A Letter from Paris

by Louisa Deasey

  I followed path after hidden track to hidden path. Signs in French warned that le forêt est inflammable, and I stumbled upon a deep ancient well. It was a storybook walk, through a land I’d only ever imagined belonged in fairytales and picture books, and as my blisters started to hurt I saw another sign for a historic fort up ahead — a different one to the one where Aldington had stayed with D.H. Lawrence.

  This one seemed more sombre, quite scary. I approached as though it was a sleeping giant, for something gave me pause. I didn’t want to turn my back on it, as though a full battle of troops might start shooting me — it seemed so full of recent drama. Yet it was pre-Napoleonic, built hundreds of years ago. A castle, a moat — grown over with grass and vines, but just as forbidding — and dark, closed gates. There was even what looked to be a working drawbridge.

  As I walked the periphery of the fort, unwilling to cross the moat for the strong feeling of fear, I wondered at the history and dramas that once unfolded, while the space gave me an increasing sense of foreboding. That something created in the sixteenth century, and unused since World War II, could still elicit such a powerful response in my physical body surprised me. I wondered at dad, driving across Europe a mere two years after World War II had ended, sleeping in country homes that once housed fleeing families, the Gestapo, even the Resistance.

  And, even though it scared me a little, the sense of everything being so interesting and full of stories in France had me wanting to return, before I’d even left.

  I wandered down from the fort to find a tribute to American allied forces during World War II.

  I found a seat by the water near the ferry dock and wrote in my little notebook, sitting on the shore with my toes in the water, perhaps the same water where dad’s fisherman had cooled his wine.

  I didn’t feel bored, or hungry, or frustrated. I filled my notebook with thoughts and phrases. I napped under the shade of a shop, and I refilled my water bottle from a tap that warned that drinking water was only a recent addition to the island’s amenities.

  An entire day stuck on an island in the South of France was perhaps the perfect period of integration for the momentous shifts in my world view that had taken place over the last few weeks. I took the occasional photo on my walk, but mostly I just let my eyes take it in.

  Every path I took, every track, seemed to hold remnants of ages past, relics and monuments that laid tribute to all that had gone before. The French honouring of history, their sense of occasion and announcement, their love of food and life, such that a fisherman was concerned that I get my espresso and Joelle had even offered to make me lunch, demanding to know what I had to eat, only letting me go once I’d produced my stale baguette as proof.

  No wonder this was dad’s peace after the war.

  They knew what had gone before, but they also appreciated the present day and the simple necessities of human connection, food, beauty, and service.

  When I’d walked so much and for so long that blisters formed on my toes, I found a shady spot back at the village, passing the same men who had greeted me that morning.

  As the ferry steamed me back across the water over the course of an hour, a familiar figure came into view at the harbour. It was Raphaël. He explained, in French, that the tourism office where he worked looked out to the ferry station.

  He, too, seemed concerned by my footwear. ‘Dancing shoes?’ He stared at my feet. He was insistent on delivering me back to my hotel.

  In my room, I peeled off my sweaty clothes and looked in the mirror. After spending all day in the sun, I wasn’t even burned.

  There’s a word I learned in Saint Clair, because I was searching for a way to explain how I felt when I stayed there.

  Nepenthe is a medicine for sorrow, literally a ‘drug of forgetfulness’, mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey and other ancient texts that dad loved. It means: something so beautiful that it takes away all feelings of sorrow, depression, or grief.

  In the depths of my grief for both my parents, I’d sometimes wondered if amnesia might be the only way to lose the pain. Amnesia of all they were to me and could have been, forgetting all the unfinished stories it pained me to never know.

  But when I’d woken in Saint Clair that first morning, after a sleep so long and so deep I was momentarily unsure where I was or when, I knew the search for amnesia was over. It was like the closing of a circle. It was more than the end of a journey to understand where dad’s letters had come from.

