The Paris Time Capsule
Read The Paris Time Capsule Online
Authors: Ella Carey
ELLA CAREY
First Published in 2014 by Charlotte Square Books
www.charlottesquarebooks.com
Copyright ©
Ella Carey Pty Ltd 2014
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being impo
sed on the subsequent purchaser.
US Kindle Edition ISBN: 0992481228 ISBN-13: 978-0-9924812-2-3
For David
and in memory of my mother
The
parcel was wrapped in brown paper and tied with a silk ribbon that remained unblemished. This was quite some feat, given the package had travelled all the way from Paris to New York. A tiny bow perched on top, its ends snipped short, almost, Cat thought, as if the person who had wrapped it was attempting to be economical. The sender’s details were written in faded sepia pen: Monsieur Gerard Lapointe, ninth arrondissement, Paris. Cat had never heard of him.
She gave the parcel a gentle shake. So
mething solid rattled inside, but as Cat reached for her kitchen scissors there was a knock on the apartment’s front door. Christian was right on time. Cat put the parcel from Paris down on the kitchen bench, picked it up again, put it back, and went to answer the door.
Christian wore
a new suit. His fair hair was slicked back, Gatsby style. “You haven’t changed yet?” He looked at his watch.
“
Do I need to?” Cat laughed.
Christian
strolled through Cat’s tiny Brooklyn apartment looking half as if he owned it, and half as if he couldn’t wait to return to the Upper West Side.
“
How about that little black dress I bought you last week?”
Cat hid her smile as Christian paused at her latest treasure, a vintage peacock
patterned shawl that she had picked up at a flea market for a song. Cat had spent hours fixing the tiny rents in the fabric, combing tangles out of its ancient fringe. Now it was draped on her red sofa.
Christian appeared to be conducting an internal debate about whether to be polite about that shawl or not.
“I had to rescue it. It was in such a state of disrepair … I suppose I could get changed.” There was no doubt that the minimalist black dress Christian had bought for her last week would blend far better with the evening ahead than the pale green nineteen forties trouser suit that Cat had chosen. She moved towards her bedroom.
Christian caught her
hand on the way. “Morgan and Adam chose tonight. The Lemon Tree. Apparently they have a new menu. But …” He adjusted his suit sleeve, glanced at his watch again.
“
We’ll be on time.” Cat slipped the new dress over her head. She handed Christian the silver necklace that he had bought her for her thirty-fourth birthday, turning her back to him and raising her honey colored hair so that he could slide the clasp together.
“
I love you in this.”
Cat turned and eyed him.
“Don’t think it’s a habit.”
“
Never.”
She dabbed some perfume on her wrists.
“A charming little parcel came in the post today. From Paris. I’m so keen to see what it is.”
Christian
held the door open. “Last time I was in Paris all I saw was the inside of the bank.”
The parcel would have to wait.
I
t was probably nothing at all.
The Lemon Tree was full, yet the elegant restaurant didn’t feel hectic at all. Cat chatted with Tash, Alicia and Morgan, all of whom were married to Christian’s oldest friends. Her hand rested in his on the table. Cat pushed thoughts of her father and what he would no doubt have to say about Christian and his successful “bourgeoisie” friends right out of her head. There was no point in worrying about Howard Jordan now.
“
You seemed distracted tonight,” Christian said as they left the restaurant together.
Cat leaned into the familiar comfort of his arm around her shoulders while they waited for
a cab. “Did I?”
“
Did you have a good time, honey?”
“
Of course.”
Outside the fog-smeared car window the city lights flew by until they reached Brooklyn.
“Do you want to come up?”
“
I have this darned early start.”
Cat kissed him on the cheek.
“You know,” he glanced out the car window at her Vespa, which was parked in its usual spot. “You should part with the scooter.”
“
Don’t be ridiculous,” Cat laughed. It had been the very first investment she had made when she had started to work.
“
It’s too dangerous. If I had my way, it’d be gone tomorrow.”
Cat went straight to the parcel from Paris. She had only visited France once, a whirlwind trip straight after college. Her time in Paris had been brief, but she had taken more than a thousand photographs during her stay. Straight afterwards she had started her job as a photographer at the same studio where she still worked now. There had been so many times when she had nearly left, but she was fortunate to have a job in these difficult times, she knew that, and every time she had been tempted to depart from the small studio, her boss had wound her back in with a string so tight and pleas so convincing that she had resigned herself to staying a little longer.
The way the bow was tied on this
parcel from France brought back memories of the sort of elegance that had enchanted Cat when she was in Paris. She slipped her scissors back in the drawer. Instead, she began to ease the pale ribbon out of its elaborate knot with the tips of her fingers; it seemed a shame to wreck the beautiful silk.
F
ootsteps sounded in the hallway outside the loft. Cat stopped, the bow half untied.
“
Honey?” Christian called through the closed front door.
