We'll Always Have Paris (19 page)

A salesgirl moves in front of me, eyebrows raised.

‘Fuck. Was that . . . how are you?’

‘Hmm.’ I point at a pretzel, my face a pantomime of apology. The girl at the counter scowls at me – this is a major breach of the bakery social contract, but these are extreme
circumstances so I scowl back unrepentantly, which seems to do the trick.

‘Do you need me to come back?’

‘God, no. I’m fine.’ I don’t really, know how I am, but there’s no urgency. I walk slowly home, ripping off small pieces of my pretzel, which is perfectly salty and
bland. My route takes me along the railings of the Parc Monceau and I peer in as I pass. It’s bitterly cold and windy and only a few hardy, well-wrapped toddlers are staggering around the
sandpit, watched from the benches by Ivorian nannies (I have learned that all the local nannies come from the Ivory Coast, for some reason. It’s a closed shop) muffled against the cold.

I can’t really have an abortion now, can I? Can you really hear a heartbeat and see an ultrasound and still have an abortion? I wonder if this absolves me from making a decision. But how
could we possibly cope with three children? Could we stay here, even if we want to?

I just don’t know. I don’t know what to do about staying or going and I certainly don’t know what to do about being pregnant. So for a few days, I just shelve it: I eat crisps
and look after the boys and call Kate now and then for a consolatory chat.

Olivier’s position on the pregnancy seems to be the same as his position on moving: it’s up to me. He is calling round clinics and looking for an opening (which is proving almost as
tricky as finding a
crèche
spot) and I’m very grateful for his help – without him, I’d probably just have the baby so I don’t have to talk to Parisian
administrators on the telephone – but he is emphatic the decision is mine. This is very clear in his mind. I know it’s meant to be considerate and thoughtful, but it feels like a
monstrous imposition and I resent it. How can this all be down to me? I seethe, irrationally, and we don’t really talk.

Instead, I talk to Christian the physio. I tell him, ostensibly in case it matters for Swiss ball and electrode reasons, but really because I want to confide in someone.

‘I’m pregnant.’

‘Congratul . . . or not?’ Christian adjusts his expression on seeing mine.

‘God, I don’t know.’ It’s a relief just to say it to someone else. ‘My kids are tiny. It wasn’t planned. I just don’t know if we can manage. I
don’t even know if I want it.’

‘Huh. Tricky.’

He doesn’t say much more than that, but he treats me normally, hooking me up to his electrodes, and it’s just nice to talk to someone who doesn’t care very much, but who finds
me reasonably congenial company for an hour.

Finally, Olivier makes a breakthrough. I get a call as I am walking around Monoprix.

‘Right, I’ve got one. It’s in the middle of nowhere, but they can fit us in. We’ve got to go over there tomorrow for a pre-appointment. OK?’

‘OK.’ After I hang up, I test my feelings in my head. Am I disappointed he’s found a clinic? I don’t know. I don’t feel anything definitive.

In the morning, Olivier rings in sick (again) and we trek all the way across Paris to the Institut Montsouris. It’s in the 14th arrondissement, on the southern border of the
périphérique
, another part of the city I never imagined visiting. We take a long métro ride (via Châtelet, for all roads in Paris pass through Châtelet),
then walk until we arrive at a plate-glass cube of great, shiny modernity.

After a lot of paper-filling farce, we are directed towards a waiting room with a sign reading ‘Orthogenics’, which sounds space age, but it’s a normal hospital waiting room,
with magazines and unhealthy-looking pot plants and anxious-looking people. I am the oldest person there by a good ten years: the room is full of teenagers. No one looks up, or speaks: it feels a
little as if we are all in detention after some misdemeanour, waiting to go into the headmaster’s office for a proper telling-off.

The doctor is appropriately headmaster-like: he’s a severe gentleman in his sixties who barks a few questions in my direction, rolling his eyes at my stammered explanations of how the
pregnancy came about. He seems genuinely angry and I don’t blame him, I’m a waste of his time and resources, someone who really should know better. He gives me a brusque internal
examination then snaps off his gloves.

‘Yes, you’re pregnant. So you are sure you wish to proceed with the termination?’

‘Yes.’ No. Maybe.

