A Letter from Paris Read online

  In the end, only one or two were actually of the Villa Aucassin. Only two showed him the layout of Saint Clair as it was in the 1940s.

  Some others, he said, were taken at the inn. Les Sables D’Or — Berky’s. The restaurant with the tired fish-dish on TripAdvisor. The inn where dad had lodged when Aldington had no room at the Villa.

  ‘Oh, God. I’m sorry, Ivor.’ I felt terrible. Like he’d welcomed me to his home — and was letting me visit the Villa Aucassin — under false pretences. ‘Would you like copies of those two photos of Aucassin?’

  ‘Yes, please,’ he said cheerily, before topping up my wine and his, and jumping up to get the doorbell.

  Another man, Richard, joined us in the kitchen, casually shedding an extraordinarily elegant scarf and coat and dropping both on the chair beside me.

  ‘Louisa’s dad lived at Saint Clair in the 1940s! We’re going to dinner soon, but let me just read this document …’

  Ivor eagerly moved on to the Henry Williamson printout from dad’s diary. As he held a glass of wine in one hand and read aloud from dad’s memoir in his Sloane Square accent, while Richard listened and chuckled at certain moments, I felt as though dad was there, sitting with us at the table, giving a performance. Ivor seemed to understand how important dad’s writing was to me, and he appreciated it, too.

  A car arrived and we all bundled in and went to dinner.

  ‘Leave your suitcase here, we’ll come back after dinner and I’ll order you another car,’ said Ivor warmly. My London adventure had begun.

  Dinner was in a nearby bistro in a place I learned to be Victoria, named after the queen, because we were just around the corner from Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey. I didn’t have the energy to feel anxious anymore, and Ivor and Richard were so friendly, I didn’t want to waste the occasion.

  A waiter took our coats and shuffled us to a table at the back of the room. As we sat down, Ivor mentioned some ‘appalling new developments’ in the South of France, and I loved that he was interested in preserving history. It was everything I’d been working on for the past year. I had an unlikely comrade — a complete stranger who was interested in both France, and Art with a capital ‘A’.

  A bottle of red wine was delivered, followed by entrees, and I forgot to ask what I was eating because Richard and Ivor were busy discussing a Klimt painting that had apparently sold for ‘too much’ at an auction they’d just attended. ‘Just because an artist is famous, doesn’t mean what they’ve created is automatically worth millions,’ one said, and I ate my mysterious entree, deliberately drinking more water than that beautiful wine in an attempt to stay awake for the duration of dinner.

  Ivor, sitting across from me on the booth side, kept looking over at me every once in a while and saying kindly, ‘You’re doing really well,’ or, ‘This must just seem surreal.’

  We talked about our dads — all born in the 1920s — and what they’d lived through. World War II, starvation, rationing, the mass migration to and from London after the war. I mentioned dad’s tuberculosis and malaria, and Ivor suggested the enforced starvation from the war rationing may have been a factor in why they all survived such maladies back then. While dad had died aged sixty-three, Ivor’s and Richard’s fathers had lived to their eighties and nineties, despite similarly harrowing and ancient diseases. I agreed with Ivor’s theory about enforced starvation. It would have really made them appreciate their butter and wine.

  ‘They think a bit of induced fasting helps longevity …’ We happily drank our wine and ate our bread, aware that all our fathers had struggled in nearby streets just to find these very things.

  We talked of Art, and history, and value, and Australians in London in the 1940s and the present-day, and at some point an enormous plate of crab spaghetti was delivered to my place at the table. A little while later, when I hit some invisible wall and couldn’t even raise my cutlery to eat, Ivor loaded up his fork and ate the rest from my plate, like he was finishing off his son’s meal at the table.

  Thinking of dad in his miserable wallpapered room in Edgeware Road, seventy years earlier, during those first weeks in his glorious first trip ‘abroad’, I felt like some kind of balance was being restored. That Ivor, a man connected to the art world, too, was buying me a delicious meal at a beautiful restaurant straight off the plane, gave me a peculiar sense of rightness.

