Chapter 12
Twelve
Romy still wasn’t sure if she’d done the right thing.
Last night, when Alex had told her about him and Audrey and how it had ended between them, she’d felt a wave of emotion surge over her, a mix of sorrow, understanding and frustration.
When he’d finished, she said, ‘But afterwards, you never tried to contact her, to write, to call, to explain?’
‘No,’ he’d said, quietly. ‘I thought it was better that she continued to think of me as worthless, someone she should wipe forever from her life. I’d been a coward. And it was much too late to go back.’
Romy sighed. ‘Oh, Alex! You have never been a coward, and you of all people should know it’s never too late.’
He gave her an affectionate smile. ‘This time it was, trust me. Best to leave it alone.’
Romy had thought of Audrey’s card in her bag.
Should she give it to him? Should she tell him that he had a chance now, if not to make it right, at least to give them both some closure?
Clearly the breakup was still haunting him, she could see that in his eyes, in the way he’d spoken.
Perhaps Audrey was the same … or perhaps she had successfully wiped him from her life, and Romy should leave well enough alone, just as he’d said.
It was not her business, after all, even if Alex was her beloved uncle and Audrey her admired inspiration.
So in the end she’d kept the card in her bag, and instead followed Alex’s diversion of the conversation back to the mystery of the letter.
But now, as she reached the school, she felt she’d overthought it.
Taking the card from her bag, she was about to take a photo of it to send to Alex when her phone buzzed with an incoming call.
Isabelle. Remembering now that she’d seen a garbled message from Isabelle about lists, she said, ‘Oh, hello. Sorry, I haven’t had time to think about it, and—’
‘Think about what?’ Isabelle asked, sounding bewildered.
‘The lists,’ Romy said, confused in turn. ‘The message you sent last night.’ Very, very late, she almost added.
‘Oh that,’ said Isabelle, vaguely. ‘It can wait. Look, Romy—can I ask you a favour?’
‘Sure,’ Romy said cautiously, wondering what was coming.
‘Are you at the school today?’
‘Yes. I’ve just arrived.’
‘Great. Can you please go and ask Pierre Cazenave to call me as soon as possible? I’ve tried to call him myself but keep getting his voicemail.
I’ve left a couple of messages, but he hasn’t answered.
He might be in class and has possibly turned off his phone.
So I wondered if you could get a message to him?
I’m sorry, Romy, I’d come myself, but I’m stuck in a doctor’s waiting room. ’
‘Are you okay?’ asked Romy, concerned.
‘Yes, don’t worry. It’s just my shoulder, but I’m likely to be here for a while yet. So if you could see him …’
‘No problem,’ said Romy. ‘I’ll go in the lunch break.’
Isabelle gave a gusty sigh. ‘Thank you so much. I—’ Her tone changed, became more uncertain.
‘After you left the café, I went to his place to look at his research materials. They are excellent, like the lists—I’ll tell you all about them later.
But then we went to dinner, and it was great, but I started to feel unwell and had to go back to the hotel. ’
Why is she telling me all this? Romy wondered. But her ingrained manners stopped her from asking so she listened politely until finally Isabelle reached the point of her story.
‘Anyway, I got here and was told the doctor was late and I’d have to wait, and I thought I’d use the time to see if we’d missed anything in the letter. So I took it out of my bag. Only, Romy’—her voice dropped suddenly—‘it wasn’t there.’
‘What do you mean?’ Romy asked, confused.
‘I mean, the plastic wallet is there, and the envelope, but not the letter. And then I remembered that last night I had taken the letter out at Pierre’s place, and we read it again while we were going through some old newspapers, and I think I must have put it down on the table and left it there.
I didn’t think about it this morning, I mean I did, but I didn’t try to look at it—until now. ’
Romy understood now. ‘Okay, so it’s at his place then.’
‘Yes. In my phone messages to him, I said I’d left the letter at his place, and could he check? It might have got mixed up with the newspapers, and he probably hasn’t seen it yet. I’m hoping he didn’t just sweep everything up and put it all back in his files without noticing.’
‘It will be okay even if he did,’ soothed Romy. ‘He’ll find it, no problem. And I’ll make sure he gets your message.’
