We'll Always Have Paris (14 page)

‘Boulder coming?’

‘No, Boulder is definitely not coming. It can’t fit in the lift, and it can’t roll upstairs.’

‘Where is Boulder?’

‘Far away. On holiday, perhaps.’

As we travel to and from Am Stram Gram, our stories are full of rail-based catastrophe, though mine are a little more fanciful than the Reverend Awdry’s, with trains waylaid by escaped
dragons or herds of buffalo, sprouting wings or being carried away on rockets. Even so, each day, the pattern is the same: I try to tie up each tale with a neat rescue and resolution and Theo
refuses, insisting on further and more perilous adventures. Engines are forever falling down holes on their way to parties, and the spectre of Boulder is never far away.

‘NO,’ he says, at any hint of a positive twist to the story, eyes flashing with displeasure, ‘’cause the lion ATE the wheels.’

‘Aha. Right. OK, well, the lion ate the wheels but they gave him a poorly tummy so he had to sick them back up again. And Percy took the wheels and gave them a rinse in the pond, then put
them back on and raced off just in time for the—’

An imperious raised hand cuts me off. ‘No but THEN Percy ’sploded.’

Sometimes I try and fight back.

‘No, it wasn’t an explosion. It was just . . . um . . . a firework in his boiler? What a surprise!’

Theo is intransigent. ‘No. He ’sploded.’

Any happy ending I can wrest from him is hard won and grudgingly conceded.

I wonder, sometimes, if this fascination with terrible things happening has anything to do with Mum. I have never been straight with him, never insisted on getting his butterfly attention for
five minutes during that confusing, awful time: to say ‘Granny died.’ I wonder what it was like for him to live in the slipstream of all that shock and unhappiness, the weird upheavals,
trips to York and back, hushed conversations and crying adults. He never asked, but I know that’s no kind of excuse. Bossy Monique at Am Stram Gram has already taken me to task about it.

‘You must explain to him, it is vital for his development,’ she tells me with an accusatory glare, but I still can’t, it feels so harsh and so final. I think I fear too, that
it won’t actually mean anything to him at all now and that would almost be worse than him being sad. It has been months after all, would he even remember her? I can’t bear the thought
of her forgotten, but he’s so little, almost half a lifetime has passed since he last saw her.

Perhaps Thomas – bossy, harsh Thomas – helps? I see the way Theo flirts with catastrophe, peeping into the abyss and challenging me to find a way back over and over again and I feel
as if it gives me a convoluted way of making good my failure.

So our stories meander on as we walk to and from Am Stram Gram, disaster, recovery and disaster again. Every day, the drop-off gets a little easier and soon, within six weeks, Theo has entirely
acclimatized to Am Stram Gram’s orderly world, hurrying to put his shoes in the basket as the bell starts to ring, anxious to be on time. Excluded from song time, I glean what I can from the
completed report sheet I get each day and a handful of ‘artwork’: carelessly crayoned print-outs of mushrooms or skiing gendarmes, Theo’s ‘take’ on life in a fortified
medieval castle (a brown line scrawled across a photocopied blacksmith), a dried-leaf collage or a potato-print spider. He never wants to talk about his activities; the story comes first, whatever
perilous cliffhanger our engines are currently in must be resolved. But the evidence seems clear: he is starting to develop a life independent of me.

Now that I have childcare, at least a little of the time, I can concentrate on getting this job.

First, I find and arrange a meeting with a legal recruitment consultant, who I select randomly on the Internet. Her office is in the 8th arrondissement on a back street near Boulevard Haussmann
– recruitment people here don’t meet you over a latte in Costa like they do in London – and it is serious and dark and imposing, with a lift with a vast iron door I need two hands
to open and close. In contrast, the consultant herself looks like a stock photo of a young executive, with swishy hair and a neat scarf and a dark suit. Her make-up is lovely. I am uncomfortably
squeezed back into one of my work trouser suits and my blouse feels too tight. I am a bit sweaty, unused to proper clothes, but I have put on some eyeliner and dredged up a vague memory of how
professional people behave with each other. I am sort of excited as well as nervous: this is really my first grown-up, non-child-related encounter in Paris (we have also bought a sofa, but that
doesn’t really count; also, I think we made a terrible choice so I am trying to forget the sofa).

‘Well,’ says the recruitment lady when we are both seated at her large, dark-wood conference table with black coffees, like the proper grown-ups we are. ‘You have an excellent
CV, great academics, a top tier firm . . . We should have no difficulty placing you.’

She is probably just being nice, but I feel a little glow of gratification.

