We'll Always Have Paris (35 page)

Perhaps, I think, walking yet again past the strange neighbour with the bench, who is currently busy applying a waterproofing spray to the inside of his umbrella, I did not appreciate how long
and circuitous and strange losing my mother would be; the effect it has had. Grief, I think, as I walk the dog, has not been like a bear hunt for me. You
can
go over it, under it, around
it, meander around the edges, it takes forever, but you get to the same end point, eventually. I have made a mountain of mistakes and caused all manner of hurt, but here we are: if Olivier can
forgive me, surely I should forgive myself. All this sackcloth and ashes is doing no one any good and there is simply no time for more sadness. Sometimes there is no time left at all, I know that
all too well. So I think of my mother and her favourite unrepentant alley cat Mehitabel and turn my attention to locating my
toujours gai
.

Gradually, too, as the building work takes shape, my perspective starts to shift. I begin to see the transformation of the house, dusty and chaotic and nightmarish as it is, an act of love and
of hope. Olivier is pouring all his optimism and generosity into making this place new and perfect for the four of us and it works, what he is creating is wonderful. He has made me an office
– a place to write that is all mine – and we have a new, bright room big enough for a proper table downstairs so we can sit and eat. It’s still home, but it’s new and
brighter and it’s his way of saying that things are different and better; that
we
are both different.

But I wonder, actually, if it is even necessary. Because the place that is ours, the bolthole, the burrow where I feel safe, doesn’t have to be physical. My safe place is the space between
our bodies when I reach out and grasp Olivier’s hand in bed. It’s the space that is created as my long-limbed boys perch on my knee for comfort and the space around the four of us as we
sit on a grimy picnic rug in the rubble-strewn backyard to eat sandwiches, chased from the house by more drilling, the dog hovering greedily over our shoulders. We have our space.

Our wedding is tiny and ordinary. Nourished by novels, egged on by films, the Emma Bovary part of me still expects everything to be big and bright and dramatic – grief,
love, myself, life – but this is indubitably small. We don’t have a bucolic Normandy blowout, unfolding over multiple days and meals, with cousins in their Sunday best, drunken
incidents, fights and children sleeping under tables. It’s not a secret, black-clad, witnesses-only piece of urban chic and we don’t elope. Rather, we get married on a wet, blustery day
in February in the swirly-carpeted town hall function room, presided over by Belgian bureaucrats and watched by our parents and our children, almost twenty years exactly after we first met.

Before the wedding, our families converge gradually at our house. We haven’t given them much warning, because the whole thing was an impulse, a moment of joint tipsy daftness over a
strange meal a few months ago, when Olivier gesticulated at me with a forkful of pigeon upon which some unspeakable culinary crime had been perpetrated and said, ‘Let’s get
married
!’ largely as a joke and I said ‘Yes!’ and meant it.

Olivier’s parents arrive the night before and sleep in our spare room. They wake early and potter around the kitchen, warming coffee and spreading butter in the good wedding suits that
have seen so much use at all those Normandy nuptial marathons: cousins, second cousins, nieces, nephews and godchildren. This is not that kind of wedding but at least, for once, we are inviting
them to a party and not the other way around. Later, after several peremptory text messages, my father barrels in, a whirlwind of bonhomie and ebullience. ‘Hello, darling!’ he bellows
and sets off on a round of shaking hands, ruffling hair and teasing the dog. My stepmother follows, warm and funny and carefully considerate of everyone, camera at the ready. As I make more coffee
I field texts from my sister who is on her way, possibly, perhaps late, and needs a pair of tights. My father and Yves fuss over Theo’s tie. He has gelled his hair to a rigid peak and, we
eventually notice, has his pet rat in the breast pocket of his jacket. Louis is quieter, hanging off my arm in a borrowed tie. He’s not keen on fuss or dressing up, although he’s happy
to see his various grandparents. The boys don’t mind us getting married, but it’s certainly not ‘epic’, Theo’s epithet of the moment.

