‘What are we here for? Bo-Bo is bored.’
Jeanne said the sentence through a mouthful of the biggest brioche Ethan had ever seen. A man had been selling them near the Porte de Clignacourt metro station. They had alighted there and Jeanne’s lips had started to quiver at the sight of them. Her small but strong hands had tugged at his sleeve like he had been completely oblivious to the stand and then she had given him those dewy, slightly piteous eyes she was obviously well practised at pulling out when necessary.
‘We are here to find inspiration.’ Ethan breathed in, drawing the cold air into his lungs like he was determined to also suck inside every nuance of the ambience of the enormous, sprawling flea market. It did always feel to him that it was a living, breathing beast, each stall owning its own pulsing heart of speciality.
‘You are in charge of props for a period drama series on TF1?’ Jeanne asked, pulling Bo-Bo away from a toy crib where he was sniffing around a quite disturbing-looking old-fashioned doll with half her porcelain face missing.
‘It is for the hotel,’ Ethan said, stepping towards a large dresser housing many oddly shaped lamps.
‘Which one?’ Jeanne asked, chocolate now smeared over her top lip. ‘Because I now know there are five hotels.’
‘All of them,’ Ethan told her. ‘But I will start with Tour Eiffel.’
‘But,’ Jeanne began, still munching, ‘according to your website, that is not your “flagship” hotel.’
The kid was smart. Always smarter than he gave her credit for. And she had most obviously been making full use of his Wi-Fi today.
‘Is it because Keeley is staying at that one?’ Jeanne asked. ‘And you want to impress her? Even though she does not know that you own it?’ She screwed her petite features up, wrinkling her nose. ‘I think there is a flaw in your plan to excite her.’
Ethan looked at the girl then, expertly tightening the lead on her dog while pushing the giant brioche into her mouth. ‘You think everyone is impressed by money?’
She shrugged, the neck of her too big T-shirt almost swallowing her head. ‘Are they not?’
‘Does money impress you, Jeanne?’ Ethan asked. He wanted to know the answer, because whatever she said would give him an even deeper insight into her mind. This child from the street with all her brashness was, in his opinion, as vulnerable as she was intelligent. Jeanne seemed to quieten a little then, chewing but also looking like she was wholeheartedly considering her reply.
‘Money buys you opportunity,’ Jeanne said finally.
‘How so?’ Ethan asked her. ‘Because I believe most people would say that perseverance and determination really make for opportunity.’
‘I show up in the reception of one of your fancy hotels and the first thing the evil man behind the counter wants to do is call me a thief. Just because of the clothes I am wearing.’
Ethan couldn’t deny that was the case. He had spoken to Antoine about being judgemental on a few other occasions. ‘Antoine likes neat and tidy. He has very high, possibly unreachable standards. He is too quick to react to those.’
‘How different would his reaction have been if I had say… styled my hair pretty, put on some make-up, a new dress perhaps, cleaned underneath my fingernails, worn shoes with a heel and… arrived to apply for the job of a chambermaid?’ She nodded with satisfaction at her answer. ‘I would need at least some money for the dress and the shoes and the make-up, for me just to be taken seriously and be given the opportunity.’ She nodded. ‘Money equals opportunity.’
‘You do not think you can be yourself and find success in life?’ Ethan asked.
‘I do not think it,’ Jeanne carried on. ‘I know it.’
‘I cannot believe that is true.’
‘Hello! I live on the street and have to beg for food to survive. No one wants me to be myself. Nobody wants me to exist at all.’ She gave a piece of brioche to Bo-Bo. ‘People turn away from people like me. They think if they cannot see me then I do not exist. Not all of them are bad people. They just do not want people like me on their conscience.’
Her words rained down on him. He had thought the same thing over and over so many times before. His heart ached for her but it also ached for himself too. He had been so lucky. He’d had Ferne back then. Her kindness, their friendship, the bond they shared that never seem to acknowledge their difference in class. It had been everything.
‘Listen to me, Jeanne,’ Ethan said, putting his hands on her shoulders. ‘Never apologise for being here, understand?’
‘Did you?’ Jeanne asked him, swallowing her mouthful of food.
‘Did I what?’ Ethan breathed.
‘Ever apologise for being here.’
Sucked back into a reverie he would rather forget, Ethan recalled the mantra he and the other children had been made to chant at the orphanage. Be seen not heard. Speak only when spoken to. Respect elders. Think not of yourself. It had been drummed into every child until it was the very first thing Ethan thought about on waking and the last thing that drifted through his mind as he prepared to go to sleep. It had broken him. Eventually, he had decided to leave the roof over his head for a life on the street where nothing was guaranteed, not even his next meal… It had scarred him, there was no doubt about that. But he had moved beyond it. With help from Ferne. One person’s belief in him had made all the difference.
‘I know you are like me,’ Jeanne continued as Bo-Bo began to sniff around a stall offering crafts made from old off-cuts of wood. ‘Or you were like me, in some way.’ She bit into more brioche. ‘People like us know each other. You watched me in the hotel, trying to get the chocolates from the Christmas tree. Perhaps I was not subtle enough, but really I think you noticed me because you had been in the same situation yourself once.’
He put an arm around Jeanne’s shoulder, steering her out of the path of a man on a bicycle. Bo-Bo popped his snout out from under the stall. ‘I was like you,’ Ethan admitted as they continued to walk. ‘I never knew who my parents were. I was left outside an orphanage when I was a baby.’ He sucked in a breath. ‘I was there for ten years until I could not stand it anymore.’
‘Where did you go?’ Jeanne asked.
