A Letter from Paris Page 3

  How lovely, for Michelle to be taken in by this Australian family in London, for the man she was smitten with to introduce her so quickly, when she had been so young and far from home.

  I pictured dad with aunt Alice in Hampstead, and I felt I understood her better, too. Aunt Alice had worn handmade Liberty of London print dresses well into her eighties and nineties, drank a sherry before dinner, and asked me to play the piano whenever I visited — perhaps it reminded her of London, of those times with dad?

  I wondered if any photos of those times existed. Although Alice and Grant had both died years ago, I wondered if somewhere, in our stack of dad’s black-and-white photos, there might be some kind of memento of such a significant day?

  And who was the sister that was educated in Cambridge? Was it aunt Kathleen, who was also dead before I was born? I didn’t realise Denison had been a naming tradition in his family … but my paternal grandfather had been a Denis. He, too, had died before I was born.

  How close and nice dad’s family sounded from those letters. Part of me longed to experience it like Michelle, but through her written words I felt in some way that I was.

  The cigarette request made me smile. I thought of an Australian friend who once went on school exchange in Lyons when she was just sixteen — her host family had given her cigarette money every single day.

  July 1949

  My dear Papa, my dear Maman,

  I want to reassure you: Deasey the Australian hasn’t kidnapped me! And I don’t think he will do anything like that anytime soon, as he has left for Ireland to rent a cottage for the summer.

  There was a gap in the letters, which Coralie explained was due to the English summer when Michelle travelled with her host family to Kent, and dad, apparently, went not to Ireland as planned, but to the South of France. They both returned in September.

  October 1949

  Yesterday morning, while I was out, Mrs Bryant received a phone call from Denison Deasey. He telephoned again in the evening to ask me if I had become English and if I could either go to lunch or dine with him soon.

  After refusing every day, I decided to go out to chat with him at the end of my course on Monday evening. I hope you trust me and that Dad is not going to have unnecessary worries, but if you really do not want me to see him again, tell me in your next letter.

  Deasey told me he had a great holiday in Austria and in the South of France. He fell in love with Vienna.

  The next letter was dated what would have been dad’s twenty-ninth birthday.

  24 October 1949

  I went out on Monday night with Denison Deasey. We dined in a restaurant in the centre of London and went to find his friends with whom we chatted, in English, from Austria, the South of France, and Brittany, where his sister spent the holidays.

  We spoke of Australia, and I saw pictures of the Deasey family. His father is a ‘clergyman’ because in all the pictures he is in black with a collar like those of pastors. Very good evening, very friendly. As I was asking what English book I had to read to know good English, they read me some passages from the Bible.

  All I knew of my grandpa, Reverend Denis Deasey, was that he’d been a vicar. Michelle had seen photos of him. Surely dad had been in love with Michelle, to share so much of his family with her … ?

  I asked Coralie if Michelle had stopped seeing dad because of her father’s disapproval — she seemed to agree. But she also said that Michelle had told her sister a lot more than what she wrote to her parents in the letters.

  Michelle had thought — and spoken — about my dad for the rest of her life.

  Coralie wrote again:

  After returning to Paris in 1950, Michelle went on to marry my grandfather in 1953 and they had three children. My mother Laurence is the eldest. Their marriage wasn’t a very happy one … She and my grandfather eventually got divorced in the 1980s when I was a little girl. Michelle never remarried and dedicated her life to her children, grandchildren and her passions for India, sustainability issues, yoga and alternative medicines.

  I thought of mum. Just like Michelle, after dad died, she never remarried. She dedicated her life to us and was always very passionate about sustainability and environmental issues. An early advocate for alternative medicines and therapies such as yoga and tai chi, mum shared a lot in common with Michelle, it seemed.

  How strange, the things that connected me to this family across the sea.

  Coralie sent me two photos of Michelle, taken in 1950, and she looked so very chic and French, but with an air that was familiar. I knew, immediately, she was something special. She looked like Gisèle: strong, passionate, brave, and independent.

  As for why her parents seemed hesitant to know that their daughter was seeing your dad in London, I guess there was nothing personal … Her family were very French, very bourgeois, very Catholic. Not adventurous at all.

  Imagine: their daughter was in London, seeing an Australian who had fought in the war! They most certainly wanted her to date and marry within a very small French society circle.

  The reason we are so interested in that part of our grandmother’s life is that clearly her time in London was her happiest souvenir. When she divorced my grandfather, she sort of retreated from any kind of love and fun life. I like to think that when she was younger she was enjoying London and fancied a handsome Australian man …

  Dad had ‘fought in the war’? I’d always thought he was the only brother of three not to have served. I thought he was too sick and had to get ‘invalided’ out of the Northern Territory before he actually did anything. At least, that’s what I’d read in his obituary.

  Coralie shared that her sister, Clémentine, was an actress and writer; her mother, Laurence, was a painter. Feeling we were having an intimate chat despite being so many miles apart, I responded that dad was the only one of his siblings to chase a creative path. Tears fell as I read her beautiful responses, and I promised to look for the Buckingham Palace photos of dad and Michelle.

