Lady Marlborough was back to her clothes, the cocktails, and an unending social calendar. The closet, her glass, her datebook all filled. The glimmer of Paris fell on the woman like the first dusting of snow.
“I dunno, mate,” Jamie said to Win early in their stay. “You’d see more of her if you rose at a reasonable hour. By the time you two miserable tramps stagger out of your bedroom, Lady Marlborough’s already out shopping or calling on an old chum. It’s a marvel she still has friends, that she hasn’t outlived them all.”
“Give her time, yet,” Win said.
Because Mrs. Spencer was so constantly occupied, Win and Pru were left to their own devices, forced to play tourists in the very best city of all.
Donning scarves and overcoats, the two braved the biting air and relentless sheets of drizzle to hoof about Paris. They visited cafés and museums. They paid homage to the Nymphéas, Monet’s water lilies at l’Orangerie, as well as the new La Tours at the Louvre.
At the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, they spent hours ogling artifacts of the French Revolution, combing through prisoner dossiers and private papers from officers and the royal family.
They visited the Diocèse de Paris, where they dug up Abbé Mugnier’s fifty-seven cahiers de moleskine and hunted down each mention of the duchess. Afterward they spent the night dancing at Le Sept, a small, fusty, and raucous gay nightclub.
And they dined. They dined in two-bit cafés and at those with more repute. Win took Pru to Café de Flore in Saint-Germain and La Closerie des Lilas in Montparnasse, the latter a favored stomping ground of Wilde, Fitzgerald, and Sartre. Hemingway wrote most of The Sun Also Rises at its mahogany bar.
When they ate together it was for hours, one meal bleeding into the next. Sometimes there was coffee, other times wine, though most often they had both. Waiters tried to shuffle them on but Win and Pru lodged themselves too thoroughly in their chairs and in each other.
One would think that in all this time and closeness Win must’ve returned Pru’s previously declared feelings of love. Alas, he did not. The man was a prat, a wanker, a no-good sissy, a chump. He lacked the balls and Pru had the politeness to let the matter slide.
Tacit contracts to ignore hairy topics notwithstanding, Win understood he was bungling this irretrievably, even as they sat beside each other in cafés and danced near in clubs.
But Win saw how Pru looked at him, with faraway eyes, their distance increasing by the day. Each time they spoke, there was no shortage of laughter, but Win could see a wall forming, a new brick added with each conversation. Through it, he clung tightly to what they had.
“I’m working on it,” Win said whenever Pru asked how they might entice Mrs. Spencer back home, and how they should handle the Marlboroughs. “I’m doing my best.”
Naturally, Win took his time.
He’d call Gads, eventually, but was in no great hurry to leave Paris, or to finish the biography, or do anything that might chase away their moment. All those years Win thought a book would make him happy, that he needed some modicum of commercial success to feel content. But he was wrong. In the end, all Win needed was a paranoid old broad, Paris, and the attentions of a girl called Pru.
Seventy-one
?LE SAINT-LOUIS
PARIS
MARCH 1973
In early March a frost settled upon Paris.
Though it made for slippery sidewalks and drafty homes, at dark, beneath Paris’s glittering lights, the city shimmered.
Win and Pru walked home late one night. Both were decked out in coats and scarves but they bunched together tightly, succumbing to a need for closeness that had little to do with keeping warm.
“I’m beginning to wonder,” she said as they crossed the footbridge near the Notre-Dame. “First you took me to Le Sept. Now this play. Do I need to start questioning your sexual preferences? Or does anything go in Paris?”
They’d come from the Théatre du Palais-Royal, where they watched a production of the new play La Cage aux Folles, a story centered around two gay men. It was the first of its kind.
“You’re questioning my sexual proclivities?” Win said with an abrupt halt.
They were at the center of the bridge, the Seine dancing below, the grounds around them still. There were no tourists that time of night or even that time of year. In the summer, people flocked to the square outside Notre-Dame along with the pigeons. Win’s island was not the tourist mecca it’d one day become but it had its fair share of guests. Yet in that moment the city felt like theirs alone.
“Yes,” Pru said. “I am questioning it. Don’t look so glum! I used to live in San Francisco. You’ll get no judgment from me.”
“How can you doubt the persuasion of such a strapping man?”
“There’s the insistence on gay nightclubs for one,” she said, smiling.
“Hmm. I seem to recall a certain American sweaty and winded from all the fun she was having at such places.”
“I wasn’t sweaty! Maybe a touch damp.”
“You were a lot damp.”