We'll Always Have Paris (11 page)

I like how predictable French bakeries are: these ones are just the same as the bakeries I haunted in Normandy and on holidays, they have a clear physical vernacular that everyone recognizes and
respects. Big cakes are displayed in the front window facing the street: glossy glazed strawberry tarts or neatly overlapping apple slices; moussey creations for six or eight with an
impressionistic swirl of colour on top. Inside the glow continues, coming partly from the soft strip lights on the underside of the sloping glass-fronted counter, which draws your eye to a deep
bottom shelf, filled with rows of éclairs and
religieuses
in paper cases, golden brown icing-sugar-dusted
millefeuilles
and individual tarts, perhaps plump, neatly aligned
raspberries or chocolate, dark and thin-crusted with a tiny flake of gold leaf on top. On the upper shelf of the counter are smaller things:
macarons
neat like buttons in a haberdashery
store or
financiers
(little rectangles of almond-heavy sponge) or
canelés
, dark ridged domes, mysterious and as unappealing to look at as shrunken heads.

The counter is usually on a slanting angle from the front door to the till to maximize queuing space, and so as you inch along the Sunday morning queue you can examine the stock, checking
anxiously whether what you have come in for is still available. Baguettes are behind the till in racks or baskets, next to shelves of other bread, round and square loaves, to be put through the
slicer.

We have three bakeries within a couple of hundred yards of us, but the one on our street is a disappointing washout, with scorched baguettes that taste of bleach and a couple of flabby quiches.
A little further away is the Boulangerie du Parc Monceau, which has a Seventies gilt and smoked-glass front window, a pile of old copies of
Le Parisien
in a rack behind the door and a
handful of tables. It is slightly better. The women behind the counter in blue-striped blouses are predictably unfriendly but not actively hostile (unless Theo puts his whole sticky face against
the glass of the counter cabinet, which he sometimes does) and they will warm up a crêpe from the pallid pile near the till and sprinkle it with granulated sugar for us. I often take the boys
in for a quick afternoon break: it is next to a good, busy intersection for Theo to observe cars and Parisian dogs squatting and straining on the pavement. It also has a tricky
priorité
à droite
, which means that we are perfectly placed to observe vicious altercations between motorists, which are numerous. Olivier sometimes comes with us for coffee on weekends and is
particularly tickled by one such incident, where the person in the wrong gets out of their car in fury and shouts:

‘Just because you have right of way, it doesn’t mean you have to TAKE it,
connard
!’

At a safe remove, with a cake, it makes for an entertaining interlude in our afternoons.

Better still is Aux Enfants Gâtés (The Spoiled Children) at the end of our street. Aux Enfants Gâtés is a
pâtisserie
, not a
boulangerie
, so
there is no distracting bread production to worry about and it looks like something from a Jean-Pierre Jeunet film, somewhere Amélie Poulain would come to buy a beautiful tart for some
lovelorn neighbour. It is dark and ornate and as well as cakes there is a small counter of also dark, oversized chocolates. What I really like there, though, is the
flan
.

Flan
is my thing; it is my cake. I knew I had been accepted into Olivier’s family when a
flan
started to appear in the box of mixed cakes his father would bring back from
the bakery for Sunday lunch, next to the coffee éclair (Yves) and the chocolate-flecked cream meringue (Olivier) and the fruit tart (Jacqueline). You get assigned a cake early in their
family and that assignment is impossible to shift; ten, twenty years later you will still be getting that cake for your pudding. It is pointless to protest that you haven’t liked meringue
since you were fourteen, because in front of the bakery counter, that is the thing they will remember. Thankfully I
do
like
flan
, which is a plain, set custard usually in puff
pastry, sometimes with a shiny glaze of apricot jam on the top. It is the most perfect of comfort foods: undemanding, simple and sweet.

I start to carve out a tiny nugget of routine in my aimless, baby-dominated days. My sister comes round and minds the boys during their lunchtime nap while I dash out and buy us both a salad,
and me a
flan
, wrapped up in a neat hospital corner of white waxed paper.

