We'll Always Have Paris (7 page)

Now she is gone and it makes no sense. She was just here, my borrowed dressing gown too big for her little frame, drinking a cup of coffee and planning her Rome itinerary. I know exactly how it
felt to hug her goodbye but I experience a complete imaginative failure at the idea of her dead. I
know
she is, but I can’t feel it, so I just get on with things. Presumably it will
sink in eventually.

After the funeral we return to London. My sister moves in with us – she can’t stand to be in York – and we spend a grisly Christmas, whose only redeeming feature is that no one
tries to pretend it’s remotely OK, together in our flat with her and her father and the saddest, most stunted Christmas tree any of us has ever seen. Then, in the dark, short, dead days
between Christmas and New Year, we head off to the abandoned Millennium Dome, where an optimistically named ‘Christmas Wonderland’ has been installed. We are hoping to amuse Theo but
the scene before us is pretty dismal: a few scrappy fairground rides dotted here and there in the semi-darkness. It’s chilly under the damp wet canvas and there’s that muddy marquee
smell, mingling with stewed hot-dog onions and the acrid burnt-sugar tang of candyfloss. I find a hard chair to sit on and watch as my sister takes Theo on a shudderingly slow miniature train. She
is smiling, but the smile doesn’t reach her eyes, which are blank with unhappiness. Theo, in contrast, is beaming unreservedly, his cheeks round and ruddy. He is wearing a bright yellow
oilcloth coat like a tiny sea captain and his fat fists thump the plastic steering wheel in delight.

Olivier isn’t watching, he’s looking at me, with an odd, sort of appraising expression.

‘
Quoi?
’ We still speak French to each other all the time. His English has improved enormously, but it doesn’t feel right – we fell in love in French and
I’d rather he deal with my linguistic infelicities than I deal with his. It seems key to our relationship somehow.

‘So what do you think about moving to Paris, seriously?’

He’s raised this before but I haven’t really been paying attention, have had other things on my mind, but now, next to the sweating hot dogs, it all comes out, properly.

His job (in a French investment bank), he believes, will not exist for very much longer; they are restructuring and things don’t look good for him. There is, however, the possibility of
doing the same job, or even a slightly better one, at head office, in La Défense in Paris. He thinks it’s the best option, but we have to decide fast.

‘Like, when?’

‘Like, well, now, really. As soon as possible.’

I understand that it makes financial sense. But I can also see some fairly obvious downsides: I am about to give birth, my mother died two months ago and we have built a life here in London,
family, friends (admittedly most of mine are local pensioners and shop assistants, but still) and jobs. My French yearnings have been in abeyance for a while: having a baby has catapulted me back
into a set of instinctive responses learned in my own babyhood, the songs I sing to him and the words I use come automatically, summoned from some unconscious part of my brain. My mother’s
death too has left me a little homesick for the familiarity of York, where people know me and knew her and where the shape of her life is still vivid and distinct. I’m constantly fighting a
desire to crawl back home and revert to childhood. What really prevents me from doing so is the knowledge that it won’t actually feel right, because the person who made it home is gone.
That’s why my sister is here with us: she doesn’t want to be in York, because it’s in York that the wrongness of everything becomes so glaringly obvious.

I look across at Olivier. He is holding a pile of stuff – my bag, my sister’s coat, Theo’s comfort blanket, a half-drunk hot chocolate – and he looks as wired as I feel
leaden. His eyes are darting round the gloom, vigilant as a meerkat, primed for the next challenge. He has met a lot of challenges in the last few months, doggedly, politely agitating to get my
mother’s body repatriated, smoking calmly in the backyard with my stepfather when he was at his most febrile and loquacious, and signing up to run a marathon with my sister to keep her
company. ‘He’s wonderful,’ people said to me over and over again at the funeral, relieved to have something unreservedly positive to say, and they were right, he is. I have
discovered how deep his commitment to us, his family, goes: he will simply do whatever he needs to for things to be OK. It’s awe-inspiring, and slightly Sicilian. If he tells me he thinks
this is the right thing to do, then I can be perfectly sure that he believes it is right for all of us.

