We'll Always Have Paris (9 page)

‘Is that your pushchair downstairs?’

‘Yes, but . . .’

‘You need to move it.’ There is no token welcoming preamble; it is despatched like a whistling ace in the first point of the first set of a tennis match, to send a message.

This, then, is the concierge.

I can’t help but feel a thrill at the thought we have a concierge; I feel like you can’t be a proper Parisian without one. I know this from a thousand films featuring officious women
in housecoats in very minor roles. Proust writes to his concierge: complaints about noise (‘I would be grateful if you could find out what is going on in Dr X’s . . . where there is now
banging all the time’) and recriminations about grievances he has heard of second-hand. In Simenon’s Maigret novels, concierges are watchful, used-up by life, ugly, like in
Les
Fiançailles de Monsieur Hire
: ‘She was thin. Her clothes hung around her like they hang around the crossed sticks that serve as a scarecrow’s skeleton and her nose was damp,
her eyelids red, her hands chapped by the cold.’

They are also a mine of information, officious and gossipy, prurient and ever alert: they know when their tenants go out and when they return, how their fortunes are faring and who they meet.
Madame Jeanne in
L’Enterrement de Monsieur Bouvet
is disappointed by life, almost effaced from it even, but the death of Bouvet, a tenant for whom she has a real affection,
galvanizes her into activity, laying out his body and preparing his funeral, chivvying the other tenants to pay their respects.

Our concierge shows no particular interest in the lives of her tenants: she would happily leave us to rot until someone complained rather than arrange our funerals and she is devoted to one
thing and one thing only – the lift. She treats it with tender solicitude like a fragile, much-loved family pet. Her flat is right next to it, so that she can keep an ear out for incidents of
mistreatment. Inside the lift, which smells strongly of Brasso, there are sheets of instructions pinned to the wall about the correct treatment of its door, the maximum number of persons and
objects it should be required to accommodate and whom to call if it is indisposed. The walls are also often the forum for frosty, anonymous tenant-on-tenant interaction, from pinched-lipped
circuitously phrased remarks (‘will the person who uses their washing machine after 11 p.m. on the fifth floor please be kind enough to have some consideration for other residents’) to
full-on ranting when someone just seems to have snapped after months of resentment.

“The lift buttons,
Madame
,’ the concierge says to me early in our tenure, materializing as if from nowhere in a puff of bleach and suspicion and starting to speak, again
without preamble. Her eyes are glinting in the gloom and her small form bars my route out of the building.

‘Yes?’ I smile back, naïvely expecting some piece of advice on how idiosyncratic they are.

“There are FINGERMARKS on them.’ She turns her gaze to Theo, waving a rapidly browning slice of apple around cheerfully, his feet swinging in the pushchair. Lowering her eyes, she
takes in the filthy tangle of knotted yarn that is his comfort blanket. It is absolutely disgusting; an insanitary clump of tendrils.

‘Oh!’ I do not have the presence of mind to ask her which part of one’s anatomy one is supposed to use to touch the lift buttons.

‘Dirty fingermarks,’ she continues. ‘Small ones.’ Her gaze does not leave Theo. I notice a small blob of cereal adhered to his collar. His top is wet with dribble.

‘Please ensure your son does not treat the lift buttons as a toy. They are for adults.’

I open my mouth, then close it again as she has already dematerialized, shutting the door to her flat behind her.

The concierge sets the tone: it is soon apparent that most of the other residents hate us.

Heavily silent during the day, at night, the block rustles with the muffled second-hand impressions of other people’s lives. The smell of
choucroute alsacienne
or a burnt Monoprix
pizza, cigarette smoke, raised voices, the eight o’clock TF1 news playing simultaneously on four or five televisions. Later comes a round of creaking plumbing noises and finally in the early
hours, when the heavy silence has settled once again, Louis wakes.

There is a particular kind of promiscuity and a relationship to that promiscuity in Parisian apartment blocks which is well explained by Jonathan Conlin in
Tales of Two Cities: Paris, London
and the Birth of the Modern City.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Paris grew upward while London grew outwards. Parisian housing took on a high-rise, high-density character still
recognizable today (though worse then), while Londoners spread into the surrounding country, preserving lower-rise, more self-contained housing stock. These contrasting urban geographies nourished
two quite distinct notions of home: the Englishman’s home became his castle around this time, a private and precious bulwark against the savagery of the street. Parisian life, in contrast,
both facilitated and tolerated a more fluid barrier between ‘home’ and other. Baron Haussmann’s nineteenth-century city planning and renovation profoundly altered the shape of
Paris, addressing overcrowding, placing a limit on building height and carving vast new boulevards through chaotic and sinuous alleyways of the central arrondissements, but that fluidity, and the
difficulties proximity brings, remain.

