We'll Always Have Paris (33 page)

More practically, all this travelling is ruinous and I need to settle and live in one place. I have made some progress with Brussels. Sometimes now when my train approaches Midi Station and I
spot the strange white elephant of an art deco church that marks the highest point of the city, Altitude 100, I feel a little spark of belonging. Climbing into a dangerously decrepit taxi that
smells of pine air freshener and cigarettes and getting into a lengthy discussion with the driver (who is
never
the person on the photo permit that hangs on the back of his seat) about the
best route to my house, over the soundtrack of Nostalgie radio playing France Gall or Alain Souchon, I feel at home, sometimes.

The city has taken shape in my head and I know how it fits together. I am more in tune now with my sleepy, surreal suburb’s weird rhythms too: how, for ten days in spring some blossom or
other makes every side street and every back garden smell of honey, and how, a few weeks after the honey, we get the lilac, an explosion of scent that vanishes as suddenly as it comes. I mark the
arrival of summer with the arrival of the eccentric neighbour’s decorated bench, with the queues of people lining up at the ice cream shop to – inexplicably – then sit in their
cars with their ice creams. After that comes the interminable school pageant, in which the boys have to dress up as Indian chiefs or the Duke of Wellington, and prize-giving, sweltering in the
gymnasium. In late July Brussels just empties, the Eurocrats vanish home and the Belgians go on holiday, and it feels as if there is no one but me and a few stray cats left in the city.

On the odd occasions I do go to Paris I don’t see Trish so often, because she has moved out to the pretty market town of Saint-Germain-en-Laye out to the west, at the other end of the rail
line Theo and I used to watch from the Batignolles park. I do still visit sometimes: she has a beautiful apartment overlooking the park and the chateau and it’s quieter now, just us and her
kids. The moment for wild festivities has passed, at least for now. In the dead of winter, we go out for oysters in a snowstorm, sliding around the snowy streets, Trish in a furry trapper’s
hat, me in leaking impractical suede boots, laughing at the wild weather. I admire Trish so much – she has done what I never could and made Paris her own – but even with all her
chutzpah, beauty and brilliance, it still doesn’t look easy, fitting in here. No wonder I fell on my arse.
Trop belle pour toi
, says Paris, like that Depardieu film with all the
Schubert I watched so many years ago at Quaker school.
Trop belle pour toi
, even in your best dress, even with a dog.

I head back into the city early the next morning to get my train to Brussels. Saint-Germain is looking beautiful, muffled under a carpet of snow, but I’m worried about getting home. Even
so, as I sit on the nearly empty early-morning RER in a puddle of melting ice, I decide, on a whim, to stop off for cake. Every trip I have made over this past year has involved cake. I just have
to buy at least one of my favourites to have something, a waxed-paper-wrapped parcel or a pretty box, to cheer me up on the way home. It’s a way, too, of remembering my other Paris year,
somehow; my tiny gesture of belonging. I have a shortlist of favourites: there’s Pierre Hermé’s famous
Ispahan
, a raspberry
macaron
with rose and lychee cream
and fresh raspberries, a flavour combination so sensuously satisfying it has spawned a generation of imitators. Ladurée’s
Saint-Honoré rose-framboise
, another
favourite, is arguably one of those imitators, but this ludicrous, blousy pink Barbara Cartland over-indulgence of a cake with flounces of Chantilly and rose petals always cheers me. Madevi has won
me over to the Stohrer éclair too, neat and bitter, almost restrained. And I’m always in the market for a good
flan
, so I keep my eyes open: Pâtisserie des Rêves
does a splendid one with puff pastry and intense vanilla crème.

Today, though, I want a
Bamboo
from Sadaharu Aoki. The
Bamboo
is a riff on the traditional
Opéra
, using dark chocolate and matcha tea, alternating impossibly
thin layers of genoise sponge, joconde biscuit, chocolate, and green tea-infused cream and it is topped with a beautiful dusting of matcha and icing sugar, shading green and white like a bamboo
stalk. I think it might be the prettiest cake I have ever seen. I want one for my journey home, which promises to be arduous, and the easiest place to find one is Lafayette Gourmet. I get off the
RER at Auber and take the short walk round the back of the Opéra to the Boulevard Haussmann and Galeries Lafayette.

