It Felt Like A Kiss

Chapter Twenty-six




It always amazed Ellie that she could get on a train in London and arrive in Paris. Not Bath or Leeds but a city in another country where they spoke a different language. As she looked out of the window of the taxi that was taking her to Le Marais, the old Jewish quarter now beloved of hipsters, fashionistas and artists with trust funds, the wide avenues, elegant Hausmann buildings, even the street signs painted on deep blue plaques edged in green, looked exotic and exciting.

Originally, Ellie hadn’t been excited about coming to Paris. As the train had plunged into the Channel Tunnel and hurtled out of it into countryside that didn’t look like the rolling green fields of England any more, she had felt her spirits sink lower and lower. It was all very well running away to Paris to escape her many problems but they’d still be waiting for her when she got back.

It certainly hadn’t helped that she’d been compelled to buy every single celebrity magazine that the newsagents at St Pancras had to offer and had spent an hour poring over pap pictures of herself and reading a detailed breakdown of her beauty regimen. (Her hairdresser had revealed that Ellie ‘would rather risk cancer than go without a Brazilian straightening treatment on her luscious long locks’, which now meant she’d have to find a new hairdresser.) Lara and Rose had welcomed the readers of OK! into their ‘beautiful Notting Hill penthouse’, and even though they were still devastated about having a newly minted half-sister, they were also super-excited about launching their own rock-chick-inspired footwear range with an online retailer.

When she hadn’t been reading things that made her stomach roil, Ellie kept checking her phone for an email or a text from David. Each time she’d felt the bitter pang of disappointment because of course he hadn’t been in contact; she’d made it perfectly clear in her letter that what they had was over before it even left the starting blocks.

But now Ellie was clinging to the edge of the seat as her morose taxi driver took a corner much too fast and nearly knocked a girl off her bicyclette, and what did it matter if she was running away? She was in Paris. She was in a city full of patisseries and the delicious cheese that was so smelly you were forbidden to carry it on public transport, and carafes of really deep, dark red wine that gave you filthy hangovers, and the restaurant on Place d’Italie that did a Thai pot au feu, and the sparkling lights that lit up the banks of the Seine at night, and …

By the time Ellie was hauling her luggage up the stairs of the narrow apartment building on Place du Marché Sainte-Catherine, she wasn’t even cursing the fact that there was no lift, because who cared? She was in Paris!

As she reached the third-floor landing, the door opposite the stairwell burst open, and two shrieking voices greeted her. ‘Ellie Cohen!! About bloody time!’

‘My taxi driver took the scenic route.’ With the last bit of strength left in her arms Ellie hauled her suitcase up the final stair and set it down. ‘I swear to God, that thing just gets heavier and heavier.’

Sue grinned at her. ‘Still haven’t learned to travel light then?’

‘Travelling light is for people who don’t know how to accessorise,’ Esme said. She grabbed the holdall, which was still attached to Ellie’s shoulder, and yanked them both through the apartment door. ‘You’ve brought the sunshine from London. Oh, Ellie! It’s so good to see you!’

Ellie always felt positively Amazonian next to Esme and Sue, who were tiny, tiny women. Esme was a streak of lightning with a mop of messy platinum blonde curls and fragile birdlike limbs. She worked for one of the couture houses as something called an artist without a portfolio, and was impulsive, seventeen different kinds of funny and couldn’t be trusted with money, iPhones or secrets.

During the year the three of them, and Tess, had lived together in London, Esme had popped out for milk and phoned twelve hours later to let them know that ‘I seem to be in New York,’ been arrested twice, slept with an A-list movie star and had to be rescued by the fire brigade when she’d climbed on the roof to rescue next door’s cat and had got stuck between two chimneys. It had been the most exhausting year of Ellie’s life, but in weekend doses, Esme was delightful.

