Chapter 16
16
EMMA
Mid-afternoon, I decide that I should eat something, so I tear off a piece of my croissant and put it in my mouth.
I’m sure I would have thought it was delicious twenty-four hours ago. Now it just tastes of grease. It’s like the food equivalent of my ‘relationship’ with Callum over the past week: depending on how you look at it, it could be a wonderful experience, flooding my senses with its amazing smell and taste, warming me, filling me, or it could just be really bad for me and best left well alone, with no nutritional value whatsoever.
I put the rest of the croissant back in its paper bag and scrunch the opening.
I’m sitting on Paris Plage, the urban beach on the banks of the River Seine. It’s a thirty-two-degree, not-a-cloud-in-the-sky day and I’m surrounded by chattering families, happy-looking couples, groups of friends. There’s the occasional person sitting on their own, like me, reading or scrolling through their phone. I wonder if any of them just got their heart broken.
I sobbed in the shower – huge, fat, chest-heaving tears – and then I hauled myself and my case to the van and then – standing there in that car park feeling like total crap – I decided that I was not going to leave Paris before I’d seen some of it by myself.
This is, objectively, a beautiful city. I’d like to experience more of it. I’d like not to have my memories of it wrecked by Callum.
I mean, I will always think of him in Paris, obviously. But I would like to be able to come back here and see more of the city and enjoy being here.
So I decided to go for a walk. And then I thought I might be hungry – I said thank you but no thank you to Callum’s offer of room-service breakfast in the hotel (I feel rubbish in hindsight about staying with him in all those lovely hotels, paid for by him) – so I bought a croissant because I found myself just staring at the various panini and baguette choices and realised that choosing sandwich fillings was one decision too many for me today.
And here I am, holding my greasy croissant bag, hiding my misery under my thankfully large and very dark sunglasses.
A couple maybe fifteen feet to my right suddenly make a commotion: it’s a man and a woman, of around my age, and she’s flung her arms round his neck while screaming and he has his face buried in her hair and is swinging her round and round, her feet off the ground.
He puts her down after a lot of swinging, perhaps a minute – how are they not now falling over? They must have excellent balance – and they stand together, arms round each other, beaming.
Maybe they’ve just got engaged or agreed to move in together or decided to try for a baby.
All things that I am never going to do with Callum.
I am such an idiot thinking this could work out. I’ve had so many stupid happily-ever-after fantasies over the past few days.
What. An. Idiot.
There were a lot of clues. Like the fact that he told me in the caravan that he couldn’t commit. And my own unease in Burgundy.
I think back to when Callum told me he loved me in the Eiffel Tower restaurant. I didn’t think about the wording or the sound of his declaration, the way his voice cracked; all I heard was the I love you . Because I’m stupid and I wanted to hear it and I did not want to question the love.
Thinking about it, Callum didn’t make any promises. He was – I now realise with hindsight – very careful not to do that.
I feel a tear begin to trickle down behind my sunglasses. And then another.
Eurgh. I’m startled out of my self-absorption by a pigeon landing close to me, followed by another, attracted I think by a discarded baguette end. I really don’t like being that close to birds.
These pigeons are so accustomed to humans.
I think about talking to Callum on the beach about birds, and sniff.
I said then that I wouldn’t like to be a bird, and I’m sticking with that. I’d be really bored.
I love being a human. There’s so much we can do.
And we only get one life.
And what am I doing , shaping up to waste more of my one life pining over Callum?
I’m not going to do it. I’m not going to pine.
I’m going to thank him in his absence for the great conversation and the company on the journey and the amazing sex and the very competent map reading and the lovely hotels and dinners. I’m going to chalk it up to life experience and I’m going to be happy . Entirely without him. This time, I do have closure and I’m going to do what you’re supposed to do with closure: grab hold of it and move forward with your life.
I’m going to find myself a cheap hotel for tonight and do some sightseeing for the rest of today and tomorrow morning, and then I’m going to drive back home.
And when I get home, I’m going to organise lots of things with my friends. Maybe I’ll take up some new hobbies, like padel tennis or Zumba. Maybe something creative like pottery. And I’m definitely going to do some more travelling in the future. There’s a lot to look forward to. Beginning with the christening I’m going to on Sunday in the Cotswolds. I’m going to be godmother and it will be lovely to see everyone there.
Wow, I realise I didn’t even tell Callum about that. We literally did not even talk about immediate weekend plans after we got back. We know nothing about each other’s lives now.
The signs were all there. It was just a holiday fling.
And I’m going to be fine.
In the spirit of being fine, I’m going to get back on top of my admin before finding a hotel and maybe going to the Louvre or another museum this afternoon. Also, scrolling through my phone is quite a good distraction.
Looking through my messages, I remember that I got a text from Dev a couple of days ago – when Callum and I were in Chamonix, behaving practically like a honeymoon couple, what an idiot I was – and I didn’t read it because I wanted to stay in my cocoon.
I’ve actually been neglecting all my friends and family, I realise, barely replying to any messages over the past few days.
Which in practice doesn’t matter, because even though it’s seemed like a long time and it feels to me as though so much has happened, it has in fact only been just over a week, so they won’t really have noticed. But what it does indicate is that I have been ridiculous. It’s like I just walked out of my real life to spend the week with Callum and that is not a sensible thing to do.
I’m too hot. I’m going to go to a café to eat a proper lunch and look through my messages and emails properly then.