Proust’s room on nearby Boulevard Haussmann wasn’t cork lined for aesthetic reasons: it was cork lined because life is
loud
in Haussmann blocks. A cache of letters written
by Proust to his neighbour, one Madame Williams, came to light recently and they are full of delicately worded references to noise. ‘A series of light taps on the parquet above me were so
precise that veronal was useless,’ reads one, later lamenting: ‘What bothers me isn’t continuous noise, even if it is loud, but
banging
on the parquet . . . and
everything which is dragged along or falls or runs on it.’

You can get a more visceral account of life in a Haussmann block in Zola’s
Pot Bouille
.
Pot Bouille
– the title means something like ‘melting pot’, a
sort of unsavoury, chucked-together stew – is an unflattering downstairs, upstairs (the servants are in the eaves in this set-up) look at the life of a classic Haussmann block in the 1870s,
viewed partially through the eyes of new arrival, provincial youth, Octave Mouret. Peeling back the elegant façade, Zola gleefully lifts the lid on the cupidity, lust, petty jealousies and
grinding, constant machination that hide behind the rigid proprieties and politenesses. There’s ghastly Madame Josserand, a Gallic Mrs Bennett, desperate to marry off her daughters to anyone,
at any cost. Madame Campardon has suffered some gynaecological unpleasantness in childbirth, which is whispered throughout the house, and is an invalid – her husband has moved in her cousin
and the three live in an uneasy
ménage à trois
. Callow Trublot, who disdains all the so-called respectable women of the house, molests the servants with impunity and Mouret
himself is far from a wet-behind-the-ears innocent: he’s calculating and cynical, throwing himself wholeheartedly into a campaign of seduction and personal advancement with no less than four
women in his entourage. The prevailing sense in the book and the building is of an oppressive undesirable intimacy. There are a lot of smells: sour breath, sweat, powder, cooking odours, damp
skirts, mouldy cellar, dirty sheets, ‘the fatty scent of a poorly maintained sink’. ‘The walls between the servants’ rooms are as thin as a sheet of paper,’ says
Trublot, feigning disapproval, ‘it’s hardly moral.’ Rubbing shoulders this closely, you simply can’t maintain the façade of civility and everyone knows far more than
they could ever wish about the habits of their neighbours. It’s stifling, ugly and utterly human.

In our block the promiscuity of collective living is less a conduit for immorality than a resented source of constant conflict. Everyone wants peace and no one can have it, so we peck at each
other mechanically, like battery chickens. As the new chickens on the block, we draw a considerable amount of the available ire.

First, we mark ourselves out as undesirables by having children. Next, unforgivably, we get the lift wrong. I know this because a smartly dressed middle-aged couple knock on our door, brimming
with outrage, to tell us so. Apparently, by failing to close the creaky concertina door correctly, we have blocked the lift on our floor. Finding the lift incriminatingly stuck here, this couple
have identified us as the culprits.

‘IT IS UNACCEPTABLE,’ says the man, putting his face, which has become puce, very close to mine. He is wearing a dark red paisley scarf tucked into a fine dark tweed jacket and he
smells of deliciously expensive aftershave. Probably Guerlain, I think, and start wondering what it is, but my reverie is interrupted by his wife, who looms over his shoulder in patent heels, a
short, tight Catherine Deneuve-style skirt and a cloud of disapproval to add ‘SO inconsiderate!’

‘I’m sorry, I had no idea,’ I try to reason, half bemused and half ashamed. ‘We only moved in recently, so . . .’ I shift the baby on my hip, hoping he will serve
as a ‘get out of lift jail’ card. I could not be more wrong about this: having small children is the worst thing you can do to alienate your neighbours.

‘I couldn’t give a shit!’ says the man, incensed. It sounds quite shocking out of the mouth of someone in tweeds and mustard cords. The two of them stalk off angrily and I
close the door.

