Chapter Fifteen
Trouvé
The distinguished-looking gentleman whose face appeared by the side of the message had no idea that, halfway across the world, he’d made me cry tears of joy.
The Villa still exists, and he will take me there!
Somehow linked to the Lavandou tourism board, who I assumed had forwarded him my Instagram message, he seemed very cultured, and I was so touched by how quickly he grasped the Villa’s importance.
I corresponded with Raphaël a little more, trying to explain the story in English; deciphering, from his messages in French, that the owner of the Villa was an Englishman. There was also a mysterious gardien de la Villa, and I couldn’t figure out if that was Raphaël or someone else, probably insulting him by asking, to which he replied that he was the Cultural Minister for the Lavandou area in the South of France.
He soon asked me for the dates I would be in Saint Clair, so he could ‘make arrangements’. I quickly booked the train to Toulon, even though I still had no idea where I would stay. But La Villa Aucassin existe toujours … I had to take the risk.
By morning, another message had arrived. It was from an Englishman named Ivor Braka.
It all seemed so simple! Yet it had taken me so long to get up the courage to post that Instagram message! How could this be?
Late that Sunday night, as the temperature soared to the late thirties and I had the Australian Open tennis on TV while my ceiling fan whirred, I waited until it was late morning in London to call the number he’d listed.
‘Hello, Ivor? Is this a good time?’
‘Yes — I’m just watching the tennis.’
It was midway through the second set, and we were both going for Nadal. I could hear the echo of the same lopped balls from Ivor’s television, halfway across the world.
At the tie-breaker, he insisted on calling me back.
When we spoke, the next night, he was remarkably casual, but his English accent reminded me of royalty. He asked me to bring originals of dad’s Lavandou photos to his flat in London, the night I arrived.
‘We’ll go for a late dinner after.’
He was as interested in art as he was in history, which explained why he was so curious to see dad’s photos and hear of the Aldington links to his villa. But he was a busy man, and had a lot of plans already booked, so the only night we could coordinate meeting in London was the night I arrived.
After twenty-four hours of travel, I’d be going to dinner in Sloane Square.
Ivor immediately emailed the ‘gardien’ — the Villa’s caretaker. It wasn’t Raphaël, but was in fact a woman named Josephine.
Josephine sent me a cheery email in English, and I immediately asked her if there was anywhere to stay. She suggested a hotel, one of the only ones that was open in the off-season, just a short walk from the Villa. I booked it immediately.
In the space of a few hours, I’d arranged meetings with strangers on the other side of the world to see a place I’d wondered about my entire life.
Aucassin.
Saint Clair.
All that was left to organise was Paris.
As January turned into February and my France trip was only weeks away, I became more determined than ever to finish working through dad’s France material at the library. I wanted to be able to walk the streets of his beloved Paris as he always referred to it, to see the same buildings, to map out my own retrace of his favourite paths. I searched for addresses and clues in old letters.
Even with Gisèle gone, I could use his previous addresses as a sort of time-travelling map while I explored the city.
I circled everything on the forty-four page itinerary of dad’s library collection that related to France — and one folder that didn’t. I double-checked which files I’d opened and which ones I might have missed, booking to see one final box with a memoir named Landscape with Australians, apparently written in the 1970s.
I rode to my sisters to see her childhood photos. Perhaps there were more of Saint Clair, perhaps there were some clues about Paris … I still didn’t have the collection in complete order.
My sister and I tried our best to figure out where they were taken, but she had been too young, and it made her sad not to know — or even have anyone to confirm. I noticed all our photos of Gisèle, who seemed to be with mum and dad and Ayala across France, England, and Germany in the 1970s. I wondered again at that curious relationship. In one beautiful photo, Gisèle was stooped in a white dress suit, talking to little Ayala. She treated us — dad’s children — as though we were her own.
Back in the library, whipping through the last of the boxes, I stumbled across a series of poems written in the 1970s.
Four Seasons in the Berry was my first experience of mum and dad romantically entwined. Watching the Tour de France together with Ayala in Saint Satur, having a picnic in Sancerre. Touring the Berry region … Mum’s handwriting mixed with dad’s, as though they’d written these poems and stories together.
After seeing those photos at Ayala’s, I could even picture them. Mum had been smiling as she patted a little goat.
Happy.
