‘I would,’ Joely confirmed.
‘He’s the image of his father, Christopher. I sometimes find it hard to look at him without seeing my brother at that age and remembering …’ She broke off and went to replace the photograph on the mantelpiece. ‘We won’t talk about him today,’ she said, ‘there’s no reason to,’ and going to an upright armchair she pulled a rug over her knees and folded her hands in her lap.
‘We drove to Paris,’ she said launching straight into her story. ‘We put the car on a ferry, and when we got there …’ A hint of irony twitched at her smile. ‘The riots were more or less over, which he was very disappointed about. He’d wanted to take part, to show solidarity with the students, because he was like that, young and revolutionary, or anti-establishment in spite of his family … Anyway, it didn’t stop us from having a good time. He never let anything get in the way of that. He’d rung ahead to book us into a small pensione on the Left Bank … It was on quite a famous street called Rue Mouffetard. Do you know it?’
Joely shook her head.
‘I believe that even now it’s still full of cafés, food shops, bistros … Typical bustling Parisian life. There was a wonderful market, I recall, with every type of fruit and vegetable you can imagine, and the colours … They were so bright they hardly seemed real, and the smells coming from the many food stalls made you permanently hungry. Naturally there was the obligatory Frenchman in striped shirt and beret playing the accordion on the street corner, and onion sellers. They seem like clichés now, but back then they were everywhere. We looked down on it all from our pensione window waving out to people if they glanced up, while doing things to one another out of sight below the sill that excited us tremendously. I expect you can imagine the kind of things and if we do decide to keep this in I hope you’ll leave the reader in no doubt as to what they were.’
Certain she’d be leaving that task for the second draft, Joely simply pretended to note it.
‘We were Monsieur et Madame Bardot,’ Freda continued joyfully. ‘We were there for the weekend before travelling south to continue our honeymoon on the Riviera. I don’t recall anyone regarding us suspiciously, I was mature for my age and we were in Paris, the city of love. We were welcomed by all and treated to copious amounts of cheap red wine in smoke-filled cafés where old men played bezique or dominoes, and l’Anglais, as they called him, struck up tunes on dusty pianos. He sang in French, all the classics by Edith Piaf of course and everyone joined in. “La Vie en Rose”, “Je Ne Regrette Rien”, “La Foule”. One night in our room he taught me the words to “I Love Paris in the Springtime” and the next day we went back to our favourite café and sang it together. In English, obviously – the French would have been too difficult for me – but everyone seemed to know it anyway, and even if they didn’t they hummed and swayed and asked us for encore after encore.
‘We saw the sights, lay on the grass in the Jardin du Luxembourg, and ate oysters at Le Train Bleu. Once we had sex in an alley close to Montmartre. I made it happen. I loved to take those risks, to feel the warm night air on my skin and know that I was driving him so wild with desire that he’d do anything to please me.’ She tilted her head as though considering that for a moment, and added, ‘Yes, he really was willing to do anything, and of course it was the same for me. Our love was becoming deeper and bigger and more consuming by the day. As Madame Bardot I was his wife and I knew that as soon as we could make it a reality we would, except I would be Mrs Michaels.’ She smiled. ‘It doesn’t have quite the same ring, does it, but it meant everything to me. It was all I wanted, all I ever thought about.
‘One morning he took me to an antique market. I forget where it was exactly, it could have been Les Puces de Saint-Ouen, but I can’t be sure. He bought me a small, art deco style moonstone ring and said that every time we looked at it we’d remember our wonderful first trip to Paris.’
Realizing she was more inside the memory than the present, Joely let several minutes pass before she said softly, ‘Do you still have it?’
Coming out of her reverie, Freda took a breath and shook her head. ‘I’m afraid not. It … I can’t remember what happened to it.’ She got up and paced over to the window where she stood staring out at the chill sunny day. Her arms were folded in front of her, and her shoulders seemed stiff with tiredness.
‘So what do you think?’ she asked without turning around. ‘Should Paris make the final cut, or do we drop it?’
Although virtually nothing had happened to make it worthy of inclusion Joely could sense how precious those days were to her client, so she said, ‘It’s a very romantic interlude, and everyone loves romance, especially one set in Paris.’
Freda nodded and when she turned around she was smiling. ‘I’ve probably made it sound as much of a cliché as the accordion players and onion sellers,’ she said, ‘but that’s what we do with memories that hold a special place in our hearts, isn’t it? We want to present them in a way that will make everyone love them as much as we do, or envy them, perhaps, or even doubt them for their perfection. It doesn’t matter. There was a trip to Paris, a lot of wine was drunk, many songs were sung in cafés, and dances danced on the banks of the Seine – and our love-struck fifteen-year-old who’d drawn everything into her passionate embrace with all the naïvety of her age never spared a single thought for what could go wrong.’
‘But it did go wrong?’
‘Not there, in Paris. Paris was perfection provided we discount the petty jealousy that made me try to stop him from phoning his mother to wish her a happy birthday. He made it, of course – he had no time for jealousy – and the abominable child sulked until he persuaded her to make up the way they always did.’
Joely said, ‘Had you felt jealous of his family, or anyone else before that?’
Freda shook her head. ‘Oh, the girls at school,’ she admitted dismissively, ‘all that ridiculous flirting … I don’t think they realized how foolish they made themselves, but they’re not important. We’ve moved on to the summer and Paris – and all that followed …’ She stopped, as if unsure how to continue. Her memories were obviously going to a darker place for the frown between her eyes deepened even as they filled with tears. ‘When we got back,’ she said softly, ‘it was two weeks later, he … he told me something … I didn’t want to believe him, but I could see it was true, and so I …’ she swallowed hard, ‘I did something so terrible …’
Joely waited, knowing better than to interrupt now.
Freda shook her head. ‘When you think back to yourself at the age of fifteen,’ she said, ‘does that girl feel like someone you know? Or does she feel like a stranger?’
Joely gave it some thought and realized that perhaps she didn’t identify with her younger self quite as closely as she might have expected. She’d grown, changed, her ideas and ambitions were different, she was less opinionated, she hoped, and less naïve. She simply wasn’t that person any more.
‘When I think of what happened,’ Freda said quietly, ‘when I view it from a distance of these many years it almost feels like a fictional story, that she is a character I’ve made up … I don’t want her to be me; it’s easier to imagine her as someone separate, to talk about her that way …’ She continued to gaze out of the window, not moving, not even raising a hand to wipe away a tear that fell onto her cheek. In the end she said, ‘When I tell you what she did you will judge her, you will judge him too because what he did was also terrible. You will listen and then you will understand why I can never forgive her for what happened, why all these years later I still hate her and I will never stop.’