Footprints in Paris

by Gillian Tindall

  Bertie, always fair-minded, had tried to equip his son for the job as well or better than he himself had been. So, before Tom spent his three years in Oxford falling in love and obtaining a not very good degree, he too had been sent to spend six months in France and six in Germany – though with rather different results from those Bertie had experienced. In the suburbs of Paris, not yet eighteen and without his father’s artistic passions, Tom seems to have been too much of a shy schoolboy to derive any benefit from his stay, but Germany was a different matter. Like Bertie, Tom flourished there, but for a quite different reason and one certainly unknown to Bertie: he was rapidly seduced by the lady of the household who received him. His months there, near Dresden, were therefore some of the happiest and most instructive of his young life. It was only, perhaps, rather a pity that this boyish idyll, self-enhancing but free of any responsibility, set a pattern for him. It was one he would try to recapture throughout life.

  So, late in 1939, Tom said goodbye to Ursula and to his eighteen-month-old daughter. He and Ursula were to meet for one or two hurried leaves spent in provincial hotels in that first, freezing winter of the War, but he was not to see Julia again till she was rising six. Perhaps this was the main reason that (as he himself once ruefully remarked) he never seemed to develop quite the kind of paternal feeling he noted in other men. Later in her childhood he treated her as one might a favourite niece, rather than as someone for whom he was centrally responsible.

  In the chilly, provisional Army quarters requisitioned somewhere in the Midlands by the Ordnance Corps, Tom proved no more convincing as a soldier than he had been as a medical publisher. It was some time before he was recommended for the commission which might have been expected to follow on his background and education. Meanwhile, his feet bled in Army boots on field marches, Sergeant-majors cursed him for inefficiency and the officers in charge did not know what to do with him. Someone eventually enquired what his job had been in civvy street – ‘Oh, medical stuff ? Good … Because the CO says we need someone to give this mob lectures on VD. You can do that, can’t you?’

  An appeal by Tom to his father and cousin at Baillière, Tindall & Cox produced some books with suitably graphic illustrations of ulcerated genitals. ‘After I showed them these,’ Tom used to recount happily afterwards, ‘those tough chaps fainted in rows.’ He also managed to teach the rudiments of reading to some who seemed hardly to have encountered the skill before.

  His stock with his superiors went up; the long winter ended and he was sent, attached to a cavalry regiment, to Palestine. So he embarked on what, in the end, turned out to be, in the phrase of the time, ‘a good War’, which was to say one full of movement, experience, new skills learnt, new friendships and a degree of personal success. Fate, in the form of the Eighth Army, took him from Palestine to the desert War in North Africa, with periods in Cairo and Alexandria, and eventually to the maelstrom of the Salerno landings in 1943. The following year a broken leg providentially kept him out of the first and most lethal wave of the landings in Normandy. He followed up the Allied invasion in the second wave, reaching Belgium and finally Germany, where he became part of the army of occupation. Five years of military life, a narrow escape in Italy and the rank of Captain (Acting Major) had by then endowed him with an assurance and know-how that he would never have gained in other circumstances.

  Engaged in a ‘mopping up’ operation near Bayeux in the autumn of 1944, in pursuit of the retreating and fragmented German forces, the Company to which he was attached was ordered next to Brussels. ‘I knew our tanks would take at least four days to get to Belgium,’ he recounted afterwards, ‘and it seemed an absolute waste of time to traipse along behind them. So I and my driver went to Paris for a couple of nights. I had a wonderful time there. We caught up again with our convoy before they reached Lille.’

  Paris, which had been liberated at the end of August, was for a horde of British and Allied forces living up to its traditional reputation for gaiety. More than ever before in its long history it figured as the place of freedom and rejoicing, almost as a Celestial City where one might hope to meet again those one had thought lost for ever. On a more realistic level, it was bursting with people, many of whom were free of daily fear for the first time in four years, and many of whom were searching for others whom they were not, as it turned out, destined to find.

