We'll Always Have Paris (23 page)

There is so much happening around us: Brick Lane shape-shifts every weekend, with pop-up openings and exhibitions and wild, anarchic events. Mark regales us gleefully with every shop and
restaurant opening, urging us to try new sausages or doughnuts or cider, luring Olivier out on wine-tasting expeditions. I even start exercising: Fiona and I share a personal trainer, laughing
helplessly as we try to stand on wobbly boards in the garden and run weakly around the market. I am finally allowed to drop group therapy, then I am referred to a grief counsellor, who is pleasant
enough to chat to, in an inconclusive sort of way (I don’t really feel I ‘get’ anywhere, but the dreams stop, so perhaps I am wrong), and finally, cautiously, the City expert
psychiatrist discharges me, releasing me back into the legal community to go forth and work seventy chargeable hours a week.

‘I’d like you to write me a letter,’ he says. ‘Setting out what you’ll do if you start to get a reoccurrence of your symptoms, because they will come back,
that’s the nature of this kind of susceptibility. You need to write down what it will feel like, and how you are going to deal with it.’

I ignore him and never write the letter. I feel as if everything is going to be OK now. We’ve weathered the storm and surely we are owed a few years in which nothing awful happens? We can
relax a little, enjoy our boys and enjoy our surroundings. My family is close by. My friends have been wonderful: Kate is a source of pure, uncomplicated happiness and I love every minute I spend
with her, and Laurie, my law ally, is endlessly kind and funny. I appreciate them so much after a year without I can’t imagine letting go again. It has been tricky, but Olivier and I have
managed to survive. It is really starting to feel like we have a home here, a home that feels secure and happy, and once you have a real home, everything else, I hope, falls into place.

There is one problem with this happy, optimistic set-up. I have sort of agreed to move to Brussels.

I am utterly convinced it is a brilliant idea to move to Brussels. My theory is that it is the perfect compromise: French enough, but not too French. The whole country, after
all, is a compromise. The technocrats of 1958 listed all its admirable, compromise-friendly characteristics when they argued in its favour: Brussels, a ‘Committee of Experts’ noted, is
located on the frontier between the Latin and Germanic European cultures, has good transport links and medical infrastructure, is an important business and commercial centre and is considered
neutral territory by the great powers of the European project. Perhaps not the most stirring of arguments, but very practical.

Nearly fifty years later, Olivier and I consider it neutral territory too. Before the children arrived I spent a few months there for work, taking taxis across the city with boxes of documents
and sitting in the unglamorous lobbies of Commission buildings, wearing self-adhesive visitor’s badges, waiting to take notes at meetings. At weekends, when Olivier visited, we explored,
peering in at lives lived in high-ceilinged art nouveau mansion blocks and drinking bad coffee and
half and half
(a disgusting yet strangely moreish old lady’s drink of half sweet
white wine and half cheap fizz) in brown
fin de siècle
cafés next to pensioners sharing their speculoos biscuits with their dogs. It’s a city that inspires domestic
dreams: the houses are a riot of decorative eccentricity and quirk (botanical details and neoclassical columns, round windows, or boot scrapers in the shape of foxes’ tails) and you
can’t help but look in and wonder what it would be like to live there. Is there a little garden out the back? What would it be like to stand in front of that round window with your morning
coffee?

It’s homely, but it’s no one’s actual home so neither of us, I reason, would be responsible for its foibles. Olivier has had more than enough of my wounded complaints about
Parisian incivility, and following several long unsatisfactory nights in A&E for minor ailments and the discovery that our school options for Theo are limited to wildly expensive private rabbit
hutches located in the basements of office blocks, I have been fielding complaints about the dysfunctional state of British public services. The last few years have been so hard, we don’t
need any more reasons to resent one another.

Brussels is a city of migrants too, migrants and exiles. It’s a place you go when you can’t stay at home. Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto there (though he didn’t like it
much, subsequently calling Belgium the ‘paradise and the preserve of the landed classes’) and in the 1850s, the newly minted country welcomed a wave of literary and political refugees
from Napoléon III’s repressive coup d’état: Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Charles Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine all spent time, with varying degrees of contentment, in
Brussels. I like the idea of this, of course: it gives the city the kind of romantic pedigree I can get behind. Further waves of migration follow the Paris Commune, the Russian revolution, the
Second World War and the declaration of independence of post-colonial Congo. Brussels residents describe themselves in dialect as ‘
zinneke
’, mongrels, and the city has learned
to welcome incomers, or at least, it welcomes the prosperous ones that work in the EU institutions or in the thousands of satellite bodies (NGOs, lobbyists, trade associations and lawyers) that
orbit around them. It welcomes people like us.

