I conceive her in Paris, in the middle of the student riots: the glorious chaos of Mai ’68. Her father says that our first child will be all fire and spark, forged as she was in the bonfire of old, conservative France.
We are students ourselves, or at least we were until recently, the two of us renting rooms on the fourth floor of a house in the sixth arrondissement, plaster peeling from its belle-époque bones. Greg has already graduated with unexceptional grades in political science while I have given up my studies in London to be here with him, persuaded that a degree doesn’t really matter. It’s just a piece of paper, he says, when I worry about it, his long pianist’s fingers circling my navel, just another way the Establishment makes people buckle down to a conventional half-existence. What matters is this. He gestures toward the city beyond our tall, dust-streaked windows. Real life.
We came to Paris ostensibly for him to see more of my homeland. He’d enjoyed French classes at school and had gone on holidays to France as a child: bracing weeks on the beaches of northern Brittany, where he’d had his first erotic experience. I think about her sometimes, that long-ago Madeleine who bewitched a teenaged Greg in the early sixties. She instilled in him a weakness for French girls that steered him unerringly toward me as I sat sipping a half pint of warm beer in the student union bar one winter-dark afternoon, trying to pretend I wasn’t cold and homesick in London, that I liked English beer. Without Madeleine, he might have walked straight past and gone on to marry an English girl instead. And me? I might have gone home and married a nice boy from my village, London washing off me as easily as grime in the shower. When I think about this, about Fate and its vagaries, and how we might have missed each other by inches, I feel dizzy.
Greg wanted to come to Paris partly because of the growing unrest. He’d heard about Nanterre, which had been shut down after trouble between the university authorities and the students. I tease him for trying to shake off his suburban background, be something more dangerous than he is. His poor parents are horrified that their clever son has gone off the rails, has run off to Paris with his foreign girlfriend.
Soon it’s July, and the city begins to swell with the usual tourists, to swelter with heat, and the riots run their course. We give up our digs and catch a train south so he can meet my parents. My mouth tastes of old coins as we rattle through the vastness of my country’s interior because I am almost three months pregnant. I reach out for my new husband’s hand, our fingers entwining. We have been married for twenty-two hours. I was surprised he suggested we marry when I fell pregnant. I’d expected him to say that such conventions didn’t apply to us.
I’m surprised again when he loves La Rêverie, the village, even my parents. I’d feared he would think them staid, conformist. I was secretly dreading that he would argue over dinner with my father about Catholicism. But he doesn’t, their exoticism, like the gentle enchantment of the house, seducing him effortlessly.
The months roll placidly by, and our return to Paris or London isn’t discussed. Instead, we stay on in my childhood home. As silver streaks my swelling abdomen and islets of darker skin rise on my cheekbones, I am in a sort of heaven, idling quietly through the days, a cotton-wadded, rainbow-glinting life. My mother knits tiny clothes from the softest wool and I paint jungle animals on the wall of the room that will be the nursery.
As summer fades to autumn and then winter, I can’t wait to meet her. I know without question that she will be a girl. When she kicks, I pull up my blouse and watch her heels rippling my skin. Excitement eddies through me at the thought that I will soon be able to weigh those tiny feet in my palms.
There is no apprehension, only anticipation. One night, too uncomfortable to sleep, I wish for her to be beautiful and clever, my fingers crossed under the covers. In the morning, I turn to Greg in the bed beside me, press my lips against his bare shoulder. “I’ve thought of a name for her,” I say, stroking his long fringe out of his eyes. “I dreamt it. We’ll call her Élodie.”