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.’
He will feel all that, she told herself, and stepped back, eyeing her latest work from a distance, objectively, her head on one side, thinking of the way she had created the panels in her imagination first. She had envisioned St Petersburg in winter, and then focused on an imaginary forest beyond that city.
In her mind’s eye, the scenery had come alive, almost like a reel of film playing in her head…bare trees glistening with dripping icicles, drifts of new snow sweeping up between the trees like white dunes. White nights. White sky. White moon. White silence.
That was the mood she sought, had striven for, and wished to convey to the audience. And she believed she had accomplished that with these panels, which would be photographed later this week and then blown up for the stage.
She had not used any other colours except a hint of grey and black for a few of the skeletal branches. Her final touch, and perhaps her most imaginative, had been a set of lone footprints in the snow. Footprints leading up between the trees, as if heading for a special, perhaps even secret destination. Enigmatic. Mysterious. Even troubling, in a way…
The sharp buzzing of the doorbell brought her head up sharply, and her concentration was broken. She went to the intercom on the wall, lifted the phone. ‘Hello?’
‘It’s Jack. I know I’m early. Can I come up?’
‘Yes, it’s okay.’ She pressed the button which released the street door, and then ran downstairs to the floor below in order to let him in.
A few seconds later Jack Wilton, bundled up in a black duffle coat, and carrying a large brown shopping bag, was swinging out of the lift, walking towards her down the corridor, a grin on his keen, intelligent face.
‘Sorry if I’m mucking up your working day, but I was around the corner. At the Cromer Gallery with Billy Tomkins. It seems sort of daft to go home and then come back here later. I’ll sit in a corner down here and watch CNN until you quit.’
‘I just did,’ she said, laughing. ‘I’ve actually finished the last panel, Jack.’
‘That’s great! Congratulations.’ As he stepped into the small foyer of her apartment he put down the shopping bag, reached for her, pulled her into his arms, and, stretching out his leg, he pushed the door closed with his booted foot.
He hugged her tightly, brought her closer, and as his lips brushed her cheek, then nuzzled her ear, she felt a tiny frisson, and this shivery feeling ran all the way down to her toes. There was an electricity between them that had been missing for ages. She was startled.
Seemingly, so was he. Jack pulled away, glanced at her quickly and then instantly brought his mouth to hers, kissing her deeply, passionately. After a second, he moved his mouth close to her ear, and murmured, ‘Let’s go and find a bed.’
She leaned back, looking up into his grey eyes, which were more