A Letter from Paris Page 4

  I realised what a cottage industry the writing profession was in Australia, in the context of the world, when I got to America.

  Perhaps if I’d waited until I could afford to eat and sleep better, I would have missed out on knowing the truth.

  And now here I was in Paris, where things were even more fascinatingly different.

  At airport customs, I’d listed writer on the disembarkation card, and the official had peered over his glasses at me with an approving smile.

  ‘Écrivain … ?’

  I nodded in reply.

  ‘Beaucoup d’inspiration,’ he’d said approvingly, before waving me on to the next round. It all felt so far from Melbourne, where whenever I mumbled out ‘writer’, people would look at me, slightly bored, adding (depending on how much they’d had to drink) something like ‘but how much money do you earn from that?’, which deeply offended me and made me not want to talk about it.

  When I’d emailed mum about the trip to Paris, her reply had been happy and enthusiastic, which was rare.

  You’ll get to explore your French heritage, she wrote. I didn’t quite understand what she meant. I wondered if it had to do with dad.

  At Pigalle station, I began the steep climb up the Métro stairs with my suitcase, and an older man in a suit loudly tsked beside me, waving off my hands without touching me, silently taking over the responsibility of my heavy load. At the end of the climb, after an enthusiastic merci beaucoup from me, he nodded gruffly as if helping me was his Gallic duty, and I was slightly grotesque for thanking him so profusely. He went on his way.

  Even the illegal market vendors spruiking rotten bananas near the sex shops by the Moulin Rouge looked glamorous. Dirt was pretty, in this city.

  I.

  Am.

  In.

  Paris.

  I kept announcing it to myself, not quite believing it.

  Unlike New York, which had been surprisingly full of rubbish bins, Paris was far, far prettier than the movies.

  I’d never seen such a beautiful city in my life.

  I pulled out my little map and made my way down Boulevard de Clichy, marvelling at the symmetry and detail of the buildings. The people in bistros and cafes all facing outdoors like on a movie set, the beautiful city in their outlook, scrawling on pages and looking thoughtful, or talking closely and passionately to friends. Something about the way the tables were placed meant that dining solo was an immersive experience. In Melbourne, I thought, eating alone was a bit more of a lonely affair.

  The French language, which I adored but couldn’t completely understand, made even the smallest overheard snatches sound like intense philosophy. Cobblestoned streets pulled me back into another era and the signs on windows played with my internal monologue, so that I started talking to myself in a sort of Franglais.

  I feel like I’m dans une petite village.

  Arriving at the Hotel Paris in Montmartre, I wasn’t so surprised to find its interior was just like the exterior — très petite. I carried my suitcase up three flights of stairs, and squeezed and leapt around the door to get inside, because the bed filled the tiny room. But I didn’t care.

  A bed! A lamp! A French hotel room and a door I could close! I had never seen such a perfect little hotel room. I went to the window, which looked out to rows of symmetrical shutter windows directly across, and I saw an elderly man drinking a glass of wine at a table near his own window, poised in perfect elegance in his own private world, reading a book.

  Merde, I was beaucoup tired. It was only around midday in New York, but by early evening in a Paris winter it was already dark. I hadn’t slept much before my early morning flight, and this little bed in a room of my own with a door that closed was the most beautiful thing to happen to me in the past twenty-four hours.

  But there was no way I was sleeping.

  I dumped my bag, brushed my teeth, and whipped out my red scarf.

  I looked at the map of Paris I’d bought at a bookstore in New York, and studied the walk from Montmartre to just near the Eiffel Tower.

  I had come to find Gisèle.

  By then it had been ten years since mum or any of us had heard from Gisèle. How could she just disappear? Trying to access the French phone book from Australia was pointless. Even in Paris, I knew I would need to physically go to her old address, because I couldn’t conduct a phone call about much more than the basics in French.

  Had I left this voyage too late?

  24 Boulevarde de Grenelle.

  I walked down the hotel stairs and stood outside for a moment, marvelling at the streets that were so beautiful, so different to streets of Melbourne, and yet so, so familiar. I felt this uncanny feeling, like I was home, and I had family living here. Being in such an ancient city had me feeling the past had half become the present. The ghosts of my ancestors seemed closer than ever. But mostly, it was dad who seemed close.

  I had barely enough euros to last me two days, so eating at one of the many bistros I kept passing was out of the question. Instead, I spotted the red flashing lights of a cafe that was also a tabac and went inside. The place was filled with men of about fifty or sixty talking through stubs of cigarettes and drinking espresso and wine at the bar. Some wore berets.

  They looked richer, to me, than any man I’d seen at a pub in Australia. Something about their elegant sense of self-dignity defied their means.

  ‘Bonsoir,’ I murmured, conscious not to speak as loudly as I had in New York. ‘Une café crème, s’il vous plait?’

  I drank my perfect little coffee with its perfect little sugar cube in that smoky little tabac, and paid my two euros to the man behind the counter.

  I pulled out my map again and saw that I was close: Gisèle’s apartment was just across the Seine. At the Louvre, I asked a couple to take a photo of me, the pyramids glimmering in the late winter light and my face lit up in hope with my red scarf whipping in the wind.

