Sepulchre (9 page)
She raised her hand to the silver intercom, then checked herself. Meredith believed in the spirit of place. She bought into the idea that, in certain circumstances, a kind of echo of the past might remain. But here in the city, too much time had passed. Even if the bricks and mortar were the same, in a hundred years of bustling human life there'd be too many ghosts. Too many footsteps, too many shadows.
She turned her back on the rue Cardinet. She got out the map, folded it into a neat square, and went in search of the Square Claude Debussy. When she found it, it was, if anything, a bigger let-down. Ugly, brutalist six-storey buildings, with a thrift store on the corner. And there was no one about. The whole place had an air of abandonment. Thinking of the elegant statues in the Parc Monceau celebrating writers, painters, architects, Meredith felt a spurt of anger that Paris had honoured one of its most famous sons so shabbily.
Meredith headed back to the busy Boulevard des Batignolles. In all the literature she'd read about Paris in the 1890s, Debussy's Paris, it sounded a pretty dangerous place, away from the grand boulevards and avenues. There were districts - the quartiers perdus - to be avoided.
She continued on into the rue de Londres, where Gaby and Debussy had rented their first apartment in January 1892, wanting to feel something, some nostalgia, some sense of place, but getting nothing. She checked the numbers, coming to a halt where Debussy's home should have been. Meredith stepped back, pulled out her notebook to confirm she'd got the number right, and then frowned. Not my day.
In the past hundred years, it looked like the building had been swallowed up by the Gare Saint-Lazare. The station had grown and grown, encroaching on the surrounding streets. There wasn't anything here to link the old days with the new. There wasn't even anything worth photographing. Just an absence.
She crossed the street. The menu was chalked up on a blackboard on an easel on the sidewalk. The large glass windows were modestly covered by lace half-curtains so she couldn't see inside. She pushed down the old-fashioned handle and a shrill bell jangled and clattered. She stepped inside and was met instantly by an elderly waiter with a crisp white linen apron tied around his waist.
Meredith nodded and was shown to a table for one in the corner. Paper tablecloths, clunky silver knives and forks, a bottle of water waiting on the table. She ordered the plat du jour and a glass of Fitou.
The meat - a bavette - was perfect, pink in the centre and with a strong black pepper sauce. The Camembert was ripe. While she was eating, Meredith looked at the black and white photographs on the walls. Images of the quartier in days gone by, the staff of the restaurant standing proudly outside, the waiters with black moustaches and crisp white collars and the patron and his matronly wife in the centre in their starched Sunday best. A shot of one of the old trams on the rue d'Amsterdam, another modern one of the famous tower of clocks on the front concourse of the Gare Saint-Lazare.
Best of all, though, was a photograph she recognised. Meredith smiled. Above the door to the kitchens, beside a studio portrait of a woman with a younger man and a girl with a mass of tumbling hair, was a copy of one of the most famous photographs of Debussy. Taken at the Villa Medici in Rome in 1885, when he was only twenty-three years old, he glowered out of the picture with his distinctive, frowning dark expression. His black curly hair was short over his forehead, and with the beginnings of a moustache, the image was immediately recognisable. Meredith was intending to use it as the illustration on the back jacket of her book.
'He lived in this very street,' she said to the waiter, while she punched in her PIN code. She gestured at the photo. 'Claude Debussy. Right here.' The waiter shrugged, uninterested, until he saw the size of the tip. Then he smiled.
The rest of the afternoon went according to plan. Meredith worked her way through the other addresses on her list, and by the time she got back to the hotel at six, she'd visited everywhere Debussy had ever lived in Paris. She showered and changed into a pair of white jeans and a pale blue sweater. She loaded the photos from her digital camera to her laptop, checked her mail - still no money - had a light supper in the brasserie opposite, then rounded off the evening with a green cocktail at the hotel bar that looked gross but tasted surprisingly good.
Back in her room, she felt the need to hear a familiar voice. She called home.
They talked for a while. Meredith filled Mary in on everything she'd done since they'd last spoken, and all the places she'd visited already since arriving in Paris, although she was painfully aware of the dollars mounting up every minute they chatted.
'There's nothing to worry about,' Mary said, the words coming out in a rush, making it obvious how much it was on her mind. She'd always been supportive of Meredith's need to find out about her past. At the same time, Meredith knew Mary feared what might come to light. She felt the same. What if it came out that the illness, the misery that had overshadowed her birth mother's entire life, was there in the family stretching way back? What if she started to show the same signs?
Since 1989, Paris had had a new, concrete opera house at the Bastille and so the Palais Garnier was now primarily used for ballet performances. But in Debussy's time, the exuberant, over-the-top baroque building was the place to see and be seen. The site of the notorious anti-Wagner riots in September 1891, it was also the backdrop for Gaston Leroux's novel The Phantom of the Opera.
It took Meredith fifteen minutes to walk to the theatre, weaving in and out of the tourists looking for the Louvre, then all the way up the Avenue de l'Opera. The building itself was pure nineteenth century, but the traffic was strictly twenty-first - totally crazy - cars, scooters, trucks, buses and bikes coming at her from all angles. Taking her life in her hands, she dodged the lanes until she made it to the island on which the Palais Garnier stood.
It blew her away - the imposing facade, the grand balustrades, the rose marble columns, the gilded statues, the ornate gold and white roof and green copper dome glinting in the October sunshine. Meredith tried to picture the marshy wasteland on which the theatre had been constructed. Tried to imagine carriages, and women in long sweeping dresses and men in top hats, instead of trucks and cars hitting their horns. She failed. It was all too noisy, too strident to let echoes of the past slip through.
