After I’d learned how meaningful Saint Clair had been to dad, I’d searched and found numerous more books Alister Kershaw had written, four of which had mentioned dad’s life in France. Alister Kershaw’s French memoirs, particularly Hey Days, had described the intense conformity of Melbourne in the 1940s, and the desperation he, dad, and the more unconventional of their peers had felt to get to Europe.
Dad and Al had a long and tempestuous relationship, and I guessed it was because they were similarly impulsive, creative, and hot-tempered. Deep in Geoff Dutton’s collection of papers were various references to dad and Al’s exploits and disagreements. Al, who seemed, by all accounts pretty wild and irreverent, called dad ‘one of nature’s crackpots’, but also clearly loved him, because he described him fondly, telling anecdotes about dad’s practical jokes, in every book he wrote about France.
It was when dad met Gisèle that Al seemed to start getting annoyed with dad, complaining that she had made him too ‘tame’ in his letters to Geoff. I decided this must have been because Al preferred the crackpot version of dad who initiated wild escapades, not the calm, loved, settled version. He probably felt a bit excluded and jealous when dad found such a like-minded companion in Gisèle.
In a poetically similar fate to the one that met Aldington decades earlier, Alister had died suddenly of a heart attack in his garden in Sury-en-Vaux in 1995. At the time, he’d been in charge of Aldington’s literary estate. I’d found references to Alister’s children in one of dad’s letters, discovering that Sylvain, his son, lived in France.
I’d sent him an email. He lived near Carcassonne, in the South, and worked as a translator. When I emailed him about my research and impending trip, he wrote back warmly, in words that echoed Alister’s writing style. When I sent him my dates for France, he booked a trip to Paris to meet me.
I feel I should warn you, he wrote, understanding the need for memories even before I’d articulated my need in the email, I don’t remember much about your father.
He met me at Rambuteau Métro station, an older man smoking an electronic cigarette, the echo of the figure of Alister I’d seen in pictures. We walked together to a nearby cafe.
‘Now, I’m sorry but I can’t tell you much about your father,’ he said again, before recalling dad and mum’s visit to Paris when Ayala was a child.
‘Your father was a larger-than-life character, and he mattered a lot to my father.’ He handed me a copy of Hey Days, which he’d carefully carried all the way from Carcassonne, 800 kilometres away. I didn’t want to tell him I already had a copy.
Because his gesture was significant. I’d had to hunt for all these books and references, but this man travelled for hours on a train to meet me, bringing me a copy because he knew it mattered. Because we had shared histoire, through our dads.
I pulled out two photos I’d printed from copies I found in the library. One was of Dad and Alister walking down a London street. The other, of dad, Al, and Geoff walking somewhere in Switzerland.
‘Oh, is this for me to keep?’ he said, holding it close like a treasure, examining the never-before-seen photos of his father, much like Gisèle had treasured the photos on Saturday. ‘Are you sure I can keep this?’ He kept thanking me, telling me how kind it was.
‘I remember when your father passed away, my father was very sad. Very, very sad. For a long time …’
Sylvain went on to tell me some stories about dad and the time in Saint Clair. About how dad got so deliriously seasick on the boat ride to Port Cros he’d recited his own eulogy in the third person.
Then there was another story of dad turning up in London unannounced and sneaking into Al’s room to add lines to something he’d been composing on his typewriter, hiding in a cupboard to see Al’s reaction.
We sat drinking coffee in Paris, like our fathers had done decades before, and I felt such a sense of comradeship with Sylvain. He offered to help translate for me when I got to Saint Clair, and I told him about the endless searches through boxes of letters, how many beautiful ones about Saint Clair I’d found in the library in Canberra.
‘Actually … I’m an idiot. An idiot,’ Sylvain suddenly said in a dramatic way that made me laugh. He remembered he had a pile of fifty letters or so from Aldington to Alister that referenced my dad.
