We'll Always Have Paris (18 page)

I think about all this as I peel a carrot for Theo and I find I have to revise my initial assessment.

‘Well, god, I
hope
I’m not.’

I need to check though, now the spectre has been raised, so on my way to see Christian the physiotherapist the next morning, I try and buy a pregnancy test. You can’t buy one in Monoprix,
of course; I imagine the bristling indignation of a thousand French pharmacists at the very idea: so irresponsible! Nor is there any such thing as Boots or a Duane Reade in Paris, a big impersonal
drugstore where I can pluck a test off the shelf and take it to the till. This is the unwelcome flipside of all that pharmacy solicitude I so enjoy. I walk around the back streets behind the Avenue
des Ternes, looking for a pharmacy which is empty, with female assistants who don’t look too dragon-like, and when I do find one, I have to face a set of questions about what kind of test I
want: early response? Digital? Multipack? I think wistfully of the fistfuls of cheap generic tests I used to buy in Boots when I was trying to get pregnant the first time, to total indifference
from the teenage boys on the till.

‘Just . . . a normal one?’

I ball up the plastic bag and stuff it into the bottom of my handbag.

My mind drifts back to the test as I lift a medicine ball between my knees and pedal desultorily on the stationary bike. I can’t be pregnant. Well, I can, but I really, really don’t
want to be. I feel as if I have just had a baby; my body still looks as if I have too, hollowed-out and weak and sagging. It has been easier, in some ways, this second time around with Louis:
nothing terrifies you like it does the first time and knowing that everything passes, eventually, makes me more relaxed. But reconciling the demands of both boys is impossible and I miss my mum,
selfishly, in the trenches of babyhood. I can’t cry down the phone to her or hand over an inconsolable infant to be rocked into submission or share a laugh at the impossibility of its
irrational demands. Less selfishly, it makes me sad when I think of the intense pleasure she took from Theo. Nothing hurts me more immediately than the thought of her not knowing the boys and them
growing up without knowing her: it feels unfair on the most basic level. This is the simplest, clearest grief I feel. I can’t imagine plunging back into that again.

On my way to collect Theo from Am Stram Gram I stop off in an empty
café-tabac
I have never tried before, right by the railway bridge. I sit at the bar and order a coffee, then
head down to the basement loo, which is brown-tiled and dark and smells of bleach. I pee on the stick then I put the lid back on the test and put it into my handbag and come back up to my stool at
the bar. The radio is playing, some kind of debate on a doctors’ strike. I drink my coffee then I square my shoulders, sigh and open my handbag.

I am totally pregnant. There is no room for ambiguity at all and I have done enough bloody tests to know: both lines are bright blue.

‘Oh,
fuck
.’

I say this out loud (though not until I leave the bar), but as I say it, I feel ambivalent. I have taken so many tests in the past few years hoping for this exact result that I find it very hard
to get my brain to perceive it as a wholly bad thing. Pregnant! This is supposed to be a cause for celebration, but suddenly it . . . isn’t.

I stand on the railway bridge at Boulevard Pereire, looking down at the weed-choked rails, and I call my friend Kate.

‘Hi, Em!’ I imagine her sitting at her desk in the National Portrait Gallery. Kate had been my other salvation when Theo was tiny, drinking endless cups of tea with me in the
gallery’s basement café as Theo spun in circles on the floor, learning how to crawl. I wish I were there now.

‘Oh god, Kate, I’m pregnant.’

‘Oh!’

‘Clever, eh?’

‘Poor you,’ she says, gently. She always knows what to say. ‘That must be terribly confusing.’

I laugh, hysterically. ‘What am I going to do? If I do have it, can I give it to you? You could keep it in a box under your desk.’

‘That sounds lovely. I would love one of your beautiful velvety babies to play with.’

