We'll Always Have Paris (6 page)

The obvious thing, surely, is for me to move to France. What is keeping me in England? This is what I have been working towards for the past six years, isn’t it? But actually, we hatch
another plan. Olivier is going to do an MBA and I am going to train to be a lawyer: in London.

We don’t even consider moving to France until six years later, when my mother dies.

I find out she is dead on an indolent, clockwatching afternoon in the office in autumn 2003, the air suffused with the familiar scents of photocopier toner and vending machine coffee. I am
sitting at my desk in a large law firm in the City, where I have recently qualified as a solicitor (European law, a discipline I hope will get me back to France eventually, though so far I have
shown scant aptitude or enthusiasm for it). I am pregnant for the second time: our son Theo, who is one, is at nursery. In a couple of hours I need to go and collect him, so with a sigh I turn back
to the spreadsheet I am laboriously composing when the phone rings.

It is my stepfather Joe, his voice strained and hesitant. I just have time to think, ‘Joe never calls me’, before he says: ‘Em, there’s been an accident in Italy.
It’s your mum.’ Then there is a pause, quite a short one, and then he says, ‘She’s dead, Em.’

I don’t really know what he says next. Something to do with a railway station in Rome. I hear him say he hasn’t told my sister, that she isn’t home yet and that he has to get
ready to tell her, so I put the phone down and I stand up but then I don’t really know what to do with myself. I don’t doubt Joe at all; he has been admirably, devastatingly clear and I
recognize the truth of his words as soon as he says them. But she was in our flat borrowing my dressing gown and cuddling Theo only a few days ago and what now? Shock leaves me befuddled and
incompetent: I can’t make a decision and my limbs are heavy and clumsy. Eventually someone calls Olivier and someone makes arrangements to collect Theo and somehow we are quite quickly back
in our flat, and I am watching the architects in the office opposite go about their strip-lit business as Theo demands yoghurt and Olivier crouches in front of me, hands on my knees.

‘We should go.’

‘Go where?’

‘To York. Come on. Just get yourself ready. I’ll do the rest.’

So we go, heading out of the city northwards, Regent’s Park then Swiss Cottage, Finchley Road and Brent Cross, as night draws in. Theo, strapped in his car seat in the back with a juice
box and a breadstick, is delighted with this break from routine and amuses himself by pointing out his favourite vans and chatting to us, like a charming cocktail party guest. He is lovely at the
moment, funny and ebullient. Having a baby so soon (I get pregnant at twenty-six, long before any of our English friends have even considered it) has been a sort of
folie à deux
,
but we have leapt into the unknown hand in hand. Some of it has been a struggle: the exhaustion, the hyper-alert anxiety of the early months, Theo’s severe eczema and the isolation of raising
a baby in the grown-up heart of central London. But our son – our long-lashed, easily amused son who flirts with everyone, from the pensioners in John Lewis to the leather queens of Soho
– is the distilled essence of delight. It’s scarcely credible that the two of us have created this marvel and we enjoy him fiercely, proudly.

The last few months have been especially lovely. Theo’s eczema has cleared up, and now he can speak I feel as if we are both emerging from the strange, scorched-earth weirdness of early
motherhood and early babyhood. A real person is emerging with desires and opinions and a sweetly eccentric vocabulary, and every week brings a developmental leap. On my days off, Theo and I play in
the fountains in Russell Square or run around the Great Court of the British Museum, we visit the sheep in Coram Fields and hang out in John Lewis toy department when it rains. Olivier makes Theo
laugh by catching pigeons for him in Charlotte Street gardens (they can stalk them for hours). My school friend Kate sneaks out from Sotheby’s for cups of tea and Maria downstairs allows Theo
to chase her gigantic fluffy cat, Bambi, around, creating suffocating clouds of hair in her overheated flat. Early on Saturday mornings we walk down to Bar Italia for cappuccinos and pastries and
watch the wild, funny, dirty city come to life. I love where we live, in the warren of streets between Oxford Street and Regent’s Park (the Household Cavalry trot smartly up our street most
Sunday mornings in a thunderous clattering of hooves); it’s full of life and history and unexpected discoveries. I am thrilled to be pregnant again too: I feel lucky, buoyed by hormones and
anticipation.

