A Letter from Paris Page 16

  Finally, after I prompted her twice (on Mystic’s advice), she sent me an email, and it was so strange, I realised she hadn’t even bothered to read my redrafted manuscript. I cried in the beautiful Sydney light, staring at the golden cliffs of Bondi and wondering what to do. How I would have loved to talk to dad right then. Instead I called Mystic.

  On Monday, I called Allen and Unwin, where the original publisher who’d requested my work had been, and explained to whoever answered the phone that the manuscript had once been requested. By Tuesday, they’d offered me a contract.

  Mystic served me a goat-cheese salad in her Newtown garden. ‘What book are you going to write next?’ she asked brightly. The complete opposite to mum, Mystic had expected my success all along.

  Yet mum’s response was so odd, so completely unexpected, so completely not what I’d thought her response to my contract of publication would be.

  ‘Thank God. Now you can move on with your life. It’s been so hard for me to watch you live like this,’ she said on the phone when I called. As though I’d been smoking crack or living on the street, not writing a book.

  She didn’t seem relieved at all, just tired. It finally twigged that nothing could change the story mum had in her mind. That life was hard and good things weren’t coming. I know she would have been proud if she’d been able to escape the weight of her depression.

  My sister consoled me over mum’s response, cheering me on for my perseverance. Dec sent me a handwritten note of congratulations.

  Mum chose to leave the world the week my contract arrived.

  Dad wasn’t a failure. Dad wasn’t a failure.

  To me, a failure was someone who didn’t try, who didn’t finish. Who cared what others thought? Dad had fearlessly pursued his dreams, despite health and money issues, despite lost luggage and missing letters and endless nonsensical rejections, despite living on a continent separated from the publishing powerhouses that ruled the world at the time. He still did it. He wrote. He finished. He sent. Despite teaching full-time and studying part-time and using a manual typewriter that must have made his wrists ache and his arthritic back hurt, he finished two books. Maybe four. Where was this travel book?

  I tore through the rest of the material in Canberra quicker than I’d ever worked before. With only a few hours until closing, and seven boxes to finish, I scoured hundreds of Ninette’s letters until I finally saw dad’s name in her cursive script from a letter to Geoff in 1942.

  He’s had a pretty lousy time. She wrote of his appearance after six months in the Northern Territory. The conditions and so on … he talks only of the war …

  A pretty lousy time. How they underplayed things during the war. Camping in squalid conditions in the middle of the outback for six months with no proper food, and ulcerated legs that would scar him for life, and dengue and malaria … Watching men shoot themselves … A pretty lousy time.

  I felt affection for Ninette, just as I had for Aldington, because she had been there for dad at a time he needed a friend. He’d written in his diary that her bright face meeting him at the station was a relief after months with suffering men.

  I worked my way through the rest of the boxes, including Geoff Dutton’s enormous collection of letters from Saint Clair. He detailed secret codes they’d use at the inn, dad’s unrequited love for one of Aldington’s American visitors who was already married, and how the three Australian men — dad, Geoff, Al — were as close as the Three Musketeers.

  When the library rang the bell for closing, I was the last to leave.

  I ordered an expensive glass of French wine in front of the open fire downstairs at my hotel, and posted a photo of one of the beautiful Saint Clair envelopes on Instagram. Clém and Coralie ‘liked’ it from Paris at the exact same time as Ayala in Melbourne.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Paris

  Louisa

  I feel bad that we never found Gisèle … Are you still coming to Paris?

  Coralie

  That summer, when my cat was seeking shade under mum’s planted succulents in the garden and the crickets started to sing, it finally felt as though things were breaking through.

  My old neighbours Jason and Deanne came down to stay in the apartment upstairs, and I found myself more confident articulating dad’s story. Curious about modern art and Australian history, they asked questions that had me proud of my new knowledge and dad’s connections, yet aware there were still large gaps.

