We'll Always Have Paris (24 page)

I don’t actually begrudge the time spent on these visits, because they are so interesting. Every house, every building in this city is so different and a confusion of eras and styles sit
side by side on the same street. For a place that trails a reputation of drabness, a single look upward shatters the myth. Any possible variation of any decorative detail – balconies,
windows, gabling, tiles and cornicing – has been tried by someone on some Brussels street at some time and no flight of fancy is left unexplored. We see a fully fledged fake Egyptian temple,
a flock of tiled peacocks, gilded frescoes and stained glass. It seems very optimistic, this assertion of individuality: the homeowners of Brussels are confident enough to put their mark on the
city. In Paris, you have to conform to the exigencies of the Haussmann standard; here you can try on a thousand different identities writ large in stained glass and paint and wrought iron and find
the one that fits best.

In the end the best fit for me is really very ordinary. I fall for a plain red-brick house in a quiet street to the south of the city. I am a bit worried that the area – prosperous and
quiet – is the Belgian equivalent of Fulham or worse still, the Belgian 17th arrondissement: apparently it is where all the French people live. But the smarter parts of the city, where the
aspirational Eurocrats live, are regrettably too expensive with two children, and the centre has no green space. This suburb has pretty, affordable houses, good tram lines and the estate
agent’s seal of approval. Also, compromise is the order of the day, so here we are.

The street my house is in does not look particularly well heeled, which is something of a comfort. The house itself is half a storey shorter than its neighbours and its brickwork is stained with
years of grime. It is a little dark and the tiny garden is a wasteland of mud and rubble. A great deal of money has been lavished, not always to good effect, upon the house by its rather
haunted-looking Parisian owners (they are moving to Dallas, which may explain their haunted look). The white goods and door handles and sanitary ware are a festival of expensive stupidity and there
is an American fridge the size of an African elephant, pointed out to me proudly by the agent. Even so, I like it instantly: it has good plain bones, the bedrooms are nicely proportioned and I fall
in love with the tired but beautiful typically Belgian brown and blue floral tiles in the hall. From the main bedroom, which is light and airy and huge, you get an enchanting view over the
patchwork of tiny city gardens to the rear, all lilac trees and ivy. There’s nothing exceptional about the house: it’s a lot like the house in York I grew up in, the house where my
stepfather still lives, just taller and thinner. Maybe that’s what I like about it? There’s something about the intimate geography of this area, the little backyards, narrow
snicket-ways and brick buildings, that reminds me of York too.

Mainly what I like about this place is that it already feels like a family home. It feels like the kind of place where you stick children’s drawings on the fridge and draw pencil lines to
mark their height on the kitchen wall. I can imagine us shoving our cardboard moving boxes – veterans of three moves – into the basement and not getting them out again. The estate
agent’s blurb describes it as a ‘
maison unifamiliale
’, a one-family home, and I like that. I am ready for a
maison unifamilale.

The area around the house is sleepy; you can hardly believe you’re in a capital city, but there’s just enough life to satisfy me. ‘Where are the
shops
,’ I have
wailed again and again to the estate agent, who can’t understand why I won’t just get in my Range Rover and
drive
to the shops like everyone else, and here at least he can
point to a couple: there’s a bakery opposite, and a couple of doors up from the house there is an open-all-hours corner shop, a chaotic warren that smells of crumbs, cats, dust and
long-discontinued sweeties, manned by a tiny frail gentleman in his eighties. Next to that is a barber’s shop lined with giant painted renderings of bouffant men’s hairstyles. The
barber’s window has a regularly changed seasonal display, from text books and pencils for
la rentrée
in September, skis and bobble hats in January, sinister bunnies at Easter.
After that, the street becomes residential again, barring a strange restaurant, the side of which is covered in a giant mural of some sandal-wearing monks inexplicably waiting for a tram and
carrying a duck on a tray. The 1900s shade into the 1930s then the 1950s architecturally until you get to a matronly lingerie shop, where the barber’s mother sells girdles and liberty bodices
in thick beige elastane, and the ice cream parlour, which is magnificent. It has retro neon signage and it is always packed: people of all ages (nervous couples on dates, elderly gentlemen on their
own, groups of well-dressed Eurocrats on team-bonding expeditions) congregate on even the rainiest days for huge overblown sundaes topped with glacé cherries and whipped cream. If you go the
other way down the street, there’s a primary school, its windows filled with bright kids’ paintings.

