A Letter from Paris Read online

  I rode to my sisters to see her childhood photos. Perhaps there were more of Saint Clair, perhaps there were some clues about Paris … I still didn’t have the collection in complete order.

  My sister and I tried our best to figure out where they were taken, but she had been too young, and it made her sad not to know — or even have anyone to confirm. I noticed all our photos of Gisèle, who seemed to be with mum and dad and Ayala across France, England, and Germany in the 1970s. I wondered again at that curious relationship. In one beautiful photo, Gisèle was stooped in a white dress suit, talking to little Ayala. She treated us — dad’s children — as though we were her own.

  Back in the library, whipping through the last of the boxes, I stumbled across a series of poems written in the 1970s.

  Four Seasons in the Berry was my first experience of mum and dad romantically entwined. Watching the Tour de France together with Ayala in Saint Satur, having a picnic in Sancerre. Touring the Berry region … Mum’s handwriting mixed with dad’s, as though they’d written these poems and stories together.

  After seeing those photos at Ayala’s, I could even picture them. Mum had been smiling as she patted a little goat.

  Happy.

  My sister caught the tram into the city as soon as I texted her. She trembled and smiled as she read the poetry collection, rebelliously photographing the entire document there and then with her phone without even bothering to turn the noise off.

  I moved a box to protect her from view.

  I realised, with a pang of solidarity, that just as I felt upset when people used to ask me about dad — who was your father? — Ayala felt upset when people asked her about her childhood in Europe, which started at six months and lasted until she returned to Australia at age six. It sounded so exotic, but she’d been so young she had only a few memories. With this newfound box, and its series of poems, she could now annotate her own childhood album.

  With my sister beside me, I worked through the rest of the folders in the 1970s. A Hotel Floridor receipt from 1973 was jumbled in with a page from a folder marked 1981. I recognised a name: Michelle Chomé.

  In cursive pencil, underneath a list of music-history books, was Michelle’s address, in her handwriting. The page was from 1949, mixed up in the wrong box.

  Ilchester Hotel, Holland Park, London.

  The same diary he’d held when he caught the train back from France to London in 1949 now sat in a box of folders of writing from 1981. He’d kept her note for more than thirty years.

  That’s Mam’s handwriting! Edouard immediately messaged, light years away, from Paris.

  I had no idea why dad had held onto it for so long. It felt planted especially for me.

  Newly encouraged that something from 1949 might be in one of the 1970s folders, I kept reading. And there, in a mislabelled box buried deep in the library, was the ‘travel’ memoir Aldington’s letters had described.

  The book chronicled dad’s life in France with Australian expats and bohemians who’d also escaped Melbourne, from that first day arriving in Marseille to meeting Albert Tucker in a laneway in Saint Germain. It spoke of his travels with Gisèle, his love of the French, the conversations in all the places still tattered and scarred from the war, and that glorious casual simplicity and luxury with which even the poorest and humblest French treated life. It was a love story and a travel tale. Historical references mingled with lively anecdotes about people I’d only ever heard of in gallery catalogues.

  There was a chapter on the Hotel Floridor, a chapter on Saint Clair, and so much more — descriptions of dad’s life and friendships in Paris, the history of certain streets and how that played into his own experiences, anecdotes and insights about little towns in France in the 1940s and 1950s, and descriptions of dishes and specialties from the different regions of France. Encounters. Dialogue. Funny references.

  The manuscript was typed and bound in a beautiful black spine, ready for a publisher: 300 pages, 90,000 words. Must cut by a third, dad had written in a margin near the start. Presumably after Aldington’s advice.

  France in the 1950s, it was originally titled. He’d updated it to Landscape with Australians in the 1970s when he’d gone back to read it, and that was somehow why it wound up in the 1970s box and not listed properly.

  Finished in October 1955, the year of his return to Australia. Just as Aldington had advised him to get another book underway, after the Denon translation.

  I felt triumphant, like I’d unearthed the most sacred manuscript of all.

  Dad’s writing carried me to France and through the cast of characters I’d spent a year deciphering and uncovering in his letters and diaries. But this was a polished book — the characters he described jumped off the page. Mostly, I felt dad’s happiness in the book; he was touring me through France in the late 1940s to the 1950s. What a gift.

  If the purpose of publishing is to make something that people can read long after you’ve gone, then dad had achieved that. The library had preserved what a publishing deal had not, just as the National Gallery in Canberra had saved his Boyd portrait from a family fire.

  With Ayala reading alongside me, I tore through the first chapters of the book, reluctant to bury it back in the box.

  When at last we had to go, I booked in to photograph it in its entirety the next day. I printed the whole thing at Officeworks the next night, grinning the whole way home to think of the treasure I now held in my possession.

  A love note to France, a long letter to me, a guide I could take on my journey.

  I stayed up late reading the chapter about a trip through a haunted village in the Pyrenees with Gisèle.

  Impulsively, I emailed Coralie.

  I know you already looked through the French phone book for Gisèle, but I was just wondering if your cousin found anything else — a death certificate, anything — just so we can know what happened.

