Chapter 27
It’s a forty-minute drive to Bergerac, the only city in a fifty-mile radius.
It feels refreshingly large, cosmopolitan almost, the old sandstone buildings next to glass offices, buses driving past people cycling home from work.
The taxi pulls up directly outside the gallery where a few people are mingling with cigarettes.
A middle-aged woman looks up as I slam the taxi door a little too hard; she takes me in – the dress and my nerves – and reassures me with a small half smile, and it is enough to persuade me that this is a good idea, that I can walk through those doors.
Inside it is starkly modern, the walls are white, the floor is white, the ceiling’s white.
It feels for a moment like someone’s interpretation of heaven, the brightness almost blinding as my eyes adjust. The crowd is different here too, infinitely better dressed than at the last exhibition, the men all in suits, the women in dresses so no one blinks an eye at me, and I feel as if I am wearing camouflage, a woman who is meant to be here, a woman who normally looks like this.
‘Madame.’ A waiter in all black hands me a flute of champagne. I take him in, think of The American’s story of the naked waiters and stifle a smile.
‘Merci.’ It’s nice to hold something in my hand, a distraction.
I take in the room, all of it, start to focus on the little spaces that have been created with some organised seating, pedestals with different multicoloured pieces of art on them.
I look for Florian but there are too many people milling about.
Instead, I decide to work my way around starting by the door, hoping that I might be struck with some inspiration of what I might actually say when I do see him because, other than the initial words of ‘I’m sorry,’ I had been drawing a blank.
Obviously, I could just recycle what The American had managed to spout out at dinner, but I’m not sure I could convince Florian that I can be that brutally honest.
And then I see him, surrounded by suits.
Next to him, the same sculpture as before except this time there are more people around it, admiring it, admiring him.
I stand back, try to tune out the background noise and catch the conversation.
He has always been more animated in his native tongue; his hands come to his midline, accentuating word after word.
He says something, the crowd laughs, he looks pleased with himself and then his eyes wander around his space in the gallery, gauging what’s a success, which of his drawings is starting a conversation.
His eyes pass over me at first, this absent, polite smile on his face that he must give to all prospective purchasers, but then I watch as he stiffens, stops, rooted in his place.
Florian swallows hard and then his eyes drift back to me.
We stand there for a moment, eyes locked, him probably wondering if it is actually me, and me – well I’m trying to figure out if he looks mildly horrified or slightly pleased.
The crowd of people around him are still talking, but he looks like he’s forgotten all about them; instead his lips pull into a wide grin, the kind that is impossible to fake.
Someone in the crowd says his name but he doesn’t waver, so instead they turn to see where his gaze has fixed itself, turn to me.
I know I’m smiling too; it’s as if I’m watching myself exist, aware of everything my body is doing but not quite being able to control it.
‘Florian!’ the admirer calls again. I gesture to his audience, and it breaks the trance. He blushes, looks at the faces, a couple more astute admirers have knowing grins on their own faces.
‘Pardon,’ he apologises with a little shake of his head. ‘Voudriez-vous m’excuser?’ He slips through his audience.
‘Please don’t abandon your fans on my account.’ My voice cracks a little from disuse and nerves as he meets me.
He dismisses them with a wave of his hand. ‘There will be others.’
‘You sound so sure.’
He looks at his feet and then brings his face back level with mine, a mischievous little shimmer in his eye. ‘My admirers have a habit of sticking around, even if they say they’re not interested.’
‘Stupid admirers.’
‘I’ve grown quite fond of them myself.’
I let the comment wash over me, try to notice how it feels, how it sticks to me, the strangeness of the relief it brings, and then I think of his face last night when I told him to go.
‘Florian, I need to…’
He shakes his head and swallows the last of his drink, resting it on one of the waiters’ trays. ‘Not here,’ he says, grabbing my hand and pulling me through the crowd and some doors onto a small courtyard, with string lights around the olive trees.
There are a few other people milling about, smoking, on phone calls, getting some air but there is an intimacy here that was lacking in the echoing room of the gallery.
He leans back against a large plant pot, his eyes meet mine again, his boyish grin returns and it’s infectious.
I bite my lip, look down, try to play it cool because there’s things that need to be said.
‘You came,’ he says gently.
‘I came.’
