December
Nor is any learning so arduous as knowing how to live this life naturally and well.
Michel de Montaigne
The pain in my right arm and shoulder was constant now, and had spread to my back and between my ribs. When I breathed, in and out, it hurt between every rib.
‘Go and see the physio,’ Anthony said.
‘I already go three times a week.’
Most of the time the ache was dull, but if I moved my arm suddenly a sharp pain shot through it. Because the autumn leaves on the footpaths were wet and slimy, I often skidded on them and instinctively shot my arm out for balance. There was an instant of calm, and then the searing pain hit and doubled me over, breath held. People looked at me in astonishment. ‘Qu’est-ce qu’il y a?’ What the matter? What’s she carrying on about? There was nothing to see.
One day when Hannah was staying for a week on her travels around Europe, she stood with me at traffic lights and I went to step out onto the pedestrian crossing. She saw a car run the red light and grabbed my arm – the pain shot through me as I bent double in front of her startled face.
Sleeping had become difficult; there was no position that didn’t make the pain worse after a few minutes so I lay this way and that for hours. Worst of all, self-pity was creeping damply in to match the cold, grey weather.
I went to another doctor who gave me stronger codeine and an anti-inflammatory. I swallowed as many of both as I was allowed a day; the codeine made me sluggish and the anti-inflammatory gave me ulcers all over my tongue and gums so that I couldn’t smile or eat or kiss without it hurting. I knew there was nothing seriously wrong with me, none of it was life-threatening, not even enough to justify calling it suffering. I thought about illness and pain being good for the character and wondered why it was dissolving mine.
Montaigne suffered a variety of illnesses: ‘rheums, fluxions of gout, diarrhoeas, coronary palpitations and migraines’, and ‘the stone’ or ‘gravel’, which sounds like either kidney stones or gallstones, both extremely painful, which is perhaps why he said ‘nor is any learning so arduous as knowing how to live this life naturally and well’.
But he was not one to seek pain as a way of learning; in fact he thought pleasure was both a guide for what we should choose – ‘I have never been bothered by anything I have done in which I found great pleasure’ – and our aim – ‘we ought to have given virtue the more favourable, noble and natural name of pleasure’. For him, the only use of pain was the pleasure that came when pain was lifted; the contrast heightened the experience of pleasure.
He did say too that ‘we must learn to suffer what we cannot avoid’ and that ‘experience has taught me that we are ruined by impatience’. That struck home. Each time the pain eased I thought, now I’m better, but the next day when it returned, I was consumed with impatience.
Rousseau was often sick as well, even as a child: he ‘was born almost dead and they had little hope of saving me’. As a young man he had long and mysterious illnesses, which he was certain each time were fatal. He knew he was a hypochondriac: ‘There was not an illness of which I read the description that I did not imagine to be mine […] I believed I had them all.’ He appears to have had depression when he was young and suffered later on from paranoia and from almost continual maladies including painful ‘urine retention’, which meant he had to use a catheter every day.
None of these are romantic illnesses, just painful, and embarrassing to talk about, and they must have shaped his thinking, at least in that they meant he was sidelined and had to observe society from the edge. It meant he also observed himself from the edge; he may have been ‘maddish’ as Hume said, intense in his passions, fanatical, but he was also self-aware in some aspects: ‘I have a passionate temperament, and lively and headstrong emotions. Yet my thoughts arise slowly and confusedly, and are never ready until too late.’ Oh, mine neither, I need a day or two to think of the quick reply!
I have been judging him too harshly, I realise. He was just another struggling human being. I had judged against his weaknesses too quickly, a flaw in my own character which has always been there. Even when I saw Proust’s cork room in the Musée Carnavalet, I wasn’t sympathetic. Marcel Proust was asthmatic, allergic to all kinds of dusts and pollens, and couldn’t bear noise; he spent much of his life shut away from the world, convinced that he would otherwise die. Instead of compassion, I felt impatience, even faint scorn. There was something in my then robust health that found his sickliness and oversensitivity irritating. I felt the same when I read the interminable – that word conveys my attitude already – pages in In Search of Lost Time where the narrator – I can’t help thinking it’s Proust himself – is waiting for his mother to say goodnight. Just get on with it, for heaven’s sake. I’d always been impatient with others’ illness, and now with my own obscure ailments.
