We'll Always Have Paris (8 page)

But move we must, so occasionally I look over Olivier’s shoulder in a desultory fashion and make offhand comments. We look at a dark modern cube near Beaubourg, but I don’t like it
because it’s ugly, all smoked glass and 1980s fittings, and it doesn’t fit with my image of what a Paris flat should look like. Then we look at a couple of Haussmann-style apartments in
the outer arrondissements, one in the 18th and one in the 17th. The small, fuzzy photographs are hard to interpret – they don’t seem to have kitchens and the paintwork is straight out
of a 1970s prog rock album – but they have the bones of Parisian grandeur, herringbone parquet, mouldings, high ceilings. I do not know Paris well enough to have the city’s geography
beyond the very centre defined in my head, so we look at a map and try to make a decision: the 17th has the Arc de Triomphe, the 18th, to the east of it, the Sacré Coeur. The one in the 17th
is near a park and three stops from La Défense for Olivier to get to and from work, so that, without me ever seeing it, is the one we choose.

Dimly, through my fog of indifference, I perceive the complexities of the process, as Olivier negotiates with agents and owners, heading off to Paris with folders full of paperwork and returning
with a muscle in his forehead spasming uncontrollably, but I have nothing to contribute and, eventually, it is done. Our lovely London flat sells swiftly (I feel a genuine stab of sadness at this
– it feels irrevocable and I have loved living in Fitzrovia so much) and there is nothing more to do but wait, wait for the baby to come, which it does, finally, late and in a rush in an
eerily quiet hospital.

It’s a boy and he’s angry and angular and strange. I can see nothing poignantly symbolic about him: he’s all nose and long, searching fingers, nothing like my mother. He does
not look like an old soul, nor does he possess any preternatural qualities of serenity: far from it. He cries a
lot
for the first few hours of his life, furiously, his whole head reddening
under his sparse covering of hair. We call him Louis. He doesn’t get a middle name: we’ve run out of names we both like that work in both languages, and all the French names I love and
find ineffably romantic – Pascal, Félix, Fabrice – conjure up some loathed school bully or boorish colleague for Olivier.

We look very happy in the pictures in the hospital. I have my head on Olivier’s shoulder and my body is misshapen and distorted in a sag of post-partum exhaustion, but I am smiling and so
is he. Our angry red bundle is asleep in Olivier’s arms, most of his head obscured by an oversized hospital-issue hat. We are, I think, happy. I had worried that giving birth, losing my cosy
status as an incubator, might open the floodgates of grief, but holding my furiously insatiable son, it seems that very little has changed. Things feel muted, sort of: the soft pedal is on. I
don’t understand it – surely this is exactly the time for enormous emotions – but I’m grateful nonetheless.

In the twelve hours we spend in hospital, people come to visit us or send their congratulations with exaggerated jollity, as if we are the long-awaited redemptive twist in a horrible story. Theo
comes in with my sister to meet his new brother. He erupts, pink-cheeked and cold, in our tiny boiling hospital room and looks appraisingly at his brother asleep in his plastic crate, etiolated
fingers reaching up jerkily at nothing as he sleeps.

‘Spider!’ he says and it seems to fit, so Spider he becomes.

Then we all go home: Theo, my sister, me, Olivier and Spider to get ready to move to Paris.

Amidst the last-minute packing up and the paperwork, I do not really contribute much: I’m breastfeeding the new arrival, taking him for walks around Bloomsbury in the pram, admiring the
blossom and feeling the first blush of spring warmth. Sleep deprivation renders me useless and stupid, which just intensifies my muffled feeling, but the new baby is very easy to love, and taking
care of him and Theo is not as hard as I had feared at this stage: my sister comes around often to help and the baby is mesmerized by his busy, funny big brother. I observe and am surprised by the
way momentary shafts of happiness inhabit me, as fleeting as the early spring sun. I do one thing, though: I take Louis to meet my mother.

I board a train to York one afternoon with him sleeping on my chest. When we arrive, spring has reached York too: the sun is out and the grass slopes under the city walls are vivid with
daffodils, bobbing in the breeze. We cross Lendal Bridge, where the River Ouse is running fast and threatening (yet again) to break its banks, and head down past the Minster, along Goodramgate
towards Cemetery Road. In the graveyard, a handsome nineteenth-century wilderness, the rambling lanes are greener than I remember them from the scuffing persistent drizzle of October. The grass is
longer, a blackbird is singing and tangled flowering briars block the smaller alleys.

