We'll Always Have Paris

by Sue Watson

  We leave the wine bar and meander through Albert Square, past the Royal Exchange Theatre, a lunar pod encapsulated in the old Edwardian Cotton exchange. We stand and stare at this for ages. ‘I remember the exchange closing in 1968.’ He turns to look at me. ‘It was a year that changed everything.’ He grabs my hand and I melt at the warmth, the feel of his flesh on mine.

  I am both comforted and saddened by his remark. I know the impact he had on my life, he was the one that changed everything for me. And though he says things changed I can’t see where I impacted on his life at all. After me he just continued on his rather self-indulgent path of travel with a career paid for by Mummy and Daddy. When I think about this it makes me think of all the years Mike and I toiled together to make a life, and my love and respect for my husband bulldozes the re-emerging feelings I have for Peter. Then I remind myself that Peter was young and his abandonment wasn’t as total as I’d believed over the years. I’m trying to pretend this is all about friendship, but in spite of everything and after all these years, I think I still love him . . . I think I always have. And I’m as mixed up as a teenager.

  It’s like fate sent him here to spend another summer with me just when I needed him. It’s a hot, breathless summer just like our first – a time of real freedom – when all I had to worry about was what lipstick to wear and whether to let him kiss me. And as the sun melts over the city tonight I look at him and realise this might just be my time to enjoy the lipstick, the kisses and the freedom, all over again.

  ‘I still love this city,’ he says as we head over to his hotel, just off Piccadilly, which gives us the chance to walk down Market Street hand in hand as we used to. ‘It’s like literally walking through the past for me.’ Having left Manchester the same year we parted, he’s lived his life elsewhere for a long time, whereas I stayed here in the same life. I’ve been steeped in the memories, unable to forget.

  ‘It’s family that’s kept me here – once you have children your world shrinks – in a good way.’ I smile. ‘Schools and friends and of course Mike’s work and then the shop, we had no choice but to settle here, it never occurred to us to go anywhere else. I’ve often wondered what it would be like to live in another city, another country . . . I wonder how different my life might have turned out.’

  ‘I often wonder how different my life might have been if I’d had children,’ he sighs.

  ‘Are you really saying this to me?’ I ask. I feel a frisson of anger ribbon through me. He had his chance – I’d have married him and had ten children if he’d asked me.

  ‘I’m sorry, that was insensitive . . . but I’ve spent much of my life kicking myself and wishing things had been different.’

  He smiles wistfully and I wonder if his wife begged him for children and if he said the same things to her that he’d once said to me.

  ‘You sound like you feel you missed out, but you had a career, a lovely life and the money and opportunities to see the world. Would you ever have been ready to be a parent?’ I ask, echoing his own words from the past. Maybe it was Camille who rejected the idea of children. Perhaps it was her wish to put her career before family. From what he says she certainly seems ambitious and I really can’t imagine her changing a nappy or wiping baby vomit from designer clothes. And having glimpsed her immaculate home, medication would be required at the very thought of a sticky-fingered child near those chiffon-grey walls. She really does seem to have lived a charmed life, moving seamlessly from the wonderful Peter to a newer, richer beau in her later years. While the rest of us are worrying about our pensions, winding down work and hoping we have enough money to leave the kids, she’s painting walls and canvases, creating beautiful living spaces – a stage on which to set her perfect life. Women like Camille make me feel rather inept and not for the first time I wonder what someone like Peter ever saw in someone like me.

  We arrive at the Malmaison and I feel immediately comfortable. The entrance is dark and sultry with plush velvet sofas and dimmed mood lighting, a perfect setting for seduction.

  Peter orders us both a brandy and I go to the Ladies to reapply make-up, where I come down to earth with a bump. Seeing the wrinkles in these brighter bathroom lights is a stark reminder of what I am – a grandmother who should know better. Because I’m with my old lover I feel more relaxed, familiar, but at the same time I’m still vulnerable. We’ve been seeing each other for a while now but I won’t just hand over my heart to him again. Mind you, at my age I’m more likely to regret saying no than saying yes – to pretty much anything.

