We'll Always Have Paris (20 page)

I whimper, involuntarily. I’m quite scared now.

‘Are you OK?’ she asks, and her eyes look kind.

‘No.’ My chest feels tight and I’m getting black spots at the periphery of my vision. It’s not doubt I feel, just stupid, basic fear.

‘It’s OK,’ says the anaesthetist, who seems to intuit that and she holds my hand tightly with one of her surgical-gloved ones for a moment. ‘It’s going to be
OK.’ I close my eyes and surrender again.

The recovery room is a blur – someone else in there sounds distressed, but I am in a peaceful, pain-free haze. Someone takes my blood pressure a couple of times, I answer a few questions
hazily and finally I am wheeled back up to my room. It’s daylight now and a light drizzle has set in outside the window, obscuring my view. Olivier is there waiting, his face pinched and grey
with anxiety.

‘Are you OK?’

‘Yup.’

I do feel OK: I feel a bit fuzzy and vague, but I have no pain and no discomfort and absolutely no regrets. Olivier has brought me a flask of tea and a croissant, it turns out unnecessarily,
because a kind nurse – not the same one as before – knocks on the door and brings me breakfast on a tray: orange juice, baguette and jam. We sit on my bed, me leaning against his
shoulder, and half watch
Télé Matin
(something to do with the forthcoming European referendum, I think, but my attention is fitful) until another nurse comes to take my blood
pressure and remove my cannula. She sticks a plaster on the back of my hand, and tells us we’re free to go.

‘Thank you,’ I say to the nurses huddled round the desk as we go out and I really mean it. I feel so grateful and so lucky to be the recipient of this magnificent state-sponsored
care (the whole process has cost us barely anything), but also of so much basic human kindness too. Getting into our taxi, I feel oddly buoyed up: I have experienced more kindness in the Institut
Montsouris than anywhere else in Paris.

I suppose this could be a turning point, the moment at which I finally start to feel at home in Paris, but it isn’t. The next morning I email my head of department and confirm that I want
to return to work, soon.

‘I can hardly imagine anyone,’ Lady Georgia observed, ‘setting out deliberately for Brussels.’

Ronald Firbank,
Vainglory

It feels amazing to be back in London, far, far better than I expected it to feel. My pride has been dealt a body blow (I can see no way of glossing over the fact I
couldn’t hack it in Paris and that hurts), but every other part of me is filled with wild exhilaration. London! The moment we step off the Eurostar – having fought our way through the
forest of French bureaucracy required to leave the country – is, for me, Dorothy entering Technicolor in Oz: everything is more vivid. We get into a taxi (a black cab! Farewell to the
deserted ranks and impenetrably complicated automated telephone-ordering system of Paris taxis) and drive across the city to my dad’s house, across the river, bright with reflected lights,
and I feel ready to burst into song.

Our flat could not be further from our Paris apartment. It’s a new build in a small block of four executive flats: light and plain, with big picture windows and laminate floors (farewell,
splintery herringbone). The flat is entirely furnished with plain, unobjectionable, matching things that are not ours and it feels like a complete liberation. There is a whole, shiny, new fitted
kitchen with fake granite worktops and pale-wood cupboards filled with Ikea plates and cups, not cockroaches, and a gleaming chrome and white-tiled bathroom. In order to get to our flat, which is
on the fourth floor, there is a small, perfectly functioning lift that no one cares about. It is absolutely nothing I have ever aspired to, but I love it, giddily. The window to the front looks
over Spitalfields market and Bishopsgate and I sit on the comfy sofa (so much better than the leather monstrosity we bought in a panic in Paris) late at night sometimes and watch the ballet of
emergency vehicles, the staggering drunks and the prostitutes soliciting on the corner. I had no idea how much I missed all this, but it feels like a shot in the arm.

London isn’t brighter than Paris, but it’s grimy and familiar and satisfying. It feels as if a cloud of cartoon bluebirds is tweeting around my head as I sashay down Bishopsgate,
past Benji’s and Tesco Metro and Snappy Snaps. I want to embrace every cashier at Boots in tearful gratitude and shake the hand of every goth in platform boots and every waxed-moustached chap
in tweed and spats (there are lots of these around Spitalfields. Sometimes I even see Gilbert and George out for a constitutional; no one bats an eyelid). I love every angry drunk and every huffy
commuter pushing their way up the escalator in Liverpool Street Station. The tiny brown mice are still running along the westbound Central Line tracks, I note with delight, and the Sweet Chariot is
still dispensing overpriced Spangles and cola cubes. I’m a bit nonplussed by my own happiness, but familiarity has never felt so delicious.

