A Letter from Paris Page 2

  I felt caught between worlds, unsure of who I was or what I wanted, restless but tired. Anxious and disorientated. Disappointed in myself, somehow.

  I sat trying to remember who I was, and what I wanted — if I could trust myself to want something again.

  A Facebook ‘message request’ appeared on my phone as my neighbour’s shouts of abuse reached up from her balcony below.

  30 January 2016

  Hello Louisa,

  I hope you won’t mind me contacting you in such an unsolicited way.

  My name is Coralie. I live in Paris, France. My grandmother, Michelle Chomé, recently passed away and we found in her apartment a stack of letters written during the year 1949 to her parents in Paris. At the time she was an au pair in London.

  In these letters she speaks of an Australian man called Denison Deasey. She met him on the train to London — he was there that same year with his sister. It seems he took her on some very special outings around London … she was very smitten with him.

  Are you related to Denison Deasey? Again, I hope I am not disturbing you in any way …

  Denison. His name was a shock and a surprise, like the stranger who typed it. I hadn’t thought about dad on any conscious level for such a long time. His story was a scar that still tugged and pulled whenever it was exposed.

  Seeing his first name and reading of him was an unexpected visitation. It brought him back, it called him in. I realised just how much I missed him without knowing him, how much I still wanted to know.

  I returned to that long-familiar longing, the knowing but not knowing, the unfinished story. Unsure what to hope for, unsure if I should.

  I’d only reactivated my Facebook account that morning after a two-week break, to stop getting alerts from University pages. Even odder, I’d then changed my profile picture to an old picture I’d taken at the Louvre, an unexpected pang to return to France having surged over me as I sat up in bed after waking. I’d been trying to think of something that excited me, since I was feeling so lost.

  I have to go to Paris again this year, I’d written in my diary.

  But here was a message — from Paris. It seemed like a confirmation. I had to get back there. But how?

  Michelle met Denison on the train to London after the ferry from Dover. They went on some very lovely outings in London … they went to Westminster Abbey to see King George and Queen Elizabeth, they saw a John Gielgud play so she could learn better English … she describes him as handsome and charming … she adored him!

  My family was wondering if you have a photo?

  I picked up a photo from my bookshelf, the one and only picture of dad and me, sitting in a park somewhere in Melbourne. He’s holding me in his lap, looking away from the camera into the distance, his pin-striped shirt rolled up at the sleeves.

  He must have been in his early sixties. It was 1981 and I was four. He had the look of worn fatigue and wistfulness, like he always did in in my memories. His grey hair was smoothly scooped to the side of his face.

  The yellow undertone of illness. He probably had cancer when that photo was taken. I wonder if he knew it … ?

  I never could imagine dad as a young man. All I’d known him to be was old, sick, the holder of history from an era I would never fully understand. I’d never asked mum — gathering, from their painful separation and then his death, that it hurt too much and that she felt guilty about leaving him when he’d been so close to the end. Of dad’s six siblings — three brothers and three sisters, all older, though his brother Irwin had died as an infant — only two were still alive when I was born, and they were aged in their late sixties. Both were now dead. I’d never known my grandparents — they, too, were dead before I was born.

  But here was Michelle — a woman in France, who until just yesterday had been alive.

  And there were stories to tell.

  Perhaps Michelle had spoken about my dad, for how else had this family been curious enough to contact me? Who was the ‘family’ Coralie meant in her message? Her message seemed to imply dad was someone special.

  What frightened and excited me at the same time was that this stranger in a foreign country was able to tell me a beautiful story about my own dad.

  From the moment I read Coralie’s message, I knew I had to meet this family in France.

  Coralie’s face on her Facebook profile was pretty, sunny, light. Her face pressed up against her husband’s, she was holding a little baby and smiling.

  The Louvre, behind me in my own profile picture, only changed that morning, seemed almost like a cosmic joke. I thought of the night it was taken — the night, ten years earlier, when I’d walked for hours across Paris to try to find Gisèle.

  Gisèle and dad had lived in France for a time and then in Australia. At some point, Gisèle had returned to France, and dad had met mum. Like everything else about dad’s life, I didn’t know the timing. All I knew was that Gisèle had loved dad, and they’d been together ‘a very long time’, as mum had once said.

  And because we were his children — Gisèle had loved us, too.

  Was this dad reaching out from beyond, offering up a gift, a clue, a message? Imploring me to search one last time — if not for Gisèle, then at least for him?

  I felt like a rare bird had landed on my windowsill.

  A chance, an opportunity.

  Something very fragile.

  I started to reply before it flew away.

  Chapter Two

  Souvenir

  Dear Coralie

  Thank you so much for contacting me. Firstly, I’m very sorry for your loss … Yes, Denison was my father, he died when I was six. He was a lot older than my mum, so I don’t blame you for confusing me with being his granddaughter. Dad would have been 28 in 1949 when he met your grandmother Michelle. Most of his family was gone by the time I was born, and I never really knew him … I would love to read these letters …

  We spent the night corresponding, from Melbourne to Paris.

