Buchan The Museum of Broken Promises

'...beautiful, elegant.' Marian Keyes
Main
ISBN: 978-1-78649-529-7
Verlag: Corvus
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 416 Seiten

'A beautiful, evocative love story, a heart-breaking journey into a long-buried past.' David Nicholls 'Enthralling and beautifully written.' The Times _________ Welcome to the Museum of Broken Promises, a place of wonder, sadness ... and hope. Inside lies a treasure trove of objects - a baby's shoe, a wedding veil, a railway ticket - all revealing moments of loss and betrayal. It is a place where people come to speak to the ghosts of the past. The owner, Laure, is also one of those people. As a young woman in the 1980s Laure fled to Prague, where her life changed forever. Now, years later, she must confront the origins of her heart-breaking exhibition: a love affair with a dissident musician, a secret life behind the Iron Curtain, and a broken promise that she will never forget. 'I ADORE cold-war novels and I live for love stories - The Museum of Broken Promises is a perfect combination of both. It's a gem of a book... beautiful, elegant.' Marian Keyes

Elizabeth Buchan was a fiction editor at Random House before leaving to write full time. Her novels include the prizewinning Consider the Lily, international bestseller Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman and The New Mrs Clifton. She reviews for the Sunday Times and the Daily Mail, and has chaired the Betty Trask and Desmond Elliot literary prizes. She was a judge for the Whitbread First Novel Award and for the 2014 Costa Novel Award. elizabethbuchan.com

Autoren/Hrsg.

