Chapter Two
Souvenir
We spent the night corresponding, from Melbourne to Paris.
I felt comfortable opening up to Coralie, for she opened up to me — all that Michelle had written of dad, the context in which they’d met, the family she’d come from, the way it all unfolded … To Coralie and her family, dad was important, significant. Her family seemed as intrigued about my dad as I was, which I found so startling, and so strange.
I didn’t sleep until five in the morning.
The flutter of excitement and anticipation with every new message from Coralie was the kind of feeling I hadn’t had for years. It was the feeling that had pulled me into journalism — that sense of excitement at a person’s story that you just had to know. Of questions seeking answers, of details that painted a portrait of someone — a life — that you’d never have expected. Something beautiful. Something secret, only able to be unfurled gently and carefully. A hidden thing that is only revealed with the right questions. Something that had to be seen through to the end.
Coralie referred to art, and writing, in a way that brought back to me all the respect with which the French treat these things, like a long-forgotten memory that in another country what I loved and valued wasn’t considered strange. I felt myself emerging from a tight ball of fear of exposing myself that I hadn’t realised had formed over the course of the last year.
With just a few emails to and from Coralie, I saw myself and my life differently. After she wrote that dad had worked as a freelance journalist in London and France when he met Michelle — which I’d never known — she immediately felt like family, because she was telling me about mine. It was so swift. I trusted her because she was so generous with information about my dad.
Information no one had ever shared with me before. Not even dad’s elderly siblings, when they’d still been alive, had been so forthcoming. It wasn’t their fault — I was too young, and how would they have brought it up? It was all just strange timing — my life beginning as theirs — and dad’s — were ending.
We sent three very long emails each, with Coralie linking to a blog where I could find the first five of Michelle’s letters, which Coralie’s cousin had begun to transcribe. I gathered her whole family in Paris knew the story of dad. That this family — cousins, uncles, I wasn’t yet sure of the size — had been holding these precious memories of my dad moved me deeply, and I wished I were in France.
Halfway across the world — the tyranny of distance pulled and tugged at me, and I yearned to jump on a plane the next day and land in Paris. But I also wanted to have something to give them back — some knowledge, some answers to their questions.
It was an earthquake, like everything else that had happened that week, but perhaps it was a good one? Paris pulled at me, again and again. I longed to be there, sitting in a room with Coralie and her family and learning about Michelle. I felt pained by the distance in time and space, and expense — wondering how I could make our meeting possible.
I was scared to spend my savings, particularly when I’d just left my job.
I wasn’t even sure if I could believe this seemingly surreal story.
I threw myself into Michelle’s letters.
Michelle had been only twenty to dad’s twenty-eight when they’d met in the spring of 1949. It was Michelle’s first trip abroad, and she’d met dad on the train to London. The Australian from the train, she called him.
He was her first holiday romance — a journalist, telling her about the beauty of Vienna, of searching for his Deasey ancestors in Dublin, mentioning places she’d never previously considered she could go, as she’d been brought up in quite a strict bourgeois family in Paris and it was bold of her to even be in London on her own.
Michelle had managed to extend her stay in London by finding work as an au pair with the help of nuns from her Parisian convent, a brave move for such a young woman, and I gathered her father didn’t entirely approve. Michelle came from a respectable Catholic family, and her father was well known in France for inventing the ancestor of the breast pump. I gathered, from all the references in the letters to ‘papa being worried’, that her father also disapproved of the romance with dad.
But these letters about their dates were her happiest souvenir, as Coralie so beautifully put it in one of her emails, Michelle’s year abroad in London one of the most significant times in her life. Coralie’s younger sister, Clémentine, who also emailed me, wrote that she felt Michelle ‘followed’ dad’s footsteps, travelling to Vienna herself and talking of pursuing a career as a journalist after the affair broke off.
Apparently, over the last few years, Coralie and Clémentine would find their grandmother Michelle reading and re-reading the letters, smiling secretly, humming the bars to an English song. She was frail and sick with complications to do with Alzheimer’s, and got to the point where she couldn’t recognise her daughters or her younger sister. But still, the memories of her times with my dad remained, and she talked of him often.
In her last days alive in hospital, Coralie wrote, remembering London and repeating the name Denison was one of the only things to make Michelle smile.
Coralie continued:
I could picture this man from her words, clear and concrete, no longer a blurry vague shadow. He sounded dashing, interesting … fun.
And all I ever wanted to do when I was twenty-eight was travel and work as a freelance journalist.
The sense of longing and surprise at where this had come from was like a puzzle piece clicking into place.
Who was the sister Michelle had met — was it my aunt Alice? And what had dad been doing in London since … 1947? All I knew of ‘Pall Mall’ in London was from the game of Monopoly. Everyone wanted to own a plastic piece on Pall Mall. How had dad once been a member of a ‘Club’ on its street?
