‘Are you all right?’
She spins round. Tim Freeland is staring at her, a brochure in his hand. She wipes briskly at her face, tries to smile. ‘I – I can’t find my way out.’
His eyes travel over her face – is she actually crying? – and she’s mortified. ‘I’m sorry. I just – I really need to get out of here.’
‘The crowds,’ he says quietly. ‘They can be a bit much at this time of year. Come on.’ He touches her elbow, and steers her along the length of the museum, keeping to the darker rooms at the edges where fewer people seem to congregate. Within minutes they are down a flight of stairs and exiting onto the bright concourse outside, where the queue to enter has grown even longer.
They stop a short distance away. Liv pulls her breathing back under control. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she says, looking back. ‘I don’t think you’ll be able to get back in.’
He shakes his head. ‘I was done for the day. When you reach the stage where you can’t see anything for the backs of people’s heads, it’s probably time to leave anyway.’
They stand there for a moment on the bright, wide pavement. The traffic crawls along the side of the river, a moped weaving noisily in and out of the stationary cars. The sun casts the buildings in the blue-white light that seems peculiar to the city.
‘Would you like a coffee? I think it might be a good idea if you sat down for a few minutes.’
‘Oh – I can’t. I’m meant to be meeting –’ She looks down at her phone. There are no messages. She stares at it, taking this in. Digesting the fact that it is now almost an hour later than when he’d said he’d be through. ‘Um … can you give me a minute?’
She turns away, dials David’s number, squinting as she peers at the traffic crawling along the quai Voltaire. It goes straight to voicemail. She wonders, fleetingly, what to say to him. And then she decides not to say anything at all.
She closes her phone and turns back to Tim Freeland. ‘Actually, I’d love a coffee. Thank you.’
Un café, et une grande crème. Even when she employs her best French accent the waiters invariably answer her in English. After the morning’s various humiliations it is a minor enough embarrassment. She drinks a coffee, orders a second, breathes in the warm city air and deflects any further attention from herself.
‘You ask a lot of questions,’ Tim Freeland says, at one point. ‘Either you’re a journalist, or you’ve been to a very good finishing school.’
‘Or I’m an expert in industrial espionage. And I’ve heard all about your new widget.’
He laughs. ‘Ah … unfortunately I’m a widget-free zone. I’m retired.’
‘Really? You don’t look old enough.’
‘I’m not old enough. I sold my business nine months ago. I’m still trying to work out what to do with my time.’
The way he says this suggests he is not particularly worried about this at all. Why would you be, she thinks, if you could spend your days wandering your favourite cities, taking in art or offering random strangers coffee? ‘So where do you live?’
‘Oh … all over the place. I do a couple of months here in the early summer. I have a place in London. I spend some time in South America too – my ex-wife lives in Buenos Aires with my two eldest children.’
‘That sounds complicated.’
‘When you’re as old as I am, life is invariably complicated.’ He smiles, as if he is well used to complication. ‘For a while I was one of those rather daft men who found it impossible to fall in love without getting married.’
‘How gentlemanly.’
‘Hardly. Who was it who said, “Every time I fall in love I lose a house”?’ He stirs his coffee. ‘Actually, it’s all fairly civil, as these things go. I have two ex-wives, both of whom are pretty wonderful women. It’s just rather a shame I never worked that out while I was with them.’
He speaks softly, his cadences measured and his words careful, a man who is used to being heard. She gazes at him, at his tanned hands, his immaculate shirt cuffs, and imagines a serviced apartment in the first arondissement, a housekeeper, an upmarket restaurant where the proprietor knows his name. Tim Freeland is not her type, and at least twenty-five years older than she is, but she wonders, briefly, what it would be like to be with a man like him. She wonders whether, to a casual onlooker, they look like husband and wife.
‘What do you do, Olivia?’ He has called her Olivia since she introduced herself. From anyone else it might sound like an affectation, but from him it sounds like old-fashioned courtesy.
She is hauled from her reverie, blushes a little when she acknowledges what she has been thinking. ‘I … I’m sort of between jobs at the moment. I finished my degree and did a bit of office work, a bit of waitressing. The usual middle-class-girl stuff. I suppose I haven’t quite worked out what to do either.’ She fiddles with her hair.
‘Plenty of time for that. Children?’ He looks meaningfully at her wedding ring.
‘Oh. No. Not for ages.’ She laughs awkwardly. She can barely look after herself; the idea of having some mewling infant dependent on her is unthinkable. She can feel him studying her.
‘Quite right. Plenty of time for all that.’ He doesn’t take his eyes from her face. ‘If you don’t mind me saying, you’re very young to be married. In this day and age, I mean.’
She doesn’t know what to say to this, so she takes a sip of her coffee.
‘I know I shouldn’t ask a woman her age, but what are you – twenty-three? Twenty-four?’
‘Not bad. Twenty-three.’
He nods. ‘You have good bones. I should imagine you’ll look twenty-three for a decade. No, don’t blush. I’m just stating a fact … Childhood sweetheart?’
‘No – more of a whirlwind romance.’ She looks up from her coffee. ‘Actually, I’m – I’m just married.’
‘Just married?’ His eyes open just a fraction wider.The question is there within them. ‘You’re on honeymoon?’ He says it without drama, but his expression is so bemused, his sudden pity so inadequately disguised, that she can’t bear it. She sees Wife, out of sorts, turning away defeatedly, a lifetime of other people’s faint embarrassment. Oh, you’re married? Your husband is where?