We'll Always Have Paris (21 page)

Other times I stand at the window and watch the buses roll along Bishopsgate, and I imagine just running away, walking north along the old Roman road up into Shoreditch, past the Vietnamese
restaurants that line Kingsland Road, through Hackney and Stoke Newington and on, onto wherever. The North. The sea. Anywhere.

It’s stupid. These aren’t real feelings, I remind myself; I’m just hungry. A sandwich would sort all of this out. Why won’t I allow myself a sandwich? I don’t know,
but on some weird level I’m enjoying the feeling of deprivation. I enjoy the feel of my prominent ribs or the hard bump of my seat bones when I sit down and I like ignoring my body’s
demands. I get thinner and thinner, my clavicles get more prominent and my jeans get too big. I’m shrinking, like Balzac’s
La Peau de Chagrin
.

It’s a strange story
La Peau de Chagrin
: a fable, really. ‘It deals with shrinking and starvation,’ said Freud, who read it on his deathbed, but it is at least as much
about the destructive force of acquisitive desire. Dissolute romantic absolutist (idiot, really; he’s awful) Raphaël de Valentin has gambled his last golden louis away and decided to
commit suicide (on another one of those Parisian bridges, of course) but an old man in an antique shop shows him a magic skin that can grant wishes. The problem is that with every wish granted the
skin shrinks and its owner loses vitality.

From being convinced he wants to die, after wishing for and getting a dissolute, lavish party and a good income, Raphaël becomes haunted by the spectre of the skin vanishing and him with
it: he wants to ‘live at all costs’, closing himself off from the world to avoid involuntarily wishing for anything. In the end, his desire for Pauline, his former landlady’s
daughter, previously disdained but now rich and beautiful, destroys him.

There’s something about that narrative of bringing about your own downfall against your conscious will that makes me think of
Peau de Chagrin
now: stopping eating has that same
peculiar, tumbling, inevitable momentum. I buy things, lots of things, and I watch myself shrink. It’s so stupid, but I can’t seem to snap out of it.

Olivier certainly thinks I’m being stupid. He thinks I’m stupid to get embroiled in this big matter at work and stupid to care about making a good job of it. He doesn’t like to
see me under pressure and stands over me rolling his eyes on his way to bed as I sit at the tiny desk in the corridor, phone tucked under my chin, talking to the partner as I type.

‘You don’t even
like
your job,’ he says, incredulous, and there is some truth in this. I am no more passionate about competition law now than I was when I got pregnant
twice in rapid succession and spent two years doing virtually nothing. But I like the fact of
a
job and I think he’s interfering, unhelpful and naïve. Everyone I know works long
hours; it’s just how the City works. Also, he forced me to make a decision about moving and here we are and this is just part of it. We view the past few months very differently: he thinks he
made a gesture of love, trust and sacrifice; I feel like he abandoned me at the worst possible time and I still feel angry. I don’t want to talk to him, so I don’t. Sometimes whole days
pass without us exchanging more than twenty words. At other times, I sleep on the sofa in mute protest, or slam out of the flat and spend the evening walking around Liverpool Street Station,
grateful for the late-opening Costa and WH Smith, sitting on benches in the dark, incoherent with anger. I can see he doesn’t understand what is happening, but I don’t care; I avoid his
bewildered eyes. We’re back to that French cinematic fighting I love to watch and it’s still as miserable in reality as it was ten years ago.

As work builds to a crescendo, so do our problems. One day, as I’m walking into a three-hour conference call, I get a voicemail from him: ‘We have to talk in the next hour, or
that’s it, it’s over.’ I know it’s desperation speaking but it feels like blackmail. The partner raises her eyebrows as I stand, paralysed with indecision and anger and
fear, holding three lever-arch files. I go to the meeting. When I get home, I just explain, flatly, and he accepts it, for now. I sort of want destruction to hail down on us by this point, but
nothing happens, he was just bluffing.

In July, the 7/7 bombings amplify my sense of strangeness and of dislocation. We sit in the office and watch as the terror unfolds around us, in the tunnels and streets we know intimately,
people like us dying going about their ordinary London business. Leaving the office that afternoon, the city feels altered: people are afraid as they have never been before, strangers to each
other, and the atmosphere for the remainder of the summer is febrile and edgy. Olivier is genuinely shaken and doesn’t want to go on the tube; the nursery cancels all outings. False alarms,
rumours and alerts convulse the city, and Brick Lane and Whitechapel feel tense and uneasy, even on the sunniest of weekends.

