Where Love Lies
Authors: Julie Cohen
ABOUT THE BOOKLately, Felicity just can’t shake a shadow of uncertainty. Her husband Quinn is the kindest person she knows and loves her peculiarities more than Felicity feels she deserves. But suddenly it’s as if she doesn’t quite belong.
Then Felicity experiences something extraordinary: a scent of perfume in the air which evokes memories that have been settled within her for a long time,
untouched and undisturbed. As it happens again and again, the memories of a man Felicity hasn’t seen for ten years also flutter to the surface. And so do the feelings of being deeply, exquisitely in love . . .
Overwhelmed and bewildered by her emotions, Felicity tries to resist sinking blissfully into the past. But what if something truly isn’t as it should be? What if her mind has been playing
tricks on her heart?
Which would you trust?
Contents
Julie Cohen
To Ken
What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly by a feeling of bliss – absolute bliss! – as though you’d suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun and it burned in your bosom, sending out a little shower of sparks into every particle, into every finger and toe?
‘Bliss’,
Katherine Mansfield
I KNOW EXACTLY
where I’m going.
I’ve only been to the restaurant once before, but as soon as I step off the train at Richmond everything looks completely familiar. I touch my Oyster card and turn left immediately outside the station. A young busker with wild dreadlocks plays ‘Walking on Sunshine’. He throws his whole body into it, strumming and twitching and singing to the darkening
London evening, as if he can make it midsummer noon with the force of his will. I dig into my jacket pocket and drop a pound coin into his guitar case amongst the litter of money.
I check my watch; I’m meeting Quinn in five minutes. I’m cutting it fine, but from what I remember, I have plenty of time to get there. I pass familiar shopfronts and turn right at the junction. The restaurant, Cerise,
is round the next corner: it’s a brick building, painted yellow, with a sign made of curly wrought iron. It’s a treat for both of us after our separate days of meetings in London – Quinn’s idea because I’ve told him they serve the best crème brûlée I’ve had outside of Paris.
I turn the corner and I don’t see the restaurant.
I stand for a moment, peering up and down the street. Maybe they have
repainted it. I look from building to building, but there’s no wrought-iron sign, no wide window with a view of the tables inside. Anxiety rises from my stomach into my throat.
A little bit late isn’t a problem
, said my editor Madelyne this afternoon, just a couple of hours ago, on the other side of London.
But this is more than a little
.
I shake my head. Of course. The restaurant isn’t on this
street, it’s further on. How silly of me. I stride to the end of the road and over the junction.
Quinn is never late. Quinn is frequently early. He’d prefer to wait outside wherever he’s going, looking around him or reading a newspaper, than to be rushed or rude. You’d think he’d know me well enough by now to build in some leeway when he’s meeting me, but he never does. I tried suggesting this
once, breezily, and he listened, as he always does when I try to explain something. ‘I’d still rather read the paper for a little while,’ he said, and that was it. I’ve learned that Quinn is Quinn, and he does not change.
And even though he never acts impatient or annoyed, I try not to be late so often. I even bought a watch. I hate to think of him waiting, over and over.
It’s warm and I’m still
feeling anxious, so I take off my jacket and drape it over my arm. The restaurant should be right here, on the left. Except it’s not; it’s a Starbucks.
I frown. I must have got turned around the wrong way, somehow. This Starbucks looks exactly the same as every other Starbucks in the world, and definitely not like a French restaurant. I probably went too far down this road. I turn around and
start back the way I’ve come.
My phone rings. It’s Quinn. ‘Hello hello,’ I say, as cheerfully as I think I should.
‘Hello, love. Where are you? Are you still on the train?’
‘No no, I’m in Richmond, I’m on my way. I took a wrong turn, I think, but I’ll be there in a tick.’
‘Right,’ he says. ‘See you in a minute, love.’
He hangs up and I put my phone back in my handbag. He always says
love
, always, leaving in the morning or greeting me when I come in the room or ending a conversation on the phone. It punctuates beginnings and endings. It’s something his father does with his mother, and he’s slipped into the habit as if he were born to it.
At the corner I catch a whiff of scent, something familiar, someone’s perfume.
I stop walking. ‘Mum?’ I say.
My mother isn’t here. Of course
she isn’t here. But the scent is so strong, it’s as if she’s just walked past me.
I glance around. Two teenage girls sharing earphones, a man walking a terrier, a young couple, her with a hijab and him with a pushchair. There’s a woman near the end of the street, walking away from me. She’s wearing a sleeveless top and rolled-up jeans, her shoulders tanned. Her hair is a long silver plait down
her back. The scent of flowers trails behind her on the warm air.
‘Mum?’ I hurry after her. She turns the corner, and by the time I reach it, she’s gone.
But I can still smell her perfume. It’s so familiar I can’t think of the name of it, and my mother never wore perfume anyway. This smell, though, is my mother: it tugs something deep inside me, makes my heart leap with hope and a kind of sweet
agony. I run further along the street and think I see the woman ahead of me, crossing the bridge over the Thames.