We chat on for a few minutes; I keep her talking. Her voice is such a comfort and such a wrench at the same time: when I hang up I feel further from home than ever. I collect Theo, buy a
baguette, take the boys to the Parc Monceau, which is chilly in the late afternoon wintry dusk, bring them home, bath and feed them. When Olivier gets home everything is, for once, relatively calm.
Things aren’t impossible with the boys at the moment, I recognize that. Theo is hilarious, constantly spinning yarns, waving his favourite plush snake (Snake Snake) at people in the street,
and spending fifteen minutes minutely examining a single bollard. The baby is jolly, too. He mainly sleeps through the night now and since he has learned to crawl and can pull himself up to a
standing position, he hardly ever cries: the greater his mobility, the lesser his frustration. He cruises around the furniture, sticking his long fingers in everything: papers, Theo’s
cherished trains or the cockroach-infested kitchen cupboards. They are still exhausting, but there’s a glimmer of something better around the corner.

After we’ve read Theo a story I corner Olivier as he’s taking off his work clothes and putting his pyjamas on.

‘So, yeah.’ I am conscious of how very different this announcement will be to the two previous times. ‘I
am
pregnant.’

He turns round to face me, features flattened with shock.

‘
Eh, merde
.’

‘Yup.’ I don’t know what else to say. I feel perversely excited even though I know it’s terrible news really. I follow him as he heads to the kitchen and uncorks a
half-drunk bottle of wine. He waggles it in my direction, but I shake my head.

‘So what now?’

‘I don’t know. I really don’t know. See the doctor, I suppose?’

‘Yes. I’ll stay home from work and we’ll call in the morning. Shit.’

We watch the Millau Viaduct news in uneasy silence, then later we lie side by side in bed, still silent, not touching, arms crossed like carved medieval tomb figures, as the plumbing cranks and
groans around us. I don’t know what to say, because I don’t know what to think.

It’s not difficult to get an appointment to see a GP in Paris – there are so many of them – so I manage to get in to see the stern lady round the corner who dealt with my knee
by late afternoon the next day. The four of us head down there in a dishevelled procession, Theo tearing up and down the dark, silent corridor that serves as a waiting room, telling us a long story
about weasels and using the door stop as a prop, Louis thrashing furiously against Olivier’s chest, desperate to be free. Thankfully, there is no one else waiting and the doctor gets to us
quickly, holding the door open to let us through, with an odd expression that seems to mix frank disapproval and a faint shadow of compassion. She has lovely blonde hair set in a firm wave and she
is wearing a very desirable silk blouse. I vow to keep Theo far away from her.

The doctor settles down behind her desk (vast, dark wood) and raises an interrogative eyebrow.

‘So . . . I am pregnant. Again. And I don’t know if I can proceed with the pregnancy’.

‘I see.’ She takes a quick note. ‘So your youngest is how old?’

‘Eight months.’ Theo has become fascinated with a sort of liquid egg-timer device on her desk. I take hold of his wrist as a precaution and he fights back against me cheerfully,
while reaching round with the other hand to see if he can grab it that way.

The doctor grimaces ever so slightly. ‘Yes, that is quite young. So you wish to consider an
IVG
?’ IVG is
interruption volontaire de grossesse.
An abortion. I
don’t even know how pregnant I am and if it will even be possible, but we’ve agreed we need to start down this path as soon as we can. We can always change our minds. Or rather, make up
our minds. It’s not as if we know what we want anyway.

‘Yes.’

‘OK, well, first you need to get a dating scan to establish how far advanced the pregnancy is.’ She starts writing out a prescription on a white pad. ‘I’ll put
grossesse non désirée
’ – unwanted pregnancy – ‘so they know.’

Theo breaks free from my arms and makes another grab for the timer, but the doctor is too quick for him. ‘
Non!
’ she says smartly, shutting the timer in her desk drawer.

‘The hardest thing is finding a clinic which can do the procedure within the time. You’ll need to ring around. Here.’ She extracts a photocopied sheet from another drawer and
hands it over to me. I hand over my €30 in exchange, round up Theo, who is examining something on the floor, and the four of us exit in chaotic fashion, dithering on the threshold to check for
forgotten trains and coats.

‘I’m not sure she thinks we should even have
these
children,’ Olivier says, pulling a face.

It’s thirty years this month since the Loi Veil, which legalized abortion in France, became law. I know this because it is in the news: there have been marches and magazine articles,
philosophical debates on its impact, interviews with Simone Veil, magnificent, humane, and utterly impressive.