By the time work calms down (which it does in August) things are about as bad as they could be between us and they are about to get really bad in my head too. Without any immediate position
papers to write or overnight numbers to crunch, I find my legs are increasingly reluctant to take me to the office. My morning wander through the M&S food hall becomes longer and longer and
when I leave, I dawdle around the back streets of the city, taking in the kebab shops and the council blocks and the hidden Hawksmoor churches. Often I end up sitting in the old cemetery at Bunhill
Fields between William Blake, Wesley’s chapel and the Quakers. George Fox, the founding father of Quakerism, is buried here somewhere. God, I think, he would have
hated
French
Elle
. I love Bunhill Fields, the quiet weight of history, the spectre of Fox and Wesley preaching thunderously all around these streets. I love, too, the total irreverence of the
contemporary city towards it, construction workers drinking cans of lager and students rolling up their trousers to soak up the sun. There is so much I love about London, so why am I in such a
bloody state now we’re back here?

When I finally show up in the office, I seem unable to raise myself to do more than turn my computer on, and when anyone tries to give me work I hide in the Ladies (a fine tradition, this) or
lie. After a couple of hours of mutinous inactivity, I go out at lunchtime and buy clothes I neither want nor need because the adrenalin flip helps me forget my hunger. One day I go all the way to
Selfridges and buy two pairs of £200 shoes I don’t particularly want for no particular reason and only get back to the office at three. It’s my crap, consumerist version of going
off the rails.

After a couple of weeks of this – no one in the office seems to notice, thankfully – I start to feel frightened. I can’t seem to make myself focus on anything, even when I want
to, and waves of cold dread wash over me. A German partner is trying to get me staffed on his huge merger deal, which will mean another six months of pressure and late nights and I know I
can’t do it. One morning I arrive at half past ten and I can’t even make myself turn the monitor on: my fingers just refuse to do it. I sit, panicking, until the trainee who shares my
office leaves, then I call Olivier. Despite everything, he’s still the only person I want – need – to speak to at a time like this. I can’t imagine turning to anyone
else.

‘There’s something really wrong,’ I stammer. ‘I can’t
move
.’

We meet an hour later halfway between his office and mine on Holborn Viaduct. He puts his arms around me and I let my head rest on his chest. He smells of Guerlain Habit Rouge and our washing
powder and I can feel his warm skin, utterly familiar, through his shirt. We’re a still point in a dark swirling mass of lunch break office workers and I just want to stay there for a while,
breathing in the comfort I have rejected for so long.

‘I don’t know what’s wrong with me,’ I say into his chest. My voice doesn’t sound right. ‘It’s like . . . I can’t breathe, I feel
paralysed.’ I press my forehead harder into him.

‘There, there,’ he says. He makes meaningless comforting sounds with his hands warm on my shoulders. ‘It’s OK, there, there. It’s all right.’

But eventually he has to go back to work, so I go back to my office too. At Olivier’s prompting I go straight down to the HR department on the third floor and I find my way to the office
of the new HR lady I have only met once. I come in and sit down, uninvited. Her office smells of perfume and sandwich.

‘Oh!’ she says, startled, and arranges her features into a smile. ‘Is there something?’ her question trails off at the sight of my face, which I suspect is not pretty. I
am all skinny and grey-faced and mad.

‘I am having a breakdown,’ I say, baldly. There is no point in sugar-coating it, after all. It isn’t as if she hasn’t heard it all before: people are
always
having breakdowns in City law firms; it’s an occupational hazard. Legendary, probably apocryphal, stories circulate the City of people in various firms being found curled in foetal balls
under their desk naked or taking heroin in the photocopier room. I attempt a smile to put her at ease. ‘I need to see a doctor.’

Ten minutes later, I am sitting outside the office GP’s basement surgery. It is in an unglamorous facilities corridor, near the gym, which accounts for the acrid smell of sweat-soaked
carpet tile and partner testosterone. There are also showers and three windowless boxes that serve as bedrooms for lawyers unwilling or unable to go home. It’s quiet down here in the
mid-afternoon and I have enough time to wonder if I am overreacting, but then the doctor opens the surgery door and beckons me in. She’s a nice-looking woman with short reddish hair and kind
eyes.

