Honeymoon in Paris: A Novella by Jojo Moyes Read Free Book Online Page A

late, perhaps even absinthe. I dropped the basket with my purse and the jar of
foie gras
in the kitchen area and walked through to the washstand, where I splashed my flushed cheeks with cold water. The girl who gazed back at me from the looking-glass was a sombre creature, her mouth set in a thin line of anger, her pale cheeks lit with colour. I tried to smile, to make myself the woman Édouard saw, but she wouldn’t come. I could see only this thin, watchful woman, whose happiness felt suddenly as if it were built on shifting sands.
    I poured myself a glass of sweet wine, and drank it swiftly. And then I had another. I had never in my life drunk in the daytime before. Having grown up around my father and his excesses, I had had little appetite for drink until I met Édouard.
    As I sat there in the silence I kept hearing her words:
He will return to his old ways. The women on his canvases … there is a reason Édouard gets the images he does …
    And then I hurled the glass at the wall, my cry of anguish carrying over the sound of the splintering glass.
    I cannot say how long I lay on our bed, lost in silent misery. I did not want to get up. My home, Édouard’s studio, no longer felt like our little haven. I felt as if it had been invaded by the ghosts of his past liaisons, was coloured with their talk, their looks, their kisses.
    You must not think like this, I scolded myself. But my mind careered around like a runaway horse, headed in new and terrible directions, and I could not rein it in.
    It had begun to grow dark, and outside I could hear the man who lit the streetlamps singing softly under his breath. It was a sound I used to find comforting. I got up, vaguely planning to clear up the broken glass before Édouard returned. But instead I found myself walking towards his canvases, which were stacked along the far wall. I hesitated in front of them, then began to pull them out, gazing at each one. There was Laure Le Comte, the
fille de rue,
wearing a green serge dress, another of her naked, leaning against a pillar like a Greek statue, her breasts small and upright like halves of Spanish peaches; Emmeline, the English girl from the Bar Brun, her bare legs twisted under her on the chair, her arm trailing along its back. There was an unnamed dark-haired woman, her corkscrew curls cascading over her bare shoulder as she reclined upon a
chaise-longue
, her eyes drooping as if from sleep. Had he lain with her too? Had her slightly parted lips, painted so lovingly, been awaiting his? How could I have thought him immune to that silky, exposed flesh, those artfully crumpled petticoats?
    Oh, God, I had been such a fool. Such a provincial fool.
    And there, finally, was Mimi Einsbacher, leaning towards a looking-glass, the curve of her bare back perfectly outlined by the unforgiving corset below it, the slope of her shoulder a pale invitation. It was lovingly drawn, his charcoal line a flowing, sympathetic thing. And it was unfinished. What had he done after he had drawn this far? Had he walked up behind her, placed those great hands on her shoulders and lowered his lips to the place where her shoulder met her neck? The place that always made me shiver with longing? Had he laid her gently on that bed – our bed – murmured soft words and pushed her skirts up until she –
    I balled my fists in my eyes. I felt unhinged, a madwoman. I had never even noticed these paintings before. Now each one felt like a silent betrayal, a threat to my future happiness. Had he lain with them all? How long before he did it again?
    I sat staring at them, hating each one and yet unable to tear away my eyes, inventing whole lives of secrets and pleasures and betrayals and whispered nothings for each of them, until the skies outside were as black as my thoughts.
    I heard him before I saw him, whistling as he came up the stairs.
    ‘Wife!’ he cried, as he opened the door. ‘Why are you sitting in the dark?’
    He dropped his great coat on the bed