Splendour, Joy and bloody Beauty – they looked as stern as ever, those three faces. Unless … was that a quirk I saw, just there? I squinted through the tumbling rain of water droplets, glistening like diamonds in the slant of morning sun. No, I decided, it was nothing. And yet, I had the feeling that the statues were trying to tell me something.
‘It would never work,’ I answered them aloud. I wanted to tell them that the fairy tales were lies, all lies, but it was difficult to say the words when above me Château Chinon rose resplendent in the sunshine, looking every inch the castle of a fairy tale. Difficult, too, to deny the existence of Prince Charmings when one had just last night come charging to my rescue. Damn, I thought. And happy endings? A sweet wind whispered through the leaves of the acacias, and I thought I heard Jim Whitaker’s voice asking me a second time, ‘Is happiness a thing we choose, I wonder?’
I wondered, too, and found no answer.
My hands were cold. I rummaged in my handbag for a pair of gloves and saw a flashing glimmer at the bottom, in amongst the jumbled clutter. Gloves forgotten, I reached in deeper, and closed my fingers round the two-toned coin. Not a French coin, but an Italian one – five hundred lire, to be exact. I seemed to see Neil’s eyes before me, watching me, quietly urging me to make a wish. Whenever you’re ready, he’d told me. Whenever you’re ready.
It had been years since I’d performed the tiny ritual, yet in the end it came so naturally. I took a deep breath, kissed the coin, and sent it tumbling with a wish into the icy water of the fountain.
I was so intent on watching it fall that I didn’t notice the cat, at first. The little creature had rubbed past my legs twice before I surfaced from my thoughts and looked down. The cat blinked up at me. It came into my arms without hesitation when I bent to pick it up, and nestled underneath my chin, purring like a motor-boat.
Behind me, Neil’s voice warned: ‘You’ll get fleas.’
I stiffened, then relaxed, not looking back. ‘I don’t care.’ How long he had been standing there, I didn’t know – I hadn’t heard his footsteps. But I heard them now, crisp and even on the pavement as he came across the square to join me at the fountain’s edge. I went on looking at the water, and my hands upon the cat were almost steady. Almost.
Neil glanced into the water, too, then turned his quiet gaze on me. ‘I see you’ve used your coin,’ he commented.
‘Yes.’
‘You didn’t wish for the cat to find a home, did you?’
I looked at him then, and saw that his eyes weren’t quiet at all. They were alive, intense with some unnamed emotion, and a question lurked within their midnight depths. Slowly, I shook my head.
The question vanished and he smiled. ‘Thank God for that,’ he said. ‘I thought you might have wasted it.’ And then he raised a hand to touch my face, a touch of promise, warm and sure, and as I struggled to smile back at him he kissed me. It felt so very right, so beautiful; tears pricked behind my lashes as life flowed through all my hollow limbs, and I lost all sense of place and time. It might have been a minute or an hour later when he moved, slanting a thoughtful look down at the black-and-white bundle of fur in my arms. The cat stared back at him, a trifle smugly.
‘I suppose,’ said Neil, ‘that this beast will have to come with us?’
Just like that. I stared up at him. ‘I thought you said your landlady hated cats?’
‘Yes, well, she doesn’t much like other women, either, but I fancy she’ll get used to both of you. Even Austrian landladies,’ he informed me, ‘recognise the hand of destiny at work.’ His own hand felt very warm as he smoothed my hair back. ‘Still, we’d better see to it the little fleabag gets his injections. Have you named him yet?’
I hadn’t really thought about it, but quite suddenly I knew there was just one name that would fit. ‘Ulysses,’ I told Neil. ‘His name’s Ulysses.’
A flash of understanding passed between us, and his dark eyes smiled down at me. ‘Right. Put Ulysses down, then, will you?’
‘Why?’
‘Just put him down.’
The cat yawned grumpily as I lowered him to the pavement. A stiff breeze scattered the fountain’s spray around the three bronze Graces, and the cat leapt safely out of range, moving to resume his nap beneath the nearest bench. The fountain’s spray struck me as well, as cold as ice, but I didn’t really mind it. Neil’s eyes, his smile, his touch, were warmth enough. Maybe he was right, I thought – it might not be so difficult, believing. I lifted my own hand to touch his face, his hair, to bring his head lower. And in the moment just before he kissed me, I could have sworn that, past his shoulder, Splendour smiled.