‘I would like to share with you a woman’s conviction,’ says Veil in clips they show on the news of the violently contested debate in the Assembly, after months of personal
attacks and even death threats. She stands, chignon perfect, poker-straight, both hands placed flat on the lectern in front of her, measured, convincing and deadly serious. ‘No woman resorts
to an abortion lightly.’ I wonder if I am about to find out.

So now I have two decisions to make, fast. Firstly, will we stay in Paris or will we go back to London? Secondly, am I going to have this baby? I have had more serene
months.

There is a certain administrative momentum to the business of terminating a pregnancy in Paris. I go along with it, at least bodily, without much questioning my own motives, drifting along in
the medico-administrative slipstream. First, there is the dating scan.

I go alone one morning. The Centre d’Imagerie Médicale is located in an anonymous back street behind Saint-Lazare, a fifteen-minute walk away. A
porte cochère
in a
classic Haussmann block gives way to smoked-glass doors and a surprisingly stylish, low-lit waiting room filled with home decor magazines. I wait my turn, looking at seaside hotels in Brittany,
Vosges linens and coir matting.

After ten minutes of instructive guidance on how to decorate my Normandy farmhouse, a friendly middle-aged man in a white coat, with a halo of grey curls, opens the waiting-room door, calls my
name and beckons me to follow him, which I do, into a large, modern room full of screens and consoles. I take off my shoes and lie down on the bed, then pull up my top and push down my trousers as
instructed, as the technician fiddles with the equipment. I feel more awkward than I did at the doctor’s, somehow: all this fuss to deal with my contraceptive idiocy.

‘Right!’ he says, advancing towards me on his wheeled chair with the ultrasound wand, and dimming the lights with a remote control. Then he flicks on a large television screen I had
not noticed right in front of me, angled in my eye line above the bed. A fizz of shock hits me in the solar plexus: am I going to have to watch? In England, even for my much wanted pregnancies, the
technicians start off with the screen towards them, turning it around only once they have established all is well.

The familiar white fuzz and dark oval appear on screen as the technician moves the wand across my belly with practised speed. I watch, gripped and uneasy.

‘Ah yes, here we are,’ he says cheerily, picking up a laser pointer and aiming it towards the screen. There, quite clearly visible, quite clearly identifiable, is a foetus. His red
dot picks out the outsized head and tiny limb buds. Lying in the darkness, I watch the fabulous, stubborn persistence of life. Stupid, dumb miracle.

‘Your baby seems fine!’ says the technician, who either has not read or does not care about the GP’s note on this not being a ‘desired pregnancy’. He spends a few
minutes in silent scrutiny, drawing diagonal lines across the screen, measuring.

‘You are approximately ten weeks pregnant,’ he adds, after a short pause.

Ten weeks. I think back, calculating quickly in my head. That would take us more or less back to my thirtieth birthday and our awkward ‘shall we leave’ dinner at Michel Rostang, the
sea urchin
amuse bouche
and the braying bankers. Some birthday present this is.

Next, eyes still fixed on the tiny form on the screen, I wonder how long I have left to get an abortion: two weeks? Four? I need to check. It feels very odd to be plotting like this while
looking at the familiar shape of a baby on the screen.

‘Fine,’ says the technician, with an air of finality. ‘We’ve finished. Ah! I almost forgot.’

He leans back over to his computer keyboard and flicks a switch, then wheels himself back over to my stomach, putting the wand back on my uncomfortably full bladder.

The urgent, galloping tattoo of a foetal heartbeat fills the room.
Ratata-ratata
.

‘There!’ he says happily, with a conjuror’s flourish. We both listen, for a minute, in silence. Then he leaves, with instructions to get dressed and to go back to the waiting
room while he types up his report.

Afterwards, report in a brown envelope in my hand, I walk back up the great, grey Boulevard Malesherbes, dropping mechanically into the Eric Kayser bakery. It’s one of my favourites: warm
and bright, with a comforting smell of yeast and butter and specialities from the east of France:
kouglof
and brioches and fat brown pretzels. The windows are still full of
galette des
rois
in mid-January. I still go into bakeries: my brain doesn’t remember that my stomach can’t tolerate cake at the moment.

My phone rings: Olivier.

‘Well?’

‘I’m ten weeks. And either there was a mix-up or I had some kind of pro-life sadist, because I had to watch. And listen to the heartbeat.’