A Letter from Paris Read online

  A LETTER FROM PARIS

  Louisa Deasey is a Melbourne-based writer who has published widely, including in Overland, Vogue, The Australian, and The Saturday Age. Her first memoir, Love & Other U-Turns, was nominated for the Nita B. Kibble Award for women writers.

  Scribe Publications

  18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria 3056, Australia

  2 John Street, Clerkenwell, London, WC1N 2ES, United Kingdom

  3754 Pleasant Ave, Suite 100, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55409 USA

  First published by Scribe 2018

  Copyright © Louisa Deasey 2018

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

  Cover design by Scribe

  Cover photos from Shutterstock.com: cards by Oleg Golovnev, leaves by Nonchanon, Paris by givaga, couple by George Marks/iStockphoto.com

  Back cover image by Catarina Belova/Shutterstock.com

  9781925713312 (Australian edition)

  9781911617457 (UK edition)

  9781947534612 (US edition)

  9781925693034 (e-book)

  A CiP record for this title is available from the National Library of Australia and the British Library.

  scribepublications.com.au

  scribepublications.co.uk

  scribepublications.com

  In loving memory of

  Denison Deasey and Michelle Chomé.

  Verba volant

  Scripta manent

  (Spoken words fly away

  Only what is written remains)

  Latin Proverb

  Contents

  Prologue: Melbourne, Australia

  Part One: Letters

  1. Disparu

  2. Souvenir

  3. Voyageur

  4. La peine

  Part Two: Art

  5. Serpents

  6. Chance perdue

  7. Manuscrits

  8. Le régiment

  9. Crise d’identité

  10. Chasser la joie

  11. Saint Clair, Le Lavandou

  12. L’écrivain

  13. Paris

  14. L’éloge

  15. Trouvé

  Part Three: Kin

  16. Par avion

  17. Passage de l’Horloge

  18. La fille de Denison

  19. Ajustement

  20. Histoire partagée

  21. En famille

  22. Date de naissance

  23. Contradictoire

  24. Fête de fromage

  25. Émue

  26. Les Sables D’Or

  27. Port Cros

  28. La clé

  29. Ma marraine

  30. Au revoir, Paris

  Epilogue

  References

  Guide to Notable Figures

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  Melbourne, Australia

  The first letter I ever received as a child came from Paris. It was magic to see the French postmark, Gisèle’s address carefully printed on the back in her distinct script:

  Apartment 10

  24 Boulevarde de Grenelle

  Paris, France, 75015.

  Gisèle’s love and thoughts reached out from her apartment overlooking the rooftops of Paris, France, to our weatherboard house in Melbourne, Australia. She was a connecting thread to my dad, too, even though he was no longer alive. Gisèle was my godmother, and had been dad’s wife before he met mum.

  The idea of a letter with words written from so far away seemed like science fiction: with a stamp, some paper, and a pen, I could receive a message across time and space from another country, all the way across the sea.

  Paris was a world away from Melbourne, and all I could picture of France was held in the mysterious photos in our family album and the prints on the cards that came from Gisèle. The parks and gardens looked smaller and much prettier than the giant expanses of greens and browns that dotted our Australian landscape. My older sister, Ayala, with mum and dad, had even stayed with Gisèle in Paris before I was born. I knew this from three photos taken on her balcony, laid out in Ayala’s photo album, which also contained the only photos of mum and dad together.

  Ayala, in a little blue pinafore, was playing with her flowers and a plastic windmill, Paris streets below.

  As magpies carolled outside in the rambling cottage garden mum had planted after dad died, I pictured Gisèle in her apartment with that tiny balcony that reached out towards the Eiffel Tower. Her pots of pansies lit with sweet reds and yellows against a champagne sky.

  Perhaps Gisèle was still working for French radio? I didn’t know what she did, exactly, just that she’d once worked as a radio journalist. Her letters to us were always so much about us, anyway, about our special days, about how much she thought about us, wanted to see us again …

  My Australian family, she wrote, never referring to problems or anything bad, always on such beautiful stationery.

  My-little-dot-on-the-map-of-Australia, on the back of a card for my birthday, packages and parcels wrapped in ribbon arriving all the way from a Parisian store.

  For Christmas, she sent me a precious necklace, a ruby stone embedded in the pendant.

  For my fifth birthday, a pearl on a gold chain.

  I know it was strange, that we considered Gisèle family, but I didn’t realise this until I was older. Gisèle had been dad’s wife for many years before or when he met my mum (I never quite knew), and perhaps it was even stranger that she’d been appointed my godmother.

  But mum encouraged our relationship, buying me stationery and stamps because I loved to write to her, because she understood the importance of a living connection to dad and the life he’d led before I was born.

  I sensed that mum knew Gisèle held some of the secrets about dad. Perhaps even about me.

  Dad died when I was six, and a precious par avion letter from Gisèle came on my seventh birthday a month later, timed to the day.