  I started to compile a chronological book of dad’s life, and ended up giving it to my brother and sister for Christmas. It was the PhD I’d been researching all year — putting his life together. It felt good to have something concrete for all the inner work.

  I returned again and again to the cathedral-like room at the State Library as the days grew hotter. I juggled freelance assignments and short-term contracts to continue working my way through another six collections while planning and saving for Paris. The more I discovered, the clearer the story of his life became.

  But the artistic connections still confounded me, and I wondered about the Nolan painting. I emailed a woman in Sydney, whose father’s correspondence I’d found in dad’s papers. He’d been a painter in Melbourne and possibly friends with Nolan, so I wondered if she might have further clues to that mysterious photo. I flew interstate to meet her, but came back none the wiser.

  Despite everything I had learned and confirmed about dad, about what mattered in life, I still couldn’t help feeling that if I could find this Nolan painting, prove that it was a portrait of dad, then I could prove dad was of value, too.

  Coralie’s name reappearing in my inbox was a perfectly timed reminder of true value. A reminder that I should forget the Nolan painting and all the other things I couldn’t find. That I should get back to the French Sisters and the people who did matter. Remember to chase what gave me joy.

  Paris.

  How sweet that Coralie cared about not finding Gisèle.

  I bought my ticket to France after she sent me that email, first just googling prices out of curiosity, then seeing the sum fly out of my bank account — and gulping at the horror of the exchange rate from Australian dollars to euros. After a moment of panic, my energy shifted to excitement. This. This was what life was about! Planning adventures when you had the means and the desire!

  I breathed out with a feeling of looking forward, at last. France was a glorious dangling carrot, reward for all the library research, the endless months spent hunched in that cold room, and the contract I’d just accepted editing automated emails in an office in the ugliest part of Melbourne.

  The excitement of an adventure to plan for gave me renewed vigour for dad’s boxes. I didn’t care anymore about the Nolan portrait and who had painted it. The only secrets I still wanted to uncover seemed to be waiting in France. Coralie and Clémentine were living and breathing, and though I hadn’t met them, I felt connected through a shared journey. I downloaded my ticket receipt, and sent the sisters the dates.

  I wanted to meet Michelle’s family, but I had no idea how much time they would have to spend with me, or even how much they were interested, because I’d never actually found any meaningful references to Michelle in dad’s archives. Did they really care? It had been almost a year since the initial email from Coralie — perhaps they’d all moved on?

  Clémentine was possibly shooting a film somewhere else, Coralie had a new job that took her to London quite a bit, and the only other member of the family who’d messaged me was Edouard, their uncle. Yet as soon as he heard of my upcoming trip, he emailed me, as if to reassure me.

  It will be so great to meet! I will take you on a tour of Paris on my Harley Davidson motorbike.

  A motorbike ride around Paris!

  A giant slip of light, just to think of that.

  I bicycled down Brunswick Street to Fitzroy and bought myself a paper map
of France to pin to my wall and look at as I counted down the weeks, stopping in a French bistro next door that I’d never noticed before. The owner talked in a sing-song French to someone on the phone as I spied a photo of his family outside the venue’s sister cafe in France. Family. France. Why did those words seem inextricably linked?

  Amid all dad’s pain, suffering, disappointment, and supposed ‘failures’, his biggest joys had come from France.

  Richard Aldington, the Villa Aucassin, his beloved Gisèle.

  Paris, writing, life at the Hotel Floridor in 1951 when the hotelier had cooked for him because he was en famille and dad was friends with everyone in every room on every floor.

  After I found the news clipping about dad’s arrest at the Hotel Floridor, I’d investigated whether or not the hotel still existed, which it did. A few miserable reviews on TripAdvisor confirmed its one-star status, and I was a little too concerned to book a sentimental stay within its walls.

  Clémentine wrote that she’d contact them before my trip to see if I could do a tour — but I also knew she was busy, and might be shooting a film in Istanbul during March, so I didn’t hold much hope of gaining access.

