We'll Always Have Paris (27 page)

The end result of my intensive cultural hothousing is inevitable: we become, to all intents and purposes, a French-speaking household. Soon, when I speak English to the boys, they reply in
French, offhand, naturally. You can almost see the geography of their speech rearranging itself week by week until they are both perfectly fluent. French is their default and their mother’s
tongue is no longer their mother tongue. Soon English words are relegated to a sort of garnish, the odd noun or expression dotted here and there. Eventually, there is nothing really left but
swearing.

‘
Je sais
,’ says Theo sorrowfully, confessing to a lost coat, ‘
que tu vas dire
“fucking hell”,
Maman
. . .’

Their French is beautiful, with that instinctive grasp of genders and tenses that no English person will ever attain. Soon they can even use the past historic properly: I have never said
anything that ends with
ûmes
or
inrent
without a frisson of terror. I speak to them in English and they reply in French, then I speak to them in English and they tell me
they don’t understand in French, so I find myself giving in, speaking French to avoid the pantomime of confusion. I should persist, but I don’t. It feels a bit fake initially –
I
feel a bit fake – but gradually, it just becomes normal. Sometimes all three of them absent-mindedly correct me when I stumble over particular blind spots, confusing the gender of
lighthouses or dishwashers, and I feel a weird mixture of shame and pride.

At this point, surely, we have got as far as we need to go: the boys are assimilated, their magnificently flexible child brains have adapted. I should try and redress the balance with English,
but for some reason, I don’t, I still speak French with them. It’s that stupid vanity: I still love the way French sounds and I feel a wholly unjustified pride at their linguistic
prowess, as if it is somehow a positive reflection on my parenting. The truth of the matter is that I actually
want
French children: having them gives me some additional stamp of
francophone legitimacy. I don’t want the kind of French Children Who Do Not Throw Food that Pamela Druckerman has been selling the world in recent years, obviously: mine would never be
paragons in Bonpoint knickerbockers. The images of French childhood I cherish are the urchins in Cartier-Bresson photographs. These grubby, wisecracking, stone-throwing savages represent some kind
of ideal of French irreverence for me, even if they are as pure a fantasy as Druckerman’s.

Initially, my glow of pride is only punctured by occasional sadness at the cultural highlights of my own childhood, which are summarily cast aside or never get an airing. The
House at Pooh
Corner
languishes unread and the
Tale of Samuel Whiskers
, even my most beloved pictures of Tom Kitten burritoed in pastry, arouse nothing but stony-faced puzzlement. No one
understands when I sing the song we sang throughout my own childhood: ‘Everyone makes a fuss / Of birthday girls who are not us’ (from Russell Hoban’s
Bread and Jam for
Frances
). In a fit of nostalgia I order a dog-eared copy of
Miss Jaster’s Garden
, in which a short-sighted elderly lady mistakenly plants a hedgehog with brightly coloured
annuals, which the boys disdain. Nothing has much success, but I let it go, I don’t insist. I accept that after their laborious handwriting homework and their bafflingly annotated maths, they
want to watch the shows that everyone is talking about in the playground and watch them in French. How can I deprive them of that means of belonging, when belonging has been so capital to me?

The reality of my dream come true starts, very gradually, to make me obscurely uneasy, as if I am not quite at home in my own family life. That unease is compounded when we go back to England
for holidays: the boys struggle to communicate with my father, which is sad after all those trips he and Theo took to the Transport Museum, and with my sister who has put in all those hours playing
with and caring for both of them. They feel the frustration themselves when we meet up with their cousins, my half-brother’s kids, and they can no longer play the way they used to.

