And yet, I knew that at any point I could have gone back to the station, done what I was supposed to do. Put Si and his feelings first. Been the good girl, the good girlfriend. But had I been in denial all along? Did I like Léo more than I was letting on, even to myself? All day we’d been finding excuses to spend more time together, and part of that was about seeing Paris, of course it was. But it was seeing Paris with him that had made it so special. And it dawned on me that, for whatever reason, I didn’t want our day together to end.
“Hannah!” called Léo, waving me over to the bike.
I waved back, putting aside the revelation I’d just had. I liked Léo more than I should. And if that was the case, what did that mean for me and Si?
15
I’ll be glad when I don’t have to get on this thing again,” I said, wandering over to join him.
“You have not enjoyed the bike?” said Léo, giving me a suspicious look. “Because I think you have started to love it, just a little bit, but that you are too proud to admit it.”
“See, you can read people,” I said, suppressing a smile.
I put the helmet on and did up the strap. After today, I didn’t think I’d ever get the chance to fly around a city on the back of a motorbike again. I wouldn’t have the guts to do it somewhere else, with somebody else. And even if I did, it wouldn’t be the same. There was something about the idea of Léo and me, cruising around Paris, the small window of time we had, the way his leather jacket flapped in the wind, the way he made me feel like Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday.
We set off, juddering at first, the engine revving. His bag was slung across his lap, which I wasn’t too happy about, but he’d assured me it would be fine. Léo shouted something to his friends as we drove past and some of them waved in a cool, dismissive way, as though they couldn’t care less if we returned or not. I turned away from them and looked out across the canal instead, at the tourists streaming up and down across the iron bridges. And then we were moving faster, more smoothly, down a street I remembered from earlier, the one with all the Indian restaurants, and then a sharp left onto the busy main road with the exotic fruits. I braced myself as we pulled out into the traffic again and squeezed my knees tighter, burying my face into Léo’s back. When I next looked up, we’d stopped at some lights on a picturesque cobbled side street that climbed steeply upward. I dug my fingers into Léo’s waist. He turned to look at me.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Where are we?” I shouted.
The sun was high in the sky now, its rays beating against the bare skin on my shoulders.
“Montmartre, already. Tres jolie, non?”
I nodded. “It’s lovely!”
Although that didn’t quite do justice to the quaint Parisian perfection I was seeing. When the lights changed we set off again, flying past trendy patisseries with windows full of tarts and éclairs and steep, winding staircases sandwiched between whitewashed, shuttered houses, which I would have loved to explore if we’d had the time. Cafés spilled out onto the pavement and locals chatted animatedly outside the supermarket, sheltering under the shade of its candy-striped awning. I looked longingly at a row of beautiful shops, the kind I’d like to spend hours browsing in if only I had the money: Aesop, Comptoir des Cotonniers, a gorgeous-looking concept store. Every corner seemed to house a cute wooden hut selling snow globes of the Sacré-Coeur and Eiffel Tower key rings and bottles of cold, crisp water.
Léo pulled over, pointing to a leafy square on our left.
“Look,” he said. “See? It is a famous mural called Le Mur des Je T’Aime. The I Love You Wall.”
The wall itself was obscured by a swath of heads and selfie sticks, but I strained my neck to see. I noticed the color first—a glistening, midnight blue. White calligraphy was etched across the tiles, although I couldn’t make out the words from this distance.
“Could we stop for a sec?” I asked.
“Sure.”
I slid off the bike and took off my helmet. A man wearing the quintessential black-and-white-striped T-shirt and beret combo was playing “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” on the accordion and somehow it wasn’t clichéd, like I might have imagined it would be in this scenario; instead it created the perfect atmosphere as I followed Léo through a tiny, fragrant garden. We worked our way to the front of the crowd.
“What’s the story behind it?” I asked, my eyes darting everywhere, wanting to remember this moment; how I’d felt standing in front of it.
“The artist went around to all of his neighbors in the suburbs of Paris, where he lived. There are people from many, many different countries and cultures living there, and he asked them to write down the words I love you in their own language,” Léo told me.
I dabbed my face with a tissue and fanned myself fruitlessly with my hand. “How many are there?”
“Two hundred and fifty different languages and over three hundred declarations of love. There is every language you can imagine, from English and French to Navajo and Bambara, which is the national language of Mali.”
“Is there anything you don’t know about Paris?”
He looked up at the wall. “There is always more to learn.”
I took a close-up of the wording on one of the tiles, which I thought might be in Arabic. “Anyway, I didn’t think you believed in the idea of love,” I said.
He took a step back, tipping his head to look at it from a different angle. “I do not believe in it for myself,” he said. “I cannot speak for other people.”
I peered at the details of the wall, the different fonts the artist had used, the shapes of the letters, the splashes of red.
“The red is to show how the world is turning on each other. That the wall is trying to bring everyone together again,” he said.
I ran my fingertips over it.
