We'll Always Have Paris (34 page)

Then I don’t think any more: the noise in my head stops, for a wonderful moment, and everything is still and quiet.

The French language has a word for what is happening to us –
retrouvailles
– the explosion of emotions generated by a reunion. It’s one of those
words that ends up in lists of the notoriously untranslatable, as if it were a feeling that only French people have, or feel the need to label. Our
retrouvailles
are both wonderful and
terrifying. It should be my happy ending, but I go a bit off the rails. Again.

We don’t go public straight away. For a few months we sneak around and take things slowly: we date, I suppose. Olivier comes to see me in the evenings when the babysitter has the boys or
vice versa and we go out on his motorbike to bars and restaurants in areas neither of us know. In the school holidays when the boys go to stay with his parents for a few days, we spend a weekend in
a hotel in a vineyard near Bordeaux. We sit out in deckchairs in the weak early spring sun and cautiously expose our pale limbs in the still chilly pool. In the afternoon we lie in bed in those
thick hotel robes that make your limbs impossibly heavy and try and make sense of everything. I rest my head on his chest. It feels strange, the dissonance of new and familiar all at once.

I feel incredibly, improbably lucky – I love him, he loves me, this is an amazing outcome – but it feels almost too easy. There has been no hardship and no drama, which is
unnerving.

Can it really have happened? Our reconciliation has a surreal, nonsensical quality, as if we are doing something a bit ridiculous, and sneaking off for weekends and evenings just adds to that. I
wonder if we can make it work and more specifically, I wonder if I can be trusted not to mess it up again. Having got everything so wrong and having been so certain I was right, I have no faith in
my own judgement any more: most days I barely trust myself to cross a road.

Olivier thinks it’s easy. He still has that lovely certainty that reminds me of my father: just stick with me, doll, and everything will be OK.

‘Do you love me?’

‘Yes. Yes! Of course, but . . .’

‘Then the rest is just logistics.’

There’s a bit more than just logistics to worry about: first we have to explain to the children. It’s an unnerving carbon copy of telling them we were splitting up: the same room,
the same febrile atmosphere. They are not touchingly delighted.

‘We’ve got something to tell you,’ says Olivier, carefully. ‘
Maman
is going to move back in, we’re getting back together.’

Instantly Theo’s face crumples in anger and distress and he starts to wail, inconsolably, overcome with some impossible to digest cocktail of emotion.

‘Too much change!’ he cries. ‘Too much change!’

He’s only nine; his brother is seven. Olivier and I have been so careful to try and make things OK for them, so scrupulous in keeping our relationship good-humoured and harmonious, but so
much has happened in the past few years: three countries, four moves, a separation and a reconciliation would be far too much for one twice his age. I try to hug him but he’s tense and tight
and his face is hot. Louis watches, as wide-eyed, silent and wary as a bush baby, as Olivier puts his arm around his shoulders and gives him a reassuring shake.

‘It’s OK, Loulou.’

‘I’m happy,’ he says thoughtfully, but he looks uncertain. I reach across and give his knee a squeeze, my arm still around Theo.

‘It’ll be OK, Theo. Honestly, it’s OK.’ There doesn’t seem to be much more we can say – the only thing that will make these words true for him is time. I want
everything to be smooth and happy and uncomplicated for them now, but life isn’t like that. Will it be OK? In the meantime, we go for an ice cream.

Even the logistics are horrible, as I try to move out and back in, dismantling the life I have been putting together, piece by piece. First I have to give notice to the gorgon landlady, who has
grown in my mind into such a towering figure of menace I half expect her stiffly waved helmet of hair to turn into a nest of snakes. She blames me for the flood in the house next door (as if
somehow I have engineered the burst pipes through solid brick) and her way of dropping in and looking round the house in disgust, as if someone has defecated on her beige linoleum, has unnerved me
to the point of genuine terror. Preparing for the
état des lieux
(the exit inspection) is one of the most stressful experiences I have ever had, during which I use up more cleaning
products than in the rest of my adult life and at one farcical point end up hiding, lying flat on the floor, when I spot the landlady’s Volvo parking up outside. I focus all my terror for the
future on the frankly irrelevant question of whether I will get my deposit back – god knows, I have thrown more money away on less important things in the past few years – and even when
we reach an agreement, I live in fear of a call or a registered letter saying I am being sued for some forgotten misdeed or unfiled piece of paperwork.