When Olivier gets home, I try to tell him without sounding pathetic. He has started work and goes off to his tower block in La Défense each morning. When he returns in the evening, I am
usually either in tears or in a rage, or both.

‘They were
horrible
,’ I say, but he shrugs.

‘It’s just a game.’

‘A game? What do you mean?’

‘I mean, you can’t take it seriously. It’s not personal; that’s just the way it works. What you need to do is find something to complain about back. Fight fire with
fire.’

‘The only thing I could complain about is that THEY WERE HORRIBLE. And possibly that he was inexplicably dressed like a pre-war country squire.’

At night our unpopularity is compounded by Louis’s appalling antics. He goes down at 8 p.m. with every semblance of one tired after a full and frank day of kicking his legs and chewing
things but at four or five – and on bad nights at three, then four, then five – he wakes, inexplicably furious, demanding comfort and company. There is nothing wrong with him: he is
well fed, neither too hot nor too cold and there is no noise that wakes him. We need to let him cry it out, but I don’t dare; it seems an outrageous breach of the fragile social contract.

Worn down, we decide we must give it a try. I buy some earplugs, beige foam slugs, and when we go to bed, I put them in and fall into a deep, near-instantaneous sleep. It feels like only minutes
later that I am woken by Olivier shaking my shoulder.

‘What?’ My mouth has difficulty shaping the words; I have been dragged to the surface at the deepest point of my sleep cycle. I take out one earplug.

‘He’s crying.’

I frown slightly, my eyes still closed. If I keep my head completely still, perhaps I can just sink back into sleep? I try to formulate my thoughts into as few words as possible.

‘We were going to leave him tonight.’

‘Yes, but listen.’ Olivier puts his hand on my shoulder and squeezes. I open my eyes; he has his head cocked to one side. I sigh and listen, emerging regretfully from the delicious
emptiness of deep sleep. Louis is crying, this is certain, on a rising pitch of fury. But here is another noise: a rhythmic
thump
,
thump
,
thump
.

‘What the fuck is that?’

‘It’s coming from upstairs.’

‘What, the old guy? The ex-footballer?’

‘I think so.’

We’ve spoken to this man a couple of times. He is about seventy, with a handbag-sized white fluffy dog. Every time I see him on the stairs he tells me he used to be a footballer. This is
the full extent of our conversations, but I have been thinking of him as an ally of sorts, since he hasn’t actually formulated any complaints.

I listen for a little longer. The pitch of the banging seems to be rising both in volume and frequency. Unsurprisingly, this is not having a soothing effect on Louis.

‘Jesus.’ I force myself into a sitting position, then drag my unwilling limbs out of bed and trudge to Louis’s room. Through the gloom I can see him thrashing around in his
cot. His legs are imprisoned in a baby sleeping bag, which he keeps lifting jerkily into the air, bashing into his mobile and sending red and yellow plastic giraffes shuddering. The noise seems to
be coming from directly above his room and it’s hard, wood on wood. A walking stick, perhaps.

I lift Louis from his cot and hold him against my shoulder, still listening. He doesn’t even seem to be awake, not really: his eyes aren’t even open. He snuffles into my neck, sobs
slowing to hiccups and then finally silence. From above, there is one last, resonant thump, then silence.

I carry Louis back through to our bedroom, treading carefully, conscious of the risk of splinters. His body is soft and relaxed now, his cheeks cooling. I sit down on the edge of our bed and
sigh. Olivier has put a pillow over his head. I glare at it.

‘Now what?’ I ask. ‘What are we going to do if we can’t let him cry?’

There is an indistinct noise from under the pillow.

Two weeks later, I am scratchy with fatigue. As we sit in front of the television watching a television chef berate a teenager for the state of his work surfaces, a single fat
tear pools in the corner of my eye, then another.

‘What is it?’ Olivier does not actually sound like he wants to hear the answer but I am too exhausted to care.

‘I’m so tired.’

Even when Louis goes back to sleep, I don’t. Night after night I find myself sitting on the hall floor, looking at the shadows of the balustrades cast by the yellow light of the street
lamps. Sometimes I send a plaintive text to my insomniac friend Kate in the selfish hope she might be awake and sometimes I get an answering echo, a steady, funny few lines of comfort. But mainly
it is silent and lonely and I am done, done with it all.