As strands of repeated notes soared out of the orchestra pit and into the empty aisles, Meredith thought of the countless times she had done the same. Waiting in the wings with her violin and bow in her hand. That sharp feeling of anticipation in the pit of her stomach, half adrenalin, half fear, before stepping out before the audience. Tuning up, the tiniest adjustments to the strings and bow, the shower of powdery rosin catching on the black polyester of her full-length orchestra skirt.
Mary had bought Meredith her first violin when she was eight, just after she had come to live with them for good. No more going back to her ‘real’ mother at weekends. The case had been waiting for her on the bed in the bedroom that was to be hers, a welcome gift for a little girl bewildered by the hand life had dealt her. A child who had already seen too much.
She had seized the chance offered with both hands. Music was her escape. She had an aptitude for it, was a quick learner and a hard worker. At the age of nine, she played in a city schools prom at the Milwaukee Ballet Company Studio at Walker’s Point. Pretty soon, she was started on piano too. Before long, music dominated her life.
Her dreams of being a professional musician lasted all the way through elementary school, right up to her last year of high school. Her tutors encouraged her to apply to one of the conservatoires and told her she had a good chance of being accepted. So did Mary.
But at the last minute, Meredith flunked it. Talked herself into believing she wasn’t good enough. That she didn’t have what it took to make it. She applied to UNC instead to major in English and was accepted. She wrapped her violin in its red silk cloth and put it away in the blue velveteen-lined case. Loosened her valuable bows, clipped them in place in the lid. Put the block of golden rosin into its special compartment. Stood the case at the back of her closet and left it behind when she left Milwaukee and went off to college.
At UNC, Meredith studied hard and graduated magna cum laude. She still played piano in the holidays and gave lessons to the children of friends of Bill and Mary, but that was all. The violin remained at the back of the closet.
Never, during that time, did she think she’d done the wrong thing.
But in the last couple of years, as she discovered the tiniest connections with her birth family, she’d started to question her decision. Now, sitting in the auditorium of the Palais Garnier at the age of twenty-eight, regret for what might have been tightened like a fist around her heart.
The music stopped.
Down in the orchestra pit, someone laughed.
The present came rushing back. Meredith stood up. She sighed, pushed her hair off her face, then quietly turned and walked out. She’d come to the Opéra in search of Debussy. All she’d succeeded in doing was raising her own ghosts.
Outside, the sun was now hot.
Trying to shake herself out of her melancholic mood, Meredith doubled back along the side of the building and headed up the rue Scribe, intending to cut up to the Boulevard Haussmann and from there to the Paris Conservatoire in the 8th.
The sidewalk was busy. All of Paris seemed to be out enjoying the golden day, and Meredith had to dodge in and out of the crowds to get through. There was a carnival atmosphere. A busker singing on the street corner; students handing out flyers for discount meals or designer clothing sales; a juggler with a diabolo shooting up and down a string suspended between two sticks, flinging it impossibly high into the air and catching it in one smooth gesture; a guy selling watches and beads out of a suitcase.
Her cell rang. Meredith stopped and dug around in her bag. A woman following right behind drove her stroller into her ankles.
‘Excusez-moi, Madame.’
Meredith raised her hand in apology. ‘Non, non. C’est moi. Désolée.’
By the time she found the phone, it had stopped ringing. She stepped out of the way and accessed her list of missed calls. It was a French number, one she vaguely recognised. She was about to press REDIAL when someone pushed a flyer into her hand.
‘C’est vous, n’est-ce pas?’
Surprised, Meredith jerked her head up. ‘Excuse me?’
A pretty girl was staring at her. Wearing a sleeveless vest and combats, with her strawberry-blond and corn-braided hair held off her face by a bandanna, she looked like one of the many New Age travellers and hippies on the streets of Paris.
The girl smiled. ‘I said, she looks like you,’ she said, this time in English. She tapped the leaflet in Meredith’s hand. ‘The picture on the front.’
Meredith looked down at the brochure. Advertising Tarot readings, palmistry and psychic insights, the front was dominated by an image of a woman with a crown on her head. In her right hand she held a sword. In her left, a set of scales. Around the hem of her long skirt was a series of musical notes.
‘In fact,’ the girl added, ‘she could be you.’
At the top of the smudged picture, Meredith could just make out the number eleven in roman numerals. At the bottom the words, ‘La Justice’. She peered closer. It was true. The woman did look kind of like her.
‘I can’t really see it,’ she said, then coloured up at the lie. ‘Anyhow, I’m leaving town tomorrow, so . . .’
‘Keep it anyway,’ the girl insisted. ‘We’re open seven days a week and we’re only just round the corner. Five minutes’ walk.’
‘Thanks, but it’s not my kind of thing,’ Meredith said.
‘My mother is very good.’
‘Mother?’
‘She does the Tarot readings.’The girl smiled. ‘Interprets the cards. You should come.’
Meredith opened her mouth, and then shut it again. No sense getting into an argument. Easier to take it and throw it in the trash later. With a tight smile, she pushed the brochure into the inside pocket of her denim jacket.
