They were hard to keep track of. Crowds of strollers kept swarming over them and spitting them back out in improbable places. One minute they would be walking past one of the lakeside bars and the next they would be kissing under a tree in the Jardin Anglais. It was one of those days when everyone was kissing so even then they were hard to pick out. Only her dark wool scarf gave them away.

More and more people kept pouring down the promenades towards the lake. The benches were filled with tanned legs all tangled up together. Aurelie’s legs maybe, touching M’s. Eating oysters one after the other. Neither one of them would have checked their watch. Oh, she would have said, and she would have tossed her hair and been absolutely transfixing doing it, saying only oh and slurping oysters. All this was possible and possibly true. I slammed my bags hard into the side of a small but intricately decorated fountain and the water reared up and splashed me and I looked down at my side for E to blame it on, Look! I could yell. It’s a game, this business of banging and splashing! But of course she wasn’t there, E wasn’t, and everything was real and awful and I looked all soft and round and spilling.

I was going to apologize to the people sitting at the foot of the fountain, the people, hundreds and hundreds of them, or maybe only two, who had been kissing and who were now staring at me, drenched. But then I caught sight of Nell and I laughed, Ha! All sharp and purposeful, because I had someone to run after, somewhere to go.

Aurelie’s legs though, they had been so long, so thin and long, like she was one long line drawn flippantly and gorgeously all at once and here I was so pulpy, so hot and scribbled and stumbling.

People lounged closer and closer to one another at the cafe tables as I passed them, chasing Nell now through the park. Fingers pressed other fingers, the sides of tanned feet touched the sides of other tanned feet. It was summer and lips drank from the same bottles. Shades of lipstick piled up on top of each other on the sides of glasses. Red and pink and red again. Men over-tipped and women finished each other’s drinks. The swans in the lake gobbled up the bread that was thrown to them, gorging on soggy crusts, on the occasional croissant. Men dropped their hands lower down the backs of women. Women ran their fingers over their collarbones and touched the corners of their eyes. The day was so warm, warm all the way through and everyone knew it. Knew that on an afternoon like this one, hands were free to wander where they liked.

I spotted Nell heading for the taxi-boat dock and ran after her. We waited in line, me two steps behind her pretending like this was all possibly a coincidence. Her tucking her shoulder into the man a bit. Her pretending that I wasn’t there. Well and wasn’t this just so explainable? Weren’t we just neighbours heading home after a stroll in the park? Didn’t we both have to cross back over the lake? How could any of this really have been otherwise? Nell could have glanced at me there so close behind her but she didn’t. Oh, hi, she could have said, I know you from the park. Her hair looked dull, I could see this now, looking at her from behind. She was smiling up at the man above her but her hair looked like it was some dead thing hanging down her back.