Excerpt from The American Lover by Rose Tremain, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

She knows she doesn't think of them as having lives, as such; they're just performing the duty of existence. They have dull, well-paid jobs, working for a Life Assurance company called Verity Life, with offices in Victoria Street, not far from the flat.

They pay for things. They watch television. The mother is half in love with Jack Lord, star of Hawaii Five-O, who drives a police motor launch at breathless speed. She loves it when a suspect is apprehended by Jack and he barks, 'Book him, Danno!' to his second-in-command. To the NUM hothead, Arthur Scargill, defending the strike that has taken Britain into darkness, the mother often shouts, 'Book him, Danno!' And this always makes the father smile. The father's smile is like a weak gleam of sunlight falling upon the room. The parents have survived all that Beth has done to them, all that has been done to her. Beth tells Rosalita that they will outlive their own daughter and this makes Rosalita bustle with agitation and reach for the crutches and tell her to get off the sofa and walk round the room. Beth tells her it's too painful to walk, but Rosalita has cradled in her arms matadors with lethal wounds; she's impatient with people complaining about pain. She gives the crutches to Beth and says, 'If you walk to the fireplace and back again, I will make hot chocolate with rum.' So Beth does as she is told and the pain makes her sweat.


The taste of the rum reminds her of being in Paris with Thaddeus.

She let herself get sacked from her job in the Gift Wrap counter in Harrods before they left, because part of her had decided they would never come back. They would live like Sartre and de Beauvoir on the Left Bank. Thaddeus would make a name for himself photographing French actors and models and objets d'art. They would drink black coffee at the Flore. She, Beth, would begin her career as a writer.

Thaddeus told her he'd been loaned an apartment 'with a great view' by an American friend. The view turned out to be of the Cimetière de Montparnasse, but Thaddeus continued to call it 'great' and liked to walk there, taking pictures of gravestones and mausoleums and artificial flowers, early in the morning. He said nothing about how long they would be staying in the City of Light.

The apartment had almost no furniture, as though the American friend hadn't yet decided to move in. The floors were wooden and dusty. The hot-water boiler screamed when it was turned on. Thaddeus and Beth slept on a mattress under a crocheted blanket of many colours.

Thaddeus said he had no money to buy sheets, but he had money, it seemed, to take them to an expensive gay and lesbian nightclub called Elle et Lui, where the personnel greeted him like a long-lost star and where a tall, beautiful woman called Fred became their friend and lover.

Fred lived in a hot little garret not far from their own empty, echoing apartment. Here, they drank rum and coke and made what Fred called l'amour exceptionnel. She said love between three people was radioactive; once you'd experienced it, it stayed in your blood for ever. She called Thaddeus 'Thad'. She whispered to Beth: 'Thad brought you here for this. It's the only kind of love he values because it's a democratic love. Tu comprends?'

She wanted to ask, does that mean what we had in London wasn't precious to him? But she didn't want to hear the answer. And she liked the way being touched by Fred excited Thaddeus. He called them 'the two most beautiful women in the world'.


'How long did you stay in Paris?' asks Rosalita.

Beth can't remember. Sometimes, she thinks it was a whole year and the seasons turned in the cemetery and the snow remoulded the tombs. Sometimes, she guesses that it was about a month or six weeks – until Thaddeus ran out of money.

Excerpted from The American Lover by Rose Tremain. Copyright © 2015 by Rose Tremain. Excerpted by permission of W.W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.