My sister caught the tram into the city as soon as I texted her. She trembled and smiled as she read the poetry collection, rebelliously photographing the entire document there and then with her phone without even bothering to turn the noise off.
I moved a box to protect her from view.
I realised, with a pang of solidarity, that just as I felt upset when people used to ask me about dad — who was your father? — Ayala felt upset when people asked her about her childhood in Europe, which started at six months and lasted until she returned to Australia at age six. It sounded so exotic, but she’d been so young she had only a few memories. With this newfound box, and its series of poems, she could now annotate her own childhood album.
With my sister beside me, I worked through the rest of the folders in the 1970s. A Hotel Floridor receipt from 1973 was jumbled in with a page from a folder marked 1981. I recognised a name: Michelle Chomé.
In cursive pencil, underneath a list of music-history books, was Michelle’s address, in her handwriting. The page was from 1949, mixed up in the wrong box.
Ilchester Hotel, Holland Park, London.
The same diary he’d held when he caught the train back from France to London in 1949 now sat in a box of folders of writing from 1981. He’d kept her note for more than thirty years.
That’s Mam’s handwriting! Edouard immediately messaged, light years away, from Paris.
I had no idea why dad had held onto it for so long. It felt planted especially for me.
Newly encouraged that something from 1949 might be in one of the 1970s folders, I kept reading. And there, in a mislabelled box buried deep in the library, was the ‘travel’ memoir Aldington’s letters had described.
The book chronicled dad’s life in France with Australian expats and bohemians who’d also escaped Melbourne, from that first day arriving in Marseille to meeting Albert Tucker in a laneway in Saint Germain. It spoke of his travels with Gisèle, his love of the French, the conversations in all the places still tattered and scarred from the war, and that glorious casual simplicity and luxury with which even the poorest and humblest French treated life. It was a love story and a travel tale. Historical references mingled with lively anecdotes about people I’d only ever heard of in gallery catalogues.
There was a chapter on the Hotel Floridor, a chapter on Saint Clair, and so much more — descriptions of dad’s life and friendships in Paris, the history of certain streets and how that played into his own experiences, anecdotes and insights about little towns in France in the 1940s and 1950s, and descriptions of dishes and specialties from the different regions of France. Encounters. Dialogue. Funny references.
The manuscript was typed and bound in a beautiful black spine, ready for a publisher: 300 pages, 90,000 words. Must cut by a third, dad had written in a margin near the start. Presumably after Aldington’s advice.
France in the 1950s, it was originally titled. He’d updated it to Landscape with Australians in the 1970s when he’d gone back to read it, and that was somehow why it wound up in the 1970s box and not listed properly.
Finished in October 1955, the year of his return to Australia. Just as Aldington had advised him to get another book underway, after the Denon translation.
I felt triumphant, like I’d unearthed the most sacred manuscript of all.
Dad’s writing carried me to France and through the cast of characters I’d spent a year deciphering and uncovering in his letters and diaries. But this was a polished book — the characters he described jumped off the page. Mostly, I felt dad’s happiness in the book; he was touring me through France in the late 1940s to the 1950s. What a gift.
If the purpose of publishing is to make something that people can read long after you’ve gone, then dad had achieved that. The library had preserved what a publishing deal had not, just as the National Gallery in Canberra had saved his Boyd portrait from a family fire.
With Ayala reading alongside me, I tore through the first chapters of the book, reluctant to bury it back in the box.
When at last we had to go, I booked in to photograph it in its entirety the next day. I printed the whole thing at Officeworks the next night, grinning the whole way home to think of the treasure I now held in my possession.
A love note to France, a long letter to me, a guide I could take on my journey.
I stayed up late reading the chapter about a trip through a haunted village in the Pyrenees with Gisèle.
Impulsively, I emailed Coralie.
Within minutes, she replied:
I looked at Gisèle’s name on the school record. I’d been spelling it wrong all this time. It was Satoor de Rootas. Not de Satoor de Rootas.
I found only four people with that surname on Facebook, and they were all located in the Netherlands. Less than an hour later, my phone started to ping with Facebook messages.
2014?
There was an address, a nursing home outside Paris. I shook as I pasted the information in an email to Coralie, begging her to call the place.
Clém, who had by now become emotionally involved in the hunt as well, messaged me as I was sitting by the computer endlessly pressing refresh on my emails.
Twenty minutes later, Coralie replied.