Parisians always took their holidays in the same place, year in, year out. They worked only the hours they were required to work, eating lunch cheaply on government and employer-sponsored meal tickets, and then retired on fat pensions. They poked fun at low-browed peasants from Normandy, at funny-accented folk from Languedoc and at les rosbifs. Unlike the English, who still made tired convict jokes about Australians, the French regarded Australians as impossibly exotic, marooned in a faraway Gauguin-coloured land peopled by tigers and brightly coloured parrots. Celestine took to calling the Suspicious Wanderer ‘mon petit kangourou’ and unveiled a secret wish to visit la roche rouge.
The Suspicious Wanderer wouldn’t live with Celestine. For a start, it turned out she was impossibly rich, amusing herself with a job as Bertrand’s assistant (although a real secretary did the actual work). Her surname included a ‘de’, which meant she was born into that class which lost its collective head in the revolution. She was a soixante-huiter herself, and still had Communist Party associations. She had given a lot of money to various causes but the cause most dear to her was Médecins Sans Frontières. In this, Celestine was not a dilettante; she had worked in Sudan and the Côte d’Ivoire, managing the administerial set-up of bases for field workers, and she still worked as a volunteer one day a week in the MSF headquarters in a street off rue de la Roquette.
The Suspicious Wanderer was scrupulous about paying half for everything, which meant they couldn’t eat out as much as Celestine would have liked. One blue spring evening, after the Suspicious Wanderer had saved up for a dinner at Balzar and they had finished their meal, they sat outside on the pavement with their coffees and digestifs. The Suspicious Wanderer retrieved from her purse her carefully saved fifty-franc note, placing it under the saucer of her coffee cup in advance of the bill. Just as she did so a man raced up, snatched it, and ran off down the street. The Suspicious Wanderer and Celestine looked at each other open-mouthed.
At the same moment an ageing waiter happened to be emerging with the bill. He shook his head. ‘Les pauvres sont toujours avec nous,’ he said sadly.
‘Ils ne devraient pas être,’ Celestine replied.
He screwed up the bill.
‘What did you say?’ the Suspicious Wanderer asked Celestine.
‘I told him the poor should not always be with us, as he suggests. We are rich enough to have no poor.’
The ancient waiter bought them another two digestifs, to steady their nerves. He refused to accept payment.
The Suspicious Wanderer enjoyed being marooned outside language. While she still studied French, and her comprehension skills improved and she could more easily read Le Monde without a dictionary, she could never quite remember the structure of a French sentence. She always spoke in the present tense, for example, and often spoke French sentences as if they were English ones. Frequently the subjects and the verbs of her sentences were completely askew, so that she sounded like an unschooled four-year-old, or an idiot. She noticed that not completely understanding what people were talking about was oddly restful. You could dream in peace and imagine every conversation was full of wit or significance.
With Celestine she travelled to the Vendée, to the family holiday house at Brétignolles sur Mer where Celestine had spent every summer of her life. For days they lay dazed on sand as crunchy as raw sugar, walking naked and brown around the old stone house and out into the garden. They lay in the chilly arms of the Atlantic and, later, in the warm seductions of the Mediterranean off Corsica.
She was with Celestine one late spring day when she met the man she knew she would marry. The knowledge came to her body first, a sensation that felt like intuition, a knowingness, a feeling of great calm and certainty. At the same time she experienced a rush, a tilt of the earth, much like the feeling that followed the first drag on a cigarette when she had not smoked for some time. Sounds came to her abnormally clearly: a motorbike backfiring, a man shouting out the price of vegetables, the scrape of a café chair against cement. The spring air was spicy, fresh, she distinguished coffee, croissants, the smell of the Seine. They were sitting in a café not far from the river. It was a Saturday, and a passing bride in a simple satin sheath dress was holding a posy of ivory roses. The Suspicious Wanderer looked at her future husband, and her future husband looked back, and everything they needed to know about each other passed between them.
She had not been practising romance all her life for nothing.
SEVENTY-NINE
The bath lover
HOW COULD I FORGET THE poetry of the bath? The limbs collapsing, swimming, cupped warm and safe, the skin and nerves and fibres of the heart surrounded once again by comforting water, as warm as amniotic fluid.
EIGHTY
That delicious equation
AND MASSAGES. THE BODY WORKED upon like clay, like dough, reduced to sinew, muscle, pulp. Each part of the body individually tended to, taken apart: the torso, the muscles of the back, the limbs, each leg, each arm, the hands, the feet, the scalp, the face. The secret moment of transformation, that delicious equation, when the body usurps the head. The organs of the body turned to soup: the urethra, the kidneys, the liver, the heart. The hands and feet forgetting to sweat, the brain and its thoughts finally disarmed, the conscious self reduced to pure body. Is the self the physical body? Or is the body the vessel for the self? On the massage table, the self is only a body.
EIGHTY-ONE
Coup de foudre—The princely lover
FOR EVERYONE SAFE FROM WAR, injustice, plagues and starvation, the choice of who to love becomes the most important question of existence. If you are not in chains or interned in the Doge’s Palace, everything of value rests on your choice: where you live, what you hope for, how joyful or sad your life will be. Work and love, is there anything else? What picture of life is found in your lover’s face? What future is seen there?
