A Letter from Paris Page 17

  Flies buzzed and crickets sang, and I went to bed with my windows open, tossing and turning.

  Had I made a huge mistake? Who books a trip to the South of France in the off-season, when nothing is open? But I’d already paid for my ticket. It was too late.

  Chapter Fourteen

  L’éloge

  The trip to France gave me the strength to attack one final collection. It had been on my list since I’d found a copy of the Corian obituary. There was a small excerpt from Stephen Murray-Smith, and I had a feeling it had been cut from a larger piece.

  Stephen Murray-Smith was an Australian literary figure who had known dad since Geelong Grammar. Enlisting in one of the first Commando groups like dad, he also travelled to Europe in the post-war period; and when Stephen returned to Australia, he became the founding editor of the literary journal Overland. He published half a dozen of dad’s essays, reviews, and stories in various editions.

  Unlike Geoff Dutton’s contribution to the obituary, which included the painful list of dad’s supposedly unfinished works, Stephen’s part noted:

  When Denison settled down and wrote he wrote well. Perhaps his diaries will some day add more to this …

  I suspected there might be some letters to or from dad in Stephen’s collection because they seemed such close friends. But mainly, I wanted to find the rest of the obituary — if it did, in fact, exist.

  Denison Deasey was caught up somewhere between the Celtic twilight, the South of France, and Ayer’s Rock …

  Searching for your dead dad’s obituary during summer holidays isn’t the cheeriest activity, but a vision of March in France was now there to warm me when the grief came back.

  Sure enough, there were dozens of references to correspondence to, from, and about dad when I examined the inventory of Stephen’s enormous manuscript collection.

  As I walked back to the reading room, I noticed Stephen’s portrait hanging near that of Arthur Boyd. I’d been coming to the library for a year now and only just noticed him nodding at the entranceway.

  I made my way slowly and methodically through the first of the boxes, moving straight to 1984.

  In the first folder, I found a full two-page letter from Stephen to the chief librarian at the State Library, recommending they purchase dad’s entire manuscript collection. Without Stephen’s detailed recommendation, both of dad’s writing style and the historical value of his manuscripts — and offered out of concern for our welfare, for mum was then a widow with three young children — I had no doubt the library would never have purchased his papers for such a large sum.

  Stephen Murray-Smith was the reason I was able to read my dad’s diaries.

  A flicker of affection came at the obvious care he had for my dad, at making such a gesture.

  Part of the recommendation gave me pause: he implored the library to make use of dad’s collection before the people and players — and the reference points they carried inside them — were all gone.

  As I brushed over a note from dad thanking Stephen for a warming fireside chat, I wished I could join them both. Stephen would have understood just how difficult this past year of making sense of all the connecting threads had been. He’d predicted it, in that letter to the library from 1984.

  From there, I found the full obituary: three tightly typed pages about dad. I scanned urgently, pin prickles forming under my skin in the tomb-cold room. I fell back into the sense that I was six and dad had just died.

  Denison was crack-hardy, he didn’t whinge … He was a brilliant, coruscating companion and leader … He had a hold over [his friends], as over a divorced wife who kept sending him sweaters until his death.

  He was hurt at school — one incident of a particularly traumatic nature was brushed aside when he sought for sympathy and protection … He never forgot this, nor forgave. It went to that buried heart of his which really believed in decency, justice and love … He would not be twisted, not by external forces, at any rate. And of course he paid for it … he retained the capacity to be an honest man.

  I shall think of him always as the handsome, devil-may-care rake with the sports car and too much money — money which he liked, but which he disposed of, because it too got in the way of truth …

  I thought about that sense of shame I always had about dad. How I’d read that he was constantly running away from school, hitchhiking, forming ‘gangs’, rebelling in ways that had him pegged as the ‘black sheep’. I wondered if it was connected to the ‘incident of a particularly traumatic nature’.

  I searched, and searched, and searched through their correspondence, trying to find out what the ‘incident’ was. Had dad written about it, like he’d written about the war?

  And then — dad’s familiar scrawl.

  All my love, Denison.

  In a box of articles for Overland, buried under a rejection slip for one of Tim Winton’s first stories, was a draft of an essay about education, presumably meant for publication. Dated 1982, dad’s handwriting was immediately recognisable on the covering note.

  I cannot pass that school even now without a slight memory-jar of repulsion. There was this curtained room, in the deputy head’s residence, the sound of flies buzzing against the window, the dark furniture, and the surprising instruction to take one’s pants down.

  Beating was good for one, in educational theory of the time … but my insolence increased in proportion to the number of beatings … I began to develop a sort of racism against the English upper class.

  The English upper class. That, in one paragraph, explained years of diary entries where he scorned anyone who was dishonest, and where he displayed a particular suspicion of English snobbery related to class.

  I felt a pang of anger on dad’s behalf, and nausea and solidarity when I remembered something from dad’s childhood memoir:

  In the Junior School he’d say ‘Kiss me …’ … the little old man with the protruding eyes … He had his own little sleep out dormitory and as a special favour a few slept there. In the mornings upon waking it was their privilege to stand behind his bed and scratch his bald head.