  I felt comfortable opening up to Coralie, for she opened up to me — all that Michelle had written of dad, the context in which they’d met, the family she’d come from, the way it all unfolded … To Coralie and her family, dad was important, significant. Her family seemed as intrigued about my dad as I was, which I found so startling, and so strange.

  I didn’t sleep until five in the morning.

  The flutter of excitement and anticipation with every new message from Coralie was the kind of feeling I hadn’t had for years. It was the feeling that had pulled me into journalism — that sense of excitement at a person’s story that you just had to know. Of questions seeking answers, of details that painted a portrait of someone — a life — that you’d never have expected. Something beautiful. Something secret, only able to be unfurled gently and carefully. A hidden thing that is only revealed with the right questions. Something that had to be seen through to the end.

  Coralie referred to art, and writing, in a way that brought back to me all the respect with which the French treat these things, like a long-forgotten memory that in another country what I loved and valued wasn’t considered strange. I felt myself emerging from a tight ball of fear of exposing myself that I hadn’t realised had formed over the course of the last year.

  With just a few emails to and from Coralie, I saw myself and my life differently. After she wrote that dad had worked as a freelance journalist in London and France when he met Michelle — which I’d never known — she immediately felt like family, because she was telling me about mine. It was so swift. I trusted her because she was so generous with information about my dad.

  Information no one had ever shared with me before. Not even dad’s elderly siblings, when they’d still been alive, had been so forthcoming. It wasn’t their fault — I was too young, and how would they have brought it up? It was all just strange timing — my life beginn
ing as theirs — and dad’s — were ending.

  We sent three very long emails each, with Coralie linking to a blog where I could find the first five of Michelle’s letters, which Coralie’s cousin had begun to transcribe. I gathered her whole family in Paris knew the story of dad. That this family — cousins, uncles, I wasn’t yet sure of the size — had been holding these precious memories of my dad moved me deeply, and I wished I were in France.

  Halfway across the world — the tyranny of distance pulled and tugged at me, and I yearned to jump on a plane the next day and land in Paris. But I also wanted to have something to give them back — some knowledge, some answers to their questions.

  It was an earthquake, like everything else that had happened that week, but perhaps it was a good one? Paris pulled at me, again and again. I longed to be there, sitting in a room with Coralie and her family and learning about Michelle. I felt pained by the distance in time and space, and expense — wondering how I could make our meeting possible.

  I was scared to spend my savings, particularly when I’d just left my job.

  I wasn’t even sure if I could believe this seemingly surreal story.

  I threw myself into Michelle’s letters.

  Michelle had been only twenty to dad’s twenty-eight when they’d met in the spring of 1949. It was Michelle’s first trip abroad, and she’d met dad on the train to London. The Australian from the train, she called him.

  He was her first holiday romance — a journalist, telling her about the beauty of Vienna, of searching for his Deasey ancestors in Dublin, mentioning places she’d never previously considered she could go, as she’d been brought up in quite a strict bourgeois family in Paris and it was bold of her to even be in London on her own.

  Michelle had managed to extend her stay in London by finding work as an au pair with the help of nuns from her Parisian convent, a brave move for such a young woman, and I gathered her father didn’t entirely approve. Michelle came from a respectable Catholic family, and her father was well known in France for inventing the ancestor of the breast pump. I gathered, from all the references in the letters to ‘papa being worried’, that her father also disapproved of the romance with dad.

  But these letters about their dates were her happiest souvenir, as Coralie so beautifully put it in one of her emails, Michelle’s year abroad in London one of the most significant times in her life. Coralie’s younger sister, Clémentine, who also emailed me, wrote that she felt Michelle ‘followed’ dad’s footsteps, travelling to Vienna herself and talking of pursuing a career as a journalist after the affair broke off.

  Apparently, over the last few years, Coralie and Clémentine would find their grandmother Michelle reading and re-reading the letters, smiling secretly, humming the bars to an English song. She was frail and sick with complications to do with Alzheimer’s, and got to the point where she couldn’t recognise her daughters or her younger sister. But still, the memories of her times with my dad remained, and she talked of him often.

  In her last days alive in hospital, Coralie wrote, remembering London and repeating the name Denison was one of the only things to make Michelle smile.

  Coralie continued:

  Michelle met your dad’s family in London. She mentions his sister and her husband and their children. They spent quite a lot of time in Hampstead. They visited the city of London, went to Cambridge, your dad took her to his Club on Pall Mall, to the Theatre … He had worked in journalism, loved writing and was a musician. He liked smoking Caporal cigarettes … She described him as tall and handsome, blue eyes, brown hair. He had already been in London two years or so when they met.

  They both went away for the summer — which is why there is a gap in the letters from July to October.

  I could picture this man from her words, clear and concrete, no longer a blurry vague shadow. He sounded dashing, interesting … fun.

  And all I ever wanted to do when I was twenty-eight was travel and work as a freelance journalist.

  The sense of longing and surprise at where this had come from was like a puzzle piece clicking into place.

  Who was the sister Michelle had met — was it my aunt Alice? And what had dad been doing in London since … 1947? All I knew of ‘Pall Mall’ in London was from the game of Monopoly. Everyone wanted to own a plastic piece on Pall Mall. How had dad once been a member of a ‘Club’ on its street?

