- - -
Claire wasn’t sure she could make it to the top floor. Mme. LeGuarde had invited her to see the hideous garages that had been built when they’d sold off the garden—a heartbreak she clearly wasn’t over—and she’d had enough trouble managing that. But she didn’t want to let Anna down or to worry her. Tomorrow Thierry wanted to take her back up the Eiffel Tower one last time. She would think about that when she got there. Now all she wanted to do was take enough morphine in the bathroom to get her through the next half hour. Then the next. Then the next.
- - -
“GREETINGS!”
The entire apartment was covered in draped material, and Sami had a manic look in his eye and a mouthful of pins. A grumpy, short, fat man was standing with a large cummerbund swathed around his middle.
“It’ll be ready! It’ll be ready!”
The man looked at his watch.
“Five hours till the dress.”
“Oh shit!” said Sami. “Darling, have you got any dexedrine?”
“Yes, Sami,” I said. “Of course I have dexedrine.”
He was so caught up he missed my being sarcastic for a couple of seconds, then remembered his manners and apologized to Claire.
“Forgive me, we are on tonight. The grand dress rehearsal. It will all be fine.”
“Ow,” said the man, as Sami pricked him with a pin.
“And you are all coming?”
“Uhm,” I said.
“You are coming! Of course! To the opera house!”
“Oh, I’m not sure…”
“You are not sure?” said Sami. “These performances have been sold out for months. They will be attended by the president, by the Prince of Monaco, by everyone who is anyone in le tout Paris, and you get offered a sneak preview for free?”
Claire spoke up. “Which opera is it?”
“La Bohème,” said the young man. “And I am Rodrigo, and I should be warming up my voice right now.”
“Oh!” said Claire, then glanced at me. “I love that opera.”
I’d never been to an opera in my life; all I knew was that song from the football. Suddenly the man, who was the most unprepossessing young gentleman I’d ever seen, opened his mouth.
Even Sami stopped moving. The sound that came from him was as thick and rich as Thierry’s chocolate. It was melting and dreamy. He sang just a fragment—I couldn’t even understand the words, but the swoop of his voice filled the house to the rafters. An expression of calm began to spread over Claire’s features.
“Okay,” I said quickly. “We’ll come.” I turned to Claire. “If you’re up to it?”
“If you could take me back to the hotel now for a little nap,” said Claire, “I can’t think of anything I’d like more.”
Thierry and Laurent met us in the lobby, both wearing dinner jackets and bow ties, Thierry’s looking rather baggy around the neck, Laurent’s looking very hired and utterly gorgeous. “It’s only a rehearsal,” I said, but I was delighted nonetheless. Claire was wearing a very simple gray wrap that did its best to make her terrible weight loss look chic. I was wearing a present from Claire; it had been a total surprise. She’d looked a bit nervous back in the hotel room but said she thought it might fit me now (I must have lost weight, I could tell by the way she said it). It was old, but it might pass for vintage, and if I didn’t like it not to worry, she didn’t know much about style these days.
But when I saw the dress, I did love it straight away; it had little daisies around the hem and though I had thought it might be a bit young for me—I was no spring chicken after all—in fact, the cut and the shape of it were so sophisticated it worked perfectly and showed off my light summer tan. It was the nicest dress I’d ever worn, and I could tell by Claire’s face when I put it on that she thought it suited me too.
- - -
Claire hadn’t even understood why she’d brought the dress in the end, until she saw Anna’s eager face, flushed and clearly in love and so happy. If she had been prone to thinking a lot of herself, Claire would have been proud that she’d sent her here.
The nap had helped a little, but nothing much. She could no longer hold down food; she’d pretended to eat lunch while Anna was out of the room. She hadn’t needed to go to the bathroom all day either. “If you can’t go,” her doctor had said, “that’s a sign. Hospital, double quick. No messing.”
“Yes, doctor,” she said.
And now she was running on fumes, she knew. It was odd, as if her body was giving up like an old boiler, or a car, one bit at a time, just gently shutting down.
She turned her face to Anna, who suited the dress well, but whose face was so brimming with happiness and excitement she would have looked lovely in a sack. She was lovely.
- - -
“Lovely,” she said briskly, and nothing more, and I made up her face for her and put some mascara on the two baby lashes she had growing and some pale pink lipstick, and we looked at each other in the mirror and she said, “Well, I guess this is as good as it’s going to get,” and we quickly hugged each other.
Laurent’s face lit up when he saw me, and Thierry made a sharp intake of breath and glanced at Claire in a way that made me think he might have seen the dress before. Then I got one of the hotel staff to take a picture on my phone, and Laurent was holding Claire up out of her wheelchair and tickling me, and he held us and we burst out giggling at the exact same moment as the flash went off.
- - -
There were absolutely loads of people there for the dress rehearsal and all of them were studiously dressed down in a way that said, “We are totally music professionals who only care about the art of it and not the silly fripperies,” but we didn’t care. Sami had arranged good seats for us in the middle of the stalls by dint of putting a huge turquoise roll of cloth over the top, and Thierry insisted on bringing a box with sandwiches and a bottle of champagne in a cool flask. I tutted at him and said Alice would kill him, and he smiled and said it was a very special one off and popped the cork as the tuning up finished and the lights started to fade.
I thought, I will be totally bored at this. I won’t get it and it will be obvious to everyone that I’m just dumb Anna Trent from Kidinsborough, average student, speaks French like a Spanish cow, likes Coldplay.