We'll Always Have Paris (10 page)

‘There, there.’ Olivier gingerly pats my back with the flat of his hand with all the assurance of a man left in charge of an unexploded landmine. ‘Let’s try again.
Another few nights?’

‘But what about ceiling bastard?’

‘Fuck him.’

‘Fuck him’ isn’t really my style, and the thought of deliberately (well, tangentially but still consciously) provoking the ire of our neighbours appals me. I hate being
antisocial; it jars me to my English core. But I don’t have any better ideas so that is what we do.

On the very first night Louis wakes around 3 a.m. and wails continuously for five minutes, not weakening for a nanosecond. At this point, someone starts thumping on our door.

‘Oh GOD.’ I jump out of bed wide-eyed and stare at Olivier. He squints back at me, then rolls his eyes at my panic. I get up, run to Louis’s room and snatch him from his cot,
then I go and shut myself in the bathroom. I can hear Olivier speaking to another man. Their voices are raised, so I run the bath tap to try and drown them out. I know this isn’t quite sane,
but I just can’t bear to listen. Louis is silent now, eyes wide open in the dark like a bush baby, the perfidious shrimp.

Some time later, Olivier opens the bathroom door. His expression is difficult to read, there’s amusement but also fury. He doesn’t look entirely stable.

‘What?’

‘Well!’ he says, with a deranged twinkle. ‘It was that tit from downstairs.’

‘What, who?’

‘The kid with the big hair and the scarves. Lives in mummy and daddy’s flat.’

‘Oh yes. What did he say?’

‘Oh, you’re going to love this.’

My stomach flips.

‘He said, “It’s not normal that your baby cries like that and I’m going to report you to social services.”’

‘WHAT?’ Louis jumps, startled, on my shoulder, the light sleep into which he has fallen disturbed.

‘Calm down. He’s just being a dickhead.’

‘But, what if he does it? What will we do? I can’t . . .’

‘Calm down and let me finish. So I said to him, “Oh, so do you have a lot of experience with babies? Because obviously we could do with your expertise.”’

‘And what did he say?’

Olivier smiles mirthlessly. ‘He said it was
inadmissible
to let a baby cry like us. So I asked him if he wanted a go. “Here,” I said. “He’s just through
here, why don’t I go and get him for you?” Then he said, “I don’t want your baby.”’

‘Right.’

‘So I said, “Yes you do! You should definitely help us with your vast knowledge of babies, just stay there and I’ll go and fetch him.” Then he just called me a
connard
and left.’

‘You seem quite happy with this outcome.’

Olivier cocks his head to one side. ‘Well, I
was
happy with it. But now I wonder if I should have encouraged him to report us. It might have helped us get a
crèche
place?’

If you turn right out of our front door (brasses polished to an unimpeachable sheen by the concierge to discourage the unwary from touching them with their filthy animal
hands), past the tiny man with the giant wolfhound who is dragged up and down our street at regular intervals ineffectually calling ‘Wolfie! Wolfie!’, you hit Haussmann territory. Wide,
grey boulevards stretch out at precisely triangulated angles towards other parts of Paris, in one direction to the Arc de Triomphe and the Champs-Elysées and in the other to the Sacré
Coeur. In the early days I walk along each experimentally, observing the pattern of shops and buildings. Imposing grey stone apartment blocks like ours alternate at regular intervals with
pharmacies, bakeries, dry cleaners and bars. Now and then there is a tiny square of gravel and neat grass where smartly topiaried dogs do their business, ignored by their smartly coiffed owners.
Everything is tidy and it is not especially welcoming. The curlicued railings and ornamental stonework seem designed to deter riff-raff and I always look the wrong way as I cross the fast four-lane
boulevards, drawing a hail of honking.

If our arrondissement feels austerely unwelcoming to me with its wide grey boulevards and formidable architecture, I know it used to have a very different reputation. In the nineteenth century
this was the epicentre of new money, a place of bling and exhibitionism and louche display in salons with not particularly rigid morals. It’s the place that Edmund de Waal describes in
The Hare With Amber Eyes
, a glitzy enclave of railway barons, industrialists and bankers and the kind of place where Maupassant sets his
mondain
stories. Imagining how it must
have been, I can’t help but think of the dreadful mini-series we watched at university called
Belle Epoque
. Sample dialogue: ‘Why
bonjour
, M. Proust! How surprising to
see you out of your famous cork-lined room where you write your intricately detailed autobiographical novels! Can I introduce you to M. Eiffel? He is involved in a most intriguing project using the
ingenious new technologies of our age . . .’