Admittedly, my knee doesn’t feel exactly amazing. Just as we started packing up the flat, and despite all that physio, it definitively collapsed, leaving me completely immobile, stranded
on a chair, crying with pain as the movers packed around me (I admit to a few dark thoughts about Christian the physio at this point). I spend the first few days in London going from doctor to
hospital, getting MRIs and emergency narcotics, a process which culminates in surgery in a marble-lined private hospital in west London (thank goodness for my employer’s health insurance) and
the conclusion that the surgeon doesn’t really know what is wrong with it, but it should be better now? Maybe? I feel fine, really, but the anti-inflammatories and the painkillers and the
constant presence of pain have left me weak and shaky. I haven’t been able to pick the boys up for weeks and I have had to stop breastfeeding because of all the drugs. I am also still
bleeding from the abortion too, but everything is basically fine.

Things get back to some version of normal with startling speed. Theo starts back at his old nursery; it’s just round the corner from the new flat and everyone is still there, the staff and
the babies, Barney and Joshua and Ladybird (yes, Ladybird), all now weirdly grown up and talking in full sentences. Even the stick insects – or perhaps more likely their descendants –
are still there. Louis joins Theo, starting in the ‘baby room’. I hang around for a while on the first few days, marvelling at how laidback everything is, with cornflour in every
crevice and kids pulling out whatever toy or book they fancy at any time of day. There are no bells and every day is different. Generally, having two small boys is much easier here: the open spaces
around the market are perfect for running around and there are easy-access museums with ramps and lift s and parks where you are actually allowed on the grass. We only get tutted at if we are
obstructing the barriers at the Underground at rush hour, which I can usually avoid.

In the office, it’s as if I had never left. I’ve had an upgrade to the coveted ‘back of the room’ desk (monitor angled away from passers-by for discreet, unobserved
Internet browsing), but it’s the same room, the same view over the internal atrium down to the canteen (staffed by the same ladies), the same timesheet system, logging my day in ten-minute
increments. The people are mainly the same too (though my main office ally Laurie has moved to another firm, which is a blow) and they are lovely to me, far nicer than I have any right to expect. I
get hugs and warm emails and offers of lunch.

I’m a bit embarrassed by my untimely reappearance after the card and the John Lewis vouchers and the leaving cakes (Colin the Caterpillar mini rolls and fondant fancies in the library),
but I decide to brazen it out. I buy myself an expensive new Diane Von Furstenberg wrap dress and a new lipstick (the thought of a salary is making me skittish with pleasure, I have been on a
delirious reunion trip around Liberty with my friend Kate, ecstatic to see both her and it) and make sure everyone knows how happy I am to be back and how ready I am to get stuck in to work again.
I don’t even have to pretend: it’s amazing to have a function again. I walk into the office every morning purposefully, say hello to the security guards and receptionists, make my way
up the back staircase to my office, change my shoes and sit down to work, grateful I still have a job.

My very favourite part of the morning, though, is my walk around the food hall at Marks & Spencer in Moorgate. I have missed M&S more than anything, so every morning I stop off there on
my way to work. I can lose ages, bathed in the cool light of the chiller cabinet, wandering from aisle to aisle marvelling at the
rightness
of it all. I like the packs of neatly chopped
vegetables and the plastic boxes of clean, perfect raspberries, the fat pink prawns stripped of everything that makes them seem like a creature, lined up in overlapping curls. Going past the
symmetrically stacked tubs of chocolate mini rolls and flapjacks, I smile at the cashiers – fresh, clearly, from some new customer-service training programme – when they ask me how my
day is going. Brilliantly, thank you, I say. I love how I’m completely in control of these simple transactions and here, among the preoccupied City boys picking up Meal Deals in the sandwich
section, I feel entirely at home.

Feeling at home, I rediscover – or perhaps discover for the first time, my memory is unreliable, flooded with London love – a taste for chat. I chat in M&S and Boots and I chat
to Harvey in the deli across the market and the girls in the Shoreditch clothes shops I browse round at weekends. It feels safe to just open my mouth and say things: there is no risk I will
attribute the wrong gender to a vegetable to widespread opprobrium. When we take the boys to the tiny park in Elder Street, we get talking to a nice couple, Mark and Fiona, who live down the road,
and they start inviting us into their cheery, chaotic flat for tea and for drinks and barbecues. They talk unguardedly and self-deprecatingly, with a preference for a good anecdote over any
semblance of dignity: Mark’s drunken antics, Fiona’s undignified labour, all the places their twin boys have peed. Olivier and I greet this easy sociability with open-mouthed wonder:
‘This would
never
have happened in Paris,’ we say to each other, thrilled. We meet up with the parents at nursery, too, by accident in the market or deliberately for picnics. I
see Kate, who I have missed so terribly, and we make contact again with my half-brother, my father’s son, who has a little girl and a new baby on the way. Without even trying, I have a social
life.