We arrive in York around midnight, park up and knock on my mother’s red front door. My sister opens it and her features look indistinct with shock. She is only seventeen, for god’s
sake. This kind of thing shouldn’t happen to seventeen-year-olds.

‘I’m so glad you’re here,’ she says and we hold on to each other in confusion and relief and misery and my stepfather comes to join us, his big nicotine-stained hands
around the two of us, and I’m so glad I’m here, too, in this little house I know so well: I can’t imagine how I could be anywhere else. That night, after we all finally go to bed
(it is strange, this, it doesn’t feel right somehow but staying up all night won’t help and I am so, so tired), I go to the loo, the baby pressing on my bladder. I find my way there
instinctively, without turning on the lights. It’s comforting to realize I know every inch of this place; that I can find my way around in the dark.

Over the next few days, we find out a little more. My mother – my beautiful, funny, ferociously loving mother – was walking through Rome’s Termini Station that morning. She was
on holiday with two old friends, Jack (her adored ex-husband, the man she married before she met my father) and his partner Brian. They had just stepped onto one of the flat mechanical walkways
that carried passengers to the platforms and were moving along it, separated by a few yards, when the section that my mother was standing on collapsed inwards, crushing her in the mechanism. My
mother was killed instantly, Jack and Brian told us, despite heroic attempts from passers-by to save her. Later we will find out that that the walkway was being repaired and had mistakenly been
left open and accessible (the ‘no entry’ cones had been placed at the wrong walkway by maintenance staff), rendering it fatally dangerous. It was a happy morning, Jack and Brian assure
us, and a good trip. My mother had been planning, Brian adds, to buy clothes for my new baby.

Whatever I have previously imagined grief to be like, from reading and television and my imagination, I am wrong. It is not operatically dreadful, a soaring, wailing, instant heartbreak
accompanied by the rending of garments and the gouging of skin. Things carry on. We are still ourselves: we drink tea and talk and eat biscuits. I sleep, constantly: fatigue keeps coshing me round
the back of the neck and I have to stagger off and lie down. Olivier spends a lot of time in the backyard smoking, keeping my stepfather, made garrulous by shock, company. The rest of the time he
is on the phone to the consulate and the airlines and the coroner, using his vast energies to get my mother’s body home (this takes on an inordinate importance; I need her to be back). It is
a thick fog of logistics, tiredness and unease, with a considerable, inevitable, amount of life as usual, thanks to Theo. We go to feed the ducks, we visit the Railway Museum and play with the toy
trains in the Early Learning Centre, between awful administrative tasks and visits from devastated friends and family.

There is a lot to be done. We have to choose a coffin (from an awful laminated catalogue; sitting on the slippery Co-op Funeral couch I get the giggles and choose badly) and organize a funeral
(venue, food and flowers). Piles of post begin to arrive from people whom I have never met or even heard of, detailing the ways in which my mother touched their lives. Others turn up on our
doorstep: a huge contingent of family, brothers and sisters, a former neighbour with the slightly eccentric gift of a microwave, colleagues and acquaintances. A criminal prosecution is underway in
Rome and we have to find representation, and my stepfather becomes very ill and ends up in hospital suffering the after-effects of shock.

Throughout it all, I feel detached. I function relatively well practically, but emotionally, I am almost entirely absent, enveloped in a thick cognitive fog, the insulating bulk of my pregnancy
acting as a shock absorber. My mother is absent from my thoughts – her real, vital self, the person who was going to Rome to drink wine and admire ecclesiastical vestments and buy baby
clothes for her new grandchild.

At her funeral I try, really try, to conjure her up. The sight of my mother’s small coffin, carried by my father and Olivier, makes my sister and I clutch one another again and sob, but
the feeling passes. My sister has done a magnificent job with the music and the readings, and the eulogies are beautiful and funny and right, but, for me, none of the melodic or lyrical grenades
hit their target: ‘Soave Sia II Vento’, the lovely quartet from
Cosi Fan Tutte
, Don Marquis’s ‘Song of Mehitabel’ from
Archy and Mehitabel
(‘wotthehell, archy, wotthehell’, her favourite rallying cry), not even Harry, one of her university friends, a brilliant sweet-voiced tenor singing an unaccompanied Scottish folk song
in the whitewashed silence of the Methodist chapel. It’s partly because there are too many people, there are hundreds of them, then the taxi driver refuses to turn down his soundtrack of
ultra-sexy R ’n’ B on the way to the cemetery, which just makes us laugh, and as we stand there in the rain and some men put my mother in a hole this is it, really it, but the feeling
is elusive. I want this moment to mean something, but I just feel angry and embarrassed at how public it all is; there are still too many people, too many distractions. I can’t find my mum in
all this. I want to, but I can’t: I have to think of her in private.