‘Then I can confirm your appointment for two weeks from today. The procedure will be under general anaesthetic, so you need to see the anaesthetist before the procedure: you can make an
appointment downstairs. I’m giving you a prescription for a drug you need to take six hours before the procedure to soften the cervix. All the information you need is on this
sheet.’

He thrusts a succinct photocopy at me, and we leave, further chastened.

When I go back to see the anaesthetist, he notes my blood group, height and weight, then casts a disdainful eye at my stomach, which is struggling to withstand another assault on its already
weakened musculature.

‘You need to lose some weight.’

He has just weighed me and I weigh just over eight and a half stone. My jaw sags open uselessly as he fiddles with a blood pressure cuff. I am totally lost for a comeback. Again. I ride back on
the métro grinding my teeth in fury.

The days pass and I still have no idea what I am going to do.

‘Sometimes,’ says Christian the physio, as I half-heartedly try to raise my leg as he presses down on it, ‘these things just happen. Not every pregnancy works out. When my wife
was pregnant with our third child, they thought there was a genetic abnormality and she would have to have an abortion.’

‘What happened?’

‘It was fine in the end.’

‘Well, that’s good.’ (And totally unhelpful, I think, uncharitably.)

‘What does your husband think?’

I make a face. ‘We’re not talking about it. I mean, he’d go along with it if I really, really wanted to have the baby but it’s not what he had in mind.’

‘No, I can imagine.’

‘It’s not really what I had in mind either.’

My mind is running along two parallel courses: one where I have a new baby six months from now and one where I don’t, and they both seem equally plausible. Early pregnancy is so
theoretical anyway – even seeing the scan hasn’t made it that much more real. There’s nothing to see and I don’t feel sick any more: sometimes it feels like I must have
dreamt the whole thing.

When I’m not thinking about the pregnancy, I’m thinking about whether we should stay in Paris. I have emailed my London employers just in case, to tell them I might return after my
maternity leave, but I don’t really want to go back. I don’t know how admirable my motives are: mainly I think it would be humiliating to have to admit we’ve failed at Paris and I
don’t know how my crumbling self-image could withstand that. Kristin Scott Thomas and Jane Birkin didn’t just give up, dammit. I project forward, imagine the conversations I would have
to have with friends and colleagues and it just feels embarrassing. It’s also sort of existential: if I’m not destined to be Parisian after fifteen years of believing that, who actually
am
I?

There are some persuasive elements on the other side of the equation, though. The boys could go back to Theo’s lovely, kind, laidback nursery. I could earn proper money again. We would be
closer to my family, my father and stepmother, my sister, my stepfather, all the people I miss. More even than all of those, I allow myself to imagine how
easy
everything would be:
utilities companies and shops and ordering a drink. I think, guiltily, how lovely it would be to drink a proper cup of tea. I have faithfully stuck to coffee here, because the Lipton
Yellow/lukewarm water/UHT milk is worse than no tea at all and because I don’t want to be a British cliché, but queasy and pregnant and repelled by caffeine, I’m left with no
acceptable hot beverage options at all. I find myself imagining sponge cakes: fat, unattractive slabs of Victoria sponge and coffee and walnut, sandwiched with buttercream. I think about Marks
& Spencer, frequently.

Trivial and important arguments chase around my head as the days tick by until Olivier and I can’t avoid talking any more; it is two days before my appointment, and we sit, uncomfortably,
on the sofa together. Olivier breaks the silence first.

‘I can’t decide for you.’

‘Yeah, you’ve said that a few times already.’ The pressure of the hard deadline I am facing is making me mechanically hostile at the moment; I’m seething with
resentment.

‘You know that I’m totally fine about us having another baby,’ he says. ‘I really, truly, am.’

I do believe him. He has a bit of that magic confidence my father has – the belief that he’ll get to where he needs to be, even if the route turns out to be more circuitous than
expected – and he’s also an instinctive father. He doesn’t question his own judgement or feelings. He does the best he can for our boys and he loves them: this is his job and he
does it perfectly.

‘But if we have the baby we won’t be able to live in Paris any more and we wouldn’t be able to move back to London. We can’t afford it. We’ll have to move out of
the city to somewhere like Cergy Pontoise.’