‘I’ll owe you dinner for this,’ said Isabelle, sounding relieved, ‘and I—’ She broke off and said something indistinguishable, speaking to someone where she was, before returning to say, ‘I’m being called in now. Let me know, won’t you?’
‘Of course,’ said Romy, but Isabelle had already ended the call. Shaking her head, feeling both mildly irritated and quite amused, Romy put her phone back in her pocket and headed into class, forgetting all about the photo she’d intended on sending to Alex.
When the lunch break came, she went to Cazenave’s room, but he didn’t answer her knock on the door.
Perhaps he’d gone out for lunch. She’d try again later.
Meanwhile, she met up with Mickael to grab a sandwich at a nearby boulangerie.
They ate lunch outdoors, chatting cheerfully about this and that, and Romy found herself relaxing in a way she hadn’t with anyone else at the school so far.
He was undemanding but warm company, Mickael, and he had a fund of stories that he told with the animation, colour and humour that Romy thought of as distinctively Southern French.
She was a Walloon herself—a French-speaking Belgian—but living here she had quickly come to recognise some of the regional variations of France, or at least the very obvious one between North and South.
Though Paris, of course, was a case all on its own!
They were both outsiders here, marked out by their respective accents, though Romy suspected that Mickael emphasised his with a happy swagger, while she still bristled when some nonchalant Parisian raised an eyebrow at her own accent, cracking the tedious old joke about mussels and chips, which were supposedly all that Belgians ever ate.
If it had been Mickael, he would have joked right back that Paris had no real cuisine of its own, and had only stolen recipes from all the regions of France.
But as to her, she’d come up with a clever retort later, in the vein of l’esprit d’escalier, or staircase wit, the kind of comeback you only think of afterwards and imagine yourself saying triumphantly.
She said that to Mickael and he laughed, not mockingly but with genuine fellow feeling.
‘Just remind them of Jacques Brel’s songs, and Tintin and Asterix,’ he said as they walked back to the school. ‘All claimed to embody some eternal French spirit—but all Belgian, in fact!’
‘Hey, I like your style.’ Romy smiled, and as their eyes met, she felt something stirring inside her that made her pulse go a little faster. To cover it, she asked quickly, ‘By the way, do you know if Prof Cazenave goes out for lunch?’
Mickael looked startled by this abrupt change of subject. ‘Sorry,’ she said, colouring a little, ‘it’s just that I’ve been asked by a mutual friend to give him a message and I thought I’d catch him in the lunch break.’
‘I don’t know about his lunch habits,’ said Mickael, with a touch of irony, ‘but he isn’t in today. I heard one of the other teachers say there’d been some kind of family emergency and he had to head off.’
‘Oh.’ Seeing Mickael’s quizzical look, Romy said, ‘My friend, it’s just that she left something—’ At that moment, as if on cue, her phone buzzed again.
Pulling it out, she saw it was Isabelle and sighed.
Couldn’t she wait? She mouthed, ‘It’s that friend I mentioned,’ and made a gesture of apology.
Mickael smiled and said, ‘See you later?’ She nodded, possibly more fervently than was wise, then answered the call.
‘Sorry, Isabelle, I haven’t had time to call you. I did go to see him, but he wasn’t there, and I’ve only just learned from a friend that the prof was called away—a family emergency of some kind.’
‘Oh, that explains it,’ Isabelle said. ‘He’s got family in Lyon, he told me. I’m sure the letter will be safe in the meantime. Thank you, Romy.’
‘No problem. Oh—what did the doctor say about your shoulder?’
‘It’s a separation of the joint where the collarbone and shoulder blade come together.
It’ll take a while to heal, but it’ll be okay.
I’ve got it in a sling now and they’ve given me some decent medication.
But listen, the real reason I called is that I contacted Audrey Oliver and we’ve arranged to meet later today.
I didn’t tell her about the letter over the phone—it’s something best done in person.
Anyway,’ she went on, before Romy could respond, ‘she also asked for your number, because she needs to check something with you.’
Romy stiffened. ‘Probably something to do with that improvised interview she did with me and my friend yesterday. I forgot to give her my number.’
‘Yes. She said she’d forgotten to ask, too. Anyway, I gave it to her. I hope that’s okay.’
‘Of course,’ Romy reassured her. The decision had been made for her, and she knew instinctively that the interview was not what Audrey wanted to raise with her.