I wonder if I will remember where to go – I have only been here twice, once to choose the spot and once to bury her – but actually it’s fairly simple and I pick my way through
the overgrown paths and past uneven rows of lichen-green headstones sure-footedly, and make my way into a small clearing ringed with bent willows. I recognize the nearest tombstone (‘Sacred
to the Memory of Sgt A. G. Davidson, The Duke of Wellington’s Rgt, who died on the 12th June 1891 aged 32 years, deeply regretted by his sorrowing widow and late comrades’): we thought
she might like a dashing young man in uniform as a neighbour. Next to Sgt Davidson is my mother’s grave, unrecognizable from the narrow Astro-Turfed hole of the previous autumn with the tiny
coffin being lowered into it. Now it is a small hillock covered with short springy heath grass. No headstone yet, it’s a decision too far.

I crouch down and unstrap Louis, still dozing on my chest, then I lie him down on my jacket and sit down next to him to the side of the grave. His eyes snap open suspiciously and he begins to
kick and wiggle experimentally, deciding whether to cry.

‘So here he is,’ I say to the hillock, feeling idiotic. ‘I brought him to see you.’

I am not at all sure what I am doing or why. I did not feel anything much at the burial, so I am not sure what I think this daft pilgrimage will achieve. It’s not as if I think she’s
still here in any sense, but then, where else could she be? The whole business still seems unfathomable. I reason, finally, that it is the kind of thing she might have done herself, my mother with
her God-faced bird dreams, the stubborn relics of Catholicism, a strain of mystic Quakerism and a belief in ritual. Perhaps that is ceremony enough. I sit for a little longer. The sun is
surprisingly warm and my spider baby has decided not to cry. He is kicking his legs decidedly, at high speed, and his eyes are wide open and focusing on, I think, the shifting branches of the
willow tree above. He is such a funny little thing, tightly coiled but mainly cheerful, which reminds me of his father. My mother would have enjoyed the puzzle of him and she would have enjoyed his
soft little body, his beady, alert eyes and the way he is growing into person-ness, eyelashes unfurling, limbs strengthening. It seems extraordinarily unfair that she can’t, and I remember
her holding Theo over her knee and gently patting his back, and later feeding him a piece of the terrible cake I made for his first birthday. I cry a little in a choked, hiccuping way like a cat
with a furball. I have not had a satisfactory cry since this all happened and I still feel
en sourdine
– muted. There’s a Verlaine poem that Fauré set to music called
‘En Sourdine’ and I think of it now and I think of my mother in her bed on weekend mornings listening to Radio 3 and holding court and a few more tears fall.

I pick Louis up and we head to Bettys, because all emotional journeys in York must end in the city’s stateliest and best-loved purveyor of cake and comfort. It’s early afternoon when
we arrive and the queue for the tearoom is already stretching out of the door and into King’s Square, but the shop is relatively quiet, a bustle of women in broderie anglaise mob caps behind
the counter arranging Fat Rascals (‘it’s a cross between a scone and a rock bun and we serve it warm with butter and a choice of preserves,’ a school friend could recite for years
after a brief sojourn working there).

I hang back for a while, remembering the many hours I have spent in Bettys, when I was tiny, as a teenager and as an adult. Theo had been with us, sitting in a high chair wearing a Fat Rascal
bib, while my mother radiated pride and love, presenting her new grandchild to the waitresses who knew her so well. My mother knew everyone in York, the homeless people, the taxi drivers, and
particularly the waitresses. Now here we are: baby’s first Bettys, another important rite.

Today, the silver trays at the counter are filled with a reassuring selection of springtime treats: neat lines of ginger rabbits, caramel slices, marzipan and fondant cauliflowers. The window is
full of Easter eggs (I used to get one every year, decorated with purple and yellow sugarwork daisies) and Simnel cake, the promise of resurrection. I buy two chocolate caramel shortcake slices and
three fondant fancies (two yellow, one pink) and take them back to my mum’s house, or rather my stepfather’s house as I suppose I should start calling it now. I sit at the kitchen table
and my stepfather makes a pot of tea in the usual stained yellow pot, then sits it under the usual stained duck-shaped cosy, his every gesture intensely familiar, and I bite into one of my fancies.
I eat it quite slowly: cutting it in half first, then nibbling the iced edges before sinking my teeth into the sponge and buttercream and jam. It’s another goodbye of sorts.

