We'll Always Have Paris (13 page)

‘This is, erm, very important to us because I need to return to work. I am a lawyer.’ (‘
Je suis avocate
’ sounds great in French. It speaks of eight years of
spectacularly dreary study, black gowns and white pleated collars. Of course, in the UK I spent a single year cramming for a set of open-book exams, then two years wrestling spreadsheets for my own
title, but no one need ever know that here.)

It is unclear if the man behind the desk has heard me. If he has, he shows no sign of acknowledgement. I continue writing and try again.

‘We moved here recently after a very difficult time. My mother died in an accident while I was pregnant with my second child, I am responsible for my younger sister and I do not know how
we will cope without a
crèche
place.’

I feel embarrassed for myself.

There is still no response from behind the desk. The tortoise turns away on his wheeled chair to reach for another pile of papers.

‘There, finished.’

I pass the form across the high desk. The tortoise takes it and flicks through without interest as I watch. Then he pulls open the top drawer of the desk, removes a stamp and stamps the form
with a loud flourish, scribbling a biro initial in the centre of the stamp. Finally he gets up, walks to the photocopier in the corner of the room and copies the documents. From the back he looks
quite vulnerable, stooped and skinny, his cords hanging off his waist.

On his return he hands me the photocopy.

‘
Voilà.
’

‘Thank you!’ I give him my best shot at a thousand-watt smile. ‘So, what happens now?’

‘You will find out in writing in September whether your children have been accepted.’

‘Thank you. And in the meantime?’

He looks at me for a second, the first eye contact we have established. I feel a nanosecond of connection. It’s not openly hostile, but there might be a touch of mockery there. I
can’t even trust myself to interpret it right.

‘Nothing,
madame
. You wait.’

I feel like I have failed, but there seems to be nothing else to do for the moment.

‘OK. Thank you.
Bonne journée.
’

His head is already bowed over the desk as I turn away to walk out.

Without any real hope of accessing the Republic’s finest childcare, we turn to what the private sector can offer us.

For Louis, this is a couple of hours each morning with Charline. We find Charline through a babysitting agency. She has no childcare experience, but when we speak to her, kindness and good
humour radiate off her in waves: she is smiling, solid, sensible. She is also a Seventh Day Adventist and attributes almost everything to the Lord, but if the Lord is telling her to come and work
for us, I am fine with Him. I love her. Nothing is ever a drama with Charline: she enjoys Louis and finds him funny, enjoys playing with him. Unlike me, she doesn’t get twitchy if he
won’t nap or spends the morning grizzling, and in her presence I relax a little too. Sometimes, if Louis is particularly good-humoured – and he often is with her – she makes lunch
for the three of us. She is a terrible cook, but I don’t care, it feels like such an act of love that I eat up her singed cubed chicken tearful with gratitude.

For Theo, it is a
halte-garderie,
a sort of morning drop-in centre. The one we find is called Am Stram Gram.

Am Stram Gram is named for a counting rhyme (a French ‘eeny, meeny, miny, moe’) and it is a primary-coloured surprise on a narrow grey street named after Aléxis de
Tocqueville, the French historian whose dry as dust prose I endured for several long months of my first year at university. It takes us twenty minutes to walk there in the mornings, along the wide
anonymous boulevards north of our flat in the direction of the
périphérique
, the ringroad.

Behind the front door is a reception area with coat pegs and baskets for shoes. The idea is that parents deposit their children in this entrance, despatching them with a brisk kiss at the red
wooden gate and leaving both parties to get on with their morning. Beyond the red gate, I discover when we are shown round, is a wet room, a messy room, an ‘art’ room and a fish tank.
There is also a slide and a heap of cushions. At the start of the day a bell rings and children move from one organized activity to another, for allotted times in allotted groups. At the end of the
morning, parents are presented with a completed sheet of paper detailing the ‘theme’ of the morning (‘Ancient Egypt’, ‘the secrets of the mountains’, ‘life
in a medieval castle’) and what activity each child has participated in (‘paint’, ‘chalk’, ‘stories’, ‘playdough’). The assumption is that new
arrivals should slot in without any special attention.

This is explained to me by Monique, who is in charge. Monique has a cast-iron range of a bosom and winged spectacles, like a matron in a Gary Larson cartoon. She is not particularly friendly
– by now I am well past the point of expecting friendly – but she is reassuringly certain about everything. Theo will settle in swiftly, she says, if I show sufficient confidence.

‘It is up to you,’ she says, ‘to show the example.’

