CHAPTER 11
The rest of the afternoon went according to plan.
Meredith worked her way through the other addresses on her list, and by the time she got back to the hotel at six, she’d visited everywhere Debussy had ever lived in Paris. She showered and changed into a pair of white jeans and a pale blue sweater. She loaded the photos from her digital camera to her laptop, checked her mail – still no money – had a light supper in the brasserie opposite, then rounded off the evening with a green cocktail at the hotel bar that looked gross but tasted surprisingly good.
Back in her room, she felt the need to hear a familiar voice. She called home.
‘Hi, Mary. It’s me.’
‘Meredith!’
The catch in her mother’s voice brought tears to Meredith’s eyes. She felt suddenly a long way from home and very much on her own.
‘How are things?’ she asked.
They talked for a while. Meredith filled Mary in on everything she’d done since they’d last spoken, and all the places she’d visited already since arriving in Paris, although she was painfully aware of the dollars mounting up every minute they chatted.
She heard the pause long distance. ‘And how’s the other project?’ Mary asked.
‘I’m not thinking about that right now. Too much to do here in Paris. I’ll get on to it when I reach Rennes-les-Bains after the weekend.’
‘There’s nothing to worry about,’ Mary said, the words coming out in a rush, making it obvious how much it was on her mind. She’d always been supportive of Meredith’s need to find out about her past. At the same time, Meredith knew Mary feared what might come to light. She felt the same. What if it came out that the illness, the misery that had overshadowed her birth mother’s entire life, was there in the family stretching way back? What if she started to show the same signs?
‘I’m not worried,’ she said, a little snappy, then felt immediately guilty. ‘I’m good. Excited more than anything. I’ll let you know how I get on. Promise.’
They talked a couple of minutes more, then said goodbye.
‘Love you.’
‘Love you too,’ came the answer from thousands of miles away.
On Sunday morning, Meredith headed for the Opéra de Paris at the Palais Garnier.
Since 1989, Paris had had a new, concrete opera house at the Bastille and so the Palais Garnier was now primarily used for ballet performances. But in Debussy’s time, the exuberant, over-the-top baroque building was the place to see and be seen. The site of the notorious anti-Wagner riots in September 1891, it was also the backdrop for Gaston Leroux’s novel The Phantom of the Opera.
It took Meredith fifteen minutes to walk to the theatre, weaving in and out of the tourists looking for the Louvre, then all the way up the Avenue de l’Opéra. The building itself was pure nineteenth century, but the traffic was strictly twenty-first – totally crazy – cars, scooters, trucks, buses and bikes coming at her from all angles. Taking her life in her hands, she dodged the lanes until she made it to the island on which the Palais Garnier stood.
It blew her away – the imposing façade, the grand balustrades, the rose marble columns, the gilded statues, the ornate gold and white roof and green copper dome glinting in the October sunshine. Meredith tried to picture the marshy wasteland on which the theatre had been constructed. Tried to imagine carriages, and women in long sweeping dresses and men in top hats, instead of trucks and cars hitting their horns. She failed. It was all too noisy, too strident to let echoes of the past slip through.
She was relieved to find that because there was a charity concert later, the theatre was open even though it was Sunday. The second she stepped inside, the silence of the historic staircases and balconies wrapped her in its arms. The Grand Foyer was just as she’d imagined from the pictures, an expanse of marble stretching before her like the nave of a monumental cathedral. Ahead of her, the Grand Escalier soared up beneath the burnished copper dome.
Looking around, Meredith walked forward. Was she allowed in here? Her sneakers squeaked on the marble. The doors into the auditorium were propped open, so she slipped inside. She wanted to see for herself the famous six-tonne chandelier and the Chagall ceiling.
Down at the front, a quartet was practising. Meredith slipped into the back row. For a moment, she felt the ghost of her former self – the performer she might have been – slide in and sit beside her. The feeling was so strong, she almost turned to look.
As strands of repeated notes soared out of the orchestra pit and into the empty aisles, Meredith thought of the countless times she had done the same. Waiting in the wings with her violin and bow in her hand. That sharp feeling of anticipation in the pit of her stomach, half adrenalin, half fear, before stepping out before the audience. Tuning up, the tiniest adjustments to the strings and bow, the shower of powdery rosin catching on the black polyester of her full-length orchestra skirt.
Mary had bought Meredith her first violin when she was eight, just after she had come to live with them for good. No more going back to her ‘real’ mother at weekends. The case had been waiting for her on the bed in the bedroom that was to be hers, a welcome gift for a little girl bewildered by the hand life had dealt her. A child who had already seen too much.
