Somewhere near where Edouard and Catherine had once lived in the tenth arrondissement, we stopped for him to show me the village market.
‘We will have some coffee, and some pastries,’ Edouard announced in his decisive manner.
As I stepped off the bike, he answered his phone. Clémentine. I could hear her speaking in French on the other side of the line.
‘Why is she calling?’
‘She wants to know why we’ve stopped.’
‘How does she know we’ve stopped?’
‘Because, the family is following our ride …’
He showed me an app on his phone — Liberty Rider — with which the French family were tracking us, like a GPS.
Another hour of beauty and slow riding later, we arrived back at Le Marais.
My last night in Paris, I met Coralie and Clém and their aunt Marie in a bistro near the Place de la Bastille.
I was slightly panicked about my luggage. I’d left dad’s three-kilo memoir back in Saint Clair, but still I couldn’t close my suitcase.
We talked about French-to-English translations, travelling, and Saint Clair, and Marie ordered a bottle of red wine.
Coralie gave me a French lesson.
‘So, your first lesson, which comes at the end of the trip, is very important. The French translation of goodbye is au revoir,’ she said in her dignified and decisive manner. ‘It means until I see you again, because voir translates as to see.’
‘Ah … It’s not as final as goodbye?’
‘Non,’ she said. ‘The only version of goodbye that is definite is adieu, which means we won’t see each other until we’re in front of God — God is Dieu.’
We ordered dinner, and the bread came with little pats of butter wrapped in gold. The portion sizes were thimble-thick, the same as dad’s 1947 butter allotment for a week. I put a square in my handbag to take back to London, in case they were still ‘out’.
Marie went to a choir practice, Laurence called to say farewell, and the sisters walked me to the Métro. We all caught the train together and said goodbye in the crowd when I got to Rambuteau station.
‘Au revoir,’ I said, trying not to cry. Clém was still holding my hands as the doors opened.
I lugged myself reluctantly out of the train, a new gift in my arms, balancing awkwardly. It was a painting, from Laurence. Wrapped in brown paper and bubble wrap, the canvas was wider than my large suitcase. It seemed Laurence had been painting furiously since the night at La Closerie des Lilas, leaving the phone unanswered even to Coralie in an effort to finish in time for my departure.
In the morning, I lugged the painting and my suitcases down to the street corner, but gave up the idea of catching one last Métro to Gare du Nord and instead decided to hail a taxi in the peak-hour Paris Monday. As taxi after taxi passed, and time ticked on, I started to panic. The Eurostar back to London left at ten, and it was now after nine.
‘Bonjour? Comment ça va?’
A young man had arrived for work in one of the shops on Rue Rambuteau. Small, dark, French, he didn’t speak a word of English.
‘Ah, je ne parle français. Pardon. Je suis australien.’
‘Ah, Hugh Jackman!’ he smiled, then asked in French if I needed a taxi, called me one, and got a quote for the price, explaining it all to me with the help of his phone and my notepad. He added me on Instagram and I learned his name was Jon.
‘Un café?’ he offered, and I said no, to be polite, but he came back with one anyway, handing it to me and standing in peaceful silence with me as we sipped.
When the taxi finally arrived with just thirty minutes until the train left for London, I hugged him in thanks. He looked shocked, like it was just his duty.
When I got back to Australia, I found a message he’d sent me on Instagram: Now you will have happy memories of Paris!
I already did, lovely stranger, I already did.
Epilogue
The painting from Laurence arrived at my Melbourne doorstep the same day my plane delivered me back from London. Perhaps we were even on the same flight?
I unwrapped the brown packaging to see what she’d created from my photo of the lemon trees at Aucassin: an oil painting in a similar style to what she loved of van Rysselberghe’s flecked landscapes of Saint Clair. When I first looked at it, I felt as though I was both back in Paris with the French family and in Saint Clair with dad at the same time. The colours combine soft beauty with hope, and the freshness of the present day. It’s my most treasured souvenir.