In the middle of one afternoon I was feeling more than sorry for myself. I was in pain, exhausted from lack of sleep, my mouth was entirely coated with ulcers, it was cold, and Anthony was away in China, in Shanghai. I had a sudden longing to have his comfort, a longing for the phone to ring and to hear his warm voice which was never impatient with illness. I even thought for a second of ringing him, but remembered it was 3 am in China and he always slept like the proverbial log and it was unreasonable to disturb him. And then, within a minute, the phone rang, and of course it was Anthony.
‘How did you know?’ I stood there, disbelieving, tears stinging.
‘I woke up suddenly with the thought that you needed to talk to me. So I rang.’
In a way, I don’t want to say anything else about that phone call, but there is so little ever said about long marriages – apart from being a source of tedium and disillusionment – that, at the same time, I want to shout out from the rooftops. Communion might be quieter and nearly invisible – tempestuous affairs are given all the good lines – but it is as fine and rare and worth as much as stormy weather. Our connection had always been strongly physical – both of us wondering aloud at times how long we would stay together without sex – and strongly intellectual, dependent on decades of conversation about books. I sometimes wondered if there was anything else between us. Sex and books. And our sons too, of course. And wasn’t that more than enough anyway? But the yearning thoughts of a sceptic had travelled across high mountain ranges and cities and seas all the way to Shanghai to wake one man amongst millions from a sound sleep and caused him to make an international phone call to a self-pitying woman in Paris. When I put the phone down I couldn’t stop smiling.
It was only a week to Christmas and both the boys were coming from Sydney. Matt in his impetuous way had decided to buy a ticket on his credit card and deal with it later. He would arrive first and then, a few days later, Patrick, on his way to his year at university in Amsterdam.
The weather was cold and damp but Paris sparkled as each quartier tried to outdo the other with Christmas lights. There were garlands strung across market streets, moons and shooting stars and mandalas and nativity scenes dancing in the sky above the crowds of shoppers, glittering in the darkness.
When Anthony got back from China we spent an evening going from quartier to quartier, holding each other’s gloved hand and admiring the transformation of the gloomy evening into sparkling fantasy. The strings of small windmills made of lights, gold and red and blue and green, in our old neighbourhood in the rue des Abbesses, were the most beautiful to our loyal eyes, but we didn’t go and see the most spectacular in the Champs Élysées that night because we wanted to see them with Matt and Patrick when they arrived. Sylvie had told me it was the custom for parents to take their children to see the Champs Élysées lights in the week before Christmas each year. Carollers wandered down the streets singing to people as they sat in cafés and parents and children drank hot chocolate and watched the lights.
‘Papa and Maman took us every year when we were back in Paris,’ she said.
I thought of children too young to properly remember, but recalling glimpses of singing and cold and stars fallen to earth. One New Year’s night when we still lived in Sydney and Matt was a baby, about two years old, Anthony and I took him sleeping from his bed and carried him down to the harbour and climbed onto a ferry. It was nearly midnight. The New Year’s Eve fireworks began and Matt woke up to see the sky exploding with red and gold and silver and green stars. The water lapped on the side of the ferry and the cool dark wrapped around him and fountains and bees and dragon’s eggs and falling leaves sparkled in every colour. He would not remember the midnight journey from his bed, but underneath conscious memory he would always have the idea that extraordinary things might happen in the dark of night. It seemed to us that it was the beginning of his education. At that time I hadn’t read more than the two or three essays of Montaigne’s that Mrs Berman had given me in high school, but I know he would have agreed. Education was to enrich the inner being, and ought to be pleasurable, a delight. Waking to the sounds of a spinnet or the sight of golden stars filling the dark, ‘to educate the soul entirely through gentleness and freedom’.
*
I went to concerts every Sunday: sacred music in St-Louis on the Île St Louis, choir at the American church, a chamber concert in St-Jean de Montmartre at place des Abbesses, pianists playing Brahms at St-Merri near the Pompidou Centre. Sometimes my lack of musical background meant I couldn’t understand the blur of sound and I became restless and sat in my overcoat – the churches were always cold – wondering why I was still trying to join a club where my ignorance held me back at the door of grace and beauty, trying to see in.