It can’t be my mother. It’s impossible. But I’m still thinking of everything I need to tell her:
I’m married, I’ve bought a house, I’m sorry. So sorry for what I made you do
.
I collide with the plastic shopping bag held by a man coming the other way over the bridge, and it falls
onto the pavement with a clang of tins. ‘Oi, watch it,’ he says.
‘I’m sorry, so sorry,’ I say, maybe to him, maybe to the woman ahead of me. I reach for his bag but he’s snatched it up again. He’s eyeing me up and down.
‘Don’t worry, beautiful, it’s my pleasure,’ he says.
‘Sorry,’ I say again, and carry on over the bridge, quickly.
‘Smile,’ he yells after me. ‘It might never happen!’
People
are between us and she’s walking rapidly; my moment with the man with the shopping bag has put me even farther behind her. But the scent is as strong as ever, and as I get closer, dodging around pedestrians, my heart beats harder and harder. It’s impossible that when I catch up to this woman she will be my mother, Esther Bloom, and she will turn around and say,
Darling
. It’s impossible that she
could take me into her arms and I could be forgiven. I know it’s impossible, and yet I can’t look away from her. It’s as if my body doesn’t know what my mind does. I can’t stop my feet from following her, faster now, running, my ballet flats pounding over the pavement, sweat dampening the cotton collar of my shirt. My jacket slips off my arm; I stuff it into my handbag, mindless of wrinkles, and
hurry forward.
The woman opens the door of a pizza takeaway. Panting, I clasp her by the shoulder.
It isn’t my mother’s shoulder. It feels all wrong, and this woman is darker than my mother, with more grey in her hair, which is finer than my mother’s was – but my body has that irrational hope that when she turns around, her face will be Esther’s.
‘Mum?’ I gasp.
It isn’t. It’s a stranger. She
looks nothing like my mother at all.
‘My mistake,’ I say, backtracking. ‘So sorry, I thought you were someone else.’
She shrugs and goes into the takeaway. The scent of flowers is gone, replaced by a whiff of baking dough and melting cheese.
My mother didn’t even like pizza very much. I rub my forehead and look around. It’s starting to get dark; the streetlights have come on, and this street
is entirely unfamiliar, even more unfamiliar because not ten minutes ago I thought I knew exactly where I was, exactly who I was following. It’s as if the street has changed around me. As if the world has changed around me.
In my bag, my phone rings. I know without looking that it’s Quinn, wondering where I am. I don’t answer it; I’ll be with him in a minute. I hurry back across the bridge and
along the road, which seems quite busy now; the cars have their lights turned on. I see a sign pointing to the station and I turn that way. This street looks strange too, but if it takes me back to the station that’s good because I can definitely find my way from there.
Though I didn’t just now.
How did I get so lost?
I reach for my phone to answer Quinn’s call. Sometimes it’s better to admit
defeat and get somewhere that little bit quicker, and Quinn loves giving directions anyway. And also it would be sort of nice to hear his voice, his habitual calm.
Hello, love
.
Two things happen at once: my phone stops ringing, and I see the restaurant. It’s thirty metres away, on the other side of the road from where I’d expected it to be, and Quinn is outside it, his phone in his hand. He’s
wearing the same grey suit he was wearing when he left this morning to get the train to London, though the tie’s been removed and he’s unbuttoned his collar. His dark hair, as usual, is sticking up in the front because he’s been running his fingers through it. The restaurant is painted yellow, with a wrought-iron sign outside. Light spills through the window. Everything is exactly as it’s supposed
to be.
He spots me and runs across the street, dodging a cab. I kiss him on his cheek, where there’s a couple of days’ growth of beard.
‘You had me worried, love,’ he says, kissing me back. ‘What happened?’
I look at my husband: slender, pale, serious, with his grey eyes and his dedication to facts. The newspaper he’s been reading while he’s been waiting for me is tucked underneath his arm.
He’s never been late in his life, and he’s certainly never followed a woman who doesn’t exist any more, except in his memory.
‘Oh,’ I say, ‘I just took a wrong turn.’
ON THE TRAIN
out of London, I lean against Quinn’s shoulder and half-doze, trying to recall the scent I followed in Richmond. It’s fading already in my memory. Something floral, definitely. Something exotic. Something I’ve smelled many times before, though I’m not sure where or why.
It didn’t necessarily belong to the woman I followed; maybe someone else was wearing the perfume, which
is why it seemed to vanish when I caught up with her. Maybe it was a flower growing in a window box, or in a garden. Maybe it was a perfume exuded out onto the street from a posh boutique, and happened to be similar to another perfume that I know.
As we drive home to Tillingford from the station, I open the window so the fresh air will wake me up a bit. ‘So Madelyne is anxious for your new book?’
Quinn says, though we’ve discussed this already at dinner. Or at least we’ve discussed it as much as I want to.