I’m in.’
‘And I am too,’ said Audrey, though inwardly she thought there were many ways this plan could go wrong.
But it didn’t matter. And that wasn’t like her.
At least not like the careful self she’d nurtured for the past twenty years, who examined things from all angles, controlled her impulses and didn’t go headlong into risk.
Now she had no idea where any of this was going.
And that was both frightening and exhilarating at the same time.