Then I met an opera singer, an Australian woman, Trish. I’d gone to an exhibition of paintings at the Australian Embassy and she had turned up, as I had, in the hope of meeting new people. I don’t remember any of the paintings at the exhibition or even who the artist was, but I have a photograph of myself there in a pink and green dress, which, in the narcissistic hierarchy of memory, I remember I bought at Porte de Clignancourt, the flea markets in the north of Paris. I talked to Trish about my manuscript, how I had taken singing lessons back home, and that I had joined a choir in the twentieth arrondissement. She told me she had come from Adelaide to study singing in Strasbourg in her twenties and had never gone home. She had married a Frenchman and had two sons, but she couldn’t sing while she was married and ended up leaving him. It wasn’t that her husband prevented her from singing, she just lost her voice.
She was sexy-looking, with green eyes and long brown hair, and had an earthy laugh, and I liked her right away. She said she was currently performing in a concert of songs from Mozart operas – she was a mezzo-soprano – and asked me to come and see it.
‘It’ll be fun,’ she said. ‘We don’t take ourselves too seriously.’
The following week I turned up at the theatre, which was down a lane in the eleventh arrondissement. I climbed up narrow stairs leading to steep rows of seats that looked as if they might tip me over onto the stage if I tripped. The dusty red velvet stage-curtains appeared to have been there since the nineteenth century at least.
A series of sketches unfolded: a man in a loud shirt sitting in a striped deckchair, a nurses and doctors surgery scene with everyone in clinical white, Roman soldiers, Trish as an Italian housewife wearing a headscarf and glasses – each with glorious songs from Don Giovanni, Cosi Fan Tutte, The Magic Flute, The Marriage of Figaro. The singers fell about with slapstick humour, acting as if their soaring voices were effortless, accidental. The program explained that they wanted to explore Mozart’s gout de l’espièglerie, his taste for cheekiness and his childish spirit. I relaxed. It didn’t have to be solemn, reverential. Their voices were rich, powerful; they could do somersaults at the same time and still sing. Trish’s dark earthy mezzo reached effortlessly low and skimmed the high notes as she clowned around on the end of a telephone acting the gossipy fool.
Afterwards we had a drink in a nearby bar. The waiter hovered around Trish and asked if she was free later. A couple of men at the next table started flirting with her.
‘Like bees to a honey-pot,’ I said.
She laughed. It was an everyday dance for her, the stepping forward and back of attraction. She smiled at them and returned to our conversation.
‘I’m trying to compose a set of songs about Australia,’ she said.
‘Even though you’ve been living here for twenty years?’
‘Proabably because I have. I’m working on a series, the whole piece will be called Terre Rouge, Red Earth. But I need to listen to Aboriginal music, didgeridoo and sticks and chanting.’
‘But what kind of songs are you writing?’
‘I’m writing them to perform myself, so I guess you would call them arias. It’s not folk or rock’n’roll or jazz anyway.’
‘And you want to combine that with didgeridoo?’
We continued talking, both of us offering bits of our work. I envied Trish her voice, her capacity to make music, her entry into a world of sound that seemed to me beyond words. Like Stendhal I had come from ‘an essentially unmusical family’. Like him I was trying to sing, but as he said, there was little that could be done about it. I could only respond with more words. I told Trish that Dina in the book I was writing had sung in a rock’n’roll band for a while and that when I wrote about her tragedy, a beautiful young mother leaving a little boy forever, I had thought someone should write a sad love song about it.
Because stories keep going, a couple of years later when I gave Trish a copy of the book about Dina, she did write a song for her, a sad love song, and sang it when I did a reading of my book at The Red Wheelbarrow bookshop in Paris. That was in the future, but I like the way stories thread back and forth over time, connecting things that might otherwise have been lost or left flapping in the wind. It makes time past and time present seem to be, not a line, but arcs of a spiral. Trish finished writing Terre Rouge after I left Paris and performed it for a season on a nightclub barge on the Canal St-Martin. I didn’t see it, but Camilla, who had also become a friend of Trish’s, directed it. I heard the Paris audiences loved it.
*
Days and weeks had found a rhythm. I wrote each morning, immersed in life after Dina had died, the long slow connection with Theo, trying to stitch it together. I had begun to think of it as a kind of song and that I was trying to find the pattern of notes. I wrote pieces and arranged them as if they were notes: four or five short pieces, a run of quarter beats, and longer pieces, whole beats, or longer still, a note held as long as a breath would allow.
