We'll Always Have Paris (16 page)

We hardly ever go out. I no longer know which actor the French government has decreed should be in every film, because two hours seems impossibly long, so we never go to the cinema. A big
adventure for me is a trip across the river to buy a handful of
macarons
at Pierre Hermé or to gawp at the ludicrously pretty windows of Ladurée. At weekends the four of us
go to the organic market at Batignolles and jostle past the wheeled shopping trolleys and gimlet-eyed pensioners to queue up for €25 chickens or we take the boys out on the RER to the swimming
pool in Neuilly, the posh suburb to the west of us (it is very chic and modern, all plate glass and tropical plants). The Palais de la Découverte is a dusty nineteenth-century
disappointment, one forbidding Van de Graaff generator crackling in a dark back room full of wooden benches and Bunsen burners, but the Cité des Enfants, a sort of superior science museum
miles away in the east of the city where parents are younger and hipper, is a success. Sometimes we go all the way – and it is a long way – to the
menagerie
at the Jardin des
Plantes, where they have a donkey with dreadlocks (it’s called the ‘
âne de
Poitou’). You can also usually observe Kiki the giant tortoise having noisy, horrifying
sex there with one of his harem of smaller tortoises. Occasionally when we take an emergency taxi back from the Jardin des Plantes, I get the full tourist spectacle of the city as we drive along
the flat, grey-brown breadth of the Seine, past Notre Dame, then across the bridge and through the Place de la Concorde, the gilt on the fountain glittering. I realize in late autumn that I have
barely seen the Eiffel Tower in all these months. From time to time, we round a corner and the tip of it appears, comically familiar, but I haven’t been up close so I decide to take Theo.

We go down one cold foggy morning in November, walking up to Étoile to take the métro to Bir-Hakeim, Theo crammed in his pushchair in last year’s yellow oilcloth coat he is
growing out of, quiet, thumb in his mouth and gross comfort blanket on his lap. We are early and there isn’t that much of a queue: I only have time to refuse, politely, a couple of
half-hearted offers of Eiffel Tower key rings from the men who circle the Champs de Mars, then we are in the lift, whizzing up to the second floor. I have to lift Theo up to see over the barriers,
to see the mist starting to dissipate over the rooftops and spires, the Jardin du Luxembourg, the Senate and the gilt obelisk at the centre of the Place de la Concorde. He’s getting heavy
now; he’s a little boy and not a baby.

‘Look over that way: that’s where our house is.’

It doesn’t really feel like
our
house, I realize as I say it: it’s just a place we live, for now. Paris is as aloof and intimidating as it ever was: I haven’t learned
the special handshake yet; I’m just rolling along the pavement like tumbleweed, collecting cakes. Theo, who is probably far more at home here than I am, doesn’t much care to look for
the house. He is more interested in the colourful carousel of wooden horses at the bottom of the tower, and the man next to it with a tempting bundle of helium balloons, cartoon characters and
dolphins and flowers, bobbing around over his head. There’s nothing specially impressive about the Eiffel Tower for him, no more so than the swings in Monceau or the trains in Batignolles,
but at least I feel we’ve crossed it off the list.

Olivier enjoys all our outings. He is as he always is: cheerful, lively and game for anything. He throws the baby happily around in the swimming pool and the baby laughs and laughs, and he
pushes Theo higher and higher on the swings, or lifts him up to get a better view of the crocodiles in the Jardin des Plantes, basking immobile in their shallow water, or tries to feed the goats
receipts. I hover and worry and get embarrassed about doing things properly and fitting in, but Olivier doesn’t have any of those anxieties: he makes me laugh and exasperates me and I
can’t manage without him; I am dependent on him, far more than I ever was in London, for practical things and for moral support. At the same time, a voice in the back of my head sometimes
says, ‘you wouldn’t even
be
here if it weren’t for him’ and not in a good way.

We still haven’t really met anyone. I see Jill a couple of times a week to flick through old
Heat
magazines while our children watch taped
Teletubbies
, and now and then
we go and see Olivier’s one friend from home who lives in Paris. He and his wife are bronzed and handsome and tall and I feel like a medieval serf in their presence. No one ever tells a joke
and Olivier and his friend talk about business, while I am supposed to think of things to say to his wife, but end up staring dully, like the village idiot, at her lovely hair as she talks at me.
The person I like best, I think, is the man with the wolfhound down the street. He is so small and the dog is so big and he just radiates pride in Wolfie (that
is
the dog’s name);
his eyes light up when Theo runs across to pet him.