‘Well,’ Ethan began, moving towards a glazed ‘shopfront’ with armchairs, dining chairs and all manner of seating outside it. Some of the chairs would not have looked out of place in a banquet hall, others seemed like they once belonged in a school. ‘When I was eight, I snuck out of the orphanage one day and I met a girl…’
‘Oh, please,’ Jeanne stated. ‘Not a romantic story. I cannot stand it. It is enough with the making love hearts with your eyes at Keeley.’
‘No,’ Ethan said. ‘It is not a romantic tale. It is a tale of friendship and… family.’ He thought about Ferne, but also he thought about Silvie and Pierre and… Louis. They had been the only family he had known and despite still feeling he was a little bit of a cuckoo, they had been there for him. ‘I had two years of visiting a very nice home in the suburbs and being taken on outings you could only dream of.’ He smiled at Jeanne. ‘With food you definitely dream of.’ He plumped down into one of the armchairs and spread his fingers over the fabric on the arms. It was rich, sumptuous green velvet but with small threadbare patches that seemed only to enhance its appeal. ‘But after each visit, I would go back to that freezing, soulless place where the people who were supposed to care and look after made it clear I was no better than something that was stuck to the sole of their shoe, and I would long to be anywhere but there.’
‘You lived on the street?’ Jeanne asked, sitting down in the chair opposite, Bo-Bo deftly leaping up onto her lap.
‘I lived on the street,’ Ethan answered with a nod. ‘I spent weekends with the family that took me out for visits, but I never moved in under their roof.’ Perhaps by refusing that offer – because it had been offered – he had made himself the cuckoo. That self-appointed status he was always using as a default position. ‘Perhaps I should have.’
He hadn’t realised he had said those last words out loud until Bo-Bo let out a bark and brought him back to the now. Jeanne hadn’t said anything and he wanted to get across to her the point he was trying to make in all this. ‘I see your independent nature, Jeanne. I know you think you are tough and you can take on the world, but do not be afraid to take help from the world too.’ He swallowed, watching her features soften and her fingers squash the food in her hands. ‘I cannot be anything formal to you. My life, it is still as up in the air as it has always been. I do not have myself together.’
‘You own five hotels,’ Jeanne stated.
‘I part-own five hotels and, believe me, that job gets more difficult by the day.’
‘You said I could stay… for a bit,’ Jeanne reminded him, her tone cutting him to the quick. ‘You said we could go to the circus.’
‘I did,’ he answered. ‘You can, and we are, tomorrow evening.’
‘Then what is this “I cannot be anything formal to you” speech about if it is not to get rid of me already?’
Ethan sighed, his body resting so comfortably in the old part-worn chair. It was like it was a piece of his own furniture, its cushions moulding to the shape of his body. ‘I would like to help you, Jeanne. Like someone once helped me. But we do not have to become a deep part of each other’s lives.’ He was not ready to be someone’s role model or moral guidance. ‘I will be your… benefactor. You can stay at my apartment whenever you like, there will be food in the fridge, but we will not always sit around the table together sharing anecdotes of our days.’
‘That would be the worst,’ Jeanne agreed with a nod.
‘And you should go to school,’ Ethan told her.
‘What?!’
‘That is my condition of you sharing my space.’
‘But what about Bo-Bo. There will be no one to look after him all day,’ Jeanne started to protest, wriggling with the dog still on her lap. ‘And the school will want many forms filled in with who I am and where I come from and who is my guardian and—’
‘Jeanne, do you think this will be my first time making up a story to suit my purposes?’
‘What will I learn at school that I will not learn from the streets… or working at a hotel? There are five of them for you to choose from. I do not mind starting from the very bottom. I can clean.’
Ethan studied her, chocolate somehow now all over her face. She was so young. He had no idea how young and he wasn’t sure the girl really knew herself…
‘We will do a trial,’ Ethan told her. ‘You will share my apartment between now and the end of the Christmas holidays and, if the arrangement is acceptable, you will commit to school.’
He watched her mulling over the suggestion. He could almost see her brain working things over. The pluses, the minuses, if this attachment to his offer was really going to be what she wanted. Of course she could flee into the night at any time, or she could stay for the duration of the festive break and then flee into the night and renege on the whole idea. But, for now, he was guessing Jeanne had nothing to lose and he would at least know she was safe for a while. One less kid on the pavements of Paris with no one looking out for them…
‘Bo-Bo sleeps with me,’ Jeanne said suddenly. ‘In the bed. Not on the floor or on a fancy dog bed he will hate. With me.’
Ethan shrugged. ‘He was meant to sleep with you last night, but he ended up in my bed. And he snores.’
‘You have terrible taste in jam,’ Jeanne countered. ‘Strawberry is the best. Not this horrible bitter orange in the cupboard.’
Ethan smiled. He didn’t even know he had orange jam. ‘So, we are agreed? A mutually beneficial arrangement for a few weeks?’
‘Mutually beneficial?’ Jeanne asked, her eyebrows rising up into her hat. ‘How does this benefit you? Is there a clause I have missed? If it is eating the jam I would rather eat Bo-Bo’s—’
‘You can work at the hotels. At the weekends. Until you are allowed to be officially employed, you will be my second assistant. That will involve anything I ask you to do.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like… making coffee or organising the new ornamental features we are looking at today.’ He relaxed into the seat a little further. ‘What do you think to these chairs?’
‘I think,’ Jeanne said, sitting further back in hers, her feet coming off the floor completely, ‘they have lived a life already.’
‘Yes,’ Ethan answered, a smile on his face. ‘Exactly that.’