I placed it in my bedroom, where I could see it every morning as I adjusted to the span of ocean between Australia and France, the worlds I’d covered, recovered, left and looped, the hearts that opened to mine and filled something I thought was destined to always contain loss. The turquoise and greens and citrus yellows in the painting are my perfect memory of Saint Clair, of a family who started as strangers across the sea, of their grandmother’s letters, which led me to learn my own family story.
Something about the painting completes the cycle that started with searching for dad’s portrait by Nolan. It never was a portrait by Nolan, as I learned by email when I was in Paris — instead it was possibly by another modernist student, and not actually of dad, but likely one of his brothers. But that doesn’t matter. The painting led me on the search, its story carrying me through to an even more valuable treasure buried at the bottom of the hunt.
My painting from Laurence is more precious than a Nolan. A reminder to me that the dad I was born to cared more for life and love than holding and hoarding, and that is my inheritance. The stories he made of his life, the stories he left me, the stories that will never die.
Because stories, unlike paintings, can’t rot or ruin, or burn in a house fire, or depreciate, or be fought over at auction. Because even when I hadn’t known them, I’d lived them, because dad was in me and I couldn’t help but follow his path. But like an inheritance I could only receive when I ‘came of age’, I’d finally dove into the 1.6 metres of diaries and papers kept safe by the oldest library in my home town, led by the promise of a mysterious email about a lost romance in London.
I know I had to be old enough — and understand enough — to fully embrace my inheritance. Until the pain of not knowing the answer to the question became more painful than the search for the answers:
Who was your dad?
Dad never mentioned anything about copyright to his material in his will, and because I didn’t know what was published and what was not, I had to make up my own mind about how much time to invest in learning his stories. That was one of the hardest lessons of all — to honour dad’s work without first needing permission. To take the time to value it, regardless of what others said and thought about my endless trips to the library and the time I spent unpicking and unravelling and transcribing things that might answer only a small scrap of a painful question.
I realised, through the course of the journey, I’d been asking the wrong questions about mum and dad’s romance all along. I’d always wanted to know why mum had left dad, but I’d never asked why she had been drawn to him, once.
They shared a mutual passion for books, music, art, and poetry.
In the middle of a search for something else, a letter fell out of my sister’s boxes of dad’s papers. It was mum’s handwriting, but it seemed unfamiliar. Mum had always written in clear capitals, as far as I could remember. But this was written in cursive script, gentle and curling. The letter was dated 1969 — the time she met dad.
It was a letter to a university friend who’d made it from Melbourne to London, talking of how she wished she could travel, how she wished she could write a book. As a twenty-one-year-old student at university, she was finding her feet and testing her dreams. The letter explained, finally, why she’d loved dad, even though she’d never said it out loud to me.
He wasn’t afraid
to fail; he wasn’t afraid to try. He finished things and pitched them. He wrote and travelled and ‘wasted’ his ‘fortunes’ chasing his dreams. Some came off, some didn’t.
To understand my inheritance from dad, I had to risk the same kind of failure. The possible waste of a year, of turning up to France and having no one to meet me, of no resolution to any of my questions. Of that same feeling I’d had that time in 2007, when I got to Gisèle’s apartment just a little too late to find her forwarding address.
I only remember mum ever holding one art exhibition, and it is such a happy memory, of seeing her beautiful works appreciated and analysed and excitedly bid on, and knowing they were going on to hang in people’s private rooms across Melbourne.
But before she died, we found she’d thrown her remaining works out on the street for hard rubbish.
We rescued some, but the rest were lost. None of them had her signature.
