A Letter from Paris

by Louisa Deasey

  For dad, the gentle sewing together again of a body wracked by tubercular infection.

  And a nightingale who sang during the day.

  May 1948

  Last week I climbed up the slippery rocks of a cascade which falls the full height of the hills ringing Saint Clair. At the top I found a track, and walked along. After a mile or so, the knock-kneed invalid of early March, who could scarcely walk downstairs for meals, began to run.

  That is what Saint Clair has done for me …

  Raphaël had the deep tan of someone who lives on the Mediterranean coast, but the clothes of a notable dignitary. I looked down at my jeans and T-shirt, feeling ugly and casual and all too Australian. He had a kind, sensitive face, though, and studied me inquisitively, a little like Laurence had done, back in Paris.

  I kept dad’s heavy memoir in the bag across my aching shoulder as he lifted my suitcase into the boot of his car. Something superstitious rose within me — I couldn’t let it go, as if it could keep me safe in this anxious moment.

  I went immediately to the left, the passenger side of cars in Australia. Raphaël galloped again, to catch me, looking confused.

  ‘Ah — I am driving …’

  In his car, I could barely speak, for fear of breaking or destroying my luck, of jeopardising something I worried was too valuable to accept.

  ‘So,’ said Raphaël, looking at his watch, ‘we have an appointment with Josephine at La Villa Aucassin.’

  The Villa.

  ‘I will stop just for a small time at your Hotel, first.’

  Another tanned Frenchman took my suitcase and handed me a giant key for my room at the hotel, without needing my name.

  As I put my bags and coat down in the light-filled room, I could hear Raphaël talking to the hotelier, in French.

  Lointain papa … après la guerre … les poètes amoureux … elle est une australienne …

  The mirror in the hotel bathroom showed me an anxious face gaping back, but it couldn’t matter.

  I grabbed my handbag, and dad’s heavy French memoir, and left the room.

  Once in Raphaël’s car again, we drove twenty metres up a track that led to the Villa Aucassin. I could have walked, but he took his role as cultural dignitary very seriously, and I was aware it was a great privilege to be seeing this villa, which made it even more ludicrous that I’d found it through social media. It was Ivor’s private residence, not a tourist attraction.

  As Raphaël pulled up, I looked around at the ancient mountains of Bormes, flanking the town like a protective shoulder, the ocean laid out through the trees below.

  Place of my ancestors. Once dad’s home, too.

  Tonight my loved sister Alice came to stay. I put her to bed in my room and walked on to the terrace for a few minutes. The cool wind blowing. Silence. The lonely fir trees on the bare point swept by this wind … this is my land; I have become possessive about Saint Clair … Yesterday I had the odd experience of having Richard Aldington tell me a story about my own uncle … My old uncle Charlie, mother’s brother, fits in … Everyone down here loved him. The slow bush speech, old tanned face, pipe always in a gnarled fist, without pretension or curiosity, living out the years after his hard work finished with slow and deep pleasure.

  As we got out of Raphaël’s car and I saw Aucassin in cursive script on the bronze gates, I wondered at the insanity of thinking I could come here and just knock on doors. I might have found it — but the gates were locked, and the sweeping forest that would have led straight down to the sea had been since cleared and turned into roads with houses.

  But it was still so quiet.

  Aside from Raphaël, and the movement of Josephine, who had come to let us in, the place and the pace of my journey, seemed finally calm.

  Events are not sudden here … Our happenings seem to approach more slowly than in cities … Hotness enough for swimming during many days, and now a cool breeze from the sea.

  When the bronze gates opened, something came over me. I lost my confidence and felt a wave of nausea. Fighting back tears, I smiled instead, because Josephine was here to show me around.

  ‘So you found it!’ she said warmly, as Raphaël pulled out a camera and started to take photos. As with Clém on our precious visit to Gisèle, I knew I would be grateful for the record, the souvenir. But still, I felt complex, like he was recording a kind of death. It felt fake to smile. I couldn’t explain my unmooring.