  When I got to the Seine, I felt I’d fallen through a crack in the walls of time. The lights on the river, the reflections of the ancient buildings, the whirr of scooters going past, and a French accordion drifting from a bistro in the background — every few metres I had to stop and just stare, taking it all in, feeling like I’d been here before and yet it was also new and comforting. It was impossible to fathom ever being tired of looking and listening to everything in this city.

  I felt so inspired by the beauty that I allowed myself to think crazy thoughts: Gisèle had moved across Paris, and the concierge would give me a forwarding address. Even if she was at the other end of the city, I would find her tonight, we could be eating dinner together by 9.00 p.m. Aren’t I lucky! she’d say with her bright smile, kissing me on both cheeks and being strong and firm, a physical reminder of parts of dad that I’d never known.

  Family.

  I walked and walked, and finally made it to the apartment building I’d posted all those letters to, so long ago. The concierge was warm and smiling, but he didn’t speak a word of English.

  ‘Ah — bonsoir … Je cherche Gisèle de Satoor de Rootas,’ I said, showing him her name on a piece of paper, flipping it for the French words for ‘forwarding address’ from the little yellow French–English dictionary on top of my tourist map.

  But Gisèle was gone. He didn’t know where. Taking over from the previous concierge who’d worked there for twenty years, this new man had only been working in her building for a month. He was indeed désolée, but there was nothing he could do.

  He shrugged, looking very sorry for me.

  I walked back in the freezing cold, disappointed and wondering what else to try. Time was running out and I had barely enough money to stay and search for two nights.

  Once back at my hotel, I emailed mum and explained what happened.

  She seemed sad that I’d got my hopes up, typing, She’s probably dead, Lou.

&n
bsp; But falling asleep in Paris that night, I had the clear feeling that I wasn’t alone. I dreamed dad was in the laneway below, standing in an overcoat, smiling up at my window. He looked younger and happier than I’d ever known him to be.

  Chapter Four

  La peine

  When I woke from patchy sleep after Coralie’s first emails, the sun was heating my top-floor flat like a radiator even through the closed blinds. I needed sunscreen just to stay in bed; it would be another unbearably hot day.

  I re-read the emails and Michelle’s letters to convince myself the story wasn’t a dream. Coralie had sent another during the night, respectfully emphasising how meaningful it was to connect with me when the time with dad in London had meant so much to her grandmother. Coralie’s English, unlike my French, was almost perfect, which meant we could communicate easily about such a sensitive topic.

  How could I form a relationship with a family on the other side of the world, seemingly overnight?

  As well as gathering a picture of Michelle, I learned that Coralie was the eldest of three, with a younger sister and brother. Like my older sister, Coralie was married, with two children. She included her younger sister, Clémentine, in one of her emails, and Clémentine replied enthusiastically and affectionately, passionate about the romance of the story, excited about the whole thing. My urge to get to Paris was overwhelming but also painful — I couldn’t afford it. But I just had to meet this family.

  First, I had to tell my brother and sister, to get my head around this bizarre story, to somehow articulate it to someone not on a computer screen and make it more real.

  I’ll look through the family photos at my sister’s today, I wrote, saying I’d search for the Buckingham Palace photo. I had a feeling a lot of dad’s family photos had been burned in a house fire just before he died, but I wasn’t quite sure. Alice and Grant, who’d been living in Hampstead, might have had the photos, but they were gone — and I didn’t know where their albums had gone.

  I wrote to Coralie:

  Some of my dad’s diaries are at the state library, because he was friends with the artists David and Arthur Boyd — who are quite well known in Australia. I think the Boyd connection is why the library has his diaries … Perhaps there is a diary from 1949 … perhaps he mentions Michelle? … I’ll have a look on Monday.

  Coralie replied immediately, excited that dad was interested in Art with a capital ‘A’, impressed that his diaries were held in a library.

  How amazing that Denison was interested in Art! she wrote, and, for the first time, I didn’t feel the need to feel ashamed of dad’s unconventionality.

  Everything about Coralie’s correspondence held interest, kindness, and a respect for what dad had been, these things I’d always kept secret, slightly hidden. While others had left me with a sense of shame whenever they referred to my dad, this family seemed to think that he was someone very special. And that I was, too, because he was my dad. She was so respectful in her words.

  It was just so strange.

  Despite it being relatively early on a Sunday morning, I knew Ayala would be up and about. Like Coralie and Clémentine, my older sister and I were a contrast of lifestyles. A different space entirely from my little solo apartment, Ayala’s rambling Brunswick house was a flurry of Sunday-morning activity. With her husband and two teenagers, everyone was busy with preparations for various sports. I let myself in through the flyscreen door.

  ‘Want a coffee, Lou?’ Sean offered to make me espresso with their new machine, and I sat down at the kitchen table, moving my niece’s homework and the Sunday papers to dump my bag.

  Ayala knew more about dad than I did, by virtue of being seven years older than me, but even she was stunned by the emails from France.