  Seven little kisses for seven year old Louisa, she wrote on the back of an illustration of children holding birthday balloons in the Luxembourg Gardens. Ask Ayala if she remembers Paris parks? was in the postscript. Seven kisses marked X along the bottom of the card, to match my new age.

  Gisèle calculated the lengthy overseas transits perfectly, and her carefully wrapped treasures arrived exactly on our birthdays, or a few days before Christmas to sit under the tree.

  To see the little French stamps and her delicate handwriting on an envelope when I got home from school meant that something miraculous was waiting inside.

  A link to dad, the wonder of air travel, words that had sped from a heart to page to letterbox across time.

  When I learned that having dad’s ex-wife as a penpal was a little ‘unusual’, I realised mum was quite avante-garde in her approach to life and love.

  When I was a child, mum didn’t have a car; instead, she’d take me and my siblings on Sunday trips to the library on our bikes, shopping on a shoestring at the local market co-op for fresh produce she’d then cook, insistent that we live in the inner city, where we’d be confident travelling around to school and events on our own.

  We never had the TV blaring with sports on the weekend; mum preferred the national broadcasters, SBS or ABC. />
  I still remember my first trip to a suburban shopping centre in an actual car when I was twelve, because it was as exotic as an interstate trip.

  France wasn’t just a place dad had once lived: there was a sense that I’d inherited some kind of French connection through the time he’d spent living there with Gisèle.

  I took French lessons at school, we watched French films on SBS, and the living-room bookshelf held a thin, dusty book of cartoons called Fractured French. I used to pull it down sometimes, thinking of Gisèle, wondering when and how dad had lived in France, who and what sort of person he’d once been.

  Through Gisèle’s letters, I learned my first French words: par avion, bonne anniversaire, joyeux Noël, and rue for street.

  I always planned to visit her in Paris one day, when I’d finished school and saved enough money. I didn’t know how old Gisèle was, like I didn’t really know or fully understand how old dad was when he died.

  Just that they were both from a completely different time.

  Ten years after dad died, Gisèle came to Australia. I was sixteen years old. She seemed full of life, impeccably chic — everything about her was so typically French. Something about her sense of self-containment and self-preservation stayed with me.

  She carried herself with a formidable sense of dignity and enjoyment that wasn’t at all self-conscious. I remember her taking mum and me out to dinner, and her smiling and saying things like Marvellous and Aren’t we lucky every time the waiter delivered food to the table.

  Mum said something depressing in the middle of the entrees, and Gisèle gently admonished her, insisting that we had better things to focus on at that moment in time. I remember it because I admired the grace with which she pulled it off. And her boldness made mum come to her senses and cheer up.

  But a year or two later, Gisèle vanished. The par avion letters stopped. My cousin Mark said he thought she’d gone to stay with a friend in Brittany, but he wasn’t sure where and had no address. She was retirement age, apparently, which I didn’t understand.

  She had always seemed so ageless. Sometimes, she even seemed younger than my mum.

  When mum died, the same month as dad’s last surviving sibling — aunt Alice — the last of any direct threads to him were gone. There were cousins who’d known him as an uncle, but no one who could tell me about who he was without the filter of such an age gap.

  Gisèle was an unsolved mystery, aunt Alice died in her sleep, and then mum died, throwing out all the childhood letters and cards I’d ever made her before she chose to leave. It was like someone had burned down the family house, but by then there was no house and the only fire was in my heart.

  My grief wasn’t just for losing their physical forms, but for all the stories I’d never fully know about my family. Dad had crossed paths with me for six years only; the rest of my knowledge of him would have to be second-, third-, or fourth-hand.

  I still had my brother and sister, but our ancestry was in the past — particularly, our dad’s story.

  Who was your dad?

  Is a question I’ve never been able to answer.

  Never thought I could answer, with any kind of certainty.

  It was an unresolved wound, a painful longing, as mysterious as death and all the stories in one life someone takes with them when they go.

  But a letter from Paris changed all that. A modern-day letter — an electronic message sent by a woman named Coralie.

  Part One

  Letters

  Chapter One

  Disparu

  When dad died in 1984, on a hot Saturday night in February just before my seventh birthday, it was the only time I ever remember seeing mum cry. I’d slept in my new leotard the night before. Pale-blue polyester with stripes of gold, it was so prickly in the summer heat. Mum had bought it for the gymnastics classes I was about to start. So I wore it to bed — ready for a cartwheel on a high beam, not falling asleep on a sticky Australian summer’s night.

  How odd, the things we remember.

  He had a blood clot, mum explained, after hanging up an early morning call from the hospital. It travelled to his heart, she said between tears.

  It took me a while to comprehend that he wasn’t coming back. That he’d gone somewhere I couldn’t visit. That his death meant no more Friday-night drives past Skipping Girl Vinegar dancing in her red dress along the way to his big rambling house in Surrey Hills full of books, papers, the clack of his typewriter, that musty smell of dust and pipe tobacco, his cheeky grin.