I’ve pored over the boxes long enough, assessed the facts, come to my own theories based on my own feelings and experiences — that someone who writes four complete books and thousands more manuscripts, even if many less are published or performed, is not a failure. Dad wrote hundreds of letters, radio scripts, and translations, but the memoir that led me through France is my most treasured of his manuscripts. And like me, despite rejection, he couldn’t not write. It was an expression of his endless hope in life, a place where he always found peace. It was an expression of his belief in the spiritual regeneration of creativity; writing was his church and his peace.
Ivor contacted me a few months after I’d left the memoir in the Villa to say that he’d used it in an application to the French government to list Aucassin as a historic monument, so that the building — with all its precious history — won’t ever be razed and ruined. The French respect for literature is such that dad’s memoir can be used as ‘evidence’ of a building’s importance.
The question ‘Who was my dad?’ used to stir others’ grief, so I learned to swallow it. Until the French family gently insisted I ask again.
Someone once said to me that the antidote to shame is empathy, and perhaps that’s why it was so important to know the times and the constraints dad was under, before I could understand that his story was not one of shame.
I used to feel shame about dad, but it’s gone now.
Family stories are perhaps the hardest to unravel because there’s so much at stake — namely, survival. If we ask the wrong questions, we might be thrown from the pack, having unwittingly jabbed a hot poker at the only people who can keep us safe.
I’ve repeated and questioned the three fortunes story long enough to know some answers. They aren’t complete, but they’re enough, for me.
The first ‘wasted’ fortune was probably the money he spent loaning Tucker and Kershaw the fares to get to England in 1947, and then buying a ticket himself. A few hundred pounds was a fortune, back then.
Another possible ‘fortune’ was from the sale of the original D.H. Lawrence letter he’d acquired during the research for Aldington. He posted the original to an American institution in good faith, before he’d received a contract on the agreed fee — which was never paid.
The third, I think, came from selling the house his sister Kathleen left him when she died so that he could get back to France in the 1970s and finish his books on education.
Whether these really were the ‘three fortunes’, or whether the story even came from truth before expanding in the telling over time, it doesn’t matter to me.
Like most stories, as you start to unpick them, the truth depends on who you ask. But his letters and papers told me what drove him and what he was always chasing: beauty and truth, something outside the mundane. The beauty and truth we both value so deeply, the stories he loved to write down.
It’s as much a relief putting this down in a narrative form as it was heavy to carry it. The complicated slipknots around my heart took two years of unravelling, the lethal bonds of stories and myths and family beliefs undone at last.
Yes, dad suffered, like Mirka had warned me all those years ago, but he also made it to France. To people who felt like kin. To that sense of creative spirit and freedom and aesthetics he’d ached for in Melbourne.
I found that same France when I travelled there — a place that doesn’t treat beauty as luxury, but instead as the way you simply must live.
Where dad found happiness and I lost grief.
And our mutual love of written words brought us together again.
So if you ask me now —
Who was your dad?
I would be able to tell you.
And I would have to start with France.
References
Aldington, Richard
Lawrence of Arabia: a biographical enquiry. Collins; London; 1954.
Boyd, David
An Open House: recollections of my early life. Hardie Grant; Richmond, Victoria; 2012.
Bungey, Darleen
Arthur Boyd: a life. Allen and Unwin; Crows Nest, New South Wales; 2008.
Doyle, Charles
Richard Aldington: a biography. Macmillan; London; 1989.
Dutton, Geoffrey
Out in the Open: an autobiography. University of Queensland Press; St Lucia, Queensland; 1994.
Dutton, Ninette
Firing. HarperCollins; Sydney; 1995.
Fry, Gavin
Albert Tucker. The Beagle Press; Roseville, New South Wales; 2005.
Adrian Lawlor: a portrait. Heide Park and Art Gallery; Bulleen, Victoria; 1983.
Kershaw, Alister
Hey Days: memories and glimpses of Melbourne’s Bohemia, 1937–1947. Angus and Robertson; North Ryde, New South Wales; 1991.
The Pleasure of Their Company. University of Queensland Press; St Lucia, Queensland; 1986.