But this is what I wanted, wasn’t it? To be immersed in Frenchness, and we are. I am so immersed myself that quite often Belgians ask me if I am French, when they can’t quite place
my accent, which gives me an adolescent thrill. And it’s not as if the children are lost to me, of course they aren’t. They are still mine and I know every curve and angle of them. They
are funny and wilful and imaginative, wearing socks on their hands, or communicating only in squeaks for a day. They still run to me with their scraped knees or their existential angst or just for
the animal comfort of a sleepy head resting on my chest. Even so, I can’t help but feel there’s a semi-permeable membrane between us, the imminence of incomprehension. I don’t
play with language so much, I find, now. My jokes fall flat so I stop telling them and whenever they fail to understand me, I get a chilling sense of a distance growing between us, as if we are
becoming strangers to each other on some basic level. The boys’ language is a tangle of TV and school and playground slang, things that have no recognizable English translation, and I
struggle to keep up. There is something lost when you can no longer play with words and every time I have to explain something with the deadening qualifier ‘
c’est un jeu de
mots
’, it’s a play on words, I feel bereft. I think it is the first time I really feel what is lost living as an expat.

Of course, there is more to this estrangement than language.

When the boys lose a tooth they believe a mouse collects it (how, I ask, can a normal mouse collect all those teeth? At least a fairy has magic on her side). At Easter, chocolate is not
delivered by a bunny, but by ‘
les cloches
’, the bells, bringing eggs back from Rome. This bothers me.

‘But how do the bells carry the chocolate?’ I ask Olivier.

‘They fly upside-down, filled with chocolate,’ he replies, flatly, as if this is entirely obvious.

‘But why are the bells in Rome in the first place?’ I persist, unconvinced.

‘To see . . .’ His certainty seems to sag a little at this point. ‘The Pope? Anyway, how does the rabbit carry chocolate with those tiny paws?’

‘It has a basket!’ I protest, stung.

My children do not know a single Christmas carol (‘that is
not
a carol!’ I snap automatically when they sing ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas’, just as my mother
used to chastise the half-arsed teen carol singers on our doorstep in York), and instead of a nativity play, there is a yearly school ‘
fête
’ where they lipsynch to
popular songs of the francophone 1980s or, one memorable year, sing the beer-themed Belgian novelty song ‘
Chef, une petite bière on a soif
’. They go on school trips to
the Magritte museum and the Côte d’Or chocolate factory, and at the age of five they are despatched to Ostend for four days of bracing seaside pursuits including careering around in
cuistax
, the murderously dangerous, ankle-attacking go-karts that are the Proustian madeleine of a Belgian childhood.

I cannot win them over with British food, either. When I send them to school with jelly cubes as a treat, they come home mortified, because their friends say they are ‘Martian
food’.

I try to make toad in the hole (‘
crapaud dans un trou!
’ I say, encouragingly, as if this would make it more appealing) to universal displeasure.

‘It’s
toad
? We’re eating toad?’ Theo’s face is a rictus of disgust.

‘No, it’s just
called
toad. It’s sausage. In a sort of . . . pancake?’

‘So . . . the sausage is the toad?’ Olivier takes a delicate fork to my golden batter.

‘Yes.’

‘And that makes this . . .
pâte
. . . the hole?’

‘No, of course not. The toad is in the hole IN the
pâte
.’

‘But . . .’

Louis is clearer: ‘
J’aime pas.
’

One day, I go to school to collect the boys and Theo runs across the schoolyard cheerily to meet me, handing over his vast school bag.

‘We had horse today!’ he says brightly (in French, of course). ‘I LOVE horse.’ His face takes on a dreamy cast. ‘It’s so tender. Mmmmmm
cheval
.’ He continues in this vein on the superior qualities of horsemeat for some minutes.

It is plain to me by this stage that I am raising aliens.

It’s hard to admit to myself, but in this strange land, with my strange children and my unhappy boyfriend, I am a little homesick. I’m still repelled by the odd kind of expat life I
see lived out around me, with imported cereals and English book clubs, and I am not unhappy with where we have landed. I love the city in all its exasperating strangeness, the loopy public
transport encounters and the unhurried chat of the supermarket cashiers, the oddity that lurks under the mantle of bourgeois comforts. But I miss so much about England. Occasionally I list the
things I miss to myself.

