Barbara Taylor Bradford - Three Weeks in Paris

BARBARA TAYLOR BRADFORD

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THREE WEEKS

IN PARIS

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk

Special overseas edition 2002

First published in Great Britain by

HarperCollins Publishers 2002

Copyright © Barbara Taylor Bradford 2002

Barbara Taylor Bradford asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Ebook Edition © 2002 ISBN: 9780007330652

Version: 2017-10-25

For Bob, truly a man for all seasons,

with all my love

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

PROLOGUE

PART ONE Les Girls

Chapter One - Alexandra

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four - Kay

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven - Jessica

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine - Maria

Chapter Ten

PART TWO Doyenne

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

PART THREE Quest

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

PART FOUR Celebration

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

On the rue Jacob the man shivered and turned up the collar of his overcoat. It was a bitter February day, icy from the wind that swept down from the Russian steppes and across the plains of Europe to hit Paris with a sharp blast.

The sky was a faded blue, the sun watery as it slanted across the rooftops, almost silvery in this cold northern light, and without warmth. But Paris was always beautiful, whatever the weather; even when it rained it had a special quality all of its own.

Spotting a cab he hailed it, and as it slowed to a standstill he got in quickly and asked the driver to take him to the post office. Once he was there he unwrapped the package of stamped envelopes, seventy-one in all, and dropped them, in small batches, into a letter box, then returned to the cab.

The man now gave the driver the address of the FedEx office, settled back against the seat, glancing out of the window from time to time. How happy he was to be back in the City of Light, but, nonetheless, he could not help wishing it were a little warmer today. There was a chill in his bones.

In the FedEx office the man filled in the appropriate labels and handed them over to the clerk along with the white envelopes. All were processed for delivery within the next twenty-four hours, their destinations four cities in distant far-flung corners of the world. Back in the taxi he instructed the driver to take him to the Quai Voltaire. Once there, he alighted and headed towards one of his favourite bistros on the Left Bank.

And as he walked, lost in his thoughts, he had no way of knowing that he had just set in motion a chain of events that would have far-reaching effects. Because of his actions lives were about to be changed irrevocably: and so profoundly they would never be the same again.

It was her favourite time of day. Dusk. That in-between hour before night descended when everything was softly muted, merging together. The twilight hour.

Her Scottish nanny had called it the gloaming. She loved that name, it conjured up so much, and even when she was a little girl she had looked forward to the late afternoon, that period just before supper. As she had walked home from school with her brother Tim, Nanny between them tightly holding on to their hands, she had always felt a twinge of excitement, an expectancy, as if something special awaited her. This feeling had never changed. It had stayed with her over the years, and wherever she was in the world dusk never failed to give her a distinct sense of anticipation.

She stepped away from her drawing table, and went across to the window of her downtown loft, peered out, looking towards the upper reaches of Manhattan. To Alexandra Gordon the sky was absolutely perfect at this precise moment…its colour a mixture of plum and violet toned down by a hint of smoky grey bleeding into a faded pink. The colours of antiquity, reminiscent of Byzantium and Florence and ancient Greece. And the towers and spires and skyscrapers of this great modern metropolis were blurred, smudged into a sort of timelessness; seemed of no particular period at this moment, inchoate images cast against that almost-violet sky.

Alexandra smiled. For as far back as she could remember she had believed that this time of day was magical. In the movie business, which she was occasionally a part of these days, dusk was actually called ‘the Magic Hour’. Wasn’t it odd that she herself had named it that when she was only a child?

Staring out across the skyline, fragments of her childhood came rushing back to her. For a moment she fell down into her memories…memories of the years spent growing up on the Upper East Side of this city…of a childhood filled with love and security and the most wondrous of times. Even though their mother had worked, still worked in fact, she and Tim had never been neglected by her, nor by their father. But it was her mother who was the best part of her, and, in more than one sense, she was the product of her mother. And not a bad product at that, she thought, continuing to stand in front of the picture window, lost in remembrances of times past.

Eventually she roused herself and went back to the drawing board, looked at the panel she had just completed. It was the final one in a series of six, and together they composed a winter landscape in the countryside.

She knew she had captured most effectively the essence of a cold, snowy evening in the woods, and bending forward she picked up the panel and carried it to the other side of the studio, placed it on a wide viewing shelf where the rest of the panels were aligned. Staring intently at the almost complete set, she envisioned them as a giant-sized backdrop on the stage, which is what they would soon become. As far as she was concerned, the panels were arresting, and depicted exactly what the director had requested.

‘I want to experience the cold, Alexa,’ Tony Verity had told her at the first production meeting, after he had taken her through the play. ‘I want to shiver with cold, crunch down into my overcoat, feel the icy night in my bones. Your sets must make me want to rush indoors, to be in front of a roaring fire.’