  With Coralie’s emails, dad was becoming less the ragged, aged man who’d made bad choices and lost out in life, and more of a dashing figure, enjoying life as an expat in London after the war and wooing a Frenchwoman who never forgot him. I eagerly translated the first letters on my phone, cutting and pasting into Google Translate through the hot summer night.

  May 1949

  Yesterday afternoon, I received a phone call from the ‘Australien du train’. He wanted to show me around London. We went to Westminster Abbey. Thanks to him, I was able to visit various chapels that aren’t usually accessible to visitors. The organist was his friend, so he showed us many tombs of great kings and queens. We even saw the coronation throne … so very beautiful and gothic …

  Afterwards, we went to Saint James Park, saw the ‘home guard’ without a horse, and caught a bus into the city of London.

  Because of the bombing, many banks have been damaged and not yet rebuilt.

  We ended the day in Hampstead at Denison’s sister’s house. A very nice little cottage: two children of eight and ten; the father is a naval officer who plays the piano very well. We spoke in English and sometimes French … I translated a letter for them … we sang songs together while we made dinner and washed up, in song.

  They are a very nice family.

  They invited me to spend the day with them in Cambridge tomorrow.

  The ‘sister’ must have been aunt Alice, whose husband, Grant, had been in the navy. Had aunt Alice lived in Hampstead when her children — my cousins — were young? And who was dad’s ‘friend’ who played the organ at Westminster Abbey?

  This man — ‘the Australian from the train’ — seemed dapper, charming, well-to-do, and warm. No wonder she had remembered this time for so long.

  He introduced her to his family. She met his sister, his niece and nephew …

  They washed the dishes ‘in song’.

  June 1949

  Yesterday afternoon, I received a telephone call from Denison Deasey asking to take me to the theatre in the evening and offering me a chair on the terrace of his ‘club’, which is right on the course of the parade on Pall Mall that leads from Buckingham Palace to the ceremony.

  Instead of leaving at six o’clock in the morning to get a bad place, I left the house at ten o’clock and was placed above the parade with Denison, his sister, and the children.

  They took pictures …

  At eleven o’clock, the king appeared in a carriage, dressed in the uniform of a colonel, splendid and smiling. Before that, Queen Mary in a covered carriage, followed by the Duchess of Kent and her two children, the Duke and the Duchess of Gloucester, and other personalities, went to the place of the ceremony.

  Princess Margaret and the Queen, both very elegant, in a black coach, smiled and greeted the cheering crowd … the greatest ovation was for the King, with Princess Elizabeth on a black horse in blue uniform … It was splendid!

  The music, like all military music, was very ‘engaging’. Before the end of the ceremony, we left our excellent squares to see the King’s entrance to Buckingham Palace and greet the royal family who appeared on the balcony.

  Even my Australians felt a little ‘English’!

  After the ceremony, we went for a quick lunch as I had to be back by two p.m.

  The King and Queen of England … Buckingham Palace … ‘my’ Australians …

  They took pictures … Where were these pictures … ?

  The letters went on …

&
nbsp; June 1949

  Yesterday evening, I went to the theatre with Deasey. He took me to this play because he wanted me to listen to English spoken with the best accent by actor John Gielgud (who often recites poems on the radio).

  He returned from Ireland content with his trip … I forgot to tell you that he is a writer. He wanted to know all the old songs, legends, and traditions of Ireland. He found Deasey fishermen in a port near Dublin, he thinks they are relatives, because his ancestors were Irish.

  He is also a musician. He currently studies music history as he wants to get into a music school in London. For the moment, I do not know any more, except that he loves the south of France, Le Lavandou, where he spent many months.

  He only smokes ‘Caporals’ and is very sad because he is out of stock. He asks whether you can send me some packs of Caporal cigarettes and said he will reimburse me with English money. Is this possible … ?

  It moved me so much to read of dad studying music, talking to fishermen in Dublin in the hopes they were his ancestors … I could picture it all. He had the same strong urge to find something in his ancestry that Coralie’s emails had stirred in me.

  June 1949

  On Sunday, I agreed to go to Hampstead to Deasey’s sister’s house to spend the afternoon. We spent the day in the garden, took tea, played piano (Deasey, his brother-in-law, and niece), then Deasey’s sister, me, and the children, went to the edge of a pond in Hampstead Heath, to sail a small boat that their father the naval officer had built. In the evening, we prepared dinner singing in chorus and did the ‘washing up’ also all in chorus. So friendly!

  I have the impression that Papa is a little worried about Deasey. I think this is wrong because he is like us. However, if for Papa’s peace I should not see Deasey any more, trust me and I won’t.

  I will give you some more details for Maman, who likes to ‘place’ people:

  Deasey is called Denison (tradition in the family), must be around twenty-eight years old, left Australia two years ago, worked as a journalist before travelling, and has a property close to Melbourne. One of his sisters was educated in Cambridge. He writes and makes music. Tall, blue eyes, brown hair. Loves Caporal cigarettes.