  Inside the gates, the grounds of the Villa were stunning. There were citrus and mimosas. A bocce court was fashioned to one side, a cleared garden where the forest to sea would have been, and an ancient stone step and shaded table on the side of the mountain.

  The impressively large and preserved villa stood with white, concrete walls, in its original state. The blue shutter windows upstairs opened out to a verandah that overlooked the sea.

  Catha goes to bed. Dusk falling. Richard goes for a bottle of champagne. I play a few bars on the piano. Netta smokes peacefully.

  I wanted to sit, and take it all in, but my two guardians, those precious connecting humans who’d allowed me to enter the gates, were chattering in French, pulling me forward. Speeding the process along, where I just wanted to press pause and stop.

  I couldn’t figure out what to do. I knew the short visit would be my only chance, and I wanted to search for dad. I knew he wasn’t there, I didn’t know why I thought I’d find him, because the forest was no longer a forest and now it held new homes. I just wanted to be alone there.

  Raphaël and Josephine led me up a little track to the lookout behind the Villa, and despite the new houses below we still had a view of the township. Serge Berkaloff’s inn, the track to the beach, it was all still there.

  A small ancient world — preserved in its beauty, I gathered, much from Ivor’s influence. Thanks to him, the rows of tall, peach-painted apartments that lined much of the coastline didn’t obstruct all the views in Saint Clair. He’d bought much of the land around Aucassin just to protect it.

  We moved inside, walking upstairs, and I had the sense that I was standing in the room that had been dad’s bedroom.

  ‘La chambre australienne,’ said Raphaël, close behind me, and when I asked him why he pointed to a framed photo of Uluru.

  … caught up somewhere between the Celtic twilight, the South of France, and Ayer’s Rock …

  Standing in that room felt like return to a family home. I could almost smell dad’s tobacco pipe, remember the movements of his arm and the constant scratching of thoughts on paper.

  The cool wind blowing. Silence. The lonely fir trees on the bare point swept by the wind. I am in France, and for two months in a Villa. The green sea is a hundred metres away … Richard, Al, Serge. At home in the place I love with people I love.

  God, even the nightingales excite me; why need there be champagne … ?

  We walked out onto the verandah.

  … the sound of steps on the verandah, some new visitor, the conversation turns to writing, art or music … disgust with the war years …

  The sky was the same, the sea was the same, even the creaking floorboards held the imprint of dad’s halcyon days.

  Yet I felt so confused. Discombobulated, disorientated, juggling past and present in my heart and not sure how to behave with two strangers.

  Downstairs, our visit reaching an end, Raphaël opened his car.

  ‘If you don’t have any plans for the evening, I thought I could drive you into Le Lavandou and we could have a nice drink?’ said Josephine, kindly.

  It was a beautiful offer, warm and generous, but I was fighting back tears, counting down the moments until I could be alone.

  ‘I’m sorry — I don’t know how to say it in French — but this is quite overwhelming,’ I said, feeling guilty.

  Some quiet talk, in French again. Raphaël clasped his hands in fro
nt of him, looking at the ground.

  ‘Vous êtes émue,’ said Josephine. Raphaël nodded, in agreement.

  I felt even more émue as she locked the gates to Aucassin and I knew my chance was over.

  As Raphaël dropped me back at my hotel, he stated in his lilting accent that he’d booked lunch the following day.

  ‘So we will meet at midi, at Les Sables D’Or.’

  Les Sables D’Or. Serge Berkaloff’s inn. The inn of the thousand bottles, the Count with the long eyelashes, and twenty types of hors d’oeuvres.

  After passing the owners at my hotel reception, I opened up my room and closed the door.

  It wasn’t until I unpacked a few things and sat outside on the balcony under a giant orange tree that I understood why I needed to be alone. A church bell rang slowly, like it was signifying the end of a hymn.

  I watched the sun set pink and orange across the Mediterranean sky in silence. The backdrop of the ancient mountains slowly shaded darker, and the salty sea waved and lapped, only metres down the path.

