A Letter from Paris Read online

  ‘I don’t have any photos of my Australian family anymore,’ she said sadly, then looked up at me with those eyes, like my presence was the reappearance of something she thought she had lost.

  When I handed her the photo of dad, she held it to her chest and cried, holding me with her other hand.

  After a while, she said, ‘Est-ils privée?’

  ‘No! You can keep it.’

  Gisèle shook her head, smiling, tears in her eyes.

  ‘Aren’t I lucky,’ she said, and propped it next to her on the shelf. A black-and-white photo of a man sat in a frame overlooking her bed, and I knew it was her father, Gerard. Impulsively, I told her that dad had given Declan the name Gerard as a middle name. I had to refer to dad as ‘Denison’ or she’d forget who I was.

  ‘Denison gave him the name … in honour of your father,’ I told her, looking at the picture of her dad, who had been through so much.

  She took a moment, looking up at me with her beautiful eyes, and then she shook her head again and smiled, as though she was back with dad.

  ‘Denison was so fond of my father … very fond of him …’

  She wanted to talk about living in Australia with dad, about all the beautiful birds she’d never seen until she got to Australia. When I asked her how she and dad had met, she said it was in London, after David Boyd’s first pottery show, in 1950. After first gaining work in London as a nanny (like Michelle), she had worked as an artist’s model for Mervyn Peake. Perhaps Mervyn had introduced her to David Boyd …

  When she went to the cocktail party after David Boyd’s show, she discovered she and dad had bid on matching plates — she the yellow, dad the blue. He’d made a joke and cheered her up, because she was in a strange mood, she remembered.

  Time fell away in that first trip to Gisèle. An hour passed, or maybe more, and it grew dark outside in the shadow of the mountain. She never let go of my hand, and examined each photo I’d brought one by one, cherishing my connection to the man she’d spent most of her life with as much as I cherished her.

  I asked why she and dad had separated, and she didn’t seem to know. She only knew that she’d returned to Paris because her mother had been ill, and then she said sadly that ‘Denison’ met another woman, temporarily forgetting how I was connected.

  ‘But we never stopped talking …’

  A pause, and then she seemed to remember my connection to dad, asking about Ayala and Declan, remembering the kookaburras of Australia and more and more details of her life with dad, asking about aunts and uncles I had to tell her were now long gone.

  ‘Little Louisa … I’ve kept all your letters. You sent me so many letters …’ She stood up to riffle through a shelf and find them. ‘You’ve always been my family, even though you were far away,’ she said.

  I had to breathe deeply so as not to cry.

  It was too special, too sacred.

  When the sky started darkening completely, I told Gisèle that I would be in Paris for a month, so I could visit her again. Like a child, this seemed to awaken something in her, and she stood up and announced suddenly that we should go and get some honey.

  ‘Honey? Why?’ I asked, laughing and a little bit confused.

  ‘Because I have stripes on my tummy!’ she replied, explaining that she had a friend who lived nearby who made his own honey. She wanted to give me a gift.

  As I stood up, a little confused at how we could visit a friend when it was growing dark and she was in her dressing gown, I noticed a painting on her bookshelf. Yellow, bright, beautiful, it was by David Boyd. I knew, because in my insomnia before the flight to London, I’d searched for his work on the internet, falling across that particular series of angels and cockatoos, loving the innocence and bright beauty.

  ‘The Boyds introduced me to Denison in London,’ said Gisèle noticing my turn of the head, and she took down the painting. ‘Is David still alive? And his wife, Hermia?’ she asked, and I had to tell her quietly that both had passed away.

  She shook her head and clucked philosophically. ‘I am ninety-one,’ she repeated, like she had escaped death by some obscure accident. She chuckled, and then she squeezed my cheek like we were the lucky ones.

  ‘Little Louisa.’

  She escorted Clém and I downstairs and forgot about the honey by the time we got to the lower level. When we passed some of the other citizens in the reception area, she pointed to Clém and I and told them in French that today was like Christmas.