  The conversation went back to Klimt, and Art, and the names of artists whose work I’d only ever seen in the National Gallery of Australia were tossed over the table along with prices and monetary values that made my head spin.

  ‘I mean, not everything Picasso did was amazing …’

  Ivor regaled us with some funny stories, playing different accents perfectly.

  Perhaps stories are the only thing whose value doesn’t change over time, I found myself pondering vaguely.

  For the first time since I’d begun the whole mad journey back in Melbourne with the library and the letters, I felt like I was experiencing dad, how others might have experienced him in London in the 1940s.

  This — what Ivor was giving me — was what dad gave to others.

  I knew dad had loved to take people to dinner, when he had the money, and bugger the cost. He adored good wine, witty conversation, history, and stories, to teach through theatrics and imagination.

  It’s what he’d done for Michelle in London in 1949, gaining access to the Coronation chair at Westminster Abbey not because a friend played the accordion (which she’d assumed), but because he was bold enough to introduce himself to the man and ask (I’d since found in his diary).

  Dad had dared to play a bigger game.

  And that’s why Michelle had been inspired to do the same. No wonder she hadn’t forgotten him, I thought sleepily, London cabs honking outside the restaurant. Just as I would never forget the humour and ease Ivor showed with his warm and fun company to a stranger straight off the plane from Australia, swooping me into his world.

  Money and access to privilege don’t automatically make someone good or kind, but when you combine the two — like Ivor did, with me, being so warm and easy and welcoming and fun — it just makes the big wild ride of life make more sense.

  Back at his house, Ivor ordered me a car to take me to my hotel. Bundled into this third new London car with warm farewells and wine-infused jokes, I pulled out the address of my hotel to give to the driver. I’d booked it because it seemed to be located directly across from Saint Pancras station; my sense of direction is terrible at the best of times, and I needed to find the Eurail to Paris first thing the next morning.

  The driver seemed disbelieving. ‘Never heard of that place, love. Sure it’s a hotel?’

  I showed him my printed receipt, an act that took a lot of energy as I’d been awake for two days, and was now also drunk. He put the address into his GPS, and seemed even more suspicious when we got there.

  ‘Hang on, just let me have a look, love.’ He slowed the car to a crawl, peering out the window. ‘Don’t want anything to happen to you, love.’

  He drove around the block once more, eventually coming to a stop.

  ‘You’ll be all right, girl. Only one night,’ he said, as if to reassure himself as much as me. He got my suitcase out of his trunk.

  I made it up the stairs while he sat there, not moving the car. As I turned to wave, imploring him to go, he shouted again, ‘Lock the door, love!’

  My room was small, but it was fine enough. The carpets were a little sticky, but I couldn’t see anything else wrong with the hotel. Was it because he’d collected me from Sloane Square … the contrast?

  I fell asleep in another world to the one I’d left. A world of cold air and long-sleeved jumpers, a world of Art and Buckingham Palace and Sardinian wine that tasted like nectar and warm strangers who were letting me visit their villas in the South of France.

  The next morning, when I
walked down to reception to enquire about check-out procedure, they offered me free breakfast in the downstairs restaurant.

  A TV blared from the entranceway: ‘Last night, a Klimt painting sold for forty-eight million dollars at Christie’s, making it the third-most expensive artwork ever sold …’

  I poured myself a coffee from a freshly steaming jug in the restaurant, and looked for some butter for my toast.

  ‘Sorry love, we’re all out,’ said a woman behind the fruit tray.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Passage de l’Horloge

  So eager to get to Paris, I arrived at Saint Pancras station an hour early. People from all nationalities bustled about me, and without a second glance at my suitcases the customs officer stamped my passport, and I was on my way, like popping over to Paris on a two-hour train wasn’t something I’d been dreaming of for years.

  As I found my seat on the train, I spied my first Frenchwoman. Slim, elegant, and gliding gracefully on her pin-thin heels, she wheeled a small suitcase to her assigned seat and took out a magazine from her bag. While passengers scrambled and panted, some bellowing loudly into phones and at small children, she maintained a self-contained air of exclusion. I tried not to stare, enchanted.