  I think about my mother and wonder what she’d think of me in a fancy hotel with Peter almost fifty years on. I know her advice would be to run home, lock all the doors and never see him again, and along with Margaret’s voice come the old self-doubts. Am I enough for someone like Peter? I’m not well travelled, I haven’t had adventures, I’m not sophisticated like Camille. Hell, I hadn’t even lived alone until Mike died. And if an idyllic life on dove-grey linen sofas in the French countryside, with an intelligent, glamorous wife, wasn’t enough for Peter – then how could I ever be?

  ‘Oh, shut up, Margaret,’ I say under my breath.

  I couldn’t wait to get away from her comments and her nagging. I remember sitting in the passenger seat of Peter’s car gazing up my street, covered in cherry blossom. The spring sunshine peeping through Persil-white clouds in a tight blue sky, the car smelling deliciously of leather, stale smoke and aftershave. Peter climbed into the driver’s seat and started the engine and I felt a rush, a breeze through my bones as we pulled away, leaving Nightingale Road behind. I was shaking off my mother’s judging and fretting and fussing and my father’s grunting and the ‘me’ I didn’t want to be who lived in that little terraced house with the net curtains and the matching plumped cushions.

  And Margaret knew how I felt, she knew I didn’t want to stay around here, that I wanted a bigger life. But she was scared for me and scared of losing me, so she fought me over everything.

  ‘I don’t want to lose you, Rosie,’ she’d once said in a rare moment of weakness after a huge row. She’d stopped scrubbing and was looking at me, a trickle of sweat moving slowly down from her forehead, and in that moment I felt an unexpected pang of love for Margaret. She worked so bloody hard with so little thanks, not even an acknowledgement from my father, all she had to look forward to was the bingo, and a bit of gossip. This wasn’t a life I wanted, I couldn’t live like this knowing I’d never see the world beyond my back yard, never feel a foreign sun on my face. She’d never known the passion of art, the way it filled you up and gave you something to live for when there was nothing but dirty streets and grey skies.

  Margaret’s vulnerability that day crystallised our relationship and I saw what was happening: she was fighting to keep me and I was fighting to leave.

  As a mother I can see it’s probably the main reason mothers and teenagers fight – we want our children to stride out into that big wide world, do all the things we never had the courage or opportunity to do. But our instinct is to hold them close, keep them safe – and never let them go. I think perhaps it’s time for me to finally let go.

  Chapter Twelve

  I flick my hair, spritz some perfume, leave the ladies’ toilets and walk back into the bar where Peter is waiting. I sit down, melting into the soft, red-velvet sofa. The brandy is warming and intoxicating – and so is he.

  ‘Tell me about Mike,’ he says. I’m surprised at this, but I suppose it’s natural he would be interested.

  ‘Mike was kind, and he loved me. He was a good dad and he lived a decent life – he wasn’t rich or famous or special, but he was special to me.’

  ‘And you were special to him, I’m sure. You gave him his family.’

  ‘Well, Mike wanted children from the outset. His own father died when he was only young and he just wanted to make a family and so did I. Once we were married the girls came along in the first few years.’

  ‘Are the girls coping . . . having l
ost their father?’

  ‘Yes, but they were so close, it’s not been easy.’

  ‘Are they okay about you seeing an old boyfriend?’

  ‘They have some reservations. They don’t want me getting hurt, I suppose. My eldest, Anna, is like my mother and has been a mother hen since Mike died. Isobel’s a little more laid-back but prone to influence from her big sis, but all they want to do is protect me. They both know you broke my heart.’

  ‘Oh God, do they? Do they know what happened?’

  I shake my head. ‘No, but they would both be horrified if they thought I was now in a hotel bar with a man old enough to be my lover.’

  He laughs. ‘Rosie. You spent your youth worrying about what your mother would say. Don’t spend time now worrying about your daughters . . . it’s your life, no one else’s.’