‘There’s no such thing as coincidence, you know,’ the girl added. ‘Everything happens for a reason.’
Meredith nodded, unwilling to prolong the one-sided conversation, then moved away, still clutching her cell phone in her hand. At the corner, she stopped. The girl was still standing in the same place, watching her.
‘You do look just like her,’ she called out. ‘Only five minutes from here. Seriously, you should come.’
CHAPTER 12
Meredith forgot all about the flyer tucked inside her jacket pocket. She returned the call that had come through on her cell - just the French travel agent confirming her hotel reservation - and rang the airline to check her departure time the following day.
She got back to the hotel at six, feeling tired and with sore feet from pounding the streets all afternoon. She uploaded the images on to the hard drive of her laptop, then started the process of transcribing the notes she’d made in the last three days. She grabbed a sandwich from the brasserie opposite at nine thirty and ate in her room as she carried on working. At eleven, she was through. Totally up to date.
She climbed in to bed and switched on the TV. She channel-surfed awhile, looking for the familiar tones of CNN, but finding only a fuzzy French flic movie on FR3, Colombo on TF1 and porn masquerading as art on Antenne 2. She gave up and read for a while instead, before turning off the light.
Meredith lay in the comfortable semi-dark of the room, her hands above her head and her toes buried deep in the crisp white sheets. Gazing at the ceiling, her mind wandered to the weekend when Mary had shared what little she knew about her birth family.
The Pfister Hotel, Milwaukee, December 2000. The Pfister was where they went for every major family celebration - birthdays, weddings, special occasions - usually just for dinner, but this time Mary had booked them in for the whole weekend, a belated treat for Meredith’s birthday and Thanksgiving, and to do a little early Christmas holiday shopping.
The elegant, understated nineteenth-century ambience, the colours, the fin de siècle style, the golden cornices, the pillars, the wrought-iron balustrades and elegant white net curtains on the glass doors. Meredith went down alone to the lobby café to wait for Bill and Mary. Sh
e settled herself in the corner of a deep sofa and ordered her first legal glass of wine in a bar: Sonoma Cutter Chardonnay - $7.50 a pop, but worth it. Buttery, holding the scent of the cask in its yellow tones.
How crazy, of all things, to remember that.
Outside, snow had been falling. Steady flakes, persistent, in a white sky, covering the world with silence. At the counter of the bar, an old lady, in a red coat and a woollen hat pulled low over her brow. She shouted at the bartender, ‘Speak to me! Why don’t you speak to me?’ Like the woman in Eliot’s The Waste Land. Her fellow guests in the bar drinking Miller Genuine Draft, and two young guys with bottles of Sprecher Amber and Riverwest Stein. Like Meredith, they pretended not to notice the crazy.
Meredith had just split from her boyfriend, so was happy to be off campus for the weekend. He was a visiting math professor on a sabbatical to UNC. They had fallen into the affair. A lock of hair pushed back from her face in the bar. Him sitting on the edge of the piano stool while she played, a hand dropped casually on her shoulder in the darkened library stacks late at night. It was never destined to go anywhere - they wanted different things - and Meredith wasn’t heartbroken. But the sex had been great and the relationship had been fun while it lasted.
Even so, it had been good to be home.
They talked most of the cold, snowbound weekend, Meredith asking Mary all the questions about her birth mother’s life and early death, all the stuff she’d always wanted to know but had been afraid to hear. The circumstances of her adoption, her mother’s suicide, the painful memories like splinters of glass she carried beneath her skin.
Meredith knew the basics. Her birth mother, Jeanette, had fallen pregnant at a tailgate party in Senior High, not even realising it until it was too late to do anything about it. For the first few years, Jeanette’s mother, Louisa, had tried to be supportive, but her swift death from cancer robbed Meredith of a reliable and stable influence in her life and things quickly deteroriated. When things got really bad, it was Mary - a distant cousin of Jeanette’s - who stepped in, until finally it became clear that, for her own safety, Meredith could not go back. When Jeanette killed herself, two years later, it made sense for the relationship to be put on a more formal basis and Mary and her husband Bill adopted Meredith. Although she kept her surname, and continued to call Mary by her Christian name, as she always had, Meredith at last felt free to think of Mary as her mother.
It was in the Pfister Hotel that Mary had given Meredith the photographs and the piece of piano music. The first was a shot of a young man in soldier’s uniform, standing in a village square. Black curly hair, grey eyes and a direct gaze. There was no name, but the date, 1914, the photographer and the place, Rennes-les-Bains, were printed on the back. The second was of a little girl in old-fashioned clothes. There was no name, no date, no place. The third was of a woman Meredith knew was her grandmother, Louisa Martin, taken some years later - late 1930s, early 1940s, judging by her clothes - seated at a grand piano. Mary explained that Louisa had been a concert pianist of some reputation. The piece of music in the envelope had been her signature piece. She played it for every encore.
