We'll Always Have Paris (22 page)

Finally, a middle-aged man in a lumpy cardigan comes in and sits down. The whole circle sighs, as one.

‘Hey, everyone,’ he says with an anaemic smile. ‘So can we all be just thinking about coming together, feeling the chair beneath our seat bones and just really being in the
moment?’ There is a generalized fidget of mutiny around the circle. I dare to look around me for a second and catch the elegant elderly gentleman mid-eyeroll.

‘There are some new faces today, I see,’ says cardigan man. ‘So, for those of you who haven’t met me yet, I’m Clive and I thought perhaps we could just go round the
circle and just, check in? Check in on how everyone is feeling today. Does anyone want to start us off?’

He looks around encouragingly; my stomach contracts with nerves.

‘I’ll start, Clive,’ says the elderly gentleman, spitting out the word ‘Clive’. He has a lovely, cut-glass voice. ‘Today is very bad, I feel very low and very
hopeless.’

Clive leans towards him and nods.

‘Of course,’ the gentleman continues, ‘it’s made vastly worse by you taking this group. I believe you’re a very poor therapist and I’m fairly sure everyone
else agrees with me.’

There is a murmur of assent around the group. Clive nods again, unhappily.

‘I’m really sorry to hear that, Jeremy. But I wonder if, perhaps, this isn’t the most productive line of discussion? Maybe we could explore why you’re struggling with
today and how we can all help you process those feelings?’

‘No,’ says Jeremy, coolly indifferent. ‘Right now, I need to talk about you, Clive.’

For the next fifteen minutes, various other members of the group speak in brief bursts, mainly expressing their reservations about Clive’s competence, which I find very cheering.
Eventually, reluctantly, the group moves on and their sad and desperate states and stories come out in tiny fragments, ineptly facilitated by Clive. There isn’t time for everyone to speak and
when Clive’s attention alights on me, I mutter something about ‘just wanting to process my feelings’ and get away with it, and at last the session is over.

Over a couple of months, I go back to group therapy regularly, though I never really get used to it. A group of broken, angry people don’t seem well placed to do a very
good job of being careful with each other’s feelings and there are spats and walk-outs and grudges and unhelpful ‘feedback’ between group members. Nevertheless, I learn a lot
about the other people who come. There is a girl of barely twenty who has been trapped in the hospital by her anxiety disorder for months (we celebrate her walking the 200 yards to Marylebone
Station one afternoon). There is a sweet, silent woman who is bullied both at home and at work, her body language a semaphore of discreet despair, and a plump, red-faced Essex lad, more a boy than
a man, really, who claims to have come because of his social anxiety but who turns out to be mourning his dead baby daughter. On one awful occasion I walk in to see a work colleague sitting on the
opposite side of the circle and have to run away, pursued by a well-meaning therapist trying to persuade me to stay and ‘talk it out in group’.

‘You can’t just run away from what makes you uncomfortable, Emma.’

‘Oh, I think I can.’

I avoid talking as far as possible, through the use of weaselly formulas like ‘I think I just need to take some time to check in with my feelings and be in the group, today’ and
‘I’m not feeling very grounded right now but I think I can take strength from the group.’ The therapists love this kind of thing, especially if you emphasize how helpful the group
is, and I rely on this until, in a cruel failure of solidarity, someone calls me out on it one day and I have to find a new approach. There are a few people who have adopted the therapy-speak with
enthusiasm and are willing to expound at length about trust and pain and what kind of person they are until someone cuts them off. In the main, though, we are all still very British about our
feelings, effortfully spitting out tiny pellets of carefully expressed emotion. We’re ‘a bit sad’ or ‘feeling a little anxious today’. Mostly I look at my shoes. I
still do an unconscionable amount of shopping (it’s a symptom, I tell myself), so I usually have nice ones. I have some red suede dancing shoes with purple flowers on the side, which are
particularly good when things are dragging.

I’m not especially interested in my own feelings and I certainly don’t see group therapy helping with anything: it is something to be endured, a hoop to jump through to allow myself
to stay off work for a while. I feel like that postcard I remember from my mum’s office wall, something like ‘I’ve waited a long time for this nervous breakdown and I’m
going to enjoy it.’ After sessions, I walk down to Liberty or Fenwick, browse through the racks and meet Kate in the café to recount the horrors of the past few hours, toying with a
cake I don’t eat.