Olivier has a new suit and I am wearing a violet silk 1950s dress, bought in a rush. I think I must have yet again taken leave of my senses when I chose the dress, since it looks a bit like
something a stout Brussels matron might wear to the opera, but Madevi has lent me her tulle dancing petticoat to wear underneath, and at Helen’s insistence I have bought myself a shiny pair
of navy Ferragamo pumps I can’t really afford, both new and blue. I put on the pearls my mum gave me for my eighteenth birthday, because if you can’t wear pearls to get married, then
when? I’ve been wearing them to bed for the past few weeks, because that was what Mum told me you should do to keep their lustre; another one of her unexpected pieces of wisdom.

We cram into our car and Olivier’s parents fit the stragglers into theirs and we head down to the town hall – a rather plain, square building, scene of many of my battles with the
Belgian administrative authorities – in the driving rain. My stepfather meets us there on foot, padding up quietly to meet us with his good suit under his cagoule, smoking a last-minute
roll-up; a brown-paper-covered Turgenev in his pocket. My sister appears in her usual whirl of chaos and forgotten essentials. She looks beautiful in a blue mini-dress and less haunted than she has
done for years, laughing and chatting. Paris seems to suit her, far more than it ever suited me. We have a flurry of kisses and hellos and photos, then a civic official in an impressive gilt chain
beckons us up to the
salle des fêtes
, where another official in a tricolour sash is ready to do the honours.

I never wanted to get married. The first year we met, Olivier asked me to marry him, but I obfuscated and changed the subject and wouldn’t commit, because, well, I don’t know. It
didn’t fit with the image of my life I held so preciously in my head, free and solitary and sitting outside Le Flore with my Scottie dog.

I have, however, considered marriage in the past for two reasons. The first is Olivier’s name. His surname is impeccably, utterly,
Tricolore
-textbook-perfect, cliché
French. You can’t get any Frencher. Mine is impossible to say Frenchly (‘
Madame
[hesitation]
Baïe-dan-ton? Bé-dine-tan
?’) and I have spelled it
wearily over the phone so many times I am heartily sick of it. With Olivier’s surname, my credentials would be irreproachable: for administrative purposes at least, I could be completely
French.

The second reason is Eric Sax. Eric Sax is the eerily smooth and mahogany-tanned deputy mayor. He in charge of all sorts of local festivities and I often see him in the local free rag, shaking
the hand of centenarians, opening fêtes and presiding over weddings. Sometimes I even see him in person, driving around in his Eric Sax branded Smart car, his blond highlighted hair perfectly
set in steely waves. I want to meet Eric Sax very badly indeed.

On the day, however, it turns out that Eric Sax is not presiding. I don’t suppose it’s worth him doing his luxuriantly highlighted hair for such a tiny, B-list gathering, so we have
a large, bossy lady who is almost certainly a primary school teacher in real life given the way she orders us around.

It feels strange, the ten of us in this huge room with its neo-classical friezes and oversized oil paintings of Belgian pastoral scenes, and the briskly unsentimental ceremony doesn’t make
it any less strange. It’s short, almost comically so, and the only thing we have to do is say ‘
oui
’ once, which we do, as indicated. We have rings, but there is
apparently no protocol for when and how we exchange them and no vows, so we just fumble it after the ‘
oui
’, then kiss awkwardly, self-conscious in front of this bossy stranger.
I am beginning to think it is one of those life events from which I am going to feel a bit detached, it has that remote, slightly unreal quality, when the registrar beckons us to sign the register
and the familiar soft swing piano intro, with its ripple of applause as Nina Simone’s live version of ‘Just in Time’, starts up. We don’t agree on much music, but we agree
on Nina.

‘
Just in time
,’ she sings as we take up the municipal fountain pen and sign the enormous blank page one after the other.

‘
You found me just in time.
’

And I realize it’s true and I can’t believe my luck. I have been spinning off my axis for ten years and most of my certainties have proved as brittle and insubstantial as a
sugar-work heron, but even so, despite it all, here we are. What were the chances? My legs go a bit wobbly, so I hold on tight to Olivier’s arm and blink back tears as we sign.

It turns out that in Belgium, you can’t take your husband’s surname and actually, I realize, this is ideal: I am completely happy like this. I don’t want to marry Olivier for
some green card or rubber stamp of Frenchness. But I am not French, not now, not ever and that is OK. I am a Beddington and some essential, perpetually apologizing, scone-loving part of me will
always be British. If I want to get married to Olivier, it is because he is home, home like the lilac tree in our backyard, home like Bettys tearoom or the last verse of ‘Dear Lord and Father
of Mankind’, home where my head is finally quiet and my heart is full.