My example is a bit wobbly. I do not, initially, leave Theo: I am not confident. I find I am unwilling to leave him to fend for himself after the chaos of the past few months, so I craft an
elaborate version of our sob-story and obtain permission – exceptional, short-term, on sufferance, Monique stresses, eyes narrowed in disapproval – to come beyond the white-painted
picket fence for a week or so to help him acclimatize.

I don’t know about Theo, but I certainly acclimatize quickly. I find the minutely organized routine immensely comforting: there is a time and a place for everything, instructions are clear
and clearly explained and nothing is left to chance. After the painting or the water play, after stories and sliding, the morning ends with song and snack time, which is, of course, also signalled
with the bell. I crouch happily on the floor with the tiny children (Theo is less enthusiastic), shuffling to the back so everyone can see past me, and learn the tunes and the actions to songs and
rhymes that every French child knows: ‘Mon Petit Lapin’ (waggle your rabbit ears, hide under a cabbage), ‘Les Marionettes’ (
ainsi font font font les petites
marionettes
, with a twisting wrist gesture to represent puppets), ‘La Baleine Qui Tourne’ (my favourite: a whale eats some boats, but then regrets his actions) and ‘Les
Petits Poissons’ (Am Stram Gram friendly message: small fish can swim as well as big ones). At the end of song time – which is signalled by a second rendition of ‘Mon Petit
Lapin’ – a plate of halved Petit Beurre biscuits or apple slices (or, when there is a birthday, a dry cube of chocolate loaf cake) circulates.

This is all balm to my conformist soul, and I would happily spend every morning colouring in medieval craftsmen then taking part in song time. I love the feeling of knowing what to do, for once,
and having precise instructions to follow. But all too soon my time is up and Monique insists Theo needs to go it alone.

The first day is awful. Theo does not understand why on earth he has to stay by himself – which is reasonable, given I have been accompanying him for the past week – and he is
furious: puce and hysterical, small fists grasping desperately at whatever part of me he can grab as a breezily determined Am Stram Gram staff member detaches him, finger by stubborn finger.
‘No,
Maman
!’ he shouts. ‘NO. I don’t like it!’ I leave to the sound of his wails, and walk the streets in a guilty, unhappy daze. I get a
palmier
,
one of those big dry flaky pastries, from the bakery opposite, cram it into my mouth as I stand on the railway bridge down the road, and chew, compulsively, wondering what is happening behind the
white gate. ‘
Bon appétit
,’ says a passing youth, sarcastically. Eating on the street is of course absolutely beyond the pale in Paris but, momentarily at least, I am
past caring.

I walk around for the allotted two hours. The streets are quiet on this weekday mid-morning and I walk fast around the Boulevard Pereire and all the way down the Avenue Niel and find myself at
the Arc de Triomphe. The bloody Arc de Triomphe is our arrondissement’s only real monument and as a piece of civic architecture I find it a serious downer. I do not like its triumphal
vastness nor the creepy eternal flame, which looks like something from a high-tech crematorium. Everywhere I go, the damn thing seems to be visible: it’s following me. The Arc is new to me:
this whole western swathe of the city has been a discovery. It’s a part of Paris shaped by industry, curved around the emerging railway lines, initially peopled by the engineers and investors
and entrepreneurs whose wealth gilded the railings and whose names are immortalized in the wide grey boulevards. Where are my wrong but romantic heroes here?

When I get back to Am Stram Gram, I can hear Theo before I see him: he is totally spoiling ‘Les Petits Poissons’ with a vigorous chorus of ‘NO NO NO.’ Peering cautiously
over the fence, I can see him, arms folded, right at the back. He isn’t crying, he’s just furious, which seems about as much as I could hope for.

Gradually, haltingly, we develop a sort of routine. Around eight, I put Theo in the buggy and walk him along the avenues busy with commuters and schoolchildren up to Am Stram Gram. We start a
story on the way, a rambling shaggy dog story full of peril we compose between us. I leave him for a couple of hours and try and look for jobs. On the way back, we finish the story and go home for
lunch and a nap.

In the afternoons, we go – all three of us – to the Batignolles park.

The Square des Batignolles is much nicer than Monceau. It is a pretty, sloping, watery affair with an old fashioned
manège
(swans, bi-planes, an omnibus). There is a small lake,
framed by a collection of plane trees that predate the construction of the park, and a glass folly on a hillock that is open for small children to run in and out of, inventing stories. It is home
to a population of exotic ducks which it is strictly forbidden to feed (everyone ignores this) and a population of aggressive chaffinches. Most of the time Theo ignores all these attractions in
favour of the main one in his eyes: the trains.

