“I’ll take a Denise,” I said finally, which I thought was apple, salted caramel and vanilla ice cream. What wasn’t to like about that?
“Bon,” he said, “good choice.”
He made our order, and while we waited, we sat on a bench in the square, under the shade of a tree, resting our feet on his bag. Next to us was a working water fountain, which was getting lots of use today, with people holding their bottles underneath to fill them and kids running around its base. In front of us, peeping between buildings, was a charming view of the rooftops of Paris.
“You know, whenever I travel somewhere new, I always stamp a picture of it in my mind’s eye, something really colorful and evocative,” I said. “So that I can conjure up the feeling of being there when I’m back home.”
I took a photo, adjusting the brightness because the sun was right over our heads and making everything look blanched and hazy. It had started when I was a kid. One year, Mum had rented us a caravan near Bournemouth and what I always went back to was an image of me walking out onto the wooden pier, holding a warm pink candy floss in my hand, the tinkling music from the carousel and Mum—relaxed for once—with her sunglasses on, smiling down at me.
“I think this might be it,” I said. “The image I’ll think of when I want to remember Paris.” I hoped it would replace the one from before, which leaped into my mind’s eye occasionally when I least expected it to. I’d get this flashback, this fuzzy-edged image of me walking by the Seine, the point at which I’d realized that coming to Paris had all been for nothing. And now maybe I would have this moment instead.
Léo nudged me in the ribs. “So I have convinced you after all.”
I slipped off my shoes, wiggling my toes around. “I suppose exploring Paris with you hasn’t been quite as bad as I’d thought it would be.”
“I knew it.”
I laughed. “You’re really annoying, do you know that?”
“Yes,” he said, grinning at me.
I closed my eyes, breathing in the aroma of sweet batter and molten chocolate drifting across the square.
“What happened before?” he asked. “Last time you came here?” And then, when he saw my face, he added: “You do not have to tell me if you do not want to.”
My throat felt tight. It wasn’t so much the thought of telling him as it was the fear of the feelings that might come with it. I knew that if I kept them buried, never talked about them, I could bear it. It was how I’d always dealt with the things I didn’t like. I had no idea what would happen if I actually addressed the past, said the words out loud. I’d never tried it before.
“I came here alone,” I told him tentatively. “I’d just turned nineteen and I was in a bit of a state. I’d fucked up my A levels and all my mates had gone off to college or university. I was still living at home and working on the till at a clothes shop in my hometown. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life.”
“So you came traveling? To Paris?”
I shook my head. “Not exactly. It wasn’t some nice trip, some gap-year adventure. I came looking for my dad.”
Léo leaned forward, his hands clasped together on his thighs.
“He was here, in the city?”
I looked down at my fingernails, examining them one by one. “I’d thought so. He’d sent me a birthday card, the first one I’d had in years. Except that it didn’t reach me on my birthday. He’d put the wrong house number on it, and the postcode wasn’t quite right. My birthday is in June, and I hadn’t got it until that September.”
“You and your mother had moved house?”
“Nope. It was the same house he used to live in. He couldn’t even remember where his own daughter lived, so that was nice.”
I became aware that Léo’s knee was pressing against mine. Without thinking too much about it, I pressed back.
“I’d had some money saved. I was going to buy myself an old camera, funnily enough, and had been saving little bits here and there. I had just enough for a day return on the Eurostar.”
“You had his address?”
“He’d scrawled it on the back of the envelope. He must want me to find him, I thought, otherwise why would he have bothered? It was the sign I’d been waiting for all those years, proof that he missed me as much as I missed him. I went to Paris the following week. He was living in an apartment in Belleville, I can’t remember the name of the street.”
A yappy dog walked past us, jangling my already jangled nerves. We heard someone calling and when we turned round, it was the man from the crêperie, waving our order around, one in each hand, our crêpes wrapped in white paper napkins. Léo ran over to get them.
“Here,” he said, slouching back down next to me, passing me my Denise.
I bit into it, closing my eyes for a second or two. “You’re right,” I said. “I have to admit it. I declare this the absolute best pancake I have ever had in my life.”
“I am desperate to say ‘I told you so.’ ”
“Please don’t.”
“Want to try mine?” asked Léo.
“What’s in it?”
“It is a Spéciale Bretonne,” he said. “Chocolate, pear, vanilla ice cream, Grand Marnier, possibly something else I cannot remember.”
He held it out to me and as I went to steady it, I put my hand over his. I held it tight, taking a bite. He was so close now that I could see my own reflection in his pupils.
“Mmm,” I said, breaking eye contact, licking my lips. “It’s delicious.”
“So continue, about your father,” he said.
“Damn. I thought I’d got away with it.”
“You know I am the master at asking questions,” he said.
I took another mouthful of crêpe, giving myself a few moments to think. To imagine myself back there.
