She lifts a thick and lustrous brow. ‘May I recommend the chocolate ganache cake with Amarena cherries? It’s a new menu item and proving very popular.’
‘Oui.’ My stomach rumbles, drawing a frown from my conservative dining companion. ‘And I’ll have a café crème, please.’
‘Won’t be long.’
‘Merci.’ I face Guillaume. ‘She’s always so jovial. It’s like she absorbs the sweetness in the air.’
As usual, he disrupts my musings with an impatient sigh. ‘Honestly, Lilou, if you poured half the effort you use to wonder about people into your business, you could expand your shop and get into the antique furniture trade.’
I reel back. ‘I couldn’t think of anything worse. Why would I take on all that work? Not to mention selling antique furniture doesn’t interest me in the slightest.’ Did Pascale’s throwaway comment about there being more value in other antiques get to Guillaume? The profit margins on the ephemera I sell may be markedly less, but it’s more valuable in so many other ways.
Guillaume does the obligatory head shake, making his disappointment known. Sure, there’s a lot more money in other avenues of antiques, but if they don’t inspire me, what’s the point? There’s no need for expansion. I’m happy in my little stall at the Marché Dauphine. Like most people, Guillaume presumes I have a lot of downtime as we’re only open three days a week in the market, but clearly that isn’t the case when I spend the other days hunting for stock and spending my nights working as Paris Cupid.
Désirée appears with my coffee and cake and my stomach rumbles its thanks. ‘Magnifique!’
‘Merci. Guillaume, yourcrêpe au jambonwill be along shortly.’
He lets out a weary sigh. ‘The bane of my life, always waiting, waiting, waiting.’
Désirée shakes her head and doesn’t play into his grumbling. ‘You’ll survive, Guillaume,’ she says as she walks away with a laugh.
He clears his throat and says, ‘You’re curious as to this unexpected visit.’ He has a faraway look in his eyes. It’s almost as if he’s talking to himself.
‘Oui.’ While I’m eager to know, Guillaume is not the type to do business over crepes and café crème, so I presume it’s a personal matter. I don’t rush him; I let the silence sit between us until he’s ready to share.
I’m halfway through my café crème when he speaks. ‘I wrote a letter. But I can’t send it.’ He casts his gaze to the table. Gone is the amiable façade of the Frenchman enjoying café life.This is aworried man who can’t meet my eye.
A wave of guilt washes over me because my urging him to join Paris Cupid is making him doubt himself like this. His melancholy is almost palpable, and I struggle with how best to support him in this moment. I pat the top of his hand while he gathers his thoughts.
I truly believe female companionship is what he needs most. A friend to dine with, attend the theatre with. All he does is work, and that’s not the French way. The workaholic ideal is abhorred here. There’s no balance, and Parisians enjoyaprèswork more than anything.
‘So you wrote the letter but you couldn’t send it because…?’ He nods and averts his gaze once more. I take a moment to decipher why he can’t look me in the eye. Ah. ‘You’re feeling guilty about Mathilde?’
‘Oui,’ he says, his voice cracking on the shortest of words.
I swallow a lump in my throat. It’s difficult to see the sadness return to his eyes as if it were just yesterday Mathilde left. This new situation has clearly reawakened a lot of memories of his beloved and reopened wounds that were once closed. What canI say to appease his guilt? When the end neared for Mathilde, she and I had many a chat about what would come next for Guillaume, and she did suggest he find a companion when he was ready. But will he believe me? She couldn’t tell him herself. She tried, but he wouldn’t listen. Talk of her impending death he outlawed completely. The head-in-sand approach was his way of dealing with it. And I understood. Death is so final, it was easier for him to pretend it wasn’t drawing near.
I take his hand across the table. ‘I don’t have to say it, do I? You already know.’
Slowly, he lifts his glassy eyes and meets mine. ‘What if she didn’t mean it?’
Is there anything more beautiful than a man who wants to keep his promise about loving her eternally for both their lifetimes? I fight back my own tears, as his fall. For a moment, we sit in these roiled-up feelings. Love and death. The cornerstones of life. I don’t want to dole out platitudes because they just don’t land in situations like this. Mathildewasa rare gem and he will always love her, but that doesn’t mean he can’t hold another in his heart too.
‘You know, Guillaume, that you can’t keep living life this way. You’re only half here. You subsist on work, and that’s no way to be. When you’re not working, or travelling for work, you hide away in your apartment. You don’t ever dine out in the evenings any more, you don’t go to the opera, the theatre, and you loved doing those things.’ I’ve invited him often enough, but he always refuses.
It strikes me, I’ve been doing the same thing. Sure, I can use the excuse that Paris Cupid is stealing my nights away, but if I’m honest, I was hiding out in my apartment before then too. Le scandalemade me feel that a bit of hibernation was in order and then I just stopped going out in the evenings altogether. Eating out alone gets a little tedious and while I have plenty offriends, I tend to catch up with them during the day when I’m crisscrossing Paris meeting suppliers.
Guillaume’s lip wobbles as he recognises the truth in what I say.
‘Hiding away is not honouring Mathilde.’ He tries to compose himself, so I continue. ‘We get one life, a short time on this merry-go-round. You’ve been incredibly lucky in love until Mathilde was called away, but that doesn’t mean thatyouhave to stop living too.’
He nods. ‘She wrote me a letter, you know, and left it inside my pillowcase.’
I smile. That’s so Mathilde. ‘And?’
‘She said I was a stubborn old man.’
We share a burst of laughter. Mathilde was not one to pull punches, especially when it came to her husband. ‘She got that right.’