‘I’ll scan them for you when I get back to Carcassonne,’ he promised, as we left the cafe to walk for a while down Rue des Archives to chat a little longer at Place Victor Hugo.
‘My father was very affected by Denison’s death,’ he repeated. I don’t know why this knowledge soothed me. As we passed a particularly beautiful doorway on an ancient building, I learned Alister had actually been writing an anecdote about dad’s time at the Hotel Floridor when he heard the news.
Something clicked and stirred within me. I don’t remember dad’s funeral, but I do remember wondering where all his friends had been, why I never got to meet any of them. It had always pained me, to think of him dying so cut off and alone. But it wasn’t true — many of his friends were just tucked away in France.
After a short walk and farewell to Sylvain, I crossed the Seine and walked through Saint Germain, across to the Musée Rodin. Clém had told me earlier that day that the gardens were a beautiful escape from the hustle of Paris.
‘Whenever I’m preparing for an important role, I go there.’
I found the gardens — a smooth and symmetrical walk of luxury, ancient art, and forest greens — and the quiet and calm of it soothed me. At a little chair overlooking The Thinker, I sat to look and listen.
Chattering tourists and passionate Italians gathered in groups across the path, pointing and talking about aspects of each sculpture. A modernist almost by accident, Rodin was rejected from art school in Paris again and again. It wasn’t until he took his first trip abroad, to Italy, in his mid-thirties, that his work gained any traction in France.
How strange, the twists and turns of the social acceptance of art.
Something about that garden, and the monumental sculptures, carved over a century earlier, reminded me of the purpose of any creative act. For art to have any kind of influence or lasting power, it has to come from that part so unique you just can’t change it, irrelevant of outside opinion or recognition.
How strange, to feel a sense of comradeship with Auguste Rodin. But I did, just as I felt with Clém, and Sylvain, who immediately recognised the importance of shared stories and literature and art, doing all they could to honour it. Sylvain, carrying his father’s book up from the centre of France because he knew how much those words would mean to me, apologising that he couldn’t remember more, not realising how just those two or three memories were so much. Clém, taking my quest to find Gisèle as something sacred, recording the interaction, and thanking me for the honour of letting her witness the encounter.
The shame and uncertainty about dad that I’d felt back in Melbourne was as unfathomable an idea as Rodin’s work being ugly. Maybe art isn’t about acclaim; maybe the real treasure is actually recognition by our kin. By the people who matter, those strangers you immediately recognise as one of your own, whether you meet them in person or just get to view their work. Those similar souls who have a flick of the eye, an untameable part that can’t be held back. Something inward that’s pushing them forward, that sense of the importance of individual creation. The sense of soul freedom that all art embodies: the most honest and unique part of the spirit, the part that is immortal.
I didn’t leave the garden until closing time, walking in the late afternoon light back to the Seine, from where I could see hundreds of lights on the Eiffel Tower begin to flicker.
Continuing to walk, I even found Gisèle’s old apartment, the one I’d visited in 2007 when the concierge couldn’t tell me where she’d gone. So many people had helped me to find her, but really it was because of the French sisters. And even though she could die, before I might see her
again, something had already been transferred to me. A knowledge, a histoire, that I could recreate with words, over and over. A profound healing because I had something now, which I didn’t have before Paris. A sense of my own history. My roots.
The sculptures of Rodin and all the art across Paris were like this treasure within me that I’d recovered and put into words. A sense of creative regeneration swept over me, like what I put into the world was something unique and never to be replicated.
A timeless thing, recognised by kin.
Chapter Twenty-one
En famille
Each night in my little studio apartment, the shutter windows opening up to the lives across the square, I’d been reading my way through dad’s French memoir. Like the figures I saw reading and sipping solo glasses of wine by candlelight, I would pour myself a glass of something delicious, and read my way through dad’s France.
I was up to ‘The Hotel Floridor’, the first place in Paris he stayed when he arrived from Saint Clair in May 1948. It seemed his Paris story started in Montparnasse. The first visit to Paris! What wouldn’t I give to relive that experience of May 1948.