  The whistle blew and we were off, first trundling slowly through the outskirts of England, past shipping yards and brown squares (what I assumed to be council flats) blocking the grey skies, until we were underground, speeding through the English Channel. As though I’d taken on his ghost in the past year, I felt the peculiar sense that dad was enjoying this trip.

  I tried to connect to the free wi-fi that had been advertised everywhere as I boarded the train, but there was no signal, even when we did make it out of the tunnel.

  ‘It’s actually a lie,’ someone said dramatically. ‘The wi-fi on the Eurail is a complete lie.’

  The Frenchwoman looked up momentarily, as though a fly had buzzed nearby, then returned to her magazine.

  When we emerged from the Channel into Calais, it was like entering a sort of dream world. I had a feeling of homecoming, and I stood up to look out the windows between carriages, finding it hard to sit still. It was the most peculiar feeling. Excitement, despite my intense jetlag. Relief of return, and an unexpected sense of security. All the anxiety of being so far from Gisèle melted away as I sped towards her.

  Like a sense memory that lingers, like the feeling of déjà vu, beyond thought or logic, from that moment we entered France I felt I was living in two times at once — reliving something from a previous existence, but also starting my own new story.

  At Gare du Nord, my mind started calculating translations. I’d forgotten the mental energy required in translating a new language. Bonjour, Je cherche, and Merci were easy, but I had to start saying ‘Parlez-vous anglais?’ to figure out how to catch the Métro.

  When I did finally make it to Le Marais (four wrong stops and six flights of stairs, with helpful people insisting on carrying my suitcases, later), my Airbnb host, Bernard, was waiting politely by the door. He couldn’t speak much English, but just as Ivor had seemed to sense my dislocation the night before, he was particularly understanding about the lengthy flight from Australia, and looked at me kindly, if a little pityingly.

  Bernard showed me the door codes and took me upstairs to the deuxième étage, and the apartment was perfect.

  Near the old Jewish quarter of Paris, Le Marais held so much hidden history from World War II. The apartment I was staying in had been renovated, but it adjoined an ancient square. The cluster of six-storey buildings were called the Quartier de l’Horloge, and from my little shutter windows I could see the Passage de l’Horloge. The passage of time.

  Bernard tried to explain there was a supermarché nearby, but as much as I tried to understand his directions, my brain was mush. Happy and relieved mush, but mush.

  He left, and I put down my suitcase and sat at the window. Mon appartement. For an entire mois. It seemed a miracle.

  I’m coming, Gisèle, I thought deliriously. One more sleep and I’ll see you.

  I’m here.

  The Quartier de L’Horloge is centrally located, in the 3rd arrondissement; twenty minutes’ walk north of the ancient Île de la Cité and Notre Dame, twenty-five minutes east of the Louvre, and close to so much more besides. Faced with the overwhelming question of what to do first in Paris, I decided to go to the supermarket, but as soon as I went downstairs I got lost again.

  The first thing I saw when I stepped out of the Quartier was an elderly man with a hunchback quietly feeding pigeons in front of Centre Pompidou, the famous inside-out museum, seemingly draped in gantries, pipes, and wiring. Why did even that sight seem so familiar? Every step was like walking through pages of my own diary. The sounds and smells — ‘Bienvenue!’ from a man selling Nutella crepes in a van nearby, a pigeon cooing, chestnuts roasting, the long queue to the archly modern Centre Pompidou in the late winter sun — it was all so perfect, so right.

  I wandered around and around narrow streets amid Beaux-Arts apartment buildings, withdrew my first French banknotes from an ATM, and bought a little Eiffel Tower key ring for my apartment key from a nearby vendor. It all gave me the eerie feeling that this was my currency, this was my language, and I’d remember it in full, soon.

  Like I had to scratch off the resistance to memory that I’d built up over the years. Even the words on shops, magasin, banque, bureau, were a language I’d always known. Remembering childhood French lessons, I felt I was back at school with my favourite teacher: Madame Bozyk, who refused to speak English as soon as the bell went, nattering in French with a cheeky smile, her hair in a tousled bun.

