I guess deep down, I was terrified it would flick some invisible switch inside me. That the minute a ring was on my finger, I would turn into a cheat, just like my dad had.
But of course, I didn’t tell Daff any of that: I thought it would make me sound weird and screwed-up and weak. So instead, I clammed up. I let her think it was about her, rather than me and my parents and my stupid, muddled brain.
Basically, I took her for granted, just like I always do. And then, a month or so later, she told me about New York – how she’d been offered the chance to spend six months working in her agency’s Manhattan office – and suggested that maybe we should use that time to ‘take a break’. Not split up, exactly, but not stay together, either. Just spend some time apart, with no contact, and have a think about what we really wanted.
So that’s what I was supposed to be doing here. Thinking. Not making a mistake that still keeps me awake at night six years later.
But then … was it a mistake? The watch-seller told me to think about why I’m revisiting these particular moments. Over the past couple of years, as things have gone from bad to worse between me and Daphne, I’ve thought about this one a lot. I’ve always wondered what would have happened if I’d stayed in Paris, instead of running straight back to London …
With comically perfect timing, the intercom screams out by the door. I sit bolt upright in bed, and my stomach begins to squirm. She’s here.
I get up and walk across the flat, the floorboards complaining noisily beneath me again. I pick up the little plastic phone by the door, and a female voice speaks.
‘Joyeux Noël! Are you ready to go?’
Chapter Twenty-Five
I am not, as it turns out, ready to go. In fact, I am nowhere near.
I am wearing only a hoodie and a pair of Queens Park Rangers pyjama bottoms. And my heart is suddenly hammering so hard I can feel it in my legs.
‘Joyeux Noël!’ I splutter into the intercom. And then: ‘Er … Can you just give me ten minutes?’
‘OK,’ she says. ‘I’ll be in that café across from the church.’
I open the wardrobe and start pulling on clothes, my chest clenched with the anticipation of what’s to come. What am I supposed to do here? It’s not like I can change what originally happened. So what is the point of coming back – just to remind me what might have been? To set me on a path I’ve often wished I could’ve explored further?
By the time I’m fully dressed, these questions are still pinballing around my brain, resolutely unanswered. I give my face a sizeable cold-water splash, and then sprint down the eight creaky flights of stairs. I shoulder-barge the huge courtyard door, and step out into the freezing fresh air. The Saint-Sulpice church bells are at it again, singing out into the clear blue sky, sending another flock of pigeons spiralling upwards towards the summit of the giant Christmas tree. The stark, cold sunlight bounces off the crunchy brown carpet of leaves on the ground. The whole square looks idyllic.
And then, across the street, sitting at an outside table sipping something warm, I spot her.
She’s wearing a long, stylish dark brown coat, and a scarf that’s almost completely obscured by her thick chin-length hair. It’s a blonde version of that bob Audrey Tautou had in Amélie, and it suddenly strikes me as perhaps the Frenchest hairstyle in existence.
The waiter approaches her and she smiles up at him. Dark eyebrows, dirty-blonde hair and deep-red lips: dramatic flashes of colour on her otherwise pale heart-shaped face.
For a second, I think about just turning and walking away. I don’t know what to do.
But then she spots me, and beckons me over, just like she did at Marek’s wedding. And before I know it, I’m at the table.
‘Hey, Alice.’
‘Hey!’
She stands and offers me her cheek to kiss. The scent of her perfume wraps itself around me like a flowery headlock. ‘Ça va?’ She nods behind me, at my apartment block. ‘Ben, I can’t believe you live right on the square. You know this is, like, one of the poshest parts of Paris?’
‘I know …’
‘How did you find this place?’
‘My mum,’ I tell her. ‘It’s her friend’s flat. A very loaded friend. He’s away for four months, so I’m house-sitting.’
Alice raises an eyebrow. ‘Bloody hell, you’re so lucky.’
She’s right, really: I was. This whole Paris thing was Mum’s idea in the first place. She didn’t react well to the news that Daphne and I were taking a break (‘That girl’s the best bloody thing that’s ever happened to you’ were her exact words). And so, when this Saint-Sulpice flat-sitting opportunity came up, she practically insisted I take it. It would be a breath of fresh air, she said: a chance to properly clear my head and come to my senses, instead of rattling around our London flat on my own while Daphne was off in New York.
It seemed like a good idea. And since I was freshly unemployed at the time – Thump having folded, unceremoniously, in April – I even got it into my head that I could live out a clichéd writer-in-Paris fantasy here: spend four months having another crack at penning something that was actually publishable.
That was the plan, then: write a masterpiece while reevaluating my relationship. Simple. But then I bumped into Alice, and that simple plan became much more complicated.
She sips her hot chocolate, and reaches into her bag for a packet of Gauloises. At uni, she only ever smoked roll-ups, and I remember being quite impressed at how sophisticated – how French – she seemed to