  Tom had no such anxieties as he went looking for his old friends. But great was his delight when, in a gathering full of different uniforms, he suddenly came face to face with his favourite of the Solanges. She had the insignia of the Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur on her shoulders – the erstwhile Resistance, now triumphantly in charge – and she was just as pleased to see him.

  ‘Just imagine,’ she said to Julia long after, ‘there, suddenly, before my eyes, was your dear father. What joy! And he was not timid any longer. He had developed so much. In fact, so much the victorious one – the sexful soldier, you know – that it took me a minute to recognise him.’ The English phrase ‘sexful soldier’, inserted into an otherwise French sentence, left Julia uncertain as to whether Solange, whose English was always more exploratory than accurate, actually meant ‘full of sex’ or ‘successful’ or a mixture of the two, but the general message was clear.

  * * *

  The War was over, and presently a little brother was born. There were, after all, some times of family life, of shared interests: of mild, decent happiness.

  By the end of the decade it was even possible to go on foreign holidays again. The new, bloodless invasion of the coasts of Europe, which would be in full swing by the mid-1950s, was already, insignificantly, beginning. Well-organised middle-class English families ventured to Normandy and Brittany. But, for whatever reason, Ursula and Tom did not take their children abroad on holiday. They did not even take a brief few days together in Paris. Paris, apparently, was still mysteriously inaccessible to Ursula, a land of lost content that could not be regained.

  When Julia, now just in her teens, bored and frustrated, mentioned hopefully to her mother their old dream of visiting Paris together, she was offered excuses that even to her seemed inadequate: ‘Oh well, no, darling, I wouldn’t want to – not with the stingy foreign exchange restrictions. Only £25. On that we wouldn’t be able to drink in cafés, you see.’

  The truth was that, after 1939, in the sixteen years of life that remained to her, Ursula never crossed the Channel again.

  The dream was not going to be tested. By and by the fantasy of Paris as a place where her lovely, real life awaited her was dropped from Ursula’s repertoire. Julia, missing it, continued it secretly in her own way. In the lonely prison of boarding school (‘Oh, Julia loves school,’ Ursula insisted to her friends) she wrote part of a secret novel, during Prep or in ill-lit lavatories after Lights Out. It was set in Paris, at some vaguely determined period that was probably late seventeenth or eighteenth century (carriages, silk breeches, low-necked bosoms, mud, beggars, monks, swords, crucifixes …) Local verisimilitude was added with the names of streets and of important buildings such as had occurred in the Pierre-Solange readers. Only, as Julia had never seen a map of Paris, the carefully mentioned ‘Rue St Honoré’ or ‘Place du Panthéon’ bore no relation to the real city. The ‘Château de Vincennes’, with a vague recollection of the now-lost Enfant du Métro, was where the King lived, and the ‘Tour Eiffel’ (having escaped from its late-nineteenth-century moorings and become a stone tower) housed a beautiful female prisoner.

  The schoolmistress who caught Julia writing the novel said it was indecent and silly, and anyway it was deeply deceitful to write a novel in school exercise books when you were supposed to be doing Prep for the next day – ‘I hope you’re thoroughly ashamed of yourself.’ She tore it up.

  At home, Ursula was now officially diagnosed with depression. She reinterpreted this in her own terms. ‘Depression’, she explained to her daughter, was an external blight like flu. It ‘could happen to absolutely anybody’ and had lit
tle connection with anything one had done or failed to do. It certainly wasn’t one’s fault. Although it might be partly other people’s fault for somehow conspiring to make one live in a place where one’s real self – intellectual, enlightened, etc. – could not flourish. Or, alternatively, it might be due to something called ‘the change of life’, which was another blight (‘like adolescence, you know, darling – that, of course, is why you’re fed up’) which apparently descended from nowhere on one’s fortieth birthday.