Village to Village: misadventures in France. Angus and Robertson; Pymble, New South Wales; 1993.
A Word from Paris. Angus and Robertson; North Ryde, New South Wales; 1991.
The Denunciad; typescript; c. 1946.
Adrian Lawlor: a memoir. Typographeum; Francestown, New Hampshire; 1981.
McCaughey, Patrick
Bert and Ned: the correspondence of Albert Tucker and Sidney Nolan. Miegunyah Press; Carlton, Victoria; 2006.
Murray-Smith, Stephen
Dow, Hume (ed.); Memories of Melbourne University: undergraduate life in the years since 1917. Hutchinson of Australia; Richmond, Victoria; 1983.
Southey, Robert
‘Denison Deasey’ (obituary) in The Corian: the Geelong Grammar School quarterly, vol. 110, no. 1 (issue 356), July 1985. With contributions by Geoffrey Dutton and Stephen Murray-Smith.
Library Collections
Denison Deasey manuscripts, State Library Victoria.
Denison Deasey letters and diary, National Library of Australia.
Sunday Reed manuscripts, State Library Victoria.
Albert Tucker manuscripts, State Library Victoria and Heide Museum of Modern Art.
Stephen Murray-Smith manuscripts, State Library Victoria.
Geoffrey Dutton manuscripts, National Library of Australia.
Ninette Dutton papers, National Library of Australia.
Adrian Lawlor manuscripts, State Library Victoria.
Richard Aldington letters and papers, British Library.
Richard Aldington letters and papers, Southern Illinois University.
Guide to Notable Figures
Aldington, Richard (1892–1962)
English writer and Imagist poet. Rented the Villa Aucassin in Saint Clair from 1946 to 1951. Wrote numerous books, including the bestsellers Death of a Hero and Lawrence of Arabia. Commissioned DD to research and transcribe all the George Bernard Shaw letters, which formed part of the seminal research into T.E. Lawrence that informed the notorious story that L
awrence faked his war experiences.
Bailey, George (1920–2001)
American journalist who lived in France and visited Saint Clair in the 1940s. Wrote numerous books, including the bestseller Germans. DD planning to visit him in Berlin when arrested as a spy at the Hotel Floridor.
Boyd, Arthur AC OBE (1920–1999)
Australian impressionist painter, potter, and printmaker, considered one of Australia’s most significant modern artists. Member of the Antipodeans movement. Painted DD in 1938.
Boyd, David OAM (1924–2011)
Australian painter and sculptor, member of the Antipodeans movement.
Arthur Boyd’s younger brother. DD paid his tuition at the Melba Conservatorium of Music in 1940, until he was conscripted. Introduced DD and Gisèle in London circa 1950, was witness with his wife, Hermia, to DD and Gisèle’s marriage in 1954.
Campbell, Roy (1901–1957)
South African poet and satirist, considered by T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, and Edith Sitwell to have been one of the best poets of the interwar period. Lived in London and worked at the BBC when DD visited, secured radio plays for his ‘friends’, including Alister Kershaw, which got Kershaw the fare to France. Stayed with DD and Aldington in Saint Clair.
Deasey, Denison (1920–1984)
Australian writer, teacher, translator. Lived in London, Vienna, and France from 1948 to 1955, visited France in 1968, and lived in London, Germany, and France again from 1970 to 1976.
Delarue, Jacques (1919–2014)
French Resistant, Police Commissioner in Paris, historian. Wrote The Gestapo. Helped DD evade trouble during spy affair at the Hotel Floridor.
Dutton, Geoffrey OAM (1922–1998)
Australian author and historian. Met DD at Geelong Grammar. Lived in Saint Clair in the late 1940s after DD and Kershaw had met Aldington. Founded Australian Letters with Max Harris in 1957; also founded Australian Book Review in 1961.
Dutton, Ninette OAM (1923–2007)
A Letter from Paris Page 28