Prologue

Melbourne, Australia

The first letter I ever received as a child came from Paris. It was magic to see the French postmark, Gisèle’s address carefully printed on the back in her distinct script:

Apartment 10
24 Boulevarde de Grenelle
Paris, France, 75015.

Gisèle’s love and thoughts reached out from her apartment overlooking the rooftops of Paris, France, to our weatherboard house in Melbourne, Australia. She was a connecting thread to my dad, too, even though he was no longer alive. Gisèle was my godmother, and had been dad’s wife before he met mum.

The idea of a letter with words written from so far away seemed like science fiction: with a stamp, some paper, and a pen, I could receive a message across time and space from another country, all the way across the sea.

Paris was a world away from Melbourne, and all I could picture of France was held in the mysterious photos in our family album and the prints on the cards that came from Gisèle. The parks and gardens looked smaller and much prettier than the giant expanses of greens and browns that dotted our Australian landscape. My older sister, Ayala, with mum and dad, had even stayed with Gisèle in Paris before I was born. I knew this from three photos taken on her balcony, laid out in Ayala’s photo album, which also contained the only photos of mum and dad together.

Ayala, in a little blue pinafore, was playing with her flowers and a plastic windmill, Paris streets below.

As magpies carolled outside in the rambling cottage garden mum had planted after dad died, I pictured Gisèle in her apartment with that tiny balcony that reached out towards the Eiffel Tower. Her pots of pansies lit with sweet reds and yellows against a champagne sky.

Perhaps Gisèle was still working for French radio? I didn’t know what she did, exactly, just that she’d once worked as a radio journalist. Her letters to us were always so much about us, anyway, about our special days, about how much she thought about us, wanted to see us again …

My Australian family, she wrote, never referring to problems or anything bad, always on such beautiful stationery.

My-little-dot-on-the-map-of-Australia, on the back of a card for my birthday, packages and parcels wrapped in ribbon arriving all the way from a Parisian store.

For Christmas, she sent me a precious necklace, a ruby stone embedded in the pendant.

For my fifth birthday, a pearl on a gold chain.

I know it was strange, that we considered Gisèle family, but I didn’t realise this until I was older. Gisèle had been dad’s wife for many years before or when he met my mum (I never quite knew), and perhaps it was even stranger that she’d been appointed my godmother.

But mum encouraged our relationship, buying me stationery and stamps because I loved to write to her, because she understood the importance of a living connection to dad and the life he’d led before I was born.

I sensed that mum knew Gisèle held some of the secrets about dad. Perhaps even about me.

Dad died when I was six, and a precious par avion letter from Gisèle came on my seventh birthday a month later, timed to the day.

Seven little kisses for seven year old Louisa, she wrote on the back of an illustration of children holding birthday balloons in the Luxembourg Gardens. Ask Ayala if she remembers Paris parks? was in the postscript. Seven kisses marked X along the bottom of the card, to match my new age.

Gisèle calculated the lengthy overseas transits perfectly, and her carefully wrapped treasures arrived exactly on our birthdays, or a few days before Christmas to sit under the tree.

To see the little French stamps and her delicate handwriting on an envelope when I got home from school meant that something miraculous was waiting inside.

A link to dad, the wonder of air travel, words that had sped from a heart to page to letterbox across time.

When I learned that having dad’s ex-wife as a penpal was a little ‘unusual’, I realised mum was quite avante-garde in her approach to life and love.

When I was a child, mum didn’t have a car; instead, she’d take me and my siblings on Sunday trips to the library on our bikes, shopping on a shoestring at the local market co-op for fresh produce she’d then cook, insistent that we live in the inner city, where we’d be confident travelling around to school and events on our own.

We never had the TV blaring with sports on the weekend; mum preferred the national broadcasters, SBS or ABC.

I still remember my first trip to a suburban shopping centre in an actual car when I was twelve, because it was as exotic as an interstate trip.

France wasn’t just a place dad had once lived: there was a sense that I’d inherited some kind of French connection through the time he’d spent living there with Gisèle.

I took French lessons at school, we watched French films on SBS, and the living-room bookshelf held a thin, dusty book of cartoons called Fractured French. I used to pull it down sometimes, thinking of Gisèle, wondering when and how dad had lived in France, who and what sort of person he’d once been.

Through Gisèle’s letters, I learned my first French words: par avion, bonne anniversaire, joyeux Noël, and rue for street.

I always planned to visit her in Paris one day, when I’d finished school and saved enough money. I didn’t know how old Gisèle was, like I didn’t really know or fully understand how old dad was when he died.

Just that they were both from a completely different time.

Ten years after dad died, Gisèle came to Australia. I was sixteen years old. She seemed full of life, impeccably chic — everything about her was so typically French. Something about her sense of self-containment and self-preservation stayed with me.

She carried herself with a formidable sense of dignity and enjoyment that wasn’t at all self-conscious. I remember her taking mum and me out to dinner, and her smiling and saying things like Marvellous and Aren’t we lucky every time the waiter delivered food to the table.

Mum said something depressing in the middle of the entrees, and Gisèle gently admonished her, insisting that we had better things to focus on at that moment in time. I remember it because I admired the grace with which she pulled it off. And her boldness made mum come to her senses and cheer up.

But a year or two later, Gisèle vanished. The par avion letters stopped. My cousin Mark said he thought she’d gone to stay with a friend in Brittany, but he wasn’t sure where and had no address. She was retirement age, apparently, which I didn’t understand.

She had always seemed so ageless. Sometimes, she even seemed younger than my mum.

When mum died, the same month as dad’s last surviving sibling — aunt Alice — the last of any direct threads to him were gone. There were cousins who’d known him as an uncle, but no one who could tell me about who he was without the filter of such an age gap.

Gisèle was an unsolved mystery, aunt Alice died in her sleep, and then mum died, throwing out all the childhood letters and cards I’d ever made her before she chose to leave. It was like someone had burned down the family house, but by then there was no house and the only fire was in my heart.

My grief wasn’t just for losing their physical forms, but for all the stories I’d never fully know about my family. Dad had crossed paths with me for six years only; the rest of my knowledge of him would have to be second-, third-, or fourth-hand.

I still had my brother and sister, but our ancestry was in the past — particularly, our dad’s story.

Who was your dad?

Is a question I’ve never been able to answer.

Never thought I could answer, with any kind of certainty.

It was an unresolved wound, a painful longing, as mysterious as death and all the stories in one life someone takes with them when they go.

But a letter from Paris changed all that. A modern-day letter — an electronic message sent by a woman named Coralie.