  As if to allow room for this depression which, like an unpleasant lodger, seemed to have moved into the house, Ursula withdrew further. She went to bed earlier and earlier, had ‘rests’ after lunch, and so encountered insomnia in the small hours. Trying to write plays now instead of novels, she nevertheless tended to resist suggestions about theatre trips to London – ‘Too tiring.’ Too tiring and difficult now also, apparently, were walks on the Forest, riding, swimming and almost everything else she had enjoyed in earlier days, including tennis. Paradoxically, this woman in the prime of life who was afraid of middle age, was now acquiring the mental and physical outlook of an old woman.

  By and by there were visits to psychiatric hospitals for abrupt doses of ‘treatment’. (This was before the era of psychotropic drugs.) In a panic-stricken way, she did very much want to ‘do something’ about herself. But the same life-view that had created her problem also prevented her from confronting it honestly.

  As the nemesis that had been in the making for the last twenty years began to close in on Ursula, Tom too became enmeshed in her bogus world of mechanistic excuses and hasty rationalisations. Kind by nature and accustomed to regard his wife as a strong character, he was quite ill equipped to cope with the emotional burden now being laid on him. He was also now the key partner in the family firm. It was all too much for him; he had neither time nor energy to think about the children too. Their small son was despatched for a long stay with cousins and then to boarding school.

  At much the same time Julia managed to leave her own boarding school, mainly by refusing, in a storm of tears, to return there. (No one had apparently noticed before that she did not like it there.) She was almost sixteen, and it was decided that perhaps she could continue her education at a crammer’s. In any case, truth to tell, she was needed at home, now that her mother was so frequently unable to get out of bed. This chimed with a half-formed, egocentric perception of Julia’s own that perhaps, in some less specific way, her mother did need her presence. They had been close during Julia’s earlier childhood – all those books and stories, all those shared times with no one else there – and it was when Julia had been sent away to school that Ursula had begun to fall to bits.

  It is just possible that Julia was right about this. But, too old now to be her mother’s soul mate, she was too young to offer objective advice or comment. Meanwhile, the responsibilities thrust on her were almost more than she could manage. At her father’s increasingly desperate but oddly unexplained request – ‘Try not to leave Mummy alone more than you can help’ – she found herself minding a woman who did things that were, to her, inexplicable. Once, Ursula was brought home by an anxious stationmaster, who knew the family because Tom travelled daily by train to his office in London. She had been wandering back and forth across the railway lines. Another time she returned in a police car. She had been found at the top of a high building in a nearby town. Julia continued not to understand, but felt cross because she had wanted to go into the town herself to mooch round the shops and perhaps run into that boy again who was often in the Kardomah … Why hadn’t Mummy, always so fussy and critical about Julia’s own movements, told her she was going in? Two days later, Julia went there by bus, and returned to find her mother trailing about the house with soaking hair. ‘I tried to drown myself in the bath,’ she confided miserably.

  It should have been revelatory, yet it still was not, not quite. An otherwise able-bodied woman cannot drown herself in a bath, as Julia correctly perceived, and therefore she was inclined to regard her mother’s desperate act as a piece of melodramatic showing off.

  If that sounds as if Julia was hard-hearted and did not love her mother, that is unfortunate. But it is no more unfortunate than the fact that the self-absorption of depressives tends to drive those who care for them into stoniness in sheer self-protection. Not only was it impressed on Julia that she was not allowed to say to her mother, ‘For Heaven’s sake, pull yourself together,’ she believed she was not allowed to think it, either.

  Teenagers are, by force of nature, self-centred themselves, necessarily looking outwards to the world in store for them. It is not good for them to be asked to sympathise interminably with the plight of someone who has failed at the enterprise of living. During those weeks and months and years Julia held her peace and did her best, but her capacity for compassion was strained beyond its limits and took many years to recover.

