The French for Christmas Read Online Free

grief.
    The hall clock chimes. Shocked out of my reverie, I look at my boots sitting there on the doormat, and then catch a glimpse of my face in the hallway mirror. My skin is too pale and the dark half-moon shadows beneath my eyes stand out stark against it. I run a hand through my hair, trying to smooth the copper curls which have gone a little frizzy, as usual, in the damp London air.
    I go upstairs to the bathroom, the two his-and-hers sinks mocking me as I rummage in the cabinet for the foil pack of pills. The doctor prescribed these antidepressants when I got to the stage of being unable to haul my sorry carcass out of bed for several days at a stretch. They make me feel a little foggy, removed from reality, but then isn’t that the point? Under the unforgiving glare of the bathroom lights, my reflection seems too far away, as though it, too, has disconnected itself from me and my grief.
    I guess you know you are really and truly alone when even your own reflection deserts you.
    I sway a little, gripping the side of the sink to try to steady the faint giddiness as the pills kick in.
    ‘ France ,’ I whisper to myself again. A faint glimmer of light at the end of a very long, very dark, very lonely tunnel.

Jingle Bells
    A day or two ago
    I thought I’d take a ride...

    S ending up a little prayer of thanks for having survived the Parisian traffic, I swing the car into the underground parking lot at Sèvres-Babylone, stretch across the passenger seat to grab the ticket that the machine spits out, and manoeuvre gingerly into one of the narrow spaces. I sit for a moment in the sudden silence as the cooling motor ticks quietly and breathe out a big sigh of relief. As an American driving a British right-hand drive stick-shift car on the wrong side of the road (or, in fact, really the right side in every sense), I congratulate myself on having gotten this far safely, with only one near miss by a kamikaze taxi driver on the périphérique and just three aggressive blasts of the horn from French drivers sitting behind me at the stoplights a nanosecond after they turn green. Thank goodness for my GPS, whose endlessly patient and polite British tones have steered me here.
    Emerging into the grey light of a Paris afternoon, I pause for a moment, orienting myself. When I first arrived in the city all those years ago, fresh off the plane from Boston and as green as the taste of a Key Lime Pie, it was a terrifying and bewildering city. But it soon became friendlier as I got the hang of the metro and worked out the geography of the place. The River Seine, the Eiffel Tower and Montmartre provided useful landmarks for newbies like me.
    The Bon Marché beckons me, its name written boldly on the skyline in a thousand light bulbs, a vast emporium offering beautiful clothes and the best grocery store in the world bar none. I hitch my overnight bag onto my shoulder and stride out. I’ll check in at the little hotel I’ve found, just off the Rue du Bac, and then head out again for a wander down my own personal Memory Lane...
    I step out of the front door of the hotel, tentatively at first, but growing in confidence as more and more familiar places come back to me. I call in at the old-fashioned Salon de Thé –come–ice cream parlour with its red and gold storefront, for a cup of tisane , served in a thick white cup with a little almond cake—a Calisson d’Aix —nestling on the saucer beside it. Then I stroll up the Rue du Bac, pausing often to gaze at the window displays in the little shops that line the street, at antiques and jewellery, furniture and flowers. The fish shop and the butcher’s both stop me in my tracks for a good few minutes as I gaze at the bountiful displays of unfamiliar cuts of meat and strange creatures from the deep. Elegant Parisians, the men as smartly turned out and immaculately coiffed as the women, hurry in and out of the shops, small, wax-paper-wrapped packages of tempting morsels for dinner stowed