As she looked at the photograph for the first time, Meredith wondered whether, if she’d known about Louisa earlier, she would have stuck with it. Not turned her back on a music career. She didn’t know. She couldn’t remember her birth mother, Jeannette, playing the piano or singing. Only the shouting, the crying, and what came after.
Music had come into Meredith’s life when she was eight years old, or so she’d thought. To discover that there’d been something there all along, lying undiscovered beneath the surface, changed the story. That snowbound weekend in December 2000, Meredith’s world shifted. The photos, the music became an anchor, connecting her to a past, one day, she knew she would go in search of.
Seven years on, she was finally doing it. Tomorrow she’d be in Rennes-les-Bains in person, a place that she’d imagined so many times. She just hoped there was something there for her to find.
She glanced at her cell. Twelve thirty-three. She smiled.
Not tomorrow, today.
When Meredith woke in the morning, her night-time nerves had evaporated. She was looking forward to getting out of town. Whatever she achieved, one way or the other, a few days R&R in the mountains was just what she needed.
Her flight to Toulouse wasn’t until mid-afternoon. She had done everything she’d intended to do in Paris and didn’t really want to start something new before going off the clock, so she stayed in bed reading a while, then got up and had brunch in the sun at her regular brasserie, before setting out to do some of the regular tourist sites.
She wound her way in and out of the shadows of the familiar colonnades on the rue du Rivoli, dodging swarms of students with backpacks and parties of tourists on the Da Vinci Code trail. She considered the Pyramide du Louvre, but the length of the entrance line put her off.
She found a green metal chair in the Tuileries gardens, wishing she’d worn something lighter. It was hot and humid, crazy weather for late October. She loved the city, but today the air seemed thick with pollution, gas fumes from the traffic and cigarette smoke from the café terraces. She thought about heading for the river to take a ride on a Bateau Mouche. She considered paying a visit to Shakespeare & Co., the legendary bookstore on the Left Bank, almost a shrine for Americans visiting Paris. But she couldn’t get the energy. Truth was, she wanted to do the tourist stuff, but without having to mix with any tourists.
Plenty of the places she might have visited were closed, so falling back on Debussy, Meredith decided to return to his childhood home in the former rue de Berlin in 1890. Tying her jacket round her hips, no longer needing the map to find her way through the network of streets, she set off. She walked fast, efficiently, taking a different route this time. After five minutes she stopped and, shielding her eyes with her hand, glanced up to get a proper look at the enamel street sign.
She raised her eyebrows. Without intending it, she’d ended up in the rue de la Chaussée d’Antin. She looked up and down the street. In Debussy’s day, the notorious Cabaret Grande-Pinte had stood at the top of the street, near the Place de la Trinité. A little further down was the famous seventeenth-century Hôtel-Dieu. And at the bottom of the street, pretty much where she was standing in fact, was Edmond Bailly’s notorious esoteric bookstore. There, in the glory days of the turn of the century, poets and occultists and composers had met to talk through new ideas, of mysticism and alternative worlds. In Bailly’s bookshop, the prickly young Debussy would never have had to explain himself.
Meredith checked the street numbers.
Straight off, her enthusiasm collapsed in on itself. She was standing right where she needed to be - except there was nothing to see. It was the same problem she’d run up against all weekend. New buildings had replaced old, new streets had expanded, old addresses eaten up by the remorseless march of time.
No. 2 rue de la Chaussée d’Antin was now a featureless modern concrete building. There was no bookstore. There wasn’t even a plaque on the wall.
Then Meredith noticed a narrow door set right back in the masonry, hardly visible from the street at all. On it was a colourful hand-painted sign.
SORTILÈGE. TAROT READINGS.
Beneath, in smaller letters: ‘French and English spoken’.
Her hand flew to the pocket of her denim jacket. She could feel the folded square of paper, the flyer the girl had given her yesterday, right where she’d put it then forgotten all about it. She pulled it out and stared at the picture. It was blurred and badly photocopied, but there was no denying the resemblance.
She looks like me.
Meredith glanced back to the sign. Now the door stood open. As if someone had slipped out when she wasn’t looking and undone the latch. She took a step closer and peered inside. There was a small lobby with purple walls, decorated with silver stars and moons and astrological symbols. Mobiles of crystals or glass, she wasn’t certain w
hich, were spiralling down from the ceiling, catching the light.
Meredith pulled herself up. Astrology, crystals, fortune-telling, she didn’t buy any of it. She didn’t even check her stars in the paper, although Mary did religiously every morning, drinking her first cup of coffee of the day. It was like a ritual.
Meredith didn’t get it. The idea that the future was somehow already there, all written out, seemed plain crazy. It was too fatalistic, too much like handing over responsibility for your own life.
She stepped back from the door, impatient with herself. Why was she still standing here? She should move on. Put the flyer out of her mind.
It’s stupid. Superstition.
Yet at the same time, something was keeping her from walking away. She was interested, sure, but it was an academic rather than an emotional interest. The coincidence of the picture? The happenstance of the address? She wanted to go in.