  Within minutes, she replied:

  Attached is Gisèle’s school record with her mother’s maiden name and her birth date. I suggest you message anyone on Facebook with the surname Satoor de Rootas … I’ll write to her school, to see if they know anything. Perhaps, like it did with us, Facebook will connect us to the right people?

  Bonne chance, Louisa xx

  I looked at Gisèle’s name on the school record. I’d been spelling it wrong all this time. It was Satoor de Rootas. Not de Satoor de Rootas.

  I found only four people with that surname on Facebook, and they were all located in the Netherlands. Less than an hour later, my phone started to ping with Facebook messages.

  Gisèle is my great aunt … the last we heard from her was in 2014 …

  2014?

  There was an address, a nursing home outside Paris. I shook as I pasted the information in an email to Coralie, begging her to call the place.

  Clém, who had by now become emotionally involved in the hunt as well, messaged me as I was sitting by the computer endlessly pressing refresh on my emails.

  Coralie is on the phone to the residence right now … hold tight, Louisa!

  Twenty minutes later, Coralie replied.

  LOUISA — GISÈLE IS ALIVE

  Part Three

  Kin

  Chapter Sixteen

  Par avion

  Gisèle is in an old people’s home outside Paris. She’s been there for the last nine years. She is very old and isolated (no family around) and is losing her memory. Apparently, she was always looking perfectly made up, going into Paris weekly, until just last year, when she had a stroke.

  I explained the story to Sandrine the receptionist, and you are welcome to see her anytime … I suggest we call them the day before you arrive, so she’s more likely to remember, because her short-term memory isn’t very good.

  When would you like to visit? I will call them to back to arrange when you let me know.

&nbs
p; Coralie

  I felt sick with emotion, so grateful to Coralie, so shocked, that I had to call her, despite it being late and hot in Melbourne and who knows what time in Paris.

  ‘Is that you, Louisa?’ she answered in perfect English, and I marvelled at the miracle of the phone.

  ‘Oh, Coralie, I had to call you! This is amazing.’

  I was sobbing in gratitude, but trying not to let the sniffles escape down the line. I asked her to explain how far away from Paris Gisèle’s residence was. On Google Maps, it had confused me, and I had no idea which Métro train to catch. Perhaps Orsay was considered the country.

  ‘Don’t worry, Louisa, Clém is going to go there with you. See you next week in Paris!’

  I wondered if I’d misheard her. I thought Clémentine was shooting a film?

  Clémentine texted me, as if reading my thoughts. Don’t worry, Lou. I’m not going to let you catch the train out there alone. We’ll go to Gisèle on Friday!

  To think that Gisèle had been sitting there, across the world, living, breathing, talking, all this time. I couldn’t sleep.

  My godmother had been alive, on the other side of the oceans it took me to find her. More, the French sisters were so caring that they took the search on as their own.

  It was unreal. Finding dad’s French memoir was a buried treasure, but Gisèle was a direct connection to dad. They’d met in 1949 or 1950, she’d knitted him jumpers until his death, she’d always sent us cards … She was family.

  Gisèle is alive. Gisèle is alive. I kept repeating the information in my head, thinking of how strange the timing was, turning the events and information over and over. She’d been there all this time, as I searched in the library.

  A stroke, just a year earlier …

  But perhaps if I’d known earlier, I wouldn’t have opened those boxes … ?

  Ayala was speechless and Dec dropped his head to his chest when I told them the news. None of us knew what it all meant.

  As the days drew towards my flight to London, excitement turned to anxiety. I scanned the list of names and addresses I’d typed into a document that my sister had turned into a printed itinerary. Strangers, really, but they meant so much in my journey:

  Clémentine, Coralie, Edouard, Gisèle, Raphaël, Ivor, Sylvain.

  Places on maps I’d only ever traced on paper:

  London. Toulon. Paris. Orsay. Saint Clair.

  It all seemed as unreal as my godmother revealing herself to be alive, years after I’d mourned her.

  Stay alive, I whispered in the dark, imagining Gisèle could hear me. A year was a long time for someone aged ninety-one. What if she was gone before I got there? I’d lost so much already, I couldn’t accept this possible new reality. Alive.

  The temperature didn’t drop below the high thirties the night before I left Melbourne, and at 4.00 a.m. when my taxi arrived to take me to the airport, it seemed almost insane to pack a scarf and jacket in my carry-on bag.

  Once on the plane, knowing I was at least travelling towards Gisèle, but panic-stricken that she might go before I got there, I poured myself a drinkable bath of valium and plastic wine and stared at the stars on the roof of the plane until I fell into a kind of half-sleep. Somewhere above the Pacific Ocean, in between two continents, I woke up and reminded myself to drink lots of water, for the upcoming dinner with Ivor was approaching.

  By the time we finally touched down, twenty-four hours and a humid stop in Dubai later, I’d made it to London.

  I thought of dad’s boat ride in 1947, how for five weeks in a tiny cabin with no windows he crossed the same oceans that took me a day. As sick as he’d been, and as little as I wanted to trade places, I did think, for a moment, that enforced duration of time between countries must have given him a better idea of the monumental expanse of space he’d crossed.

  Walking through the many checkpoints to enter Britain from the plane, I turned on my phone to call Ivor, disorientated by the queues and calling codes. I found the line for those without a British passport.

