Three Weeks in Paris

Three Weeks in Paris
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The latest novel from the genuinely bestselling author of seventeen compelling novels, from A Woman of Substance to The Triumph of Katie Byrne.

As students at the prestigious Anya Sedgwick School of Decorative Arts in Paris, Alexandra Gordon, Kay Lenox, Jessica Pierce and Maria Franconi share the challenges and excitement of developing their artistic talents to the fullest under Sedgwick's caring and demanding guidance. But once best friends, they part enemies, and after graduation they go their separate ways, pursuing careers and establishing lives in different corners of the world.

Alexandra, a set designer, becomes a leading figure in New York's theatre world. Kay, who marries and moves to Scotland, designs a successful line of clothing. Jessica, an interior designer, makes her home in California, while Maria returns to her native Italy, where she continues to work in her family's textile business.

For each of them, the arrival of an invitation to Paris to celebrate Anya Sedgwick's eighty-fifth birthday stirs up complicated feelings: nostalgic memories are coloured by poignant regrets and the reluctance to revisit their own pasts mixes with curiosity about the other women. It is ultimately their desire to deal with unfinished business that convinces all of them to attend the party. During three eventful weeks in Paris, they visit their old haunts, rekindle ties, and awaken in each other the sense of wonder, adventure, and possibilities they had shared so long ago.

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BARBARA TAYLOR BRADFORD

__________________________________________________________

THREE WEEKS

IN PARIS


This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk

Special overseas edition 2002

First published in Great Britain by

HarperCollinsPublishers 2002

Copyright © Barbara Taylor Bradford 2002

Barbara Taylor Bradford asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Ebook Edition © 2002 ISBN: 9780007330652

Version: 2017-10-25

For Bob, truly a man for all seasons,

with all my love

On the rue Jacob the man shivered and turned up the collar of his overcoat. It was a bitter February day, icy from the wind that swept down from the Russian steppes and across the plains of Europe to hit Paris with a sharp blast.

The sky was a faded blue, the sun watery as it slanted across the rooftops, almost silvery in this cold northern light, and without warmth. But Paris was always beautiful, whatever the weather; even when it rained it had a special quality all of its own.

Spotting a cab he hailed it, and as it slowed to a standstill he got in quickly and asked the driver to take him to the post office. Once he was there he unwrapped the package of stamped envelopes, seventy-one in all, and dropped them, in small batches, into a letter box, then returned to the cab.

The man now gave the driver the address of the FedEx office, settled back against the seat, glancing out of the window from time to time. How happy he was to be back in the City of Light, but, nonetheless, he could not help wishing it were a little warmer today. There was a chill in his bones.

In the FedEx office the man filled in the appropriate labels and handed them over to the clerk along with the white envelopes. All were processed for delivery within the next twenty-four hours, their destinations four cities in distant far-flung corners of the world. Back in the taxi he instructed the driver to take him to the Quai Voltaire. Once there, he alighted and headed towards one of his favourite bistros on the Left Bank.

And as he walked, lost in his thoughts, he had no way of knowing that he had just set in motion a chain of events that would have far-reaching effects. Because of his actions lives were about to be changed irrevocably: and so profoundly they would never be the same again.

It was her favourite time of day. Dusk. That in-between hour before night descended when everything was softly muted, merging together. The twilight hour.

Her Scottish nanny had called it the gloaming. She loved that name, it conjured up so much, and even when she was a little girl she had looked forward to the late afternoon, that period just before supper. As she had walked home from school with her brother Tim, Nanny between them tightly holding on to their hands, she had always felt a twinge of excitement, an expectancy, as if something special awaited her. This feeling had never changed. It had stayed with her over the years, and wherever she was in the world dusk never failed to give her a distinct sense of anticipation.

She stepped away from her drawing table, and went across to the window of her downtown loft, peered out, looking towards the upper reaches of Manhattan. To Alexandra Gordon the sky was absolutely perfect at this precise moment…its colour a mixture of plum and violet toned down by a hint of smoky grey bleeding into a faded pink. The colours of antiquity, reminiscent of Byzantium and Florence and ancient Greece. And the towers and spires and skyscrapers of this great modern metropolis were blurred, smudged into a sort of timelessness; seemed of no particular period at this moment, inchoate images cast against that almost-violet sky.



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