16
Alistair and I are lounging. It’s 9.45 p.m. and we’re draped — Dali melted clock-fashion — over the furniture. We’ve just eaten a late and rather weird dinner, which is the only kind served at the moulin. We’re big on finishing up stuff, Alistair more so than me. I draw the line at furry cheese.
Tonight it was haricots verts, pine nuts, pumpkin seeds, carrots and spring onions — all tossed together with questionable bits of prosciutto and a vinaigrette of indeterminate use-by date (I can’t recall when I made it). In a ‘Why not?’ moment we threw a fried egg on top. And of course there was the compulsory baguette and glass of red.
Tonight is 13 July, i.e. the day before 14 July (bear with me). The significance of this is that 14 July is Bastille Day, as it’s known everywhere except France, where it’s simply ‘la fête nationale’.
The day celebrates the storming of the Bastille prison by the people of Paris in 1789, an act which signalled the start of the French Revolution. A French friend told us, ‘You know, there were only a handful of prisoners in there when the people fought their way in. But that is not the point — it’s the symbolism of it! These were political prisoners!’ He said this with great passion.
On the eve of this public holiday everyone goes to town (villages included) by letting off fireworks. Tonight’s public display is at 11 p.m., which is a challenge given our current state of dynamism. I’m all for sloping off to bed with my book, but it would be a shame to miss out on this calendar highlight. So we agree to head out by bike, in the certainty that the night air and dicing with traffic in the pitch black will soon wake us up.
I stay close behind Alistair on the road, as my headlamp doesn’t work too well. At one point I have problems shifting gears, panic as a car approaches from behind, wobble off onto the verge and have to head back the way we came, downhill. I can’t re-mount on an incline. ‘What the hell are you doing?’ says Alistair when I catch up with him. I can’t tell him because I am laughing too much.
Forty-five years ago, to the day. That’s when I last gazed up at the Bastille Day fireworks.
The year was 1977, and I stood on a river bank in a Parisian suburb with Françoise and Thierry, the couple I was nannying for. With us were their two children: little Cyril, a blond, cherubic nightmare, and skinny Lionel, impish and adorable. Lionel had unruly dark hair, a pinched face, slightly sticky-out top teeth and pencil-sharp shoulder blades. There was something urchin-like about him, despite his growing up in a middle-class Parisian postcode. I much preferred his raggle-taggle naughtiness to the slightly mummy’s boy entitlement of Cyril (give him a break, Maria, he was only four. At that stage in my life, however, I didn’t have time for children and planned to never have any of my own). We watched the sky spit out sparks and erupt into flame, and laughed that the oscillating reflection of a train crossing the bridge was prettier than the display.
Nineteen. I had no idea what was to come. I didn’t know that my then-worst nightmare (having a Cyril and Lionel of my own) would be the source of my greatest joy. That I would live for many more decades (the nuclear arms race was revving up and even the next week didn’t seem guaranteed). That I would get my modern languages degree, that my father would die of a heart attack in four years’ time, that I would leave everyone I loved to live on the other side of the world — and do it all again in the opposite direction. That I would be deliriously happy, heartbroken, extremely poor and have everything I dreamt of and more.
This current firework display is beyond beautiful. I’m crying now, and in solidarity a cascade of sparks ripples down from each viaduct arch.
How did it happen? I mean, seriously what the hell? How was I nineteen one moment, and 64 the next? It’s like I nipped off to buy ice cream and returned to find a thief had made off with an entire Parisian family and four decades of my life.
I share this with Alistair. ‘Yep, it all goes so fast. I guess the big question is, would you do anything differently?’
I stare at the red flares bursting from the bridge. No regrets, that’s always been my mantra. But mantras are mantras. They’re not the truth. So many wrong turns, bad choices, batshit moves, terrible relationships. Then I think of my two daughters.
‘Not a thing,’ I reply.