Between the Bridge and the River by Craig Ferguson

Author:Craig Ferguson
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Published: 2007-09-12T22:00:00+00:00

LA VIE NOUVELLE

AFTER THE DEATH OF HER LAST LOVER, Bruce, the Australian diplomat who had drunkenly stumbled in front of a Metro train, Claudette had felt she had to clean out her life and make it simple to the point of monastic.

She had lived in the large, rambling apartment she had inherited from Guillame, and over the years she had filled it with knickknacks and books and sofas and paintings and elastic bands and cotton buds and pieces of string and pamphlets and all the other rubbish that builds up in a home the longer one stays in it.

When Bruce died, she rented a room at the nearby Hôtel l’Abbaye and had contractors come and put all of her possessions, except for one framed photograph of each of her lovers, and all of her furniture into the back of a truck and take them away and sell them or burn them or dump them, she didn’t care.

She just wanted everything gone.

Guillame had left her wealthy and she hadn’t been foolish enough to give away the money. She loved the apartment and could not bear to part with it, so once it was cleaned out, she hired a decorator, Monsieur Garrido, a dark, squat man who was originally from Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain, to completely redecorate the place under very strict instructions.

The floors were sanded, the walls painted white, and she bought one large comfortable bed that she never slept in with any man. Her sheets were expensive white linen. She had one dining-room table with one chair, one bookcase, one reading lamp, one easy chair, one knife, one fork, one spoon. One cup.

She had one wall decoration. A wooden crucifix that she had bought in one of the many neighborhood stores that catered to the pilgrims who flocked to the nearby Saint-Sulpice. It hung above her bed.

Long, thick white curtains hung on each of the tall windows. The effect was meant to be stark and sad. Claudette wanted to enhance her solitude, she wanted the place to look as bleak as she felt, but in fact the result was completely the opposite. The old French apartment was so artfully constructed and had been lived in so much that Claudette’s spartan style change had only improved it. It was breathtaking. Without clutter, the cornicing on the ceilings stood out, the marble of the fireplaces shone, and the sanded wooden parquets looked rich and warm.

Claudette’s enforced period of minimalist solitude had only made everything more beautiful.

They kissed all the way to the fifth floor—the tiny elevator familiar to many old Parisian buildings seemed to insist on it—and when Claudette unlocked her door and let George enter, he felt a rush of adrenaline and approbation.

The Paris night filled the apartment with a dreamlike glow.

What they both failed to see was the ghost of Guillame, who had haunted his old home for the years since his death. He had been standing by the window in the living room, and when he saw

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