We'll Always Have Paris (30 page)

‘Take a year. Stay with us, but do whatever you have to, I won’t ask anything of you, just wait and see.’

But I just can’t see how this would work. I can’t imagine gallivanting around Europe like an Amish teenager on rumspringa then coming home to my family. I might be disgustingly
self-indulgent, but this is beyond me: I’m not brave and I’m not candid and I don’t have the emotional maturity to make that work. By this point in my life I am pretty clear that
I can’t reason my way out of guilt and shame thanks to the light of pure positivism. I need to break away, I can’t see any other solution. ‘Everything is black and white with
you,’ Olivier tells me often and I suppose that’s true.

So I say it again more explicitly:

‘I can’t do this any more,’ I say. Or I think I say. Something like that. I don’t know, but I think my facial expression is a bit clearer this time, because it feels more
definitive somehow, and from the set of his jaw, I can tell Olivier feels it too. He disappears for half an hour and when he comes back, he tells me we are going on a day trip, so we get in the car
and drive to Bruges.

‘We’ve never been to Bruges!’ he tells me, firmly. ‘If we’re splitting up, we need to have been to Bruges.’

This is pretty stupid, but I quite like this impulsive Olivier and at least something is happening at last. It’s raining and Bruges is grey and greasy, the belfry obscured by cloud and the
squares and narrow streets clogged with tour groups in waterproof ponchos. We arrive so early that nothing is open and drink bad coffee from paper cups staring at the same shop windows we have in
Brussels. We have to bring the dog and he whines because it’s cold and we can’t go into any restaurants or churches because of him, so we sit in a bus shelter, then we sit on the main
square at a tourist bar while it drizzles and then we drive home again. I don’t know what he says and I don’t know what I say: our discussions are bleeding into one another and
it’s exhausting. I’m sick of myself, sick of hearing my lame justifications.

We still don’t split up. ‘Give it the summer and see how you feel in September,’ he says, and that seems reasonable, so a few months later, we go on holiday again. We go back
to Normandy, where it all started, just the four of us. Olivier chooses the place and it is perfect. I have never stayed anywhere quite this beautiful and I can’t imagine how much it must
have cost him, but he’s in a ‘what the hell’ mood about life and throwing everything he can at trying to save our relationship. This is his Hail Mary holiday. It’s a large,
airy white house with huge windows, actually
on
the beach, a vast expanse of soft and deserted white sand just up the road from Deauville. We can open the door in the morning and the boys
run out to play, collecting hermit crabs and racing them, or splashing in the shallow waves. The sun shines almost constantly, which is unheard of for Normandy, and the sunsets are ravishing, a
shimmering pink haze on the water as we drink dry cider and watch strings of horses walking silhouetted at the shoreline. It isn’t all portentous and poignant: we have a laugh too. We find a
book in the house about how to petrify fruit and vegetables using the power of your mind and spend a fun afternoon trying to petrify a lemon. We teach the boys to play chess and all four of us play
long inept tournaments with our early evening aperitifs. Late at night when they are asleep, we watch films in bed, his head on my shoulder, then we turn off the TV and open the window to listen to
the waves. It’s so strange: everything is wonderful but it’s awful too. All the anger and artifice has fallen away and I’m implacably calm; I just know what I want. I spend a lot
of the time sitting on the immaculate cream sofa, writing, while Olivier plays with the boys outside. Most of the time he is bouncy and fun, throwing them into the sea as they laugh and squeal and
pushing them around on their inflatable alligator. But sometimes he gets sad.

‘It’s such a shame you can’t be happy with me,’ he says, as we sit out in the late afternoon sun. He gestures around at the boys who are building a den for a dead crab
from seaweed and stones, the beach, the exquisite house. ‘With us.’

And he’s right; it is an awful shame and at that moment I really, really wish I could. This lovely man would do anything to keep us together and our boys are wonderful and we have had such
a laugh and such strange moments of tenderness over the past few months. But I am so, so sure. I can’t explain it to him satisfactorily, which makes it worse, so I just repeat myself: I
can’t be with him any more; this can’t be all my life. I am thirty-five years old and even though I have had two children and buried my mother, I feel as if I haven’t really
lived. Depending on Olivier – and he is so perfectly dependable – has made me weak and cowardly and lazy. I need to go out and make some mistakes without his loving, stifling, safety
net.

We have a final French holiday to celebrate, after a fashion, Olivier’s birthday, on a grey September weekend at a B&B in a crumbling chateau on the northern coast near Le Touquet.
It’s a strange place, remote and draughty, run by two gruff brothers out of their scruffy kitchen. There’s a herd of Shetland ponies, baby rabbits and guinea pigs to pet and a donkey
you can take out for walks, which we do, the boys taking it in turns to sit on its back. On the Sunday morning while I am out with the boys petting the guinea pigs, Olivier finds some notes I have
scribbled, full of thoughts of escape and of the married man. When we get back he starts to pull away properly, angrily, going out for hours at a time, then one morning he comes into the bedroom
and looks at me for a moment, then he just says, simply, ‘You don’t want to be here. You should go.’

So I do.

And just like that, the slow, affectionate, exasperated untangling that seemed as though it would never end is over. Things accelerate vertiginously: we are really splitting up
and I have to find somewhere to live. That is what we agree, late at night, huddled in the back garden after the children are in bed: we will share custody equally, a week each, and I will move
out.