Lafayette Gourmet is on the first floor. It’s not the most extravagantly beautiful of food halls – La Grande Epicerie is prettier – but it’s wickedly well stocked, with
smart men in black chef’s jackets carving Serrano ham,
macarons
from Jean Paul Hévin and, my destination, the Sadaharu Aoki counter, with its jewel-box-perfect display of
patisserie: matcha and black sesame éclairs, thin, crisp, salted caramel tarts and acid bright rectangular ganaches, perfect as an unused child’s paintbox. I pick up my
Bamboo
and a bar of Aoki’s crispy caramel chocolate then, with a little time to spare, I wander on through the store, straying into the jams, the dried pasta, the ‘British’ section
(Tiptree marmalade, oatcakes, misfiled Lucky Charms and marshmallow fluff; I would be offended for British gastronomy, but I gave up that fight years ago). I don’t seem to be insulated by the
protective layer of euphoria I usually have when I come to Paris and as I walk, memories of walking these same aisles during our Paris year start to drift to the surface.

I remember coming down to Lafayette Gourmet a few times, in search of treats on special occasions. I recall looking for a nice dinner for Olivier’s birthday, regretfully dismissing
truffles as too expensive and wondering about hand-carved pata negra ham, wandering the aisles and leaving, frustrated at my lack of resources and imagination, with a single chocolate chip cookie.
I had been back around my own birthday in search of treats from home and stared blankly at boxes of Twinings teabags and shortbread, trying to buy a comfort I couldn’t find anywhere else.
Finally, at Christmas, Theo and I went to look at the window displays. The windows of the
grands magasins
are a seasonal tradition in Paris, miniature tableaux of wonder and colour,
featuring hydraulic magic and glittering lights. The streets are packed and the stores provide little wooden steps and walk-along platforms to allow children to see the displays, but Theo and I
only managed a couple of windows before the five-deep crush and the shoving chased us away.

Looking back, I feel, suddenly, incredibly sad. I have this glib account of our year in Paris I trot out when asked – the comic clashes with awful neighbours and the on-street aggression
– but I have never really thought about what unhappiness, overlaid and muffled and hidden under the ordinary hard business of looking after tiny children, ran through it. I remember, now,
Olivier, throwing all his energy into trying to buoy us up, again and again. My sister, hiding behind her curtain of hair, wishing for the earth to swallow her up. My stepfather, coming to visit
and trying to weave connections and make sense of his shattered life. I remember how lost and out of place I felt in these aisles and walking through them today opens up a Pandora’s box of
long-suppressed sadness, so I hide behind the expensive canned tuna and cry.

Once I start crying, I don’t seem to be able to stop. It’s not discreet, silent weeping either, I’m gasping for breath and snotty in the tinned fish aisle and oblivious
Japanese tourists keep reaching across me for sardines, so I stumble out, half blind with tears, into the street behind the shop, all delivery vans and cheap noodle bars and sales assistants
muffled in down coats on cigarette breaks. I like the ugly back end of the
grands magasins
, the behind the scenes bit;
l’envers du décor
, they say in French.
Sometimes too much beauty and too much opulence are oppressive and today the shabby Rue Saint-Lazare is a great comfort.

I drop into a loud Vietnamese café with Formica tables and a strip-lit display cabinet of trays of bright orange sweet and sour pork, brown, sparsely garnished noodles and rows of those
plump, tightly clingfilmed rice paper rolls. There are hundreds of them, all over Paris. I order myself a bowl of noodles, dry my tears on a scratchy paper napkin and find myself thinking of
Olivier. This is nothing new. I think about him often, sometimes irritated, sometimes guiltily, usually unconsciously. He’s always in my mind somewhere. When I lie in bed I get a muscle
memory of how he would reach across in his sleep and take my hand or let his fall into the hollow of my hip. Now, though, I remember him in Paris. I imagine, for the first time, what it must have
been to live with me, angry and sad and silent. I remember how tired he looked in the evenings and his eternal bounce and optimism nonetheless. I was often furious with that optimism and his
insistence that everything would be all right. How the hell could he know that? I appropriated all that sadness for myself, rolled myself up in it and paraded it around, but in fact it was shared,
painfully, lovingly shared. I thought Olivier couldn’t comprehend my loss, but I realize belatedly that he had lost the life we shared. He had also lost my mother, who adored him, and in
every meaningful sense he had lost me. His love, despite all this, seems like a miracle I just ignored. Now I see it; I feel it.