While I was writing, I listened to bellbirds and magpies in the Blue Mountains, to the sound of Theo’s near-silent crying, to Dina’s breath gargling in her throat as her weak lungs struggled to draw air. As I tried to re-create those sounds, those days, I felt as if they inhabited me, that my body and heart were living there and not in Paris. My body felt warm while I wrote, but afterwards, I was cold. I finished about two o’clock each day and when I lifted my head the sound of police sirens and cries from the street rose to my room on the fifth floor.
In the afternoon I returned to the present where there were ordinary tasks: I had my new trousers taken up at the Nigerian sewing shop across the street, I bought bath cleaner at the supermarket and ginger and honey at the African shop, I had massages with Tristan de Parcevaux, and studied French verbs on the internet. In the evenings I had a drink with Camilla or a conversation with Sylvie, and went to choir every Thursday night.
At choir I had learned that ‘Qui a tué Grand-maman?’ was an environmental protest song and I was getting the hang of muttering through the wordy lines of a chanson. We had added a few more to our repertoire, ‘J’en ai marre’, ‘I’ve Had Enough’, which I understood was a general angry complaint about poverty and hard work and lack of love, and a folk song, ‘J’ai vu le Loup, le Renard et la Belette’, ‘I Saw the Wolf, the Fox and the Weasel’. They were fun but the Bach cantata, No 11, Choral 6, I loved and was now brave enough to say so. I didn’t understand any of the German words, but the slow rich sound and rhythm reminded me of the swing of the incense crucible in the Friday night Benediction service of my childhood, the comforting weight of a belief I no longer had. The priest chanted and the faithful responded, incense filled the air. Here in the room in the rue Amandiers each note felt like a solid step underfoot, and each one inevitably led to the next one.
‘J’en ai assez de Bach,’ the young woman next to me grumbled. I’ve had enough of Bach.
‘Non, j’adore Bach,’ I defended. Marc nodded approvingly.
We started learning an English song too, Janis Joplin’s ‘Mercedes Benz’, one of my all-time favourites. I had sung it when I was sixteen walking up the middle of the road one night on a weekend away from boarding school, my first time in Sydney without my parents, the first time I’d had a beer or two. I was with a school friend who had introduced me to Janis Joplin’s torn soul, and we sang loudly in the quiet street. ‘Oh Lord,’ we yelled into the night.
‘For Parti,’ Marc said, and asked me to read it out loud with the correct English pronunciation. I read it, delighted to be the one who was the authority on a song for the first time, but when we sang it, I couldn’t help but blend in with the French accents: ‘Ma fren orll drive Porchez, Ay muz make amen.’
Marie-Louise had taken me under her wing and invited me home to practise French with her. She told me she loved French with all her heart and wanted to protect it – I understood – from my murdering ways. There was a kind of intensity in her that made me nervous though, and made me fear doing violence to her language. I had started to see that the passion to communicate mattered more to me than sounding perfect; I improved more with Sylvie because we wanted to understand each other more than we wanted to be correct.
I still practised French every day, listening to the news with a dictionary open on my knee. The words I learned weren’t ones I could often use in daily conversation – naufrage, shipwreck; sinstré, disaster victim; ravisseur, kidnapper – but I could understand what was going on in the world. I liked listening to President Chirac in particular, not because I agreed with any of his politics, but because he enunciated so clearly. ‘Français et Françaises,’ he would always start solemnly. French men and French women. I wanted to sit to attention, be one of the patriotic French women he was addressing.
I learned more useful words from Tristan de Parcevaux as he massaged my sore body. Allongez-vous, lie down; l’hanche, the hip; la boite, slang for nightclub – he sometimes told me about his weekends. It was an odd way to have French lessons, a young man and a half-naked older woman. I suspected there was more warmth and gaiety in the way we corrected each other’s pronunciation than might have been the case if we were both sitting at a desk in a classroom. And then, on my second-last appointment, a ‘thing’ happened between us. It was unspoken and, if anyone had been watching, unseeable, but it was something. We were talking, I think it was about his desire to be a musician, and then there was a silence, but not because we had run out of things to say. It’s strange that I can’t remember our words but I can remember the quality of the silence. It was warm and there was a current of understanding or acknowledgment exchanged, a kind of energy. It wasn’t sexual, not on my part and most likely not on his, but there was a tenderness, a knowledge that we had, for some brief moments, connected. There was something exposed in it, a vulnerability. We both hastily resumed our professional selves and pretended it had not happened, but I think of it sometimes. The way human beings can touch each other isn’t something to forget.