  I read and re-read Michelle and Coralie’s words all night, picturing dad as a younger man, his sister living close by in Hampstead, his glamorous life in London — travelling across to Europe and having adventures, ‘wasting’ his fortune on life and love and discovery — so beautifully described in the letters.

  I felt Michelle’s excitement and gratitude at meeting this warm family seep through from her French words, and I wished I’d known them, too. But just as dad had introduced her to his family, it was as though this French family had re-introduced him to me.

  I couldn’t help but think of my own first travel overseas, crossing expanses of ocean and time in a journey so challenging and so exciting it stayed in my memory bank like an imprint that can never be removed. Those peak experiences of our lives, the first trip abroad, filled with wonder and romance and more than a little fear … No wonder Michelle had held onto those letters.

  Her memento, her souvenir, of the time that had challenged and changed her.

  I remembered Gisèle, thinking how similarly she and Michelle looked from the photos. Dark hair, bright smiles, strong faces, that chic air of pride and independence. Both remarkable women, who lived through remarkable times.

  And I remembered my first trip to Paris.

  Chapter Three

  Voyageur

  Paris, 2007.

  The man at customs wanted to know where I would be staying. ‘P-Pigalle’ — I stuttered, hyper-alert after two months in New York, where the threat of terrorism is never felt more than at the airport. He paused, stared just a little too long, a slight flicker of amusement dancing across his blue eyes. I didn’t know if he wanted more information or if it was just a pause. I’d never been to France before. Was he flirting … ? Or was this a test? Were they going to scan my eyes like they did at JFK?

  ‘Here!’ I handed him a card with the name and address of the hotel I boo
ked online. His head pulled back to his chin, eyes twinkling in delight.

  ‘Well I see you there later, then!’ he laughed with a colleague, showing my card. They both smiled at me and I realised I was free to go.

  I walked through the airport down the escalators to the Métro station, feeling relieved but a little embarrassed. New country, completely different rules to America …

  Airport security man was still laughing and staring when I turned back to look.

  The first thing that struck me was how different the crowds were in Paris. The Métro was packed and hot, just like the subway in New York, but no one was encroaching into my personal space, no one was desperate to strike up a conversation or perform like in extroverted New York.

  The dang-ding-dong of the train announcements, a musical scale in a minor key, sounded every few minutes, and the loudspeaker referred to us as ‘voyagers’, which made me feel like a passenger on a ship in the 1950s.

  I exhaled deeply for the first time in months, feeling strangely at home on this packed train in a foreign country.

  I could barely speak the language, but I felt at ease, familiar. Like I had a place there. Even the ground felt like I had walked it once upon a time in a past life.

  The second I alighted from the Métro at Pigalle, the cheap flight from New Jersey to Charles de Gaulle — so cheap that none of the in-flight TVs worked, there were some dubious foodstuffs lodged into my seat, and I thought I saw a rat scamper across the aisle at one point — was forgotten.

  I. Am. In. Paris.

  I realised that I had always, always wanted to come to France. What took me so long? It had been a toss-up between travelling the world and pursuing a career as a freelance writer, and I’d chosen writing. It wasn’t until I’d worked long and hard that I didn’t have to be pinned to a particular location, that I could earn money from afar.

  An unexpectedly large job rewriting a twenty-page website on the topic of things to try before you die had planted the now or never idea in my head, so I spent the whole fee on a return ticket to the USA. I was thirty, and I’d never really travelled internationally before. I’d spent the previous two years building up enough writing work to be able to live freelance in Australia, untied to any particular city or locale. Going further — living overseas — seemed the logical next step.

  I picked New York because I loved Joan Didion and found the writing culture exciting, particularly the number of options and the sheer volume of print media. I had an idea that I’d find some literary companions — maybe even get a job as an intern at an eccentric literary agency or a busy magazine.

  I was desperate to find people who talked about more than house prices, renovations, and football matches — all I seemed to hear about in Australia. Even among writers I felt like I was a frog stuck in a very small pond. The number of people employed in different writing fields in New York surely meant that by the law of averages, I would meet some like-minded souls and encounter more opportunities.

  Since the airfare was so huge, and the flight so far, I’d decided to stay for three months. It was risky, but possible. I couldn’t get a visa for any longer, or I would have made it a year.

  Mum was worried, which was understandable, even when I lied and said I’d saved more money than I actually had. Mum’s open-mindedness in some aspects was at odds with a more conventional anxiety about job security. She seemed endlessly disappointed by my inability to ‘settle down’ in one place or job for an extended period of time, and I didn’t want her to try to talk me out of the trip. I told her I was going only after I’d purchased my non-refundable ticket.

  But poverty in a foreign country was preferable to sitting in an office with the same group of people in the same room five days a week. I needed variety, I loved challenges, and if I wasn’t learning anything new, whatever the job was, it felt pointless.

  At that point in my life, I detested ‘sameness’ the way other people craved it for security. Many of my friends had settled into mortgages and started creating their own families, but I had a sense of urgency, a compulsion to jump without a parachute and try to live in a foreign country as a writer.

