Paris Still Life: A Novel

by Rosalind Brackenbury

I wished then that I had asked for a glass of wine, not juice, as if I were a child, as I stared at him out of the shipwreck of my life. I longed for him to give me something, tell me something I hadn’t known. But what could he give me? Whatever he said, he couldn’t give me back my parents.

  I said, stubborn and trying not to go on crying, “Yes, and I have just separated from my husband.”

  “He is American, your husband?”

  “Yes. I only left a few days ago.”

  “And you think it can’t be mended? You can’t go back?”

  “I’m not sure. I don’t think you can ever really go back, do you? But maybe it’s possible to find another way forward.” I wanted to ask him, What do you think? Is there a film that talks about this? Come on, you are French. Is there a theory, a story, a clue, to how life may be lived?

  “So, you are living in your parents’ flat in the cinquième, right?”

  “Yes, except it’s mine now. Ours, I should say. My siblings are all busy, married with kids, mortgages, all that, so they don’t mind. We were going to rent it out, but we didn’t, thank God.”

  “I see. And what will you do, here in Paris?”

  “Get a job, eventually. Write too. I have a book of poetry to finish, though probably nobody will want to publish it.” My first one, I now thought, had probably been a fluke, even though the prize I had won for it was three thousand dollars, good money for poetry, and it had been put forward for a National Book Award.

  “Ah, like my film.”

  “Yes. What happens to all the films and books that don’t get published? All the ideas? Does it make a difference that we have made them, do you think?” Does it make a difference that people live, and then die?

  He said, “I think so. Sometimes films are found decades later. In cellars, in ruins. You know, someone found L’Atalante in a cellar, decades after it was made? You know it, Jean Vigo? One of the best films ever made.”

  “I haven’t seen it, no.”

  “Ah, you must, you must. Rent it. I am sure you can find it—1934, it was, before the war. Beautiful. And it could so easily have been lost, buried in rubble, dust, the debris of the war. A lot of things are lost, but not all of them forever. I am sure that what you write will see the light of day, and of course if I didn’t believe that about my films, I doubt that I could go on.”

  There was comfort in knowing that he had known my parents years ago, when everything was safe, when I was young. It was like being close to the wall of a house that the sun has warmed, that after sunset still stands at your back like a radiator. I could put out my hand and touch him, and almost warm myself at him. But I was no longer safe, nor young. I couldn’t base my whole life on somebody one day finding a torn manuscript of mine in a cellar. Neither could I tell this man I hardly knew, what—or whom—I had just seen.

  I said, “I suppose Jean Vigo never knew that people found his film.”

  “No. Of course not. He died young. But it lives on, that is the point.”

  “André, tell me about them. My parents. Anything you can remember? Anything I might not know.”

  He looked across at me, a whitened man with a sweet mouth and pale-blue eyes behind thick glasses. He saw my hunger. Crumbs of information, even meaningless scraps of memory, would do. Then I could go away and, like the people who painstakingly put that film back together scrap by torn and faded scrap, create what I needed, a coherent story, in order to live.

  “Peter was somebody who was never content with things as they were, I always thought. It was as if he always wanted something more, or different. He was a restless soul. But your mother, she couldn’t have been more down-to-earth. I think she connected him to reality, in a way. Would you like something else?”

  “No, thanks, that was fine.”

  “I knew your father better than I knew your mother. Though I was very fond of her too. It was partly because he came here on business. I always felt he was someone who had a hidden life, not exactly secretive but as if something was going on behind the scenes. I knew about his other woman.” He paused and looked at me. “Forgive me for mentioning her, Gaby, but it was partly why he came here. There was a journalist. I never met her, but she was part of his life for quite some time, I think. Also, I think he would have liked to be a painter himself, not just a dealer. There was some disappointment in his youth, I think. His father wouldn’t allow him to go to art college, you know. You look very like him, by the way. But, Gaby, I’m afraid I shall have to go. I have another appointment. I’m so sorry. I had forgotten when I suggested this. Can we meet again?”

