LE CHAPEAU I don’t know why you think I know Paris so well. You talk about places assuming I can see them as clearly as you. You talk about little streets and cafés. You say, do I remember that little place La Palette? On the rue de Seine? No, I don’t. But it sounds like somewhere I’d like. So why not? Lets meet there. If you get there first, order me un petit café noir, would you? You’ll know it’s me because I’ll be wearing an unutterably chic little Parisian raincoat, belted of course, my long boots for the puddles, and a felt hat. It’s a great little hat, that I saw in a one-off shop in Oxford, that sells crazy, individual handmade hats. It’s a raspberry pink felt cloche with floppy velvet flowers and an asymmetric brim. Not too practical in the rain, but just the thing for drinking coffee on a wintry late morning in Paris, on the rue de Seine. It will be tempting to keep checking my reflection in the mirror behind the bar as I arrive, to see if my mascara has run in the rain, but I’ll do it surreptitiously. I don’t want you to think I’m concerned with my appearance. I will have run all the way from the metro, because I wasn’t sure whether I was going left or right at the exit and took the wrong turn. Why do I always do that? And I’m beginning to worry that you’ll have gone by the time I arrive, because we said eleven, and it’s nearly twenty to twelve. I’m not even sure you thought I’d really come. My stomach is churning. Be there. Please still be there, I can see the café now, dripping tables outside the door. They’ve put up an odd plastic cover from the awning, that blows a little in the wind. I can see the gold chairs behind the plastic and old men drinking beer. I’ll be calm when I go in. Breathe deeply and slowly. Steamy windows behind the plastic so I can’t see if you’re inside. Be brave. Push open the door. Thank God for the mirror behind the bar. Mascara is fine. Hat is at a jaunty angle. Cheeks a bit too pink from my sprint and from the sudden bakery heat inside. Breathe. In. Out. Are you even there? If I step out slightly from the queue of people at the bar, I’ll be able to squint past the couples at tables and waiters bearing trays with cups, saucers, silver teapots and steaming coffee. But where are you? Oh God. Have you gone? Did you give up? Did you think I wasn’t coming after all? Oh thank God. There you are. You’re sitting there, your empty coffee cup on the table, newspaper folded and notebook on top. I’m not sure you notice me come in. I’m right behind a tall man in a wool overcoat with a velvet collar. He stands between me and the rest of the room, I catch my breath, wait for my heartbeat to slow a little. I stay hidden for a moment longer. Gather myself. And there you are, looking out the window, watching to see me arrive. I think I get almost to your table before you realise it’s me. I smile a smile that I’m still smiling. From ear to ear. You smiled the same one right back. And then I am wrapped in your arms and your coat and your scarf is falling on the floor. I don’t know how long we stand there, your arms tight round my waist, mine around your neck, my face buried against yours. You smell of coffee and soap and toast and familiarity. That hug is like a homecoming. And then we sit. We smile. No, we grin like idiots. And our hands reach across the table at the same time as we talk. You order more coffee, of course. Espressos for both, little black coffees with an exquisite, perfect crema on top, steaming hot. I have an almond croissant, because I can never resist when I’m drinking coffee. My favourite. You show restraint and say no. But of course we share it, because actually you can’t resist either. I get icing sugar on my coat sleeve. Naturally. I am messy even here. I almost lick it off, unthinking, but then I realise where I am: in a café on the rue de Seine, Paris. Neither the time nor the place for licking my own coat sleeve, I remind myself. But you know what I’m thinking, you’re watching the thoughts flit across my face and you’re laughing at me. You offer to save me embarrassment by licking the sugar off for me. I don’t know whether I decline your offer or not. Either way, there’ll be a stain on the sleeve of that raincoat that I cherish. And we will talk. Oh my god, will we talk. How long we shall sit there, I don’t know. Perhaps we won’t notice, perhaps time will just pass us by and the sun will carry on in its arc over the sky. You ask me everything. I will tell you. We will be endlessly sidetracked by each other, by the extraordinariness of sitting in La Palette, on the rue de Seine, sitting and talking and laughing. I will have to ask you questions that I thought I’d forgotten. You will have to forgive me that, humour me a little. And what tense will we use when we talk? Will it be past, present or future? Will we stay in the conditional? Would we? Could we? Maybe there will be a whole new tense for just this moment out of time. And as we talk we will rediscover our shared passion for the pleasure in words, just the sheer delight in exchanging words. We will rewrite our own language of intimacy, of words that mean something only to us. The rain will stop, of course. I know you say that it always rains in Paris and you do love to grumble about that. I shan’t spoil that pleasure for you. I’ll let it rain a little longer. That way, we can shelter in La Palette for a while more, watch people come in and out. See if we can sneak the backgammon board onto the table without being noticed. That will panic me a bit, because I’ll be remembering the time we were thrown out of a café for illicit gambling, when you were trying to teach me how to play. I was incensed, do you remember? Gambling? For goodness sake, I barely understood how to bear off, let alone take a punt on a double and wager actual money. But this time, we’ll laugh in the face of such danger. Because we’re older and wearing better clothes. That counts for a lot in Paris. I’d like to think that when we play, we are now evenly matched. All those years of practice on my