Cat put the parcel back down, slow.
She smiled. “Not such an early start, then?”
Christian wen
t to the drinks cabinet that she had rescued from an old theatre sale and poured himself a whiskey.
At one o’clock in the morning Cat turned on her bedside lamp. Christian had left a while ago, and yet here she was, wide-awake. Adrenaline hurled insidious darts through her system and her mind would not slow down. She tried thinking about the dullest things she could conjure, but nothing seemed to work. There was an unopened parcel from Paris in the kitchen. She was going to have to climb out of bed and open it up.
The loft seemed colder than when
Cat was last up. She pulled aside a curtain and looked out onto the street; the empty pavement was smothered in snow. Cat wrapped her cream cardigan tighter around herself and moved over to the kitchen.
Her fingers, despite being
cold, were deft with the strange energy that had overtaken her in the night. She finished untying the ribbon, and slid her fingertips under the brown tape that bound the package together. A small cardboard box lay inside the paper wrapping.
A wind flurry caused the windows to shake.
Cat shuddered. A mug of hot chocolate was definitely required given she had been awake for so long. Cat slipped across the kitchen, poured milk into a saucepan. Stirring the warm milk in the pot seemed soothing somehow. She broke up two thick slabs of dark chocolate and watched them melt into the liquid, then poured the delicious drink into a blue and white china mug that had belonged to her mother: her sweet, sweet mother.
Cat was
determined to live the happy life that her mother must have dreamed about. Sometimes, Cat pushed aside dark thoughts as to whether she wanted such a life for her mother’s sake, or for her own. One thing was for certain; Cat’s mother would have been far happier with a kind man like Christian rather than her own opinionated and domineering father, whom her mother had, it seemed, loved desperately when she was young, only to spend the rest of her life regretting her horrible mistake.
Difficult relationships were not in Cat’s vocabulary.
She took a sip of the heavenly chocolate, put the mug down, and lifted the lid from the cardboard box. There were two things nestled inside the box: a typed letter and an old brass key.
Cat
moved across the living room to sit on her sofa, scanned the letter once and then reread it a second time. It had been typed on a typewriter. It made no sense at all.
Cat’s full name was at the top of the page: Catherine Laura Jordan. Below this, in capital letters was the name around which t
he letter appeared to revolve: the name of the woman whom Cat’s father had disapproved so deeply that he turned puce when that name was mentioned in the house: Virginia Brooke, Cat’s utterly unacceptable maternal grandmother.
The letter was formal, legal and brief. Monsieur Lapointe
, who was a lawyer based in Paris wrote that Virginia Brooke had been the sole inheritor of the estate of the recently deceased Isabelle de Florian. The estate after the passing of the late Virginia Brooke in 1983, and the subsequent passing of Virginia’s daughter, Cat’s mother Bonnie Jordan in 2003 - was now left entirely to Cat.
Cat knew that her grandmother Virginia had tr
avelled solo in Europe for several years just before the Second World War, only returning to America when her family insisted that Europe was unsafe. Virginia had remained single well past the duration, throwing herself into a lowly job in New York’s garment district in spite of her middle class family’s protests, not to mention enjoying the company of several lovers. She had married late to a far older man, Cat’s grandfather, a professor at Harvard whom Virginia by all accounts adored. She hadn’t given birth to Cat’s mother Bonnie until she was well into her forties.
Bonnie had been wonderfully neglected as a child; left to ramble about the family’s old Connecticut
farmhouse and its wild gardens alone, while Virginia and Cat’s Harvard grandfather went about their lives exactly as they wished.
As a result, Bonnie had cultivated not only a deep imagination, but an appealing sort of romantic yearning
for a real life that had captivated Howard Jordan, an ex-Harvard student of Bonnie’s father’s. Howard went on to become a history teacher with strident political and moral convictions. His sole purpose in life appeared to be to shape both Bonnie and Cat into something prosaic and suited to his own needs.
Bonnie had never mentioned that her mother knew an Isabelle
de Florian in Paris. Not once. Cat knew that Virginia had frequented Parisian cabarets and bars during the jazz age. Apparently Virginia had been party to all sorts of wild escapades in both France and Switzerland between the two world wars, but there had not been mention of an Isabelle de Florian, Cat was sure of it.
Cat had half expected,
more than half hoped that her own trip to Paris might hold a hint of something wonderful too. Instead, her own European tour had seen her careering around several countries on a crowded bus along with forty inebriated students. By the end of it, Cat decided that romance was best left in the past.
She had returned to New York, started working in the photographe
r’s studio, and just under a year ago she had met Christian. Now, she was happier than she had ever been in her life.
Paris was six hours ahead
of New York. Two hours to wait and then this mysterious Monsieur Lapointe’s office should be open for business.
Cat would be business-like
herself; she would ring Monsieur Lapointe up and she would sort the situation out. Fast.