Once that is done, we give away my fridge and store my TV in the attic, roll up the mattress and try to decide between two sets of toasters, kettles and microwaves. The wasted expense –
all my savings gone – makes me feel sick and the confusion is exhausting. At one point the dog has an actual nervous breakdown at all the toing and froing between houses and sits down in the
street, refusing to move in either direction. ‘Too much change,’ his eyes say: he doesn’t know where he lives any more and I don’t either. I have to carry him back to the
house, where he whines when we go upstairs and pees on the fridge. It takes me forever to work up the nerve to tell my father and stepmother Olivier and I are back together, which is stupid, it
turns out, because they are delighted. My dad pours a lot of wine and calls Olivier up to tell him how happy he is, then he calls up several other family members too.

My stepfather and sister are easier, somehow, probably because they’ve been in contact with Olivier throughout. He has been part of the family for so long that even if we had never got
back together, he would always have been part of their lives. My sister is studying and working in Paris now, helping in shelters for the homeless and working with autistic kids. She has bottomless
reserves of kindness and compassion I can only wonder at: her most recent flat share fell apart when she brought home a homeless kid she found sleeping in a park. I feel happy to see her settled
and a bit discomfited at how much better she manages Paris than I ever did: she has a Navigo pass and a flat in Montreuil and a gang of mates, and she knows how to use those intimidating
Vélib bikes. Her relationship to it is very different from mine: she hasn’t read all those novels or watched all those films and her Paris is real, it’s a world of children in
distress and illegal immigrants and she is doing what she can to make it better.

It takes me ages, too, to tell people outside the family we are back together because I just sound so stupid to my own ears. Logically, I know that we have both changed during our separation and
that things
are
different, but I’m ashamed of the trail of damage I created along the way. When I finally screw up my courage, if my friends are bemused, they don’t show it.
Helen reassures me over a lunch where I cry uncontrollably for reasons I can’t quite fathom. Trish says it’s ‘wonderful and romantic and full of hope’. Kate is gentle and
reassuring and Benjamin, who is in the process of moving to Scotland, trades terrors and gets me drunk. ‘For what it’s worth, I’m happy for you,’ says Madevi, then we go
back to watching a video of a manatee eating carrots.

To make matters even less relaxing, the minute I move back into the house, so do the builders. Olivier has big plans, ones that involve planning permission, load-bearing walls, a loft conversion
and a ground-floor extension. For months as I try to deal with shutting down my old-new life, my new-old life is filled with drilling, dust and the thwack of mallet on masonry. The walls are daubed
with paint samples and catalogues full of sinks and bannisters clutter every surface. At weekends, there is always something we need to go and examine in a far-flung builder’s merchants. We
have to eat squashed around a fold-up picnic table with a nest of spiders in the centre and for six months there is just a giant hole in the exterior wall in the house, blocked up with hardboard
and duct tape. I would not have chosen this, not now. It’s chaos, dusty, noisy chaos, and there is no refuge anywhere, no space of our own to crawl into. Instead, I take the dog for long
walks around the neighbourhood and question my sanity. I’m so happy about the basic fact of having Olivier back, but everything else is weird and frightening. When he comes out walking with
me, I question his sanity too.

‘This isn’t all some elaborate trick, is it? When all this is over, you aren’t going to turn round and say “actually
I
need some space now” are
you?’

‘Pffff.’

I don’t really believe it, but I have to sound out my fears, because I am scared all the time. The evenings, when Olivier and the boys are around, are tranquil and reassuring and life
makes absolute sense when the four of us are together, but in the daytime when I am on my own, I go a bit odd. The situation seems far more than I deserve, too good to be true, and waves of dread
consume me. How could I get it so catastrophically wrong and still luck out like this, back with the man I love? Everything seems terrifyingly fragile: when I ride on the back of Olivier’s
motorbike I imagine the crunch of impact, shattered glass and limbs, and when anyone goes out, I fast forward to the knock on the door from grave-faced Belgian police constables.

