AllFreeNovel
Share Us
We passed the shop I’d seen earlier – Antoine et Lili – which was made up of three separate sections painted in glorious shades of sunshine yellow, mint green and rose pink. I stopped for a second to have a peek through the window at the most gorgeous Parisian homeware inside, cushions and linens and ceramic teapots and pretty candle holders. If I’d had the time and money, I would have bought a little something to take home – a bowl, or a tea towel or something – so that our kitchen would always remind me of Paris.
I jogged back across to Léo. ‘How did your dad cope with all these women in the house when you were growing up?’
‘To put it simply: he did not,’ said Léo, looking out across the water.
So he hadn’t had it easy, either, then. When I’d first met Si, and had told him what life had been like for me, he’d tried to empathise, but I’d known he was struggling with it, because he only had his own near-perfect upbringing to compare it to. A memory flashed into my mind, of the two of us at Mum and Tony’s. I’d dragged him out into the hall to show him the ‘photo gallery’ as Mum called it, the eclectic set of photographs she’d had blown up, framed, and hung on the wall by the stairs. There were a couple of the two of them, a nice one of them all dressed up for one of the Post Office’s Christmas parties. One of them walking hand in hand on Torbay beach at sunset. When it came to the pictures of me, I cringed. Mum had chosen a horrific sequence of unflattering shots, as though purposely displaying me in the worst possible light.
‘This one’s my favourite,’ I’d said, pointing to the school photograph taken aged eleven, when I’d had a very attractive braces-and-monobrow combo, having not yet worked out that plucking my eyebrows was an actual thing. I recalled deciding, at the time, that I hated my thick curls and in the absence of straighteners and products (those would come later) it had felt almost impossible to manage.
Si had run his finger over it. ‘You look adorable,’ he said, trying to be nice.
We walked up a couple of steps to look at another stand-out shot, taken on Mum and Tony’s wedding day: it was of Mum, a grim-faced, slightly chubby seventeen-year-old me, and Mum’s sister, my auntie Sinead, who had come over from Ireland and who was wearing a black-and-white psychedelic-print jumpsuit that would have looked less out of place at Studio 54. Despite there being hundreds of much better pictures to choose from, Mum had thought the one of me looking away from the camera and sporting a double chin would be the best one to stick on the wall for all to see.
‘You make a lovely bridesmaid,’ said Si, putting his arm around me.
‘Shame about the turquoise satin meringue,’ I said, grimacing.
Si laughed and followed me up to the landing. I ran my fingertip around the gold frame of the only photo I did like. It was of me aged about six months; I was lying on the lounge floor, on the swirly brown and orange rug I still remembered because we had it for years afterwards, my legs kicking up into the air, a colourful rattle clutched in my right hand. We stared at the photo for some time.
‘My dad took that,’ I said.
‘He’s got a good eye,’ said Si, nudging me in the ribs. ‘Now I know where you get it from.’
Sylvie finished her call and turned to hand Léo a cigarette; she lit it for him, cupping her hands around his. They were both so beautiful, the canals shining behind them, the blue sky, the treetops, that I moved to put my camera to my eye and then thought better of it.
‘You smoke?’ she said to me as an afterthought.
I shook my head, although I could have done with one after what I’d just read.
‘Here we are,’ said Léo, coming to a stop outside a restaurant. The windows were opened up at the front so that most of the clientele were sitting outside, drinking beer in the warm July sun. When I realised the intimidating bunch of people gathered around a wooden trellis table were Léo’s friends I wanted to turn round and run in the opposite direction.
‘This is Hannah,’ he announced, although I didn’t know why he’d bothered, since we weren’t planning to stay. I smiled weakly. They mostly looked up. I’d assumed it was a cliché, but they really were all dressed in black, with odd colourful details – a belt, a scarf – thrown in for good measure. A skateboard was propped against the window frame. It wasn’t fair to make assumptions, but on first impressions, they seemed very caught up with themselves and how good they looked.
Léo parked the bike and pulled three chairs across from a neighbouring table. He beckoned me into the seat next to him.
‘How long are you planning to stay?’ I asked him quietly, reluctantly lowering myself onto the chair and wishing I’d gone straight to the station. I was feeling unsettled after reading Si’s emails and telling Léo about the ring and didn’t think I had the energy to make small talk, which I found difficult at the best of times. It would likely turn into one of those occasions when I silently retreated into the background, observing the conversation rather than participating in it, until eventually people began to talk over me, forgetting I was there at all.
‘It is boring for you, all this French?’ he said, after a few minutes had passed and I’d had a fixed smile on my face as they’d all chattered around me.
I shook my head. ‘Course not.’
Actually, being here in Paris had kind of reignited my love of the language, although I’d been too shy to say much myself. Maybe I’d think about doing a beginners French course sometime, they were bound to have them all over London. It was one of those things, like photography, that I’d always liked and had naturally been quite good at but had never known what to do with. It wasn’t like there were many French-speaking photographers round our way.
I watched him turn to say something to Sylvie, his shoulders sloping forwards, his feet crossed at the ankle. There was an easiness between them, despite her thunderous exterior, and I could tell they were close, that they knew each other well. With the guys across the table, the ones wearing a uniform of black on black who had barely glanced in my direction, he leaned forward, elbows on the table, hands gesticulating madly about something. With them he was more forthright, more direct. And then I noticed that when we talked, he swivelled towards me, his back turned completely to Sylvie. I caught her eye over his shoulder a few times and, feeling awkward, drew her back into the conversation.
To my left was a girl called Clarice, the girlfriend of one of the guys in black. She was only twenty-two and lived above a club in the apparently very trendy Oberkampf area. She was nocturnal, she told me, and rarely ventured out of her flat while it was still light, which probably explained why her skin was so pale it was practically luminous. She had a long, slim neck and several piercings in each ear.
‘How long have you been with your boyfriend?’ I asked, hoping she spoke good English and feeling as though I ought to make an effort to talk to someone. I didn’t want Léo thinking I was socially inept, he’d only say something sarcastic about it later.
‘Two months. Three, perhaps,’ said Clarice.
‘Still quite new, then?’ I said.
‘Do you think?’ To her, three months probably felt like an age.
‘What’s he like?’ I asked.
Personally, I thought he loved the sound of his own voice a bit too much; I hadn’t seen him talk to her once, not that it seemed to faze her. I admired that about her, her self-assuredness, the fact that she didn’t appear to need anything from him, and I was envious that she’d cultivated an attitude like that at such a young age. I imagined Si and Catherine had been like that, too, when they were in their early twenties, full of bravado and the belief that they could do anything they wanted. I didn’t know about Léo. I felt like my first impressions of him were changing. Were the snippiness and the disparaging comments hiding something else, a part of him that was more sensitive, that perhaps hadn’t had it as easy as I’d thought?