  Dad was in everything that I loved about Saint Clair, and in every part of me that took the risk to search for it. The kind of person who journeys across the world because of a letter.

  The kind of person who — no matter what’s gone before — leaves the door open to joy.

  To have that feeling of kinship — with dad, with the French, but most of all, with myself — was worth risking everything.

  I remembered who I was, in Saint Clair.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  La clé

  On my last day in Saint Clair, I received one final treasure.

  It had started to rain as I packed my suitcase, and Josephine texted.

  It’s not very nice with the rain. I spoke with Ivor, he says it would be better if you come to the Villa to spend the rest of your time in Saint Clair.

  I hadn’t expected her to leave me the key.

  It was different being left alone in the Villa. When the gate locked shut, I walked the circumference of the garden from lemon tree to mimosa tree, and sat on the stone porch that looked down to the sea. I felt so content.

  I wandered from room to room in the 1920s-built mansion. The floorboards, the tiles, most of the fittings and fixtures were exactly as they would have been when dad, Kershaw, and Aldington had stayed there, writing and dreaming and singing and sighing and entertaining guests from England and Australia who shared one thing in common: a love of poetry, a sense of the sweetness of life and how much it needed to be preserved, or reimagined. A protection of their precious peace, because they knew what war could shatter.

  My peace here … an absence of strain and strife, it has always been peace.

  I walked upstairs to the master room, and looked out the shutter windows to the ocean, almost hearing music on the gramophone, dad playing the large piano downstairs, I could even taste the sweet, dry bubble of champagne Richard might have opened from the verandah. I could feel love and peace emanating from the floorboards, coming from all who had lived and laughed here, and all the poetry they’d created from those times and in the path their lives took afterwards. The choices they had made to come here, what they’d suffered and what they’d saved.

  I smelled the mist rising up from the garden, and that same Mediterranean air dad had inhaled in 1948, and I remembered his words.

  Here, I see the war was worth it.

  Downstairs, I returned to my notebooks, carrying dad’s heavy French memoir into the living room, where I could curl up under the lamp on the couch.

  I leafed through the pages of dad’s memoir, thinking of the extraordinary journey he’d taken to come here, to start a life in France. The pages typed on an ancient, heavy typewriter, the stiffness of his aching back making the typing exercise a battle between awareness of pain and the desire to see something through. The desire to create something that lasted.

  The memoir had been the heaviest thing in my suitcase to France, probably weighing as much as his ancient typewriter, and I’d almost left it in Australia, until Ayala implored me to use it as a guide through the French life of dad.

  I’d used that memoir as a map, retracing dad’s footsteps in Paris and Saint Clair. While the France that I saw wasn’t still peppered with scars from the occupation of World War II as it was when he arrived, everywhere I’d journeyed held ruins from ancient battles, and doorways to medieval churches.

  I lay down dad’s memoir in the Villa Aucassin as a t
hank-you to Ivor for keeping it as it was, for letting me in.

  Besides, I knew the story and I would always have it, now — the feeling of a life that held joy as well as sorrow, sunshine as well as sickness, a beauty and love that lasted so much longer than his physical pain. Dad’s words had shown me the way. I’m sure he would have liked that memoir to return to Saint Clair, to the Villa where, outside, the nightingales still sing during the day, his words back in his beloved France full of people who felt like kin.

  I wrote a long note and slipped it into the front page, placing the heavy manuscript on the table in the room that looked out to the sea.

  After an hour alone in the precious Villa, Raphaël arrived, the man who’d bridged the divide between me and Saint Clair. He parked outside and I opened the gate.

  ‘So — you have your key … ?’ he said, and I’d been lost in thought for so long I thought he was being poetic.

  ‘No, I mean, we need to lock the door.’ I just stood there, blankly.

  We laughed in a way that bridged all our language mishaps. But he seemed concerned about something — and there was a change in his face. He looked at his watch.

  ‘Louisa — have you eaten?’

  Oh, France. The necessity of food.

