Someone's Wife

  Madame Astic has had a rose named after her by a famous Lyonnais rose breeder, so Marcel, who never does anything without a string being pulled, suggests that Robert learns to breed roses. In a moment of vast stupidity, turning down the opportunity to rival Sam McCready, Robert says no thanks, he’s sick of plants after nearly six years at university. A café? Marcel offers hopefully. Shall the LOU buy Robert a café? That’s more tempting, but having seen the friends of Marcel who start the day with a white wine at the Chez Rose, Robert imagines a life propping up a bar on the serving side, drinking more pinot noir than is good for him. He says he’s always been interested in photography. He’s sufficiently talented to have photographed the weddings of several friends. Marcel has a link to someone with a business in St-Genis-Laval, a village just outside of Lyon.

  Robert starts work. He spends his days learning how to print photographs. When not busy, he’s encouraged to print his own. After a month, he asks, er … when is he to be paid? His boss laughs. Nothing to do with him, he says. It’s the rugby club who are funding Robert. Robert has by now learnt to lift his shoulders up to his ears, throw up his hands and pout. This is nothing to do with him, either. From now on, he gets a fortnightly wad from the rugby club, via the photographer, just to make things look legal.

  As our French improves, so does the depth of our friendships. The players and their partners seem to understand us now, and I find that random conversations I hear in shops or on the streets are starting to make sense. And I suddenly have a friend who’s very available: ’Appy tits’ fiancée, then wife, Isabelle.

  We go to their wedding: we’ve known them only a few months. It’s in a beautiful village, Pérouges, an hour or so from Lyon, already a town that tourists visit to gawk through windows at people still trying to live normal lives. It has an exquisite Norman church, vast blocks of plain stone. In its soaring cream simplicity it remains the most beautiful church I have ever seen. De Gaulle’s son is a guest. Isabelle, as slender as Posh Spice, is the daughter of a medical general in the French army who runs the École Militaire de Santé in Lyon. This is in an elegant complex, reminiscent of Buckingham Palace, built around a square. Three sides of the square house the young doctors training for the military. The other side is the family’s expansive apartment.

  Isabelle has no intention of working after marriage, spending her days with her equally svelte sister and mother, sitting around the extensive table in their dining room. They are enormously hospitable; when Robert begins what is laughingly called work, I go there most days. They adore my darling blond brown-eyed baby. Who wouldn’t? Six months after our Benedict is born, Isabelle has her little boy, Valentin. She has travelled, and having spent much of her girlhood in Tahiti with her family she knows the Pacific; she’s even been to New Zealand. We slip in and out of each other’s languages. Slowly, as I improve, we speak only French. When I mention the nuclear tests in the Pacific, she laughs them off—Papa has said they’re fine! she says, and Papa, a doctor, would know. She lights her twentieth cigarette of the day. Feeling oddly nostalgic for my chain-smoking father, I deeply inhale the nicotine that, with the smell of freshly cut lawn, encapsulates my childhood. I sit with Isabelle, her sister and her mother, all of them lighting one cigarette after another. I’m happy.

  But now, in 2019, I look up the building where Isabelle’s family lived on the internet, and recognition wrenches my heart. During the war it housed the Gestapo. I relive going through that grand front door, each time reading the plaque remembering the members of the Resistance tortured to their deaths there. It’s almost certainly in that room which Isabelle’s family filled with nicotine that Klaus Barbie, who became known as the Butcher of Lyon, decided to send 120 members of the Resistance to St-Genis-Laval. This is where Robert would muck around printing photographs, being illicitly paid by the LOU. There, 30 years earlier, only 30 years earlier, they’d be shot, piled on top of each other, some still alive and groaning, stamped on, then burnt. It’s almost certainly in this room where I sat breastfeeding my baby that Klaus Barbie gave the orders for 44 Jewish children, aged from three to 12, to be taken from their school, their sanctuary in nearby Izieu, to be sent to their deaths in Auschwitz. Non-Jewish teachers chose to go to their deaths with them. I think of our grandson Edward, who’s two.

