Paris, France is where Emma Morley tries to turn a long-imagined escape into an actual life of writing, and where Dexter Mayhew arrives on 15 July 2001. The city is not presented as a single romantic destination: Emma avoids its tourist center for the working-class northeast, yet her first walk with Dexter still exposes how self-conscious a carefully chosen Parisian scene can feel.

Emma’s Paris and the choice of neighborhood

Emma moves to Paris for the summer to write, making real a plan that had seemed precious and fanciful when she first considered it in April. Tired of married couples telling her that she could go to Paris whenever she liked, and of a London that had become, in her view, one enormous crèche, she chooses to leave for a while and have an adventure. Her move is also a practical answer to the life around her: she wants distance from other people’s children and space to pursue her work.

The city’s literary associations sharpen the contrast between aspiration and circumstance. Emma thinks of Paris through Sartre and De Beauvoir, Beckett and Proust, while recognizing that her own successful writing is teenage fiction. Rather than settle among tourist attractions, she chooses the working-class 19th arrondissement, on the border of Belleville and Ménilmontant. She values the area as lively, inexpensive, and multicultural, but catches herself reaching for the easy claim that it is more authentic. Her account reveals both her attraction to the neighborhood and her awareness that describing it as “real” risks turning it into a pose.

The Gare du Nord and the route into the city

On Sunday 15 July 2001, Emma reaches the arrival gate at the Gare du Nord in good time. Dexter is due on the 15:55 train from Waterloo. Around her, lovers wait with flowers, chauffeurs hold handwritten signs, and the crowd presses toward the platform as passengers emerge. Emma briefly considers making a joke of a sign bearing Dexter’s misspelled name, but the train is already arriving and she joins the crowd looking for familiar faces.

After they meet, Emma takes Dexter by the hand and leads him outside into muggy air thick with fumes. Grey clouds threaten rain. She proposes coffee beside the Canal Saint-Martin, a fifteen-minute walk away, followed by another fifteen minutes to her flat: two rooms over a courtyard, not the grand Parisian rooms Dexter might imagine. His playful description of it as a writer’s garret meets Emma’s modest account of her home, giving the walk an immediate connection to the life she has chosen rather than to a tourist’s view of the city.

The Canal Saint-Martin and an uneasy reunion

Emma has memorized a scenic route, as scenic as she can make one through the dust and traffic of the northeast. At the Canal Saint-Martin, they descend stone steps to a small bar by the water. Dexter compares the view to Amsterdam; Emma explains that the canal is an old industrial link to the Seine, running beneath Place de la République and the Bastille before reaching the river. She hears herself sounding like a tour guide and tries to calm herself by remembering that Dexter is an old friend.

The setting does not make their reunion effortless. Emma immediately regrets choosing a venue that feels self-consciously picturesque, and the pair sit looking at the water while she struggles to find something to say. The canal walk therefore holds two versions of Paris together: the city Emma has chosen as a place to work and live, and the staged scenery she fears she has arranged for Dexter. Its significance lies in that tension. This is her home for the summer, but the first outing with an old friend still resembles a blind date.