Everything takes me back to M&S though: it’s where I get wine to take to barbecues, picnic food, snacks for the boys. It is my happy place, from the neatly folded jumpers to the
six-packs of knickers and the perfectly ripe peaches nestled in moulded polystyrene. I have spent the best part of a year in the world’s greatest gastronomic theme park, but I would rather be
here than in the loveliest Parisian market. I don’t want dirt and blood and roots and angry, challenging conversations. I want the reassurance of cellophaned stir-fry packs, regimented carrot
batons, perfectly cuboid chunks of mango and anodyne chit-chat at the tills. I know how to do this! I feel re-enfranchised by M&S; it is ridiculous, but true.

The really stupid thing, though, is that I don’t really eat my M&S foods. I don’t eat much of anything if I can help it.

‘Look at you!’ says one of my colleagues admiringly on my first day back as I walk into the galley kitchen. ‘You look so
thin
. Is that a Parisian thing?’

It’s not actually a Parisian thing; it’s more of a London thing. I’m busy here, and moving has been fraught and stressful and I have things to do other than buy and eat cakes.
I’m not much minded to listen to my body’s demands, anyway: I feel ambivalent about it after the abortion and irritated by my crumbling knee. On top of that, the strong painkillers have
eroded my appetite and left my stomach sensitive. I drink cappuccino in the morning and miso soup for lunch and pick at the boys’ dinner in the evening. Work is quickly quite stressful: I get
enlisted onto a big case with an impossible timetable and deadlines that follow each other in relentless succession. Lunch is for the weak, and so is apologizing in the middle of a meeting and
sprinting out to collect the children before nursery closes, but I have to do that. As soon as the children are in bed, the partner in charge calls to give me instructions and I spend the evening
in front of my spreadsheets and my economists’ reports. The gnawing emptiness of my stomach is an odd sort of comfort, a reassuring constant.

If I’m honest, really honest, with myself, I know there’s something quite unhealthy going on. I have stood in front of our bathroom mirror, stepped onto our scales and understood
that I am heading down an insidious road, a road with nothing good at the end of it. It wouldn’t be the first time. I had the almost-obligatory Oxford eating disorder, kick-started by a year
on steroids to treat my hair loss and a censorious dermatologist who monitored my every gramme of steroid-related weight gain. I spent a year I should have spent going to parties and studying Vichy
France with my head down an Oxford lavatory, my knuckles rubbed raw trying to make myself sick. I’m not doing that again: I’ve wasted enough time thinking about my thighs and the
calories in semi-skimmed milk. Eating disorders are all about control, aren’t they, and I’m totally in control now, back in a place where I can make a doctor’s appointment without
an hour of sweaty rehearsal.

Perhaps I’m not
completely
in control when it comes to Louis. Our usually sunny, if nocturnal, baby is going through a strange patch. He’s learning to talk, which should be
making him less frustrated, but instead he’s suddenly angry. Most evenings he’s overcome by a violent tantrum, lurching around the kitchen like a tiny drunk, screaming at me about
crackers and toys. Sometimes he lies rigid on the floor and headbangs; once he even tries it in the bath, but he quickly realizes this is a terrible plan. It should be funny. There’s nothing
sinister going on, it’s just a developmental curveball, probably something to do with the move and the exhaustion and stress of starting nursery. When Olivier’s around, or when Kate
comes over, it’s fine, I can laugh at my tiny tyrant demanding we don’t look at him and bellowing for biscuits. Even when it’s just the three of us on my days off, we’re
fine most of the time: I take the boys to the City Farm to stroke goats and back to the lovely playground at Coram Fields, where I used to take Theo when he was tiny (I’m pretty sure
it’s the same grimy sheep skulking in the corner pen). We spend hours in the sandpit at the Museum of Childhood and sometimes my father and stepmother take Theo out for the afternoon. But
occasionally when I’m on my own with both boys, Louis’s outbursts seem to mirror some seam of violence in me. Sometimes I have to lock myself in the bathroom because I can’t deal
with his rages (he sits outside, banging on the door and shouting), and sometimes I need to hurt myself for the relief it brings, punching myself hard in the arm or raking my nails over my forearms
until they draw blood.