THE FIRST TIME I ever kissed Alexa, she tasted of French agriculture. She’d just eaten Reblochon, a runny cheese that gives off an aroma somewhere between old sock and cow dung. But I didn’t mind – I’d just eaten andouille de Vire, a sausage that smells even more pungent.
This time, a year later, both our mouths were like empty jars of caviar, so we had definitely come on in the world.
We were standing on the Pont des Arts, a spindly, wind-blown pedestrian bridge from where you can look along the Seine towards Notre Dame, which, from a distance, seemed to be a horned animal waiting in the undergrowth to pounce on one of the many bateaux mouche heading up the river towards it.
Closer to us, almost immediately below the bridge, was an arrow-shaped garden on the prow of the île de la Cité. This, Alexa told me, was where King Henri IV used to seduce his lovers.
‘I expect there weren’t as many tourists and homeless people back then,’ I suggested.
‘You’re really not romantic, are you, Paul?’
‘No, not at all,’ I said, kissing her.
‘You know,’ she went on, ‘I like Sacha a lot, I really do.’
‘I’m glad.’ And I meant it, too. There it was. Proof. Poor old Sacha had been relegated to the ‘like’ division. He wasn’t in the ‘love’ league. ‘But I love you, Alexa, and I want to be with you. And I’m old enough to know what I want.’
First time I’d ever used my age as an argument with a woman. Bloody hell, I thought, was this maturity finally arriving? Or old age?
Back in the Russian restaurant Alexa had taken me to, I’d tiptoed into the potential minefield of why she shouldn’t stay with someone because his dad’s rich, and I’d come out of it pretty well unscathed. It was a dilemma that had been bothering her, too.
However, she’d hit back at me with a real heat-seeking missile of a question.
OK, she asked, what if she did drop everything, move out of Yuri’s house in London and find alternative funding for her film? Would I still be there for her?
She’d taken a slug of ice-cold vodka and breathed her worries at me in all their chilling detail.
‘The first time we were together, you slept with another woman,’ she said.
‘I was unconscious at the time.’
‘OK, we have discussed this. Then you slept with Virginie.’
‘I thought she was your way of telling me to forget you and find someone else.’
‘Another girl as a goodbye present? I am not so generous. But OK, we have discussed this, too. But do you see what I mean? I am not ready to leave London yet. I am trying to organize this same exhibition there. Will I call you in Paris and get a woman who has picked up the phone from the side of your bed?’
‘No, of course not.’ I was going to add that I never let anyone else answer my phone, but it wasn’t the right time for a joke like that. The air was too full of vodka and heat-seeking missiles. ‘I know what I want now, Alexa, and it’s you. And only you. I’d never have slept with Virginie or any of the others if I’d been with you.’
‘Others?’
Whoops.
‘Yes, you know, Florence, my ex-girlfriend, the one I just broke up with.’ No need to confuse tilings by mentioning Nathalie. Besides, I was serious. If someone had suddenly burst into the restaurant and told me I’d won the Shag Anyone In The World lottery, I’d have chosen Alexa, thank you very much. Unless, of course, there’d been a massive cash prize attached if I agreed to shag a reality-TV star, in which case I’d have put on a dozen condoms and donated the money to the Alexa film fund. But only if Alexa agreed.
‘Forget the others,’ I told her. ‘Yours and mine. The reason why I ride out into the salt marshes at midnight to talk to you, the reason I phone you up with stupid questions at dawn on a Sunday, the reason I somersault over scooters, the reason I went along to your exhibition even though you asked me not to, is because I’ve decided what I really want. You.’
This was what had earned me my first caviar kiss of the evening. And this was why we were clutched together on the Pont des Arts, watching Paris’s golden street lights flicker over the dark waters of the Seine.
I whispered in her ear. ‘Come with me to my apartment, now, please.’
She tensed in my arms. Then I felt a breath of warm air on my neck as she relaxed. ‘Yes.’
I squeezed her then like someone who’s just been reunited with a kidnap victim. She’d been taken away from me and now she was back.