My sister doesn’t like cake. I realize quite early I don’t really know what she likes, or if she should even be here. She is staying in a rickety one-room sublet, which Olivier has
found for her ten minutes away. She has opted to stay in Paris for a couple of months, because she does not want to be in York and she has decided not to go to India (her original gap-year plan
before Mum died). It’s an uneasy arrangement for both of us (though not for Olivier, who has the most basic and inclusive attitude to family: of course she must come, there is no debate).
We’re family, in that fundamental, instinctive way Olivier responds to, but we aren’t intimate. There are ten years between us and I left home when she was in primary school, so how
could we be? That impulse to keep one another close has been powerful and I’m glad she’s here, but I can’t shake the feeling that it’s not helping. I mean, she’s
helping me with the practical side of looking after the boys and that’s a precious lifeline, but I’m not helping her: I don’t know what to say or what comfort to offer, so I
don’t say anything, most of the time. All I have to offer is the babies, the basic animal consolation of small children and their simple needs.

So my sister takes Theo out to the park and plays games with him, or stays at home and amuses him while I go out to sort out some piece of paperwork. She’s completely lost, in a strange
country, and all I do is sit around and eat cake. I look at her sad, lost face and I just feel helpless, so I sit and eat cake guiltily, at greedy speed, in the uneasy silence of nap-time. Maybe
there’s nothing to be said? The Enfants Gâtés
flan
is small with a dark caramelized top and it is barely set, extravagantly trembling when you put a spoon into it. It is
pure comfort, the regressive comfort of beige, nursery food before someone tucks you up in bed with a brisk kiss on the forehead. I wish I knew what would comfort my sister in this basic way. I
wish, really, that she liked
flan
.

Outside our handsome building full of people who hate us is all of Paris, gorgeous dreamy Paris, the city of all my childhood dreams. Unfortunately everyone there seems to hate
us too.

Perhaps hate is too strong; it’s more that they find us tremendously irritating. My mere existence seems to be an affront to much of Paris, which is a serious blow to my belief that I am a
French person trapped in an English woman’s body, just waiting for the opportunity to emerge, ice cool, uncompromising and unapologetic.

Day after day, walking to the shops and the market, I am subjected to a surprising – to me at least, used to the blanket indifference of London – barrage of criticism. I thought the
social contract of capital cities (you leave me alone, I leave you alone) was the same everywhere in Europe, but it appears I was wrong. Strangers, passers-by, stop to tell me I am walking too
slowly or in the wrong place, that my toddler needs to stop shouting or that his sticky fingers have no place on that shop window. The baby attracts a particular brand of ire, which is mainly
directed at how he is dressed. Why, women ask me, incensed, is he not wearing a hat (it is May and 20°C)? Where are his socks (he has probably taken them off and dropped them)? Why have I not
brought a blanket (see above, May, 20°C)? The way I dress him is taken as a personal affront.

Olivier thinks I am being over-sensitive. ‘It’s just a game,’ he explains, again, weary and crumpled in his good work shirts after a slog along the RER A line. When he gets
home I meet him at the door and unload my grievances, pink-cheeked and indignant. I find his arrival in the evening confusing. I wait for this moment all day and when it comes, I am relieved of
course, and happy to see him. The cavalry have arrived and I can pee, drink a glass of wine or read my book for ten minutes. But at the same time, this is when all my resentment comes out. He has
an independent existence with colleagues and a desk and a lunch break. He even gets packets of luncheon vouchers, €7 a day to spend on Paul sandwiches, and when he gets home he smells of the
outside, of elsewhere and other people. I have nothing to show for my days but a series of mundane grievances and some kind of purée smeared on my sleeve. I unload, daily.

‘The dry cleaner shouted at me because she only takes cash EVEN THOUGH there’s a Visa sign on her door,’ I tell him one evening. ‘She said I was wasting her
time.’

‘
Salope
,’ he says reflexively, with a shrug. Bitch.

‘She was
horrible
! I was totally polite and she was just gratuitously mean.’

Olivier walks into the kitchen and looks in the fridge. This is a doomed endeavour, because I am too scared to buy any real food due to everyone being horrible all the time. Apart from cakes,
all our food comes from Picard, the superlative frozen goods shop. I love Picard. The aisles are quiet and free of violently inclined old ladies, and the people on the till process your shopping in
capital city-appropriate silence. Picard is reputedly where Parisian women buy pre-prepared morels and scallop dishes to cheat at dinner parties. It sells delicious meals, pasta gratins and seafood
tourtes
and things with ‘
sauce vierge
’ which are far better than anything I could make using real ingredients. Nowhere in Paris sells any of the things I normally
bought in Marks & Spencer anyway: neatly trimmed vegetables, pre-packed stir-fries or breaded cod fillets; food for children and the culinarily timorous. Monoprix is nothing like Marks &
Spencer, though you would think by rights, this being Paris, it should be better. Our nearest branch is in a dingy basement and it has terrible lighting and luridly pink vacuum-packed meats.
Franprix is far, far worse: even the crappiest Tesco Metro beats Franprix (although I concede that the selection of yoghurt is extremely comprehensive).

