Paris: The Novel

taking you to the opera as soon as I return in September.”

    The apartment was quiet when she returned. Claire was still not back. After she had prepared for bed, Marie told her lady’s maid that she and the other servants should go to sleep and that she’d let her daughter in herself.
    She was looking forward to hearing about the Ballets Russes from Claire. Diaghilev and his company had decided to stage
Le Train bleu
for the Olympics, and it had opened just four weeks ago at the Théâtredes Champs-Élysèes, which lay below the great avenue, near the river. All Paris knew about the huge front cloth that Picasso had painted for it, of two strangely ungainly women running on a beach.
    Claire could be relied upon to give a vivid description of the performance.
    An hour passed. Marie supposed that her brother had either taken the young people out to a restaurant, or was giving them a drink at his apartment. She decided to telephone him.
    When he picked up the receiver, he sounded half asleep.
    “I was looking for Claire,” she said.
    “Oh. They went for a drink with friends. Americans.”
    “Where?”
    “How do I know?”
    “You let Claire go out with a young man, to God knows where, in the middle of the night?”
    “Look, Marie … She’s a young woman now.”
    “She’s a respectable young woman. Do you remember what they are like?” she shouted down the line. “But I was forgetting,” she added bitterly, “you never knew any respectable girls in the first place.”
    “What do you want me to do?”
    “Look after her. Return her to me. Not let her go off with a young man in the middle of the night. You have no sense of responsibility,” she cried in exasperation. “You never had.”
    “Well, there’s nothing I can do now, anyway.” He sounded guilty, but bored as well, which only infuriated her more.
    She hung up.
    And then she waited. After a while, she opened the window of the salon, which gave out onto a small balcony where she could see up and down the street. Paris was silent. Now and then someone appeared in the lamplight, but it seemed that the city had gone to sleep.
    Were they in a bar or nightclub? The night was warm. Were they walking along the Seine, or out on one of the bridges? Was young Frank’s arm around Claire? Was he kissing her? Or worse, had they gone back to his lodgings? Would he do such a thing? Of course he would. He was a young man.
    She wanted to run into the street and save her daughter. And perhaps she might have gone out, if she had any idea where they might be.
    She pictured Frank Hadley, his tall frame and unruly mane of hair, so exactly like his father. She imagined his eyes in the darkness.
    And then, despite herself, she was assailed by a terrible sensation. It caught her by surprise and took hold over her before she even knew it was happening.
    She wanted Frank Hadley.
    Was it young Frank, or his father? She could hardly say. The other evening at her brother’s it had seemed that the Frank she knew had suddenly walked in from the past. Now it felt as if her old self had reappeared, as if the layers that made up her personality had been peeled back to the girl she’d been a quarter century ago, who had now emerged, hardly changed from what she had been before.
    The shock she had felt when she saw Frank had now turned into something else. A terrible longing.
    Desire. Jealousy. She wanted him for herself.
    Could one be two people at the same time? It seemed she could. As a mother, she wanted to protect her daughter from Frank Hadley. But when she thought of them together, she wasn’t a mother anymore. She was a woman whose rival is trying to steal her lover. She felt ready, almost, to physically attack her. But first, she had to know.
    Was Claire her rival? And how far had it gone?
    She was sitting on the sofa in this confused state when she heard a sound at the door. She moved quickly to the hall. The front door opened. It was Claire.
    “Are you all right?”
    “Yes, I’m fine.” She looked pale. “I drank too much.”
    “It’s so late. I was worried about you.”
    “I’m fine.” Claire closed the door.
    “You came home alone?”
    “No. They brought me to the door.”
    “They?”
    “Frank and his friends.”
    Was she telling the truth? Marie wanted to run back to the balcony to see if they were down in the street, but didn’t feel she could.
    “So long as you’re all right,” she said.
    But the next day she warned her daughter that she