  She walked outside and hugged me for what felt like hours. I remembered Mirka Mora’s words, all those years ago, ‘You have your daddy in you.’

  I whispered to Gisèle that the hug was also from Denison.

  She held me tightly for many minutes, smiling through tears.

  I travelled back to Paris in a sort of shell-shock. Clém had to lead me onto the train as I was totally disorientated. I couldn’t stop thinking about Gisèle’s stories. She’d told me so much about dad. Stories I’d ached for my entire life. Of a love that spanned thirty-five years, of family, of their life in Paris and London and Australia.

  And I was her family.

  And she was mine.

  I put together the fragments of what she’d told me. In London, in her late twenties, she’d just finished a liaison with a man who’d lost his wife in the Blitz, and despite being in a bad mood had gone to David Boyd’s art show in Chelsea. It was one of his first shows, and she’d bought the plate to support him because he was a friend. After the opening, there was a cocktail party at the Boyds’ nearby house in Chelsea: dad appeared, and found her sitting by the fire on her own.

  ‘The first thing he said to me was the last thing I said to him, when we talked on the phone the night before he died.’

  The night before he died. She’d spoken with dad …

  How I’d hated to think of dad all alone in his hospital bed, just before he died that February night. But Gisèle had spoken with him on the phone; they’d stayed in such close contact despite the miles. He’d had some comfort, in his final hour.

  He was her husband — it was clear to me that dad’s relationship with mum did nothing to dent Gisèle’s lifelong loyalty to dad. She and dad appeared to share a very independent, unconventional view.

  The last thing Gisèle had said to dad the night before he died was the very same thing he’d said to her thirty-five years earlier when they’d first met. I ached to know what it was.

  Gisèle smiled so much when she spoke of dad, and it filled a part of me I’d thought irrevocably empty. He was so loved. He was someone. He wasn’t a failure. He had been her greatest treasure; their life together in London, Paris, and Melbourne had given her her most meaningful memories. Dad had been her life.

  Throughout the afternoon, if she appeared to forget who I was, I’d gently hold up the picture of dad, which set memories falling like notes on a scale you’ve played over and over. Her Australian family, her happiest souvenir.

  ‘Mon mari,’ she said a lot. My husband. Not even caring that I was his daughter from a different woman. I belonged to Denison. So I was her family.

  When they came to Australia, she’d been welcomed like kin by dad’s siblings. Despite some obvious racism she experienced in Australia through references to the colour of her skin, she remembered her time in Melbourne so fondly. The kookaburras, going to the races, working at the State Library ‘past the Joan of Arc statue’, making the news reports on early morning radio to be broadcast live across to Paris.

  ‘My husband was always writing,’ she’d also said, ‘has anyone typed up his memoirs?’

  I’d shown Gisèle the photo from 1974, taken in Bois de Boulogne, both of them grinning like the oldest of friends, dad looking so at home back in France. Dad and Gisèle had still been married when it was taken. My brother had only just been born.

  In another photo, when mum was bring
ing Dec home from the hospital in Oxford, Gisèle grinned widely like a proud aunt as they all stood in the doorway. I think dad must have taken it. Aunty Gisèle: this was how my cousins had described her. She’d even seemed aunt-like to my mum.

  The train didn’t arrive back at Saint Michel until after seven, and Clém held my arm for most of the trip. All I could manage to squeak was ‘thank you’ over and over. We went straight from Gisèle to meet Coralie.

  After eight hours together, bonded by this strange, intense, experience, I was scared to let Clém go. We travelled up the miniscule lift to Coralie’s apartment, and a new French family awaited me. Coralie, her husband, and her two little daughters greeted me at the door.

  ‘Le kangaroo?’ said her daughter, after Coralie explained I’d come all the way from Australia. After brief introductions, followed by goodnights to the children and her husband, Coralie bundled us off and we were apparently going to dinner in a nearby bistro.