  Instead I found an Airbnb studio apartment in Le Marais in which to stay for the entire month of March. My fortieth birthday in Paris. The romance of that thought made me smile. I scanned the map of France, putting a post-it on Le Lavandou in the South, knowing Saint Clair was somewhere nearby, even though it wasn’t listed on the map.

  The Villa Aucassin was still a mystery, but I had to find it.

  It seemed logical to me, that a place where dad had changed so much, become himself so fully, might still hold a trace of him. I felt convinced that if I found the Villa Aucassin, I would find something of dad that I’d never known before. Something secret, something hidden.

  I had to find it.

  But the letters hadn’t listed a street address, just Villa Aucassin and Chez Richard Aldington. Hundreds of letters and diary entries, and none of them had a street address.

  Every night I searched again, coming up with nothing but a sad fish-dish review on TripAdvisor for Les Sables D’Or inn, where dad had stayed and which appeared not to take travellers anymore. It was unclear whether or not the restaurant was still in operation. The sad-looking fish photo had been taken back in 2012.

  While the sun blazed outside in the heat of summer with the crickets singing into sundown, I drank Provence rosé in a wine glass filled with melting ice cubes on the floor of my apartment. I spaced out dad’s photos, attempting to collate the only ones I knew for sure were taken in France.

  In some ways, the journey through the boxes in the library and all the new books I’d found had been about collating dad’s photos. I just wanted a simple album, a neat and tidy chronology. To be able to say, dad went here, then, and this was him here, when he was doing this. I was envious of people with family albums someone else had arranged and annotated. The level of research just to uncover the location of one of dad’s photos — and to find new ones — had taken me a year.

  One photo of dad had always struck me — singed slightly at the edges, it had escaped fire in mum’s painting studio, decades ago. Looking away from the camera, he was lounging on a chair in the sunshine somewhere, wearing a vest.

  In another, dad was standing in front of grape vines in what looked like Provence.

  Blessedly, he’d written on the back of both of them: St Clair, 1948.

  He would have been twenty-eight.

  I fingered my favourites, the ones where he smiled differently, displayed a sense of relief, a face full of light.

  Saint Clair, Le Lavandou, they all had in common. 1947, 1948, 1949.

  Villa Aucassin.

  Saint Clair.

  While family and friends drove to the coast and swam in the blazing heat, cooking up sausages and sharing barbecues in bare feet, I spent the first few weeks of the year on the floor of my living room, working through the night to the soundtrack of the Marion Cotillard film La Vie en Rose while I put together my picture puzzle of dad’s France.

  I stuck post-its on my map anytime I found a particular photo location, just to have a visual of how and when dad had travelled, so I could try to retrace his footsteps in March.

  Melbourne. Paris. London. Vienna.

  Saint Clair. Saint Clair. Saint Clair.

  I searched the internet, holding the nearest corresponding town up to my giant map, locating Toulon a few centimetres to the left. Buried down the bottom of France, midway along the Côte d’Azur to Nice, there it was:

  Saint Clair Le Lavandou.

  My next task was to find the Villa Aucassin. Letters described life in the town, the Russian innkeeper named ‘Berky’, the fresh mullet Aldington’s wife, Netta, cooked with herbs, the local fishermen who chilled rosé in the rocks of the sea.

  Last night we put a record on the gramophone upstairs and sipped a glass of pastis with Henry Williamson.

  Compared to going through the same tattered pages recounting starvation and rations in London, reading dad in Saint Clair was like entering a halcyon world.

  Saint Clair is the first time I’ve felt the War was worth it. Everyone else seems obsessed with restraint. Here, in France, they know how to live.

  I searched the photos for more signs and clues.

