The old woman on the train didn’t look like the kind of person who had a secret burning darkly, deep inside her chest. The kind of secret that twisted itself around the heart, squeezed tighter than a fist, ready to burst.
But she did.
One that, if she only dared whisper it aloud, would cause more than a few of the strangers around her to gasp, even now, after all these years.
Strangers who might never have imagined such a thing hiding behind the worn face of the woman sitting by the rain-lashed window, clasping a burgundy cashmere shawl to her neck, her fingers red and gnarled and painful in the sudden snap of cold weather.
The young don’t think about the old that way. They don’t see the scars time has left behind, the heartache, the joy. They only see the blank face of old age.
Certainly, the young woman with dark hair, tired eyes and a bulging laptop bag bouncing against her hip, who’d offered to help stow the old woman’s suitcase in the luggage rack overhead, didn’t stop to think of her in that sense. If she thought of her at all, it was merely as someone in need of a helping hand, perhaps, or someone less likely to object to her taking the available seat next to her, where she planned to go over her notes for the talk she would be giving the following day, in relative peace. Vowing as she did every week that it was time to look for a different job.
The old woman’s suitcase was cobalt blue and old-fashioned, the kind covered in stickers of faraway places. The young woman swung her glossy hair over her shoulder, setting her teeth while she hefted the suitcase into the available space above their heads, using an elbow for traction as it began to slip, almost regretting her offer of help when the suitcase nearly came crashing down on her head. She muttered a curse, and then cleared her throat when the old woman looked at her with a frown, making an awkward attempt to get up and help. ‘I’ve got it, don’t worry,’ she said, forcing a smile.
At last she heaved the case up, wedging it between a large tin of chocolates and a grey duffel bag, and sat down, blowing out her cheeks, which had grown pink from the exertion. ‘That was heavier than it looked – don’t tell me you’re fleeing with the last of the Romanov jewels?’
The old woman’s green eyes brightened. ‘Just my memories. They are heavier the older one gets. Particularly when you frame them.’
The young woman laughed, showing very even, white teeth.
Around them people were still boarding the train from Moscow, glasses fogging in the sudden warmth of the interior, wheeling suitcases behind them, their faces showing the spectrum of excitement and resignation that marked most travellers facing a long train journey ahead of them, with this one coming to its end in Paris.
A recorded voice came over the loudspeaker, announcing that the train would be departing in the next few minutes.
The young woman settled into her seat, then rubbed her neck, a casualty of the brick-like pillows at the drab hotel they’d put her up in near the Moscow office. She opened her laptop and took out her headphones, which she was planning to use to drown out any distractions while she concentrated on her work; but then she frowned, curious despite her better intentions, as she considered the old woman’s words, and turned back to her, a question on her lips. ‘You travel with your photographs?’
The woman nodded, and a loose strand of powdery white hair slipped out of the chignon at the nape of her neck, which she tucked behind an ear, her hand shaking slightly. Her nails were filed into rounded ovals, the colour of pearl. There was a faint trace of perfume, floral, pleasant and expensive.
‘I like to keep the people I have loved close to me, wherever I go.’
Whatever flippant remark the young woman had intended – along the lines of a suggestion that the old woman consider going digital in future – died before they could leave her mouth, as the older woman’s words touched something inside: the barren pain of missing someone you may never see again, all too real since her mother had passed away two years before. She sucked her bottom lip, as if to tuck the emotion back in, and said instead, ‘I can understand that – home wherever you go, that’s… lovely.’
The old woman nodded. ‘It’s not quite the same as the real thing, though. I suppose that’s why I’m going back to Paris now, after all these years. I can’t quite believe it myself.’
The young woman detected the trace of an accent, English mixed with something else, possibly French. ‘Home is in Paris?’ she asked. ‘I’m Annie, by the way.’
‘Valerie,’ said the old woman, with the kind of smile that transformed some faces, showing the young person hiding beneath the passage of time. Then she answered Annie’s question. ‘Yes, Paris is home, I suppose. Though I’ve spent most of my life away from it. I’ve been travelling these past few years now, since my husband died. I always wanted to see Russia, and thought, well, why not now? Though I went all over first. Prague, Istanbul, Morocco… but yes, Paris is always home when I think of it. Funny how that works, isn’t it?’
