PART II
Paris October 2007
CHAPTER 9
PARIS FRIDAY 26TH OCTOBER 2007
Meredith Martin stared at her reflection in the window as the train hurtled towards the Eurostar terminal in Paris. Black hair, white face. Stripped of colour, she didn’t look so good.
She glanced at her watch.
A quarter of nine. Nearly there, thank God.
The grey backs of houses and small towns flashed by in the gloom, more frequent now. The compartment was pretty empty. A couple of French businesswomen in pressed white shirts and grey pantsuits. Two students asleep on their backpacks. The soft tapping of computer keys, low calls made on cell phones, the rustle of the late-edition newspapers – French, English, American. Across the aisle, a quartet of lawyers in striped shirts and chinos with razor-sharp creases, heading home for the weekend. Talking loudly about a fraud case, their table was covered in glass bottles and plastic cups. Beer, wine, bourbon.
Meredith’s eyes drifted to the glossy hotel brochure on the plastic table, even though she’d read it through plenty of times already.
L’HÔTEL DOMAINE DE LA CADE
RENNES-LES-BAINS
11190
RENNES-LES-BAINS
11190
Set in delightful wooded parkland above the picturesque town of Rennes-les-Bains in the beautiful Languedoc, the Hôtel Domaine de la Cade is the epitome of nineteenth-century grandeur and elegance, but with all the comfort and leisure facilities expected by the discriminating twenty-first-century visitor. The hotel is situated on the location of the original maison de maître, which was partially destroyed by fire in 1897. Run as a hotel since the 1950s, it reopened after a major refurbishment under new management in 2004 and is now recognised as one of the premier hotels in south-west France.
For full tariff and detailed facilities, see opposite.
The same information was repeated over in French.
It sounded great. Come Monday she’d be there. It was her treat to herself, a couple of days of five-star luxury after all the budget flights and cheap motels. She pushed the brochure back into her transparent plastic travel file with the receipt confirming her reservation and put the whole thing back in her purse.
She stretched her long, slim arms above her head, then rolled her neck. She couldn’t remember when she’d last been so tired.
Meredith had checked out of her hotel in London at noon, had lunch at a café close by the Wigmore Hall before taking in an afternoon concert – seriously dull – then grabbed a sandwich at Waterloo station before boarding the train, hot and exhausted.
After all that, they’d been late leaving. When they finally got going, she spent most of the first part of the journey in a daze, staring out the window watching the green English countryside flash by, rather than typing up her notes. Then the train plunged beneath the Channel and was swallowed up in the concrete of the tunnel. The atmosphere became oppressive, but at least it killed the cell phone chatter. Thirty minutes later, they emerged the other side to the flat, brown landscape of northern France.
Chalet-style farmhouses, the flash of small towns, and long straight farm tracks looking like they led to nowhere. One or two larger towns, the slag heaps grassed over by time. Then Charles de Gaulle airport and the suburbs, la banlieue, the drab and depressing rent-controlled high-rises that stood mute on the outskirts of the French capital.
Meredith leant back in her seat and let her thoughts wander. She was part way through a four-week research trip to France and the UK, writing a biography of the nineteenth-century French composer Achille-Claude Debussy and the women in his life. After a couple of years of researching and planning – but getting nowhere – she’d caught a break. Six months ago, a small start-up academic press made a modest offer for the book. The advance wasn’t great but, given that she didn’t have a reputation in the field of music criticism, it was pretty good. Enough to make her dream of coming to Europe a reality. She was determined to write not just another Debussy memoir, but the book, the biography.
Her second piece of luck had been getting a part-time teaching post at a private college outside Raleigh Durham, starting the spring semester. It had the advantage of being close to where her adoptive parents now lived – which saved on laundry, phone bills and groceries – and not far from her Alma Mater, the University of North Carolina.
After ten years of paying her way through college, Meredith had racked up a lot of debt and money was tight. But with the money she made from teaching piano, combined with the advance from the publishing company and now the promise of a regular salary, she summoned up the courage to go ahead and book the tickets to Europe.