Perhaps he’s right? I don’t know. On one obvious level it sounds like a terrible idea: you don’t run off to another country with a newborn and a two-year-old after –
indeed during – the most cataclysmic time of your life. That sounds stupid and warning bells go off in my head, but then again, I don’t really trust my own emotions. I don’t
actually
have
any emotions except a flat, permanent tiredness and a bolus of dread in the depths of my stomach. I don’t know how to think about my mum and I don’t really try.
One frosty morning as I am crossing Bloomsbury Square Gardens on my way to work I find myself thinking about her grave and how cold it must be: she must be
freezing
, I think, why
can’t I do anything about it? We have to get her out of there. It’s unbearable for a couple of minutes and I have to sit down and breathe through my mouth, trying to expel the terror
with each breath. But then the feeling passes and life goes on; I go to work, look at spreadsheets, collect Theo, make dinner. It’s sort of horrifying the way life goes on, but of course she
knew all about that and had lived it: one of those parcels she sent me to Oxford contained Auden’s ‘Musée de Beaux-Arts’ (‘About suffering they were never wrong, The
Old Masters’) and an accompanying postcard of Breughel’s
Fall of Icarus.

So life will go on and why not in Paris? Paris! My dulled spirit feels a tiny fillip of excitement at the thought of it. Magical, beautiful Paris where everything is finer and brighter and more
exalted. Paris is Juliette Binoche sitting on top of a statue of Henri IV drunk and mad and half-blind, and shooting her father’s service revolver (
Les Amants du Pont-Neuf
).
It’s saturnine Jacques Dutronc being
le dauphin de la place Dauphine
, describing the city at dawn in his elegant, clever prose. It’s Daniel Auteuil (oh, Daniel Auteuil, the
most exquisite of raddled-looking French actors, my fantasy husband) playing a nihilistic knife thrower, smoking and saying to Vanessa Paradis, ‘
Vous avez l’air d’une fille
qui va faire une connerie
’ (you look like a girl who’s about to do something stupid) before she jumps off the Passerelle Debilly into the Seine in the daft but stylish melodrama
The Girl on the Bridge.
Paris is obviously the place for strong emotions (although it may be best to avoid the bridges). We will go to Paris.

‘OK,’ I say. ‘Let’s do it.’

As I get larger and even slower, Olivier starts to look for flats in Paris, bringing home sets of estate agents’ particulars from his trips. It should be exciting, but
somehow it isn’t for me; it all seems very distant and unreal, whereas Theo’s needs are immediate and pressing and easy to satisfy and they stop me from thinking too much. We are also
selling our flat, so I spend a considerable amount of time putting away toys and hiding things in cupboards, which is dull but vaguely gratifying. The aim is that we will move almost as soon as the
baby is born, in the springtime.

I feel utterly detached from the idea of moving to Paris, an idea that should thrill me to my core. I love Paris. Of course I do; everyone loves Paris. All my adolescent fantasies centred around
living in Paris, drinking coffee in bars and smoking Gauloises, with a nice dog at my feet. Maybe I would wear men’s shirts like Jane Birkin. Perhaps I would be a writer. Doubtless, I
assumed, I would have lovers, though they took no clear form in my head. I spend more time imagining my outfits and the dog: a neatly trimmed Scottie, I think. I don’t have any idea how to
reconcile my fantasy Parisian self (well-dressed, single, faintly ascetic, formidably self-possessed, dog owner) with my current self (nine months pregnant, in elastic-waisted trousers, largely
subsisting on Marks & Spencer’s chocolate mini rolls).

Conscious of my own ambivalence, I try to motivate myself with remembered trips. My parents, rather touchingly, were keen to make my first time in Paris special. For my thirteenth birthday,
despite having been separated for a decade, they decided to take me to Paris together. We stayed on the Ile Saint-Louis, on the Rue Saint-Louis-en-l’Ile, perhaps one of the most perfectly
romantic addresses anywhere in Paris, which sets the bar pretty high everywhere. In the mornings, my father would take me on long walks across the city, then after a large lunch, my mother would
potter with me around the enthralling stationery shops of the Ile, admiring elegantly clipped dogs and their owners and stopping late afternoon for a Berthillon ice cream. We ate
tarte aux
quetsches
in a dark, half-empty restaurant and my parents got happily drunk and maudlin on
eau-de-vie.
Every morning I was despatched mercilessly to go and buy croissants from the
bakery across the road (delicious, but the ordering was mortifying) and a perpetually naked man wandered around the flat opposite my hotel room. It was magical and strange, as your first trip to
Paris should be.

