‘I’m going to be a writer,’ she explained quickly. ‘That’s why I’m going back to Paris. To write a book.’
‘You don’t have to go to Paris to do that,’ replied Edward with annoying matter-of-factness.
She turned and frowned, watching his profile – a strong nose and a set jaw gave him a look of confidence that bordered on arrogance – and decided to stand her ground.
‘Several of the twentieth’s century greatest novelists might disagree with you. Joyce, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound all wrote some of their best work there.’
‘Not because of the nice views and decent croissants.’ He shrugged. ‘They were all escaping either war or Prohibition. Paris was more bohemian and liberal; it attracted artists like a honeypot and they in turn inspired and mentored one another. But it could have happened in any number of big cities. A coffee shop in London could become the next great literary salon. It’s what’s here and what’s there that counts,’ he said, pointing to his head and his heart. ‘Everything else is just geography.’
‘Well I found I worked very well there,’ she said, sniffing. ‘I had a favourite spot right in the gardens behind Notre-Dame. By the time I left two weeks ago, I had five diaries full of thoughts and scribbles.’
‘Then there’s your book. A memoir. An English Girl in Paris. You could even finish it between parties.’
‘No one is going to be interested in the memoirs of an unknown eighteen-year-old girl. I want to be a novelist like Françoise Sagan.’
She could see him smiling to himself in the dark and it irritated her.
‘So what about you? What does life beyond the Season hold for you?’
‘I graduate in a few months,’ he said, explaining that he was at somewhere called Christ Church, apparently part of Oxford University. ‘My father works at a bank. I’ll go and join him there, but at some point I want to live in New York.’
‘New York?’
‘What’s wrong with that?’
‘My mum always says that New York has no culture. No history.’
‘Nonsense,’ smiled Edward, as if she had said something quite ridiculous. ‘The Met Museum is the best in the world. Plus jazz, art, theatre, film . . . It’s like Paris was in the twenties.’
‘You’ve changed your tune,’ she replied haughtily. ‘You were London’s biggest cheerleader a minute ago.’
‘London is a great city, but it will take another decade before it is fully recovered from the war. The Empire is dead. The class system is dying. You only have to look at the end of the deb season to know that. New York is the new centre of the world. So that’s what I want to do. Open a division of the bank on Wall Street. One day the City of London will be the centre of the financial world again, but until that point, the global commercial heartland is New York.’
‘Well, it must be nice to have it all figured out,’ she said a touch more tartly than she meant. ‘Meanwhile, I’ve got nothing to look forward to but six more months of stupid cocktail parties and dances.’
‘Get a job,’
‘I’m doing the Season.’
‘But your days are free, give or take the odd trip to Ascot or a pheasant shoot.’
‘I don’t have any experience.’
‘Work in a coffee shop. Meet people, observe them, people-watch. It’ll all be good for your writing. Perhaps you could even start a literary salon.’
She wasn’t sure if he was teasing her. Certainly he had the innate confidence of the rich, that self-belief that made her feel slightly uncomfortable, as much as his suggestions appealed to her. They were on the King’s Road now and the neon lights from a row of coffee shops spilt on to the puddles in the street. Part of her wanted to go inside one. She wanted to drink espresso and learn all about jazz in New York, suspecting that Edward Carlyle was the sort of person who knew a lot about all sorts of things.
She was going to suggest it but he was already indicating right to turn on to her street, and she felt a faint pang of disappointment.
‘Which number?’ he asked, slowing the car.
She could see the upstairs light on in their little flat. Estella would be waiting up for her.
He pulled in to the kerb, and for a second the two of them sat in a silence that made her feel uncomfortable.
‘Are you heading back to Richmond?’
‘I think I’ll give it a miss,’ he replied, glancing at his watch.