A Letter from Paris Read online

  Sure enough, as I pulled in the newspaper from the front doorstep on the Saturday when results were publicised, my name was nowhere to be found. My sister consoled me, knowing how badly I’d wanted it, taking me out for gelati on Lygon Street for a distraction.

  By the time I got home, I’d decided to get a job on a cruise ship that was to go to Europe. The thought of travel was the only thing that lifted my spirits, and a week later the cruise liner was already checking my references. I visualised a fully stamped passport replacing that paper degree — maybe travel would give me something worth writing about?

  But a week later, aunt Alice called early on Saturday morning.

  ‘Lou,’ she said in her formidable, slightly breathless voice. She never spoke about them, but I knew from her host of ancient ailments it would have taken an effort for her to get to her phone. ‘I’m looking at your name in the paper, next to Professional Writing and Editing, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.’

  I’d mixed up the newspaper’s announcement dates. Pre-internet alerts and digital updates, if she hadn’t read the newspaper front-to-back at her dining table over her morning toast every day, perhaps I would have got on that ship.

  As steely-eyed and intimidating as Alice was, she could surprise me with her perceptions. I’d always felt a sense of shame and how dare I? about pursuing writing, but Alice didn’t treat it that way. I learned one day, she’d warned mum not to expect me to ‘settle down’ into any kind of ‘normal’ career.

  She called again the day I had my first article published, which gave the occasion some gravitas, clipping the newspaper and keeping the story to show visitors.

  In the last trip I made to Point Lonsdale, not long before she died, aged ninety-five — when Barack Obama was inaugurated as president of the United States and I could tell she was confused as to what era she lived in — she pulled out a magazine to show me dad’s first published creative piece in the literary journal Overland. It’s one of the only memories I have of anyone being proud of his writing — and actually showing it to me.

  I didn’t tell Alice, because she had twilight eyes and I sensed she was losing her grip on the earth, but Overland was the first magazine that had paid me for a poem, a few years earlier.

  Michelle had met Alice in 1949, according to the letters, an event I still found beautiful to think about. Coralie’s French grandmother had met my aunt Alice! Dad had taken Michelle to Alice’s cottage in Hampstead for a picnic with the children, and afterwards they’d washed the dishes together.

  In song.

  At home, re-reading my own old diaries, searching for the discussion with Mirka Mora, it struck me how romantic it must have been, for dad to introduce Michelle to his sister and family. If I was far from home and had just started dating someone, I’d be touched if they took me for picnics with their siblings and their children in Hampstead Heath. And there was so much literary history in that area of London; I wondered what literary connections he’d made other than Dylan Thomas and Roy Campbell and those names dotted across his diaries I’d swam through in a blurry frenzy.

  I emailed Coralie and Clémentine, pasting a small photo of the page of the diary that mentioned Michelle. I’d snuck it quickly and silently, wedged behind one of the boxes, wanting to emerge from that cave of a library room with some sort of visual proof of dad — some part of him to take with me.

  It felt too small, not anything like the reams of letters they’d already transcribed and sent me. But it was still Michelle’s name, all the way across the ocean from France to Australia, uncovered from a box, and written in dad’s personal, cursive script. A little record of that time with Michelle, proof that our families had once been connected — and maybe still were.

  It was something.

  I’m sorry that this is all I could find of Michelle, I wrote to Coralie. I saw that there’s a folder full of black-and-white photos, but I have to request them in a different room, on a different day. I’ll go back.

  For the rest of the week I was at the library by opening time, reading until the warning bell went for closing, feeling foolish that I’d waited so long to know the story of my dad.

  The photos — which I did eventually get access to — were black-and-white shots from London, France, and Vienna in the 1940s and 1950s, just after the war. No Michelle. No Buckingham Palace.

  But still — they were so precious, so new and intriguing.

  There were weathered black-and-white photos of soldiers and a camp in the outback, a man I knew to be dad’s friend Alister Kershaw, and I also recognised Arthur and David Boyd. There was a black-and-white photo of the writer Richard Aldington, and a small strip of photos of a gathering outside a bistro in Paris, and numerous travel shots from what appeared to be the 1940s and 1950s with men and women I couldn’t name or place.

  They were beautiful photos, and showed dad travelling in post-war Europe, laughing, smiling, wearing well-made suits, shirts, and coats. I’d never seen him looking so dashing, if a little thin. There was even a photo of him at school with friends, as a teenager. But my favourite of those secret photos in the library folder was one where he was striding down Oxford Street, London, with Alister Kershaw.

  He looked happy, well-to-do, approachable, and handsome, just the kind of man you’d like to meet on a train.

  But no photos of Michelle.

  I started to have dreams of dad, as his words seeped further and further into my heart and I could envision him as the person he was, not the sick man who’d died before my childhood brain had the chance to comprehend him.

  The first dream came after the second day at the library: we were emailing each other despite his being on ‘the other side’. He asked about Ayala and her kids, and I told him she’d had a girl and a boy — he had grandchildren. He sent me a poem as life advice to give to them, and I can only describe that dream as a visitation.

  He was alive, back in my life, even if it was all on a level that I couldn’t quite express or yet understand.

