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‘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 shopfront with the sombre air of a funeral parlour. 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 Desmoiselles 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?’