She was relieved to find that because there was a charity concert later, the theatre was open even though it was Sunday. The second she stepped inside, the silence of the historic staircases and balconies wrapped her in its arms. The Grand Foyer was just as she'd imagined from the pictures, an expanse of marble stretching before her like the nave of a monumental cathedral. Ahead of her, the Grand Escalier soared up beneath the burnished copper dome.
Looking around, Meredith walked forward. Was she allowed in here? Her sneakers squeaked on the marble. The doors into the auditorium were propped open, so she slipped inside. She wanted to see for herself the famous six-tonne chandelier and the Chagall ceiling.
Down at the front, a quartet was practising. Meredith slipped into the back row. For a moment, she felt the ghost of her former self - the performer she might have been - slide in and sit beside her. The feeling was so strong, she almost turned to look.
As strands of repeated notes soared out of the orchestra pit and into the empty aisles, Meredith thought of the countless times she had done the same. Waiting in the wings with her violin and bow in her hand. That sharp feeling of anticipation in the pit of her stomach, half adrenalin, half fear, before stepping out before the audience. Tuning up, the tiniest adjustments to the strings and bow, the shower of powdery rosin catching on the black polyester of her full-length orchestra skirt.
Mary had bought Meredith her first violin when she was eight, just after she had come to live with them for good. No more going back to her 'real' mother at weekends. The case had been waiting for her on the bed in the bedroom that was to be hers, a welcome gift for a little girl bewildered by the hand life had dealt her. A child who had already seen too much.
She had seized the chance offered with both hands. Music was her escape. She had an aptitude for it, was a quick learner and a hard worker. At the age of nine, she played in a city schools prom at the Milwaukee Ballet Company Studio at Walker's Point. Pretty soon, she was started on piano too. Before long, music dominated her life.
Her dreams of being a professional musician lasted all the way through elementary school, right up to her last year of high school. Her tutors encouraged her to apply to one of the conservatoires and told her she had a good chance of being accepted. So did Mary.
But at the last minute, Meredith flunked it. Talked herself into believing she wasn't good enough. That she didn't have what it took to make it. She applied to UNC instead to major in English and was accepted. She wrapped her violin in its red silk cloth and put it away in the blue velveteen-lined case. Loosened her valuable bows, clipped them in place in the lid. Put the block of golden rosin into its special compartment. Stood the case at the back of her closet and left it behind when she left Milwaukee and went off to college.
At UNC, Meredith studied hard and graduated magna cum laude. She still played piano in the holidays and gave lessons to the children of friends of Bill and Mary, but that was all. The violin remained at the back of the closet.
Never, during that time, did she think she'd done the wrong thing. But in the last couple of years, as she discovered the tiniest connections with her birth family, she'd started to question her decision. Now, sitting in the auditorium of the Palais Garnier at the age of twenty-eight, regret for what might have been tightened like a fist around her heart. The music stopped.
Down in the orchestra pit, someone laughed. The present came rushing back. Meredith stood up. She sighed, pushed her hair off her face, then quietly turned and walked out. She'd come to the Opera in search of Debussy. All she'd succeeded in doing was raising her own ghosts.
Trying to shake herself out of her melancholic mood, Meredith doubled back along the side of the building and headed up the rue Scribe, intending to cut up to the Boulevard Haussmann and from there to the Paris Conservatoire in the 8th.
The sidewalk was busy. All of Paris seemed to be out enjoying the golden day, and Meredith had to dodge in and out of the crowds to get through. There was a carnival atmosphere. A busker singing on the street corner; students handing out flyers for discount meals or designer clothing sales; a juggler with a diabolo shooting up and down a string suspended between two sticks, flinging it impossibly high into the air and catching it in one smooth gesture; a guy selling watches and beads out of a suitcase.
Her cell rang. Meredith stopped and dug around in her bag. A woman following right behind drove her stroller into her ankles. ' Excusez-moi, Madame.'
Meredith raised her hand in apology. 'Non, non. C'est moi. Desolee.' By the time she found the phone, it had stopped ringing. She stepped out of the way and accessed her list of missed calls. It was a French number, one she vaguely recognised. She was about to press REDIAL when someone pushed a flyer into her hand. 'C'est vous, n'est-ce pas?'
Surprised, Meredith jerked her head up. 'Excuse me?' A pretty girl was staring at her. Wearing a sleeveless vest and combats, with her strawberry-blonde and corn-braided hair held off her face by a bandanna, she looked like one of the many New Age travellers and hippies on the streets of Paris.
Meredith looked down at the brochure. Advertising Tarot readings, palmistry and psychic insights, the front was dominated by an image of a woman with a crown on her head. In her right hand she held a sword. In her left, a set of scales. Around the hem of her long skirt was a series of musical notes.
At the top of the smudged picture, Meredith could just make out the number eleven in roman numerals. At the bottom the words, 'La Justice'. She peered closer. It was true. The woman did look kind of like her. 'I can't really see it,' she said, then coloured up at the lie. Anyhow, I'm leaving town tomorrow, so . . .'
Meredith opened her mouth, and then shut it again. No sense getting into an argument. Easier to take it and throw it in the trash later. With a tight smile, she pushed the brochure into the inside pocket of her denim jacket.