Sue, who worked at Sotheby’s Paris office, would have got more credit for having a wild side a mile long if she hadn’t been best friends with Esme. The difference was that Sue always managed to extricate herself from whatever scrapes she’d got into. Like the time she’d been accused of card-counting at a rinky-dink Park Lane casino but had protested her innocence very calmly and convincingly by claiming that she’d failed her Maths GCSE. She’d also dated a bona fide prince, though Sue insisted that ‘he wasn’t a prince, just a minor Belgian royal’, and was dark-haired, dark-eyed, terribly amused all the time and had a casual, easy elegance that Ellie knew she’d never be able to emulate no matter how many white dresses she bought.


Sue was looking terribly amused now, and chic in a strappy little black dress, as Ellie told them about her traumatic taxi ride. Esme was wearing a beautiful, nude-coloured flapper frock encrusted with thousands of tiny sparkling beads, and a pair of cheap flipflops. Ellie felt decidedly de trop in her cuffed shorts and a Breton top which was crumpled from the journey and besides, you couldn’t really do Breton tops in France. It was culturally insensitive.

‘So, shall I jump in the shower, then slip into something—’

‘No time for that,’ Esme cried. ‘We’re meeting friends for pre-dinner drinks in ten minutes in Bastille. You’ll love them. They’ll love you. It’ll be much mutual loving.’

Ellie tugged at her top, which was clinging to her because, despite the rain she’d been promised, Paris was as hot and humid as London. ‘I need to change.’

‘You don’t. You look adorable,’ Sue said, picking up Ellie’s Mulberry bag and draping it back over Ellie’s shoulder. ‘A Breton top in Paris. It’s so witty.’

‘Beyond witty,’ Esme echoed. ‘Tell us all your news over dinner. Never mind being the scourge of the tabloids, girls only run away to Paris to escape men.’

‘You invited me!’ Ellie reminded her as she was pushed out of the door.

‘Yes, but you could have said no. It can’t be the man in the papers. Nobody who wears tight white vests and has a tribal armband tattoo is capable of breaking a girl’s heart,’ Sue said, as she locked the apartment because Esme wasn’t trusted with her own set of keys. ‘Who was he?’

‘No one,’ Ellie insisted. ‘My heart is very resilient. It doesn’t break that often.’

‘One aperitif and two glasses of red wine and you’ll be telling us everything,’ Sue said and Esme agreed, but Ellie begged to differ. Maintaining a dignified silence had become a way of life by now.

Sixteen hours later, Ellie longed for swift and sudden death because death would be preferable to having to live when the inside of her head had been colonised by a troupe of tiny people jumping up and down in hob-nailed boots while beating sticks against her temporal lobes. They also had a bunch of mates who were hanging out in her stomach like it was their own private rave tent.

‘Oh God,’ she muttered out loud. ‘I must have had a dodgy moule last night.’

‘You didn’t have any moules,’ Sue said gently, as she removed the soggy ice pack on Ellie’s forehead and replaced it with a freshly frozen one.

‘Stop talking about moules,’ Ellie groaned. It wasn’t a rogue mussel that was responsible for her current malaise. It was a quiet Saturday night with Sue and Esme and their lunatic friends, which had started with Kir Royales in a little bar in Bastille, then a three-course meal at Swann et Vincent with white wine and dessert wine. By then, Ellie had been feeling a little wobbly – she’d had to request a bread basket instead of pudding to mop up some of the alcohol – but she’d still jumped in a taxi to Montmartre to sit outside a café and have coffee and brandy before climbing twisty uphill streets, only to descend down some rickety stairs to a cellar where she’d drunk ice-cold beer and danced to really bad dubstep with a specialist in Egyptian Antiquities from Venezuela, and then … Ellie couldn’t remember getting back to Le Marais. All she remembered was waking up an hour ago on Esme and Sue’s sofa with a bucket on her chest. It was an empty bucket but Ellie wasn’t sure how much longer it would remain that way.

‘Are you sure you don’t want to come to St Tropez?’ Esme asked again. Ellie had never noticed before how shrill her voice was. ‘There’s room on the private plane we’re getting from Orly. Honestly, Ellie, once you’ve flown on a private plane, it ruins you for non-private planes. You have to experience it once in your life.’

