The Girl You Left Behind

woman in a peacock-feather hat. If she had looked up from her position at
     the face creams, she would have noticed that my ears had turned pink. ‘Whatever
     suits you,’ he said, adding, ‘She has your colouring.’
    I sorted carefully through the silk scarves,
     my skin growing ever warmer, and freed one of my favourites: a fine, feather-light
     length of fabric in a deep opalescent blue. ‘This colour suits nearly
     everybody,’ I said.
    ‘Yes … yes. Hold it
     up,’ he demanded. ‘Against you. Here.’ He gestured towards his
     collarbone. I glanced at Madame Bourdain. There were strict guidelines as to the level
     of familiarity for such exchanges, and I wasn’t sure whether holding a scarf to my
     exposed neck fell within them. But the man was waiting. I hesitated, then brought it up
     to my cheek. He studied me for so long that the whole of the ground floor seemed to
     disappear.
    ‘That’s the one. Beautiful.
     There!’ he exclaimed, reaching into his coat for his wallet. ‘You have made
     my purchase easy.’
    He grinned, and I found myself smiling back.
     Perhaps it was simply relief that he had stopped staring at me.
    ‘I’m not sure I –’ I was
     folding the scarf in tissue paper, then ducked my head as my supervisor approached.
    ‘Your assistant has done sterling
     work, Madame,’ he boomed. I glanced sideways at her, watching as she tried to
     reconcile this man’s rather scruffy exterior with the command of language that
     usually came with extreme wealth. ‘You should promote her. She has an
     eye!’
    ‘We try to ensure that our assistants
     always offer professional satisfaction, Monsieur,’ she said smoothly. ‘Butwe hope that the quality of our goods makes every purchase
     satisfactory. That will be two francs forty.’
    I handed him his parcel, then watched him
     make his way slowly across the packed floor of Paris’s greatest department store.
     He sniffed the bottled scents, surveyed the brightly coloured hats, commented to those
     serving or even just passing. What would it be like to be married to such a man, I
     thought absently, someone for whom every moment apparently contained some sensory
     pleasure? But – I reminded myself – a man who also felt at liberty to stare at shop
     girls until they blushed. When he reached the great glass doors, he turned and looked
     directly at me. He lifted his hat for a full three seconds, then disappeared into the
     Paris morning.
    I had come to Paris in the summer of 1910,
     a year after the death of my mother and a month after my sister had married Jean-Michel
     Montpellier, a book-keeper from the neighbouring village. I had taken a job at La Femme
     Marché, Paris’s largest department store, and had worked my way up from
     storeroom assistant to shop-floor assistant, lodging within the store’s own large
     boarding house.
    I was content in Paris, once I had recovered
     from my initial loneliness, and earned enough money to wear shoes other than the clogs
     that marked me out as provincial. I loved the business of it, being there at eight
     forty-five a.m. as the doors opened and the fine Parisian women strolled in, their hats
     high, their waists painfully narrow, their faces framed by fur or feathers. I loved
     being free of the shadow my father’s temper had cast over my whole childhood. The
     drunks and reprobates of the 9th
arrondissement
held nofears for me. And I loved the store: a vast, teeming cornucopia of beautiful things.
     Its scents and sights were intoxicating, its ever-changing stock bringing new and
     beautiful things from the four corners of the world: Italian shoes, English tweeds,
     Scottish cashmeres, Chinese silks, fashions from America and London. Downstairs, its new
     food halls offered chocolates from Switzerland, glistening smoked fish, robust, creamy
     cheeses. A day spent within La Femme Marché’s bustling walls meant being
     privy to a daily glimpse of a wider, more exotic world.
    I had no wish to marry (I did not want to
     end up like my mother) and the thought of remaining where I was, like Madame Arteuil,
     the seamstress, or my supervisor, Madame Bourdain, suited me very well indeed.
    Two days later, I heard his voice again:
     ‘Shop girl! Mademoiselle!’
    I was serving a young woman with a pair of
     fine kid gloves. I nodded at him, and continued my careful wrapping of her purchase.
    But he didn’t wait. ‘I have
     urgent need of another scarf,’ he announced. The woman took