Olivier comes to have a look, pokes at the walls and frowns at the boiler. He’s not as convinced as me – the garden is tiny, and aren’t we paying over the odds for all these
daft Philippe Starck doorknobs? – but I walk him around the neighbourhood, aping my companion the tweedy estate agent, pointing out the excellent transport links, the cheese shop and the
hundred-yard walk to the primary school (above ground). I manage to convince him over a scoop of vanilla at the ice cream parlour (the school has a canteen, which helps) and we put in an offer.

The house purchase is as tense and long-winded and bad-tempered as these transactions usually are. The Parisian lady who is moving to Dallas has a breakdown over curtains and cries on the phone,
there is a last-minute demand for us to provide a stack of cash to a dark-suited silver fox of a
notaire
in a wood-panelled office, which leads to farcical scenes running around the banks
of Liverpool Street and transporting wads of cash on the train but finally we all come together in tense silence in the
notaire
’s office in the very respectable Sablon square with a
pile of paperwork to sign the
compromis
, which makes the sale binding. Madame signs with the
notaire
’s Montblanc in a benzodiazepine stupor, Monsieur shakes our hands coldly
and there it is, we are Belgian homeowners. Olivier and I go a few doors down to the Vieux Saint Martin, which is possibly the nicest bar in the city, for an expensive cup of coffee on the
terrasse
to celebrate. The sun is shining and you get a delicious miniature palmier biscuit with your coffee and it feels like the start of a new adventure.

A few weeks later we move in.

On some level, I suppose I think that Belgium will be like France with training wheels, and Brussels like Paris for the psychically feeble, but it becomes very obvious to me
very soon after we move in that I am wrong. Belgium is so very much not France and Brussels is nothing like I thought it would be.

The most important thing first: cake. Every corner of Brussels smells of vanilla and yeast and baking dough thanks to the waffle vans, but Belgian patisserie makes me sad. It tastes and looks
like French patisserie executed by someone who doesn’t actually like cake, who knows vaguely what it is supposed to be but hasn’t bothered tasting anything. There is a thing
optimistically called a ‘
flan
’ you can find in some bakeries and supermarkets but it is dense and claggy, in a wet, thick pastry case with an unappetizing brown spongy top.
Belgian croissants have had both their legs amputated to become a sad truncated blob called a ‘
couque
’ which has little to recommend it, and in restaurants the safest option is
to eschew patisserie entirely and go for the ever-present
Dame Blanche,
vanilla ice cream and chocolate sauce. The bakery in our street is a disaster for everything but Moroccan pancakes
and none of the others in the neighbourhood are up to much: the éclairs are dry, flavours are unimaginative and anything promising is inexplicably contaminated with speculoos. Speculoos
– the cloyingly sweet and insufficiently spiced national biscuit – is ubiquitous, contaminating cheesecakes and tiramisus and at its worst even game stews. Whenever I hear of a rumoured
good bakery (and I keep my ear to the ground on such matters) – it turns out to be French and when I go, there is always a queue of antsy Parisian exiles, shooting daggers at whoever gets the
last
baguette à l’ancienne
.

Shopping, generally, is a discombobulating experience. The corner shop in our street is a time machine to a bygone era, motes of dust hanging in the air and mysterious meats in the vintage
fridge, with a smell that reminds me of my one-eyed great aunt Eve’s house. Everyone in the neighbourhood has an account, kept by the ancient shopkeeper in a giant ledger he completes in
pencil, and his son (not so young, in his forties perhaps, but strangely ageless) delivers pensioners’ shopping on foot in a wheeled trolley, while dispensing slightly uneasy compliments to
any female under sixty in the vicinity. If you want a bag of sugar or a can of Coke, you can anticipate a lengthy wait as some doddery elderly lady does her entire weekly shop in front of you,
including long discussions of the relative merits of various kinds of muscat and some painfully slow ham-slicing. While this is unfolding, you can try to stroke one of the cats who sit in the
vegetable rack full of savoury crackers, but this is best avoided if you value your epidermis, or you can study the wall of small ads (mainly lost cats, presumably chased away by the ferocious
vegetable rack ones).

