True Pleasures (2 page)

I was grateful for this task because it brought me home to Sydney and restarted my life. I made good money. Sometimes I had the opportunity to travel: I ran training courses in Japan and China. Unfortunately, however, I knew deep down that the job didn't matter a damn. I helped the consultants spin a good yarn for the clients, but I didn't believe a word of it. I just couldn't think of anything better to do.

After a couple of years, the atmosphere at work
changed. The tide of largesse was ebbing. Luxuries were being cut back, and I was, well, a luxury. As the human resources manager reminded me sourly, I was not a profit center, but a
cost
center.

One day, about a year ago, my boss called me into his office.

‘I'd like you to think about taking on a change of role,' he said. ‘Moving into the consulting stream.'

I nearly burst out laughing. ‘Become a consultant? Me? But I can't count!' (It was bad enough working for the Deputy Prime Minister, who also happened to be Finance Minister; I couldn't even wield a pocket calculator with confidence.)

He dismissed this reservation with an imperial wave of the hand. ‘Doesn't matter,' he said. ‘You've got the brains. You'd be the boss, the strategist; the junior consultants would crunch the numbers.'

‘You know,' he added, coaxingly, ‘you would be on track to become a partner. You could make a lot of money. I mean, a lot,' he concluded. I could see he felt this argument was highly persuasive. He didn't know that as far as I was concerned, I was already making a lot of money.

‘OK,' I said. ‘Let me have a think about it.'

But thinking about it just made me feel tired. I recognized the signs. Another phase in my life was coming to an end, which simply meant I had to prepare myself for more change, more new beginnings. This was not a cause for exhilaration, but, at thirty-five, for weary deflation. More of the same old quest – if only I could put my finger on what the quest was all about.

One useful insight was revealed to me by that unsettling conversation with my boss. Even though I really liked the
idea of a lot of money, money just wasn't enough. It seemed I was greedy: I wanted more than money.

Gradually, things began to stir inside me. I came to understand that this time it wasn't going to be enough for me to find a new job, or change cities again, or scale my ambitions up – or down – a notch, or even just mark time. All my life, it seemed, I'd been trying for something better than this, something
bigger
than this.

Most of us, I guess, when contemplating a life change, turn to the accepted sources of advice in the modern world: friends, family, mentors, colleagues, therapists, career advisers, self-help guides. And so, during this period of professional and personal stalemate, did I.

But it didn't seem to work; I felt I was crawling blindly within the same old parameters of discussion. There was only so far I could get with conversations about career choices; about men, marriage and babies; about Sydney property values; about work–life balance. At the back of my mind I couldn't help but suspect that this seemingly endless conversation was, itself, part of the problem. I felt a bit like that character in
The Truman Show
, wondering if, somewhere out there, real life started from a completely different set of premises.

So – and it seems inevitable in retrospect – that's when the reading started. Or perhaps I should say resumed, for at first I turned to some of my oldest friends, to Colette and Nancy Mitford and Edith Wharton. I re-read their novels and their memoirs, their biographies and their essays. The retreat to books had always consoled me, and these writers in particular had always had something to say to me about being a woman, about crafting a beautiful life.
Then, almost without pausing, I moved on to their life stories. And I rediscovered that these three had created their works of art within a few miles of each other, in the heart of Paris. Why hadn't I thought about this before?

The life stories of these Paris-based writers led in turn to the women of Paris whom
they
had admired: there was Madame de Pompadour, immortalized in biography by Nancy Mitford; George Sand, who fascinated Edith Wharton; and the notorious nineteenth-century courtesans, inspirations to Colette. And through these came others, a parade of
Parisiennes
. They began to fascinate me, these women, so much so that their past soon became a lot more interesting to me than my present.

On early morning plane trips to Melbourne, business travellers would prominently peruse the
Financial Review
: I was buried deep in
Mademoiselle Libertine: A Portrait of Ninon de Lanclos
. Friends looked surprised when I told them I hadn't yet read Martin Amis's prizewinner, but that I
could
warmly recommend
The Duchess Hortense: Cardinal Mazarin's Wanton Niece
. One day a senior colleague discovered me in a café with
The Passionate Exiles: A dual biography of Mme Récamier and Mme De Staël
. He could barely smother his alarm.

Through this strange period of reading and working and contemplating their past and my future, the women of Paris – wild, noble, brave, bad, strong, foolish – came to represent important things to me: the grand scale that an individual life can achieve; the beautiful arc that a finished life can describe; the radiant, limitless scope of female potentiality.

And I found that the individual stories of these women's lives did not exist in isolation, but connected
across time and space, like threads in the grand narrative tapestry that is the story of Paris itself.

And so, at last, I find myself light and tired on the spare bed at Rachel's place. I quit the job, of course: my diary is empty. But my heart feels full. I roll onto my side, but I can't sleep. The tingle of adrenaline floods my veins. Like Scheherazade's wakeful emperor, I crave the stories.