Most of what I know about the 17th arrondissement comes from my old friend Zola.
La Curée
(The Kill), which is the second novel of the Rougon-Macquart cycle, takes on the
particularly hot topic of property speculation in the 1860s, right in our neighbourhood. The novel deals with speculation in both property and human chattels. It’s a story of rapid enrichment
and moral turpitude at the height of Haussmannization. The ‘Kill’ of the title describes the hunt for and acquisition of quick and easy fortunes by preceding Haussmann and buying up
housing that would then be compulsorily purchased by the state at an inflated price. It also evokes the callous way Aristide Saccard (the speculator at the heart of the story) treats people as
strategic collateral in his ascension. Both in the novel itself and, even more so, in Zola’s preparatory research (he would spend weeks in the field making minutely detailed notes before
commencing a project), the newly gentrified Plaine Monceau area where we live is described vividly and it’s almost trashy: loud, bright and garish. Gold, the colour of new money, is
omnipresent: Zola doesn’t do subtlety where there is scope for an avalanche of the bleeding obvious. In the new house overlooking the park occupied by Aristide Saccard, there are gilded
railings, gold panelling, vast mirrors, gold upholstery and gold ceiling roses. The descriptive passages are constant, heavy and filled with so much gold you feel almost assaulted by it. I find
myself imagining a sort of nineteenth-century version of Roberto Cavalli’s yacht, all life-sized gilded porcelain panthers and circular beds covered in animal pelts on an inlaid Carrera
marble floor.

Leached of its original
nouveau riche
glitz, the Plaine Monceau feels chilly to me, even in the warmth of spring, even under the blossom-heavy trees in the park. Because if we turn left
out of the front door and walk for two minutes, which we do most days, we reach the heart of the Plaine, the Parc Monceau, which is the reason we chose the flat. The park entrance is marked with a
slate-topped rotunda and vast black and gilt gates, and beyond the gates is classic Parisian park territory, dusty gravel paths and neat flowerbeds, the lawns mined with sternly worded notices
about what is and is not acceptable. There are two children’s playgrounds, a sandpit, a string of fat ponies who walk slowly up and down the central alley bearing tiny children, a carousel, a
pond full of overfed Barbary ducks and a kiosk that sells sweets and balloons and crêpes. It is a wonderland of delights and we go almost every day. Within a couple of weeks I loathe the
place with the heat of a thousand suns. When I find out it was used for mass executions in the repression of the Paris Commune revolt in 1870, I just nod, with a complete absence of surprise.

The Parc, which also contains a profusion of weird statuary and follies, was originally designed by Philippe, Duc d’Orléans, the aristocrat whose passion for the Jacobin cause in
the Revolution caused him to change his name to ‘Philippe Egalité’, sit in the revolutionary National Convention and vote in favour of the execution of Louis XVI. For all his
republican fervour, Philippe was unable to escape the implacable, twisted logic of the Terror and faced the guillotine in 1793. Sometimes, on my gloomier days walking the sandy alleys and dodging
the uniformed guards when Theo escapes onto the outlawed lawns, I think about Philippe Egalité, complicit in, furthering even, his own downfall. Loving Paris feels a little like this at
times.

It is a warm spring, but there is no warmth, either literal or figurative, in the playground, which catches the wind and makes me anxious. We don’t fit in. I thought Theo’s yellow
oilcloth Petit Bateau coat was perfectly Parisian, but all the children here look like they have escaped from a nineteenth-century etching: they are exquisitely dressed in Bonpoint poplin and tweed
and none of them is coated in drool or breakfast. Their games are quite neat and orderly: they go the right way up the slide, then slide down, then do it again, and they make neatly levelled sand
pies. Theo is anarchic and fanciful and he tries to talk to them in English: none of this wins him any playground points and he ends up alone and frustrated most of the time. I have the advantage
over him in speaking French, but I am wearing Gap jeans, an old winter coat and trainers. I don’t even know where my make-up is: did it even make it through the move? It’s not as if I
need it. I have two tiny children and it’s the playground, for god’s sake, not a catwalk show, but Paris is worse than Leeds for dressing up, it turns out. Everyone has their face on,
shoes are shiny, the West African nannies are draped in immaculate outsized fake Louis Vuitton and Chanel shawls and no one, not even the grandparents in green loden coats reading
Le Nouvel
Observateur
, ever talks to me. The only consolation is that they do not talk to each other either. Usually my only interactions are in negotiating the return and fair distribution of toys,
which all the other adults ignore entirely. Once, though, a grandmother snatches back a spade Theo has picked up from the sandpit and slaps him smartly across the wrist.