The hotel Floridor seemed to be built over a bicycle shop, the lift didn’t work, the carpet was faded and threadbare, and a strong smell of cooking arose from the patron’s quarters. I liked it at once, and liked the patron, Louis Marandou, a broad-shouldered, red-faced Berrichon whose accent it was to take me four years to understand completely.
The room was large, and so was the bed, there was a small wash-annexe with a hot and cold tap. That was for the look of it only, like the lift, hard experience taught me. A window opened on an exterior square, around which the hotel was built. The sun shone down on washing hanging over window-sills, a glimpse of a woman’s head, a man shaving. I flopped on the wide bed and sniffed Paris smells deeply. The patron made me understand … if I wished to save money, let me just bring back some food from the shops, and a bottle of wine, his wife would cook it for me … I was en famille.
Mademoiselle Moos, an elderly woman with one leg, who had hidden resistance fighters from the Gestapo, had lived a few streets from the Floridor. She welcomed him that first night because she’d once met his sister Kathleen, and offered dad cigarettes before taking him on an express tour of shops that sold food ‘not at black-market prices’, introducing him to people to ensure he had the best knowledge of where to source what he needed during his Paris stay.
Food infused everything, back then, because it was so scarce. Unlike London, where dad had found that knowledge of where to get food was fiercely guarded, in Paris they talked of the black market almost casually.
The Hotel Floridor had been a complete contrast to his first rooming hotel in London, where he’d lie starving upstairs looking at the awful wallpaper as he smelled the cooking food that he wasn’t allowed to eat though the patron had purchased it with dad’s ration book.
According to Google, the Floridor certainly didn’t look like the Palace of Versailles dad had described in wonder, but I was so happy it was still there. I’d be able to get a sense of Paris in 1948 as dad saw it — for it was certainly unrenovated.
I walked up the steps of the Métro station at Denfert-Rochereau to wait for Clém on the busy Avenue du Général Leclerc, just a short walk from the Floridor. Laurence — Clém and Coralie’s mother; Michelle’s oldest daughter — had invited us to lunch, and she and her husband, Arnaud, lived nearby. I spied a street vendor selling fresh jonquils and impulsively bought a bunch.
Underneath my feet lay the skeletons of over six million people in the catacombs. An underground tourist attraction that had repulsed dad, since he’d learned of tour groups accidentally ‘leaving’ people there, it similarly repulsed me. I’d had to quickly deal with my claustrophobia to get around on the Métro, but I wasn’t going to pay to see any tunnels of bodies. The entrance to the catacombs, near the lion of the old city gates, seemed appropriately named La barrière d’Enfer. The Gates of Hell.
Clém greeted me with a kiss and led me laughing to the Floridor, which was still built over a motorbike shop, and still had the ancient steps and carpet. I could even picture dad pushing open ‘his’ front door. In dad’s collection of letters at Ayala’s, we even found postcards from Louis Marandou, sent to dad and Gisèle after they’d married and moved out of the hotel. Dad had returned to stay in 1973!
Clém and I walked up the steps from the front entranceway, which led to a small reception area with a little landing. The first thing I noticed was the low ceiling and the tiny lift. Dad had been over six feet tall — how on earth had he navigated Parisian lifts? It didn’t even look big enough for me.
‘Bonjour!’ a friendly man greeted us, and Clém immediately started telling him (in French) that I was from Australia, and my dad had lived in this hotel after the Second World War, in 1948.
‘Ah! Ah!’ He was smiling and friendly, not even slightly surprised that we were treating the decrepit hotel like the living museum it is.
‘He’s telling me there’s someone in the room that you think your dad described. But if you come back on Wednesday, at eleven in the morning, they’ll let you see it when the man checks out.’
The man behind the counter offered for Clém and I to walk around in the ‘common areas’, so we crept up the sticky stairs to the kitchen. The stairs were so steep, I couldn’t help but wonder at dad’s gasping lungs, still only a few months from recovery from TB. How had he managed it?