  ‘Raphaël, I have to ask. You and Josephine have been so generous, so kind. Why?’

  He looked at me thoughtfully, opening the door to his car.

  ‘Because we see, the story is very sensible.’

  ‘Sensitive?’

  ‘Oui. Pardon …’

  He stood, choosing the right words to finish.

  ‘And — it is your father.’

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Ma marraine

  As if sensing I’d stepped in the door, Clém called before I’d even taken off my jacket. It was after midnight.

  ‘I hope you won’t be too sad to be back in Paris, Lou, but I have some good news for you …’

  She’d heard from Sandrine, and Gisèle was safely back in her Residence apartment, now receiving daily medical care, apparently happier and healthier than she’d been even before our first visit.

  ‘I have to work on Saturday morning, but I was thinking we could go at lunchtime and take her some flowers to replace the ones on her balcony that blew over in the wind.’

  We talked into the night, and I could sense Clém’s love and urgency, that familiar tug of attachment and separation, trying to find the middle ground. Clém reassured me, for the umpteenth time, that she would check on Gisèle after I returned to Australia. We talked into the night, laughing at my poor French and what I’d said and done in Saint Clair.

  ‘When Raphaël asked me how old I was, he was very embarrassed, but I think none of them really understood how dad had lived there after the war, and had me so late in life. I told Raphaël quatorze, and he looked at me so weirdly.’

  ‘Oh, Lou, you said you were fourteen.’

  On our tour through the ateliers a few weeks earlier, Laurence had taken me to the studio where Foujita once lived. I still chuckled to think of dad clutching his Foujita paintings that Albert Tucker had given him, trying to sell them in the Latin Quarter to secure some more French francs to prolong his stay, but accused of forgery instead.

  The paintings fitted easily into my suitcase, and I had taken them as an added security. I had no gold-watch to pawn, and my typewriter remained at Saint Clair.

  The leading French experts on the Japanese artist’s work were to be found near the Rue Jacob, I discovered, so off I went on the 68 bus, roaring down the Boulevard Raspail to fortune and prosperity. I did sums in my head and wondered how many more delicious weeks I would spend in Paris — perhaps even a month.

  The expert lady pounced on the paintings with that clutching hand of the dealer in beauty. She looked from them to the cats on her gallery-walls, and then at me, as if I had painted them myself.

  ‘Where did you get them?’ she said. I told her they’d come from Foujita himself. ‘Impossible!’ she said. Angrily, she told me in plain language, that she could tell a Foujita when she saw one, signature or none. Did she think I had painted them? I demanded, almost as cross as she by this time. She shrugged, put them back in their brown paper wrapping. One thing was certain, Foujita had not.

  I had read several books in a bistro later before the humour of the thing struck me. There was I, two late works of a known Parisian artist lying on the zinc counter beside my glass and the experts declared them forgeries!

  What added to the joke was that Albert Tucker had a letter from Foujita himself, written in English, referring to the paintings.

  La Closerie des Lilas was one of those particularly exquisite relics where I could imagine dad had stopped in for a drink and placed the precious Foujitas on the zinc counter. Its name translating as ‘a pleasure garden of lilacs’, the stately restaurant and bistro on the corner of Boulevard de Montparnasse is a Paris institution. Much like La Coupole, La Closerie had been refurbished for the moneyed set, catering to the fascination with the ancient literati who once mingled and scribbled inside its walls. Although he’d never be able to afford a mineral water by its current prices, you can still picture Hemingway sitting over his notebooks with a whisky in the corner, or Rimbaud singing over the piano in the entranceway.

  French and American voices filled the entranceway to the bistro when I arrived, flanked by a wooden bar full of spirits, and white-shirted bartenders. Someone sat at the grand piano playing jazz while the Friday night crowd grew in size and decibels.

  Arnaud and Laurence’s friendly faces appeared as I took in the ambience of the busy bar, and we all stood up to kiss.