‘Can’t go. Stay here,’ Ellie whispered. ‘Stay here and die.’

‘Please don’t,’ Sue said, and after an hour of clattering about and banging things and talking at the very top of their vocal registers, they were off on their holidays, leaving Ellie a catatonic lump on their art-deco Jules Leleu sofa. Eventually she managed to stagger to the Monoprix to buy Evian, Diet Coke and ready-salted crisps, which were all she could choke down when her hangover was this evil.

Once she was sufficiently rehydrated, Ellie shifted location to Sue’s bed, where she slept until eight the next morning, woken only by the cafés in the square below opening their awnings and putting out tables and chairs, because it was a complete myth that Paris ground to a halt during August.

Paris in August was perfect. Esme’s favourite cheese shop was fermé but the café where she liked to have her morning tartines à la confiture d’abricot (Parisian cafés hadn’t really embraced muesli) and black coffee was open, as were the Jewish bakeries on Rue Saint-Antoine. She bought structured white dresses and drapey blouson tops at Sandro, Zadig et Voltaire and Maje, and canvas tennis shoes at Bensimon, but Ellie wasn’t in Paris simply to shop. Or lounge on the sand at one of the Paris Plages, the artificial beaches set up each summer along the Seine. No, shopping and sunbathing were morning activities, then after a leisurely lunch, Ellie would start work.

Work involved trying to track down pieces by an obscure Surrealist painter by pretending she was interested in pieces by another obscure Surrealist, because Vaughn didn’t want anyone else on the trail. He also wanted Ellie to sniff out any new trends and artists and get a general sense of what was happening on the street. Vaughn was always obsessed with what was happening on the street.

So, armed with her company credit card, Ellie spent her evenings meeting up with artists, sculptors, painters, filmmakers and people who did stuff with lights and fibre optics and holograms, who all thought that art dealers and the employees of art dealers were in league with the devil unless these employees had company credit cards and were happy to get their round in.

Ellie could allow herself to breathe out because, finally, there was real distance between her and her scandal. She could even make Billy Kay fade back into the background, because no one in Paris was obsessed with celebrities in the same way that people in Britain were unless it was Carla Bruni or a member of the House of Grimaldi. Her Parisian acquaintances simply shrugged when the subject arose and talked about how bourgeois celebrity culture was. They’d only have been impressed if Ellie’s long-lost father turned out to be Serge Gainsbourg, or Johnny Hallyday, at a pinch.

There was never any shortage of interesting and interested men in Paris either. So unlike British men, who were useless at picking up signals or wouldn’t admit they fancied you until after they’d actually kissed you. Men who claimed to have wanted you since the very first moment that they saw you, but still suspected you of being an avaricious schemer. Also men who already had girlfriends. Ellie had had quite enough of men like that.

But she wasn’t interested in any of the men who showed signs of being interested in her, despite the fact that she was sure she was wearing her heartbreak on her sleeve. Maybe heartbreak was exaggerating her fragile emotional state but Ellie’s heart had definitely been damaged. Before, she’d always suffered at the end of a relationship from the knowledge that she hadn’t been good enough, that it had all gone wrong again.


Now, she was grieving a relationship that had never happened, which was pathetic. In mourning simply for a few kisses and a night spent holding someone who’d been asleep. People always said that it was better to regret something you had done, rather than something you hadn’t done, but imagining what she and David could have had was torture, and Ellie was sure that she bore its scars. So when men offered to buy her a drink, or asked her to dance or lingered too long as they kissed her on each cheek at the end of an evening, Ellie shied away.

That was why, on Friday morning, she decided not to meet up with Stéphane, who owned a small gallery in Belleville and had offered to show her around. Stéphane had smouldering dark eyes, a sultry pouty mouth and a lock of black hair that fell across his forehead and made a girl yearn to push it back and let her hand rest against his skin. Oh, no, Ellie wasn’t going there, but making her own way with the aid of a guide book and her own lousy sense of direction.