“I got the early train. I thought I’d sleep most of the way, but I couldn’t, I was too wound up. When I got to Gare du Nord I walked to Belleville, because I didn’t have any money for the Metro, never mind a taxi.”
“What happened, when you arrived at his apartment?”
I shook my head. This was the difficult part. The part that seemed unbelievable, looking back on it. The sort of thing that happened to characters in soap operas, but not to actual people in real life. Not the people I knew, anyway.
“A woman answered the door. She was very French, older, dressed all in black. She told me there had been a couple living there, a Portuguese man and a Frenchwoman, but that they’d moved out a few weeks before. Apparently they’d had to leave in a hurry, she didn’t know why, or at least, she wasn’t telling me.”
“Had they left a forwarding address?”
“Nope. Nothing. She had no idea where they’d gone, or whether they were even still in Paris. She said they’d kept to themselves, that she knew nothing about them, except that they’d paid their rent on time, which was all she’d appeared to care about.”
I watched a little girl swinging herself round and round a lamppost, one of those old-fashioned ones that made me think of Paris late at night. It must be even more romantic, I thought, by moonlight, the streetlamps glowing, the shafts of light from the windows of the apartments above filtering through once everyone had closed their shutters.
“So your trip had been for nothing,” he said quietly.
“I hung around the streets for a bit, sat on a bench in a little square, hoping I’d catch a glimpse of him strolling past if I looked hard enough. I wasn’t even sure I’d recognize him after all that time. Eventually I gave up and walked into the center of the city. I had hours to wait for my train. I walked down to the Seine, all the way along to the islands. Saw Notre-Dame, which is the one thing I’m glad about now, of course. That’s all I did all day, walk and walk and think. I realized, later, that perhaps my dad had sent the birthday card as a sort of goodbye.”
; “Why would he do that?”
“And that he hadn’t meant to put his address on the back.”
“No, Hannah.”
“I never heard from him again. So he couldn’t have wanted to see me that much, could he?”
I looked away, because the air suddenly felt charged with something and it scared me. Léo made me feel as though he was really with me when I told him about my life. It might have been the way his eyes were so wide and bright, or his melancholy voice, made all the more evocative by his lilting Parisian accent. The magic of Paris and being in this gorgeous square. It was funny how you could meet a perfect stranger, be thrown together and begin to share things that you hadn’t told your closest friends and probably never would.
“You cannot control how people behave,” said Léo softly. “Perhaps your father had his reasons for not getting in touch, and you might never know what they were. But what you must remember is that you did not do anything wrong. You know that, oui, Hannah?”
I shrugged, trying to dislodge the image of my dad that was now firmly imprinted in my mind’s eye.
“It was a long time ago. About time I got over it, don’t you think?”
He stood up, shielding his eyes from the sun. “There are some things we will never get over.”
I hugged my arms around myself, closing my eyes for a second or two, letting the sun’s rays turn the insides of my eyelids orange.
“For example, I cannot get over the fact that you made me miss my very important meeting in Amsterdam.”
I looked up at him sharply, relieved when I saw him smiling.
He hesitated, looking sideways at me. “There is one more thing I must show you.”
I shook my head. “Come on, Léo, there’s no way we can fit anything else in.”
“True, we do not have long. But I want to end your second—and far superior—trip to Paris on a high. Literally.”
“What are you suggesting?”
“We need to go to the Sacré-Coeur. I insist. You cannot come to Paris without seeing it.”
“If we miss the next Amsterdam train, you do know I’ll kill you,” I warned him.
“Oh yes,” he said. “I know.”
16
I rested my chin against his shoulder as we headed uphill, his hoodie, which was still tied around my waist, flapping about behind me.
“You see the basilica?” called Léo over his shoulder.
“I see it!” I shouted. It was right in front of us, looming between buildings, as spectacular as it looked in all the pictures.
We wound our way up the hill in front of it, the curving, cobbled street flanked by more of the pretty, old-fashioned lampposts I’d seen in the square, their yellow bulbs encased in clear glass. A fairground carousel tinkled out a sweet version of “Twinkle, Twinkle” and tourists swarmed across the gardens leading up to the church, being drawn to the summit by the promise of views. We flew past them all, skimming the start of the funicular railway that ran tourists up and down the hill all day. Montmartre’s sloped roofs and chimney pots tumbled down the hill below us, and to our left—and looking tiny now—the Eiffel Tower.
When we reached the top, we parked and stood next to each other, our heads thrown back in a sort of silent reverence for the huge, brilliant white domes of the Sacré-Coeur. I imagined how grand and mysterious it would look at the beginning of the day, before the tourists arrived; if we’d had it all to ourselves.
“I come up here sometimes to write,” he said, as if reading my mind. “When it is quiet. In the winter, or first thing in the morning. I find the words come easier here than almost anywhere else.”
I nodded, wishing we had time to go inside the church itself.
“Shall we sit?” he said. “Just for a moment?”