She had seized the chance offered with both hands. Music was her escape. She had an aptitude for it, was a quick learner and a hard worker. At the age of nine, she played in a city schools prom at the Milwaukee Ballet Company Studio at Walker’s Point. Pretty soon, she was started on piano too. Before long, music dominated her life.
Her dreams of being a professional musician lasted all the way through elementary school, right up to her last year of high school. Her tutors encouraged her to apply to one of the conservatoires and told her she had a good chance of being accepted. So did Mary.
But at the last minute, Meredith flunked it. Talked herself into believing she wasn’t good enough. That she didn’t have what it took to make it. She applied to UNC instead to major in English and was accepted. She wrapped her violin in its red silk cloth and put it away in the blue velveteen-lined case. Loosened her valuable bows, clipped them in place in the lid. Put the block of golden rosin into its special compartment. Stood the case at the back of her closet and left it behind when she left Milwaukee and went off to college.
At UNC, Meredith studied hard and graduated magna cum laude. She still played piano in the holidays and gave lessons to the children of friends of Bill and Mary, but that was all. The violin remained at the back of the closet.
Never, during that time, did she think she’d done the wrong thing.
But in the last couple of years, as she discovered the tiniest connections with her birth family, she’d started to question her decision. Now, sitting in the auditorium of the Palais Garnier at the age of twenty-eight, regret for what might have been tightened like a fist around her heart.
The music stopped.
Down in the orchestra pit, someone laughed.
The present came rushing back. Meredith stood up. She sighed, pushed her hair off her face, then quietly turned and walked out. She’d come to the Opéra in search of Debussy. All she’d succeeded in doing was raising her own ghosts.
Outside, the sun was now hot.
Trying to shake herself out of her melancholic mood, Meredith doubled back along the side of the building and headed up the rue Scribe, intending to cut up to the Boulevard Haussmann and from there to the Paris Conservatoire in the 8th.
The sidewalk was busy. All of Paris seemed to be out enjoying the golden day, and Meredith had to dodge in and out of the crowds to get through. There was a carnival atmosphere. A busker singing on the street corner; students handing out flyers for discount meals or designer clothing sales; a juggler with a diabolo shooting up and down a string suspended between two sticks, flinging it impossibly high into the air and catching it in one smooth gesture; a guy selling watches and beads out of a suitcase.
Her cell rang. Meredith stopped and dug around in her bag. A woman following right behind drove her stroller into her ankles.
‘Excusez-moi, Madame.’
Meredith raised her hand in apology. ‘Non, non. C’est moi. Désolée.’
By the time she found the phone, it had stopped ringing. She stepped out of the way and accessed her list of missed calls. It was a French number, one she vaguely recognised. She was about to press REDIAL when someone pushed a flyer into her hand.
‘C’est vous, n’est-ce pas?’
Surprised, Meredith jerked her head up. ‘Excuse me?’
A pretty girl was staring at her. Wearing a sleeveless vest and combats, with her strawberry-blond and corn-braided hair held off her face by a bandanna, she looked like one of the many New Age travellers and hippies on the streets of Paris.
The girl smiled. ‘I said, she looks like you,’ she said, this time in English. She tapped the leaflet in Meredith’s hand. ‘The picture on the front.’
Meredith looked down at the brochure. Advertising Tarot readings, palmistry and psychic insights, the front was dominated by an image of a woman with a crown on her head. In her right hand she held a sword. In her left, a set of scales. Around the hem of her long skirt was a series of musical notes.
‘In fact,’ the girl added, ‘she could be you.’
At the top of the smudged picture, Meredith could just make out the number eleven in roman numerals. At the bottom the words, ‘La Justice’. She peered closer. It was true. The woman did look kind of like her.
‘I can’t really see it,’ she said, then coloured up at the lie. ‘Anyhow, I’m leaving town tomorrow, so . . .’
‘Keep it anyway,’ the girl insisted. ‘We’re open seven days a week and we’re only just round the corner. Five minutes’ walk.’
‘Thanks, but it’s not my kind of thing,’ Meredith said.
‘My mother is very good.’
‘Mother?’
‘She does the Tarot readings.’The girl smiled. ‘Interprets the cards. You should come.’
Meredith opened her mouth, and then shut it again. No sense getting into an argument. Easier to take it and throw it in the trash later. With a tight smile, she pushed the brochure into the inside pocket of her denim jacket.
‘There’s no such thing as coincidence, you know,’ the girl added. ‘Everything happens for a reason.’
Meredith nodded, unwilling to prolong the one-sided conversation, then moved away, still clutching her cell phone in her hand. At the corner, she stopped. The girl was still standing in the same place, watching her.
‘You do look just like her,’ she called out. ‘Only five minutes from here. Seriously, you should come.’
