Under One Sky

Chapter 51

51

3 JANUARY 2019, PARIS, FRANCE

Lines snake around the four bronze legs of the Eiffel Tower. Excited faces from far away shuffle and smile. Hector stands at the pilier est , just in case the pilier nord was unlucky. He waited for five hours there yesterday. At first, he was wide-eyed and vigilant, looking up at every lone woman who crossed the centre circle under the Eiffel Tower, weighed down by hope and expectation as beautiful and as heavy as the wrought-iron latticework in the sky above his shoulders. As the hours passed, Hector started to recognise people exiting their aerial adventure, having seen them when they joined the back of the queue what seemed an age earlier, and he became more cavalier in his watch. More accepting that she wasn’t going to come. So he lost himself in Hergé’s ligne claire and hoped that, on the tiny off chance she would turn up, she would seek him out, sitting on the floor, leaning against a concrete pillar, reading about adventures in an even colder world than this.

The view from the east pillar looks slightly different and he can’t smell the chestnuts from here, or perhaps the marrons man isn’t out yet. But at midday, Hector looks at his watch, removes and replaces his cap, and leans. Waiting. Observing.

A family from the New World, carrying balloons and backpacks, stand under the empty vacuum of the tower’s skirt and laugh before their balloons pass, and Hector sees a woman in the middle, with bewildered eyes, and gets up off the floor.

It’s her.

Brown hair tied into a low ponytail, a fringe now, but her round eyes look as nervous as they did more than twenty years ago.

‘ Güera! ’ Hector shouts, straightening the strap of his hessian messenger bag as he walks across to greet her. He opens his strong arms wide, and Kate blushes and laughs.

He’s even more handsome than she remembered.

Not the flaco skinny boy she first met in the orphanage that summer they painted the whole thing over. The kids were staying in Coatepec while Kate and the local boy, former inhabitant of the Villa Infantil De Nuestra Senora, Hector Herrera, were charged with painting the walls varying shades of white and terracotta. Hector was studying fine arts at the university campus across town, and painted frescoes and murals to lift the décor. Kate remembers how much of the summer she spent gazing up at him, watching as he straddled a wooden plank between two ladders, tongue poking out from the corner of his mouth as he concentrated on his art. How she gazed up at him as he straddled her in her accommodation – but only when her kindly hosts were away by the coast.

The skinny shoulders of a younger boy are now broad. That warm earthy-brown skin looks a little tired and pallid under a bitter Parisian sky. But he is unmistakably Hector. His face is so handsome; his cinnamon-flecked eyes are as impassioned and as playful as Kate remembers. A youthful brown curl peeps out from under his cap at his temple, reminding Kate that he is four years her junior as she smooths down her home-dyed hair. Ricky’s fleece-lined army-surplus jacket is buttoned up to the neck and Hector looks cold . Kate lowers her reddening face into the neck of her dark blue duffel coat as he approaches, her nose knocking the top brown toggle, and even though Hector can’t see Kate’s mouth, he can tell she is smiling.

‘Hello, you,’ Kate says, falling into his arms. They hug tightly and she loses her breath in his jacket, his chest, his heart. As Hector squeezes Kate tight, she feels self-consciously thicker set. She knows she’s curvier than when Hector last saw her, when she fled Mexico a week early, heartbroken but braced and ready to start her graduate job at Digby Global Investors. Her hips have since borne three children, and as Hector releases Kate from his embrace, she tugs at the waistband of her polyester trousers, and then looks up.

Their eyes lock. The apples of Kate’s ruddy English cheeks rise as she feels nothing but warmth for the man who broke her heart.

‘It’s good to see you, Hector,’ she says, intrigued as to why Hector Herrera wanted to see her now, on a bleak January day, after so many years.

Why now?

‘ Ay que friiiiiiiio! ’ Hector laughs, shivering in this borrowed coat.

‘Oh, I’ve forgotten all my Spanish!’ Kate apologises.

‘That’s OK, I learned English,’ Hector says, startling Kate with the ease at which he speaks it. ‘Come on, let’s get outta here, so crowded, malditas turistas. ’ Hector rolls his eyes and Kate laughs. She’d forgotten how easy he was to be around, a feeling she hasn’t felt with anyone in so long.

‘How are you? What are you doing in Paris?’ Kate asks .

Hector puts his arm around Kate’s shoulder and leads her away without answering. There’s too much to cover; they can start somewhere warmer.

‘Where are we going?’ Kate giggles giddily, her wobbly voice warbling.

‘I found a good creperie in the park down there, you hungry?’

‘Not really…’ Kate was too nervous to eat this morning as she got the first train to Liverpool Street and crossed to St Pancras to catch the Eurostar. She didn’t even buy an almond croissant at Pret A Manger, an old favourite from her Digby days, her stomach was in such knots. ‘But I’m sure I will be shortly. Crepes sound delicious.’

‘ Vamos ,’ Hector says, playfully pulling in Kate as they walk side by side. Her temple brushes against his chin. Kate leans in and is surprised by how comfortable she feels, how the bubbling anger, humiliation and heartache that simmered inside her for so long have gone. They snake through the crowds like careless lovers again, heading to the Champ de Mars.