  ‘How was Saint Clair?’ said Laurence, keen to know everything about the trip, while Arnaud ordered little plates of croque madame, oysters, and prawns, and Laurence and I had cups of champagne.

  I shared the tale of the Villa, of Port Cros, of the trip to Bormes, and there was much passing around of my phone with its photos.

  ‘Can you send me this photo?’ She pointed to one of the garden at Aucassin, holding it up and out to see it in a different light.

  Surrounded by Arnaud and Laurence and now Clém, all eager to learn of my trip, sitting in that busy bar in Paris was beautiful but bittersweet. Almost as soon as I’d met this extraordinary family, it was time for me to leave.

  On Saturday, the sun was shining and it was a tourist-postcard day across the Seine. I strolled the now-familiar path down the Rue de Rivoli, past the Hotel de Ville and Notre Dame, to wait for Clém on the steps of Saint Michel. A busker played Piaf’s ‘La Vie en rose’ on accordion to passing tourists catching photos of the light across the water, reminding me of the video of Michelle. Was that really just over a year earlier?

  At Orsay, reflecting our happy moods, there was a celebration in the village, and crowds of children and parents were in costume and singing up and down the main street. At the little nursery where I’d bought the petunia, what felt like months before, Clém insisted on buying four pretty purple plants for Gisèle, and I chose a large camellia.

  We walked up to the Residence, and Gisèle greeted us happily, like she’d been hosting us for years. She seemed younger and healthier than even weeks earlier. It was a complete miracle.

  Her smile when she saw the camellia, touching the leaves and bringing its pink flowers to her nose, made the choice even more special.

  ‘Camellias. I grew them in Australia with Denison.’

  ‘Den-i-son,’ she said slowly, settling into the memory.

  For hours we sat in her little room looking out over the mountain. She told us about working as a young French au pair in London and the Isle of Wight.

  Gisèle and Michelle — both meeting dad in London. Both French twenty-something au pairs travelling with Catholic nuns. And now here I was, with Gisèle, because of Michelle.

  After many hours, it was
impossible to say goodbye to Gisèle without tears. We hugged and kissed, and I whispered that I loved her.

  How do you say goodbye to people who’ve changed your life so deeply?

  I had only been in Paris a month, but the tug and pull of two countries — France and Australia — was mind-boggling.

  The Leducs were my family, Gisèle was my family, but I had to get back on the train to London, then the plane to Australia, moments after finding, in France, treasures and secrets I’d been searching for my entire life.

  I wept to Clém on the phone that night, completely melting down over the course of an hour, a free call on an internet service that would have cost thousands in dad’s time. How did they do it? Travelling in times when goodbyes were so final, without any of the Skype or email or video or photo connections we have to minimise the difficulties of time and space.

  In the morning, I put ice cubes in a face washer and tried to restore my eyes from their piggy state, but it was no use. It didn’t matter, anyway.

  I’d forgotten how much power beauty has to take away pain.

  Chapter Thirty

  Au revoir, Paris

  Edouard hadn’t forgotten his motorbike promise.

  Hello Louisa

  Are you ready for a little trip across Paris? We will go along the Seine to the Champs Elysee to Montmartre, Bastille, rue de la Contrescarpe (Pantheon), Montparnasse, Tour Eiffel, Saint Germain then back to Rambuteau. Please wear a jacket, it’s cold in the morning.

  For an hour we rode, amid exhilarating beauty, all the little spring flowers coming up to blossom in the early light. Spoiled with wondrous visuals, we rode slowly along the Seine and up the Champs Élysées, along the Butte to Sacré Coeur in Montmartre. On the back of Edouard’s Harley Davidson, we unintentionally recreated dad’s first, endless, beauty-filled walk that night in May 1948.

  Further, we rode down to the Canal Saint Martin, and then to the Place Charles de Gaulle, around the Arc de Triomphe, where the traffic seemed to pool and rotate in a dizzying nonsense.