  His other woman? I was stunned by what he had just said. I wanted to hold on to him, make him tell me more, but I didn’t know how to without seeming impossibly needy. I said, “Yes, of course,” which is something you often find yourself saying in Paris. (A journalist? She was part of his life for some time . . . But who? What? How?)

  I asked him instead, “How did you know I was here?”

  “I know one of your neighbors, in your building. She said she’d seen someone, a young woman coming and going, that your apartment was inhabited, so I guessed it would be you, not your sister. I gave her the letter, as I thought you might not think to look in your mailbox. Your sister lives in London still?”

  “Cambridge. She’s married, with kids, so, yes, it was more likely to have been me.”

  We wrote e-mail addresses and phone numbers on small squared pages torn from his notebook. Outside, the crowds on the boulevard Saint-Germain slowed and massed, and the tempo of the afternoon had changed. The striding and pushing had slowed to a saunter, and I remembered the French word for strolling, flâner. I had not been able to do much flâning since I had arrived a week ago. Living in south Florida had made me take sunshine as a right, like orange juice, like the ocean, like not having to wear a coat.

  “André, thanks for the drink. Thanks for asking me.”

  I noticed that he frowned as I took his hand, in the weak sunshine outside the café, where there seemed to be well-dressed bodies flung onto every possible chair. Once this place must have been empty, quiet, a suitable café for two middle-aged writers to meet and talk. Today, the rush-hour traffic on boulevard Saint-Germain roared past.

  “Gaby, are you all right? What you have told me makes me worry about you. I mean, I know you are grown up, but I can’t help thinking of Peter and Helen and that they would want to know you are all right. Will you come to me if you need anything, the smallest thing, it doesn’t matter. Call me. Or write me an e-mail. I’m here for the next two weeks, then I have to go and see my mother in Normandy. Promise, if there’s anything at all.”

  “Thank you, André. It’s good to see you, and good to know that you are here.” Another thing I have learned lately is that people like to be thanked, and like to be important, even necessary. I couldn’t think what I would ask him for, what the “smallest thing” would be, but I could say wholeheartedly that I would let him know.

  “I am sorry, but did I shock you, telling you about your father’s other woman?”

  “Oh, no, I always knew. It’s okay,” I lied, because I didn’t want to admit how shocked I was, even to myself. “And thanks for the story.” The quick thud of my heart, the sweat in my armpits, were the real effects of what he had told me.

  “The story?”

  “The story of your film. It’s safe with me. Even if it never gets made, I have it all in my head now. Better than in a cellar, perhaps.”

  He smiled, and after a hesitation, we kissed on both cheeks. He went off to the métro, and I to wander down rue de Seine, past the statue of Voltaire grinning to himself in a little garden, and along the quai des Grands Augustins toward Place Saint-Michel. I needed to walk it off, to shed tears as I walked, to be invisible in the faint glow before sunset, to digest what I had just heard about my dead parent. Ask, and you get told. Want information, and you get a piece you never wanted. Had I known? I began to remember all the times my father had not been there, and both
we and our mother had seemed to find it perfectly normal. But what had I left out? What had remained invisible? I walked along the quai Malaquais, then up the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève and past the Panthéon, the monument to all those grands hommes that always feels too big and bulky for its site, and home through the Place de la Contrescarpe and down the crooked familiarity of rue Mouffetard. It seemed that I would have to begin to remember everything differently. But you can’t undo memory, you can only reinterpret it.

  Paris took me back into its heart as I walked. I remembered walking the banks of the Seine all those years ago when my parents had shipped me off here as a teenager, to spend summers speaking French with friends of theirs, the Beuchets, who lived on rue des Rosiers in the Marais with their daughter, Sophie, who was my age. Sophie and I had walked and walked, partly trying to lose weight, partly to exchange eye contact with young men in cafés and be invited to join them. I thought of her now—where would she be? We had lost touch, or lost interest in each other, yet those first walks across the city, all the way along the Seine, up to Trocadéro, sometimes into Belleville and up to Montmartre, sometimes along the Canal Saint-Martin and all through the Marais, had been a sort of pilgrimage for me, and she my guide in a first heady taste of Paris—and freedom.

