The Heroes' Welcome by Louisa Young

rattling, the specks in the wind. She stuck her head out of the window for a moment, and wanted to shout out loud. She was Anna Karenina … At Paris she had a few hours before her next train. Waiting seemed impossible. What to do? New perfume! She’d been wearing Malmaison and Nuits de Chine since 1913: another from Rosine? Or – hm. Poiret was too pre-war.
Something new
… she strolled out of the great Gare du Nord – laughing at how it said NORD NORD NORD all over it –
no doubt about where you’re heading, and I’m not! –
and looked around, but even with the spring gleaming around her nothing seemed clean enough. It was all too close to the remains of the war.
    Later
,
she thought.
I must, after all, get the right scent for my new life. New stamping grounds, new thoughts, a new way of being. The new persona.
    A cab took her down to the Gare d’Orsay, across the river. All the symbolism seemed right to her. South and west. Warm and new.
    Her final change was at Bayonne: Westward-ho! The train had double-decker carriages and a tremendously, humorously tall chimney. She went on the upper deck. Anna Karenina had faded away …
Charlie Chaplin?
No. Some fabulous vamp. Theda Bara! No, too tragic – Mabel Normand? Not dignified enough …
For a moment Emma Bovary crossed her mind, but she didn’t let
her
stay long. The rails spoke to her, as rails do:
I tried, I tried, I tried, I tried. And in French – j’ai essayé, j’ai essayé, j’ai essayé, j’ai essayé.
    And on through Anglet to Biarritz, where the fresh ocean air threw her backwards, and the stupendous majesty of the Hôtel du Palais, formerly Empress Eugénie’s
pied à mer
, filled her with glee. She took a modest room (she wanted to be here for a while), made no excuses about being alone, and from the array of available restaurants and cafés she selected the white and gold Rotonde, a great semicircle stuck on the western face of the hotel, with a wedding-cake aesthetic and tall windows in all directions. It was slap bang on the edge of the world and at the same time in the middle of everything. She took a table at the apex of the semicircle. To her right, the Lighthouse, on its pile of rocks. To her left, the Rocher de la Vierge
,
with its winding walkways through the crashing surf. Behind her, the town of Biarritz, Aquitaine, the whole of France, the whole of Europe. Before her, the golden beach, the salty bright Atlantic ocean, the west spreading out –
nothing but water between me and New York!
It was terribly exciting. Her stomach was trilling away.
    I shall take
tilleul
, linden, for its calming effect.
    She felt like a queen.
    New York! Well, why not New York? And what would you do in New York? I would work in a handkerchief shop. People would value me for my good manners, alluring demeanour and elegant English accent. I would live in a ladies’ hotel. I would sell my jewellery. Or, I would find a lover – who would lavish me with furs and keep me at the Ritz, a railway tycoon from Pittsburgh, a Russian prince fleeing the revolution, a tall silent horse-riding man who owns half of Texas, a man – a lover …
    A rush of blood, her spine shivered and she felt weak with sudden desire. This illicit thought, this thrilling word …
    A new man?
    Yes! If a man can be found who sees the peculiar allure of my new face, then yes, damn it, why not?
    Six weeks now since that last
act of union. It had not been horrible as Tom’s conception had been, three years before, that nightmarish almost-attack. This had been … sadder. She had allowed herself to hope, and he had been incapable of hoping. It had been, really, the moment of proof of the separation between Peter and her. The act of dissolution, confirmed.
    And how dissolute he is now. How dissolute we are, the pair of us. Dissolved – from each other, and in ourselves. Nothing to hold on to—
    ‘On second thoughts,’ she said to the waiter, ‘I’d like a cocktail.’
    ‘
Bien sûr, Madame.