‘Thank you, that’s great news.’ I pull out my extra-perfect French accent for her.

‘So, what are you looking for? Another role in private practice? Or in-house?’

‘Well, potentially I’d be open to either, but it really needs to be part-time.’

The consultant frowns. ‘Part-time?’

‘Yes. I have two very young children . . .’ I trail off as she makes a face, then puts down her pen.

‘The problem is . . . Well. I only know one person in your sector who works part-time. One. In my twelve years in the job.’

‘Really?’ I find this very hard to believe. Plenty of people work part-time in my sector back in London. Well, plenty of them work four days a week and a few more part-time. I sip my
coffee anxiously.

‘It’s just not part of the culture. I really think you will struggle to find a part-time role. They just don’t exist.’

I don’t really know what to say to her. ‘So . . .’

‘Perhaps in-house would be easier with your responsibilities?’

‘Um, yes, I suppose so . . .’

We agree she will have a look around and get in touch if she hears of anything suitable.

As I leave, deflated, I think of all those Parisian mothers at Am Stram Gram, dispensing a single no-nonsense kiss and leaving swiftly in a cloud of expensive scent. They all work: France, with
its tax breaks on childcare and priority
crèche
spots for kids with two working parents, assumes they will. So they get up early and put their make-up on, leave their children with
their nannies or take them to nursery, then they work all day. When they get home at seven, they supervise homework and bedtime, eat the dinner the nanny has prepared or make it themselves
(possibly assisted by Picard). After a serious conversation about Palestine or the stock market, they have sex with their husbands. Or so I imagine. I feel cowed by their reserves of efficiency and
competence. What, actually, do I do? I drift around the city nervously, read books, get upset multiple times a day and don’t even cook proper meals. In the evening we watch overwrought
cooking shows and then I fall asleep, wearing earplugs, purple tracksuit bottoms and my father’s moth-eaten cricket jumper. I am not up to Parisian womanhood by any stretch of the
imagination. I can do my job, the one I used to be paid for, and I can – more or less – look after my children. But both together
and
sex and current affairs? Realistically,
no.

But the weight of expectation is definitely there. One of Olivier’s friends has been complaining to him about his wife, a clever accountant, who has expressed a desire to give up work
after having her second child. ‘That’s not the woman I married,’ he says. ‘I don’t want to be with a
housewife
.’ I can’t decide if this is
admirable or appalling.

Despite my worrying lack of a work ethic, the recruitment consultant finds me an interview a few weeks later, for a pharmaceutical company on the very outside border of the 15th arrondissement,
to the south of the city. I read up on intellectual property law and parallel trade and grey imports and locate some more work clothes in the bottom of a box, then I take myself off one morning in
a too tight skirt and shoes that rub. Charline looks me over before I leave and declares me ‘
très pro
’ which seems unlikely, but buoys my confidence. I arrive too early
and have to spend twenty minutes hanging around in a bookshop getting progressively more and more nervous while pretending to read an Amélie Nothomb novel, and when I am finally shown into a
huge, dimly lit boardroom to sit opposite the HR director at a table that would easily seat thirty, I am barely functioning with nerves. It shows. I don’t quite know how it all goes wrong,
but apparently my interview is so epically disastrous that after about twenty minutes my interviewer holds up a finger and stops me in mid-flow, to make a call cancelling the planned second stage
practical part of the process. After this, the recruiter stops calling me.

Out of ideas, I email the partners at my old firm’s Paris office, who invite me in for interview. Their offices are in a beautiful eighteenth-century villa just off the
Champs-Elysées (at least the job search has got me out of the 17th, however briefly). Reception is brutally air-conditioned and the main desk is staffed by a gaggle of beautiful, haughty
women dressed in the firm’s colours with matching hair accessories in their chignons. The collective effect is ultra-high-class air hostess, except none of them offers me a gin and tonic and
a packet of peanuts. All the surfaces are glass and I feel anxious when my fingers brush against the table in case I leave dirty fingermarks (the concierge has me well trained by now).

Two partners interview me: the male one is small and neat and terribly patrician, and the woman is simply terrifying. She is sort of tomboyish, in an ultra-stylish kind of way, in a slouchy
trouser suit and Superga plimsolls and her expression in repose is the purest Parisian scorn. If she came anywhere near me in Monoprix, I would hide in the nappy aisle until she went away again.
Thankfully, she doesn’t speak at all for most of the interview, doodling instead on her notepad as I stumble my way through a very polite grilling.

