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‘C’est bizarre, ça,’ she said.
‘What’s bizarre?’
‘I do. I do want to swap.’
He crossed their plates one over the other. ‘Maybe I’m stealing your magic,’ he said.
‘Oui,’ she managed to say, with her mouth full of cheeseburger.
He leaned across the table and rubbed a smudge of Maison Bleue’s secret sauce from her chin. It was her, he knew. She was the only thing he craved.
Sunset
I am here to live out loud.
Émile Zola
With the bells of Sacré-Coeur ringing the Angelus above her head, Claire held her bag open for a security guard to peer inside. Playing an unlikely counterpoint to the bells, a police helicopter circled the church at a dramatic angle. Three canvas-sided trucks pulled up alongside the curling queue of churchgoers, and each disgorged a troupe of police, weapons clattering alarmingly as boots hit the ground.
‘It’s not what you’d call a prayerful atmosphere,’ said Claire.
Another policeman waved a scanner up and down her body.
‘Looks like a six o’clock shift change.’
Ronan was right. The new arrivals spread out to prominent positions around the square, while those being replaced leaped into the trucks and were driven away.
‘I’ve never seen so many guns.’ Claire knew she was staring, but she found it almost impossible to look away from the weapon cradled in the arms of a policeman at the church door.
Ronan nudged her, and she saw that the queue had moved a few steps ahead.
‘Is that supposed to make me feel safe?’ She turned away from the gun and stepped into the shade of the basilica.
‘I think it’s supposed to intimidate you into behaving yourself.’
‘Hah, and if it doesn’t work, they send you inside to repent?’
‘Shush.’ With uncanny timing, a small man dressed in vestments poked Claire’s arm with a bony finger, then held the same finger to his lips and said again, ‘Shush.’
Claire felt blood rush to her cheeks. That was all it took to trigger her guilt nerve. She lowered her eyes and fixed her gaze on the white runners of the man in front of her as the shuffling line of visitors continued in a slow tour of the perimeter. It was a one-way system. To Claire, it was reminiscent of a circuit of IKEA, only without the meatballs. She’d taken against the place now, decided it was graceless and cluttered.
A central seating area was cordoned off with a rope and multilingual signs declaring it reserved for prayer. Wordlessly, Ronan lifted the rope and ushered Claire into a seat. She watched as he walked over to the votive candles and pushed a couple of coins through the designated slot. He took a fresh candle and lit it from an old one, then stepped back. He kept his gaze down as he walked back to her, but stepping between the rows of benches he glanced up, and they locked eyes. Deliberately, she held her face impassive, determined to show no judgement and no questions. He shrugged and sat down beside her with his broad hands held loosely together in his lap. She looked towards the altar and wondered how many tiles it took to make the gigantic mosaic of Jesus Christ.
‘On ne parle pas ici, madame.’ A loud whisper from behind interrupted her attempt at an estimate.
Cautiously glancing to her left, she saw again that odious little man stalking the side aisle. He spoke incessantly, admonishing visitors to be quiet, put away their phones, respect the prayerful, refrain from speech. Claire bowed her head once more, thinking she should pray, thinking it was pointless, thinking the world was full of self-righteous little twits who ruined things.
Leaving the prayer area, they merged once again with the stream of tourists and were unceremoniously expelled from the church.
Evening had fallen while they’d been inside. The heat had gone out of the day, and the light was fading. Standing there, at the top of the highest hill in Paris, the view was enthralling. To their right, the western sky was glowing pink where the sun was about to drop below the horizon. The entire city seemed to have turned to face it, to stand for that one moment in veneration of a higher power, a brighter light, or maybe to draw the last rays of a star’s energy into itself.
Walking a little way towards the sunset, they found a gap in the rooftops that might have been specifically designed to frame the Eiffel Tower, right there, in the middle distance. It occurred to Claire that they’d been in Paris a whole twenty-four hours without laying eyes on this most famous of radio towers, that it might have waited for just this picturesque opportunity. A dozen or so tourists were gathering around them, hoping for the perfect photo of the tower lighting up against the rose-tinted sky. There was a pleasant air of expectation and camaraderie.
Claire handed her bag to Ronan and climbed a wall to get a better angle.
He dropped the bag to his feet and held her hips.
‘Jesus, be careful, would you.’ He sounded cross, unnecessarily anxious.