  Passing me milk for my coffee without looking up from my phone, she scanned through the French letters from the kitchen table. Finnian peered over while he laced up his boots for soccer, as if sensing something out of the ordinary.

  Your grandpa … I thought, considering for the first time the flow-on effect of dad’s absence.

  My brother, Declan, slowly came into the kitchen, tired and hot from a sleepless night in the studio out the back of their house. But his eyes flickered with interest, having overheard a snippet of the story as he’d entered the house.

  A year or so earlier, Dec had used his own curiosity about dad to fuel an exhausting attempt at putting our stack of black-and-white photos into some sort of chronology. Until then, Ayala had been the sole bearer of all the family albums that had belonged to mum and dad, giant boxes of disparate photos and papers all in a jumble, the ones that escaped the fire.

  I’d appreciated the extensive research work just to make sense of the tiniest parts of dad’s photo documentation, but I could see, as Dec had worked through the boxes, which had never been properly sorted or annotated, that the job took its toll.

  The living room of Dec’s apartment became an archival records site, with sticky notes, plastic boxes, expensive plastic sleeves, and folders scattered everywhere as he discovered one thing or another was precious and needed to be properly stored. He barely did anything else when he was in the middle of the project. Tobacco and rollie papers appeared on his balcony, the addiction he’d fought to give up reappearing with the strain of poring over the past in all its half-explained details, which would inevitably have brought up grief, too.

  Every time I called him, he seemed to be on another trip to the Public Records Office to try to track down some missing piece, and the photos he showed me were hard for me to even understand — I had no idea how old dad was when most of them were taken, so couldn’t put anything into context.

  After months of work, he’d only been able to guess at a vague time line. He’d sorted and annotated as best he could. From a military background and with more knowledge than Ayala or me of the context of World War II, Dec could put some of the history clues together and understand some of the photos of dad and his brothers and sisters from the 1940s.

  But Dec hadn’t contacted any strangers, and I knew that it was lucky Coralie had messaged me, because both Ayala and Dec were unlikely to respond to a random query from a stranger about dad — particularly on Facebook.

  At the end of Dec’s work, dad’s personal photo album was still, largely, a mystery. I didn’t know who the people or places were, or how old dad was in most of the photos. Who were the people around him? Where were they taken? My sister had a hand-drawn family tree she’d made as a teenager, but we all had to be in the right mood and the same frame of mind to want to even talk about the story.

  It was so full of mixed emotions for all of us — mostly, intense grief.

  Some of the photos were obviously childhood photos, but it was dad’s twenties, thirties, and forties that were the biggest mystery — and had no documentation.

  The years he spent abroad, the time when he’d met Michelle.

  ‘Dec, when you did all that research, did you see any photos you think might be this woman?’

  He joined us at the table, and I showed him Michelle’s picture on my phone. Sean turned down the radio to hear more, offering me a second coffee.

  ‘The letters mention it was taken outside a “club” overlooking Buckingham Palace, 1949 …’

  Dec stood up, disappeared into Ayala’s study to get one of the huge boxes, lugged it onto the kitchen table, and pulled off the giant lid.

  A post-it flapped from the front of the album:

  DAD PICS. NO CHRONOLOGY. SUGGEST WE START OVER.

  Two photos from the mid-1940s showed dad proudly shining a nice car — maybe a Mercedes. Just after the war had ended, we guessed. Possibly taken in Melbourne.

  Another — this one torn in half, strangely — was of dad skiing in Vienna, Switzerland.

  Was this the trip to Vienna he’d mentioned to Michelle?

  Again, we had no idea
of the year. I texted the photos to Coralie anyway, whizzing them from Melbourne to Paris on my iPhone so her family could see something when they’d already given me so much.

  ‘So these letters were just in France … all this time?’ Ayala said, as baffled as me at the story, translating the French transcriptions from Coralie much easier than me.

  ‘The sister Michelle describes was Alice,’ Ayala confirmed. ‘Alice and Grant lived in London after the war.’

  I nodded, processing it all, missing aunt Alice, wishing I could ask her about it.

  My cousin Julian, her son, was also my godfather.

  I’d stayed with him when I worked in Sydney in my early twenties. As we sat down to dinner, he’d poured stories of dad out over a bottle of red. It struck me that he’d been the only relative to openly and fondly talk of dad without me having to ask or prod, feeling like Oliver Twist begging for scraps with my empty bowl.

  Julian used to say dad was his favourite uncle, and when aunt Alice died he put together some of the things that were dad’s and wrote little notes to explain certain parts of his life for us. Denison set up the Oberon Press in 1947 and published a small number of books, he wrote, inside a copy of a book called Horned Capon by Adrian Lawlor, apparently published by dad at age twenty-nine.

  Julian’s version of dad, like Michelle’s, contrasted starkly with the sense of shame and failure that came from elsewhere. His fondness was one of the first trickles and hints that dad was fascinating and not someone to be ashamed of. It was a hard concept to reconcile with the view I’d absorbed back in Melbourne, where no one ever brought him up unless I explicitly and painfully asked. Julian, too, had since died.