For all my nerves, I must make some rudimentary sense, because they call the next day to offer me a full-time position, albeit for considerably less money than my previous role. Of course, that
is still considerably more money than my current salary of ‘nothing at all’ and I am really happy that
someone
wants to employ me. I start to imagine myself as one of those
Parisian women, with a wildly demanding job. I think about new shoes and handbags. I am mentally stalking through the office in Robert Clergerie heels, on my way to a high-stakes meeting with
fantasy clients who look like Daniel Auteuil and want me to help them with their luxury fashion businesses.

A friend from the London office calls.

‘So they offered you a job?’

‘Yes! I’m really pleased.’

‘This is going to sound bizarre, I know, but . . . I don’t think you should take it.’

‘Oh. Really? Why?’

‘I just don’t think it would be right for you at the moment. It’s really demanding, you know.’

I am a bit bemused, but as I hang up, doubt gathers. Could I cope? I don’t know. I don’t really know what is going on in my own head at the moment; everything is so foggy. I
don’t feel grief or anger or fear, at least not in any way that I recognize. I just feel stalled, sitting lost in my own life with no idea how to get restarted. Surely a job is the way
forward? I will meet people, at least? I need to get a foothold in the city somewhere other than Am Stram Gram and the expensive paediatrician’s office (they have an almost full-sized replica
Cadillac in the waiting room; I can’t help feeling I haven’t found the most economical option for the constant sore throats and rashes). Who am I in this place without work, even work I
don’t much like? My mind wanders to Simone de Beauvoir, an evangelist for the importance, the salvation, of work.

‘Earning your living is not, of itself, a goal, but it is the only way to attain solid internal autonomy,’ she says, even when she is teaching indifferent teenagers in a Rouen
lycée, and I know she’s right.

And yet, and yet. My colleague has spooked me, and on reflection, I think he’s right. In my old job in London I had been pregnant and coasting more or less since I had qualified; here
there would be no slack whatsoever. I can’t see how to shoehorn eighteen-hour days and constant availability and foreign travel into our life and, quite honestly, I’m a bit scared. What
if it makes everything worse? I just don’t see how we’ll cope.

So I turn them down and I feel like a pathetic failure. But since I no longer need my mornings for job-hunting at the moment, I can at least turn to what I am really, really good at: cake.

Because if anything, anything at all, has made me happy in Paris, it is cake. I know where I am with patisserie, with the lovely familiar geography of the French bakery window: this is how I
started to explore and months later, it continues. I navigate the city via more and more bakery windows, appraising
Saint-Honorés
and
Paris-Brests
and comparing
éclairs. I start out in our local bakeries and then gradually widen the perimeter. The bakery by the Batignolles gardens does fat gooey puff-pastry twists with warm pistachio crème
pâtissière and dark chocolate. There is the bakery that makes loaves in the shape of hedgehogs and crocodiles down by the Boulevard Malesherbes. In the Rue de Lévis there are
three good bakeries and I walk between them, gimlet-eyed, trying to decide whose
flan
looks better. When I have a little longer I can go further afield, down to the Place de la Madeleine,
where I cruise around the windows of Fauchon and Ladurée, admiring perfect
macarons
. I measure out my days in waxed-paper parcels. They are an indulgence, but I get so much pleasure
from so few euros with cake, it feels like a thrifty solution to my gloom.

There is something utterly reassuring, too, in the unchanging canon of French patisserie. It has its own beautiful language, a gorgeous rolling poetry reminiscent of Paris métro stations:
Tropézienne
,
Opéra
,
Tarte Bourdaloue
,
Kouglof
,
Divorcée
, instead of
Crimée
,
Stalingrad
,
Poissonnière
,
Mouton-Duvernet
. No Francophile can be insensible to this. French cakes have not only a name but also a history and a set of rules attached. A
Paris-Brest
is piped praline cream in a choux doughnut, and it is wheel-shaped in honour of the Paris-Brest cycling race. On a
religieuse
(a ‘nun’), a small choux bun
sits on a larger one and they both have the same-flavoured fondant icing – traditionally chocolate or coffee – while on a
divorcée
the smaller bun is coffee and the
larger chocolate. I like how everyone knows this and I like the fact that I know it too: it’s easy and accessible and it thrills me how easy it is to fit in in bakery world. If someone says
Mont Blanc
I immediately visualize a domed nest of piped chestnut and vanilla cream and if they say
Opéra
I know there will be thin layers of chocolate, coffee cream and
genoise sponge. Even a marzipan potato (and who could possibly want such a thing? I would rather eat a raw real one), brown, squat and profoundly lacking in charm, has a ‘right’
composition and appearance.