*
Rousseau and Stendhal often wrote about their passionate feelings, but not about the delicate and transitory. They both seem to have lived most of their relationships entirely in their own heads – or is that what we all do? Perhaps every relationship is imaginary in that we construct a version of the person in our heads to fall in love with. Proust said that the loved person is ‘a person most of whose constituent elements are derived from ourselves’, but Stendhal and Rousseau both went as far as falling in love with women who were entirely imaginary, Stendhal with a fictional character – ‘I went absolutely berserk, the possession of a real life mistress, then the object of all my desires, wouldn’t have plunged me into such a torrent of voluptuousness’ – and Rousseau with women he imagined himself: ‘I created for myself societies of perfect creatures, celestial in their virtue and beauty […] I spent countless hours and days, losing all memory of anything else.’
De Beauvoir wrote of her feelings for her friend Zaza when she was a teenager: ‘I allowed myself to be uplifted by that wave of joy which went on mounting inside me, as violent and fresh as a pounding cataract, as naked and beautiful, and bare as a granite cliff.’
To my Anglo-Celtic soul, it sounds extreme – violent, naked, pounding cataract, cliff – and I want to shrug it away as excess. But just as I do, I suddenly remember the long-forgotten years as a teenager when every night I unfolded an imaginary love affair in fine detail in my mind. It’s curious that I didn’t think of it when I read of Stendhal’s and Rousseau’s imaginary lovers. Each evening I could hardly wait for the solitude of my bed to imagine the next intricate instalment of love and passion. There were jealous scenes, passionate reconciliations, slow kisses, piercing glances from dark eyes. Cliffs and pounding cataracts; I’ve had a few in the endless landscapes of the mind.
Still, still, I want to insist, what of the subtle and transitory? A boy’s smile as he plays ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ on his violin, a wordless conversation in a physiotherapy clinic, two elderly women helping each other in the street below, the accordionist and his song, beekeepers inspecting hives in a park.
*
I told Sylvie that my sons were coming to Paris. She smiled and said I always glowed when I talked about them.
‘Do I?’ I blushed as if she had found me out in some sentimental nonsense. I hadn’t thought I was a woman who centred her life around her children; like Simone de Beauvoir, as an adolescent I had wanted to write, not beget children. She famously said that to have children was to keep playing the same old tune, ‘but the scholar, the artist, the writer and the thinker created other worlds, all sweetness and light, in which everything had a purpose’.
I can remember saying something similar as a teenager: why be born simply to give birth in turn? But somewhere along the years I had realised that nothing mattered more. Writing mattered, of course it would always matter, but if I couldn’t write again it wouldn’t annihilate me. Probably.
‘Sorry, I guess I’m like Madame de Sévigné.’
‘Ah my dear,’ she had written to her daughter, ‘how I would love to see a bit of you, hear you, embrace you, watch you go by …’ A familiar longing. But I thought of de Beauvoir and how she never found out that feelings as fundamental as disinterest, and even distaste, could be transformed into an adoration filling every cell of the body. I had not been interested in babies either when I was a teenager – I couldn’t imagine what it was people saw when they exclaimed ‘what a beautiful baby’. To me they looked red-faced, squashed, bald, and they smelled of milk and poo. I scorned women in my country town who didn’t want to go anywhere or do anything except have babies. My mother had observed my lack of interest. After I told her, when I wasn’t quite twenty-one, that I was pregnant, she dreamed that I got off the train in my hometown alone, blithely saying I’d left the baby behind in another city.
‘Non, non,’ Sylvie smiled. ‘But anyway, it’s the most important thing for children that their parents believe in them, don’t you think?’ she said.
I knew she wasn’t talking about believing in their brilliance or beauty and I felt reassured. I had looked at them and recognised them and that was worth something.