I’m not quite sure what I say to her. I give a breathless rundown of the past eighteen months, I think: Mum, move, abortion, move, work, conflict with Olivier, Marks & Spencer. I
don’t know if I manage to convey the sense of perpetual dread that has crept up on me day by day over the past six months. I know I don’t mention the fact I’ve stopped eating. I
definitely don’t tell her that leaving Paris means admitting defeat at the thing that has basically defined me for the past fifteen years and that I can’t really deal with it. I reckon
I definitely sound mad enough, though. I
feel
mad enough.

‘It sounds,’ says the doctor in a very measured tone, writing frantically, ‘as if you have had a very difficult time.’ And just like that, I get signed off work.

I have always thought a breakdown would be sort of glamorous. This feels like a rather sub-standard variety. There is no eye-gouging, no reckless fucking of strangers, no
sitting on statues and shooting pistols in the air. It’s a part-time, unassuming kind of thing, which I put on hold in the evenings to look after the boys.

The psychiatrist the work GP sends me to see clearly thinks he’s seen plenty of my kind before. He is a beautifully dressed man with big brown eyes and a domed brown bald head and he
specializes in City malaises. Hundreds of alpha personalities in T. M. Lewin shirts parade through his offices each week, with exhaustion, burn-out and other alpha afflictions.

‘I expect,’ he says during our first consultation, in his dark wood-panelled office in Guy’s Hospital, ‘you are concerned about letting your clients down. You will
probably resist my suggestion that you take some time away from the office.’

I am not at all sure that I will resist that suggestion, but I nod, noncommittally.

‘Is,’ he probes delicately, ‘the anxiety of constantly comparing your achievements with those of your peers at the root of this sense of paralysis?’

‘I don’t
think
so,’ I venture. This encounter would actually be quite funny if it were not for the cold dread that envelops me. He’s not actually too worried
about my motivation anyway, because he’s planning to prescribe some high-dose antidepressants and send me to therapy, he explains. They can sort me out there. I need to see a counsellor and
go to group therapy three times a week at a posh private hospital just off Marylebone Road.

The hospital is a strange place in a strange part of town that seems utterly out-of-time, a throwback to another era. You almost expect to see Celia Johnson emerging from a café in the
back streets by Marylebone Station, lighting a gasper and buttoning her coat. The building, too, is old-fashioned looking, a red-brick pile more like a crammer for rich, indolent schoolboys than a
psychiatric hospital. Inside, there’s a constant ballet of thin women with great hair in velour tracksuits and sunglasses and boys in skinny jeans and hoodies. It would have a certain louche
glamour if it weren’t for the fact that several sections of the building are locked and you can’t get in or out without checking your name on the mandatory sign-in sheet held by the
security guard at the front door. There’s an edge to the atmosphere that makes me nervous before I even attend a single session: the possibility of something bad happening hangs imminent in
the air.

Group therapy is interesting, in the Chinese curse sense of the word. It takes place in the basement, past the canteen and the art therapy studio, in one of three insipid, pastel rooms full of
hard chairs.

I have expressed, as strongly as I know how, how very, very much I do not want to go to group therapy. I tell the blandly encouraging hospital coordinator who reviews my notes and assigns me to
a group over and over again that I do not want to go.

‘It’s normal to be nervous,’ she says, smiling at me.

‘I can’t do it.’ If I were Béatrice Dalle, I’d be throwing a chair round about now, but I’m not; my repertoire doesn’t extend much beyond apology, the
British silver bullet. ‘I’m really sorry, but I honestly can’t.’

‘It’ll be fine,’ she says firmly, and I realize that I am not actually in charge of this. I really do
have
to go. She ushers me down the stairs, dragging my heels.

The chairs are arranged in a circle and a handful of people are already in the room. There is a whole range of ages and types, from an elderly, aloof-looking man who must be easily in his
seventies to an Asian teenage girl with a pierced lip dressed entirely in black and all points in between. Some look raw and troubled while others are perfectly dressed and made-up as if for a
light lunch and a post-prandial wander round the Conran Shop. The coordinator pats me briskly on the shoulder and leaves. I hate her. Longing for her death sustains me through the next few minutes
as I take a seat and more people file into the room, but it wears off and the dread returns.