“Sylvie seems to know you pretty well,” I said.
“Why, what has she been saying?” he asked, crouching down. “You know, the tiles are made from enameled lava,” he said, placing his hand on one.
I bent down to touch it, too, my fingertips centimeters from his.
“She told me you don’t have long-term relationships. It seems like she’s worried about you.”
He whistled through his teeth. “She thinks that everybody must be the same. I have many friends. I have my music. There is nothing a relationship would bring to my life that I don’t already have.”
I looked at him quizzically. “Do you really think that?”
“Yes, otherwise why would I say it?”
“What about companionship? The joy of falling in love? Sex with somebody you have genuine feelings for?”
“Come on, Hannah. We all know that disappears over time, non? You can honestly tell me you experience these things, still? With your boyfriend? This joy you talk of, the excitement?”
“You’re afraid of getting hurt, aren’t you? That’s what it is.”
He groaned. “This is what Sylvie told you?”
“She didn’t,” I said, not wanting to throw her under the bus. “It’s obvious, that’s all.”
“I am fine as I am, Hannah. If people paid more attention to their own love stories, perhaps they would be less concerned with mine.”
I pressed my lips together, taking another series of shots.
“Don’t your feelings ever just take over, though?” I asked him. “Don’t you ever find yourself falling for someone, even though it’s the last thing you want?”
“Yes,” he said, looking sideways at me. “Sometimes.”
I stood up and walked the length of the wall, dusting my fingers across the tiles, which were smooth like glass.
“Look,” I said, “there are symbols, too. There’s a heart, see?”
“And a peace sign,” he said, reaching out to touch it.
I put my camera to my eye and t
ook three or four more close-up shots.
“Have you always been looking for it, Hannah? This idyllic, romantic love, like we see in the movies, or read about in books?”
I shielded my eyes from the sun to look at him. “I think I always knew it wasn’t like that.”
“See, you are just as cynical as I am after all.”
I laughed. “Let’s just say my love life didn’t get off to the best start,” I said.
“Come,” said Léo, picking up his bag and beckoning me out of the gate. “Let us take a little walk around Abbesses. You can tell me how it was for you when you were a teenager. Were you very cool, all in black? A goth?” he asked.
“Ha! Hardly. Have you seen the film Clueless? My friend Ellie and I would try to re-create that preppy American high school look using a terrible array of charity shop items.”
“I am sure you both looked très agréable.”
“We did not. Rest assured, boys weren’t exactly breaking down the door to ask me out.”
Léo smiled. “Hannah. You are too hard on yourself.”
I told him about the moment Gus Davidson from my class had asked me out to the cinema, and about how my first thought had been: Who put him up to this? Is it some kind of cruel joke?
“I was fifteen. He was the brainiest boy in our year.”
He’d been tipped to go to Oxford or Cambridge, I recalled, a mysterious and exotic notion for the rest of us who were struggling to get good enough grades to stay on in sixth form, never mind considering Oxbridge.
“How did he do it?” asked Léo.
“He ran up behind me when I was walking home one afternoon,” I said. “I couldn’t work out what the hell he was doing. I imagined he would have been holed up in the library, or off doing some sort of extracurricular activity for the very gifted.”
“You were not used to the attention,” said Léo.
“Maybe,” I said. “I think I must have had confusion written all over my face.”
Léo laughed. “You should have played it very cool.”
“Were you listening when I told you what I looked like?”
The accordion was still playing softly. As we walked along the curved streets of Montmartre, I began to daydream. I saw myself in a gorgeous cream-colored building with the shutters of an apartment thrown open and a window box hanging off the ledge and on the cobbled street down below, somebody would be playing some mournful tune. Léo would be next to me and we would be laughing about something, the sweet smell of waffles and cherry blossoms wafting up into the air. I snapped myself out of it. What was I doing?
“I must know about the date with this . . . Gus?” said Léo. “Was it good?”
“I mean, I looked great. I’d slathered myself in my mum’s blue and lilac eyeshadow and had put my hair up into a high ponytail, like this,” I said, showing him how I could pull my hair off my face so tightly that it looked as though I’d had a face-lift. He raised his eyebrows and smirked, and I elbowed him playfully in the side.
“And what was he wearing, can you remember?”
I thought back. “A checked shirt. Under a navy V-neck jumper.”
“Classique.”
“When he saw me, he shook my hand.”
“Too formal?”
“The film was terrifying, I remember that.”
“You do not like scary movies?”
I shook my head. “Not at all. And he didn’t put his arm around me or anything. I had my hands over my eyes most of the time.”
“He did not kiss you?” he said, looking shocked. I didn’t imagine Léo had ever held back in that department.
“Not that night.”
“How long did it last, this romance?” he asked, pointing to a beautiful entrance to a Metro station I was sure I’d seen in a film. I took a photo of its romantic mint-green railings and glass-covered canopy. The classic green-and-yellow Metropolitain sign hung from its apex.
