I laughed and Anna gave me a look.
‘No, we are going to walk. We are having an escapade, remember?’
‘Yes, but I wanted a nice adventure, not a compulsory tramp through France with my suitcase,’ Harriet said. ‘My knee?—’
Anna huffed in exasperation. ‘It’s half an hour tops. You’ll be fine. Honestly. I’ve checked on my phone.’
‘Shall we have coffee first?’ I said, hoping to placate both of them.
‘Naturellement,’ Anna said, ‘bien sûr, of course. You see, I can speak a bit of French.’
We walked through what looked like another building site outside the railway station and then on to a broad shopping street where people were already starting to fill the cafés and bistros. A lot of other people had cases too, and a few of the students had such big backpacks they looked like slightly stooped Ninja Turtles, and they were a positive danger to the people behind them when they turned round.
We passed plenty of cafés with awnings and outside seating, all of which looked perfectly fine to me, and to be honest my tongue was practically hanging out, what with the red wine and Pringles the previous evening and only a forgettable bottle of water to sustain me that morning. Normally by nine thirty I would have had at least two cups of tea, but Anna obviously had fond memories of their last trip here and she wanted the ‘right’ place.
As we trudged on I began to wonder if we would ever find it. That was always the problem with Anna; when she had an idea in her head she tended to ignore everyone else’s suggestions.
‘That’s it,’ Harriet said firmly after about ten minutes, ‘I’m on strike. What’s wrong with this place?’
She pointed to a delightful café with green canopies outside and several tables in the shade where people were drinking huge bowls of café crème and eating delicious-looking pastries.
‘I was just looking for the place we stopped last time,’ Anna said. ‘I’m sure it was around here. I remember that statue. I had moules.’
‘Not for breakfast?’ I said, pulling a face.
‘I know it’s here. There was a really tall man with a waxed moustache, and we sat on tables with red checked tablecloths and cane chairs,’ she continued.
‘You’ll have to narrow it down a bit,’ I said. ‘There are lots of places like that. And it was decades ago.’
Anna looked around for a few moments while Harriet and I perched on the edge of a stone bench, and then Anna looked annoyed.
‘It was there,’ she said, pointing, ‘I’m sure it was. I can’t believe it; it’s a shoe shop now.’
‘Be reasonable, it was nearly fifty years ago,’ I said, ‘things are bound to have changed.’
‘I have changed too,’ Harriet said, ‘and if I don’t get coffee soon and something to eat I’m going to change again, this time into a very bad-tempered old woman.’
Anna tutted and sighed. ‘Oh, all right then.’
We sat down and a waiter came out, not bringing us a menu but jerking his chin up in the usual way of French waiters to ask what we wanted.
‘Trois café cremes et trois pains aux raisins,’ I said in my best French, ‘s’il vous plait.’
He seemed mollified by this and returned a few minutes later with exactly what I had ordered, which was a relief in itself. This adventure business was all very well, but sometimes it could be stressful. For a moment I almost wished I was back on the train.
‘Yum,’ Harriet said, pulling her pastry apart. ‘You are clever, Lizzie.’
‘Sorry I was cross,’ Anna said as the caffeine and sugar rush hit her system, ‘I just wanted it to be exactly the same as it was – when we came here before.’
‘Really?’ Harriet said, sounding incredulous. ‘Why?’
I hadn’t been there all those years ago and I had no idealised memories of particular places or people. I wanted to see the sights in my own time in my own way. For too long I had glamorised that trip, and I was beginning to wonder if I had been right. And did I want to toe the line with someone else’s experiences when there was absolutely no need to?
‘But this is our adventure,’ I said, ‘a new one. We are making our own memories, aren’t we? The place you remembered has gone and probably the big chap with the moustache is long gone too.’
‘True,’ Anna agreed, ‘but I researched the place we are staying in in the Old Town, and it’s definitely the same one where we stayed before, and I bet it hasn’t changed at all.’
‘Well, I hope it has! I hope they’ve changed the sheets anyway,’ Harriet said, ‘and the towels. And got rid of that massive spider in the shower.’