Years later I lay on a small camp-bed alongside my dying mother. We, all her many sons and daughters, had been taking turns to stay with her in her last days and that night it was my turn. It was the middle of the night in winter and because the winters are cold in my hometown I had the blankets up to my chin. Her hospital bed was higher than mine so I couldn’t see her face but I still lay with my face towards hers. It was quiet, not even the rubber-soled pad of nurses’ feet checking other patients could be heard. My mother had not spoken for several days and I thought I would probably never hear her speak again.
Suddenly in the dark I heard her voice, low but quite clear. ‘Kathy,’ she said, ‘Peter, Barney, Tim.’ I held my breath. ‘Patti, Kevin, Mary, Terry.’ They were the names of all her children. All my brothers and sisters. She started again. ‘Kathy, Peter, Barney …’ All the way through to the last. And then again. And again.
She told me once that she used to chant our names to herself every night and if she stopped on someone’s name she knew something was wrong with that one. One last safekeeping chant of the name of each child before she died.
*
On the day Matt was due we arranged to meet him at Gare du Nord. It’s a vast station on the RER, the Île-de-France lines, and the national train lines as well as the Metro, and was being renovated at the time. We tried to give instructions by text.
‘Outside ticket barrier, near Lafayette poster.’
‘Which barrier? There’s lots.’
‘On stairs leading up to main concourse then.’
‘?’
‘Stay there, at top of stairs – can see u.’
And there he was, with his open face and warm energy, bounding towards us. His reddish gold hair had darkened as he’d gotten older and it was shorter, no more luxuriant curls, a grown-up man. He was taller than both of us, and more outgoing, more confident and at ease. He had been the sort of child who made friends in a moment and kept them for life, never doubting that he wouldn’t be received with the same openness. He had always been ready for adventure, jumping off cliffs into mountain pools and riding his bike along fire trails and doing well at school, delighting teachers with his enthusiasm. I often thought, he likes the world and the world likes him. He put his arm over my shoulder as we walked.
That evening he went out after dinner and found Café Oz, an Australian-style café with corrugated-iron walls near the Moulin Rouge. Each evening afterwards he went out to chat to the Australian dancers who met there after performing at the Moulin Rouge and came home in the early hours of the morning.
Patrick arrived a few days later, slipping in from the airport and making his own way to rue Simart. He came in smiling shyly, trying to hide his delight as he had when he was a child and first realised how vulnerable it made him. It was a smile from a better world, I’d often thought, and it made me realise there was such a thing as a pure heart. He had been a child who loved knowledge, the kind that explained medieval trebuchets and how the pyramids were made and the history of architecture. He wandered the student quartier in the fifth arrondissement on the first day and went to the Museum of the Middle Ages on the boulevard St Michel. In the evening he drank wine with us. His narrow face and dark hair and his dark-coloured, understated clothes made him look typically French. I wasn’t surprised when, a few years later, he went back to Paris by himself and came home with a French girlfriend.
The first night we were all together we played Scrabble in Camille’s, but there were letters missing – someone had taken most of the ‘e’s – and we didn’t get far. In the next few days both boys explored all over Paris, walking from Montmartre down to the Seine and all the way up to the Eiffel Tower, but when they were back at rue Simart, they took up all the available space with their bodies and backpacks and clothes and youth. I bought a coat-stand to shift the small mountains of hats, gloves, scarves and coats off the lounge chairs. It fell over with the lopsided weight nearly every time either of the boys hung their coats up.
I announced we were going to take them both to see the lights in the Champs Élysées.
‘Okay, but I’ll just go myself,’ Patrick said.
‘No, I want you to come with us.’
‘Why? I can work out how to get there.’
‘It’s traditional. Parents take their kids to see the Chrissie lights in the Champs Élysées.’ I knew how I sounded before I’d finished the sentence.
‘You want us to be like little kids. Swinging hands.’ Matt grinned. They were ganging up on me.
‘Yep. That’s it. Indulge me.’