“Oh, about three weeks.”
He looked impressed. “That long?”
“He stopped talking to me one day, completely out of the blue. I cornered him in the science lab to find out why and he dumped me, right there, wearing a white coat and safety goggles.”
It was all so long ago, but I could still recall how I’d felt that day, how much it had hurt. How rejected I’d felt. Because I obviously wasn’t good enough for a straight-A student like Gus. How could I be, I remembered thinking, when I wasn’t even good enough to make my own father stick around? The two had felt linked in my mind, and it was always the same: I didn’t seem to be able to get over things the way other people could. Each little glitch, every little mistake, was another reminder that I was a girl that nobody wanted. Even if Dad hadn’t loved Mum anymore, he could have carried on seeing me. That feeling of being discarded, or abandoned, had continued throughout my entire life. And I was sick of feeling that way; I didn’t want it to be like that anymore.
“Let me take a photo of you here,” I said, shooing Léo back. “I want you right under the Metropolitain sign.”
“There are only two original entrances like these in the whole of Paris,” he said. “They are called ‘the dragonfly,’ for some reason. Perhaps they are modeled on their wings.”
This time he didn’t do a silly pose, he just put his hands in his pockets and hung his head and then looked up at me through his fringe, and when I looked at him through the viewfinder, I honestly thought it might be one of the loveliest images I’d ever seen.
He checked his watch. “Come. If we run up this staircase we will see a secret square, one of my favorites in the city. Très artistique. Very nice views.”
“What time is it now?” I said, catching up, watching his bag bob up and down on his shoulder.
“It is 12:45,” he said.
“Only one hour left,” I said, to myself more than anything. Funny how when the day had started, all I wanted was for the hours to pass so that I could get to the wedding and be with Si again. And now, suddenly, what I wanted was for the hours to stand still. For us to be paused, right here in this moment.
“Hurry,” he said. “Up here.”
We walked up some steps to a cobbled, leafy square. To both sides, restaurants had their heaving tables spilling out onto the pavement, full of people enjoying a spritzer with their lunch in the midday sun. There was a quaint-looking hotel on the far side, and another building called the Bateau-Lavoir.
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to it.
“I will show you,” he said, steering me across the square.
As we passed diagonally across the cobbles, a small group of family and friends and well-wishers were gathered around a couple who had presumably just got married. She was simply dressed in a cream shift and sling-back heels; he was in a white shirt, open at the neck. Everyone laughed as someone threw confetti and there was a flurry of camera flashes as they tried to capture the snowstorm of pastel paper.
“Now, that’s my kind of wedding,” I said, surreptitiously taking a photo of them myself. “If I ever get married, I’d like it to be something like that.”
“When you get married, don’t you mean?” he corrected, walking off.
I joined him and we stood outside the window of the Bateau-Lavoir, which up close was not much more than a black shop front with the somber air of a funeral parlor. A few seemingly unrelated paintings and sketches were displayed in the window.
“This was a very famous artists’ residence in the late 1800s and early 1900s,” he said.
“Am I right in thinking Picasso painted one of his famous paintings here?” I said.
He nodded. “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.”
I put my hand on the glass. “All that history.”
“An exciting time to be an artist, non? To live and paint and drink with Modigliani and Matisse and Cocteau, can you imagine?
”
“How do you know so much about Paris, anyway?” I asked him. “If you’re like this with other subjects, you should definitely go on a game show. Or do pub quizzes, or something.”
“What is a pub quiz?” he asked, screwing up his nose.
“It’s like a general knowledge quiz. In a pub,” I said, laughing. “The winning team gets money. If you ever come to London, you should try one.”
“You will be on my team?” he asked.
“Absolutely.”
It was impossible to imagine him in England, to picture what he’d be like out of context. Everything seemed so muddled together in my head: Paris itself, my worries about Si, the feelings I was developing for Léo, which I hadn’t yet made sense of.
“Ah!” he said. “I almost forgot. You have to try the best crêperie in the world.”
I tutted. “There are other places with great cuisine, you know.”
“I challenge you to name somewhere with more delicious food than Paris.”
I waved him away, reluctantly following him over to a hut carved into the wall, which in all honesty looked like one of the tatty pizza joints at the cheap end of Oxford Street. Léo was already scouring through a blackboard with a list of about twenty varieties of crêpe on it. Who knew you could do so many things with batter?
“Which one would you like, Hannah?” said Léo, ridiculously excited.
“Um, lemon and sugar?”
“No. Absolument pas. You must have something you have never tried before.”
“Why?”
He looked at me. “That is what today is all about, non?”
“But what if I make the wrong choice and I don’t like it?”
“Then what is the worst thing that could happen?”
I sighed, crouching down to look at the menu, trying to decipher what everything was so that I didn’t choose something with snails in it, or something equally revolting.
The Paris Connection Page 18