  And I’d never really know who he was.

  I did get hints that dad was remarkable, but I also got hints that he was wild. There was the sense that he was inexplicable, someone I should perhaps be ashamed of. The black sheep of the family. I gathered he’d lived a life that was far from normal — or even acceptable — to the family and the time in which he was born. The only obituary I’d ever seen, printed in the Geelong Grammar quarterly The Corian, held a list of his ‘unfinished’ published work. I forgot all the rest.

  Casual comments can create an entire story a child builds up around a parent — and the story’s even stronger when you can’t remember who made the comments or where or when.

  He squandered three fortunes …

  He wasted his talents …

  What Geelong Grammar–educated man drives taxis … ?

  The tone I absorbed was one of disapproval and shame.

  The story was that he was impulsive, that he ‘wasted’ his money on writing and travel and never finished anything, that he should have been more stable, should have made more sense. He was ‘difficult’, possibly a bit of a lunatic. What hurt the most was the word ‘amateur’ — where had I read that? Was it from Geoffrey Dutton’s memoir, Out in the Open, or Alister Kershaw’s Hey Days? They were the only two books I’d ever found that mentioned dad. Or was it from the obituary in The Corian?

  Denison conformed neither in his behaviour nor in his intellectual attitudes or aesthetic tastes, according to his obituary, written by prominent businessman Sir Robert Southey. A paragraph from writer and editor Stephen Murray-Smith was also included, claiming that dad was caught up somewhere between the Celtic twilight, the South of France, and Ayer’s Rock … None of it had made any sense to me as a child.

  The effort of packing up dad’s house, and his papers, was enormous, and it took mum over a year. She always had an anxious, heavy face after he died, tight with remembering. The complication of his boxes and paperwork made her so sad. I learned not to say his name, sensing a guilt so complex I might make something explode by asking for details.

  Two or three memories of dad stayed with me, like visions from a dream that quickly disintegrates when you open your eyes. I had to write them down to keep them safe.

  The first was when dad turned up at my primary school, pulling up in his taxi outside the spot in the playground where I was playing with my friends. It seemed so miraculous that he’d found me, in all the giant playground and secret places I could have been hiding. I usually only saw him every second weekend, or birthdays, because by then he and mum had separated.

  Dad, grinning with sparkly eyes, was holding something in his hand for me and strode from his taxi to the school fence to pass it over: a box of chocolate Smarties. It might as well have been a Willy Wonka bar with the golden ticket. Chocolate was a special treat — especially when given randomly, and in the middle of a school day.

  ‘Make sure you share them, Louie.’ He grinned, and waved goodbye.

  Another time, he turned up unexpectedly with another gift — a soft toy bunny rabbit he must have seen in a shop and bought on a whim.

  ‘Where is Lou?’ he said theatrically, standing behind the flyscreen door at mum’s house in North Carlton, pretending he didn’t know it was me because I’d had my hair cut.

  ‘It’s me, dad!’

  ‘Don’t forg
et to give Lou her gift!’

  And then — the broken bottle.

  We made the trip to the shops near his house. He always had a glass of red wine with the Sunday roast, which we’d eat in his kitchen after church at 3.00 p.m. He called it ‘Sunday dinner’, and it was one of his favourite rituals.

  He walked out of the shop with a bottle wrapped in paper, and realised he’d left something inside.

  ‘Hold this for me, Louie?’

  Inevitably, I dropped it. Red liquid and broken glass covered the footpath, and the smash made me so frightened that I ran down the street. Dad’s long legs caught me within seconds.

  The look of fear and sadness in his eyes was worse than any anger I’d expected over the broken bottle.

  ‘Lou! Why are you running?’

  ‘I smashed your wine, dad.’

  ‘There’s always more wine! But there’s no more Lou!’

  And then he died.

  No more dad.

  It was late on Saturday night when Coralie first contacted me. Despite a sudden summer storm, my inner-city apartment was stifling. I’d returned from a friend’s house for dinner. An amazing cook, she’d made a small group of us seafood and salads, and we’d talked into the night as we waited for the storm to settle. Dinner at Carmen’s was the highlight of an awful week.

  In the space of seven days, I’d attended a funeral, been to the emergency ward, and had to call the police because my downstairs neighbour had gone off the rails.

  I’d quit my job at the University a fortnight earlier after an impossible situation, and the prospect of starting from scratch depressed me. The job had been so ideal when I’d started, and ended so awfully, leaving a sad hollow in my stomach, a resistance to giving anything else my all.

  I wanted to write, maybe freelance again — but I had to come down from the year-long stint at the University, the disappointment I felt at how that had all turned out. There was no space in my head to plan and dream — everything felt a bit scary. I wondered if there was something wrong with me, for not being able to ‘hack’ the situation at the University, if only to keep earning a regular income.