My future husband had horizons in his face. He had freedom in his eyes, dreams, hopes, infinite opportunities in his fingertips. I looked at him and my future appeared, dazzling, more beautiful than I could have believed.
I saw boats on shining seas, a house of laughing children. I saw rooms of people I wanted to know, swooping movement, a big life. I saw a man I recognised at once.
‘Coup de foudre. Love at first sight.’ I heard Celestine say, a voice through cloud.
I turned my eyes from him and looked at Celestine, who I had forgotten. ‘Deborah, je te présente mon ami David. David, voici Deborah.’
He had the same name as my father.
EIGHTY-TWO
Prince
OUR DAYS WERE GLAD.
Our days were counted not in the number of breaths that we took but in the number of moments that took our breath away.
We counted ourselves lucky.
We counted out the hours we had left to us, each of us set like clocks, with our handful of seconds.
We counted the colours and sounds and smells of the world, saturated with detail.
He was a lawyer, did I tell you that? He had a job, shoes, clothes, by which I mean to say that he was of the world, a real person, as well as the man of my dreams.
He was English and he lived on a houseboat on the Seine, a converted freight transporter with creaking floors, moored opposite the Petit Palais.
He was a lawyer but a lawyer with a heart (insert jokes here). He worked for Médecins Sans Frontières.
He spoke flawless French.
His father was a famous children’s book illustrator, an artist. His father was a member of the British Academy and belonged to the Chelsea Arts Club, a place I had always wanted to go.
How fast a person can move from a standing position! How quickly a person can go from being loveless to being loved! Within seconds of laying eyes on my prince, my life rearranged itself into a miraculous new pattern, a shape yet to be revealed to me but which I already knew contained everything I wanted.
But first things first: over Celestine’s head, the man of my dreams as
ked me to meet him later that same afternoon.
‘But I don’t even know you!’ I said, laughing.
‘Yes, you do,’ he said.
He told me where his houseboat was moored, with explicit instructions on how to distinguish his boat, Scheherazade, from the rest. I was watching his mouth move: his bottom teeth were slightly crooked. His front teeth, the teeth he smiled with, were straight and white.
What can I tell you about his face? He had blue eyes, arrestingly blue, a smallish mouth, a slight cleft in the middle of his chin as if a child’s finger had pushed itself into clay. It was an intelligent face, sensitive, passable as handsome. He wore his brown hair long, tangled and curled round his ears, the nape of his neck. It was a face that you might pass in the street without a second glance, but for me it was a specific face in which I could read the future.
I noticed he was tall. I noticed his body had a natural grace and that he moved with ease. He had beautiful hands.
‘Je suis ici, mon petit kangourou,’ said poor Celestine, who might as well have been a scarf slipped unnoticed from the back of a chair to the floor. When I turned my eyes towards her it took me a moment to recognise who she was. ‘Deborah?’
Had I ever seen her eyes look so worried?
Had I ever properly looked at her before?
Walking home, Celestine, uncharacteristically, talked all the way. She chattered on like a schoolgirl, about this and that, about our plans for the weekend. All I wanted to hear her speak about was him.
‘How long have you known him?’ I asked.
For a moment it appeared she was going to answer ‘Who?’ but I could see the struggle and its aftermath, the sad news settling in her face. I saw that her face was not sultry at all but full of suffering.
‘Several years,’ she said. ‘Much longer than you, évidemment.’
We walked on, past our favourite florist, with flowers arranged like living works of art, arranged as only Parisians could arrange flowers, with every detail perfect, each arrangement as beautiful as a painting. I wanted to gather up armfuls of beauty, to eat it, to become the flowers. I wanted to arrest the moment, to stay dazed and smote all the days of my life.
EIGHTY-THREE
The tree lover
SOMETIMES YOU HAVE TO DO nothing except lie on your back with your eyes closed, preferably with your bare toes touching grass. Sometimes you have to lie on a picnic rug, anywhere near a spreading tree, and open your eyes to look up into the spreading tree, a living green umbrella. Any tree will do, but ideally one with arms that embrace you, reaching out and around you, a dome of branches and leaves. The great oaks of Richmond Park, where you can lie close to the descendants of deer brought there by a king escaping the London plague. The chestnuts of France, with their blossoms like artfully designed cakes scattered like decorations in a Christmas tree. The strangler figs of Queensland, with their whiskery, old-man beards, and their cousins, Moreton Bay figs, rigged like boats, a fretwork of sinewy branches twisting and turning, as tangled as ropes. Sometimes you have to cry at the beauty of a single cherry tree in blossom, of the white stars strung like lights, so white against the perfect blue of the sky. I lay upon the earth one spring and looked up at such a tree and my heart sang because it knew what it meant to be beating.
EIGHTY-FOUR
Toes
THERE IS NOTHING LIKE IT: mudflats at low tide, the slivers of silver water, the ooze between the toes, the adult feet returned to childhood, shoes off, crab holes everywhere and, if you are lucky, a cloud of crabs with their bony, articulated limbs swarming across the ruffled mud.