  It was finished. Something had finished. A battle I hadn’t even known I’d enlisted in fighting, all that time ago back in the library.

  But why didn’t I feel more relieved?

  I wished I could return to Aucassin, alone, to lay something down in a ritual or to whisper to dad, but the gates were locked. As the air dropped in temperature and the sun started to fade, I put on my shoes to walk the town alone.

  I wandered up and around the tiny town. I couldn’t hear dad, so much as feel him whisper.

  He wanted to tell me the story.

  It was March 1948, and I’d been in London for eight months, Lou. Those hospitals in Dublin and Switzerland … Grey skies and biting winds were punishing to my wretched windpipes after catching tuberculosis from the boat. My ration book had been confiscated by the patron of my boarding house, and as I lay, half-starving in that ill-patterned room, a man gassed himself in the room beside me.

  The War was over, so why were we all still suffering? Al wrote me a maddening letter with tempting descriptions of Saint Clair.

  The mess of the War years still lapped and waved at my memories, threatening to surface at the strangest of times.

  Getting to England had been no mere matter. No one would write me a recommendation. I had to beg that bunker on the bottom floor of the SS Asturias because of my behaviour at Geelong Grammar. Over 150 pounds, and I still had to weasel my way onto that hell-ship.

  Five weeks. No windows, no trips out on deck. God-awful, matchbox-sized packets of food. And a mad captain addicted to speeches.

  London seemed full of martyrs and misery. It was a medieval game of power and subterfuge just to get an egg, the tradespeople behind their counters intoxicated with their newfound roles of power. Meat, fresh fruit, and more than a thumb-sized pat of butter were unavailable, as, it seemed, was cheer. I buried myself at the galleries until Al saved the day.

  The price of a talk on kangaroos for Roy Campbell, who’d just landed the job at the BBC in London, got Al to Paris, and from there he wrote to Aldington in Saint Clair. His letters started to arrive at my flat in Edgeware Road. Talk of sunshine and food, books, music, and song. Aldington, an English poet who’d written the best anti-war book I’d ever read, had exiled himself from England’s rations and found a hamlet of peace in the southern coast of France. There, he wrote, and Al joined him at noon each day.

  ‘You can eat well, Dease, and rest, and talk books. Come stay with us in Saint Clair.’

  There was sun, eggs, fresh fish, and bread. Even the wine was unrationed.

  Londoners warned me against it, Lou. They said the French had ‘failed to plan’ for the War, or some rubbish. But I ignored the propaganda and caught the plane, after producing some other documentation proving the sea air would be good for my lungs. At Marseille, I tottered down the steps like an octogenarian clutching my windpipes — and was greeted by warm air and men in berets. Grunting in French through the stubs of cigarettes in their mouths, they delivered my bags to a bus.

  France seemed like life again, Lou. Winter had ended — the long winters of Australia and England and the misery of the War years, people hiding in their houses … or drinking in closed institutions with their backs to the street.

  Here, Lou, I feel the War was finally worth something. You’ve noticed, haven’t you, Lou? They make the most of things. They sit outside. They take time to discuss things, to savour different moments — in all their complicated glory. They face the sun.

  For a year I’d sat hunched in the tomb-cold reading room in the library. It had felt destructive, really, unearthing dad’s life and loves. Thinking of mum and dad, of all that loss. The struggle had so many times felt futile; he was gone, why did this matter?

  But I’d had to get to the end of those pages. And I finally had, in Saint Clair.

  As I sat on the private little beach with an ancient tugboat anchored near the lapping waves, I took off my shoes and scrunched toes in the sand, walking across and along the water, letting something reach and fall down like the patterns of the water, that same shore that had cleansed dad’s painful limbs so long ago, the same limbs that held scars and hollows from infection in the war.

  I made it. The pilgrimage was over. Perhaps this had been what it was about — finding my way to Saint Clair.