I miss Marks & Spencer, of course. I miss buying
Heat
and
Grazia
magazines on a Tuesday lunchtime and reading them in the weird, empty café on London Wall that gives
you free chocolates. I miss Kate and I miss Brick Lane early on a Sunday morning before it gets busy. Dairy Milk – actually all the iterations of British chocolate: Caramels and Crunchies and
Rolos. Bettys tearoom of course and everything in it, including the cake samples under the plastic cloche, the melancholy evening pianist and the copies of
Yorkshire Life
neatly hung from
wooden rods. Coram Fields playground with its two gloomy sheep. Barnitts, the pride of York and best hardware store in the world. Proper-flavoured crisps (Belgian crisps come in paprika and
Bolognese flavours, both of which are appalling). The Lakeland catalogue with its primary-coloured assurance that your life will be instantly revolutionized by lettuce scissors or nestable Lock
&Lock containers. Mist over the Ouse in York and the smell of After Eights from the Rowntrees factory.

I know things are bad when absence starts to make my heart grow fond of things I don’t even like: Battenburg cake, Fig Rolls and Ribena, Scampi Fries and
Antiques Roadshow
. On one
bleak Saturday when I am pining for the
Guardian Weekend
magazine, I make Olivier take me to the awful ‘English Shop’ out near the airport, a thoroughly eccentric enclave of
the kind of little England expat life I profess to despise. It looks and smells like a Cotswold Spar, half-timbered and lino-floored, and I walk its aisles in a trance, picking up bacon and Creme
Eggs.

Most of all, though, I realize I miss my language, after all these years trying to escape it. In French, even my vocabulary still feels sparse and unimaginative. I can ‘pass’, but
I’m frustrated by my own limitations and lack of wit and imagination and I don’t seem to get better, however much TV I watch. Having hit this ceiling, rather than being spurred to
improve, I find I want the ease of my own language. At work, I hear English and speak English, but it’s not the same, it’s a convenient simulacrum of English invented by non-native
speakers and the more I am immersed in it, the less I notice its oddities and imports and artifices. I want to speak real English, I want to feel agile and clever again, to tell jokes and spin
yarns. Without any of this, my sense of self feels fragile: what am I, exactly? I’m still not French but I’m losing my Englishness too.

But, really, I need to shut up about what I want. I brought us here, it was my choice and my decision and I have got what I wanted. Olivier has more than enough on his plate, trying to make a
living, squirrelling money away, and dealing with the boring minutiae of being a homeowner I can’t be bothered to engage with. This is my problem, and mine only.

So I deal with my homesickness on my own, and in a couple of ways. Firstly, I start to make British cakes. I locate the box where I have stored the baking kit I acquired back in London and start
churning out scones and fairy cakes for school events and children’s parties. I am not very good, but the standard at school is gratifyingly low (the cake table is usually limited to a couple
of half-hearted chocolate fondants and a selection of bought loaf cakes), so I rapidly get a reputation as a master pâtissière, with my Spiderman cupcakes and edible glitter. Soon, I
get more ambitious and order a selection of complex cake-decorating equipment and books. I start producing fondant-covered dragons, Pokemon cakes and Halloween biscuits, and it feels lovely: it is
gently creative but also very structured and absorbing and it makes me feel obscurely in touch with my homeland. I don’t come from cake-baking stock, but it taps into a reassuring sort of
folk memory of coffee mornings and Brownie bake sales. The baking does not endear me to Olivier at all: the kitchen is regularly covered in clouds of icing sugar and I stay up late, fiddling with
my designs when I should be doing other things. I like the late nights when the house is quiet and I can roll out fondant and place sweets in restorative peace, but it is true, it means we spend
even less time together.

Secondly, I start a blog.

Having a blog is amazing, almost immediately, which makes me wonder why on earth I didn’t do it sooner. During all those weird, awful years, why wasn’t I writing
this stuff down?

I don’t know what pushes me finally, but one afternoon in the office, I just open up a basic blogging platform, pick a title (Belgian Waffle) and a template. I like reading blogs. I have
become addicted to the way the format offers a voyeur’s window into quite ordinary lives, click after click, reading hungrily through stories of relationship struggles, mental health issues
and parenting all woven up in the mundane minutiae of daily life. Recently, I have started to think I can tell my own, so when I get home, after the boys are in bed, I start writing. I’m
bored and homesick and lonely, but it’s more than that: there’s a head of steam of frustration building up inside me that has no outlet. I have so much to
say
and I want
someone, anyone, to laugh at my jokes and I want to write about this absurd, under-appreciated city.