Annie shrugged a shoulder. ‘I’ve never lived anywhere else, so home for me is always a little house in the Kentish countryside. Makes it easier, I guess, when it’s all you’ve ever known. I can’t imagine actually living in Paris, it seems incredible to me. Baguettes any time you want, croissants, cafes spilling onto cobbled streets, the fashion…’ She sighed, eyes alight picturing the romance of living in the City of Light – and love. ‘I’ve always wanted to find the courage to move there. Maybe one day…’
The old woman nodded. ‘I couldn’t imagine living there either when I was around your age, when I moved there by myself. I was terrified, actually, and I didn’t feel like I could ever fit in – I wasn’t exactly fashionable. I was an assistant librarian… alas, to the core, clunky brogues and corduroys, mostly.’
Annie grinned. ‘That’s fashionable now – nerdy chic?’
Valerie chuckled, a throaty sort of laugh that belied her age.
‘So what made you decide to move to Paris then?’ asked Annie.
The old woman’s fingers played with a signet ring on her left hand.
‘I wanted to know who my family were, rather desperately, and that need was stronger than the fear, in the end.’
The train started to move, and the station whooshed past in a grey and blue blur, from men and women scurrying to their destinations, to the sudden shock of green and gold of the countryside. An announcement came over the loudspeaker that refreshments were available in the middle carriage, with a selection of hot and cold meals.
Annie was dying to hear more, but she saw Valerie look towards the back and guessed, ‘Coffee? I can get us both some.’
‘That would be lovely,’ said Valerie, opening her purse and handing her a note. ‘Black, please. My treat.’
‘Thanks very much,’ said Annie.
As Annie navigated her way past people’s elbows and knees, in desperate need of a caffeine fix, Valerie thought about the past. How could she not, when that’s what this trip was about after all? She’d finally be back where it had all started, where her whole life had changed, after all these years.
There was a part of her that couldn’t help feeling the same trepidation she’d felt as a young woman when she’d first made a trip, similar to this, over forty years before. She twisted the ring again, a garish thing made of brass and bad taste, a nervous habit she couldn’t break.
Annie came back, handing her a Styrofoam cup filled with steaming black coffee, just as she’d asked, then looked at the ring Valerie had been twisting, but didn’t comment.
Seeing where Annie’s gaze had fallen, Valerie gave a small, wry shrug. ‘It was my grandfather’s, once upon a time, it’s horrid really, but I love it all the same because it was his,’ she said with a small hollow laugh, taking a sip of the coffee.
Annie closed her laptop and sipped her coffee too. She was curious about the woman sitting next to her, despite her good intentions to go over her work – she was diverting, to say the least. She’d always had a fascination with people and their stories; sometimes she couldn’t help herself, like now.
‘You said earlier that the reason you went to Paris was to meet your family? They were French?’
Valerie nodded. ‘We were separated by the Second World War, when I was just a child. I was taken to live with a distant relative in England – I was told that it was for my safety. I was never reunited with my real family, not until well after I was a grown woman.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Annie, who couldn’t imagine how awful that must have been.
Valerie shrugged. ‘Just another casualty of war, I suppose. What so many men have failed to realise after waging all these wars is that there are no real victors in the end, not really – there are only casualties, and they keep coming long after the battle has passed. I was in my twenties when I found out that my family were still alive. Well, one member was anyway.’
‘You didn’t know?’ gasped Annie.
‘I had no idea. I was told they were dead. I was raised by my mother’s cousin. For the purposes of avoiding too much confusion, I was told to call her “Aunt Amélie”. She’d married an Englishman during the war, my uncle John, and I went to live with them. I was told that there was no one else alive, after my mother died, apart from Amélie. When I turned twenty, she felt that I deserved to know the truth. It is only now that I am old that perhaps I have begun to understand why they did what they did. How they thought that the lie would spare me the pain.’
Valerie sighed sadly.