  When I woke, I realised he was asking me to keep reading his diaries.

  It was as clear to me as if he’d come back from the dead and asked me to complete a task. It was so real — he was so real. Even though I’d found him in the library, it was Coralie’s message that had started the journey. I couldn’t express to her how grateful I was. I still desperately wanted to visit her, and the rest of her family, and I sent her another emotional email of thanks and apologies for not finding more about Michelle.

  Clémentine, as emotional in her emails as me, told me not to be stupid and that it was all so important, regardless of whether I found Michelle in his diary. I felt comforted by that.

  Each morning that week, as my neighbour woke and started shouting abuse upstairs, I’d check my emails to see if anything had arrived from Paris. I found myself hoping a message had flown its way over in the night, searching for Coralie and Clémentine’s names in my inbox. I should have been looking for a job, or a new place to live, but I was obsessed with this story of dad and the French family. Everything else came second. Soon, their uncle Edouard emailed me, too, telling me that he was so thrilled Coralie had found me, that his precious Maman had spoken of dad since 1984, that he thought the whole story was like a movie script, and that he wanted me to come to France.

  On the third day, after the visit from dad in my dream, an email came from Clémentine. It held a link to a short video that was password-protected. I tentatively clicked open, a little afraid of what it might hold.

  The video was of Michelle talking about my dad, just days before she died. A tiny, frail Frenchwoman propped up in her hospital bed, obviously nearing the end of her life. Edith Piaf’s ‘La Vie en rose’ played softly in the background. It looked as though the family had decorated her cubicle with a beautiful patterned sheet to make it more comforting.

  Laurence — Michelle’s eldest daughter; Clémentine a
nd Coralie’s mother — swayed to the music to make Michelle smile. She wore a white top and reminded me of my mum; they had a similar way of moving, looked a similar age. It was uncanny. I remembered she was a painter, just like mum had been.

  As Laurence swayed, Michelle clicked her fingers and called her in closer, speaking quietly in French. All I could make out was Denison.

  ‘Denison … Où est Denison?’

  Laurence replied, in English: ‘He is in Australia … I think …’ She smiled.

  I wailed and wailed, watching that video over and again. Clémentine had recorded it just a week earlier, not long before Coralie’s first message.

  An actual living, breathing connection to my dad.

  In Michelle’s twilight time, she even thought dad was still alive.

  That all of this had been happening in Paris only a week or so ago made my head spin. Though I’d lost Gisèle and that connection to dad’s life in France, Michelle had been there all along. She seemed a sacred treasure. I grieved for her after watching that video, like I’d lost a member of my own family.

  When I’d gathered myself together, I sent Clém an email to thank her. I wondered if she’d needed permission to share such an intimate video.

  I rode back to the library and continued the search through his letters.

  To Dec and Ayala, Clém and Coralie quickly became the French Sisters, and when Edouard, Michelle’s eldest son, expressed his passion for the story, they all became the French Family.

  My sister used her research skills to find newspaper clippings of the Gielgud play dad had taken Michelle to see and the Royal visit they’d witnessed at Buckingham Palace, wishing we had more to send the French family.

  After talking about the library papers one night, Ayala and I agreed to ask the French Sisters if they could search for a record of what happened to Gisèle. Coralie had explained in one of her messages that their uncle worked as a special investigator tracking down people owed large fortunes. As he was based in Paris, we thought he might be able to find her death certificate, at the very least so we could have some closure.

  I messaged Gisèle’s full name, and her last known address on Boulevarde de Grenelle.

  While Coralie and Clémentine and the rest of their family travelled from Paris to Brittany for Michelle’s funeral, I established myself in the library, negotiating boxes in a subterranean world of papers and stories from another time.

  Edouard emailed me the video of Michelle’s life they had played at the funeral. I was so deeply moved by all of it that even though Michelle had just passed away, I felt my family had expanded.

  In the library, I requested the maximum number of boxes I was allowed each day, and read in that cold room like I was cramming for an exam. I found an entire typed and bound memoir written when dad had returned to Australia in 1955, one I’d never known existed; I scanned it quickly to search for Michelle, but found instead Gisèle, ‘my French wife’ as dad referred to her.

  I photographed thirty or forty photos, precious photos I could add to our record of dad’s twenties. He looked so happy in France, his face radiated delight all the way across time. He’d made it, at last.

  But I didn’t find anything else about Michelle.

  I snatched photos of dozens of typed diary entries from Saint Clair, in France, because the writing was so beautiful and filled with poetic descriptions. Dad’s cursive script appeared on French hotel stationery that oozed luxury, where, in Melbourne, paper had been rationed so strictly that dad’s purchase of the printing press — and paper — to publish Adrian Lawlor’s book was apparently considered obscene.

  The days in the South of France were dad’s happiest days, I realised, reading the joy in his words at finally making it across the Channel and meeting Richard Aldington. The Writer, he called him grandly, feeling an affinity with Aldington almost like a father–son relationship. Aldington had also been affected by the war, exiling himself from England to France to get away from the ‘wreckage and the waste’.

