‘I always forget how beautiful Paris is,’ said Jules, her eyes alive, rather than glazed, as she drank in the city. She hadn’t taken her phone out of her bag all through dinner, which Nina took as a good sign. It was working, the magic of Paris was having an effect. Paul was right.

5

Paris, 2008

Part One: The Day Before the Wedding

Jules stepped on to the concourse at the Gare du Nord, still in her suit, and felt unexpected relief rush through her. She’d told herself she didn’t want to come, felt guilty to be away from home for the weekend, but as she clipped through the station, absorbing things she had forgotten but that were as familiar as an old friend – like the jingle that preceded an announcement over the tannoy, the rush of people, snatches of French words and conversation – she felt herself breathe properly for the first time in months. She was in Paris! She spent all her weekends at her parents’ these days. They’d downsized, fortuitously shortly before her father had had his stroke, moving from their large house outside Guildford to a smaller house further south. Whereas once her mother had taken great pride in her interiors, the new house was shabby, the effort of taking care of her father clearly sapping all her mother’s energy.

Jules tried to make herself useful when she was there, but she felt like an intruder in her mother’s kitchen – It doesn’t go there, Julia! No, not like that! Use this! – so mainly she sat with her father, reading out who was racing that day and taking the merest grunt or flicker from him to be an intention that she should place a bet on his behalf. He’d always liked a flutter on the horses – just a little one – and it seemed so cruel to Jules that he had been robbed of this last pleasure. They’d watch the race together, her cheering on whichever horse she thought her father would have picked to avoid the tears pricking her eyes, the memory of being a small girl watching the races with her father neck and neck beside her. Occasionally, her mother would enter the room, tut and leave, but Jules was sure she was doing some good when Jabbers Gut won a race and her father very slowly and deliberately moved his hand on to her knee. She felt the faintest pressure as he tried to give her knee a squeeze, before promptly falling asleep. She sat there with him for hours, not wanting to move, conscious of the passing of time, that the window of opportunity for moments together was getting smaller and smaller, the shutters coming down on her father’s life. He’d always seemed so vibrant, it didn’t seem possible.

She would have stayed, missed the wedding, but her mother insisted she go. Insisted was a polite way to put it: she reminded Jules that her brother, William, was coming home that weekend with his tedious alpha-mum wife, Gilly, and son Jasper, and there wouldn’t be room for her anyway. Will and Gill and Jasper, she grimaced, recalling their home answering machine. Her mother would be in her element, doting on the three of them in a way she never had with Jules.