My mum was very little, barely 5' 2", but she fought and laughed and danced and loved like a giant.

Born in a poor ex-steel town in the west of Scotland, one of seven children, she was the first in her family to go to university, leaving with a first in English, a wild eye for beauty and a
lovely, gay husband, Jack. Her parents both died when she was in her early twenties and their deaths and the early experience of caring for them shaped her perception of life and family. She lived
bigger, brighter and louder than I would ever dare to: moving to Ghent without a word of Dutch, moving in with my then-disreputable father and his menagerie in the Scottish Borders and stalking a
pianist who had broken her heart round the concert halls of London.

She knew things you would never expect: how to get a table under the art nouveau
coupole
in the lovely Bofinger brasserie in Paris, the best churches for a quiet sit-down in most
European capitals and any number of excellent cafés, and she had an anecdote for each. ‘I had my bag blown up by the Bow Street police here,’ she would say, tucking my arm into
hers as we walked through the back streets of Covent Garden or, studying the flyers at the Wigmore Hall, ‘When I was stalking that pianist, I sat in the front row during a recital here and
glared at him the whole way through.’ Her wardrobe was full of evidence of an intensely lived life: a daring crocheted Biba mini dress, lace-up platform boots, a psychedelic floral babydoll
nightie. Jack fell in love, initially, with her red shoes, glimpsed across the university library.

In her professional life as a research fellow and subsequently as a professor of social policy, she was instrumental in effecting seismic shifts in the way that child and other unpaid carers
were treated. She knew, personally, what it meant to care for someone when there is no option and no support and she spent long hours listening to, recording and bearing witness to the lives of
people caring for the profoundly disabled.

But she was also wickedly funny: she was a woman who stole chips from strangers and danced on tables and coloured in the holes in her tights with a ballpoint pen. She loved the opera and her
tiny garden, other people’s terriers, schmaltzy country music, nice bedlinen and Guerlain potions.

We were close, perhaps too close, bound together by love and dependency and a decade of physical proximity when it was just the two of us. My childhood memories are mainly of her: long train
journeys to Glasgow, sitting with a pen and a packet of Smarties in the corner of her meetings, riding on the back of her bike and weekend mornings in Bettys tearoom in York with a round of granary
toast and a hot chocolate, her reading the paper and me the
Beano.
Our closeness worried her sometimes: she thought she hadn’t given me enough structure or discipline and perhaps she
hadn’t. She was a grade-A worrier, her appearance of insouciance hard won, her lightness of touch maintained by a real effort of will. Her love held me steady as much as it kept me afloat
– I knew instinctively what would disappoint her. This kind of love is a massive – if unconscious – effort for the person doing the loving and many of us, the lucky ones, float
complacently in the benign amniotic safety of maternal love, swatting away its unwelcome excesses, giving no thanks. I did.

When I was miserable in Oxford, she took me out for meals and sent me money for massages. Parcels arrived for me constantly: books, poems, carefully copied out in her familiar handwriting,
Chanel lipsticks, and once, as I prepared for my finals, a huge bunch of spring flowers – my favourites, scented blue hyacinths, parrot tulips and dark tendrils of ivy – with a card
that read ‘nearly time to come out, Persephone’.

When, later, I struggled after Theo was born, isolated and anxious, she would make the two-hour train journey to visit us in London almost weekly, rocking Theo’s tense colicky little body
over her shoulder and dancing with his peach-fuzzy cheek against hers, one hand cradling his wobbly head as she sang ‘Cheek to Cheek’. She tried to teach me what Olivier understood
instinctively: how to enjoy the baby, to relax and savour the delicious animal warmth and otherness of him. I didn’t quite get it then. Soon I will, when the new baby comes.