The typescript was due with her publisher at the end of April. Right now, she was on track. In fact, ahead of schedule. She had spent ten days in England. Now she’d got nearly two weeks in France, Paris mostly, but she’d also scheduled a quick trip down to a small town in the southwest, Rennes-les-Bains. Hence the couple of days at the Domaine de la Cade.
The official reason for the detour was that she needed to check out a lead about Debussy’s first wife, Lilly, before heading back to Paris. If it had only been a matter of tracking down the first Mrs Debussy, she wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble. It was an interesting piece of research, sure, but her leads were pretty tenuous and hardly essential to the book overall. But she had another motive for going to Rennes-les-Bains, a personal one.
Meredith reached into the inside pocket of her purse and pulled out a manila envelope with DO NOT BEND printed on it in red. She slid out a couple of old sepia photographs, the corners dog-eared and bent, and a printed sheet of piano music. She looked at the now-familiar faces, as she’d done so many times before, before turning her attention to the piece of music. Handwritten on yellow manuscript paper, it was a simple melody in common time, key of A minor, the title and the date hand-printed in old-fashioned italic script at the top: Sepulchre 1891.
She knew it off by heart – every bar, every semiquaver, every harmony. The music – plus the three photos she carried with it – was the only thing Meredith had inherited from her birth mother. An heirloom, a talisman.
She was well aware the trip might turn up nothing of interest. It was a long time ago; the stories were faded. On the other hand, Meredith figured she couldn’t be worse off than she was right now. Knowing virtually nothing about her family’s past, needing to know something. For the price of the air ticket, it seemed worth it.
Meredith realised the train was slowing. The rail tracks had multiplied. The lights of the Gare du Nord were coming into view. The atmosphere in the carriage shifted again. A return to the real world, a sense of purpose at the end of a shared journey nearly over. Ties straightened, coats reclaimed.
She gathered up the photos and music, and her other papers, and slipped everything back into her purse. She took a green scrunchy from her wrist, twisted her black hair up into a ponytail, ran her fingers through her bangs, and stepped out into the aisle.
With her sharp cheekbones, clear brown eyes and petite figure, Meredith looked more like a senior in high school than a 28-year-old academic. At home, she still carried her ID if she wanted to be sure of getting served in a bar. She reached up to the luggage rack for her jacket and tote bag, revealing a tanned, flat stomach between her green top and Banana Republic denims, aware that the four guys across the aisle were staring.
Meredith put the jacket on.
‘Have a good trip, guys,’ she grinned, then headed for the door.
A wall of sound hit her the second she stepped down to the platform. People shouting, rushing, crowds every place, waving. Everybody in a hurry. Announcements were blaring out over the loudspeakers. Information about the next departure, introduced by a kind of fanfare on a glockenspiel. It was totally crazy after the hushed silence of the train.
Meredith smiled, breathing in the sights, smells, character of Paris. Already she felt like a different person.
Hoisting her bags high on each shoulder, she followed the signs across the station concourse and got in line for a taxi. The guy in front of her was shouting into his cell and waving a Gitane wedged deep between his fingers. Blue-white tendrils of vanilla-scented smoke twisted up into the night air, silhouetted against the balustrades and shutters of the buildings opposite.
She gave the address to the driver, a hotel in the 4th arrondissement, on the rue du Temple in the Marais district, which she’d picked for its central location. It was good for the regular tourist stuff if she had time – the Centre Pompidou and Musée Picasso were nearby – but mostly for the Conservatoire, and the various concert halls, archives and private addresses she needed to visit for Debussy.
The driver put her tote bag in the trunk, then slammed her door and climbed in. Meredith was thrown back in her seat as the taxi accelerated sharply into the crazy Parisian traffic. She put her arm protectively around her purse and hugged it tight to her, watching as the cafés, the boulevards, the scooters and streetlamps zoomed past.