  I walked, barefoot, up and around to the narrow rocky path that led to Le Lavandou, up to La Fossette (the hotel dad had once described under the beauty of a full moon), and the sky changed to a deeper purple. I found myself at a lookout. Instead of a stone plaque to explain its history, it held a painting, a rendered representation of the view laid out in front of me. I’d unintentionally followed the Chemin des Peintres, a walking path created by Raphaël honouring painters and writers who made Saint Clair their home. This particular painting was the work of Théo van Rysselberghe, who spent the last winter of his life ‘hiding’ in the quietness of Saint Clair.

  I walked down the little hill back to the town, finding that the one and only shop had closed. But there was one restaurant that was open: Les Sables D’Or.

  I sat outside under the same plane tree dad had felt ‘scratch’ him as he tottered in to find his dear friend Berky making numerous delicious hors d’oeuvres for his dinner. The same inn that filled our mysterious family album. Numerous black-and-white photos of dad — they’d all been taken under that very plane tree. One — my favourite — had even escaped fire that had melted steel in my mum’s painting studio. I didn’t know which was the bigger miracle. Still having the photo or standing where it was taken.

  I ate my perfect dinner under the tree with a view to the full restaurant inside. Unlike the sad TripAdvisor review I’d found from Australia, in reality, Les Sables D’Or was a thriving, warm, and cosy restaurant, with fresh produce cooked by locals.

  Far from the clatter and clang of Paris, I slept deeply. In the morning, a crack of light slipped through the bedroom blinds and I reached a toe to open it further.

  Home. I’d made it. I had nowhere to be, no Métro to catch, just a day in Saint Clair and lunch with Raphaël and Josephine.

  I wandered downstairs to the breakfast room, where one of the original church walls from ancient days now held up the building. Dad had written of the church in his memoir, saying that pilgrims would travel to the village to have their sight restored.

  Saint Clair. So Clear. The words seemed the same.

  I’d made it. No more fighting.

  Life was allowed to be joy. Gisèle’s words, let’s just be happy, seemed to be dad’s, too, and the feeling was finally transferred.

  After breakfast, I showered and walked back up and down the streets of the town, back to Aucassin’s gates and retracing the track to the inn and past the little village gardens growing vegetables in the sun. The town was placidly sleepy.

  Up I walked on the road to a vie
w of the rocky point of the sea, the rockpools below, near a camping ground. Those same rockpools in our family photos, where Aldington and Catha waded, and dad, Ninette, Geoff, and Al dipped and swam.

  It was a walking meditation, travelling barefoot around the town, and the only person I saw was a Frenchman adding a new lick of paint to a shopfront near the sea.

  In the little Saint Clair supermarket, I bought a bottle of Provence rosé — the same one I’d sipped on my apartment floor through the Australian summer as I tried to make sense of the photos of this town. Here, it cost three euros.

  I felt sorry to have only two days in Saint Clair, remembering my state of mind when I’d booked the trip. How foreign that feeling of fear seemed, now.

  Back at reception, the woman in love with the man who’d made me breakfast told me I was wanted on the phone.

  Clém. She hadn’t been able to get me on my mobile phone, which didn’t work because I had no wi-fi. We spoke in my room.

  ‘Lou — there is some kind of transformation in your voice. You have to stay longer. I’ll change your ticket.’

  Knowing my internet connection was poor, she quickly made the transaction, booking me for a train a night later than I’d planned, and emailed reception the receipt, to print.

  ‘I miss you, Lou,’ she said sweetly, and I missed her, too.

  But I wasn’t ready to leave Saint Clair.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Les Sables D’Or

  Raphaël was waiting by the entrance to Les Sables D’Or at midday on the dot, ready with another welcoming smile and handshake. We sat outside, under dad’s plane tree, which shaded us from the bright sun. I passed Raphaël my box of photos, the ones it had taken the course of a year’s research to put in any chronology.

  Raphaël wore his glasses to pore over them slowly. ‘Precious, precious photographs,’ he marvelled quietly, as he held one up to examine, then another, inspecting each carefully in the light. Like Ivor had, just weeks before in London, Raphaël was able to quickly identify the island of Port Cros and the town of Le Lavandou in so many of the photos.