Chapter Twenty-four

Fête de fromage

It was Friday night, time for fromage. I’d been careful to eat nothing but soup for lunch, because I knew how proud the French are of their unique rules about pasteurisation.

I hailed a taxi in Montparnasse after catching the Métro and getting lost, and gave the driver Edouard’s address.

Safely inside a stately entrance, past three separate sets of door codes and up in another teeny tiny lift, Michelle’s three children were all waiting with smiles and wine. Leonard Cohen crooned on the stereo, the aroma of baked apples and cheese and bread mixed in the living room, and there were cries of ‘Bonsoir!’ and ‘Welcome!’

Maxime took my coat and lay it in the ‘cloak room’ (his bedroom), and Edouard steered me towards the numerous platters at the back of the living room. He proudly explained each of the dozens of delicious French cheeses. Ooh la la. Soft goats, stinky bries, mouldy blues, this was my idea of a last supper.

Arnaud held out a plate and challenged me to try them all. I shook my head — there was a lot of cheese.

‘But Louisa, you must.’ He was emphatic. ‘This night is held in your honour.’

I was in a French film, chatter and cheeses moving in circles around me, Michelle’s children taking turns to ply me with questions. Every once in a while, if my plate became empty, Arnaud’s knife would appear, Daliesque, with a large sliver of cheese, which was then moved to my plate with a quiet description of its origin.

There was an air of competition around who spoke the best English in the family, which was a relief for me, because it meant that when anyone asked me a question there would be an argument over the best way to phrase it. I didn’t need to translate. Yet I loved hearing the French spoken.

I wasn’t sure I understood properly, but Edouard seemed to be saying his parents sent him to a Montessori school, but took him out because he was too creative. There was no sense of shame in us all sharing our family stories, just an intelligent, passionate, high, low, open, and curious discourse.

‘Louisa, what is your favourite of the cheeses?’ Arnaud prodded in between an exchange I was having with Marie on psychotherapy, because cheese is just as important as the deeper discussions in life.

Then suddenly the discussion turned to me getting some good cheese back to Australia. ‘It’s your right!’ shouted Arnaud, explaining how to get a vacuum-sealed bag of their finest fromage through customs in London and back to Australia.

At midnight, when I was settled on the couch in between Laurence and Marie, talking about dad, Edouard disappeared to his study. He returned, proudly brandishing a copy of my travel memoir, Love & Other U-Turns, calling everyone’s attention to the pink-covered paperback. The book was passed around the group, thumbed and discussed, and eventually he handed me a pen for my signature while the family reverentially went quiet as I thought of what to write.

‘It’s a very modern cover,’ Marie said, and Clém explained that in France, books are usually released with only the title of the book on the cover. No pictures. And the hardbacks in France were usually a cheaper edition printed on lower-quality paper with rough binding. My published paperback was a treasure!

Catherine waited until I’d finished signing, and handed me a slice of her apple tart.

Who were this family, where had they come from?

Laurence pulled out a slip of paper, handing it to Arnaud. It held a transcription of a piece of graffiti we’d seen written on a wall outside La Grande Chaumière in Montparnasse when we’d taken our atelier tour; it had been written after the terrorist attacks in Paris in 2015. Laurence and I had discussed what it represented about the French attitude to life. France is the personification of what all the religious fanatics hate, it began.

Arnaud read the translated version aloud, persevering despite numerous interruptions to discuss which English word would have been a better translation. Exhausted after the performance and all the interruptions, he retreated to the corner with a whisky.

Clém kept looking over to me and smiling. Someone took some photos and a video.

‘You’re doing me a huge favour,’ I said to Edouard.

‘What do you mean?’ he replied, perhaps thinking I meant the cheese, which I did, too.

‘By competing over your English. It’s quite relaxing for me to not have to translate.’

He peered down from his glasses like I’d set him a new challenge.

‘Do you like movies?’

‘I love movies.’

‘We will take you to the movies on Sunday. I’ll find one with the subtitles in French for me and Catherine. Clém will give you directions to find the cinema from Le Marais.’

And that was that. A new appointment had been arranged.