Meredith felt she knew Debussy’s muses, mistresses, lovers, wives – Marie Vasnier, Gaby Dupont, Thérèse Roger, his first wife Lilly Texier, his second, Emma Bardac, his beloved daughter Chouchou. Their faces, their stories, their features were right there, at the front of her mind – the dates, the references, the music. She had a first draft of the biography and she was pretty satisfied with how the text was shaping up. What she needed now was to bring them to life on the page, a little more colour, a little nineteenth-century atmosphere.
From time to time, she worried that Debussy’s life was more real to her than her own day to day. Then, she dismissed the thought. It was good to be focused. If she wanted to hit her deadline, she needed to keep at it for just a while longer.
The cab screamed to a halt.
‘Hôtel Axial-Beaubourg. Voilà.’
Meredith settled the fare and went inside.
The hotel was pretty contemporary. More like a boutique hotel in New York than what she expected to find in Paris.
Hardly French at all.
It was all straight lines and glass; stylish, minimalist. The lobby was filled with blocky outsize chairs covered in black and white dogtooth check or lime-green or brown and white pinstripes, arranged around smoked-glass tables. Art magazines, copies of Vogue and Paris-Match were stacked up in brushed chrome racks on the walls. Huge, supersized lampshades hung from the ceiling.
Trying too hard.
At the far end of the small lobby was the bar, with a line of men and women drinking. Lots of toned flesh and good tailoring. Gleaming cocktail shakers stood on the slate counter; the glass bottles reflected in the mirror beneath blue neon lights. The rattle of ice and the chink of glasses.
Meredith pulled a credit card from her wallet, different from the one she’d been using in the UK, just in case she’d hit her limit, and approached the desk. The clerk, sleek in a grey pantsuit, was friendly and efficient. Meredith was pleased her rusty French was understood. She hadn’t spoken the language in a while.
Got to be a good sign.
Turning down the offer of help with her bags, she made a note of the password for wireless computer access, then took the narrow elevator to the third floor and walked along a dark passageway until she found the number she was looking for.
The room was pretty small, but clean and stylish, everything decorated in brown, cream and white. Housekeeping had switched on the lamp beside the bed. Meredith ran her hand over the sheets. Good-quality bed linen, comfortable. Lots of space in the closet, not that she needed it. She dropped her tote on the bed, took her laptop out of her purse, put it on the glass-topped desk and plugged it in to charge.
Then she went to the window, pulled back the net curtain and opened the shutters. The sound of traffic surged into the room. Down below in the street, a glamorous young crowd was out enjoying the surprisingly mild October evening. Meredith leaned out. She could see in all four directions. A department store on the corner opposite, its shutters closed. Cafés and bars, a patisserie and a deli were all open, and music filtered out on to the sidewalks. Orange streetlamps, neon, everything floodlit or silhouetted. Night-time tones.
With her elbows resting on the black wrought-iron balustrade, Meredith just watched awhile, wishing she had enough energy to go down and join in. Then she rubbed her arms, realising her skin was covered in goosebumps.
Ducking back inside, she unpacked, putting her few clothes in the closet, then headed for the bathroom. It was concealed behind a curious concertina-style door in the corner of the room, again aggressively minimalist in white ceramic. She took a quick shower, then, wrapped in a towelling robe and with thick woollen socks on her feet, poured herself a glass of red wine from the minibar and sat down to check her mail.
She got a connection fast enough, but there was nothing much – a couple of emails from friends asking how things were going, one from her mother, Mary, checking she was OK, an advertising flyer for a concert. Meredith sighed. Nothing from her publisher. The first part of the advance had been due to go into her account at the end of September, but it hadn’t come through by the time she left. It was now the end of October and she was getting jumpy. She’d sent a couple of reminders and been reassured everything was in hand. Her financial situation wasn’t too bad, at least not quite yet. She’d got her credit cards and she could always borrow a little from Mary, if absolutely necessary, to tide her over. But she’d be relieved to know the money was on its way.
Meredith logged off. She drained the last of the wine, brushed her teeth, and then climbed into bed with a book for company.
She lasted about five minutes.
The sounds of Paris faded. Meredith drifted asleep, the light still on, her battered copy of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe abandoned on the pillow beside her.
