‘Shut your eyes,’ Ren said at the bottom of the concrete stairs.
‘I know where we are,’ Sacha said drily, but he complied, closing his fingers around her hand when she took his again.
‘Indulge me,’ she said and guided him up the stairs to the exit. The sound of heavy traffic and scuffling pedestrians reached his ears. He could picture the cobbled intersection, the grand museum buildings to his left.
He tripped on the kerb and caught a glimpse of the hazy light from the streetlamps before he shut his eyes again. Perhaps this wasn’t such a sensible idea.
‘Oops, sorry.’ She slipped an arm around his waist to lead him more securely.
He imagined their progress, past the illuminated columns and gold statues of the Palais de Chaillot. He gestured with his free arm, eyes still closed.
‘These buildings were ultramoderne when they were built, but now they remind people of Hitler and Truman and the post-war period of the United Nations.’
‘You can recount history with your eyes closed?’
‘At one of the most iconic places in Paris? Oui, tout à fait.’ They turned right, weaving through a crowd of cooing tourists. ‘You see the inscription up there?’
‘Are you sure you don’t have your eyes open?’
‘“Tout homme crée sans le savoir; Comme il respire; Mais l’artiste se sent créer; Son acte engage tout son être; Sa peine bien aimée la fortifie,”’ he quoted.
‘Why do you know that? And what does it mean?’
‘All people create without knowing, like breathing. But the artist feels the creating, with his whole being. His dear pain – or sadness – makes him strong. Or something like that. My father loved the quote, and he admired the man who wrote it, Paul Valéry – a poet and philosopher. He wrote notebooks, too.’
He thought of the book in the bottom of his rucksack, full of scribbles, not all of them intelligible. Paul Valéry would have been horrified.
‘I still think sadness is overrated,’ she murmured after a long silence. His hand tightened in her coat, as he was reminded of what she’d been through as a child. Her preference for happy endings had seemed sweet before, but now he wondered if it wasn’t brave. He peeked at her, but she pressed a hand over his eyes. ‘Not yet. Although I’m thinking you’ve seen this view more often than you led me to believe.’
‘Yes, I have stood here and looked at this view. But I’ve never been up… there.’ It was what she had planned, he was sure. He told himself the gesture wasn’t as symbolic as it felt. He didn’t want to talk himself out of it. No matter what it would mean to him in the future, he would go up with her tonight. ‘Can I open my eyes yet?’
‘Nope,’ she said, her fingers shifting against his forehead. She shuffled forward and he did the same blindly. He bumped into a stone barrier and clutched it to steady himself. ‘This is your city,’ she said. ‘You’ve shown it to me. Now I want to show this to you. Tell me what you see.’
She removed her hand and he blinked his eyes open. The elegantly curved tower of glowing, illuminated latticework blazed before him. Tonight, with Ren beside him, it would become part of ‘his’ Paris. ‘It looks like the tower was crocheted by generations of French grandmothers and it’s still hanging off the needle by a thread,’ he muttered. ‘It was built after a century of troubles and deprivation. It’s a folly and a symbol of ambition, but also of hope for the future, desire to achieve the best. It’s naïve and a little bit rebellious…’
He cut himself off and turned to take in the other view: Ren staring at him with her big eyes that seemed to draw things out of him. ‘Like you,’ he said before he could stop himself.
Her face broke into a grin. ‘Naïve and a little bit rebellious and just like the Eiffel Tower? I love it. Now, if you’re done, we’re going to eat crêpe and then I want to go up – all the way up!’
He grasped her hand to stop her. ‘Why now?’ Why me?
She glanced from their joined hands up to his face. ‘I’ve spent most of my life waiting for other people to do things to me and for me. I want to do this for myself.’
‘That’s a good reason.’
‘Don’t worry. I don’t expect you to propose up there. If you did, I’d probably fall off and take you down with me, given our track record.’ He shook his head drily at her bad joke, but he was glad she’d lightened the mood. He glanced at the tower with a frisson of anticipation. He was going up. With Ren.
She dragged Sacha down the wide steps to the kiosk at the bottom of the Jardins du Trocadéro. She bought three crêpes because she couldn’t decide which filling she wanted and they juggled the little cardboard plates to the park benches facing the Seine and the Eiffel Tower. A blaze of lights and a rumble of music reached them from the Christmas market at the base of the tower and a nearby busker on an accordion accompanied their frigid picnic.
‘I’m going to spill Nutella all down myself, aren’t I?’ she mumbled.
Sacha held out a serviette. ‘If you don’t, it will only be half of the experience.’ As it was, she was messier with powdered sugar and it looked as though it had been snowing in her lap.
She offered him bites and it didn’t seem strange at all to let her do it. He was unexpectedly contented, looking at the Eiffel Tower at night. She insisted on taking a photo with the tower in the background, both of them biting into the same crêpe. It was goofy and embarrassing and he was so damn happy.
‘Is it just me, or is the tower glittering?’
‘It’s glittering,’ he confirmed. ‘It doesn’t do that all the time. Perhaps just for you?’
‘Just for us,’ she corrected. ‘Isn’t it illegal to take a photo of the Eiffel Tower at night? The lights have copyright?’
