One Night in Paris by Nina George

Author:Nina George [George, Nina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2025-07-24T00:00:00+00:00

20

It is an illusion to believe the ground under our feet is solid. The world is its own wrecking ball, and year by year continents are shifting imperceptibly. Coordinates are losing their meaning, the plates under the landmasses drifting apart with every heartbeat. One day Paris will be where Berlin is now.

Claire watched Gilles bustling around the lounge between the open-plan kitchen and ‘his’ room. From tomorrow evening, 14 July, they would have to change their existing sleeping arrangements. Ludo would go in Claire’s room, Anaëlle and the ominous N in the attic room. The room where you felt as if you were on a ship high above the sea. As a child, Anaëlle had bagged the attic with the big porthole window with the instinct of a girl from Paris-Belleville who knows she has to run faster than everyone else to have a chance in life.

How long was it since Claire and Gilles had slept together in the same bed? The whole night, side by side? Five years? Seven? How long had they been co-occupying space without really sharing it?

The imperceptible drifting apart of souls.

‘Claire, where are my binoculars?’

‘In the bag.’

‘Which bag?’

‘The one you took with you last time.’

‘And where’s that?’

‘My money’s on the cellar. Where all the other stuff is.’

This had been going on all morning.

Gilles was searching for binoculars, dip net, fishing bait and six-pack cooler. Nicolas complained he couldn’t find his favourite hoodie (it was in Paris: why hadn’t she reminded him to bring it? he chided a laughing Julie), hunted around for his swimming goggles (they were hanging on a hook in the bathroom), and noticed that one of his flippers was torn (which had already annoyed him last summer, though clearly not enough to get a new pair).

This morning the men planned to set off for an overnight stay on the Glénans, their first trip in Ewan’s black speed-boat; he and some friends ran a business, Glénan Découverte, offering tours of the islands. In a Zodiac straight from Trévignon harbour, it would take them just twenty minutes to reach Saint-Nicolas, as opposed to an hour and a half on the sluggish Vedette tourist ferries from Concarneau or Benodet. ‘Nicolas on Nicolas’ was a longstanding tradition between father and son.

Claire and Julie would be alone until tomorrow afternoon.

At least, if the gentlemen can manage to pack without supervision, thought Claire.

It brought back one of her first summer academies in the US, on the theme of visual perception in animals and humans. One of the female professors had explained, to the amusement of the female students, why men never noticed clumps of dust in corners and could never find the butter in the fridge: ‘Because it doesn’t move. If the washing-up danced or the laundry made its own way towards the machine, those objects would rise above the stimulus attention threshold required by the testosterone-saturated brain in order to initiate an action such as hunting or a heightening of vigilance. In a nutshell, mesdames: teach the rubbish to shake its booty.

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