  Dad’s TB-riddled body healing with the luxury of sunshine, slow walks around the little town, Aldington’s companionship, and the quiet life in the South of France. Crystal-clear Mediterranean waters, some jolly fishermen drinking their wine by the shore. Dad napping in a beret on a boat. A picnic under plane trees with Alister Kershaw and Geoff Dutton. Ninette lounging under the same plane tree. George Bailey, who’d gone on to write dozens of books, proposing to his wife because dad was so charismatic George worried he might steal her first.

  I finally knew who these people were. Some of dad’s closest friends.

  The descriptions of the Villa were my reference point, but even with Google Maps it was impossible to find if it still existed.

  Perhaps it was no longer called Aucassin? In one of Aldington’s hundreds of letters to dad, he had mentioned the Harmsworth family, a link to a famous English newspaper baron. But searching all the Wikipedia entries on that family revealed no clues, either. I messaged Aldington’s literary estate.

  Do you know if the Villa Aucassin still exists?

  They replied that they didn’t know.

  Saint Clair, Le Lavandou. Just the name sounded like a line from a song. I pulled a book of poetry off my shelf, seeking some relief. It was one of the small pile of books I’d chosen from dad’s collection when mum had packed up our house in the country.

  Inside, I saw a now-familiar name listed as editor: Richard Aldington.

  Published in 1947.

  Something felt so special, about knowing not only the name of the editor of this book, but also how and where it was assembled. This was the book of poetry Aldington had been working on, perhaps at the Villa Aucassin. I had to find this villa. I just wanted to look at it, to smell it, to walk inside. It was an obsession. Irrationally consuming.

  At the end of January, my sister arrived back from summer holidays with a book for me: it was a guide to the Côte d’Azur that included a paragraph on Saint Clair, which was apparently a little way from the main town of Le Lavandou. I read the pages, horrified to find hotels in Saint Clair wouldn’t be open until April, and my entire stay in France was booked for March. It was too late to change my ticket.

  Even the ferry, which I’d hoped to take to the island of Port Cros, where Aldington had lived with D.H. Lawrence, and dad had travelled by boat and been fed by those gorgeous jolly fishermen in one of my favourite photos, was closed for winter.

  ‘If you’re going to catch a train to the South of France, you need to book ahead. The price goes up the longer you leave it,’ she said.
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  But how could I book a train when I had nowhere to stay?

  ‘It seems like the town is only a tiny hamlet,’ I said. ‘If I even booked an Airbnb, I’d be miles from the water. And how would I get anywhere?’

  I pictured myself staying in a weird bungalow miles from the town, having to beg an owner in my poor French to drive me into town.

  The maps were confusing, the task of finding the Villa was overwhelming, and the time difference from Australia meant I couldn’t call any hotels in the Lavandou region to find the right information. I finally figured out the phone codes and stayed up until midnight to call the weird fish-dish place, rehearsing my terrible French to state my weird quest, but they didn’t answer and had no answering machine. The internet revealed no email address, either.

  I emailed two hotels, in English, and received two replies in French saying they were closed until summer.

  Would I have to just knock my way up and down the town to find the Villa Aucassin? I was prepared to do that, I felt so obsessed.

  I emailed Aldington’s biographer, Vivien Whelpton. She was generous and friendly, sending me references to dad she’d found in some of her research, but said she doubted if the Villa Aucassin still existed.

  I was too scared to book the train from Paris to Toulon, still having no hotel or place to sleep in Saint Clair.

  After two weeks of emails and searching, I decided to take a risk. I typed up an excerpt from one of dad’s entries about Saint Clair, and carefully chose one of the old photos I’d scanned. I included details of the flora and fauna around the Villa Aucassin, hoping someone might recognise part of the description.

  I added as many hashtags as I could think of and posted the picture to Instagram and Facebook, making the whole thing public, feeling vulnerable and scared.

  On seeing my post, Clémentine texted me something she found on Google in French, cheering me on for my bravery.

  I shared the post with the Lavandou tourism office, which also appeared to be closed for winter.