J’entrais dans une pâtisserie, je mangeais une brioche et je me récitais ironiquement le mot de Heine: ‘quelles que soient les larmes qu’on
pleure, on finit toujours par se moucher’.

I went into a bakery, I ate a brioche and I recited Heine’s words to myself, ironically: ‘whatever tears we cry, we always end up wiping them away’.

Simone de Beauvoir,
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

A few days later we fetch up in a café on the Boulevard de Courcelles in the 17th near the new flat – Olivier, my sister and me, Theo busy under the table running
a small car over its ornamental metal feet, Louis wedged in a corner in his buggy. The sun is out, showing up the smudges on the café windows. We are waiting for the removal lorry to arrive.
This is not a part of Paris I know, though the basic street geography – the red neon lozenge of the bar-tabac, green pharmacy crosses, yellow letter box – is utterly familiar: you
couldn’t be anywhere else.

Our new flat is on a quiet side street, running between two other quiet side streets, tucked away between the Boulevard and the Avenue Wagram. We have had a quick peep inside already. It is on
the fourth floor of the block, a solid, classic Haussmann number of pale, regulation quarry stone with iron balustrades and an imposing double door to the street. Inside, a marble-lined entrance
hall leads to another set of double doors – glass this time – and beyond that, a tiny creaky lift, with concertina doors that wheeze like leaky bellows as the lift ascends. For those
who find the lift too alarming, the alternative is a dark, shallow wood staircase, redolent of furniture polish and old cigarette smoke, the dark blue carpet runner held in place with polished
brass rods.

Behind its narrow front door, the flat is huge. It’s also a sort of elegant wreck, collapsing and crumbling in aesthetically appealing, but practically alarming, ways. The double-width
salon
still has elaborate ceiling roses and chandeliers, three shuttered double windows with wrought-iron balustrades and original die-cast radiators, but the rotting
point de
Hongrie
herringbone parquet gives you splinters if you try to walk on it barefoot. The hallway is lined with full-length gilt-edged mirrors to adjust your hat or check the fall of your bustle,
but the kitchen, in keeping with most Parisian rentals, is little more than a grimy tiled cupboard furnished with a set of bare standpipes. A population of small, irrepressible cockroaches occupies
the single built-in cupboard.

To the rear, a dark corridor leads to a dark bathroom (peach fittings, mid-1980s, no apparent ventilation) and a lavatory seemingly as old as the building itself, with tarnished brass fittings
and massive porcelain ware crazy-paved with cracks. When I pull the chain, the pipes roar and tremble until the whole flat seems to vibrate. One bedroom, as the fuzzy estate agent’s
photographs hinted, appears to have last been decorated in 1979 under the influence of powerful hallucinogens, possibly using fingers or some other body part to apply the turquoise and violet
paint. The others are fairly ordinary in comparison, though the one that will become mine and Olivier’s is more of a corridor than a bedroom and it is set at an angle such that our window,
which faces the rear, overlooks a messy patchwork of nearby windows, pipes and roofs, quite different from the neat façade to the front. It is the kind of view that can feel quite romantic
when you are on a budget city break in a two-star hotel somewhere, a glimpse into a whole set of other lives. There are serried ranks of dusters and wrinkled American tan pop socks, a whole ledge
of cactuses and in one curtainless window, ominous to contemplate, a drum kit. From the living room at the front, the view is very different: we overlook the austerely perfect
salon
of the
people opposite, furnished with expensive-looking antique rugs, upholstered Directoire chairs and a baby grand piano.

Soon after we finish our coffee and walk in awkward convoy back to the flat, the movers arrive and install an external lift from the lorry to our window and our things start to ascend, wobbling
alarmingly. I am standing in the corridor trying to work out what each hastily assembled box is when there is a knock at the door. Olivier opens it: a small woman in her fifties or sixties in a
blue housecoat. He starts to formulate a pleasantry, but she cuts him off.