O unfathomable, inexhaustible Paris …

Colette

T
HERE's A REASON
why people write songs about Paris in the spring. And it's not just because of the chestnut blossoms or the glossy new vegetables or the open-air cafés. It's because in springtime, Paris achieves the optimal balance between her two most essential attributes: elegance and enjoyment. In spring a woman can wear stylish clothes with a tilt at holiday freedom. She can stroll, as I do, with a jaunty air along the rue de Bretagne, in the bluish morning light, wearing a structured jacket with a little T-shirt beneath (in case the day turns balmy) and a sweater in her bag (in case it turns cool). Spring in Paris has a woman's strong and shifting moods.

Rue de Bretagne, at the unfashionable end of the Marais, will be my shopping street for the next three weeks. I acquaint myself with my preferred local
boulangerie
(one of three, but this one has the best
croissants beurre
, according to Rachel's note), the
fromagerie
for cheese, the local Nicolas wine shop, the fruit and vegetable vendors. I absorb the vivid colors, inhale the rich odors, but there's no rush to taste or try. This timeless Paris scene has been here forever; it will wait for me just a little longer.

Heading towards the river, the Marais district becomes both more enchanting and more imposing with every step. It has detail and scale. I have to keep crossing the road to gaze through small shop windows at a delicately embroidered handbag, or a witty lampshade, or a frail dress, or to gain a little distance and perspective on a grand seventeenth-century mansion. I am already trying to remember what I have read about each building – attempting to superimpose my fictional and historical idea of Paris onto the real thing. I pass one of Rachel's favorite shops on rue des Francs-Bourgeois – it sells rack after rack of old postcards telling their own black and white version of the history of Paris.

As I breathe the cool air, I feel my chest expand and my heart lift. I have always looked persistently forwards at life, peering anxiously into the void. Too often I've rushed headlong towards it. In this, I guess, I've been a creature of my times. Modern society is all about negating the past. We are encouraged to abandon whatever is old, or used, or private, or can no longer be measured in dollars. Instead we are enjoined to live in a state of nagging dissatisfaction, downgrading our personal belongings and experiences in order to seek out new and better ones in the marketplace. Even our own ageing bodies are subject to this relentless
rejection of that which isn't fresh and new. Our eyes are raised to a golden future, purchased over and over again, and yet never, quite, achieved.

But now I feel myself easing back from this anxious modernity. It seems I am beginning to learn the solace and the lessons of history. These past few months of reading have lengthened and clarified my perspective. History takes life backwards – and allows us to see the future in a different way. Within its grand schemas individual lives seem less important, and yet somehow, or perhaps for that very reason, more beautiful. History humbles and ennobles us all at the same time.

On this morning in Paris, among the timeless shopkeepers and the eternal streets and the ancient buildings, I can thank the women of Paris for another insight. For many of them, like me, things didn't necessarily make sense from day to day. Life was a mysterious and elusive business. But they held their nerve, and time vindicated their courage.

It's springtime, and the season unfolds with orderly beauty. I relax.

What a great old dame she is. Weaving my way through the crowd outside Notre-Dame Cathedral, I pause and gaze upwards at the vast stone facade. She has been thoroughly cleaned in recent years and the facelift has worked wonders for her. Even the gargoyles look happier. I don't go inside the church – it's all a bit too gloomy and bats-in-the-belfry for my taste (I prefer the delicacy of Sainte-Chapelle) – but I wander behind her great bulk and cross over the bridge. Here's a very traditional café from where, in a window seat, I can look across to the
back of Notre-Dame. From this angle I can see the old lady's flying buttresses, the boning and corsetry and stiffened petticoats which keep her aloft and intact.

This great dame resides in the historic and geographic heart of Paris, at the center of a city which, like a magnet, has attracted grand women from around the world. The roll-call in the past century alone includes Maria Callas, Nancy Mitford, Edith Wharton, Jane Birkin, Olivia de Havilland, Charlotte Rampling, Petula Clarke, Anaïs Nin, Lee Miller, Isadora Duncan, Mata Hari, Marlene Dietrich, Gertrude Stein, Josephine Baker, Janet Flanner, Djuna Barnes … each of these women migrated to Paris at some time during their lives, and many of them made their permanent homes here.

Why did they come to Paris? Love, of course, has always played its part.
She met a Frenchman, she fell in love, she moved to Paris
. (Many times, of course, she came to Paris to find love with a woman.) Nancy Mitford's love of Paris became a passion after she commenced her love affair with Frenchman Gaston Palewski. But there was always more to it than love alone, I think. Paris provided a space for women to free themselves, if they chose, from the tangled web of romantic and familial relationships. It was where they could be free to
be
themselves. Free even to
reinvent
themselves.