Half an hour later, I’m sitting at a table under an awning outside a café with a view over the river, waiting for a tuna ni?oise salad, and I open Dev’s message.
I find myself frowning and blinking at what I see. I’m feeling a bit more together now I’ve had some lemonade – I honestly think I was in physical as well as mental shock and needed something sugary – and I didn’t struggle too much with deciding on my lunch (helped by going for the set menu, which only has three main options) but I’m struggling to compute Dev’s words.
He says he’s in Paris for work for a few days and he’d like to meet up if I’m still going to be here at the end of my trip. He says he’s really missed me, and to give him a call if I would like, and he would really like to see me.
I laugh out loud at the sheer ridiculousness of the timing, and the woman on the table next to me smiles across at me and in an American accent says, ‘I’d like to read what you’re reading.’
‘Ha,’ I reply, thinking: No, you really would not .
The waiter puts my salad down in front of me while I’m still staring at my phone and I pick up my cutlery.
By the time I’ve finished the salad, I’ve recovered my wits and I’ve done some thinking and I’ve decided to meet Dev.
I wanted closure with Callum and I got it. I don’t really feel like I need closure from Dev, but maybe he feels like he needs closure from me. We were together for two years. And we were a big part of each other’s lives during that time.
I should meet him.
He replies immediately when I text, and we agree to meet at the Musée d’Orsay in the middle of the afternoon. It’s my suggestion because it’s a museum full of really famous impressionist art that I’d like to see and if things feel awkward between us we’ll have the art to talk about.
And, wow… I think, for me, it’s going to be good seeing Dev. He’s part of my real life; we aren’t together any more but we were recently – as adults (as opposed to Callum and me when we were young) – and we share friends and recent knowledge about each other. This week with Callum has been a weird throwback fantasy and it will be good to put a layer of real life over my memories of him. And hopefully Dev will enjoy seeing me too, and we’ll both have a good afternoon.
Dev and I agree to meet next to a statue of an elephant outside the museum, and, after a bit of confusion where I don’t check the enormous statue I’m standing next to properly and spend ages waiting next to a rhino and we have to exchange calls to find each other, even though we’ve been standing only about twenty feet apart for a good ten minutes, we finally see each other.
My heart doesn’t jump in the way it’s always done when I’ve seen Callum, but I do actually feel pleased to see cheerily smiling, friendly, classically handsome, gorgeously uncomplicated Dev.
I’ve been travelling for four months now, and I realise that I’m ready to go home and be back in my real life, and I’m not really up any more for spending too much time sightseeing alone.
Also, Dev’s always nice to me. He’s pleasant company – quite often great company in fact – just nice .
‘Hey.’ He envelops me in a big bear hug and I cling to him for a moment, kind of for comfort, until I feel guilty that the reason that I need the comfort is Callum, and he is another man, and even though Dev and I split up and for all I know he’s met any number of women since then, I think he might be – would be – hurt that the Callum thing has knocked me a lot more than splitting up with him did.
I pull back and smile at him. ‘Hey.’
‘Good to see you know your elephants from your rhinos.’
‘Ha, yes.’ I keep on smiling. I’m very pleased to see him, I realise. ‘Shall we go in?’
We chat about what Dev’s been up to (the usual basically, but he always has some good stories) and about my travels. Obviously I don’t talk about Callum, because, well, I just can’t right now, plus it clearly wouldn’t be appropriate to talk to Dev about him.
We’re looking at Monet’s Water Lilies when I say, ‘Did you know that he painted the same scenes so many times due to an ambition to document the French countryside across different seasons?’
And Dev replies, ‘I really miss you. Would you… consider getting back together?’
I… What? What did he just say?
I feel my eyes swivelling left and right in shock as I keep my head pointed straight ahead at the painting.
Eventually, I ask, ‘What did you say exactly?’
‘Sorry, yes, sorry, that was pretty out of the blue. I just… I miss you so much, Emma, and seeing you… I’d love to get back together. It doesn’t matter that you don’t want to marry me.’
God. I give him a small smile and then look back at the painting again and try to think. My instinct is a big fat ‘no, of course not; there’s a reason that we split up’. But I don’t feel that my instincts have served me well recently. I should try to analyse this.
Dev would never hurt me the way Callum did, because he can’t . Because I do love him, of course I do – you never stop completely loving someone you used to love if there’s no good reason to stop, and in our case when he asked me to marry him I just felt as though I shouldn’t because it was like I needed something more – something indefinable – and that’s why we split up – but I don’t love him in the same stupid, self-destructive, all-in way I love Callum. I know that because when we split up, the biggest thing that upset me about our big conversation was that I thought Dev was right when he very politely and kindly said could he just mention that he worried I didn’t seize the day enough. And the reason I thought that he was right was that I’ve had an underlying worry through the whole of the past twelve years about that very same thing because of Callum.
I keep on staring at the lilies.
Maybe what this road trip has done is prove to me that I need to grow up. Stop with the hankering over what can never be. I want kids. I know that Dev wants kids. We’re nice to each other. He’s never hurt me and never would because he’s a generous, kind, considerate, lovely man. Maybe this trip has taught me that I need to be pragmatic. I could have a lovely life with Dev.
Seize the day.
That’s what I was doing when I set off on this trip so spontaneously.
Maybe, when you grow up, you have to learn that there are different kinds of seizing the day.
I think about the painting in front of me. Great painters have to seize the day, follow their passion, do what’s right for them.
There’s a lesson there.
I’ve come to a snap decision, I realise.
I turn to Dev.