  I think of the president of the rugby club, Gilbert Bourvis, Jewish, who spoke often of being in Lyon during the war, and how he was constantly on the run. Each timesomeone he knew betrayed him—a common occurrence in occupied Lyon—he had friends with connections who warned him. He often escaped with minutes to spare through the traboules of Lyon—the secret passageways that have been in Old Lyon for centuries, useful in so many conflicts, hidden behind innocuous-looking doors that look like all the other doors that go into people’s houses. I think of the French who alerted him, I think of the French who turned him in.

  I think of the Astics, who took us to lunch one day in the countryside near Lyon, a beautiful restaurant which had been owned by friends for decades. We were sitting outside, looking at the panoramic Rhône Valley, and Madame Astic said that she was at this restaurant the day Lyon was being liberated. The valley was on fire, she said, sweeping her hands across the vast vista. Everyone was bombing it! she said. Americans, English, Germans! Alight, she says. All of it.

  I think of Monique, who so reassuringly made the war feel not unlike the games that Susan and I played all those decades ago. Always happy endings.

  I think of Happy Tits and Isabelle, who had Posh’s fertility as well as her hips, and went on to have four children with Jean-Luc before their marriage ended. By then, ex-socialist Jean-Luc had completely changed sides and become a right-wing local politician.

  I think of the Butcher of Lyon. It’s years before anything much happened to him. With the assistance of the Americans—he was usefully anti-communist—he fled from France and moved to Bolivia where he spied for the CIA and got into the profitable arms-trading business. Nazi hunters tracked him down; they’d done this by the time we got there, but it’s not until 1987, when the rulers of Bolivia are no longer quite so accepting of their ex-Nazi citizens, that he was brought back to Lyon to stand trial. Found guilty. He died of cancer in prison. He lived into his seventies.

  I think of Isabelle’s parents who will be long dead now. And the place where they lived, where Klaus Barbie also lived, where I played with babies and drank coffee and enjoyed friendship and kindness and laughter under a fug of smoke, and which is no longer the École Militaire de Santé. I am happy that the fine building is now the Centre of Resistance and Deportation.

  And I think of the audacious Germans, who think, quite wrongly, that in spite of those on the other side who are surprisingly helpful, that in spite of annihilating so many of those who they believed to be inferior to Aryans, that in spite of bribing the referee, they can win an away game.

  10.

  TOBY

  In which we have to confront our worst fear

  Years later I read that fighting with your partner while pregnant can cause the foetus life-threatening stress. I remember Fiji, where Robert doesn’t notice that he’s used a US$100 note to buy something. American notes all look the same and he thinks it’s a single dollar.

  I rant and scream. I taunt and blame. I am seven months pregnant and I’m going to live on the other side of the world, where almost nobody I know lives, in a country where almost no one speaks my language. My mother has just learnt she has angina. We’re in a small crummy motel and he’s just given some opportunistic person selling—what? a taxi ride? a sandwich?—$100.

  He’s going through his wallet, and he realises what he’s done. He’s reluctant to tell me.

  I want to kill him.

  At the airport the next day, a man, old, middle-aged, in a Hawaiian shirt, as plump round the middle as I am, sidles up to me, comes too close, and says, ‘So you’re having a baby? You don’t look old enough,’ and around me people shift uncomfortably.

  1973. They�
��re constantly on about cot death. They say, you must sleep your baby on its front. You must not smoke. You must breastfeed. We conscientiously buy a special sheepskin rug to take to the other side of the world.

  Two days after Christmas, two and a half weeks before the baby’s due, I have what I know is called A Show. Robert says he’ll go and tell the team he can’t be there for practice but he tells Lyn, whose husband Ron is also playing for the LOU, that something is happening, and she arrives at my door just as my waters break. Her two little boys are revolted.