The hotel was miniscule, but perfectly situated. A stone’s throw from the Gare Montparnasse and not too far from Saint Germain, there was even a little park directly across the road.
I pictured dad walking home to the Floridor the night he was arrested, unaware of what was about to greet him in the doorway. The hotel was tiny. A swarm of police — or even journalists — would have filled the stairs out to the street.
After the Floridor visit, Clém took me to a market vendor because she wanted me to try a French goat cheese. We stopped into a bookshop where a man was parked up the front with pencils, sketching. Montparnasse, as far as I could tell from walking the streets with Clém, seemed to hold the most beautiful touches of the old Paris.
We rounded the corner to her parent’s apartment, where a Frenchwoman in a leopard-print cloak joined us, talking excitedly as she seemed to know Clém. Thankfully, she didn’t also join us in the lift, which only just fit the two of us. The building, according to the brass panel outside, had been the first meeting place of the leader of the French Resistance, Jean Moulin, and the lift seemed a relic of that time, too.
Laurence was waiting as we creaked our way up to the top floor. Smiling and so typically French, she was familiar from the video Clém sent me of Michelle, a year earlier. The video where Michelle repeated, ‘Where is Denison?’ and Laurence had smiled and replied, ‘in Australia … I think …’
I felt we’d already met.
‘Hello, Lou-ee-sa,’ Laurence greeted me warmly, smiling and kissing me on both cheeks. She led me into the studio apartment, where smiling Arnaud was waiting in a lovely pink sweater, and I received another gentle cheek scatter of kisses and greetings.
Tall and light-filled, the apartment was scattered with a few of Laurence’s oil paintings in progress, a mixture of abstract and impressionist styles, while a large one hung over the living space. I had the sense that I’d entered a gallery. There was so much light, and the view reached over the rooftops of Paris. Despite it still being early March, the sky was bright and blue.
The large windowed doors of the living space opened to a small garden with a table set for lunch. My choice of seat was apparently important, so that I’d have the best view of the Montparnasse rooftops in the sun. Arnaud had a bottle of red open at the ready.
It was a perfect, sunny day. As Laurence fussed with food, she and Arnaud fired me questions like excited cousins.
‘So — when we —
ah — learned about this story — about Denison, last year — we wanted to come to Australia!’ Laurence said first, staring at me intently in the same way Marie had done on my birthday. ‘I thought — maybe I have a sister that I don’t know? Maybe we are related?’
Arnaud sat back laughing, and poured me a glass of wine.
Clém winked at me and went inside to make herself a peppermint tea.
As we talked over a beautifully prepared feast of courses — veal and salad, potatoes and more wine, followed by cheese and bread again — I got the sense that my arrival in Paris was a cherished occasion to this warm and beautiful family.
Clém kept saying ‘merci, Maman’ every time Laurence put food on her plate, which triggered the memory of watching French films with my own mum. But I didn’t miss mum, just as I didn’t grieve dad, in Paris. I felt close to mum in this space, because Laurence was a painter, just as mum had been. Her hands even had the same shape as my mum’s, earthy and square, used to constant movement. Like they always needed a brush, a plant, something to manoeuvre into a visual presentation, just so.
Laurence and Arnaud wanted to know all about my research since Coralie’s initial email, and I realised the whole family had been talking about and invested in the story even though miles away in Australia I’d only written to Clém and Coralie. I’d had no sense that this family would be welcoming me like this, and I found it extraordinary to look back at how lonely and confused I’d felt, researching the things I was now happily relaying with a view across the rooftops of Paris.
After a seemingly endless feast of lunch, Laurence brought out the album of Michelle’s family photos. As Coralie had done a year earlier by email, Laurence explained the religious and cultural constraints Michelle had been living under when she returned from London to Paris. But now I had the knowledge of where dad had been, too, and when.
A Letter from Paris Page 22