  ‘It’s easy for you to say. I swear the minute I turned sixty they started to see me differently. Mind you, doesn’t everyone? People want to define you, put you in a box and label you “old” like you have no right to have fun any more. As far as my girls are concerned I’m too old to take risks, make mistakes – but isn’t that how we learn . . . from our mistakes?’

  I think about what happened with Peter all those years ago and realise it was the biggest lesson I ever learned and it taught me a lot about myself.

  ‘We’re never too old to learn on this journey, and along the way we discover ourselves – some of us may take the road less travelled, which in its own way is a sign we understand who we are and what we need.’

  ‘You took that road, but I’ve lived with other people . . . travelled with other people,’ I say, acknowledging his metaphor. ‘So I’ve never really had the chance to know me, what do I feel? What do I want? And I don’t just mean the big things – I buy mint choc chip ice cream because it was the girls’ favourite, and I eat it too. But I don’t really like it. So what’s my favourite flavour? I don’t really know because I’ve never stopped to think about it. I’ve been too busy stuffing the freezer with bloody mint choc chip.’

  He laughs again. ‘Perhaps that’s the first thing on your list – find out what your favourite ice cream is?’

  ‘I suppose. It’s just that having a family is wonderful, but it’s also compromise: you’re involved with a group of people who all want something and as a parent, a wife, you want them all to get what they want and you don’t think about yourself. I still don’t know what I really want.’

  He settles into the sofa. ‘So apart from ice cream perhaps you need to try on a few things for size. Look around and decide what happens next for Rosie?’ I appreciate this, and I’m reminded again of his thoughtfulness – he’s always interested in what I think, he cares how I feel.

  Mike and I didn’t always have the time and space for discussions like this and perhaps it would have been a little too esoteric for us to talk about life in this way. When you spend your time together discussing mortgage payments, car insurance and what to have for supper, those ‘us’ moments in a relationship become fewer as the years go on. Consequently, my relationship with Mike was reality-based, it didn’t involve hopes and dreams and what ifs. Our life involved getting things done, the important stuff like looking after the kids, buying a house, building a business, creating a good life for ourselves.

  ‘I still don’t know what I really want,’ I sigh. ‘I know I don’t want to waste a minute of what I have left, and I still want fun. I want to open up the box of things I used to dream of doing and look through them. I may not be able to do everything, I may not be able to do anything, but I want to feel like I made a good fist of it, you know?’

  I look at him and he’s smiling, nodding, he understands me, we don’t need to explain.

  ‘It’s hard to define a future for people like us, it comes with the sixty-something territory,’ he says. ‘We’re too old for sports cars and too young for stairlifts.’

  ‘Speak for yourself, I’m not too old for a sports car,’ I say, and I suddenly see myself driving down country lanes in a red MG, sunglasses on, the wind in my hair.

  ‘Ah, The Ballad of Lucy Jordan,’ Peter sighs, referring to a song Marianne Faithfull sang sometime in the seventies. It was about a woman who had once dreamed of driving through Paris in a sports car and how marriage and kids had ended her dream. It’s a song that’s always made me feel incredibly sad, but now the image fills my mind and makes me feel euphoric. Peter’s right, it’s never too late and unlike Lucy Jordan, this wife and mother may one day live her dream of Paris after all.

  ‘I think the real tragedy is that I’m wiser, stronger and probably a damn sight more interesting than I was at seventeen – I just don’t look it to the outside world,’ I say wistfully.

  ‘You’ll always be seventeen to me; a stronger, wiser girl, but still beautiful.’

  Being with this man who sees my seventeen-year-old self makes me want to be her again. I don’t want the lack of confidence and the vulnerability that came with youth – but I would like to taste some of that freedom, a flake of happiness without responsibility, without consequences.

  I smile, thinking of what Anna and Isobel would say to this. Like most kids they only see the wife, the mother, the grandmother. And until recently, so did I.

