‘Rach!’ Keeley was starting to regret bringing Rach with her. She had actually adopted a very stern expression whenever Ethan had said anything and immediately asked a zillion questions like she was a reporter asking ridiculous things at a government briefing.
‘No, it is OK,’ Ethan reassured. ‘It is a hotel I helped to begin with my best friend. I mainly worked in the background, but now they have… left the business… I want to try and ensure the hotel is… how do people say these days?’ He smiled then. ‘Being the best version of itself.’
‘The hotel we’re staying in is nice,’ Keeley told him. ‘But—’
‘You told me the menu is a little too elaborate,’ he reminded. ‘A lot of small things.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I am interested for this because… I want to improve my hotel.’
‘It isn’t just the food,’ Keeley continued. ‘It’s the way it breathes.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Rach scoffed. ‘I like the hotel. Except that Antonie on reception. He could do with changing.’
‘You are staying at Perfect Paris?’ Jeanne asked.
‘We are,’ Rach answered.
‘The way it breathes?’ Ethan queried, looking only at Keeley.
‘Look at this place,’ Keeley said, indicating the café’s surroundings. ‘This is exactly what I was talking about before. It’s like stepping inside someone’s private collection of memories. It’s almost living. It’s almost breathing.’
‘It’s full of junk really,’ Rach remarked, running a finger over a shelf as if expecting to find lint.
‘I like it,’ Jeanne said with a snotty sniff. ‘It reminds me of my aunt’s house. Her place was full of… disques vinyles.’
‘Vinyl records,’ Ethan translated. ‘To play on a… gramophone.’
‘See!’ Keeley said excitedly, raising a little in her chair. ‘Already it has given Jeanne a feeling and a memory.’ She suddenly realised her excitement and tried to taper it down. She could almost sense Rach’s lack of understanding.
‘She was a terrible cook,’ Jeanne added. ‘Once she made me chicken livers with so much garlic no one would sit next to me on the bus. When I used to get the bus.’ The girl seemed to immediately break out of her reverie when she realised everyone at the table was looking at her.
‘Well,’ Rach broke in, ‘this would never do at House 2 Home. There you always make homes clutter-free before we show potential buyers around. Minimalism, right?’
Keeley bristled slightly. ‘Actually, it’s a bit more complex than that.’ Rach only saw problems and solutions. As brilliant as her best friend was at her own job, Keeley knew she didn’t see the full and complicated picture when it came to ‘framing’ a lounge area or widening a narrow shower room. Keeley put her fingers around the coffee cup, enjoying the heat against her palm, moulding her skin to the porcelain. Right away she was imagining all the other customers who had held it in their hands. ‘It’s about creating balance,’ Keeley said. ‘Like making an instant uplifting mood from the moment the potential buyer sees the property. Starting with the kerb appeal outside, then making a welcoming front porch, a spacious entrance hall that beckons people in… and then continuing a positive flow throughout. It’s not about how much or how little there is on the shelves. It’s about the kind of things that are there and how those items might stir people.’
*
Ethan was absolutely mesmerised. He was hanging on her every word yet again, thinking how, before now, he must have travelled through life with his eyes closed tight shut. Keeley, she saw things other people missed. Here she was, describing one of his favourite eateries, and he had never really known why he liked it so much. He only knew that whatever crazy combinations it was delivering on the décor and ambience front, it always hit his buttons, pressed at his heart. The way Keeley was talking now was making this place’s soul sound like a heady mix of science meets kismet. He ached to feel even more deeply what she was selling with her words. He also wanted to know what it would feel like to hold her in his arms and allow the notion of it all to seep slowly inside of him.
‘Bleurgh!’ Jeanne blurted out, tongue poking out and eyes lolling into the back of her head. ‘It sounds like you are writing a card for Valentine’s Day.’
Bo-Bo nudged Ethan’s chair and he fell out of the spell, almost spilling coffee into the saucer of his cup.
Rach’s phone began buzzing on the table and she swiped it up, getting to her feet and moving away. ‘Sorry, I’ll have to take this.’
‘Do you want some more cake?’ Jeanne asked Keeley, proffering the plate.
‘No, thank you,’ Keeley said.
What Ethan really wanted was for Keeley to keep talking about how décor could change the way people felt, but he sensed the moment had gone. Unless, maybe, he could draw it back again…
‘Oh! Look!’ Jeanne said, standing up, bashing Bo-Bo on the nose with the corner of her jacket as she reached to the bookcase covered with flyers. Below the shelves were posters unevenly pasted to the wall. ‘There’s a circus.’
He really did need to get rid of the girl. In the nicest possible way. She had to belong somewhere. Except he suspected he already knew the answer. Most likely, she was an inmate of one of the authority-run homes or worse still an orphanage exactly like the one he had existed in. The thought of sending her back to a place like that didn’t sit well at all, but what was the alternative? To know that she was going to be curling up in a cardboard box every night? To know that she would be cold, hungry, frightened to close her eyes or even more scared not to close them? Jeanne offered him a flyer now and he felt obliged to take it.
‘Le Cirque Pinder,’ Ethan read.
‘Look at the acrobats on the horses!’ Jeanne marvelled, face hanging over the flyer in his hands.
‘I didn’t know there was a circus in Paris at Christmas time,’ Keeley remarked.
‘This circus… it is on the outside of the city,’ Ethan said.
‘You’ve been to it before?’ Keeley asked.
‘Yes, once.’
It had been one of the first outings with the Durands. One of the orphanage-approved ones before he had made his own decisions about his future. They had picked him up in their fancy car from outside the wicked building. Pierre was driving, Silvie was dressed in a bright red dress with a fur stole around her shoulders, Louis in dark smart trousers, a shirt collar visible under a jumper with garish cartoon character braces Ethan felt he should have laughed at but was secretly a little envious of. And Ferne, she had been alive with excitement that they were going to the circus and that he was being permitted to go with them. She had been dressed smartly too – a pale pink dress with a matching wrap that should have made her look the age of her mother but had instead, in Ethan’s eyes, made her look like an advertisement for everything that was good about life. Ferne had chattered all the way from the centre of the city to the big top at Boir de Vincennes. We are going to see ponies who can dance. We will laugh so hard that our stomachs ache and Louis will burst his braces. And so it had been. Alongside Ferne and Louis in their fancy attire, Ethan in ragged jeans and a jumper that was too small for him, they had eaten hot dogs with the sweetest caramelised onion atop them and watched acrobats, magicians, clowns and daredevils complete amazing tricks of sheer skill.