Cergy Pontoise is one of those
zones pavillonnaires
the French build so many of. A vision of it comes into my mind with awful clarity: executive bungalows in a muddy brownfield site, a
ten-minute drive to the nearest hypermarché and school drop-offs in a sensible family saloon car. It’s the antithesis of my Paris dreams. If I am lonely here, imagine life in small
town Cergy, six RER stops from the city. I can just picture the isolation, the awful quiet of weekday afternoons with a napping baby in a suburban estate, and it terrifies me. I know with absolute
clarity that I will go mad, truly mad if I do this without sleep, without company, splitting my time and attention between three children under four.

My pleasant delusion, the happy vision of another pregnancy and another baby, fractures like crazy-paving. There isn’t actually any option, or any decision to take: I can’t possibly
cope. If I can’t imagine making the sacrifice of living out in the suburbs for this baby, how could I possibly cope with all the other compromises, large and tiny, that will come with another
child? I have no support, no mother, no reserves of grit or composure and no belief that everything will be OK. I need to cling to the shreds of adult life I am painfully reassembling, not throw
them all away with a baby I couldn’t care for. What a stupid idea this was, how stupid I am. I feel sick at my own inadequacy, but at least I know what I have to do now.

‘We don’t have to have this conversation,’ I say. ‘It’s fine, I’m doing it.’

So the next evening we watch the 8 p.m. news as usual and eat our Picard dinner as usual and at bedtime I have a shower with the special anti-bacterial soap I have been instructed to use. Then I
take the first of the cervix-softening pills and it is really definitive; there is no going back now. I go to bed and fall asleep almost instantly.

The alarm goes at four and I get up and take the second pill, then I head out alone into the dark. Olivier has to stay behind with the boys, but I am happier on my own anyway.

The Boulevard de Courcelles is dim and deserted under the orange street lamps and I ride a succession of métros with the night shift workers and early morning cleaners, my mind soft and
empty. Jacques Dutronc’s ‘
Il est cinq heures, Paris s’éveille
’, that hymn to the grubby city at dawn, tired and busy and ordinary amidst the beauty, trots
stupidly through my head, the rumbling bass line accompanying the jolts of the métro.

I’m so relieved the decision is made, and even though I am scared, I know I can do this bit: it’s simply a case of placing one foot in front of the other and surrendering myself to
the absolute assurance of French healthcare. I navigate the maze of platforms and corridors at Châtelet, get to Porte d’Orléans and walk along the dark flank of the Parc
Montsouris. I’m a quick walker: I have been walking this city for months now.

The hospital is shut and dark when I arrive, so I search around for a bell on the side door and raise the night porter, who lets me in. I cross the hospital, following the instructions on my
photocopied sheet, and take the lift to the third floor, where a nurse shows me to my room(I have a
room
, it seems rather luxurious) and hands me a cellophane package, which contains a
gown, paper slippers and a hairnet. I put them on and sit on the side of the bed, careful to keep my mind very, very empty. I look at the gaps between the ceiling tiles, the metal window frame, and
watch the progression of a faint suspicion of light at the horizon, through the scrub of the park, as dawn arrives.

A motherly nurse comes in and places a cannula in the back of my hand: it’s quick and painless and she smiles quite kindly when it’s done. ‘Not much longer now.’

When she leaves, I start counting the ceiling tiles again, with slightly greater urgency. I examine the texture of each, the veins in the material, until there is another knock on the door and a
couple of porters come in, with the same nurse.

‘It’s time to go – lie down on the bed.’

So I lie down obediently and let myself be wheeled along a corridor in bed, even though I am perfectly well, perfectly able. There is a comfort in having absolutely everything taken out of my
hands: I don’t need to think any more, so I don’t. We go down in a lift, along corridors, and up in another lift and finally I am wheeled through the swing doors into what is
recognizably an operating theatre. The nurse and the orderlies leave and I feel cold and frightened as a masked team of four busy themselves around me.

‘Right,’ says the anaesthetist (thankfully it’s not the one I met previously). Her face is obscured by a surgical mask and she is leaning over me in green scrubs.
‘We’re going to start this drip off now. It might tingle.’