We did go, rugged up in gloves and hats and scarves, and there were children everywhere, bundled up in woollen coats or parkas, their faces shiny in the cold. We walked up from Concorde towards the Arc de Triomphe with thousands of others, a stream of sightseers enchanted by pretty lights. The roundabout near Concorde had a halo of lights in the middle like a vast swarm of bees, and the gardens – where Proust’s narrator played and chased his friend Gilberte – were festooned with golden shapes and patterns, and the chestnut trees all the way up the avenue glittered, a glorious silvery-gold blaze. Near the top we sat in a café on the terrace and had extraordinarily expensive hot chocolate. Up close in the chestnut tree in front of us we could see the lights strung along each branch.
‘Is this what you imagined, us all together in Paris at Christmas?’ Matt looked at me quizzically. ‘It’s not bad, is it?’
Patrick didn’t say anything. They were both used to my attempts to make life fit a perfect imaginary version. A couple with three children walked past, one of them crying to be picked up. The father carried a large parcel and the mother was carrying the baby but they both looked down and made encouraging noises. A white terrier hopped around the child, trying to be of use.
‘To our boys,’ said Anthony, and lifted his cup of hot chocolate with one hand and, under the table, held my gloved hand with the other.
‘It’s cold,’ said Patrick after a while. ‘Let’s go.’
‘I’ve booked a proper house for Christmas,’ I said. ‘It’s in Languedoc in the south-east. La Livinière.’
‘Are we going to have a Christmas tree and presents?’ asked Matt.
‘If you are good children. A Christmas tree and a turkey and an open fire,’ Anthony said.
*
Christmas on the farm was always hot. A branch was lopped from one of the tired pines in the top paddock and put in a bucket full of rocks to hold it up. There was anticipation and sticky-taped presents and Mass in the town church and a hot Christmas dinner in the hot middle of the day. Sweat on the vinyl kitchen chairs, roast chicken and roast potatoes and pumpkin and tomato sauce, wrapping paper and cards still lying about, the old plaster nativity scene with the paint chipped off Mary and Joseph, Christmas stockings from Coles. And then the long, slow afternoon. One year someone was given a plastic slide viewer of Switzerland and at first I thought it was magical. Snowy peaks and grassy meadows and chalets. But there were only eight pictures and once I’d clicked through them a few times, that was it. It wasn’t enough to transform a flat Christmas afternoon.
*
Even though it was in the south, it would be cold in Languedoc, which meant I needed a book for days around a fire. Perhaps a novel – I could leave the memoirists to themselves for Christmas. In WH Smith’s bookshop I pulled out novels I had always wanted to read but not got around to and ones I thought I ought to read one day. None seemed what I needed. As I stood there in front of tens of thousands of books, there was a sense of looking for exactly the right tincture for some wound. I felt stiff, heavy. A sense of grief had been with me the whole time in Paris and I couldn’t quite see what it was. The painful shoulder seemed an obvious metaphor; I was carrying something heavy that I needed to put down. I had to be quiet and still, let the right book come to me.
I moved over to the memoir section but still didn’t see anything. Then just as I was about to give up I pulled out My Father’s Glory and My Mother’s Castle by the film-maker Marcel Pagnol. I turned it over – the back cover said it was about his boyhood exploring the wild hills in the south-east of France. Before I even opened it, I knew this was the book, that there was some revelation waiting for me. I started reading it as soon as I got back to the apartment.
We set off for Languedoc four days before Christmas, the boys’ backpacks and our bags and presents stuffed in the boot. It was sleety when we headed off and there were two snowstorms on the way. Snowflakes blew towards the windscreen from a single, ever-disappearing point and snow powdered my head and shoulders as I ran with Anthony and Matt and Patrick into auto-stops for hot coffees and toilet breaks. I remembered photographs of us standing in the snow in the Blue Mountains, Matt in a cardboard box sled, Patrick not quite born yet. Snow on gums and bottlebrush and banksias.
It was evening by the time we reached the medieval steel crucifix marking the turn-off to the village. It wasn’t snowing anymore and I could see La Livinière ahead along a winding road through the vineyards, its milk-coffee stone buildings and orange slate roofs looking like a perfected French village. It was lit by the golden light that comes sometimes after the sun has gone down, ‘entre le chien et le loup’ – between the dog and the wolf – the light between two worlds. We bumped over a walled bridge and suddenly dropped back at least two centuries into cobbled lanes between stone houses, each with brightly painted shutters.
