We'll Always Have Paris (4 page)

Dating Olivier makes absolute sense of my weird Normandy adventure; in fact it becomes my weird Normandy adventure. Almost instantly I move out of my metal box and into his grotty little house
with the Kiss wallpaper and damp lino and he takes me to school each morning and brings me back in the afternoon. Sometimes, thrillingly, he brings me in on the back of his motorbike. At weekends
we see his friends or go to the cinema, or lie in bed and eat oranges.

He’s clever and open to anything and he makes me laugh properly by saying dark, horrible, funny things, but above all of it, above everything, he is French. Oh, but he is so, so French. He
is French in the obvious ways: he listens to George Brassens and Serge Gainsbourg and uses the subjunctive effortlessly and has volumes of Montaigne’s essays on his bookshelf. He wakes me
with a sincere and beautifully expressed endearment, finds physical affection simple and buys me gifts. He likes a rambling, circular philosophical discussion. But what really fascinate me are the
weird little idiosyncrasies of his Frenchness. The way he spreads sweetened condensed milk from a tube on a supermarket loaf cake at breakfast time, then dunks it in a soup bowl of black coffee.
The awful, tartan old man slippers he wears religiously at home. In bars, he sometimes orders
menthe à l’eau
, that violently green mouthwash, and I marvel at how anyone could
enjoy it. Frenchness is stamped all the way through him like a stick of rock. ‘He looks so French!’ says my mother, amused, when she comes to visit me in Rouen. ‘He’s very
French
,’ says my father, his eyes narrowed in naked suspicion, when I finally pluck up the courage to introduce them some months later.

On Sundays, we go to his grandmother’s dark little house for a proper three-course lunch, perhaps asparagus or scallops, then roast chicken, followed by a home-made apple tart or something
from the patisserie in a big white cardboard box finished with a slippery knot of ribbon. Lunch is preceded by dainty glasses of muscat and salty crackers and discussions of what we are going to
eat, and finished off with Nescafé from the good cups and chocolate squares out of the tin she keeps in the forbiddingly huge
armoire normande
(a giant, brown piece of furniture
that could easily double as a family tomb), possibly accompanied by some kind of meditation on the awfulness of ageing and the imminence of death or, on better days, reminiscences about
Olivier’s childhood.

Later – considerably later, this is obviously a bigger psychological step – Olivier introduces me to his parents.

My picture of French family life is half drawn from those elegant films of bourgeois adultery and anomie that take place in grand Parisian apartments, and half from
Jean de Florette.
A
French mother, thus, is a whippet-thin Kristin Scott Thomas smoking and saying cutting things or a bounteously sexy Emmanuelle Béart figure preparing tomatoes at a stone sink as the cicadas
sing outside for a selection of rugged, shirt-sleeved sons of toil. Beyond that, everyone should be preoccupied with food to the extent British people are preoccupied with the weather, and talk
openly about sex.

Olivier’s parents are nothing like this and they fit in none of my cinematic boxes. His dad is quiet and gentle and bearded and his mum is little and loud and lively. They live in a brown,
modern house in Rouen with Olivier’s younger brother and a soppy Alsatian and they like riding bicycles through the forest and playing Scrabble. Olivier’s mother once offers to loan me
her copy of the 1960s erotic novel
Emmanuelle
, but obviously thinks better of it five minutes later; apart from that, no one tries to talk about sex, ever. Most shocking of all, they
aren’t particularly interested in food.

Perhaps that is unfair. Some of their food is good and they certainly
enjoy
eating, but buoyed by the convenience revolution of the 1970s Olivier’s mother decided that she would
not be spending her life cooking and she has stuck to this principle: tinned Buitoni ravioli is Olivier’s version of Proust’s madeleine. Vegetables are thrown into the
‘
cocotte minute
’, an intimidating monster of a pressure cooker, from whence they emerge soft, greying and defeated (except the artichokes, which are new to me and delicious and
which we eat on the chilly terrace when Olivier’s mother decrees it is warm enough, which is when the temperature hits 12°C). Puddings come from the supermarket in plastic boxes and for
special occasions food is sourced from the ‘
traiteur
’. This special occasion food is pastel-coloured and moussey and often imprisoned in a trembling dome of aspic, though on
one memorable occasion, Olivier’s mother orders a vast pie from whose crust twelve charred bird heads emerge, with fantastic whimsy (Olivier’s uncle picks off and crunches each
individual head with relish, beak, bones and all).

