I went home, full of joy. Later, when I heard her opening the door of the flat, I seriously thought that my heart might stop. I felt sick but it was a heady sort of sickness and I told myself to stay strong. I focused all my strength to the top of my legs and I concentrated on my breathing. While Jenny put her bag on the kitchen table, I inhaled and I popped the cork from a bottle of champagne. I poured two glasses and placed them on the table beside her bag and I got down on one knee, as I had dreamt of doing, and I asked her to be my wife.

Her eyes seemed to glisten and she gave a gentle cough and then she said, yes, she would marry me, and I felt my strength waver momentarily and then the euphoria that rose in my chest was like something that I’d never felt before.

We drank champagne and I babbled nervously. I started to cook – the fillet steak rare, the spinach wilted perfectly so you could easily absorb the iron in it, the thin chips cut with precision. The scent of the meat cooking in the flat seemed to bring calm.

I couldn’t believe she would be my wife.

We finished the champagne and I opened a bottle of red wine and we drank some and then we took our glasses to bed. Jenny turned to me and touched my face. She was so tender and it felt like we were once again in Paris, I felt so in love, we were so in love. To think that a feeling like that could allow itself to be duplicated, to think that it could travel across France to Ireland and instil in us the certainty of togetherness.

It wasn’t the fact that the Pompidou Centre was constructed from the outside in, it wasn’t that the place seemed to reflect me, the way I wore my heart. It wasn’t that our efforts to escape bumping into other tourists were successful, that is the way of Paris. It was the way Jenny linked my arm, lightly, as we strode about the city, how she waited while I bought the carnets and she passed her ticket into the turnstile, always after me. And the way she stroked my fingers, gently, as I studied the Métro map in the stations, working out which exit we should take. I could have been leading her anywhere. I had led her to stay with me, forever.