Theo loves trains, and from the low wall on the westerly side of the square, you have a perfect view of the curving sweep of ten or twelve sets of train tracks that run out of the Saint-Lazare
station and sweep up, under the Cardinet bridge and out towards the western suburbs. This is the heart of Parisian rail history: trains shaped this arrondissement. It was from here that the Pereire
brothers, Isaac and Emile, ran the first passenger line in the city, out of Saint-Lazare and west to Saint-Germain-en-Laye twenty kilometres away. No one was quite sure it would work until the line
opened – the tunnel through the Batignolles hill was a terrifying 331 metres long and contemporary commentators feared the temperature within might reach 45°C and kill everyone –
but after a successful maiden voyage the line enjoyed instant popularity, with 18,000 visitors on its first day open to the public.

The trains found their way into the art and literature of Batignolles, then a cheap place for studio space (that famous Fantin-Latour group portrait of the Impressionists where everyone is
standing around, grave and bearded, is called
Un Atelier Aux Batignolles
): this is where my romantic heroes hung out (and I’m a bit wistful we don’t live here). The local
creatives observed and absorbed their trains. Monet’s Saint-Lazare series is the best known, but Manet’s
The Railway
is also a vision of Saint-Lazare, with his favourite model,
Victorine, sitting by the railings with a young girl, apparently fascinated by the clouds of steam emanating from within. Caillebotte painted the nearby Pont de l’Europe, a popular place to
watch trains, with its network of rails. Zola, too, liked a train. Of course he did; no contemporary phenomenon was safe from his pen.
La Bête Humaine
– a violent,
claustrophobic tale of murder and revenge – takes place along this same railway line from Saint-Lazare to Le Havre and the engine in it,
La Lison
, is a character in its own right,
valiant but dangerous. When the engine lies wrecked following a derailment, Zola describes its demise in these affecting, haunting terms:

‘The poor
Lison
only had a few minutes left. She was cooling, the embers in her hearth were collapsing into ash, the breath that had escaped so violently from her open flanks had
dimmed to the soft complaint of a crying child.’

La Bête Humaine
is full of people looking at trains, just as Manet did in his studio in the Rue de Saint-Pétersbourg, or Zola did in his garden in Médan, and every
afternoon, we sit too and watch the ballet of rolling stock for as long as Louis will tolerate. I lean against the wall and hold Theo safe as the late-afternoon commuter trains increase in
frequency, heading out to Saint-Germain, Le Pecq or Vésinet, and listen to his commentary.

‘Train!’

‘Yep.’

‘That train is FAST.’

‘It is, isn’t it?’

‘Train!’

‘Oh yes, another one.’

‘It’s full of people. Hello, people! You’re in the train!’

‘Indeed they are.’

‘Bust my buffers! Careful of the bridge! Oh no! Watch out!’

This last is in homage to Thomas the Tank Engine. I don’t know if Theo likes trains because of Thomas or if he likes Thomas because he likes trains, but either way, the little blue engine
dominates our days. The flat is full of winding, elaborate wooden tracks and Thomas-branded trains, wooden faces painted in exaggerated expressions, linked together by their magnetic buffers. We
have bridges and signals and cranes, cackling trucks and ersatz TV tie-in locomotives. The trains run across the table at breakfast time, line up neatly on the sofa, covered with Theo’s
comfort blanket to watch television, and go on occasional outings, carefully clasped in his hands, ready to enact new catastrophes.

Because Theo and his trains are all about disaster, thanks to Thomas. His play is a litany of perilous incidents watched and then replayed and amplified: chains break, loads drop, there are
crashes and fires and derailments. Theo re-enacts it all in lurid detail day after day: collapsing bridges, sheep on the line and mechanical failure. He is particularly drawn to – and
terrified of – an episode in which a giant boulder pursues an engine around the Island of Sodor, wreaking destruction and terror. He feels compelled to revisit the trauma often, discussing
‘Boulder’ in hushed tones, retelling and replaying the worst moments obsessively. In some moods, an inadvertent reference can trigger a sobbing fit and for a few weeks, Theo’s
first thought on waking is the risk of being crushed by a gigantic rolling stone in the streets of Paris. ‘Boulder coming to squash you,’ he says, gravely pointing a finger at me, his
words heavy with the weight of prophecy. As I put him to bed, he takes hold of my wrist for a last, urgent check.