own, against virtual partners will have paid off. I will begin by losing. You will smile kindly, not really surprised, and you’ll be magnanimous in your victory. But a game or two later, I’ll be on a fabulous winning streak. You will be amazed, impressed and slightly cross. You thought I’d forgotten how to play. That I’d not got any better in twenty years. You will be determined to thrash me. For old times’ sakes. There’s a steady clonk of dice in the pot, the clack of wooden pieces as they move around the board. You will be waiting for me to knock your pieces willy-nilly onto the bar, because I never could resist that, and then I’d be whipped. Resoundingly beaten. But today I will be canny. I will be ruthless. I will not be tempted into any easy trap. I shall enjoy this, skipping round the board. And it will be joyous. We’ll be quiet, reading the dice as we tip them out, enjoying the thrill of the perfect throw at the perfect moment. Five and a three to start. Double six, double one. Six and a one. The numbers speak their own language as we play. As you concentrate on a move, I will be able to watch your face, your hand as it hovers over the board. You’ll look up at me, catch my eye, we’ll smile. But you’ll raise an eyebrow and carry on playing: nothing gets in the way of the game. Time will go by. I will watch you move those wooden pieces, two fingers sliding a pair from one spike to two. I know that I’m a better player than I was. I know I can wait, I can take my time and not rush into immediate moves. The dice don’t scare me like they used to and I can take defeat so much better. If you win a game, I can only learn for the next one. This is the beauty of the game. I can step outside my normal niceness, my desire to please and be sweet and I can be ruthless, vicious, take no prisoners. It’s the only real thing I play to win. So I shall glare at you across the board, across the empty coffee cups and the sugary table: and you will smile as you win a gammon. And I take your lovely hand and squeeze. We smile and I know we’re both thinking of old times. You put a ring on my finger once. It took my breath away. It weighed my hand down, made my fingers heavy. I’m keeping my hat on, though, not because I’m cold, but because it’s a treat to wear. Makes me feel as though I’m a character in a Vita Sackville West novel. Eccentric but beautiful. Tall and enigmatic. You know, feels lI can carry anything off with this hat on my head. Something about those velvet flowers, the way they flop. Something winning about the way the brim curves down over my ears, just framing my eyes. I put my faith in this hat. Rain hat, sun hat, it’s my raspberry pink cloche with the damp velvet flowers. Breathe in. Breathe out. Outside the café, we are walking. We will look into all the gallery windows. Choose ourselves objects and paintings for homes we don’t live in. We’ll despise some. Laugh at some. Love a few. I ask you to choose me something that will make me laugh. I’m still thinking about my hat. When I glimpse a reflection of it in the shop windows, I can’t help smiling. You point out a stark, angry scrapmetal sculpture in a neon-lit modernist gallery. It’s hideous. I hate it. I can’t believe you think I’d like it. “Nice hat-stand.” You say. I’m so relieved. I had thought for a second or two that all of that amazing synchronous understanding was an illusion. “I love it.” I say, “I want two.” The shady street opens out onto a broad, sunny embankment. We climb down the steps onto the pressed gravel pathway by the river. Barges glide along below, traffic chunters over the bridge ahead. The Seine flows on. What is it about light on water that lifts the spirit? I wonder as we walk along, avoiding little piles of dog-mess in the gravel, between square stone pots of privet. “So bloody French.” You say, morosely, pointing out the mess. It is, I suppose. But I’m lost in the spectacle of light on water, in the watery shadows on the underside of the bridge ahead, in the rhythm of our feet walking. I don’t notice the dog-shit. I’m lost in the dream. The dream that takes me to streets I’ve not walked, to cafés I’ve not visited, with the ghost of a dream of a man I once knew. If I close my eyes I can keep walking. I can hold onto the dream for a little longer. If no one speaks, no one moves, I can feel my arm through his arm, his side against my side, shoulders bumping as we walk. I can still smell the coffee, hear the steam shooting through the milk. I can feel the wooden dice in my hand, the sugar on my fingers, taste the almond paste inside the flaky pastry. And I can feel the hat on my head, the pink felt, the cloche, that hat I fell in love with once. The hat that can work magic, a travelling hat for dreamers. A hat with flowers that flop to one side, that still are a little damp from the rain. I love that hat. One of these days, I shall go and I’ll find that hat I fell in love with. And no matter what the price, I’ll buy it, if I have to beg, borrow or steal. And I shall wear it out of the shop. I shall wear it and wear it. It will take me places. Maybe to the rue de Seine, to a coffee shop where I’ll see you sitting drinking coffee, waiting for me. It might take me to the river, arm in arm with my laughing, funny ghost of a dream. And there’s the sorry thing. I left that hat in the shop. I didn’t buy it when I saw it. It wasn’t a useful object, it didn’t fulfil an obvious function. I felt guilty just trying it on, because I knew I would be a goner if I did. It would be love at first sight, first try. I told myself that the sensible thing to do would be to put it back on its little stand without trying it, without checking how it suited me. But I couldn’t resist its appeal. And so my love affair began. Nobody else noticed. They said, “Do you really need another hat?” and I said, “No, no, I really don’t.” And I left my raspberry pink felt cloche with the velvet flowers in the shop, with the shadow of a tear in my eye. Because I could see that it was a real, live dream hat. And that’s the nature of regret