  ‘I adore the girls and when I think about what my future holds, they are a huge part of it. But if I want to change and make a life for myself, whatever it may be, I will have to make it clear to the girls that I have to be allowed to make some mistakes.’

  ‘I suppose you’ll just have to alter their perception of you. I’m sure they’ll understand.’

  ‘Yes, first I need to convince them that I’m capable of leaving the house without a police escort. Like now, they would much rather I was tucked up safely in bed than drinking brandy in a hotel with an old boyfriend.’ I say this as though I have lots of old boyfriends, when in reality he is the only one. ‘If one of them calls me in the morning and I don’t answer there’s hell to pay – our Anna called the police recently and I’d only gone to Sainsbury’s.’

  ‘A wild, supermarket adventure, eh? You rebel,’ he laughs.

  ‘You may laugh, but it’s such a role reversal. I’ve spent most of my life protecting them and guiding them through life’s ups and downs, but now they do the same for me. Don’t they realise I’ve been there and done that and I know best?’ I’m joking but sometimes it’s how I feel.

  ‘Ah yes, that scientific fact: Mum always knows best,’ he jokes.

  I think about my own mother and how she warned me against falling for him, but I thought I knew better.

  ‘Having children makes you think about your own parents,’ I say. ‘Margaret said you’d never marry me because you came from a different world. I told her that’s why I wanted to be with you – because you were different.’

  ‘And that’s why I love him,’ I’d screamed in her face. ‘Because he’s different . . . and I’m different.’ I told her I wasn’t going to live her life, slaving away in the kitchen waiting for a man to come home from the factory every night, never going anywhere, never doing anything except bloody bingo every Friday and polishing the front room on a Wednesday . . .

  He shakes his head. ‘It was quite tough for you, wasn’t it?’

  ‘It was tougher for Margaret. I try not to think of all the cruel insults I hurled at her, I just remember the pain in her eyes and it hurts even now over forty years later. She was protecting me and I hated her for it. I just hope after everything that she knew I loved her and in the end I know she was right.’

  ‘I’m sure she did. I suppose having your own children helps you work through the relationships you had with your parents?’

  ‘Yes, in a way it’s a kind of therapy, but we never learn. We all think we’ll be perfect parents but we bring our own flaws to the party.’

  ‘And now, with your girls . . . what would you do differently?’

  ‘That’s a tough one. It’s hard to identify let alone reveal what you didn’t get righ
t. I think if anything I’ve been too involved in their lives. Margaret wanted to be involved in mine, but she did it through control; she thought if I stopped seeing you I would stay in her orbit for ever, marry a local boy and she could keep me close.’

  ‘And you did.’

  ‘Yes, and it worked, because in the end she knew best.’

  I may have wanted someone like Peter, but she knew I needed someone like Mike. I get a tight knot in my stomach just thinking about him. Without him I still feel like I’m in the middle of the ocean and there’s no one to rescue me. Perhaps I need to rescue myself?

  ‘I know the girls are grown up, but I still sometimes feel like a single parent without Mike at my side. Take Isobel, she’s had problems having children and she sometimes talks about it, and I know she’s hurting, but she doesn’t feel she can share her pain with me because she doesn’t want to upset me. Likewise, I don’t want to tell her I’m worried about her because I don’t want her to feel like she can’t tell me if she needs to – it’s a complete conundrum. But if Mike were here I could talk it through with him.’

  ‘It must be difficult to lose that kind of relationship, that trust and sharing . . . but if you need to you can talk to me, Rosie. If you’re worried about your family I will listen and—’

  ‘Thanks, Peter, but although they are a huge part of my life my time with you should be about us, not everyone else.’

  ‘Yes, but being in a relationship is about sharing your problems. When we were younger you told me about your mother and I listened . . . it’s the same thing.’

  ‘I suppose you’re right, I just feel a bit territorial about my girls – especially where Mike’s concerned . . . and what you said just then about a relationship?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are we . . . having a relationship?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’d like that but I don’t know how you feel . . . I know I couldn’t bear another goodbye.’