  I’m in a private clinic, paid for by the rugby club. Toby arrives quickly. He’s 3 kg, a good weight, and perfect. It’s winter so you leave your champagne chilling on the windowsill outside. I share a room with Monique. Minutes after birth, all she wants to do is her makeup. I just want to shower. To wash my hair. They give me a bread roll and white coffee for breakfast. I want a glass of milk. They’ve never heard of a grown-up wanting cold milk. Lunch is something I’ve never seen before. Artichoke. I try to chew the leaves but they taste like tough plastic. Then I watch Monique and she’s pulling the flesh through her teeth.

  We have a bald baby. Monique’s little boy has a full head of black hair. The nurses bring him in and they are giggling because they’ve given him a centre part.

  Toby is crying and I take him into bed with me. The nurse says, He’s not a doll. Robert visits and I want him in bed with me. He climbs in.

  The nurse looks at me, at my body, and says, Hmm … Work! Beaucoup de travail.

  I want to breastfeed. The matter-of-fact nurses say times have changed. Nature has invented biberons! Bottles! Now, women’s milk is water! You have no milk, they say. C’est normal! Beside my bed I have The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding. It is so American, in a Californian type of way. I think, I’ll just wait.

  I try to ring Robert but I have to go through the clinic’s exchange and my French isn’t good enough. Their phone numbers are different. Ninety-six isn’t nine six, it’s quatre vingt seize. Eighty sixteen—no, four twenty sixteen. I say chiffre par chiffre? Number by number? Can’t you speak French? the woman on the exchange says irritably. I’m English I say, because saying I’m a New Zealander just adds to the complication.

  I’m so sick of looking ignorant that I write it all down. In French. I have university-level French, for what it’s worth. They’re impressed, cluster round, and read my requests for milk and more breakfast and whatever else it is that I feel I need at the time. I can write French, and if it comes down to it I can probably use the subjunctive. Their attitude changes.

  They’re going to give me a lesson on how to bath him. Just as we get his clothes off, someone says there’s a phone call for me so I go to answer it. When I come back the bath has already happened. It hasn’t occurred to me that they won’t wait.

  We take Toby home. Robert signs off our—the rugby club’s—responsibility to the clinic while I get into the bright-yellow VW Beetle with denim seats. There’s just the two of us. Where’s Toby? I say, and we realise that each has thought the other has him and we’ve left him in his little basket at the clinic’s desk. We run back and get him. This is something we will tell him, we laugh, when he’s grown up. We left you! At the clinic!

  He is so bright-eyed. Another LOU player’s wife brings her baby to visit while our husbands are away playing rugby, and hers is such a pudding. He lies blandly on our sofa, a round flat face and a comb-over. Toby looks at us as if he knows the way the world is and I think, My baby is so aware.

  Bruno is the team’s doctor. He’s an ear, nose and throat specialist and sexy in a particularly French way. He is married to Chantal, who has red hair, is little and runs everywhere, if she’s not driving a Fiat Uno with her feet barely touching the pedals. When she fell in love with Bruno, she was told by his father—same job as Bruno—that a man in his position needs to marry a nurse; she will understand his work. So she trains as a nurse. They have two beautiful children.

  Chantal is so kind and she has a strong sense of duty, and even though she has had an awful virus she is worried that I feel lonely and she comes to see me.

  I vomit. My bowels open. At the same time. I marvel that I have married a man who will clean up after me. If Toby gets this, I say, it will kill him.

  Toby is not quite 11 weeks old.

  I’m a bit better. Toby’s fractious, so I feed him, then give him some top-up from a bottle, then, because he still seems hungry, some squeezed orange juice. I just want him to sleep.

  I’m feeling better enough to need company and Robert’s at Language School, so I put Toby in his basket, on his tummy, on his sheepskin, and take him to visit Ron and Lyn in the next apartment block. We put Toby in his bed on their bed. He cries briefly, then settles.

  I’m there for an hour or so and then I go to get him, and Ron, Lyn and I look down at him in his basket, and as I say, You can see, can’t you, why when babies are asleep people think they’re dead, Lyn, a trained nurse, is already reaching in, pulling him out, breathing, breathing, breathing into his mouth, pushing on his tiny chest. Ron’s fetched Robert and Robert takes over the breathing then the firemen are there and Toby goes off with them in their fire engine.