‘Oh, Em,’ she says, eyes wide with sympathy and concern, and I feel like a fraud, because I’m not even trying to get better. I just want to get thinner and buy more dresses and
continue running away from my responsibilities. In January, when my sister turns twenty-one, I turn up on the doorstep of her shared house in Nottingham with a lavish basket of fruit, a ludicrous
sticking plaster for her sadness. I know university is proving unbearable for her, all those happy, undamaged kids. My stepfather’s worry for her is all-consuming: it’s all he wants to
talk about. I haven’t been in touch much, because I feel like it’s my turn to be crazy for a while.

But now here I am, trying to make up for it with my feeble birthday gesture. We go for a walk around town in the January cold.

‘You look very thin, Em?’ she ventures cautiously at one point but I just brush it off with an excuse, all the while feeling a sick little thrill of triumph.

I don’t really know what Olivier thinks, because I don’t ask: I’m absorbed in my daily dramas, the ones that play out in group therapy and the ones inside my own head. He
doesn’t believe in antidepressants (I’m not sure he believes in depression or anxiety or any mental complaint, actually), but he has seen that they have made a difference so he has made
a temporary, uneasy peace with mine. We don’t seem to have a language to talk about what is happening, which becomes even more obvious when my counsellor invites him along to a session.
‘You look like a concentration camp victim,’ he says bluntly, when asked how he feels about me, looking straight at me, hurt masquerading as anger. I roll my eyes because it seems
stupid and over the top but I think it penetrates anyway and reminds me of what I already know: that it can’t go on. It’s a grotesque vanity, this not-eating business, and almost
aggressive in the way it pushes Olivier and the boys away. I’m too tired and weak to have much enthusiasm for trips to the park and playground. Sex is a joke: I feel nothing more than faint
curiosity at the physical sensation of the new hard clash of our hip bones.

When I am not in therapy, I lie in bed in the murky afternoons, conserving my dwindling reserves of energy for collecting the children, drinking black tea and reading dark, cold murder stories.
I mainly read the Scandinavians, but I immerse myself in Fred Vargas too. Vargas, an archaeologist, plague historian and crime writer who writes playful, strange stories of things that should be
impossible, is one of my only Parisian cultural souvenirs. It’s cold too in her newest outing for the eccentric Commissaire Adamsberg,
Sous les Vents de Neptune
: the action starts in
an icy Paris with a broken boiler in the 13th arrondissement police headquarters and heads to snowy Quebec, where Adamsberg is forced to confront a buried but not forgotten story from his past and
to return to the Pyrenean village where he grew up. I feel a bit like that: I have unfinished business, with France and with my mother, and I’m confused about where home is and where I am
supposed to be.

At night I dream over and over again my mother is dying but I am being kept away from her; she doesn’t want to see me. I scream and rage until I wake up, trembling and confused. During the
day, I potter around the shops and the Internet, looking at nice things for the house and for the children. I have developed a cult-like fascination with the seasonal rituals of family life: Advent
calendars and Christmas decorations and crayon marks on the wall marking the children’s height. I am consumed with nostalgia for life growing up with my stepfather, coming into the kitchen
after school to Radio 4 playing and some fiddly Middle Eastern dish cooking, Joe smoking a roll-up in the yard with a copy of
New Scientist
. I think more about him than my mother; the
quiet way he went about making home feel like home: tins of mince pies at Christmas and hot cross buns at Easter; pizza dough rising under a tea towel every Sunday. I want my children to have the
reassurance of familiarity I had and I believe, I think, that this is how you knit your family and your home together. You build it through repetition and predictability; you put in the time. I
want to be as careful and slow and patient as my stepfather. I want a drawer full of wrapping paper and string and scissors and a tin full of cookie cutters and birthday cake candles. It’s as
if my ambitions have narrowed down to this and this alone: I want to make a nice home.

It doesn’t feel like this is about my mum, although I suppose it must be, somehow. Her cakes were as thin and crisp as communion wafers and the waiters in the pizzeria round the corner
knew our order by heart. She got home late and travelled across the world while my stepfather cooked and washed our clothes, a Russian novel wrapped in brown paper on the kitchen counter and Radio
4’s
Analysis
on the radio. My sister and I were absolutely vital to her but so was work, and the trappings of domesticity were negotiable. It’s also ludicrous. I can’t
offer the boys anything like this cosy Cath Kidston fantasy life in my current state, but then again, perhaps that’s why it’s so seductive. Nevertheless, one afternoon I set aside my
Scandinavian murder and I decide to make a cake. My children have reached the age of cake: I have been to enough nursery birthday parties and oohed at the flat, wonky sponges, iced blue and
decorated by toddlers.