Later, when I was teaching in Canteleu, I met my mother and sister when, as a result of some devastating gambit in the (largely good-humoured) mental chess match between my parents, they were
staying in barely credible luxury in the Pavillon de la Reine on the Place des Vosges at my father’s expense. I stayed a night with them and in the morning, Olivier, whom I had just started
seeing in earnest, sneaked in for a free breakfast. On arrival, he looked shifty and somewhat discombobulated. ‘A man in uniform has just valet parked my car.’ Olivier drove a
dilapidated Peugeot of indeterminate vintage, the back filled with a clutter of wood and old blankets, the front approximately eighty per cent rust and Coke cans. After breakfast, I introduced him
to my beadily curious mother, we took my sister up the Eiffel Tower, then the four of us sat in a café, ate chips and made slightly stilted small talk. When Olivier left, my mother drew me
aside and poked me with mock indignation.

‘You told me you
weren’t
going out with him!’

‘I wasn’t!’ I protested. ‘Er . . . then.’ She didn’t seem to mind much, satisfied I was in reasonably safe hands.

Soon after we moved to London, Olivier and I took my father and stepmother to the Salon de l’Agriculture. This superlative agricultural show on the outskirts of the city, with outsized
cattle, regional produce as far as the eye can see and rabbits in tricolour sashes, is a key feature of the French TV news year and a test of presidential mettle: whether you can glad hand the
farmers and admire the cows with sufficient enthusiasm can define a president. Chirac was famously brilliant at the ‘hail fellow well-met’ bonhomie of it, tasting saucissons, patting
cows and drinking everything proffered; Sarkozy got himself into enormous trouble for hissing sour obscenities at a protester. On our visit, Olivier translated gamely for my father as we meandered
round the various tasting stations in the wine tent, then admired the magnificently fat cows, all rippling muscles and polished flanks. It snowed and we were staying on the Left Bank, opposite
Deyrolle, the magnificent taxidermist. We stared at the stuffed zebras and macaque monkeys as fat snowflakes stuck to our winter coats, then walked down to the Deux Magots for hot chocolate.

My most recent trip was two years previously, celebrating my sister’s sixteenth birthday. I was pregnant with Theo and we stayed in pretty Saint-Sulpice on the Left Bank in the eaves of a
ramshackle hotel for a weekend of wandering and window shopping. We ate
Poilâne tartines
in the café on the square, walked around the Jardin du Luxembourg and went shopping
for cool stuff for my sister and maternity clothes for me. My mother’s infallible Rolodex of a memory located several magnificent brasseries she had not visited in decades, where we debated
with the waiters several times, for my vegetarian sister’s benefit, whether ham can be considered a vegetable. One evening, we took my sister for a cocktail in a mirror-lined bar on the Rue
de Rennes to celebrate her nearly being a grown-up and me nearly being a mother and we laughed and took pictures.

My mother came down to breakfast one morning with a bemused expression.

‘I had such a peculiar dream last night,’ she said.

‘Oh?’

‘Yes. I was following a bird and it turned round and looked at me and I knew I had seen the face of God.’

‘A bird-faced God?!’

‘No! A God-faced bird.’

We teased her for a while, then forgot about it as we got fleeced by a taxi driver who drove us round and round in circles to a destination approximately 200 metres from our starting point.

I have a picture of my sister and my mother from that trip and I locate it as I am sorting out paperwork for the move. They are standing in the Jardin du Luxembourg in the bitter February cold
on a raised gravel pathway, near some kind of decorative stone urn, and the picture looks posed even though it isn’t. Their bodies are facing towards each other and they are both looking at
the camera. My mother’s eyes are pink-rimmed from the wind and she’s wearing a fuchsia cashmere scarf that I’ve now brought back with me from York. My sister is in a denim jacket,
reddish tendrils of hair whipped across her face by the wind, freckles standing out clearly on her milky skin. She looks about twelve: actually she still looks about twelve now, but in this picture
she looks happy. They both do. Behind the camera, I was happy too: we were in Paris, I was having a baby and life was exploding with possibility. It seems a thousand years ago now. I am pregnant
again, but it couldn’t feel more different. My sister is a hunched little wraith, who drifts almost silently in and out of our life (she is moving in with her aunt in Peckham now the baby is
imminent). I feel I have failed her, failed to be any comfort whatsoever and by association failed my mother too. I seem to have nothing to offer.