  Back at the apartment—my apartment, as I was beginning to think of it—I made tea and boiled an egg to calm myself down. I dipped toast fingers into my egg, as my mother had showed me when I was a small child, and as I had eaten my eggs ever since. I thought of her and wondered: Had she known? Had she been miserable, in private, without any of us knowing? My father had lied to her—he must have. Did she discover the lies? Was she unhappy when she drove her car out that day, when a truck had driven into her? I would never know, now. Tears dripped into my egg as I ate. I felt furious, betrayed, myself as well as her, myself where I was her, her child. Yet, I was his child too, and I could also imagine him here, alone but about to go out and meet a woman—who?—somewhere in Paris.

  Later, as I was trying to get to sleep, dosed with melatonin and red wine, the light still picking its way in between the shutters, I thought again about May ’68 and the two lovers who were women, student and teacher, and the car crash, and the way love flames up and then is brutally extinguished, like revolution. You can tell a story so many different ways, you can leave things out, make things up, change the characters, you can play with it endlessly. But the story I had just been presented with, the real one, was about my life. It involved me; it had involved me for years, without my knowing. It was, had to be, my story now.

  3.

  My father, Peter, was a secretive man, as André had said, but I knew he loved my mother. Or I thought I knew, until now. You could see it in his face when he looked at her. Sometimes he frowned and scowled, but then there was always the beseeching look, saying, Helen, love me, I need you, I want to know you are near. But was needing someone the same as loving her? If my father had not loved my mother but someone else, all my notions of what love was would have to be revised. I would have to forget everything I thought I knew about them. I would have to tell it all otherwise.

  I was in America when he died, last November, as I had been at the time of my mother’s death, two years earlier. I booked a flight from Miami and arrived at Heathrow on a wintry evening and took the train as fast as I could to Norwich, not very fast because all the trains now are called “Cross-Country” and tend to stop arbitrarily in the middle of nowhere, so that you have to sit and stare at banks of nettles. I arrived just in time for the funeral, which my brother Hugh had organized. My father had died suddenly. A heart attack, I was told. He was sixty-five, and it ran in the family. I knew he’d been taking pills and trying to do meditation for a few years, at a doctor’s suggestion, after many years of drinking and eating exactly what he felt like and in between flying all over the world, taking long, fast walks along the cold beach that ran in front of their house on the east coast. He had quit smoking too, saying that there was no point now, it was not a mark of freedom but of simple idiocy. He’d been lonely since my mother died, no doubt, and my sister and brothers could only visit so often. The house was cold, isolated, uncomfortable, but he wouldn’t move from it to a smaller place in Cambridge, near my sister, Margot, which had been suggested. I used to call him from Florida and listen to his ranting about George Bush and American politics, his jibes about how he didn’t know how anybody in her right mind could live there.

  “Dad,” I’d say, “what about Margaret Thatcher? You didn’t leave the country when she was in power.”

  “Ah, but we were militant. Labour was militant in those days. What are the Democrats doing? Nothing at all. I don’t know how you can put up with it, darling. Florida, of all places. I suppose the weather must help. When are you coming over, anyway?”

  And then he was dead. Hugh called me, and then Phil. None of us could believe it. He had been found out in the marshes near Blakeney, as if he’d been a vagrant. Facedown in some reeds, his old coat spread around him. It made me think of Magwitch in Great Expectations. At the funeral in the flint church that reared up out of the marshes and summoned everyone with its peal of bells, the way it had announced shipwrecks for centuries, there were not many people. Hugh, Phil, and I; and Phil’s twins; and Marg and her husband and children; and some neighbors, the Blacks, who looked after the cottage when he was away; none of his friends from London; no one from the gallery; certainly no one from Paris. At the time, I thought it was strange. I asked Hugh, “Didn’t you put it in the papers? Didn’t any of his friends know?” I couldn’t believe there wasn’t anyone who knew him at work. My father had had a gallery on Cork Street for many years and had traveled widely, buying art. He was always having drinks with one person, dinner with another. Amsterdam, Paris, Rome. Friends, colleagues, mysterious people with strange names. Where were they all?