  But I went against it. I organized a gang, dug my nails into his head when they tried to tame me by the flavoured flattery, put mice in his bed and began to build up a reputation as Bad.

  My shame at his ‘black sheep’ status transformed into a swelling of pride at such an early sense of self-protection. But the pride was also a sense of understanding, finally, why he was so ‘wasteful’ with money. He couldn’t stand dishonesty.

  It wasn’t something you reported to the family, he’d written.

  Certainly not when it was the best school in Australia and your family was paying money for you to board there. Power. Secrets. Money. Institutional lies.

  The job I’d left at the University a year earlier had ended because of a similar situation with an individual. No one wanted to talk about it. No one wanted to risk their jobs. Money. Secrets. Lies. Money.

  In a second, my own attitude to freedom, the same attitude I’d always been ashamed of, because I couldn’t just be ‘normal’ and put up with things — ‘Lou, just stay there, think of the money’ — was unlocked. I’d inherited it from dad.

  My lifelong recurring nightmare — that someone is attacking me and I can’t make a noise — came from a fear that materialised at that University job. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t be honest. Because of money. And hierarchy. And prestige.

  When I raised the issue with workmates who had noticed, and experienced, the same thing with the same individual, I was stunned at their lack of solidarity. Eventually, when it got to the point where I felt physical fear about coming into work, I initiated a report. Only one of my workmates had come with me.

  Because the University had such a reputation. If they rocked the boat by speaking out, they might lose their jobs. Their security. Mortgages and money. Mone
y. Secrets … Sometimes it’s better just to keep quiet …

  Three months after I’d made the initial complaint, three months during which the vile behaviour continued, the person was finally asked to leave. Remaining on a six-figure salary for a further six months to avoid any embarrassment to the University. Everyone kept going along like nothing had happened.

  I was so disgusted I quit.

  No one could understand why I walked away from such a job. Best university in Australia. I could tell my friends and family were disappointed in me — that I couldn’t just grin and bear it.

  Think of the money. Think of the prestige. Think of your future, Lou. Just stick it out for another year …

  Time is such a construct.

  Dad’s trauma was familiar; at the same time, it was both new and unknown. Part of me felt I had always known, because I had inherited the feeling that came from it, even though I didn’t know where it came from. I felt disgust at the kinds of people who end up in power, as well as those who keep them there by insisting on maintaining the status quo.

  Then another part of me became angry on dad’s behalf, and then another part was adding it up with all else that I’d learned so far, about his attitudes to money and religion and formality and superficiality, and it all merged with his love of France, their Gallic pride in the individual and their questioning of authority and how they weren’t afraid to talk about complicated things.

  It also explained his intense interest in French education theories, which valued liberty, play, and self-expression over the hierarchical English imperialism and insistence on corporal punishment that he’d witnessed first-hand in Australia.

  That vicar deserved more than mice.

  His own father sat on the school council and had his name on wooden boards plastered around the halls.

  It wasn’t something you reported to the family …

  He was just a kid. Nine years old, maybe ten.

  In moments of fear like that, even as a child, you see through it all — the esteem, the religion, how unquestioned power means some can take advantage. See the rotten core. So much so that you couldn’t feel safe simply because someone had more power in the hierarchy.

  He was only a kid.

  I remembered another incident from one of his diaries, about how the older boys at that prep school had half-filled bathtubs, put the younger boys in, then placed wooden planks above them as they turned on hot-water taps. Torturing them in some sort of initiation.

  The best school in Australia. The Australian version of Eton.

  Further in the childhood memoir — that sense of fiery self-protection he believed had come from his Irish ancestors, which is why he was so determined to go to Dublin and find them.

  To tell some stories, to have some real, unpretentious conversations.

  I looked up from my desk, understanding why dad had always been so irreverent to authority, so comrade-like in his own career as a teacher, treating his students more like allies than subjects. He encouraged them to read books off the school syllabus, to go to the theatre and explore and create and express themselves and try new things, which had got him in trouble with the other teachers and even the school boards. He endured constant attention from the school board for initiating cultural trips to the theatre. Because thinking for yourself and creative imagination wasn’t something that was encouraged in his time.

  I felt sadness, but also a strange sense of relief.

  Months earlier, I’d contacted dad’s school, to see if they had any public record of his school days. Like his army service records, his biographical cards from the school didn’t make any sense until I’d read the corresponding memoirs. When they had arrived in the mail, attached was a handwritten note:

  Denison had a general record of unconventionality.

  There was also a handwritten apology from the school’s historian for one of the notes on the card. Below the facts and dates of dad’s army service and subsequent life in France were the words:

  Married a non-European. Not improved.

  The words referred to Gisèle.

  I remembered her olive skin, a vague memory that her family had come from the Netherlands, originally. Or perhaps Indonesia.

  I sat with Stephen’s obituary, lingering on a new detail: a divorced wife who kept sending him sweaters until his death.