  My face was a mess. I’d been crying, listening, talking, tense for most of the day. And really, I hadn’t slept properly since I’d left Australia, four days ago.

  Coralie, like Clémentine, was the quintessential Parisian. Blonde to Clém’s brunette, but equally miniscule and elegant, she steered me towards a seat in the corner of a beautiful French bistro. She told the waiter that she had a guest d’Australie, which apparently meant we were to be treated with the utmost care. Wine was poured, a delicious chicken dish was delivered, and Coralie and I caught up on everything that we hadn’t been able to express in our emails.

  ‘I messaged you because your Facebook picture was the Louvre. I saw that you had a brother and sister, but you were the only one with a picture from Paris. I thought — it’s a sign, maybe she’s in France?’

  We shook our heads at all of it. I was still having trouble coming back from the meeting with Gisèle.

  ‘Maybe Gisèle is the reason I contacted you?’ Coralie said philosophically, understanding how momentous the reunion had been.

  Over dinner, we talked of dad and Michelle, dad and Gisèle, dad and mum. Coralie mentioned ‘all these women’ with a cheeky smile, and we talked about lovers and husbands and how open-minded it had been of mum to encourage our relationship with Gisèle. Had dad ever apologised to Gisèle for getting another woman pregnant while they lived on separate continents? We didn’t know.

  Like Clémentine before her, Coralie wasn’t afraid to explore complex topics about relationships and history; she didn’t need to dismiss complication or quickly sum things up.

  She explained her own complex family intrigues, why Michelle’s father had probably asked Michelle to stop seeing dad. When Michelle had started to talk of dad again, in 1984, they thought she was being sentimental, unsure if he had really existed until they found the letters.

  When Coralie asked me questions about dad and mum, I didn’t feel the usual pain or grief that I’d felt back in Melbourne. Everything was different in Paris. Something felt lighter.

  After dinner, she walked me to the Métro, kissed me on both cheeks, and instructed me how to get home.

  I had a whole month ahead in France, and I already had my treasure.

  So much French family.

  So much beauty.

  So much love.

  Upstairs later in my apartment, I found Clém had slipped a box of menthe tea in the Soeur boutique bag to replace my mistaken tilleul.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Ajustement

  After four days travelling from Melbourne to London to Paris and not really sleeping, that long sleep on Friday night reunited parts of my psyche scrambling to put order into my new space in time.

  I woke to find Clém had sent an audio recording of the visit, in a zip file along with dozens of photos she’d taken of Gisèle and me hugging and smiling. I’d been too overwhelmed by Gisèle’s presence to notice Clém silently pressing buttons on her phone.

  I replayed the audio, listening carefully.

  After hours watching the rain with my notebook, trying to find words for the experience I was still trying to process, I finally left the apartment at 2.00 p.m.

  I went for a casual stroll, stopping from time to time to watch the tourists. The bells from Notre Dame clanged as I stood in the rain, and I felt strangely privileged, oddly like an insider.

  I stepped into a Pharmacie des Archives and the big department store BHV to buy some pyjamas. Back in Melbourne, I’d packed all the photos and documentation I needed to retrace dad’s steps but had completely forgotten the basics, including toothpaste and pyjamas.

  In my tired delirium the night before in my apartment, I’d pressed the wrong button on the TV and messed up the whole music/internet/television system so that the only TV channel I could get was Chérie 25, a channel that played nonstop French soap operas. As I stepped out of BHV, a familiar face stepped in front of me, as if he’d heard me calling.

  ‘Bernard!’ The only man I knew in a city of over two million. ‘Ah, pardon. But I’m having trouble with the TV. I can’t call you, my phone is all mixed up … I think I may have pressed a button and now I can’t use the music, or wi-fi?’

  ‘Ah, d’accord. I can come in twenty minutes to fix for you?’

  Bernard turned up, as promised, patiently taking me through the TV system again, repeating everything he’d said two days earlier.