‘For some, the truth is a burden. Something that can never be restored once unleashed – a Pandora’s box – but for me it was the opposite. It was an anchor to the past, providing me with a sense of belonging, even if it was a painful one to bear.’
Annie put her headphones down. Discarding them next to her laptop, she had a feeling then that she wouldn’t be opening it for the remainder of the journey.
‘So you decided to go to Paris to find your family? To find out why it had been kept a secret that they were still alive?’
Valerie nodded. ‘It was 1962, and though it’s been many years now, I can still remember where I was sitting when I boarded the train from Calais. I didn’t have the window seat then,’ she said with a small laugh. ‘There was snow in the air, and all I could hear were Amélie’s words going through my head. Don’t do it, Valerie. Don’t do this, please. But I had to.’
‘She didn’t want you to go and find them – even after she told you about them?’ asked Annie with a frown. ‘Why?’
Valerie twisted the ring. ‘It was more that she didn’t want me to be disappointed – I’d been given up, after all. She didn’t want me to expect some fairy-tale reunion. Didn’t want me to open a wound that might never close. But I wasn’t after the fairy tale. Just the truth. I had to find out why they did what they did. Why they had sent me to a strange country to be raised by someone else – a stranger, really, even if we were distantly related.’
The train sped along, and Annie was swept along with it by the old woman’s words, hurtling through the khaki and gold countryside, and into the past.
Paris, 1962
The whistle blew as the train slid into the station in a billow of fog and cold. Valerie craned her neck to see out of the window, past the woman seated next to her.
Paris.
She couldn’t believe she was here, that she’d gone through with it in the end.
Well-heeled passengers stretched lazy limbs and put on the coats, scarves and hats they’d abandoned hours earlier in Calais.
An old woman muttered, ‘Névé.’ Snow: she could smell it in the air.
Valerie shivered in her borrowed coat, though it was nerves more than cold that made her shake.
She was a slight figure, made more so by the heavy tweed coat that draped beyond her toes, shapeless as a tent, and still smelling of Freddy from when he’d slung it about her shoulders. She breathed it in, the mixture of aftershave and something that was always, somehow, home. Before she’d boarded the ferry, he’d put his head against her forehead, and said, ‘You don’t have to do this – you know that, right? We could have our own adventure here, just you and me?’
She’d nodded, a lump in her throat, because she had to go. If she didn’t do it now, she never would.
Valerie closed her eyes. Thinking of Freddy wouldn’t help now. Beneath the shapeless coat, she wore the thin, rose pink cardigan with the hole by the left elbow, and the faded pearl buttons that Aunt Amélie had sewn onto it when she was thirteen. She hadn’t worried about its lack of style, till now.
She took down from the luggage hold her aunt’s old suitcase, which was tied with string to keep it from bursting open. Across from her a woman, with a silk scarf expertly knotted at her throat, looked her up and down, seeming to bookend her worn cloak and clunky brown brogues with something akin to pity. Valerie looked away, touched the folded letter in her coat pocket, felt the sharp point of the envelope – which had turned into a softened round crease from her worrying fingers – and drew courage; this was why she was here. She hadn’t had time to assemble something fashionable, not that she had the money for such things. Times had been tough lately.
She raised her chin slightly, then opened up her suitcase, slipped off the coat and put on an extra jumper, and wound a hand-knitted scarf around her neck. If there was snow, then she would be prepared for it. Even if she wasn’t prepared for anything else.
He’d sent a map, along with the letter. It was thoughtful of him to do it; later she’d realise just how out of character it was too. Though it stabbed her heart a little to think that the closest living blood relative she had would need to send a map for her to find him.
Still, after today, they would be reunited. That was what mattered most.
The job would help. She was luckier than most. Besides, the advertisement had said that no experience was necessary, just a love for books. Well, that was her, wasn’t it? As a trained librarian and former bookseller, Valerie had escaped into books the way some women escaped into the arms of men: headfirst, and without a life jacket.
Amélie’s words rung in her head, even now. ‘But Valerie. This isn’t like a story from one of your books. I’m not sure how he will react when he finds out. Vincent Dupont has always been a mercurial man. He may not respond in the way you hope, when he finds out that you’ve come.’
I. . .
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