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Chapter 16
I rested my chin against his shoulder as we headed uphill, his hoodie, which was still tied around my waist, flapping about behind me.
‘You see the Basilica?’ called Léo over his shoulder.
‘I see it!’ I shouted. It was right in front of us, looming between buildings, as spectacular as it looked in all the pictures.
We wound our way up the hill in front of it, the curly, cobbled street flanked by more of the pretty old-fashioned lamp posts I’d seen in the square, their yellow bulbs encased in clear glass. A fairground carousel tinkled out a sweet version of Twinkle, Twinkle and tourists swarmed across the gardens leading up to the church, being drawn to the summit by the promise of views. We flew past them all, skimming the start of the funicular railway that ran tourists up and down the hill all day. Montmartre’s sloped roofs and chimney pots tumbled down the hill below us, and to our left – and looking tiny, now – the Eiffel Tower.
When we reached the top, we parked up and stood next to each other, our heads thrown back in a sort of silent reverence for the huge, brilliant white domes of the Sacré-Coeur. I imagined how grand and mysterious it would look at the beginning of the day, before the tourists arrived; if we’d had it all to ourselves.
‘I come up here sometimes to write,’ he said, as if reading my mind. ‘When it is quiet. In the winter, or first thing in the morning. I find the words come easier here than almost anywhere else.’
I nodded, wishing we had time to go inside the church itself.
‘Shall we sit?’ he said. ‘Just for a moment?’
‘It would be rude not to,’ I said, not ready to walk away from the view just yet.
We found a little spot on the main steps that led down through the gardens back into the village. He wedged his bag between his feet. I pulled the bottle of wine he’d bought at the Eiffel Tower out of my bag, brandishing it between us like a magician holding a rabbit.
‘A quick glass each before we leave?’
‘What you said before. About it being rude not to,’ he said.
I poured us each a cup and we sipped it silently, taking in what seemed like the whole of Paris spread out before us. It was mostly flat and low-rise, I noticed, much more so than London, and almost all one colour, that lovely cream, topped with the ubiquitous slate grey roofs.
‘We are at the highest point in the whole of Paris, except for at the top of the Eiffel Tower,’ he said. ‘Something like 130 metres above the level of the sea.’
‘What’s that?’ I asked, pointing to a colourful building in the distance with bobbles on top, like a child’s toy.
‘The Centre Pompidou,’ he said. ‘It is a very cool art gallery with a sort of inside-out architecture. And from there – from the bar on the roof – you can see beautiful views of where we are now, of the hills of Montmartre, and the Basilica.’
A little boy ran past us up the steps, giggling wildly, his mother panting, trying to catch him up. I laughed.
‘Do you get on well with your mum?’ I asked him. ‘You haven’t really spoken about her. You must be sick of hearing me moan about mine, so go on: your turn.’
He shifted position, sticking his legs out in front of him, ruffling his hair. ‘Actually, my mother died,’ he said. ‘When I was seventeen years old.’
I looked down at my feet, mortified. How stupid of me not to know this already; how self-obsessed of me not to have asked until now.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘I had no idea.’
‘How could you have done? There is a difference between reading people and reading minds, Hannah,’ he said.
‘I know, but––’
‘I do not ever talk about it. That is not what I do. For me it is better if nobody knows and then they will not think differently of me afterwards.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘They will not feel sorry for me.’
I tried to act as though I didn’t feel sorry for him, when I did; desperately sorry.
‘What’s so bad about that?’ I asked.
He shrugged. ‘It is not who I am. I have always been the strong one. The fun guy, the party boy. After it happened all I did was go out drinking with my friends and get into fights and not bother going home until it was already daylight, and everybody thought it was my way of dealing with it, that I was young and out there having a good time, despite my mother being dead. But I was drinking, and I remember it clearly, only so I could numb the pain.’