I can’t think of the last time I made a cake, a real cake. In France, of course, no one bothers to make cakes. Even Olivier’s grandmother has long since given up making her famous
apple tart and goes to the bakery like everyone else. I want to make a proper British one, a Proustian madeleine of a cake, so I unearth Mary Berry’s
Fast Cakes
from a packing box
and I set about making a lemon sponge. Lemon sponge is my family’s traditional cake: everyone gets a lemon sponge for their birthday, topped with sugar flowers or jelly diamonds, depending on
what we can find in the back of the cupboard. We aren’t really cake bakers, not even Joe who will happily trifle with yeast, so we stick to what we know. Joe has brought me lemon sponges
filled with his home-made lemon curd to Oxford and to Paris, the tin carefully wrapped up in newspaper and placed in a Bag for Life. If I’m going to make any cake, it has to be this one.

I go to Tesco for caster sugar and lemons and baking parchment – you can’t get that kind of thing in M&S – and back in the flat, I cream butter and sugar by hand because we
don’t have a food processor. It’s hard work and I get sweaty and short of breath very quickly: I’m painfully unfit. I grate lemon rind and it’s as fiddly as I remember.
Gradually, I get into a rhythm, adding a little flour to my mixture because the eggs are too cold and it’s starting to curdle, lining the tin. By the time I finish, evening is drawing in and
I have to go and collect the boys. I put my cake in the oven and dash the few hundred yards to nursery.

When we return, the cake is ready, plump and brown and uneven, the top mined with molehill bumps. Theo is quite excited to see it – for all my domestic longings, I don’t do much in
the way of cooking – and clamours to try it, so I hack off a corner for him and one for Louis, then cut myself a piece. I look at it for a moment. I am weak after my efforts, and hungry. I am
always hungry; hungry and cold. It’s exhausting and the effort of it makes me feel detached and disengaged from everyone and everything: I’m just waiting for the moment I can go back to
bed. My hip bones and my clavicles and my sternum stick out and when I sit down, my seat bones bump painfully against the chair. I am so sick and tired of self-denial, I realize. I can’t even
recall what I thought I was trying to achieve, but I know I can’t do it any more. I am going to eat the damned cake. I put a piece in my mouth. It is slightly dry – I have overcooked
the top and the crumb is coarse – but it is warm and buttery with a familiar edge of lemon acidity. My salivary glands contract painfully with the unaccustomed sugar hit. It is delicious.

I start baking regularly after this, familiar and not-so-familiar recipes. I grate carrots and chop walnuts and find buttermilk to make scones and I buy more cookbooks: Nigella’s
How
to Be a Domestic Goddess
and a
Good Housekeeping Book of Baking
. Some evenings I bring them into the bedroom to read instead of my murders. The cupboards fill up with cream of tartar
and vanilla pods, with cocoa powder and caster sugar. Baking feels therapeutic: I put on music and get out my ingredients and it is just absorbing enough. I like the steady, methodical process and
the enforced precision and I take comfort from this weird notion that baking is somehow What You Do, as a parent. I see it as a way to give my children the certainty that they are loved and that
what makes them happy is important. I can convey that with sponge and icing: it’s my way back.

When I make my first cake, it’s still winter and the afternoons are solidly, inkily dark outside our dirt-streaked fishbowl window. But gradually, the light lingers longer over
Spitalfields and the sun comes out now and then and the hardier after-work drinkers start taking their pints outside. There’s birdsong, from the persistent blackbirds in Elder Gardens, and
Mark and Fiona, our friends from round the corner, dust off their barbecue again and lure us in for wine on weekend afternoons. Gradually, I start back at work a couple of half days a week.
We’ve spent a full year here now, and now that I seem to be conquering whatever possessed me, it feels full of possibility. Theo and his friends chase each other around the market waving
plastic lizards and Louis falls into the pond. He’s not an angry baby any more: he’s nearly two, wildly contrary but chatty and charming.