‘You look…’
‘Ridiculous?’ I interrupt before he can finish.
‘No!’ he says fiercely. ‘No, you look beautiful. I mean seriously beautiful.’ I know I’m blushing, I can feel it, the way my cheeks are on fire, the way the heat is thundering down my body.
It’s a heat so consuming that even the cool evening air is doing nothing to dampen it.
I straighten down the bodice of the dress.
‘You can thank The American.’
He looks around at the dissipating crowd. ‘Just for the dress, or for the fact you’re here?’
I shrug. ‘Both.’
‘I will thank her profusely.’
There’s a beat. I could kiss him, try to say everything I need to with one action, but the opportunity to have frank and honest conversations would probably disappear after we do that.
‘Florian, look I’m sorry, I’m really sorry.’
‘You know when you said you needed some time, I had kind of assumed you meant more than twenty-four hours.’
‘Well, I never did specify…’
‘Did Archie come back?’
‘Yes.’
‘How was it?’
‘It was like kicking a puppy.’
‘I didn’t mean to…’ He stops, noticing my look of incredulity. ‘Okay, well I did mean to, but I didn’t want to hurt the guy.’
‘I know. I think he knows too. We talked when the dust had settled a bit, but I realised you were right.’
‘I hate it when I do that.’
‘Yeah, it sucks.’
‘So…’ He plays with a leather bracelet on his wrist. ‘What do you want, Ava?’
‘I don’t know.’ It comes out as an exhausted sigh and I watch as his eyebrows furrow, the smile wiped from his face.
I don’t like it. Now that I know how to make him smile, how to muster up that disarming little grin, I want to do it all the time.
I put my hand on his forearm, step towards him so he has to bend his head to keep looking me in the eye.
‘I think I want to see what this could be.’ He bites his lip and his index finger swoops under my chin, lifting it up so that we are looking at each other, eye to eye.
‘I’m sure I can manage that.’ His voice is gravelly, low. I know what I want now. I want to go, with him, I want to be with him anywhere other than here.
‘Florian!’ a voice calls from the doorway. His hands drop, I leap back. Turn my head to see Madame Grenaud smoothing her hair behind her ears. She looks alarmed; it makes all her sharp features more chiselled and angular than normal.
‘Shit,’ he mutters, scuffs his brogue into the ground and then looks up. ‘Mama, I’ll be there in a minute.’
She ignores him, steps towards us but still keeps her distance. ‘Ava? I didn’t think you were coming,’ she calls to me over the courtyard.
‘A surprise,’ I shrug, my stomach lurching at what we look like to her, what poisonous thoughts are now thundering around her head.
‘You have buyers, Florian. Stop… talking and get back in there.’ She manages to soften her voice at the end, controlling her fury.
‘Give us two minutes,’ he offers her, looks back at me with a wink.
‘She can wait, the Trelcats can’t.’
The viciousness of the way she said ‘she’ is difficult to ignore. It was a slap and I can feel Florian stiffening next to me but this isn’t the time or the place and nothing is going to be achieved by a screaming match in the gallery garden.
‘Go.’ I shoot him a pleading look. ‘We can talk anytime.’ He doesn’t look convinced. Instead, he looks like a teenager, someone who was about to hop the wall and play truant at his own show. ‘Go,’ I repeat, trying to wipe any ounce of flirtation from my voice.
‘Fine,’ he salutes her sarcastically, but she doesn’t leave the doorway until she sees Florian move from his flowerpot and start towards the door. When she turns her back, he holds out his hand behind his body and I take it.
‘So… this time I did know she was coming,’ he adds, noting the apprehension on my face. ‘I just didn’t exactly know that you were.’
‘How about in future, the first thing we say to each other is whether she’s in the vicinity?’
‘Romantic.’
‘Do you think she saw anything?’
‘Saw what, Ava? We haven’t done anything.
’ He lets go of my hand as we get to the door where Madame Grenaud is waiting to sweep him up under her arm, he turns his head around to me before being swamped by his well-wishers and with a wink he mutters, ‘yet’.
My head fills with every delicious detail that I had worked hard on trying to ignore, allowing myself the pleasure of private reruns of how it felt to be touched like that, to want to do nothing so badly as to rip his clothes off that I was blind to my surroundings, dumb to whether we had been five seconds or five minutes.