  When he’s grown up we could tell him, You went in a fire engine!

  There’s a tiny white coffin and the other wives weep and wail and howl and I think, sort of amazed, you didn’t even know him.

  The rugby club commences the organisation of a move from our flat in the depressing suburbs into a much nicer one in the heart of the city. I’ve been sick, I think, and they’ll see that our flat is a tip. Meanwhile, we stay with Bruno and Chantal, and at dinner something makes me laugh and Bruno leans over and puts his hand on mine and says to me that I will survive because I can laugh. His father, whom he had adored and emulated, had the year before been killed in a car crash on the autoroute, driving at 160kph. He was 57. He was my world, says Bruno, but I have survived.

  But he wasn’t your baby, I think, and I think, Is it wrong at a moment like this to fancy someone as seriously as I fancy Bruno?

  They organise a local English vicar to speak quietly to us. Robert, whose father is an elder in the Presbyterian Church, impressively knows what to say. I want to say, I don’t believe in any of this shit. But I find myself saying, Please—he wasn’t christened—does this mean …?

  Bernard Labeyrie, a winger in the team, a year or two younger than us, a brilliant young man who has just graduated from the prestigious École Polytechnique in Paris, says, I will take you to my parents. My mother will look after you.

  We drive the yellow Beetle down through the Rhône Valley and across the bottom of France to a tiny village near the Pyrénées. Sorde-l’Abbaye. Bernard’s father had been set to go to university to do maths but it’s 1939 and the situation changes. Instead he returns to his father’s plot of land, which is just like the ones we used to write about in our French Life and Customs cahier in 4th Form French. It is just a few—very few—acres, stretching in a long narrow field behind their house. They are effectively subsistence farmers, and going out with Bernard’s mother to watch her force-feed geese to make foie gras is like being in a subtitled movie. Ram ram RAM she goes. The geese seem resigned but I watch it only the once.

  Bernard’s dad is keen to discuss agriculture with Robert. He can’t believe that New Zealand hasn’t patented the name ‘kiwifruit’. We can grow them here and use the same name, he says, with a bemused shake of his head.

  A neighbour pops in to meet us. The All Black! Her neighbour’s son has a friend who’s an All Black! Do you have any children? she asks, and that is impossible to answer and Bernard changes the subject.

  Bernard has two brothers and a sister, and his mother’s mother lives with them too. She wears a dusty black frock. Her job is to wait on the family. So there are nine of us around the table and Bernard’s father is at the head, we are at either side of him, and Mamie, the granny, is at the kitchen end. She’s pretty silent. She gets up and down removin
g our plates. Three of us have wine glasses. The young drink lemonade. Bernard’s mother and grandmother drink water.

  They are all so proud of their Bernard who is so clever. The one daughter, who has given up her bedroom to us, carries photos of all her brothers in her wallet. One of the brothers is lost to my memory now, but the other is Jacques, who is studying engineering at Bordeaux but who loves literature. My milk has finally dried up. I am susceptible to falling in love and so is he. Some men love sad, damaged women. Books! we say. Books!

  There is a game called Mastermind. We play it. They hide four coloured pegs (out of eight possible colours) behind a little bar at their end of the board. You, the code breaker, choose four pegs and place them at your end of the board. They judge your choice against theirs. Wrong colour. Right colour, right place. Right colour, wrong place. I look at Bernard’s sister, in her last year at high school, who has hidden her pegs, and she is so fresh, so sweet, that I think, Green then white then green then white. I put them in. She moves the piece that hides her choice. How did you know that? she says. How did you know that?

  Bernard’s mother’s mother is humble, but his father’s mother is very different. She is one of three. One of them has married a diplomat. One has married a Parisian jeweller. And one has married Bernard’s father’s father, the subsistence farmer. He has an extraordinarily merry face. His wife wears the soft cotton pinafore worn by working-class women. She has a fine face, haughty eyebrows, beautifully delineated brown eyes, and Robert takes their photo, and the grandfather wears a beret and his eyes twinkle, mocking what he could have been, and her eyes stare boldly. Don’t underestimate us.