We drank mojitos downstairs at Freud, at the one table that always clears in time. “Let’s be young,” Henny had said, and we had whooped and sauntered over to Freud. So slouchy a bar, Freud, so scruffy, and with such sweet, sweet mojitos. We nursed our drinks as long as we could, and then we went up the stairs and out into the night, chilly now, and turned to go our separate ways.



The next morning I was on the train to Paris with Laureen. “We need something for these coffees,” she said – we had paper cups of coffee on the pull-down tables in front of us, and a couple of back issues of Gourmet – and reached into her silver tote for a bag of Tunnock’s caramel wafer biscuits. Like magpies, we’d been drawn to the shiny red-and-gold foil wrapper when we saw it on the shelf in the store. “Still original size,” the packet read on its front, and, on the side, with some pride, “More than 4,000,000 of these biscuits are made and sold each week.” “Well,” Laureen said, unwrapping with little ceremony, “four million people can’t be wrong.”

Truly, they cannot. Inside the red and gold foil wrapper – I smoothed it out on the table afterwards, of course, and tucked it away for safekeeping – was a biscuit crisp and chewy, just this side of sweet, and infused, if you are me, with the slightest memory of those red-foil-wrapped, air-filled chocolate wafer biscuits you found at every child’s birthday party in 1980s Singapore.

(Wafers in the tropics, eh? They inevitably came to their sad and flaccid end: Sometimes you’d bite into a biscuit and, instead of crunching through the wafer layers, discover a consistency rather like sinking your teeth into chocolate-covered cotton wool. “Chao hong,” we’d say – an untranslatable Hokkien phrase meaning, essentially, that the humidity'd won again – but we’d just as likely go on to eat the whole thing, it was strangely addictive that way.)



We unwrapped the red-and-gold foil wrappers, Laureen and me, and we popped our ears when the train went so fast our bodies couldn’t keep up, and, almost two o’clock at Gare du Nord, when we saw Maud in the crowd at the end of the platform, it was like unwrapping the best red-and-gold foil wrapper of all. “Ouais!” I said, because I couldn’t help it, and the woman in front of me turned to look. Maud had on a vintage seersucker suit the colour of candy; a baguette, we were to find, was perched on the dashboard in her little Peugeot. We tumbled into the car and whizzed through the city: we jerked the wrong way down a one-way street and hung a wide left, then vroomed along the quais of the Seine behind a Roman Holiday girl in a pink helmet and billowing sky-blue skirt riding pillion on a scooter.

Paris in the summer is a party with iced cakes and cream desserts. The sun catches, twinkles in shiny confetti.



We bought a lot of cheese that first day, from the nice ladies at Quatrehommes, including a stinky Livarot circled in rush leaves for me and a sultry double-cream Brie for Laureen. The tray marked “Fontainebleau” was empty – there was but a doily on the silver tray – but Maud got the lady to make us some for the road. “It is like eating clouds!” Maud said, by way of introduction, and we watched the cheesewoman carefully pipe molehills of cream into small Styrofoam cups and wrap them up in gauze. These we carried home – well, Maud carried them home, wearing her candy-coloured seersucker suit, for I was carrying a couple of kilos of cheese – to eat in the garden out back. We dribbled redcurrant jam onto white, we scooped up teaspoonfuls of cream to eat with thick bitter-orange jelly. I don’t know if it was like eating clouds, but it sure was like – exactly like – eating cream. Lots of cream. We made tea in an Aladdin teapot. We ate – there is no way around it – cream by the spoonful. (Where is the book titled French Women Eat Cream, I ask you.) In an hour and a half dinner would be on the table.



We met Hector at Le Pré Verre, later, where we scored seats on the banquette. The doors were open to the evening. “Maud is looking for a parking space,” we said. “She was going to park in a loading zone,” we reported, nibbling on olives, “but we told her her car might not still be there when we came out.” Hector gave us a look in which disdain mingled openly – flirted, even – with pity. “It is Saturday night,” he said. “I have parked straddling a loading zone and a pedestrian crossing.” “Well,” I said, and I stabbed another olive with a toothpick while Maud circled the neighbourhood outside, “that will teach her to listen to the non-Parisians.”

It was nearing midnight by the time we headed home, Maud having pulled out of her loading-zone parking spot and trying, now, not to run the yellow lights. I was in shotgun and Laureen was in the back; the chocolate truffade in our bellies was settling in for the night. Traditionally an Auvergnat speciality of potatoes and cheese, the truffade had been reinvented, this night, in dense slabs of dark chocolate. We’d eaten it dipped in a pool of sesame-tinged milk. We’d eaten it with a molasses ice cream the taste of the exotic. It was sweet and rich and lickable all at once, the kind of thing served on small, gold-edged plates at an outdoor table under a chandelier of diamonds and lit candles hung from the trees. We’d alternated with spoons of a sweet-tart rhubarb compote, and then we’d returned, inexorably drawn, to the truffade. My brain was turning into truffade. Left brain, right brain: truffade, truffade.



It was nearing midnight, and we were driving westward through the city, to the Eiffel Tower blue against the night. We went by it once, then twice, and when, at midnight exactly, it began to twinkle, we yelled (“Oh my god!”) and then fell silent before the wonder. “This,” I said, unsilent, “is just great.” The Eiffel Tower was steel made delicate like lace, I traced the curve of its arch in my mind, it – the tower – was sparkle blue on deep blue. This was the first day.