“It would be rude not to,” I said, not ready to walk away from the view just yet.
We found a little spot on the main steps that led down through the gardens back into the village. He wedged his bag between his feet. I pulled the bottle of wine he’d bought at the Eiffel Tower out of my bag, brandishing it between us like a magician holding a rabbit.
“A quick glass each before we leave?”
“What you said before. About it being rude not to,” he said.
I poured us each a cup and we sipped it silently, taking in what seemed like the whole of Paris spread out before us. It was mostly flat and low-rise, I noticed, much more so than London, and almost all one color, that lovely cream, topped with the ubiquitous slate-gray roofs.
“We are at the highest point in the whole of Paris,” he said. “Something like one hundred thirty meters above the level of the sea.”
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to a colorful building in the distance with bobbles on top, like a child’s toy.
“The Centre Pompidou,” he said. “It is a very cool art gallery with a sort of inside-out architecture. And from there—from the bar on the roof—you can see beautiful views of where we are now, of the hills of Montmartre, and the basilica.”
A little boy ran past us up the steps, giggling wildly, his mother panting, trying to catch up. I laughed.
“Do you get on well with your mum?” I asked him. “You haven’t really spoken about her. You must be sick of hearing me moan about mine, so go on: your turn.”
He shifted position, sticking his legs out in front of him, ruffling his hair. “Actually, my mother died,” he said. “When I was seventeen years old.”
I looked down at my feet, mortified. How stupid of me not to know this already; how self-obsessed of me not to have asked until now.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I had no idea.”
“How could you have done? There is a difference between reading people and reading minds, Hannah,” he said.
“I know, but—”
“I do not ever talk about it. That is not what I do. For me it is better if nobody knows and then they will not think differently of me afterward.”
“How do you mean?”
“They will not feel sorry for me.”
I tried to act as though I didn’t feel sorry for him, when I did; desperately sorry.
“What’s so bad about that?” I asked.
He shrugged. “It is not who I am. I have always been the strong one. The fun guy, the party boy. After it happened all I did was go out drinking with my friends and get into fights and not bother going home until it was already daylight, and everybody thought it was my way of dealing with it, that I was young and out there having a good time, despite my mother being dead. But I was drinking, and I remember it clearly, only so I could numb the pain.”
“Did it work?”
“For a while. And then I thought: fuck, I cannot do this for the rest of my life. My mother would be mad! I had already been offered the place at music college, it was something she had been very proud of. So I packed up and came to Paris, as soon as I could.”
A group of Japanese tourists came streaming up the steps toward us, following a guide waving a yellow flag. I shuffled closer to Léo to let them pass.
“Is that why Paris means such a lot to you?”
He nodded. “My mother was from here, so immediately I felt closer to her, more so than I had in my town.”
“Where is that?”
“Limoges. It is a small city in southwest central France.”
“Why did your mum leave Paris?”
“She met my father and he was not a big-city person. We had a beautiful house near the river, and everything that we could need, but she missed the excitement of Paris. We would sometimes take a trip here together, the six of us, my mother, my sisters and me. We came only once to the Sacré-Coeur. I remember we each had an ice cream and we sat on the steps over there and my mother told us stories about what it was like for her when she was a kid.”
“Do you still miss
her?”
“Every day. And every day, too, I think about that I did not say goodbye to her. And I still feel very bad about it.”
“What happened?”
“I knew that she did not have long left, but I could not bear to see her like that, so ill and on all these different types of medication so that she was hardly ever awake. She had always been so full of life, and so it was very difficult for me to see her like this, lying in a bed, so small and sad.”
“Of course,” I said. “I can imagine.”
“So I went out all the time, hanging around the town center, leaving it as long as possible before I had to go home. And then one day, I arrived at our house and my father was in the kitchen crying, and my sisters, too. I had heard them from the end of the street and I knew, before I set foot inside, that she had gone and that I had missed my chance.”
I swallowed hard. “You feel bad that you weren’t with her,” I said.
He nodded. “It has stayed with me ever since. The truth is, in some small way, it is why I came back for you,” he said.
I looked at him, confused. “At Gare du Nord?”
“I cannot bear to feel guilty or to let anybody down. I cannot stand it, and I do everything I can not to feel that way. Because it takes me right back to that time. And even though I know it is a different situation, a different set of circumstances, I feel almost as bad as I did then.”
“Is this finally an apology for tripping me with your bag?” I said, touching his knee with my little finger.
He smiled weakly. “Nice try, Hannah.”
A cheer broke out from the bottom of the steps where a street performer was blowing giant bubbles into the air, sending all the children whirling around in a frenzy as they tried desperately to catch one. Léo looked at his watch.
“We have to go,” he said, standing up. “It is 1:15 already. I will have to park the bike at the station and telephone Hugo to tell him where it is. He will be mad, of course. Sylvie will go crazy with all her shouting.”
“I bet she will,” I said, not moving.
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