In the evenings, Olivier and I eat our Picard frozen dinners on the sofa and catch up with developments on the Millau Viaduct.

The Norman Foster designed Viaduc de Millau, spanning the Tarn river and part of the Paris–Montpellier motorway, is the main story on the evening news for weeks. This engineering marvel is
nearing completion and it is a repository of national pride, a superlative-exhausting heap of steel and concrete. For weeks – months, it seems – before its (grand, ceremonial, forty
minutes of coverage) opening, the viaduct features in some form or another on the TV news on both principal channels, the commercial TF1 and the public FR2. One night there might be a report on the
company who made the girders, while the next, it will be the likely fate of the roadside cafés at either end of the suspended marvel, or details of who would be working in the tollbooths
when it opens in December. No aspect of its construction, economic rationale or social impact can be left unexamined and I know everything about it, more than I have ever known about a piece of
civil engineering: length (2,460 metres), height (343 metres, taller than the Eiffel Tower), number of columns (7), cost (€400m) and even how long it is guaranteed for (120 years). Olivier is
a structural engineer by training and even he has reached Peak Viaduct. Still we sit and watch, because watching the 8 p.m. news seems somehow essential. If I can’t belong in any other way,
at least I can watch what everyone else in the building is watching and by now I feel as invested in the viaduct as if I had built the damn thing myself.

Sometimes, to break up the routine, people come to visit us. My Scottish aunties come, with Jack and Brian who were in Rome with my mum when she died. They are jolly company, dandling the baby
on their laps and exclaiming at his resemblance to this or that family member, filling the flat with the comforting sound of Glaswegians at rest, long spooling anecdotes and frequent pauses for
cups of tea. The aunties look a lot like my mother and sometimes, when the light is right, I get a lunatic moment of hope when one of them walks across my field of vision.

My friend Kate comes for the weekend and promptly gets stuck in the lift, leaving me to shout phonetic instructions up the shaft for her to relay to the engineers as the concierge scowls at us.
We eat cake, admire paintings and laugh and I ache when she leaves, because for a little while I felt like my old self, sarcastic and silly and alive to beauty.

My stepfather comes, often, travelling with two Sainsbury’s bags stuffed with stacks of back copies of the
Guardian Weekend
magazine, Yorkshire Tea and Bettys cakes, and possibly
something silly that has caught his eye in Lakeland. Folded into the sofa, a serious book on his knee, he asks a lot of questions: history, geography or sociology. He wants to know who our street
is named for and which way the 17th arrondissement votes, whether I have been to the Guimet Museum and where is the best place to drink coffee in our neighbourhood. We walk the streets together as
he assails me with gentle yet insistent questions and sit in bars as he observes the minutiae of local life with wide-eyed amused curiosity. I find it quite annoying.

‘I don’t know,’ I say, over and over again, crossly. I feel shown up for my own lack of curiosity and interest in my surroundings. It’s all very well Joe turning up here
with a multipack of Walker’s crisps every couple of months and trying to pique my interest in fascinating titbits of social geography he has gleaned from
Le Monde Diplomatique
, but
he doesn’t have to live here. He buys a book in the end, to fill in the gaps in my knowledge: it is called ‘A historical and architectural itinerary of the 17th Arrondissement’
and from the outside at least, it looks like the most boring book in the world, with a dull pink and grey cover, featuring an aerial shot of Paris leached of any of its usual beauty, reduced to a
blocky mass of modern towers. Turning its densely unwelcoming pages, he regales me with stuffily told historical vignettes. The substance, though, is occasionally fascinating: I’m gripped by
the bits about the repression of the Paris Commune, the revolutionary scratch government that formed following France’s controversial surrender to Bismarck in the Franco-Prussian war in 1870.
The book relates how the Communards of the Batignolles fought like cornered tigers during the desperate final days of resistance.

‘The blockades at rues Legendre, Cardinet, des Dames, La Condamine and La Fourche were defended with the energy of despair. The combatant prisoners were immediately executed in the Parc
Monceau, the Square des Batignolles or in front of the town hall and buried hastily in mass graves.’

The text is accompanied by early photographs of the Communards at Porte Maillot (the northernmost point of the arrondissement), dark figures and sandbags and piles of guns. It’s another,
unimagined side to my neighbourhood.