The thing is, and this is perhaps inevitable with compromises, that Brussels doesn’t represent anyone’s dream. When you tell people you’re moving to Paris, you get envy, an
approving nod or a dreamy exhalation. Brussels, more often than not, gets a pause, a moment’s recalibration before your interlocutor says something like: ‘Oh! Is that for
work?’

It’s not a dramatically beautiful city. There is beauty, but it is discreet and tucked away and there are few of the kind of vistas that make your heart swell. The architects of the
European project put paid to that with twenty years of hasty destruction and expedient concrete. The Grand-Place is lovely, but the streets around it are an ugly warren of kebab shops, improbable
Manneken Pis trinkets (the Manneken Penis corkscrew is a favourite) and rowdy bars that periodically disgorge gangs of vomiting stags. The Sablon is undeniably beautiful too, but most of the square
is used as a car park by oblivious Mercedes-driving pensioners stopping off to collect boxes of
petits fours
from the creakingly formal
traiteur
, Wittamer. Most of the centre has
stubbornly resisted gentrification and architectural treasures are left to crumble next to Subway outlets and discount stores. The
bruxellois
still mainly believe that the aspirational
thing is to head outwards, away from the urban unpleasantness to the leafy suburbs: Woluwe, Uccle and Waterloo. Brussels’ equivalent of the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré is the foully
congested Boulevard de Waterloo, where Tiffany and Louis Vuitton rub shoulders with illegal waffle vans, and huge sink holes open up in the pavements to universal indifference. There is no
Champs-Elysées and no Boulevard Saint-Germain: there is a sort of vista along Rue Béliard in the European Quarter from the Arche du Cinquanténaire, Brussels’ answer to
the Arc de Triomphe, but the perspective is of hundreds of office blocks of varying vintages and limited aesthetic appeal. The Atomium has not had a chance to become a fraction as iconic as the
Eiffel Tower, since it’s so far outside the city it’s practically in Antwerp. There’s no river: well, there used to be but it was buried underground in the 1870s after one cholera
epidemic too many, and instead there’s the canal, a murky industrial highway of a thing in disreputable Molenbeek, the commune that causes respectable
bruxellois
to shiver when they
mention it. Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron would not dance along the
quais
of the Bruxelles–Charleroi canal.

Brussels was very much not Charles Baudelaire’s dream, though he spent nearly three years in the city, exiled from Paris by debt and scandal. Brussels disappointed and disgusted
Baudelaire: his lecture series was cut short and he failed to find a Belgian publisher for his proposed new works; he found the Manneken Pis revolting and the Waterloo lion ridiculous, the Belgians
bovine and provincial.

‘Everything bland,’ he writes in notes for a never-completed book about Belgium. ‘
Pauvre Belgique
. . . Everything sad, flavourless, asleep.’ (Apparently this
did not extend to the gingerbread from the biscuit shop Dandoy near the Grand-Place, where he was a regular customer.) ‘Typical physiognomy comparable to that of the sheep or ram. Smiles
impossible because of the recalcitrance of the muscles and the set of the teeth and jaws . . .’

Sebald is similarly uncomplimentary in the
Rings of Saturn
, his odd, meandering fictional account of a walking tour of Suffolk, with diversions through other lowlands in northern
Europe. ‘In Brussels in December 1964, I encountered more hunchbacks and lunatics than normally in a whole year,’ he writes, challengingly, continuing: ‘one sees in Belgium a
distinctive ugliness.’ The Brussels section of the book highlights ‘the strikingly stunted growth of the population’, detailing a series of dismal encounters under leaden grey
skies with ‘a deformed billiard player’, a hunchbacked old woman and a ‘slatternly garishly made-up sutler woman pulling a curious handcart with a goose shut in a cage’. In
the manner of the earnest nineteenth-century phrenologists, both Baudelaire and Sebald try to make physiognomy revealing of character, in this case national character. For Sebald it’s a
physical and psychic manifestation of postcolonial guilt at Leopold II’s atrocious record in Congo; for Baudelaire it encapsulates everything wrong, mean, unseemly and peculiar about
Brussels.

