He turns towards me, three decades older but somehow looking exactly as he did the morning we parted at the Gare de l’Est. His face, etched with wrinkles of time and confusion, slowly breaks into a bewildered smile.
‘Fran?’ he utters, the word barely forming.
‘Yes,’ I answer, stuck to the spot where I stand.
He steps towards me and gently raises a hand to my face, familiarising himself with the lines that weren’t there thirty years ago.
‘My God,’ he sighs deeply, wrapping himself around me, and I squeeze him back, completely dumbstruck.
‘I don’t understand,’ he says when he pulls away, his eyes dazed.
‘Nor I,’ I say, feeling utterly disorientated, uncertain if I’m in the past or now or some other dimension altogether. ‘How did you . . .?’ I point to the bookmark in his hand.
‘It was in the book of an elderly woman I met earlier this evening.’
It occurs to me that this must have been Elsa, but withNotre-Damestill in my handbag, I can’t fathom how she came to have it.
‘Should we sit?’ I gesture to the steps, not entirely sure what the right thing to do is in a situation like this.
‘What brings you to Paris?’ he asks, once we’re settled, both of us just staring at each other, me trying to reconcile how he looks now with how he looked then, he probably doing the same.
I look out over the city at night, the Eiffel Tower sparkling like a diamond pendant.
‘I’m here on a work thing,’ I say, still too bamboozled to go into the details. ‘How about you?’
‘I’m here with my son,’ he answers.
Staring out over the Paris skyline, I wonder about his life and the mother of his child.
My thoughts and words still paralysed, I reach into my handbag and pull outThe Hunchback of Notre-Dame.‘Do you remember this?’
‘You were reading it when we first met, outside Notre-Dame,’ he says, touching the cover.
‘I found mementos from our trip inside it,’ I continue, an image of Quasimodo clinging to Esmeralda’s body flashing into my mind. We lay out the bookmark, the Pompidou ticket and finally the postcard.
He takes the postcard from me, turns it over and over, thumbing the empty space where my address should be.
‘I kept them all,’ he says, a faraway look in his eye.
‘What do you mean?’
‘The book, the postcard, all of them.’ He looks at me sadly. ‘I kept them as tokens of you.’
‘You’ve had the book all these years?’ I ask, trying to join the dots but failing.
‘Until last week when my wife told me she’d had a clear-out, that our son had taken my books to a second-hand bookshop.’
‘My bookshop,’ I whisper, the picture rapidly developing.
‘Hendersons in Edinburgh?’
I nod.
‘That’s where Flynn told me he dropped them, but when I went in to retrieveNotre-Dame, the owner searched everywhere and said he didn’t have it.’
‘Because I had it,’ I say, gazing at it in my hand, only registering now that Flynn is Alistair’s son, that Flynn is the reason the book ended up in the shop and that I am now here in Paris. ‘The man you spoke to is my husband, Robin.’
I nod quietly, inching a little further along the step, away from Alistair.