  Was that Gisèle? Dad had written of her knitting by the open fire in Warburton.

  Every year until he died. This warmed me so much. How she must have loved him.

  De Satoor de Rootas was Gisèle’s surname. Spelled in so many different ways depending where I looked. Some of dad’s papers spelled it ‘Ruytas’; another said ‘Roitas’. Even the obituary spelled it differently: ‘Reitas’. Coralie had told me her surname wasn’t French. Maybe that’s why we couldn’t find her death record.

  Regardless of where she’d come from, Gisèle had represented all that dad loved about France. Liberty. Art and culture (for even after she’d returned to Paris, Gisèle wrote always to dad about the latest exhibition she’d seen). Independence and freedom of self-expression. In France, he’d been unburdened by the conventions of his repressive Church of England upbringing.

  I rode home through the Fitzroy Gardens, the summer song of cicadas and a gentle breeze blowing me home. As I arrived home, I heard a buzz from my phone.

  A Facebook message from a stranger appeared:

  Chère Mademoiselle …

  The sender’s name was Raphaël.

  He appeared to live in Saint Clair.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Trouvé

  Chère Mademoiselle, La Villa Aucassin des les fonds de Saint-Clair existe toujours.

  Si vous venez au Lavandou, je pourrai vous la montrer.

  Dear Mademoiselle, The Villa Aucassin still exists in the streets of Saint Clair.

  If you come to Lavandou, I can show it to you.

  The distinguished-looking gentleman whose face appeared by the side of the message had no idea that, halfway across the world, he’d made me cry tears of joy.

  The Villa still exists, and he will take me there!

  Somehow linked to the Lavandou tourism board, who I assumed had forwarded him my Instagram message, he seemed very cultured, and I was so touched by how quickly he grasped the Villa’s importance.

  I corresponded with Raphaël a little more, trying to explain the story in English; deciphering, from his messages in French, that the owner of the Villa was an Englishman. There was also a mysterious gardien de la Villa, and I couldn’t figure out if that was Raphaël or someone else, probably insulting him by asking, to which he replied that he was the Cultural Minister for the Lavandou area in the South of France.

  He soon asked me for the dates I would be in Saint Clair, so he could ‘make arrangements’. I quickly booked the train to Toulon, even though I still had no idea where I would stay. But La Villa Aucassin existe toujours … I had to take the risk.

  By morning, another message had arrived. It was from an Englishman named Ivor Braka.

  Raphaël told me of your journey to search for the Villa Aucassin and I’m happy to tell you I’m the owner and I’d be pleased to let you see it. My phone number is below, let’s discuss your trip when the times co-ordinate from London to Australia.

  It all seemed so simple! Yet it had taken me so long to get up the courage to post that Instagram message! How could this be?

  Late that Sunday night, as the temperature soared to the late thirties and I had the Australian Open tennis on TV while my ceiling fan whirred, I waited until it was late morning in London to call the number he’d listed.

  ‘Hello, Ivor? Is this a good time?’

  ‘Yes — I’m just watching the tennis.’

  It was midway through the second set, and we were both going for Nadal. I could hear the echo of the same lopped balls from
Ivor’s television, halfway across the world.

  At the tie-breaker, he insisted on calling me back.

  When we spoke, the next night, he was remarkably casual, but his English accent reminded me of royalty. He asked me to bring originals of dad’s Lavandou photos to his flat in London, the night I arrived.

  ‘We’ll go for a late dinner after.’

  He was as interested in art as he was in history, which explained why he was so curious to see dad’s photos and hear of the Aldington links to his villa. But he was a busy man, and had a lot of plans already booked, so the only night we could coordinate meeting in London was the night I arrived.

  After twenty-four hours of travel, I’d be going to dinner in Sloane Square.

  Ivor immediately emailed the ‘gardien’ — the Villa’s caretaker. It wasn’t Raphaël, but was in fact a woman named Josephine.

  Please show Louisa inside Aucassin, and take her up to the upper areas, and the back part which overlooks the town.

  Josephine sent me a cheery email in English, and I immediately asked her if there was anywhere to stay. She suggested a hotel, one of the only ones that was open in the off-season, just a short walk from the Villa. I booked it immediately.

  In the space of a few hours, I’d arranged meetings with strangers on the other side of the world to see a place I’d wondered about my entire life.

  Aucassin.

  Saint Clair.

  All that was left to organise was Paris.

  As January turned into February and my France trip was only weeks away, I became more determined than ever to finish working through dad’s France material at the library. I wanted to be able to walk the streets of his beloved Paris as he always referred to it, to see the same buildings, to map out my own retrace of his favourite paths. I searched for addresses and clues in old letters.

  Even with Gisèle gone, I could use his previous addresses as a sort of time-travelling map while I explored the city.

  I circled everything on the forty-four page itinerary of dad’s library collection that related to France — and one folder that didn’t. I double-checked which files I’d opened and which ones I might have missed, booking to see one final box with a memoir named Landscape with Australians, apparently written in the 1970s.