‘Thank you for bringing everyone together like this, Edouard!’ I said later, but Laurence looked concerned about something and I heard her refer to a ‘Benjamin’. It seemed Coralie and Clém’s brother never received an invite to Cheese Night. Clém had accidentally put the wrong number in our Australian-French WhatsApp group.

After 1.00 a.m., when everyone started to leave, Edouard booked me an Uber ride to get home. We all walked down the stairs, and when it arrived Edouard leaned in and spoke in French to the driver before opening the passenger door for me to get in.

‘I told him I’m your cousin so he keeps you safe,’ he said.

I sailed back across the Seine in the rain, full of fromage.

On Sunday, I met Edouard and Catherine at the cinemas in the huge Beaugrenelle shopping centre. We enjoyed two hours of spoken English with French subtitles, a little breather from the constant mathematics of translation.

‘Do you go to the movies very often?’ I asked Catherine on the way out.

‘Every weekend, sometimes twice or more.’

No embarrassed laughter, no faux guilt. That’s just what they like to do — no apologies. God, I loved them.

As we walked outside, Edouard spotted someone in the crowd.

‘Pierre!’ It was his oldest friend, who apparently already knew who I was, because he’d heard the story of dad and Michelle many times over the last year.

We all went over the road to a bar for a glass of champagne.

As we walked inside, Edouard looked like something had struck him.

Hasard. Hasard. I kept hearing that word. And then Edouard said in English, ‘This is as if from God!’

It was Clém and Coralie’s brother, Benjamin, and his girlfriend. They lived elsewhere in Paris, but their nearest cinema had been sold out, so they’d made the unusual decision to come all the way to Beaugrenelle.

We kissed and talked. I’d finally met the whole family. All Michelle’s children and grandchildren.

‘That is bizarre,’ said Edouard, shaking his head with a smile after they left, and I couldn’t quite believe it either.

After our perfect glass of champagne, Edouard insisted on taking me home on his motorbike. Catherine gave me her pink helmet and left to go home by the Métro.

‘So. Louisa. I will ride along the Seine and you will see Paris by night.’

With the Eiffel Tower flickering as we left Beaugrenelle, we passed the Musée D’Orsay, the Louvre, and finally crossed the Seine. When we’d crossed the river and I saw the familiar Métro station signs, I was hit by a sweep of sadness that it would all be ending soon.

‘Thank you so much, Edouard. You’ve all been so generous.’

‘Of course, Louisa.’ It was, apparently, an obvious conclusion. ‘We have been waiting for you to arrive since Coralie’s email.’

Hasard. What did that word mean?

Like dad’s life — full of so many coincidences. Perhaps he didn’t suffer from bad timing, perhaps it was all as it should be? Perhaps his life, actually, was very beautiful?

Perhaps those moments of hazard, like they had for me, meant that everything happened at just the right time — meeting Michelle’s last grandchild, quite by accident, then celebrating with une coupe de champagne and being driven across glittering Paris on the back of a motorbike. Perhaps the return to Australia in 1954 hadn’t been a failure, but, as Gisèle seemed to remember it, just a continuation of the French story, with a different landscape and more wild birds?

Maybe dad’s story was more joy than sadness? More luck than loss?

He’d once joked to a cousin that being the ‘seventh son’, according to Celtic myth, gave him extra powers. And maybe it did. Like Gisèle, he’d lived through a lot — war and malaria, starvation and tuberculosis. Even when mistaken for a Cold War spy, he hadn’t been shot, but instead was handed a cup of champagne.

After fifty years on earth, when he’d assumed he was unable, he’d even had children.

And now here I was, seeing Paris as he did, almost like he and Michelle were directing the scene from the skies.

As Saint Clair drew nearer, I began to feel harrowed by the clattering Métro, the wailing beggars, the sleepless song of the city. I wasn’t ready to leave France, but I needed a break from Paris. Like I’d needed that first sleep after catching my flight, I wished for space to knit something up in my psyche. To make sense of the patterns, to see the story from afar.

A message from Raphaël arrived in my inbox. In one line, like a telegram, it said simply:

See you tomorrow.