So I hide out in the attic, turn down good offers of work and obsessively review my awful behaviour over the past couple of years. My finger hovers over the button to delete the blog: the
archives feel like an embarrassing catalogue of things I’d rather forget and I don’t know how to be unguarded on there any more, the stakes are just too high. I want to be strong and
unrepentant and happy but quite frankly,
je regrette
everything, every misstep, flawed conviction and casual cruelty. So mostly I stay at home, sitting in the attic, wearing the same awful
pair of unflattering, slightly shiny black trousers, which I dub the ‘occupational therapist’ trousers, every day for weeks. Now I’m the one circling the wagons: I just want to
huddle with my family. I don’t know what my place in the world is, really, except with them.

Three things get me out of my funk. The first is that the boys start speaking English again. I decide that I just can’t have children who don’t speak my language and can’t
speak to half their family, and I can’t bear another dubbed
Bob l’Éponge
, so I insist they only watch English TV. The BBC steps in where I have failed, making the most
of the licence fee I am not paying and on a diet of
Horrible Histories
,
Blue Peter
and
Hacker and Dodge
(a pair of lary Mancunian dog hand puppets), within months they
are fluent again, not just fluent but making jokes, singing along to Furniture Warehouse adverts and speaking to me in English even when I forget and talk to them in French. I don’t
understand how it happens so fast and I certainly did not expect it to be this easy: the incredible plasticity of children’s brains astonishes me. Louis develops a fondness for homophones
– he likes ‘knows’ and ‘nose’ and ‘we’ll’ and ‘wheel’ and drives everyone demented with his laborious punning. Theo discovers LOL-cats
and starts texting me gnomic, idiosyncratically spelled messages: ‘tniy’, ‘awsemom’, ‘I aftoo clean my theets’. Soon, the four of us can sit down and watch
Father Ted
together. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so delighted to hear them chorus ‘arse, feck, girls’ but it’s exactly what I thought I might never get and it makes me
truly happy.

The second thing is that I start working on a big translation project with a Congolese-Belgian rapper and poet, Baloji. I’m not sure I’ve ever done anything harder in my professional
life: Baloji is so demanding (my first drafts are never good enough and often my second and third drafts aren’t quite there either), and the way he uses language is so intricate and clever it
makes my head ache as I stumble over his double meanings and plays on words, but when I get it right and he’s happy, the satisfaction is enormous. A lot of his work is about identity and
exile: Baloji left the DRC to live with his father’s extended family in Liège when he was three and didn’t return or see his mother for twenty-five years. Having never felt he
really belonged in Belgium, on returning to Congo, he realized just how European he had become: a veil of incomprehension separated him from his mother and his birth culture. When you don’t
go home – even if that decision is imposed upon you and entirely passive – your relationship to home is irrevocably altered. What is especially interesting to me, though, is how he
chooses to view this ‘in-between’ identity: it’s a wrench and a loss and perpetual puzzle, but it’s also a positive identity of its own and a creative force. You can do more
than just try and reconcile the different parts of your identity: you can build something unique from them. At its best, Belgium itself, that uneasy mix of French and Flemish, transient incomers
and strong diaspora communities, feels like the consecration of that idea. More often it feels like a mess, but the idea is powerful and optimistic.

Finally, I just give myself a talking to. ‘What is
wrong
with you,’ I hiss to myself as I drag the reluctant, still freaked-out dog round the empty summer streets, which are
strewn with discarded ice cream wafers and warmed to a state of perfect torpor. Would Béatrice Dalle be flipping out with self-flagellation and doubt? Would Catherine Deneuve? Lots of
wonderful things have happened in the last few years, not just shame and misery. Would I want my life without Madevi or Helen or Ben? And isn’t it, actually, a great thing I am no longer the
world’s worst competition lawyer? More important still, I don’t see how Olivier and I could have survived without some kind of shake-up, violent and hurtful as the one I engineered has
been. We are different now, freed from the roles we spent so long stuck in. We’re gentler with each other’s foibles, we definitely laugh more and, sometimes, I even manage to talk about
my feelings (not often, but I try).