  I thought back: there had not been a strange woman at the funeral, in black, standing apart, looking like the French actress Fanny Ardant; I would have noticed.

  Hugh said, “I put it in the Times and the Telegraph and phoned a few people who might not read newspapers, and we got quite a lot of letters, you can read them when you have time. Nice letters. People missed him, they minded. But I suppose nobody wanted to travel to the wilds of Norfolk on a cold November day and catch their deaths themselves. That’s all I can think.”

  I wondered whether André Schaffer had been one of the people called. He had seemed very calm about his friend Peter’s death—not the reaction you would expect from a contemporary, a man nearly the same age.

  I remembered the cold in the church, and then, just when we were getting used to it, a blast of hot air as the central heating suddenly kicked in. From freezing, we sweated. Young, spotty-faced men from the undertaker’s heaved my father’s coffin up the aisle as the organ wheezed out its traditional hymn tunes, and I’d thought of how English this was, all of us in our winter coats—mine one I’d left in a cupboard in my parents’ house for years, with moth holes in it now—rubbing our hands together, watching the plain pine coffin shouldered up the aisle, dreading going to the crematorium, dreading the tea afterward in the cottage; there would be the whisky bottle passed surreptitiously from hand to hand, the slight sniffs that stood in for tears. Then, the sudden blare of heating, so we were all red in the face and sweaty in the armpits, panting to get out. The church was one of the East Anglian churches built when this part of England was rich in sheep and wool. A wool church. It was where my mother’s funeral had taken place, only two years earlier. Yet somehow because Dad had still been there to organize it, none of us had felt quite so bereft. We were not yet orphans, then, nor were we the chief mourners. I remembered the feeling from that time, the sheer astonishment that our mother was no longer there to try to organize our lives, she from whose control I had fled, at seventeen, never really to return.

  Our father’s coffin had looked strangely small as it was set down. Phil, the younger of my two brothers, nudged me
suddenly and said, “I wonder if it’s really him in there?” and his son Andy immediately said, “Maybe it isn’t him; maybe it’s someone else!” and Hugh, tall and frowning over his hymnbook, shushed them both.

  “What happened to the dog?” I asked Hugh at the tea.

  “The dog?”

  “Muffin, whatever she was called. Dad’s dog. He wouldn’t have gone for a walk without her. Did she come home alone, or sit there nobly with the body, like dogs in movies?”

  “You know, I haven’t the slightest idea. I never thought of that. I wonder where she is?”

  After my father’s funeral, I went back to Matt and to Florida and tried to take up my life as it had been, but nothing worked. I began to detest heat, palm trees, the traffic in Miami, people’s accents, the sameness of days; I began to detest my husband. I knew that none of this was his fault, that he had not changed during my brief absence, but I was unable to love him, unable even to talk to him. I was more depressed than I knew: cast adrift, as I felt it, on the uncaring tide of American life, stunned by the glitter and speed of the city, horrified by its highways that I had to negotiate in order to go anywhere, in hiding from the brightness, the hard surfaces, even from the unending blue of the ocean. Matt, I have to go, if only for a while, I have to leave you. I practiced saying it in whispers, to myself in the bathroom; then I said it to him. He hardly argued. I realized that I had been, for many weeks, an intolerable presence in his life. He looked at me across the breakfast table when I said it aloud, then he simply got up, left his plate of scrambled eggs and toast, took his coffee cup with him, and walked out of the room. I didn’t follow him. I looked at congealing scrambled eggs and heard the front door slam. If there had been a conversation, would it have been different? At the time, our whole marriage seemed to be expressed by that refusal of his to talk, even to defend himself.

  “I love you.” It was the last thing he said to me, on Concourse D at Miami International Airport, where he had insisted on coming to see me off. The first time someone says these words to you, they go through you like an electric shock. The last time—well, it sounds so plaintive. In America, it is supposed to be the magic word, the phrase to end all argument. The open sesame, if you like. Lights go up when you say it, music plays. Where it is used more sparingly, in England, for example, it does not have this instant argument-ending power.