  But heading to New York without a lot of money (or even a credit card) was a lot tougher than I expected. The Australian exchange rate was sixty cents to the US dollar, so my income from writing had shrunk from its already-meagre state, and accommodation cost twice what it did in Melbourne.

  For two months I lived in a thirty-person Chelsea hostel where we had to be out by 10.00 a.m. each day and weren’t allowed back before four. I lugged my laptop out in the snow to file my Australian newspaper columns at the New York Public Library, which was warm and had good wi-fi. I smoked cheap cigarettes on the steps while it opened — a habit I’d adopted since landing — patting the lions’ concrete manes for luck in the cold but beautiful snow. I wandered through the library’s free exhibitions, took breaks for dollar bagels and coffees from food trucks, watched buskers who rapped and moonwalked, and chatted to strangers everywhere because everyone was so interesting. There was just so much to do and see. The variety was overwhelming — in the best way.

  The week before, an illustrator I’d befriended in Brooklyn had offered me a week’s work supervising eccentric stamp collectors at an auction house on the Upper East Side. I made sure the men didn’t steal the million-dollar stamps or touch them with their un-gloved hands (only tweezers allowed), and I was paid US$500 in cash. I used almost half of it to get that cheap flight to Paris.

  What girl in their right mind flies to Europe with no money?

  Despite all logic and reason, Paris felt like the best decision I’d made in my life.

  Why, at thirty, had I chosen to live in a grimy hostel in New York, sharing a room with multiple snorers, when back in Melbourne I could have my own apartment and enough writing work to keep me happy and well fed — minus the giant rats and unfortunate exchange rate?

  The real reason was that I needed to be in a place where more than one other person made a living in the same way as me. There was something lonely about always being the anomaly in my social circle. In Melbourne, I had only one other friend who earned her living as a freelance journalist, and I’d had to work quite hard to find her. My mentor, an astrologer who’d carved a writing niche with an unusual blog, lived in Sydney. Facebook and social media were barely a thing back then. Unless I physically flew to my writer friends interstate (which I did, out of sheer desperation for meaningful connection), most of my companionship came from email. Finding like-minded folk in Australia was hard, and I never wanted to be the kind of person who complains about something but never does anything about it.

  Most of my friends at that time gazed on my freelance lifestyle as a kind of delusion, or a phase. Perhaps it was a mixture of envy, confusion, and pity. None of them really understood the ins and outs of my work, and I got bored explaining when I was still learning myself.

  Mum didn’t really understand it, either, and I think she’d been disappointed to learn it wasn’t just a phase.

  My sister offered the most support.

  Ayala had miraculously been booked to go on a work trip to Philadelphia while I was in New York, so for two nights I slept in the twin bed of her four-star hotel room, and we went sightseeing together around her work. After that Chelsea hostel, the Sheraton Valley Forge might as well have been the Palace of Versailles. We explored the oddly contrasting sites of the biggest mall in America and Valley Forge National Park, which held hand-built huts from the Revolutionary War. She sent my clothes off for laundering on her hotel account and bought me huge American-sized portions of takeaway salad for lunch.

  As we walked on the median strip of the freeway that led to the mall, just minutes away, Americans honked at us, confused we weren’t in a car. I loved seeing my sister in the context of another country — walking despite the hotel begging us to catch the shuttle, laughing off the honks from t
he drivers.

  Aside from the adventure of travel, the most content I ever felt was when I was in the zone of writing, tap dancing across the keyboard, creating stories — from the nugget of an idea or a curiosity, by interviewing people, by finding new things and weaving them into something else. It was really the only thing that lit me up, the only thing that made me feel alive. Every time I learned something, every time I met someone, every time I observed something wacky, mundane, good, or bad — I had to write it down. Everything else fell by the wayside in pursuit of that feeling: fulfilment and authenticity, like I was finally doing what I was meant to do. If I went more than a day without writing — even just in my journal — I felt physically ill.

  To make actual money from it was the biggest high I could ever achieve, and I still got goosebumps when an editor sent me an un-pitched story commission. Occasionally, I’d be sent a reprint fee out of the blue, and that, too, felt like money for daring to be myself and follow my instinct.

  New York hadn’t disappointed me in its array of interesting new companions. The first person I sat next to at a cafe was a fellow freelancer who talked openly about writing for Vanity Fair. Everyone was always giving me their ‘card’ for possible future work or just correspondence. I went to a writer’s meet-up I’d found on a forum, in a coffee shop near Bryant Park, and was one of ten who worked freelance. We went drinking at a bar in Soho and then had some kind of networking dinner at a penthouse on Fifth Avenue. The Americans were so eager, open, and enthusiastic about even the biggest pipe dreams — in New York, I had none of the naysayers and doubts-echoed-back-to-me that I’d always had in Melbourne when I dared to verbalise my crazy dreams.

  The Writers Guild of America was striking for better wage conditions from the day I arrived, and I found it so incredibly inspiring to see such solidarity — hundreds of picketing writers in New York outside particular offices; just a handful of the 12,000 who were striking across the country. In Australia, I’d been a member of the arts union as a freelance writer, but twice they’d given me completely inaccurate information because Australia simply didn’t have the size and scope to support such a ‘niche’.