Luc came to the door wearing jeans and a pullover. If he was surprised to see me standing on his doorstep, he was too polite to let it show. “Hello,” he said.
“I need to go to Paris.”
For a moment he just looked at me, and then he reached behind and took his leather jacket from its peg upon the wall and shrugged it on. “OK.”
Chapter 15
He didn’t have a car today. “Denise’s wouldn’t start,” he said, as he walked down the front porch steps with me, “and Noah had his lesson, so I let them borrow mine. But we could take the RER, the train. It goes to Châtelet–Les Halles and joins the Métro. Where is it you need to go?”
“Could we take that?” I pointed to the motorcycle parked beside the house, a sinuous thing of black leather and chrome.
He raised an eyebrow. “The Ducati?”
“Noah says that it goes very fast.”
“It does,” he said, and smiled. “You’ll need a helmet.”
I had only ever ridden on a motorcycle once, behind the brother of a school friend. He had taken me quite slowly up the street where we’d all lived and round and back again. I’d thought it so exciting at the time, but it was nothing like the feel of being on a busy road in winter in the middle of a stream of cars all driving on the wrong side. It was not that I felt unprotected—Luc had found a helmet for me and an extra leather jacket he’d insisted I wear over mine for safety, and he had loaned me gloves that were too large but very warm, and I was pressed so close behind him on the seat he blocked the wind. Not being used to this, I hadn’t known where to put my hands, but Luc had solved that problem for me, taking my arms and wrapping them around his middle. “Hold on tight,” he’d said, and so I did.
It was a thrilling feeling. The Ducati had a power that chased up my legs and made me feel a part of it; a part of Luc as well, as we were forced to move as one, to lean in unison at every change of lane and every turn. The road dived into tunnels and I loved that even better, loved the feeling of enclosure with the ceiling dark above us like the sky at night and little rows of lights like stars to either side that flashed by in a calming rhythm, drawing us along. I almost hated coming up again to sunlight, but my disappointment vanished when I saw the Arc de Triomphe dead ahead of us—that huge iconic stone arch in the middle of its always-busy roundabout, a massive circle of confusion ringed by trees and buildings, old and modern intermingled, though in honesty I only saw a blur of branches, pale walls, and the high gray mansard roofs that were so wonderfully Parisian.
Here the street turned into cobblestone and made the ride more perilous, and I held on to Luc more tightly as he slowed and wove between the whirlpool lanes of cars, passed round the shadow of the looming heavy arch, and neatly zipped off onto the broad Avenue des Champs-Élysées. This, with its expensive shops, was one of Jacqui’s meccas, but while I’d been here before I’d never been here at this time of winter, so I was surprised to see the row of wooden vendors’ stalls with open fronts and peaked roofs, like small white-painted chalets strung in a line along the pavement, with signs proclaiming it the “Paris Village de Noël”—the Christmas Village. There was more to read on those signs but I only registered the “Artisans et Arts” part before we had turned again and my attention was distracted by the Eiffel Tower on our right and by the sunlight catching the gold statues on the columns of the bridge as we crossed over to the Left Bank of the river Seine.
The parking gods of Paris smiled kindly on us, leaving us one space for the Ducati in the row of motorcycles parked beside the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, a lovely ancient church of pale stone with a soaring tower that allowed it still to hold its own in that great boulevard of buildings that rose six and seven stories high. The pointed tower with its belfry rose above them all.
I wasn’t sure if this was the church Mary Dundas had written about in her diary, the one where she’d gone to hear Mass, but I wasn’t inclined to run the gauntlet of the group of tourists milling round the entrance to go in. There were too many people on the pavement for my liking, too, all pressing past and chattering, weaving through a cluster of more Christmas Village vendors’ stalls at this side of the church.
Seen up close, the stalls showed their simple design—like white boxes with peaked roofs and flaps at the front and sides that had been lifted and propped open to reveal whatever wares lay inside on display—but they’d all been made festive with fairy lights strung round and warm lights within and green garland with tinsel roped up and down over the peaks of the roofs in a glittering line. Some stalls offered jewelry and some offered food or warm wine or embroidered white linens. One had a display of fur hats in a rainbow of colors, and one had been stacked full of glass jars of honey of different varieties, claiming that it would add years to your life and more life to those years. But the stall that attracted my eye was the one with the strings of pashminas and bright woven scarves. There was one scarf draped over a hanger, a beautiful fringed scarf of cornflower blue shot with silver that made me slow my steps and feel my pocket for my wallet, but apparently of all the things I’d thought to bring, my wallet wasn’t one of them.
I found the pen, the notebook, my small booklet of Sudoku puzzles, and the mobile—took them out to make quite certain there was nothing else in either pocket—and had put them back and was preparing to move on when Luc strolled over, chivalrously carrying both motorcycle helmets by their chin straps, one slung over his left elbow and the other in his left hand. He asked, “Which is it you want? The blue one?”