  Aldington, Richard Aldington. The name felt important, inextricably intertwined with dad’s. Why? I searched for letters to dad from Aldington, but they seemed to be in a different library — hundreds were kept in the National Library, in Canberra. My research expanded every time I looked up a new piece of information.

  I found an Aldington letter in a book held in the State Library describing dad treating him to a meal in Paris that was so decadent I wondered if most of his wasted ‘fortune’ went on French food.

  I filled the entire memory of my phone within the first week.

  I found a note about the time he bumped into a distant ancestor on the street in Ireland:

  Galway, 1949

  I met Jack Deacy in the street in Galway this morning and we went into the pub. Jack bought drinks. A hornpipe was playing outside. ‘Well, when ye come back to Galway, I’ve a house out about a mile and there’ll always be a room for ye. Now remember you’re first preferred. Come back for the races, now.’

  I copied letters from Albert Tucker, and David and Arthur Boyd, and a postcard sent by Barry Humphries, and by necessity I swung my research to the mid-to-late 1950s. I understood why the library must have wanted this material: it covered such an interesting time in Australian history, and dad recorded so many quotes and anecdotes drawn from artists and friends who later became famous. There was correspondence from writers and bohemian figures such as Manning Clark, Tim and Betty Burstall, Stephen Murray-Smith, so many names I’d seen on spines of books or related to Melbourne or literary history.

  Dad had even written a film script with my cousin Julian, who’d been a TV director. The little boy Michelle had met. I’d had no idea dad pitched a film script — I started to understand why Julian adored him so.

  In the boxes from the 1950s, a letter from dad to his brother Randal appeared, and he talked about Gisèle. I wondered if dad had met Gisèle at the same time he met Michelle, as it might explain the lack of correspondence about Michelle.

  Dated 1953, the letter gave me some clues.

  We met in London, years ago, and recently reunited in Paris. She’s small, dark, and very French. Soon we’ll be married.

  It would mean a lot if you could send her a note.

  Dad and Gisèle, too, had met in London through ‘friends’.

  Who? How? Was ‘years ago’ 1949? Or 1950?

  More diary entries about Gisèle’s father: his name was Gerard.

  A gentle and softly-spoken man, much like a zen master, he held the same scars on his legs from infections from the war …

  Gerard — that was my brother’s middle name. A French name and I’d always wondered why …

  There was more about World War II, about Gerard. He survived four years as a prisoner of war with the Japanese in a camp in Java, where he’d climb under the fence to tear up weeds he’d give to the other prisoners so they could have some food. For four years Gisèle heard nothing. Unable to stand not knowing, she joined the army, intending to go and find him, but the war ended before she could be sent overseas.

  Gerard was expatriated out of Java and returned to Paris by the Australian Red Cross at the end of the war. Tiny and thin, wearing clothes also donated by the Australian Red Cross, with permanent marks on the back of his head from the canes used by the Japanese in the camps, he woke screaming from nightmares for the rest of his days.

  When dad lived with Gisèle in Paris, he felt so peaceful in Gerard’s presence. In turn, dad drew Gerard out of his shell. Rather than finding dad’s nationality a bit frightening, as Michelle’s parents had (Australia was so far, he might take their daughter away, I assumed was the fear), Gerard and Gisèle may have been drawn to dad because he was Australian. For the Australians had returned Gerard to France. To life.

  Dad wrote so intimately of those nights spent talking with Gerard, and how much he admired him. How close he fel
t with Gisèle, how warm he found her companionship. He nicknamed her ‘Rat’ and she called him ‘Mate’. The two were married at a registry office in Kent, England, in July 1954, even though they’d been sharing a flat near the Eiffel Tower, in the world-famous 7th arrondissement, for at least a year by then. David and Hermia Boyd were their marriage witnesses. Were the Boyds their mutual friends?

  Perhaps Dad, Gisèle, and Michelle had all lived in the same arrondissement? Perhaps they’d passed each other on Paris streets, circling each other like cats in the dark, completely unaware of me sitting here in the future, picturing the past.

  The librarian who’d been so strict the first day seemed relieved when I returned for the third day in a row, because she didn’t have to repeat the rules. I’d been asking for dad’s inventory on her screen at the end of each day when I requested the next day’s boxes, but on Thursday she slipped over to my table.

  ‘Don’t tell anyone I did this, because we’re not supposed to print things out,’ she whispered conspiratorially as she slid the forty-something pages of the descriptive list across the bench, clipped together like the book that it was.

  Oh, that token gesture helped so much. I could record which folders I’d actually seen, which boxes I’d requested where and when, what held what. I even began correcting the descriptive list in the margins of the library inventory, when I discovered the boxes and folders actually contained different things to what was listed.

  I tore through the diaries from 1947 to 1949, trying to figure out how and when dad caught the boat from Melbourne to London, where he stayed, how he’d got to Dublin.

  I’d never really registered how close to the war those days in London had been, how the circumstances of the time would have affected everything he wanted and tried to do. The bombed-out buildings, the hunger, the debt, the rationing. The six long years of the Blitz, which would take over a decade for England to completely recover from — nine years after the war had ended, food rationing was finally lifted.