Buchan, Elizabeth

Leseproben

CHAPTER 2
SHE NEVER ATE BREAKFAST AT HOME BUT, IF THERE WAS time, Laure brewed strong black coffee. Her apartment on the second floor of a former warehouse was typical of a modern Parisian conversion: small (some said cramped), the windows were plate glass and the doors MDF. The kitchen only just accommodated a modest oven and fridge and, if the table flap was up, it was a squeeze to get to the sink. Apart from the stacked, labelled boxes in the second, tiny cupboard of a bedroom occupying what space there was in it, furniture and trimmings were kept to a notable minimum. Sometimes, there was a vase of flowers, a coat cast onto a chair, a French novel in a yellow dust jacket but, usually, the effect was extreme minimalism. Finding anywhere to live in Paris was a nightmare and a flat, however small, was a flat. Admittedly somewhat joyless, the anonymity of the place suited her plus it was only a short walk to work. In the courtyard below, Madame Poirier, the concierge, conducted one of her conversations punctuated with explosive syllables. ‘It’s against regulations, monsieur,’ she was saying. Which ones this time? Laure wondered. (Madame Poirier’s regulations came and went.) Which monsieur was she bullying? In truth, Madame never shut up, but, like the ugly doors and windows, she was part of a set-up into which Laure had inserted herself. The quasi-bullying, the tiptoeing around the regulations, the irritations were anchors. They were the ingredients of the life she had chosen. Having washed up the coffee pot, she put it out to dry on a tea towel spread out over the drainer and checked that the one sharp kitchen knife was back in the drawer. Not content, she reopened the drawer and stuck a cork onto the tip of the knife, just to be sure. Sharp knives made her uneasy. She rarely cooked or entertained and possessed only four pieces of good furniture, including the sofa. But hardly anyone ever slumped down into it for a late-night drink or to read the Sunday papers. Sometimes her English friends – including Jane back home in Brympton – commented on how unlived-in it felt. Charlie, her younger brother, was more forthright. ‘You could at least unpack the boxes, Laure.’ ‘They’re fine as it is. I want it light, free from clutter.’ ‘Most normal people have something. A photo, some books, the chair Granny gave them. You might as well live in an egg box.’ Laure eyed him. Charlie was not much of a home-bird either and their mutual amusement held more than a tinge of irony. ‘Pot and kettle?’ ‘The very ones.’ If it was a modus vivendi which struck the English as odd, the French saw nothing peculiar about it. They were not curious as to how Laure chose to live and, if they wished to eat a meal together, they met at a restaurant. Listening to the news with half an ear, she drank her coffee and dried her hair. The meteo predicted 26 degrees at midday and she hoped no higher because her hair would suffer. Dommage. She gave it a final blast from the dryer, threaded drop pearl earrings into her ears and inspected her nail varnish, an exciting dark red that required upkeep. But, the colour of riot and sex, it was worth it. She tilted her head at the image in the mirror. What she saw in it told her that her efforts had paid off. She had sometimes listened to other women saying how much they hated their looks but she felt that she had been through too much to allow herself to indulge in that. It hobbled the mind. She swept a finger over her cheek. Her skin, of which she was proud, was still clear and youthful-looking. Once upon a time, in another country, Tomas told her that her skin reminded him of mother-of-pearl. Her final act was to apply sun-protection cream before picking up her laptop and handbag and letting herself out of the front door. Emerging into the street, she turned canalwards, glancing right and left and scanning the buildings. It was the old habit of ‘dry-cleaning’, the art of shaking off surveillance, that she had never discarded. Or rather, it refused to discard her. She set off and her mobile piped ‘Night Owl’. It was Xavier, her ex-husband. ‘Oui, mon brave.’ ‘Ma belle.’ Neither greeting meant anything much. It was the language and tone they had mutually agreed to adopt since parting several years previously. Xavier had remarried and had had the son for which he had longed. So civilized had been the divorce that Marie, the new wife, invited Laure over to dinner from time to time. Possibly to keep an eye on her predecessor? ‘If we had loved each other more,’ Xavier once remarked, ‘meeting would be a problem, but it’s not.’ ‘Strange to think how cut and shut it is now,’ she remembered replying. ‘Strange but true. Yet not uncomfortable, I think?’ ‘No, darling Xavier, not uncomfortable at all.’ They had stared at each other. Laure could not help thinking, as she sometimes did, that his kindly, worldly regard enshrined the accusation: your heart is arid. Traffic sounded in her ear and she deduced Xavier was in the street. A decade of marriage inevitably meant that this and that intelligence about your spouse stuck in the memory and there was a fair bet that he was wearing taupe chinos and the same black jacket he had cherished for years. His hair would be brushed back and, ten to one, he would be squinting into the distance because he was too vain to wear his glasses. ‘It’s one of the days I miss you, Laure. And your lovely gooseberry-coloured eyes.’ She smiled. ‘Me too, Xavier.’ Regret for the failed marriage surfaced more frequently than she owned up to. Xavier had his quirks, but he was a principled man and often very funny. ‘But you have a wife.’ ‘So I do.’ Knowing that Xavier was still fond of her warmed Laure, picking her way around the rubbish on the street. ‘You will always be half a Brit,’ he once said. ‘However good your French and however long you live here. You need a champion.’ Rubbish. Laure was more French or, to be accurate, more Parisian than Xavier gave her credit for. ‘J’aime deux choses seulement… vous et la plus belle ville du monde,’ she replied. It was a line from an old and sentimental poem, but it pinpointed her giving of her heart to the city. Xavier’s point about championing her was the one that held the real bite. If they had championed each other a little more during their marriage, the outcome might have been different. For that, she blamed herself. Mostly. Despite the banter, Xavier never wasted his phone calls. ‘Spotted an article in Figaro about the Louvre lobbying to gather the Museum of Broken Promises into its embrace. Its spokesman argues that the day of the private museum is over. They reckon you and they would be terrific in bed together.’ ‘Apparently.’ She gave a tiny sigh. ‘Pushing the metaphor: the Louvre is a disgusting old roué and you’re but a child bride. It’s the old thing. Money talks and those who have it talk away. How would it fit in with Nos Arts en France?’ Nos Arts en France was a semi-government body that issued grants for cultural enterprises. Laure had been warned that they were tricky but had found her dealings with them to be straightforward. ‘The board of Nos Arts will assess the situation and let me know whether they wish to continue funding the museum. If they do, nothing will change and I’ll be happy.’ ‘Nos Arts have been generous to you.’ ‘We could not have survived without them.’ Xavier became serious. ‘Do you mind if you’re taken over?’ She looked up in a sky lashed with trails of whipped cream. ‘I shall fight tooth and nail.’ ‘Chérie, you might not have any choice.’ He sounded regretful. ‘You have become powerful but not that kind of powerful.’ It wasn’t the first time Laure had encountered a threat – theoretical or otherwise – and she had learnt to deal with them by splitting herself into compartments. There was the Laure whose experiences in the past helped her to negotiate the dusty, complicated structures of public governance without too much bother. Then there was the Laure who burned to make her museum work precisely because the past still lived in her and who could be cast down by the bureaucratic grind. ‘On a happier note,’ she said, ‘Maison de Grasse is going to be our patron.’ It was Xavier’s turn to be taken aback, and the audible click of his tongue was an expression of admiration for a coup. ‘Nice.’ Having started life as a small, exclusive perfume house, Maison de Grasse had grown into a multi-national that supplied scents for a huge range of goods from household cleaners, which would be unusable without them, to candles and room sprays. They still created and manufactured the most exclusive perfumes, of course. Many of the larger French companies offset tax liabilities by becoming patrons of a museum. Maison de Grasse was following suit in concluding that it would be a prudent blend of fiscal planning and largesse to support a slightly alternative arts project. For Laure, there were sweeteners promised in the form of publicity for the...