‘It’s not his. He needs to learn,’ she says to me decidedly as I turn open-mouthed to try and remonstrate. Words fail me: what I really want to say to her – touch my
child again and I’ll report you to the police, you
hag
– only comes hours later.

Sometimes after, or instead of, the playground, we go to the carousel, the
manège
, which has cars and lorries and fire engines and bright flashing fairground bulbs. On our first
few visits Theo is desperate to have a turn, but as soon as he is seated in a small car, rudimentary seatbelt fastened, he finds it terrifying and screams to be removed. This pantomime happens
several times before he works up the courage to stay on, face furiously concentrated, ticket clutched in his hand. The atmosphere around the
manège
is surprisingly serious, for
something that is supposed to be fun. The
manège
man doesn’t exactly exude bonhomie or job satisfaction and the children rarely smile: they are grave-faced, small hands tight
on steering wheels, or ready to press a button or anticipating the important handover of the ticket. Once the
manège
starts to move, they spin, stately slow, faces blurred, ignoring
the waves and encouragements of parents and nannies. Sometimes someone breaks down and cries, a red, crumpled face flashing past with the others. Depending on the degree of parental stoicism, this
might be met with a jolly exhortation, or in the last resort, the long legs of the
manège
man, striding over tiny cars and horses to whisk the wailing infant to safety. It has a
strange, U-rated sense of peril that attracts and frightens the children all at once.

Parisian parks and public spaces are supposed to be emblematic of French childhood: they are the theatre of its pivotal events. As a sickly child in
Du Côté de Chez Swann
,
Marcel’s outings are limited to trips to the yellowing, also sickly, lawns of the detested Champs-Elysées, but it is there, bored of playing next to the wooden horses and seeking
distraction, that he spots Gilberte for the first time, making each return trip an agony of anticipation. Will she be there? Will rain thwart him? The Champs are transformed by the intensity of his
longing and expectation into a shimmering wonderland of possibility.

In Simone de Beauvoir’s account of her very proper Parisian childhood,
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
, ‘le Luxembourg’ is so much part of the quotidian that it
doesn’t even merit its full name and becomes almost a character in its own right. It returns again and again as the arena of so much formative memory: it is the place where she experiences
her first crush on another girl, the place where she ‘marries’ her cousin and where they have their honeymoon on the carousel, where she takes twilight walks with her father, spies on
courting couples and spends her first solo outings reading near the Medici fountain. In the ‘perfectly domesticated’, orderly landscape of Catholic schoolgirl Paris, the park represents
a tiny taste of freedom. As I watch Theo clamber into Monceau’s fake grottos, collect leaves and run cars along the base of the statues, it seems a small kind of freedom compared to my
childhood in the empty expanses of the Yorkshire moors and dales, but when you’re as little as he is, perhaps even this is enough.

More often, though, I think about how much longer we need to stay for Theo to be tired enough for us to have a relatively calm evening or whether Louis is about to explode with furious hunger
and whether I have time for a crêpe on the way home. The crêpes are so good. They come scaldingly hot from the iron grid in the park kiosk, handed over by the unsmiling man behind the
counter. They are pale and a little floppy, but with a crunch of sugar crystals, the outside speckled with darker brown, wrapped in a tight fold of white waxed paper. This momentary sweetness is
the high point of many afternoons.

The thing I like best about the neighbourhood is unsurprising: it is the bakeries. The bakery windows are a burst of forgiving colour: they are instantly identifiable by the wash of warm yellow
light that emanates from within them, punctuated with vivid points of glossy red and chocolate brown. Often, you can smell them before you see them: the best ones exude a yeasty, buttery promise
that cuts through the ambient grey.