Giving up on food, Olivier finds some wine and pours himself a glass.

‘You just have to be rude too. They’re rude, you’re rude back. The best way to react is to say that not accepting cards is totally unacceptable and she deserves not to have any
customers.’

‘I can’t do that. I just couldn’t.’

‘You need to try. It’s not personal, they’re like that with everyone.’

‘But it really feels personal! Because when someone is incredibly rude to you, it kind of
is
personal, isn’t it?’

‘No, you don’t understand.’ He frowns, struggling to explain. ‘It’s just . . . what you do. It’s a bit like a kind of dialect. That’s just how people
talk.’

Unconvinced, after two months I tally up my street incidents to try and decide whether I am over-sensitive.

I have been:

Shouted at by the dry cleaner for trying to pay for my cleaning with a credit card.

Shouted at by a woman on the till at Monoprix for loading my shopping wrongly onto the conveyor belt.

Shouted at by the woman behind me in the Monoprix queue for unloading my shopping too slowly.

Shouted at by a woman on the till at Monoprix for trying to pay for €27 of shopping with a €50 note.

Shouted at for blocking the pavement with the pushchair, about ten times, by motorists, old ladies, other pushchair pushers and once by a handsome young man in a navy quilted jacket, who seems
far too young to care about such things.

Shouted at by old ladies at the market for taking up too much space with pushchair three times.

Shouted at by market stallholders variously for touching – not squeezing – an avocado, for dithering, and for asking for fruit at the vegetable till.

Poked with a walking stick for blocking an old lady’s ingress to Paul once. I am still reeling at this one: I never expected things to get physical. She looked so sweet and vulnerable too,
with fluffy white hair and frail, blotchy legs in patent leather mid-heel court shoes, but she just jabbed me in the ribs and hissed at me.

One afternoon, as I leave the Parc Monceau, someone shouts after me. I turn, assuming I or one of the children must have dropped something, expecting to meet an extended hand proffering a toy or
sock. Instead, three nannies, each with a child in tow, surround me.

‘You need to do something about your jeans,’ one says, gesturing at my bottom. ‘They’re falling right down.’ The other two stare, eyes narrowed. This is not
friendly advice, it is admonition.

My mouth sags open. My jeans are riding quite low, but I’m a long way from round the knees gangsta pants. ‘I’m carrying a baby and pushing a buggy,’ I say. ‘I
don’t have a free hand to pull up my trousers.’

They raise their eyebrows and walk on.

Later, in bed, after all these incidents, I think of the clever and cutting things I could have said to them. ‘Oh!’ I say, witheringly, in my head. ‘I didn’t realize
there was a dress code for the sandpit!’ Or ‘The next time I want fashion advice from a woman who thinks stonewash is still a thing, I know where to come, thanks.’ There is a
reason
esprit d’escalier
is a French expression, I think.

Surely this can’t be normal. What is going wrong? It is not that I am failing at the basics: I know to say hello, properly, when I go into shops or meet the concierge. But what I gradually
discover is that I am only speaking half the language: the rest is all about appearance, body language and tone.

Clearly, I am not doing myself any favours aesthetically: I know this from the looks I get in the Parc Monceau. Years of living in London have left me believing I can leave the house in
anything: in my post-natal wreckage phase, I walked around Fitzrovia and Soho in men’s tracksuit bottoms, a giant fleece and what were essentially slippers and no one even glanced at me.
Here, that’s simply not an option. I do understand that the way I look is genuinely affecting the way I get treated, but I can’t quite get it together to do anything about it. With
Louis’s nocturnal habits, just getting up is already a struggle; the idea of dressing up is simply absurd. Worse, stuff has a habit of adhering to me and I am seemingly incapable of getting
through a day without acquiring a squalid full body coating of crumbs, dust and coffee.