The house on the corner of the rue de la Républic and the rue Vieux Pressoir had three whole bedrooms to spread out into, a huge fireplace, and a kitchen with everything you could want including Scrabble and a pile of books. It was cold though, and the air had a faint stony shut-in smell of past human lives, sweet and sour traces of other meals, other habits. I pushed newspaper into the cracks around the windows and pulled the shutters tight. Anthony tacked a blanket over the door, and Matt lit the fire with pine-cones and roots he found in a basket next to the grate.
Next morning we ventured out, rugged up like bears. It took minutes to layer on the coats, hats, gloves and scarves, all tucked in tightly with no chinks to allow the cold air entry. Just up the hill behind our house was a Romanesque church, twelfth century, with arched buttresses joining it to the surrounding buildings. Nearby was a square with a medieval covered market and fountain and on the edge, a cemetery with its gravestones sinking into the earth. Back in the house I read that La Livinière had supplied wine to the Romans and the name had originally been Cella Vinaria, Latin for ‘wine cellar’.
Although there were bare vineyards all around the village, with no resemblance to the wheat paddocks of my childhood, I kept thinking of the farm. The girl I was on the farm. Proust says the ‘better part of our memories exist outside us, in the blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or of the first cracking brushwood fire in a cold grate’. At the edges of rows of vines, bushes clung to the dry soil and the crumbly texture of the dirt brought the memory of walking barefoot in a wheat paddock, the wheat as high as my chest. The smell of wood smoke gave me my father chopping wood. The cold air on my face in the morning when I woke in the whitewashed bedroom brought back a winter’s morning walking up the lane to school, frost on the grass. The sharp sweet eddies of lost childhood washed through me in a foreign place.
In front of the pine-cone fire we drank local red wine and played Scrabble. And read. Pagnol kept pulling me into the garrigue, the stony hills he roamed as a boy and, strangely, I was that boy as well. I breathed in rosemary and lavender and chalky earth and scraped my legs on a thorny bush, but it wasn’t until I was almost finished that I came upon the sentences I had been waiting for. I went upstairs and sat on the bed and cried. Later that night, after I had gone to bed, I recalled the sentences and again cried. Anthony started reading Pagnol as soon as I finished – not because I cried, he didn’t see my tears, but because I’d said it was the right book to read in this part of the country.
I went out the next afternoon and bought some holly and arranged it along the mantelpiece. I understood for the first time what it was really for. The fierce green leaves and red berries had only ever been Christmas kitsch before seeing them here in the bare coldness.
Anthony finished reading the book the day after he started. He has always been a passionate reader and will sit and read until he is finished whereas I like to take my time.
‘Did you cry?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Why should I cry?’
‘Because of these sentences,’ I said. I opened the book and read them out: ‘Such is the life of a man. The long childhood of joy is obliterated by unforgettable grief and sorrow. But there is no need to tell the children so.’
To my surprise I started crying again. I had thought before it was the cumulative effect of the story, but even on their own the sentences pierced the pleasant surface of things. Patrick and Matt sat by the fire, reading, taking sips of wine, pretending they didn’t notice.
Somehow Pagnol’s words untied the amorphous sadness. Nothing can ever be turned back; childhood was long ago, and now my children’s childhood was long ago. Sun, wind, the smell of harvested wheat, the caw of crows, bees in the almond blossoms, the peppery smell of rosemary – a child’s heart knows and sees everything. In every life, the kingdom is lost again and again, it must be lost, and nothing will ever bring it back. But there is no need to tell the children so.
The next day was Christmas Eve. Anthony and I tried to make a traditional French Christmas dinner according to the instructions Sylvie had given me before we left Paris. We drove across the bare countryside to the markets in Narbonne, an ancient seat of Roman government, and found dindes, turkeys, staring balefully at us from dead eyes. They were too big for four people to eat so we selected a chicken instead and watched the woman hack its legs and head off and stuff them inside the body cavity. Then we found marrons, chestnuts; moules, mussels; and an extravagantly iced and decorated Bûche Noel.
I cooked the mussels in wine, Anthony prepared the chicken and roast potatoes and green beans, then we sat around the table on Christmas Eve and ate our Christmas dinner in a village in the south of France. Afterwards, at midnight, we toasted each other with champagne and then, in the middle of the night, I rang my mother in Australia. It was already a hot Christmas morning there.