These special occasions are something to behold. I attend a few of them because Olivier has what seems like several hundred cousins and they kindly invite me along to their christenings and
weddings and anniversaries. I both like the feeling of being included and slightly dread the actual events at which large groups of family – often thirty or forty or fifty people –
gather in village halls in far-flung corners of Normandy. First there is a flurry of cheek kissing, during which no one is quite sure which branch of the family does how many – two? three?
four? – and which side to start (
bise
anxiety is a constant factor in my life). At this point, some bristly male relative can be guaranteed to trap me in a
bise
cycle as
implacably relentless as a crocodile’s death roll, from which I will be too embarrassed to extricate myself. Next we sit down for a meal of many, many courses, after an arbitrary number of
which Calvados will be served as a palate cleanser. I am often seated near some elderly relative who speaks with as much clarity as Father Fintan Fay, the monkey priest in
Father Ted
(‘It’s OK,’ Olivier says cheerfully on the way home, ‘no one else understands him either’), which makes my Calvados-blurred perception of these events even blurrier.
When people find out I am English, they tell me about their awful school trips and laugh about lamb and mint sauce and ‘
les
beans’. Everyone gets steaming drunk (usually not
the children, though Olivier’s mother does often claim they used to put Calvados in babies’ bottles on her parents’ farm) and the day and then the night slip away in loud,
confusing merriment. Usually, the whole thing starts up again the next day. It is the wedding scene in
Madame Bovary
brought to life: best dresses, overwhelming piles of food, an endurance
marathon of festivity (‘. . . they ate until night. When they were too tired of sitting, they went for a stroll . . . the children had fallen asleep under the seats’).

When we aren’t with his family, Olivier is game for anything. We go on road trips to Brittany, museum visits and zoo outings. Sometimes we go to the forest that surrounds Canteleu to see
the not-so-wild boar in the amateurish nature reserve: Olivier knows exactly where to scratch the piglets behind the ears so that they fall into a deep trance, fully unconscious for a whole
minute.

I am never homesick, not once in my eight months. Life with Olivier is fun and intense and gratifying, like an extended holiday romance. It is
dépaysant
, all this cultural and
sociological exploration and I am
dépaysée
in grey-green rainy Normandy.
Dépaysé
means something a little like homesick but it’s hard to
translate precisely because it is quite different from homesickness, there’s no implication of longing and no sense that it is a bad thing. You have been taken away from what you know and
that can mean anything, good or bad. For me, it means I am hungry for it all. What I really want is for all this to no longer be
dépaysant
but to become familiar, and to achieve
this I become the most indiscriminate consumer of French life. I gobble up television sitcoms and talk shows, dubbed German cop series with Olivier’s grandmother and dubbed
Love Boat
(
La Croisière s’Amuse
) with his stoner cousin. We go to the cinema to watch trashy comedies with the improbably tanned and perfect Thierry Lhermitte, as wooden as an Action
Man, costume dramas with Fabrice Luchini over-emoting in a frock coat and American blockbusters (also dubbed) alike. I eat couscous and
choucroute
,
rillettes
, Danette puddings
from Carrefour (I still love a trip to the hypermarché with its ludicrously well-furnished yoghurt aisle) and puff pastry swans from our local bakery. I discover Sephora for lipstick,
Princesse Tam Tam for underwear and Printemps for everything else. I can feel my vocabulary extend and my fluency grow and I definitely still want to be French, more than ever. This trip has just
confirmed that, even if no one I meet looks like Daniel Auteuil or Isabelle Adjani.

But the school year draws to an end and it is time for me to go back home, and from there to university. I have assumed for many months that Olivier and I will bow to the inevitable and break up
at this point but when the time comes, the obvious time when we stand in Charles de Gaulle airport and my flight is called and I need to turn and head up one of the escalators, we don’t seem
to be breaking up at all.