  The most unusual feeling of that first day walking Paris streets was that with every step, I felt I was shedding a mask I’d worn for decades — perhaps my entire life. I was finally coming back to being me.

  At four in the afternoon, the bistros that lined the streets were full of diners, drinkers, smokers. Ten years as a waitress in similar European-style cafes in Melbourne came flooding back. Perhaps I’d been searching for Paris my entire life — in books, places, people, exchanges. Maybe even in the little French restaurant in Fitzroy where I scraped hundreds of empty plates full of oyster shells into the bin.

  I wandered into shop after shop: first, a museum for poetry, then a pharmacy, distracted at every turn by more and more beauty. I was in a jetlagged delirium, but I didn’t care, taking turns turning up and along cobbled side streets. Finally, I spied a pretty little restaurant that looked warm inside, worthy of my first meal in Paris.

  ‘Bonjour! Is it jeudi today?’ I asked the gentle waiter, an older, bearded man whose face, like that of most of the Frenchmen I’d noticed so far, had a lot going on under the surface.

  ‘Oui. C’est vrai,’ he answered, looking at me curiously while handing me a menu and pointing to the chalkboard of specials.

  I translated nos vins du moment as no wine at the moment, and when he returned I asked why they’d run out.

  ‘Where are you from?’ he asked me slowly, in English, after delivering a glass of red wine because, thankfully, nos doesn’t mean no, it means our.

  ‘Australia,’ I answered.

  ‘Ah — but it is too far,’ he said, shaking his head and making a move with his hands to signify the plane. He was decisive on this point.

  Yes, yes it is.

  I ordered the plat du jour, which was pot-au-feu, and the chef delivered it in his apron, pointing out particular ingredients in French with a flourish, like I was eating in his family kitchen and he wanted me to cherish every bite. A meal like that, after such a long journey, is almost a religious experience.

  I was a millionaire, I was royalty. I had everything I wanted in that meal, in those strangers, in that little restaurant with an open fire blazing in the corner and cold Paris outside. No one hurried me, no one rushed me; two men sat talking nearby,
sitting on a simple espresso and turning over what sounded like poetry but was probably something banal. The wind had started to kick up as the last of the afternoon light fell outside, but in that little bistro every bite of the slow-cooked lamb, every exquisite sip of the Beaujolais, warmed me spiritually as well as physically.

  After paying the bill, I glided out of the restaurant to search for a bath plug, but with my poor French mixing with jet lag all I managed to say was salle de bain and shop assistants kept trying to give me soap. It took me an hour of cherch-ing and queuing to find they actually sold bath plugs at the supermarket, and I returned to the apartment just as the rain started, loaded up with bread, cheese, coffee, and fruit. And, thankfully, a bath plug.

  ‘LOUISA!!!!!! WELCOME TO PARIS!!’

  Lying on my bed looking out the window, I had been startled out of my reverie when the phone rang.

  ‘Do you need anything? I have pillows, I have a hot water bottle, I have tea … Are you okay with the supermarket? I know it’s hard to know what to buy when you don’t speak the language … I bought lentils in Turkey last year instead of rice …’

  Clémentine’s kindness overtook me. Ready and waiting for my arrival, she’d called me as soon as she finished work for the day. I couldn’t believe how familiar she was — taking ownership of my wellbeing while I stayed in her city.

  ‘I’m okay! I found a bath plug, and there is even a heated towel rack …’

  We chatted for over two hours. I was propped up on the bed as the lights flickered on in the little apartments across from me in the square; Parisians appeared by the windows of their little spaces, some pulling books off a shelf to read underneath a lamp. One lady, in a beautiful dress, draped herself out the window to smoke her cigarette, while someone else played a saxophone in a room nearby. Each was alone, and none of them looked lonely.

  ‘We’re all very emotional that you’re here,’ Clémentine said, the narrator to this beautiful symphony. ‘It’s just huge, Louisa. You’ve flown across the world for this. We are all so excited! But, at the same time, we don’t want to overwhelm you …’