  By Sunday morning, the jetlag had lifted just in time for my birthday. There were bonne anniversaire messages from the French family when I woke up, but I couldn’t understand if they wanted to meet me or not. Coralie texted mysteriously that she’d ‘be in touch’.

  I called Clém.

  ‘Okay, so here’s what’s happened. We want to make your birthday authentically French, but we couldn’t agree on where to take you …’

  Reuniting with Gisèle was all the gift I ever could have expected, and now the French family were arguing about where to take me for my birthday!

  ‘Okay, here’s what we’re going to do,’ Clém said on our third call, after numerous discussions with the rest of her family. ‘We’ll meet in Saint Germain. I’ll text you the address when we can agree. Is 8.00 p.m. okay? Not too early?’

  Of course.

  I loved the Parisian view of ‘early’.

  When I looked in the mirror before leaving the apartment, I saw, at last, that the grim, drawn look of the last year had finally left my face. I was happy to be me again. Proud of all that I’d inherited and all that I chose to do, no longer uncertain. Proud of dad.

  To feel younger than I’d felt in over a year seemed the biggest birthday miracle of all.

  I walked down Rue Rambuteau from my apartment towards the Seine, past Notre Dame and across to Saint Germain, heading right at Saint Michel train station towards a neighbourhood overflowing with bistros, their tables out on the streets. It was such a beautiful walk, and I was glad I’d booked an apartment so close to all the old landmarks of Paris.

  Clém’s sweet face, now familiar, peeked out from a cashmere beanie, with another beautiful Frenchwoman smiling by her side.

  ‘Hello, Louisa, how are you?’ Michelle’s youngest daughter, Marie, greeted me just as enthusiastically as Coralie and Clém had.

  We sat down at a table outside a bistro and Coralie soon joined us, followed by Margaux — their youngest cousin and Edouard’s daughter.

  They were all so excited to meet me, so curious about my life and my history and my family, that I felt — just as I had with Gisèle — that my direct connection to dad made me like a visiting member of their own family.

  ‘So, do you have children? What is your work?’

  Marie asked me lots of questions and I kept catching her studying me, like perhaps we were related. Her eyes glimmered with quiet intensity.

  ‘When is your birthday, Marie?’

  ‘October twenty-fourth.’

  ‘Ah
! You have the same birthday as dad!’ I said. There was a flutter of French, anniversaire de Denison, an ‘ooh’ from Margaux and Coralie, smiles and victorious laughter.

  Marie shared that she had once been to Australia, staying in a small seaside town just outside of Melbourne. In Point Lonsdale.

  ‘That’s where my aunt Alice lived,’ I told her, shaking my head at the coincidence — she’d visited Point Lonsdale, a village that doesn’t get a lot of international tourists; Michelle’s daughter had stayed in that exact spot in Australia where my aunt Alice, who’d met her mother in London with dad, had lived. Washing dishes. All in song.

  Why Marie chose Alice’s little town on her one and only trip to Australia was a mystery. When Clém probed her, she explained it was a liaison.

  Ah, I loved the French reference to liaisons.

  Coralie ordered a stream of hors d’oeuvres for us all, and we drank wine and champagne, laughing and talking about numerous different topics.

  In the morning I found I’d been added to a newly created WhatsApp group by Clém: Australian-French family.

  Chapter Twenty

  Histoire partagée

  It’s impossible to understand how the French think about life without understanding the nuances of their language. Histoire doesn’t just translate as history, it has multiple meanings in the French language — story, history, lesson, specific information. Souvenir, similarly, could mean photo or memento or treasure or even record, depending on the context. Staying in Paris had me marvelling at the different meaning of French words, dependent on the other words you placed either side of them.

  I pondered the French way of only revealing the meaning of a sentence at the very end, how it spoke of their whole approach to life: too complicated, not afraid to be complicated, going the long way around. Most English-speakers — and many bilingual French — consider the language too difficult because it doesn’t get straight to the point. Dad adored the French language, and, in many ways, piecing together his life had been as complicated and indirect as his favourite language itself.