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‘Here,’ he said, slumping 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.
‘Mmmn,’ 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 Métro, 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 French woman, 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 themselves 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 lamp post, 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 street lamps 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 recognise him after all that time. Eventually I gave up and walked into the centre 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 realised, 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?’