With Coralie’s emails, dad was becoming less the ragged, aged man who’d made bad choices and lost out in life, and more of a dashing figure, enjoying life as an expat in London after the war and wooing a Frenchwoman who never forgot him. I eagerly translated the first letters on my phone, cutting and pasting into Google Translate through the hot summer night.
The ‘sister’ must have been aunt Alice, whose husband, Grant, had been in the navy. Had aunt Alice lived in Hampstead when her children — my cousins — were young? And who was dad’s ‘friend’ who played the organ at Westminster Abbey?
This man — ‘the Australian from the train’ — seemed dapper, charming, well-to-do, and warm. No wonder she had remembered this time for so long.
He introduced her to his family. She met his sister, his niece and nephew …
They washed the dishes ‘in song’.
The King and Queen of England … Buckingham Palace … ‘my’ Australians …
They took pictures … Where were these pictures … ?
The letters went on …
It moved me so much to read of dad studying music, talking to fishermen in Dublin in the hopes they were his ancestors … I could picture it all. He had the same strong urge to find something in his ancestry that Coralie’s emails had stirred in me.
How lovely, for Michelle to be taken in by this Australian family in London, for the man she was smitten with to introduce her so quickly, when she had been so young and far from home.
I pictured dad with aunt Alice in Hampstead, and I felt I understood her better, too. Aunt Alice had worn handmade Liberty of London print dresses well into her eighties and nineties, drank a sherry before dinner, and asked me to play the piano whenever I visited — perhaps it reminded her of London, of those times with dad?
I wondered if any photos of those times existed. Although Alice and Grant had both died years ago, I wondered if somewhere, in our stack of dad’s black-and-white photos, there might be some kind of memento of such a significant day?
And who was the sister that was educated in Cambridge? Was it aunt Kathleen, who was also dead before I was born? I didn’t realise Denison had been a naming tradition in his family … but my paternal grandfather had been a Denis. He, too, had died before I was born.
How close and nice dad’s family sounded from those letters. Part of me longed to experience it like Michelle, but through her written words I felt in some way that I was.
The cigarette request made me smile. I thought of an Australian friend who once went on school exchange in Lyons when she was just sixteen — her host family had given her cigarette money every single day.
There was a gap in the letters, which Coralie explained was due to the English summer when Michelle travelled with her host family to Kent, and dad, apparently, went not to Ireland as planned, but to the South of France. They both returned in September.
The next letter was dated what would have been dad’s twenty-ninth birthday.
All I knew of my grandpa, Reverend Denis Deasey, was that he’d been a vicar. Michelle had seen photos of him. Surely dad had been in love with Michelle, to share so much of his family with her … ?
I asked Coralie if Michelle had stopped seeing dad because of her father’s disapproval — she seemed to agree. But she also said that Michelle had told her sister a lot more than what she wrote to her parents in the letters.
Michelle had thought — and spoken — about my dad for the rest of her life.
Coralie wrote again:
I thought of mum. Just like Michelle, after dad died, she never remarried. She dedicated her life to us and was always very passionate about sustainability and environmental issues. An early advocate for alternative medicines and therapies such as yoga and tai chi, mum shared a lot in common with Michelle, it seemed.
How strange, the things that connected me to this family across the sea.
Coralie sent me two photos of Michelle, taken in 1950, and she looked so very chic and French, but with an air that was familiar. I knew, immediately, she was something special. She looked like Gisèle: strong, passionate, brave, and independent.
Dad had ‘fought in the war’? I’d always thought he was the only brother of three not to have served. I thought he was too sick and had to get ‘invalided’ out of the Northern Territory before he actually did anything. At least, that’s what I’d read in his obituary.
Coralie shared that her sister, Clémentine, was an actress and writer; her mother, Laurence, was a painter. Feeling we were having an intimate chat despite being so many miles apart, I responded that dad was the only one of his siblings to chase a creative path. Tears fell as I read her beautiful responses, and I promised to look for the Buckingham Palace photos of dad and Michelle.
I read and re-read Michelle and Coralie’s words all night, picturing dad as a younger man, his sister living close by in Hampstead, his glamorous life in London — travelling across to Europe and having adventures, ‘wasting’ his fortune on life and love and discovery — so beautifully described in the letters.
I felt Michelle’s excitement and gratitude at meeting this warm family seep through from her French words, and I wished I’d known them, too. But just as dad had introduced her to his family, it was as though this French family had re-introduced him to me.
I couldn’t help but think of my own first travel overseas, crossing expanses of ocean and time in a journey so challenging and so exciting it stayed in my memory bank like an imprint that can never be removed. Those peak experiences of our lives, the first trip abroad, filled with wonder and romance and more than a little fear … No wonder Michelle had held onto those letters.
Her memento, her souvenir, of the time that had challenged and changed her.
I remembered Gisèle, thinking how similarly she and Michelle looked from the photos. Dark hair, bright smiles, strong faces, that chic air of pride and independence. Both remarkable women, who lived through remarkable times.
And I remembered my first trip to Paris.