Belleville, where Edith Piaf was born, in the north-west of the city, was a shabby, eclectic neighbourhood with a large Asian community and a bustling Chinatown, and was as close as Ellie would ever get to the Montmartre of the 1920s, when Montmartre had been home to a colony of artists drinking absinthe and pastis in dark cafés and having torrid affairs with each other.

The cheap rent and abandoned warehouses and factories of Belleville had brought the artists in the 1980s and they were still there, although they weren’t drinking absinthe in dark cafés but eating pho in the amazing Vietnamese restaurant where Ellie had lunch, elbow to elbow with elegant French hipsters and little old ladies with a firm grip on their bulging baskets from a successful morning’s marketing.

After lunch, Ellie went exploring. It was almost five when she discovered a little alley between two buildings and, curious, slipped down it to find herself in a huge walled garden bordered by the backs of buildings, most of them derelict, apart from a big industrial space with its doors wide open in the summer heat. What she saw in that space made her inch forward, eyes wide, mouth open.

It was a forest of trees. Spectral, otherworldly trees bowed to the ground under the weight of their branches and drooping leaves. Trees shaped not by some divine hand but by a man and woman who were busy mixing up huge amounts of papier-maché.

Inge, when she could stir herself, insisted that good art made you feel, and Ellie had always nodded and agreed, but it was only now, on a sticky hot Friday afternoon in a working-class area of Paris, that she finally got it. She was getting tingles, not dissimilar to the tingles she’d got when she’d walked right into David’s arms all those weeks ago. Looking at this enchanted forest of paper trees made her appreciate the fragility and futility of nature, how it celebrated life and death and made her feel humble and a bit teary, but also made her want to jump up and down and clap her hands in delight, because, really? This must have been how Brian Epstein felt when he first heard The Beatles.

She managed to convey some of this to Claude and Marie, the artists, who sat her down, made her some mint tea and showed her a time-lapse film they’d shot of a tree’s year-long cycle. The barren, bare branches of winter, the first tiny buds appearing, the froth of pink and white spring blossom. Then the lush, redolent glory of green leaves and how they lost their vigour in the dog days of August, turning gold and orange as autumn settled in, then becoming desiccated wisps that floated gently to the ground.

Ellie longed to call Vaughn, but she didn’t. She simply gave her card to Claude and Marie and begged them to keep on making paper trees and not to seek any other representation, and of course they could totally stay with her when they came to London for the Frieze Art Fair in October but she’d be in touch way before then.

It was a relief to feel excited and happy. It was even a relief that when the excitement and happiness fizzled out, instead of being sad again, Ellie seethed about the in justice of her imminent unemployment. She still didn’t think she had an angle but she certainly had no compunction about keeping Claude and Marie under wraps until Vaughn played his hand.

Ellie wandered out onto the Rue de Belleville. She’d planned on grabbing a table and a cold glass of citron pressé outside Aux Folies, but there was a fetid scent in the air and she decided to return to her flat. Every artist she met told her that Paris had been anaesthetised and sanitised and had lost its heart and soul, but at least it didn’t smell like a pissoir. Her phone rang just as she was about to descend into the Metro to catch line 11 back to Le Marais.

It was an English number familiar enough that she fumbled to slide the lock on her phone to take the call.

‘Miss Cohen?’ It was odd that her hopes could both rise and fall at the sound of his voice. She couldn’t believe that David’d gone back to that ‘Miss Cohen’ crap even after he’d kissed her, mouthed her breasts, had his hands full of her. He couldn’t make it any more obvious that she was back in the box marked ‘strictly business’.

‘Is there something I can help you with?’ Ellie asked as tersely as she could.

‘I have some documents you need to sign,’ he said, like his brusque tone completely trumped her terseness. ‘I’m sending an overnight courier on a wait-and-return. Address, please?’

‘What documents? What could I possibly need to sign?’