  She retreated into work for A-levels, and from that official activity into reading the dated novels with which the house was well supplied. Encountering Margaret Kennedy’s The Constant Nymph, she daydreamed of dying, like its heroine, in the arms of a secret lover in a Brussels boarding house. By and by she began turning the story into a play in French, an activity which she thought of as a private escape from Milton and Carlyle. Only long afterwards did she realise, between amusement and puzzlement at her younger self, that this endeavour had been rather remarkable in a teenager who had never yet been abroad. Perhaps a specific gene-for-French, inherited from Aunt Maud, had been making its presence felt in her … But of Aunt Maud herself, the teenage Julia knew nothing.

  As for Ursula, instead of the old dream of Paris as the lost Eden, London now began to figure on her mental map as the place where she might find again her true self. London was only an hour and a quarter away by rail; she could have spent every day there, had she wished, as her husband did – but the idea of the great life-changing move was put into action. The task of finding a new London home and organising it distracted her satisfactorily for some months, but as Moving Day approached she must have begun to realise (with what misery and panic one can only surmise) that London held out no magic remedy. A further dramatic collapse took place. Julia and her father had to organise the move on their own.

  Ursula reappeared from hospital, to be welcomed into the new home. She complained, very much, because in the move her fountain pen had disappeared. How could she be a writer without her fountain pen? It must be somebody else’s fault. Six days later, having by the move severed further the ties that had held her to life – and having, incidentally, taken her family away from all its supports and accustomed surroundings – she made another suicide attempt which, this time, was fatal. She was not found for two days.

  To Purgatory fire thou com’st at last,

  And Christ receive thy soul …

  No one, I think, can measure the real distress that must lead someone ‘with everything to live for’ to such an end. It seems self-evident that the suicidal impulse can be overwhelming. But even now, more than fifty years later, when the dead woman that I recall is young enough to be my daughter, I find myself appalled by the manner in which she chose to carry it out, and in particular by the lack of any scribbled word of apology or grief or love for either of her children.

  I also find it odd. In her own distorted way Ursula was conscientious, sometimes obsessively so. Julia was within a month of taking her Oxford entrance exams (‘Oh you’ll love Oxford, darling – I did’). In choosing such a moment for her traumatic exit, did she, as Julia darkly wondered afterwards, have some destructive intent towards her daughter? Because she was so unhappy herself and felt a failure, did she, at some level, need Julia to be so too?

  But the simpler answer, I have come to suspect over the years, is that she thought she was going to be rescued. Only the day before, she had bestirred herself to go shopping, buying two new nightdresses which were found after her death still in their cellophane wrapping. She probably imagined that t
he garage with the sports car where she hid herself would be opened in time, that there would be an ambulance, and once more the blessed cocoon of hospital and concerned voices. Once again she would be looked after and told it wasn’t her fault. Once again she would be an indulged schoolgirl, safely organised by other people, a jeune fille de bonne famille, clever favourite daughter of a clever father. It would all be all right, and she would never – quite – have to face the realities of ongoing time and change and inevitable loss, the wavelength on which real life is lived generation after generation.

  Chapter XVIII

  ESCAPES

  Three years later Simone de Beauvoir’s Mémoires d’une Jeune Fille Rangée was published. Julia read it. The last sentence, following on the quasi-suicide of de Beauvoir’s greatest childhood friend, Zaza, runs ‘… et j’ai pensé longtemps que j’avais payé ma liberté avec de sa mort’ (‘… and I thought for a long time that my freedom had been bought at the cost of her death’).

  The words struck at a section of Julia’s heart which, almost all the time, she managed to keep shut off from her current life. She seldom, at that period, thought of her mother at all, and it seemed to her, reading de Beauvoir’s words, that such a bargain with fate had been struck in her own life too. Ursula’s death had surely been the necessary price of her own freedom?

  ‘J’ai pensé longtemps …’ Not till she was older and a mother herself did she understand what a terrible act it is for a mother deliberately to abandon a young child. And not for a number of years more did she know that to abandon a child who is just growing up is almost as great a betrayal of responsibility and trust, of love itself.