My degree is in modern history, but for three years I do everything I can to make it all about France. I pick and choose courses to plug the gaps in my knowledge from the
storming of the Bastille to the Liberation of Paris and I fill my head with Marat and Danton and Robespierre, with Manet and Apollinaire and Huysmans. I skim over the dry stuff – the land
reforms, the Pépins and the Clovises and the arid rationality of the
Lumières
– and concentrate on the mad, bad and dangerous to know parts, especially the Revolution,
the Communards and the
fin de siècle
poets and painters. I like anything with blood or sex or intrigue, neglecting the economic origins of the Franco-Prussian war in favour of
Courbet and Baudelaire’s friendship, Zola wading into the Dreyfus affair and Céline swooning at the occupying German army. I learn, selectively and with varying degrees of enthusiasm,
and I start to build a more rounded picture of France in my head. One of the most important things I learn, however, is not part of my degree at all. I learn that it is almost impossible to have a
functional relationship when you draw your role models from French cinema.

I have watched a lot of French cinematic fights by this point and I have become something of an expert on them. There are
loads
of fights in 1990s French films and, I must say, many of
them are excellent. French actors are really great at fighting. I don’t mean they are good at fighting in a relentlessly logical, enlightened
cartésien
style they might have
learned in the philosophy exams for the
baccalaureat.
The fights I watch in the cinema are illogical and mad and often just stupid, but they are fiery and articulate and everything that
comes out of the protagonists’ mouths sounds beautiful. French actors having fights sound like I imagine Rimbaud and Verlaine duelling would sound, even when they are throwing shoes at each
other in their underwear. Victoria Abril, the Spanish actress who often appears in French comedies, is good; I like the way she lets rip with a volley of fury at Gérard Jugnot in the
ludicrous war zone comedy
Casque Bleu
or at dozy Alain Chabat in the equally ludicrous ‘oops, my wife is a lesbian!’ farce
Gazon Maudit.
Josiane Balasko, playing her
lover, does some good headbutting too. Isabelle Adjani is magnificent as the Medici queen, less for her fighting than her general attitude, battling and defying and carrying her lover’s head
in a burlap sack on her knee at the end of
La Reine Margot.
But Béatrice Dalle is my favourite.

In
37°2
(
Betty Blue
in English) – the preposterous 1980s cult classic of doomed love and stonewashed denim in a beachside shack on stilts – Dalle is the loosest
of loose cannons, kicking off at the slightest provocation, throwing and breaking things and generally making an almighty nuisance of herself. There is not much of a plot to speak of (boy meets
girl, girl goes mad, girl gouges out her own eye, boy smothers girl), but the sexual chemistry between Dalle and Jean-Jacques Beineix is heady and Dalle plays her part like a woman possessed,
luminously beautiful, believably insane and unapologetic. At nineteen, I find this vision of love and relationships utterly persuasive: fuck logic, screw compromise, set everything on fire with a
raging passion, have sex in front of the fire and then carry the embers on your lap in a burlap sack. Or something.

My love of cinematic drama means that when Olivier and I fight, which we do, almost constantly, I am obscurely satisfied by it. Our fights are awful, but according to my sources love is supposed
to be unbearable and violent (‘happiness is an abnormal state in love,’ says Proust, who I read this year and who seems to elevate self-imposed misery to a fine art) so we must be doing
it right. I take an unhealthy pleasure in standing in the corridors of my college, fighting with him in French on a payphone, which a small part of me thinks is rather glamorous and good for my
image. I have taken great, ridiculous pains to cultivate my ‘French’ image at university – slightly distant and sophisticated is what I am aiming for – by going away often
to Normandy, smoking Gauloises Blondes Ultra Légères that I import from France and walking the thirty minutes to the Maison Blanc patisserie to buy a millefeuille or a
tarte au
cassis
in French. When I am in a good mood, I play Serge Gainsbourg records (‘L’Anamour’ or ‘Le Poinçonneur des Lilas’) on repeat, provoking the ire of the
Dean, who lives downstairs. When I am not in a good mood, I play wistful, droopy ballads by men who look more like antiquarian book dealers than pop stars: Alain Souchon, Francis Cabrel and William
Sheller. I worry about their possible naffness, though, which is as hard to gauge in a foreign language as swearing. Am I listening to the equivalent of David Essex? Chris de Burgh?
Sting?
This fear haunts me often. I am odiously, ostentatiously French, and the dramatic French fight scenes fit perfectly with all this.