I walk back up to Saint-Lazare to catch a métro to the Gare du Nord and the streets feel charged with memories in a way they have not on previous trips. This is the place I took my very
first train to Normandy on my own as a nineteen-year-old. Here is the road up to the Batignolles bridge and that bloody intimidating organic market where I was always too nervous to ask for
anything (and where I once cried in the queue for a chicken and told an old lady I missed my mum – she was quite nice about it, actually, and told me she still missed hers). But here too are
the streets where Olivier bought me cakes and made me laugh and held my hand.

When I get back to the Gare du Nord, my train is delayed, of course. A cold wind is insinuating itself around the concourse, which is packed with angry commuters and patrolled by
machine-gun-toting CRS riot police, and as I wait for more information, I get that panicky feeling again, as if I have lost something. This time, though, I don’t need to check through my bag
for my passport and my keys: I know exactly what I have lost. I just don’t know how, or if, I will ever get him back.

I do not run back to Brussels and tell Olivier I still love him in dramatic, cinematic fashion: actually, I don’t even consider it might be an option. You can’t get
it back: ‘
Ni temps passé
/
Ni les amours reviennent
,’ says Apollinaire in ‘Sous Le Pont Mirabeau’; time and loves don’t come back, however
much you might wish they would. Initially, the realization that I have walked away from something extraordinary feels like another painful dose of self-knowledge. Intimations of my own inadequacy
come thick and fast this year: ‘just another shitty personal growth moment,’ someone says on the blog apropos some other act of stupidity and that is exactly how it feels: like a long
series of shitty personal growth moments, necessary but painful. I don’t really think there is any way back from the place I have landed myself.

What I
do
do, eventually, after weeks of ruminating, is go round for coffee one morning after I drop the boys at school and shoot my mouth off, vaguely. It’s almost as if I
don’t really know how to say what I need to say, but I know I need to say something, so I just open my mouth and hope for the best. ‘The only real problem with us,’ I say to him,
‘was timing. We met each other far too early.’ I am all worked up and confused and over-caffeinated and this is unusually frank for me. Even so, I’m not scared: I can say most
things to Olivier and we never stopped talking when we split. We still
like
each other, liking each other was never really the problem. ‘We’re actually really
compatible,’ I say, warming to my theme, ‘but I just hadn’t
lived
at all, so I couldn’t know.’ It’s hardly the great romantic speech, but for me,
it’s huge.

Olivier smiles: he looks almost amused. He seems healthy, a long way from the grey wraith of a couple of years ago. He spends his free time climbing, playing squash and rollerblading. He has
started volunteering for a suicide helpline and he’s made what seem to be a really lovely group of friends who won’t let him take himself too seriously. He is about to go off to visit
an old university friend in Canada. It’s interesting, I think, how his world has expanded without me. He’s lost some of his previous closed-off intensity and from the outside, at least,
he seems
bien dans sa peau
, at ease with himself. But what do I know?

‘You reckon?’

‘I think so.’ I don’t say I’m sorry, but I’m thinking it, hard. How did I not see you, I think. I drink my coffee, which is excellent (Olivier has invested in an
eye-wateringly expensive coffee machine, which is whirring and spitting in the corner of the kitchen) and get ready to leave. It’s strange how somewhere I know every brick isn’t mine
any more and it’s strange to be back here, just the two of us. I could find my way around this house in the dark – I have done enough times – put my hand straight to every light
switch and avoid every creaky board. I feel the same about Olivier, in some ways; not at all in others. What’s going on in his head right now? He nods as if I have proposed an interesting
thesis.

‘We should spend more time together,’ he says. ‘It would be good. Let’s get a drink sometime soon.’

‘Sure, when you get back from Canada?’

And I think no more about it, because what exactly is going to happen? Nothing. He’s just being pleasant.

But when he does get back from Canada, he comes to pick the boys up, tanned and happy and full of tales of riding quad bikes on frozen lakes. Then he comes round again. The four of us watch a
film squashed up on the sofa in my house one Sunday afternoon and it feels good, but so confusing. The next time, he comes round when the boys aren’t even with me and we have a drink. After
that, he takes me to a concert on the back of his motorbike. Days pass, weeks pass. Then one evening after we have been out for a couple of drinks in the bar round the corner and we are chatting
about nothing very much, he kisses me, just like that in the kitchen and I kiss him back and I think ‘Oh!’ and ‘Really?’ and it feels as if after all my missteps and
stupidities, my idiotic vanities, I have cheated time somehow, because my love is back.