  ‘Wonderful that you made it, Louisa!’ Ivor said, answering quickly, like we were old friends. He confirmed he’d be ‘home’ by the time I got through customs and made my way to his flat, giving me a rough idea of how long it would take from Heathrow in a car.

  I collected my heavy luggage and walked through the airport, thinking there must be some sort of customs queue to check my bags, but, when I found myself outside, it seemed apparent there was none, and I’d missed my chance at using a luxurious indoor bathroom to get changed. As it poured down with rain in the dark outside a public bathroom, I got changed for dinner in London in a toilet cubicle next to the bus stop. I coated my face with make-up and sprayed all sorts of products in an attempt to disguise my jet-lagged stupor, then went outside and hailed a lovely old-fashioned London cab.

  ‘First time in London, love? Let me guess — Australian?’

  The black cab was so shiny and elegant, I must have said something about how old it looked, because my cabbie started telling me how many London city history tests he had to pass to drive a cab. He was very proud of his profession.

  ‘Nah, nah, can’t speak, mate, I’ve got an Australian in the back who’s never been to London before,’ I heard him say to his phone, before commencing our forty-five-minute history tour from Heathrow to the city of London.

  Getting out of the airport, we passed what looked like housing-commission estates and hit a freeway full of traffic, which got thicker and thicker until we were in the sleek streets of Earl’s Court and the City of Westminster.

  ‘That’s the Victoria and Albert Museum, love … Alfred Hitchcock the film director, you know? That’s his old house, oh and Lady Diana had her dresses made here … some pretty posh fashion places, if you will …’

  It was dark, but I could still see the streets and the architecture, locations I’d only ever read of.

  In Sloane Square, finally, we entered what seemed to be a court of red-bricked houses overlooking a tidy square.

  ‘Very posh area, love, very posh. Staying with family, are we?’ He turned to inspect me as he slowed down the car.

  I mumbled something indecipherable in reply, not sure what to say.

  ‘There’s your man in the window,’ he announced, as though Ivor was a waiting uncle. I looked out at a huge corner building, where Ivor waved from his desk.

  The old building looked so elegant and inviting with its glowing lamps in the London dark, like a library or a gallery being opened up to me for a private tour.

  ‘Louisa! Good to meet you!’ We kissed on the cheek and Ivor waved me in, grabbing my enormous suitcase and hoicking it up the steps to the hallway. ‘Come in, come in!’ he said warmly, guiding me inside, a little distracted by something on his phone. I gathered he’d just come from an art auction and was tidying up some paperwork.

  The ceilings were so tall, and the entranceway flanked by such an impressive gothic painting, I felt I could finally exhale after enduring the confinement of that pressurised air cabin for twenty-four hours.

  Thin, wiry, intelligent, Ivor was friendly and open and busy and unformal. He obviously loved his work. I felt comfortable with him immediately, despite the fact we’d never met before.

  His son wandered in and we were introduced, but then he quietly disappeared upstairs.

  ‘Let’s have a glass of wine in the kitchen. You can show me your photos.’

  He turned to look at me as I followed him out of the study, apparently concerned by something in how I moved or sighed.

  ‘Oh, you didn’t fly coach did you … ?’

  He looked nauseous just contemplating it.

  ‘I’ve invited an old friend to join us for dinner. He’s Australian, you’ll like him. He’ll be here soon.’

  He led me to the kitchen, with a nervous whippet tagging along behind us both, and we sat
at a large wooden table. Oh, it was so nice to be in a kitchen within an hour of landing in London, the ceilings as high as a church, soft light and natural air relaxing me after the fluorescent artificiality of that twenty-four-hour flight.

  I pulled out my precious box of photos. I’d been so paranoid about losing the originals, I’d kept it in my carry-on luggage, every so often checking it was still there during the flight.

  Each of the fifty or so photos was in a plastic archive sleeve with a slip of paper detailing the source, possible date, or at least possible year on the back. It had taken me all year to create that box — and still, many of the slips of paper had question marks.

  Ivor poured us generous glasses of wine from a bottle of something French, eagerly scanning the photos. I learned he bought the Villa Aucassin because his own father had taken him to Saint Clair for holidays as a child in the 1950s and he had his own sentimental attachment to the town. He’d even bought some area around the Villa to protect it from overdevelopment, in an effort to help the town retain its original tranquillity. He was particularly keen to see if I had any photos of the garden or the town’s flora and fauna from 1948, because he wanted to preserve the gardens as they had been originally intended.

  As he looked, I pulled out a photocopy of one of dad’s diary entries from Aucassin. I’d impulsively packed it, thinking Ivor might like to know Henry Williamson once drank pastis in his holiday house.

  The speed at which Ivor flicked through the photos was breathtaking. I felt a pang, and wished we had more time to discuss them one by one. ‘Oh, that’s the fishing wharf in Saint Tropez,’ he’d comment on one that had a question mark, before speeding on to the next one, suggesting it was taken in Nice or Cannes, before I had the chance to write on a post-it to stick on the back. In less than fifteen minutes, he worked through all fifty or so photos.