‘Standard documents,’ he insisted. ‘You were meant to sign them when you turned eighteen. I need to get all these loose ends tied up.’

He was also clear that he wanted nothing more to do with her. Ellie felt another little piece of her heart chip away but, God help her, she wanted to keep him talking a little bit longer because even his most clipped chat about contracts was still him talking to her.

‘What’s so important it needs an overnight courier?’ she asked sulkily.

He launched into an explanation so dense with legal terms it could have been Pig Latin or him making up words as he went along. It was impossible to follow, especially when she was buffeted by the Friday rush-hour crowd and a busker to the left of her was belting out ‘La Vie en Rose’ on a mouth organ.

‘What’s the address?’ David asked when he came to the end of his long, legal spiel. ‘And please make sure you’re in at eight tonight to sign the documents.’

‘Don’t they have to be witnessed? I’m not sure I want a courier to witness my signature and I should have time to read them over. Anyway, eight is only a couple of hours away. Is he already en route? You might have given me some warning. I could be in St Tropez for all you know!’

‘Well, you’re patently not,’ David snapped impatiently. ‘For goodness’ sake, Ellie, just give me your bloody address!’

Ellie gave him her bloody address, then hung up. She was tempted not to be waiting obediently back at the flat at eight – she had had vague plans to meet up with some friends of Esme and Sue’s for Cuban food – but after talking to David, she wasn’t up to going out. People would expect her to be friendly and engaging, albeit in halting GCSE-grade French, and the effort might kill her.

She’d stay in and wait for the courier, but she bought two bottles of wine on the way home. She could light some candles and open all the windows to let in the breeze and the sound of people carousing in the street below.


By seven thirty, Ellie had tidied up, drunk one glass of wine, eaten three olives and decided that as soon as the courier had been and gone, she was going out. If she stayed in all she’d do was brood and replay every word of their phone call, then rewind the night they’d spent together, though she hadn’t spent such a chaste night with a member of the opposite sex since she was seventeen. By then, she’d have probably got through both bottles of wine, and she’d be drunk and melancholy and desperate enough to do something really stupid like phone David Gold and beg him to love her because she was kind of in love with him.

Ellie prowled around the flat. Originally an atelier, it was a huge triple-height space so she got dizzy just looking up at the ornate ceiling mouldings. A mezzanine floor had been added to one half of the room, though it still felt light and airy, which was where the two bedrooms and the black-and-white art-deco-tiled bathroom were situated. It was a beautiful apartment but Ellie felt hemmed in and she needed to do something that would make her feel better, make her not feel like this, even though the last words Esme had said to her before she left on Sunday morning was, ‘Help yourself to anything, but even think about borrowing any of our clothes or accessories and we’ll kill you.’

Sue had even followed it up with a text message, ostensibly to remind her that Madame Lelong, the concierge who lived in the basement flat, came up to clean on Monday and Thursday afternoons, but really to warn Ellie that she’d ‘hunt you down like a dog if I hear you’ve been seen with my Chanel 2.55 bag’.

Though she planned to own a Chanel 2.55 bag one day, Ellie wanted nothing to do with Sue’s handbags or her chic black, fitted clothes, because Sue was ridiculously small. So was Esme, but at least she had outfit options, and it wasn’t as if Ellie was going to borrow any of them, she just wanted to try them on.

Esme possessed two wardrobes built into recesses, five clothes rails, and the broom cupboard in the hall, which had been customised with cubbyholes each large enough for a shoe box. Stuck to each shoe box was a Polaroid of the pretty, pretty, pretty shoes inside. It was a crying shame that Esme wore a size two and Ellie had size-seven clodhopper feet.

Very carefully Ellie rifled through the rails, unzipping garment bags to gawk at silk and satin and charmeuse and taffeta and chiffon and knits so fine they might have been made from cobwebs rather than wool. There was nothing that was going to fit and most of it was beaded or sparkling; no wonder Esme had found a job where she could wear a ballgown to a Monday meeting if she wanted.