There is nothing I recognize nearby as a proper supermarket – the local one is like shopping in a crap 1980s Asda where they hide the aluminium foil near the envelopes – and in the
tiny convenience stores near work, I am constantly unnerved by the employees’ desire to engage me in conversation: so I really like avocados then, she can’t eat them they go right
through her, what am I making for dinner, ooh, that sounds good. Weirdest of all is Colruyt. I don’t know if we would have made it to Colruyt on our own, but everyone in the office is
insistent I have to go there, so we do. Colruyt is a discount supermarket in a poorly lit orange hangar and it is a Belgian institution. It is famously the only supermarket chain that was not
affected by the dioxin scandal of 1999 and its meat is revered in a cult-like fashion across Belgium, but as a user experience, it is challenging. The floor is bare concrete, approximately half of
the surface area is devoted to beer, fresh produce is kept in an eerie refrigerated room in which it is impossible to spend more than two minutes without risking hypothermia, and the trolleys are
famously resistant to being pushed. When I am struggling to try and get one down an aisle without taking out anyone’s shins, a shelf stacker hails me.

‘You have to look straight ahead,’ he explains to me with the air of one inducting a novice into a tricky technical discipline. ‘Don’t look at the displays.’

‘Why?’

‘If you look straight ahead, the trolley will keep going, but if you look at the display, the trolley RUNS STRAIGHT INTO THEM.’

‘But . . .’

‘There have been studies.’

This kind of exchange is typical. The meat in Colruyt is kept behind a glass window and is not accessible to customers. Instead, you have to fill in a lengthy form detailing the kind of meat you
want, and leave it in a box. Later, a tannoy announcement (in Dutch) recalls you to collect your purchases. On Saturdays, Colruyt is transformed into a giant coffee morning, with enough free
samples of food and drink to keep you going well past lunchtime. The whole experience is utterly confusing.

My confusion extends – expands, even – when it comes to language. It’s not so much the Dutch that bothers me, though I don’t think I realized that Dutch speakers –
you never say Flemish speakers, it’s considered rude and inaccurate – are actually in a majority (57 per cent) in Belgium. My office mate is Dutch-speaking and I enjoy listening to her.
She’s ultra-blunt (this is widely considered to be a Dutch characteristic in Brussels) and explains to me how to access a late abortion and voluntary euthanasia as a sort of extended office
induction, after the coffee machine and the lavatories. I’m quite tickled by the Dutch signage – I like the words I come across repeatedly like ‘
omlegging
’ and
‘
endbestemming
’ (diversion and terminus, thank you, the 92 tram) and I soon learn exactly how to say ‘the order number 400 is ready for collection at the
butcher’s’ (thank you, Colruyt). For an English speaker with a smattering of German it’s both easy and fun to make some basic sense of Dutch.

I’m actually more perplexed by the French I hear. I don’t find it ugly, but it’s earthy and rhythmic and far, far away from the poetry of the lines of Proust I would recite to
myself in Normandy. Yes, everyone says
septante
and
nonante
and it’s peculiar and I feel self-conscious when I have to give my new mobile number, full of 70s and 90s, but
there’s so much more than that. Belgians use
s’il vous plaît
in the way the Dutch use
astublieft
, as a sort of ‘here you are’, which sounds mannered
and old-fashioned to me when I first hear it. They use
savoir
, to know, when they mean
pouvoir
, can.

‘
Je ne sais pas le faire avant mardi
,’ the dry cleaner will tell you, shaking her head. ‘I don’t know how to do it before Tuesday’, which makes no
sense.

The word ‘
excessivement
’ seems to me to be used, well,
excessivement.
Olivier shudders like a dowager when someone says ‘
il fait caillant
’ for
‘it’s chilly’, but ‘
la drache
’ for the insistent, cold Brussels rain feels nicely onomatopoeic. Some things I love, but are just too Belgian for me –
they feel wrong in my mouth. ‘
Non peut-être
?!’ which means the opposite – absolutely – is just too colloquial and I can’t manage ‘
Je te dis
quoi
’ (a sort of ‘I’ll let you know’), though Olivier rapidly adopts it. I could never mimic the way Belgians say
huit
either, which comes out with a sort of
rounded ‘o’ sound hidden in it:
houit
.