‘I think so.’ A little twinge brought him down a notch. ‘But you’re not going to publish that photo, right? So, it doesn’t matter.’
‘I’m sure Ziggy would want me to post it,’ she said drily, but the pinch at the edge of her mouth suggested the thought upset her more than she let on.
‘You know what I mean. They’d rather you posted a photo alone. I’m the last man in Paris.’
‘I didn’t really mean it like that, you know,’ she said. He searched for her teasing tone, but she was gazing wistfully at the view. ‘I was thinking about my grandmother and what she would think, not what I thought. You were far from the last man in my mind – even back then.’ Her tone was so soft, the words crept under his skin. But she gave a little laugh so neither of them had to acknowledge the significance of her confession. ‘Come on, Sacha,’ she said, standing and brushing her hands off on her jeans. ‘We’ve got a tower to climb!’
‘Incredible!’
Ren was pretty sure that was meant to be her line, but she was distracted from the wonder of engineering by Sacha’s unexpected enthusiasm. Enormous cogs turned and their little glass cocoon hoisted them up inside one of the elegant brown legs of the tower, but Ren’s eyes kept drifting back to him.
‘Do you think the tower might be “your Paris” after all?’ she teased.
He gave a sheepish shrug. ‘It’s…’ He gestured at the bolts and struts, the lattice of girders fanning out into a structure that was more than its parts. ‘I admit I should have come here before. I’ve heard the story, the “inutile et monstrueuse Tour Eiffel” that would ruin the beauty of the monuments of Paris with its bolts and metal and its impossible height. Others said it was too artistic and ignored the requirements of engineering. But… when you look,’ he said, peering at the swooping and overlapping metal above them, ‘you can see they were both wrong and they were both right.’
The vast iron structure above her followed a pattern that was mathematical, but undeniably beautiful. Would she have noticed any of it if Sacha hadn’t been there with his curious gaze and wide-ranging mind?
On the first-floor terrace, Paris stretched endlessly before them, a labyrinth of lights, the slate roofs with rows of chimneys almost close enough to touch. By the second floor, the wind picked up and Ren began to feel a little wobbly. The four pylons spread out below, like the tracks of a rollercoaster, giving her vertigo when she looked down. The ghostly night watchman, the Sacré-Cœur, stood guard on the distant hill of Montmartre.
The final lift scuttled up inside the ironwork, heading straight up to the stars. They didn’t speak as they ascended, girders and trusses flying by as though the tower was moving and not the lift. The patterns of glowing metal changed like a kaleidoscope against the dark sky and Paris rapidly became a toy city below them.
At the top, the low shriek of the biting wind and a definite sense that she was swaying made Ren shiver with unease. The city below glowed with light, but above was nothing but darkness. Sacha could barely contain himself as he gaped at the long drop and the lights of the city.
‘It’s amazing! Look at the Christmas market on the Champ de Mars. It’s tiny. And the wind! It feels like flying!’ He was grinning with delight, his habitual frown nothing more than a faint groove. That she’d brought this smile to his face was almost as exhilarating as looking down.
She took a tentative step towards him. ‘Come here, Ren. You look freezing!’ He caught her hands and then wrapped his arms around her, tugging her back to his front and turning her towards the view.
Tucked against him, his cheek at her temple, listening to him describe the monuments they could discern among the pattern of boulevards, the darkness receded a little and the light came into focus.
‘That tall building is the Tour Montparnasse, the only skyscraper in Paris outside of La Défense. We got used to it after fifty years and I don’t think it’s so bad. You can see the form of the Champ de Mars, the field. It was a place of celebration during the revolution, although some of the celebrations involved Madame Guillotine.’
‘I’m glad I didn’t have to study that at school.’
A beam of fierce blue light appeared suddenly above them, shooting out and breaking up the darkness. Ren stared in wonder, her heart and her senses full for a moment of utter contentment. She turned her head, slightly, to feel the rasp of his beard and the warmth of his skin against hers.
‘I’m glad I’ve never come up here, before,’ she whispered.
He tensed for a moment, but then tightened his arms around her. ‘Me, too.’
‘Do you… think you’ll ever come up again?’ Her breath wouldn’t come as she awaited the answer to that question.
‘I might bring Raph. You’ve convinced me. The tower is our Paris, after all.’
‘I’m glad,’ she said, although his answer didn’t satisfy her hope that he would keep this memory as sacred as she would.
‘Would you come up again?’
‘No,’ she answered immediately, and he tilted his head to peer at her in question. ‘I don’t know. Maybe in ten years’ time.’ Perhaps that would be enough to forget all the reasons they shouldn’t be together. She glanced at her watch. ‘The 17th of December at 9.15, in ten years’ time. Would you come back to meet me?’ She tried to inject some humour into her voice.
‘It won’t take you ten years to get over Charlie, will it?’
Charlie? God, no. It was this moment, the future that would never happen, she would need to get over. Damn, she hated when her past self was right: climbing the Eiffel Tower was a milestone, like falling in love for the first time. But she’d also been wrong to think she could predict and control how and when she’d first come here. Even though her Disney ending was far off, she couldn’t muster any regret for sharing the moment with Sacha.
The future was a mess, but screw it. The present was perfect.