It wasn’t until she was head first in the second wardrobe that Ellie found the dull gold trapeze dress. Made from a soft slubby silk, it was sleeveless and had myriad knife-edge pleats cascading down from a mandarin-collar neckline. It took Ellie many long, tense minutes to ease the dress over her head, arms raised like a champion diver so she could work them through the armholes, then much gentle tugging before finally she was wearing one of Esme’s dresses. It was probably knee-length on Esme but swirled about Ellie’s thighs so if she bent over even a little she flashed her knickers.

Not that Ellie dared bend over or make any sudden movements, because, within scant seconds she realised she’d made a terrible mistake. The collar of the dress was choking her (how could Esme’s neck be thinner than hers?), the armholes pinched her skin and the flimsy, delicate material was stretched perilously tight across her shoulders. Which made it the perfect time for two short, sharp buzzes on the intercom. Walking slowly like she had a big book balanced on her head, Ellie managed to get down the mezzanine stairs to press the intercom.

‘Courier? I’m on the third floor.’

It was not an ideal situation. Ellie didn’t want some motorbiking desperado in the flat while she was fashion-incapacitated and showing far too much leg. She’d send him away until she’d begged Madame Lelong to come upstairs and extricate her from a dress that probably cost more than three months’ salary and commission.

Ellie heard someone come up the stairs, then a knock on the door, and even reaching up to open it put a terrible strain on the dress.

But that was nothing compared to the terrible strain on her heart because standing there in a crumpled suit and carrying two M&S carrier bags was David Gold.



Camden, London, 1987

‘You’re going to be all right, Ari,’ Billy said calmly.

He helped her get dressed, buttoned her into her leopard-print faux-fur coat and led her out into a world covered in snow to catch the number 24 bus to the Royal Free Hospital.

The pain was constant and all Ari could do was sway on the spot as she was asked questions she couldn’t answer because she’d never kept any appointments or taken any tests, and someone really needed to call Carol.

‘I will,’ Billy said. Ari wanted to beg him to stay because he was a calm, still presence in the corner of the room as she was hooked up to machines. She couldn’t do this alone; suffer pain that started deep in her spine and ripped through her in never-ending waves. ‘And I need a cigarette. I’ll be back in ten minutes, baby.’

Billy didn’t come back in ten minutes. He wasn’t back in two hours, and Ari stopped caring because she couldn’t think about Billy any more. All she could think about was how stupid, how dumb she’d been to only think about the baby in the most abstract way and to imagine childbirth as something you screamed your way through while your partner mopped your face. It wasn’t like that all.

Labour was a silent battle between her and her body. Ari curled up in a ball and for the first time she could sense the baby as an insistent pull, a compelling voice in her head. ‘You’ll be OK. I’ll be here soon. Everything’s going to be all right.’

Then she was being told to push, but her body wanted to do that anyway and it took for ever, then no time at all until someone said, ‘It’s a girl. Congratulations! You have a daughter!’ A squalling, bloodied red scrap of flesh and bones was held up for Ari’s inspection.

It had lots of dark, curly hair. The midwife said that was why Ari had had indigestion for months – nothing to do with Billy breaking her heart on a weekly basis. And for what? So she could birth his daughter, who looked like a furious little monkey: fists clenched, chicken legs pistoning, wet mouth open wide on a scream.

Carol should be here. This was Carol’s moment, not hers, and where the f*ck was Billy? They whisked the baby away, still screeching, then it was back, and before Ari could tell them she wasn’t interested, no thank you, not today, she’d made alternative arrangements, a nurse dumped the baby on her chest.

It was terrifying. Ari didn’t want to touch this thing, this angry thing that she’d made, and then it shut its mouth and stared at her and she felt it.

‘Oh God, nobody told me,’ she whispered, and cradled her perfect daughter to her.

Before this moment nothing in Ari’s life had been real, but this tiny beautiful girl was real.

It wasn’t possible that Ari deserved such a prize – and then she remembered that she wasn’t allowed to keep her.