I have no quarrel with Belgian physiognomy and I don’t think everything is bland or ugly, but it’s true that I don’t dream of Brussels like I dreamed of France: it’s hard
to be romantically inclined towards the city. Even so, I’m optimistic and positive: it looks easy to navigate and comfortable, there are schools and doctors and nice places to live with
little gardens and I think we can be happy there. The job that I am applying for is much easier than my current one, too – it’s a support role, so there should be no more client calls
at 10 p.m. and no overnight turnarounds of research memos. It’s the kind of job I have been fantasizing about since the children were born and suddenly there’s a position open in my
firm’s Brussels office. It’s the kind of opportunity that only comes around every four or five years and I feel a rare surge of certainty: I want this job and I can get it. My head,
that oh-so-trustworthy organ, says it is the right thing to do.

I suppose there’s some justification to ask – and people do – why I feel we need to move again. What is the rush? Couldn’t we just . . .
be
for a little while,
now that I’m not completely crazy and we’re settled in this lovely part of London? It seems utterly contrary to uproot again, but it feels as if, for once, I actually could be in charge
rather than just drifting with the current. Olivier is enthusiastic, predictably. He always favours change over stasis, always sees solutions in action.

‘Do it,’ he says when I bring up the idea tentatively. ‘Let’s go for it. At least we won’t have to pay thousands of pounds a year to send our son to school
underground like a mole, in a place with no outside space and NO CANTEEN’ (for some, probably French, reason the ‘no canteen’ incenses him more than anything).

We have talked about moving to Brussels before, about how good it could be for us, so at least it’s a shared vision. I really like the idea of us building something new together after
these wearying years and it feels like the beginning of a sort of apology from me to Olivier, a turning back towards him and the boys after my self-indulgent solo loopiness of the last year.
Perhaps I need that mythical thing, the fresh start? So I apply for the job.

I turn on the charm and call in favours and visit the Brussels office to schmooze the people I know and meet the ones I don’t. I am paraded around the office – a vast
nineteenth-century pile near the royal palace, it’s the former Belgian Bank of the Congo of the colonial era, part of the complex of Congo-related administrations Conrad’s alter-ego
Marlow visited in
Heart of Darkness
– and show off my French and my experience (thankfully no one seems to remember the four months I spent as an intern in the office, hiding in the
ladies lavatory to avoid all-nighter sessions working on a hideously contentious fertilizer merger). I truly believe that I can do this job and do it well and I negotiate – actually
negotiate! – until eventually we reach an agreement: the job is mine. I can start in the summer.

Once the decision is made and the papers are signed, of course I start to feel anxious about leaving again. It’s not so much the upheaval – for some reason that doesn’t bother
me – but leaving my family. Joe is always down from York, showing up with offerings from Bettys, and my sister and her boyfriend drop in and hang out, playing with the boys. It has been
lovely having my father and stepmother a short tube ride away too, and it feels right, to have a sort of family life – this is how you are supposed to raise children, not in isolation. My
father sometimes comes over to the flat between meetings in a black cab and takes Theo out to the Transport Museum or the zoo, and I love watching the two of them head off, seriously, in
conversation. Why would I turn my back on all this?

‘It’s really not far,’ I tell them, trying to convince myself at the same time. ‘Two hours! It’s no further than York.’

Before we move definitively, I work in the Brussels office a few days a month and during that time I try to find us somewhere to live. A fat, patronizing estate agent in a tweed jacket and
cashmere roll-neck collects me from the office after work in his Smart car and drives me round the city for viewings. He has quite fixed ideas about what I ought to like – detached country
villas in the furthest reaches of deadly silent suburbs accessible only by Chelsea tractor, mainly – and we have some thoroughly unsuccessful, if fascinating, visits. We see a perfectly
preserved in amber brown and smoked-glass 1970s condo, complete with a built-in deep-fat fryer and an indoor rockery in a glass atrium (‘It has so much potential,’ says the estate
agent. ‘But who on earth
lives
here?’ I marvel). We see several enormous, dull flats in quiet blocks, all magnolia paint and marble flooring, recently vacated by embassy staff
from countries I could not place on a map. One afternoon we see an elegant art nouveau villa crumbling away between two office blocks, and that evening we tour a tall, thin house from a fairy tale
panelled in intricately carved oak, as dark and poky as a priest hole.