Theo, who is in charge of our camera, takes a picture, and then all of us line up together for the man in the giant ceremonial chain to take another one of us for the local magazine (where we
will appear regrettably without Eric Sax) and then as we all start to wonder what happens next – is that it? Can we really be married already? – the town hall stereo starts to play
Jacques Brel’s ‘Bruxelles’.

‘Bruxelles’ was our other musical choice, though not because it has any sentimental value for us: we just like the idea of a nod to our home (host?) city. I have more and more time
for Brel these days. I came to him late, compared with Gainsbourg, and he always seemed a bit square, with his giant mouthful of teeth and his verging-on-mawkish theatrical love songs. Gainsbourg
has that effortless French
désinvolture
(though I think now some of it is shyness), whereas Brel seems sincere and sincerity is never cool. But I have watched a lot of old Brel
performances on YouTube in my anxious attic over the past few years, the young Brel, all angles, sweaty and electric, and realized how wrong I was. Because Brel is caustic and clever and angry and
his lyrics are beautiful, from paeans of regret and tenderness to razorsharp social satire.

The boys have sung ‘
Ce Plat Pays
’ at school – you can’t get through a Belgian primary education without singing a couple of Brel songs – and it is proper
poetry, lyrical and funny and clear-sighted all at once:

I wonder if my children think this flat land is theirs. I suspect they won’t know themselves for years, if ever. Where do any of us fit? I think of Madevi’s peripatetic life and
Trish who has devoted so much of her life to France but is drawn inexorably back to Ireland, of Benjamin exiled in Scotland for love, and of Baloji making something wonderful in the uneasy
interstices of two cultures. Isn’t that just life, a quicksand of compromise and accommodation where nothing is completely stable? My boys will be at home wherever they choose, eventually,
and it probably won’t be anywhere I would have predicted. I’m happy here, for now, in our strange, sleepy suburb. A Picard has opened up down our street and there’s a rumour Marks
& Spencer is coming back to Brussels next year. Forever? Who knows?

‘Bruxelles’ is so irresistibly jolly that as we leave, the three civic officials sway gently in time to it. We take another couple of pictures on the steps, but the wind is really
up, whipping our hair into our faces, so we give up quickly and head home for tea, where everyone sits round the kitchen table conversing in an awkward, but good-humoured, confusion in French and
English. Later on, we have lunch in an eccentric guesthouse nearby (the proprietor keeps trying to interest us in his novel design for self-warming dog leads) and then there is a cake, of course
there is, there must be cake.

It’s not the wedding cake I would have imagined for myself. If I had considered it, I would have thought we’d have a towering
pièce montée
, like the
pâtissier from Yvetot made for Emma Bovary, a
croquembouche
or perhaps one of Stohrer’s alternating chocolate and coffee éclair
religieuses à
l’ancienne
, the ones Madevi introduced me to. But time was short and nothing ever works out how I imagine it, so instead, I’ve asked a girl I know to make a cake for us: a lemon
sponge. It’s a very good lemon sponge, light and not too sweet and filled with home-made lemon curd, but it’s far from an aesthetic triumph. It’s a bit flat and wonky, topped with
a cursory sprinkle of hundreds and thousands (we are too drunk by the time we cut it to even remember to put the little ‘just married’ sign on the top). Nevertheless, it’s a
surprising success: everyone likes it. Even my father who never eats cake approves.

Later, Yves gets out a ceremonial bottle of his grandfather’s Calvados, one of the last ones in their dwindling reserve, and we all drink too much of it. My stepfather and sister are
lurking in the muddy garden, deep in conversation, smoking roll-ups, Olivier’s mother is explaining something very loudly to my stepmother, the boys have slumped in a corner to play video
games and my father, who has toasted and laughed and generally been the life and soul of the party, has fallen asleep with practised efficiency at the table. I catch Olivier’s eye over the
stained tablecloth and the spilled wine, our lopsided family and the remnants of our lopsided cake, and I smile and he smiles back. Then we go home.