My father and stepmother visit too, renting an apartment in the Marais. They’re delighted with the place, which is on the Rue de Sevigné just a short stroll from the Place des
Vosges, opposite a fire station where handsome broad-shouldered firemen in tight blue T-shirts can be admired polishing, tinkering and having a sneaky cigarette between call-outs. In the morning,
my father goes out for coffee in a nearby bar, buying bread and fresh fruit on his way back, then they wander around the beautiful, tourist-friendly Marais, looking for a nice little restaurant for
lunch or popping into a museum, then returning to the apartment for a siesta before aperitifs and dinner. They collect Theo and take him off for the afternoon, buying him punnets of strawberries in
the markets and playing with him in the playground on the Place des Vosges.

I listen to their happy stories of the firemen, the beautiful raspberry tarts and the long lunches stonily: they make me feel rather hostile. I am, I realize with a shock, sort of jealous. I
want
their
Paris experience, the picture-postcard Amélie Poulain perfect one, not mine with the dogshit-strewn streets and the angry locals and the obstructive administration. I
could do a great job of staying in a nice Marais apartment for a week or two – I would be brilliant at that, finding cool cafés, buying good steaks for dinner and looking at stuffed
boar heads in the Musée de la Chasse. I want my old Paris back; I want to be a tourist again.

I can’t really work out which bits of our constrained life are grief, which are Paris and which are simply the inevitable result of looking after two children under three. I know it feels
small to me, though: there are not enough people in our lives and not enough things happening.

I feel, too, I think, the stirrings of something like homesickness.

It’s stupid that I am surprised by it: some of the things I miss are so obvious. I might find his questions exasperating but I miss the constant, careful kind of love that my stepfather
dispenses from his Sainsbury’s Bags for Life; the way that he sits down on the floor with the children with his knees tucked under him and brings out a tiny present; I miss his Russian and
German dictionaries neatly bound in brown paper with hospital corners.

I miss my expansively adoring, funny father with his aura of magical, golden confidence, the enveloping sense that everything will be all right if you just stick with him, doll. I miss my
gentle, solicitous stepmother and I miss my friends, their dry – and yes, British – humour and affection. I miss Maria, our downstairs neighbour from Newman Street, still working the
old-school Italian restaurants of Soho in her eighties, secreting the night’s takings in her zip-up boot at the end of her shift to take to the bank. I miss lazy afternoons in the
cat-hair-choked atmosphere of her flat, curtains drawn against the sun, listening to stories of sixties Soho, gangsters and nights at the Golden Nugget casino. I miss Gino and Eleanor from the
café around the corner on Goodge Street, who cuddled Theo and gave me offcuts of cake.

But I miss the place as much as the people. It’s almost unbearable at times. Absence brings home to me just how deeply I threw in my lot with London, how the sticky pavements of Soho and
the alleyways of Fitzrovia, the soaring vault and soft light of the Great Court of the British Museum where Theo learned to walk, had become home. I miss being in the places where my mother had
seen me happy, at last, where she and my father had raced, half in jest, half in deadly earnest, to my bedside in the crumbling brick and lino of University College Hospital, both desperate to see
their first grandchild. I miss the dark, secretive corners of Liberty’s upper floors and Marks & Spencer basement food hall on Oxford Street, where the motherly cashiers chat and smile at
my babies as I buy biscuits. I miss the tiny, dirty brown mice, busy and surprising along the Central Line rails.

I miss the smells of London too, and think about them often. Sometimes when I lie in bed in the evening and sleep is elusive, I take an olfactory tour in my memory from our old London flat,
choosing a route and a time of year. I might decide to think of the deep blue of a summer night and the metallic tang of the Post Office car park, the sickly coconut and cumin and incense of the
Hare Krishna centre curries, lager and sweat and aftershave in Soho Square and Frith Street, then the battle of coffee grounds and Thai food down by Bar Italia. I could carry on when I needed: down
through the Peking Duck and durian smells of Chinatown, to popcorn and hamburger at Leicester Square, then a big waft of diesel as you hit Trafalgar Square and the Strand, and finally down to the
faint brine of the Thames. Other times I head east in my imagination to Bloomsbury in late autumn, conjuring up the particular smell of London on a sharp frosty day, of petrol and coffee and leaf
mulch, and something indefinable and smoky and exciting that reminds me of childhood. These fits of homesickness are oddly pleasurable: it’s nice to know I can still feel something and on
some level, this feels right. I’m in this murky hinterland of grief and it makes me an outsider; I feel unreachable. There is an obscure comfort in having the external match the internal.