EIGHTY-FIVE
A black pearl
MY FATHER ONCE BROUGHT ME back a gleaming black pearl. He flew in on his magic carpet from a land of lotus leaves and burning candles and there it was: a glistening drop of beauty on a silver chain.
My father selected only me for this pearl: not my beautiful mother, and not my beautiful sister Jane. ‘It goes with your skin,’ he said, doing up the clasp at the back of my neck. The black pearl sat perfectly in the scoop of my collarbone as if all my life my bones had been waiting for its touch.
EIGHTY-SIX
David, David, David
EVERYONE WARNED US ABOUT GETTING married so soon. On the telephone from Australia Ro said, ‘You’re getting what? Wasn’t it you who made the jokes about “better dead than wed”?’ Steph and I had the first and only falling-out of our friendship: she sent a postcard of her heroine, Emma Goldman, scrawled with a quote: ‘On rare occasions one does hear of a miraculous case of a married couple falling in love after marriage, but on close examination it will be found that it is a mere adjustment to the inevitable.’ Beneath it, she wrote, ‘Deb, why not have the honeymoon without the wedding? Why not wait to see if you like him first? It doesn’t sound like a good idea to me, marrying someone you’ve known for three weeks.’
I replied, in writing trembling with emotion, ‘How dare you, Steph! Never in a million years would I advise you not to get married, or not to have a baby, or to have one. That’s between you and Nasser. These decisions are intimate, deep, personal, the most private decisions any of us can make. I would never offer you my opinion on such a thing and I’m shocked that you would.’ I later learnt that after reading this Steph rushed around to Ro’s tiny house in Balmain, sobbing.
Clementine said: ‘Why rush? He will still be there in six months. If he loves you, he will still be there in a year.’
She began a campaign to win me back, to sanity if not to her arms. She took me to the opera, to a house on the cliffs of Normandy for a weekend, to a private soirée at the Hôtel de Marigny. She took me to a ball at a chateau near Fontainebleau, a ball that lasted till dawn, with baccarat tables and jazz bands in rooms with gilded ceilings, rock bands in tents in the gardens, peacocks on the lawns, waiters moving along hallways that resembled Versailles’ golden passages, painted, mirrored, dazzling. There were real peasants staring through the locked fences as we drove in. ‘Celestine, you secret aristocrat,’ I said. She laughed, wound down her window, and shouted, ‘Liberté, égalité, fraternité!’ The peasants cheered.
Horatia said: ‘You are like a child who wants to eat up all the ice-cream in the world. Being grown-up means stopping before you make yourself sick.’
I replied: ‘Thank you, Dr Freud. I didn’t know you were an expert on these matters.’
She looked at me and smiled. ‘Well, my dear, I can see that your mind is already made up. When you want something, you really want it, don’t you?’
I really wanted my dream lover.
I really wanted my perfect lover, my prince, having waited and waited.
I really wanted to hand myself up, as if on a plate, a liver, a heart, dissected for his delectation.
I really wanted to eat up all the ice-cream in the world until I was sick.
I really wanted to die in his arms, just like in a fairytale, going up, incandescent.
I saw that in choosing him I was closing the door on that intimate room in which Ro and Steph and I had dwelt so long, that cosy room in which we told each other secrets about men who loved bottoms and lovers who fell in love with desire and soft-eyed Arab boys who wore silk cravats. I knew I had to join that world of responsible emotional engagement before I was lost, stranded forever on the shores of adolescence, where girlish intimacies stood in for adult intimacies between women and men. I had never before burdened myself with the responsibilities of a mutual adult relationship.
We rushed, laughing, him and me, down the rue de Rivoli to buy the golden rings inscribed with our names.
We rushed, love at our heels, flying to our future.
I was wearing the orangey-red dress I was in love with, holding the hand of my perfect lover, arrived at last.
We were married in the Mairie du quatrième, just us, with no-one else present. I wore a lace top I had found at a marché aux puces, which I dyed by leaving it in a bowl of tea overnight.
Our first night married we
washed each other’s bodies, tenderly, the palms of each other’s hands, the soles of each other’s feet. With a soft cloth and a bowl of warm water we anointed each other.
Afterwards we lay in each other’s arms on his creaking boat and all the happiness of the world came to rest upon our heads. We felt a kind of religious beatitude.
EIGHTY-SEVEN
The unrequited lover
THERE HAS TO BE ONE unrequited love in a life.
My unrequited lover was romantic love, which naturally and properly never gave me what it promised, exposing me as a child who believed she was growing up to turn into a swan.
EIGHTY-EIGHT
Horatia
HORATIA LIVED THROUGH THE SECOND World War. She was in the army, the ATS, and wore a soldier’s khaki uniform. She once showed me a picture of herself in it, a pretty girl with a Veronica Lake hairstyle swept over one eye.
Horatia was a driver. For a time she drove a general around a bomb-struck London and he was so impressed with her that she was recruited to the team who looked after the prime minister.