I start to look for a place to live, armed only with a wildly optimistic back-of-an-envelope calculation of my income and my own prejudices, and settle on a house that is almost the carbon copy
of our current one, a ten-minute walk away: another sleepy street, another hairdresser a few doors up. It hasn’t had the Texan–Parisian luxury treatment and everything in it is cheap,
greige and utilitarian, but it’s big and solid and it feels convincingly like a family home. I don’t consider very seriously whether I can afford it: I’m so caught up in the
momentum of the blog and writing that I truly believe money won’t be an issue, because I’m going to write a bestseller, or become a broadsheet columnist or something. I’m
optimistic about everything, including the separation: I look to my parents’ example, remember the pair of them taking me to Paris long after they separated, how much they still made each
other laugh (it’s a mark of success for a divorce, I find myself thinking much later, if your children don’t realize the huge efforts involved in that appearance of ease). I know we can
do this. I just ignore how grey and unhappy Olivier is as I extricate myself from our family home, because it doesn’t fit with my rosy and enlightened vision.

Milestones follow one another in rapid succession over the following weeks: I sign a lease; we split our savings; we tell the children. It becomes very real at this point: Theo cries instantly
then Louis cries because his brother is crying and we hold them tight and I mouth all those platitudes about still loving them and liking each other, we’re just living in separate houses now,
and even though it’s all true, it really is, I feel hollow and dishonest. I look across at Olivier. He looks ill and deflated, as if someone has gutted him like a fish. But what can I do? I
can’t give him the only thing he wants, which would be the news that I have changed my mind. I haven’t. So we push on, reassure and console, blow noses, and then we sit on the sofa and
watch cartoons. After a week or so, as the boys’ immediate attention turns back to school and Pokemon and who has taken whose biscuit, the shock fades; gradually it becomes another hard thing
among all the hard things Olivier and I have done together. I organize a removal firm and box up my books and clothes and trinkets and one day in November, when Olivier isn’t around, I move
out. The stupid dog comes with me (this is something of a silver lining for Olivier).

Initially, there are parts of separating that are quite exhilarating. I am so sure that it is the right thing to do that there’s a kind of excitement to it for me, as if this is a
difficult but necessary stage towards becoming the person I am supposed to be. The process has a fierce forward momentum and there are so many things I have to do that I have very little time to
brood. Many of the things I have to do are the kind of tasks I have always left to Olivier. I deal with my new landlady, who is horrible; a desiccated, gimlet-eyed, tweed-clad matron with a rigid
helmet of grey hair and a strong line in wordless disapproval (I fall victim to a classic bait and switch: one day I am signing the paperwork with her fat, jovial husband, then before the ink is
even dry, the temperature drops ten degrees and Tweed Nosferatu is released from her underground lair. I never see or hear from him again). I have to buy furniture then put it together and make the
television work. I deal with the boiler, procure a washing machine and fridge and source an energy provider, grown-up tasks for which I feel wholly unqualified, lost in a tangle of SCART cables,
Allen keys and rawl plugs. I do a lot of driving too, which I hate and have spent my adult life thus far avoiding. A month after I move out it is Christmas, and I have to persuade a car hire
company to rent me a car without a driving licence (I have, of course, lost mine), then drive it, plus children and dog, to York and back in treacherous, icy conditions. I manage, but it takes a
week afterwards for the pain of my tensed shoulders and wrists to fade.

Nevertheless, it feels sort of salutary, all this admin: this is what adult life is like, I tell myself, without the security blanket of an ultra-competent, ultra-grown-up partner and I can do
it, sort of: I can pick up the phone or go to the bank when there is no one else to do it for me. Whenever anything is difficult or frightening, I tell myself that this is what I wanted, and it is
about time I shaped up.

But as much as our separation is about the serious business of being an independent grown-up for the first time, it is also about sheer escapism. The possibilities of solo living make me giddy:
I go to nightclubs with my friend Tom, drinking too much gin and watching a procession of Belgian drag queens, calves clad in thick American Tan hosiery, stomp up and down a tiny bar. I start a
baking business of sorts with Madevi, selling home-made biscuits stamped with rude words at craft fairs. It’s a vast amount of work and we barely break even, but it’s so much fun
working with her: we laugh and laugh and make other people laugh too. I buy myself self-indulgent home furnishings I cannot afford: silk quilts and children’s beds that look like castles and
a large plastic dog that glows in the dark. I have never made these kinds of choices alone before – the only places I have ever lived alone were during those few weeks before I met Olivier in
Normandy and my college room in Oxford – and I’m determined to enjoy them, hang the expense. I say yes to everything: concerts, drunken evenings with acquaintances, terrible German
performance art, an air guitar contest in a bar in Flanders and an urban safari round Charleroi’s abandoned factories and slag heaps in the back of a dilapidated transit van.

It’s fun, a lot of this stuff, but it has one serious consequence. I become more distracted than ever at work, preoccupied with writing and my messy personal life, drifting in late and
compulsively checking my messages under the desk. It should come as no surprise – though I am still shocked – when I find out I am next in line for redundancy. Olivier is very cool and
kind about it when I call up and blurt it out: dramas of this kind never seem to faze him. He takes me out for a meal and reminds me how much I want to do other things with my life. I know
that’s true but I feel sick at having put myself in such a precarious situation. After a couple of weeks of panic, though, I find it sort of bracing, having no income – bracing like the
North Sea in January. I can’t just float around making biscuits and trying to write a novel, so I knuckle down to finding as much work as I can, scrabbling to do editing and translation and
unglamorous writing jobs. The big break I was so certain was just round the corner remains elusive. I’m not sure I think I can make it as a blogger now: I’m finding my former levels of
candour harder and harder to sustain. It’s as if I have only just realized that other people are involved and my writing does have consequences.

In other ways, though, the redundancy shock makes me reckless; indifferent to consequences. I get drunk often, with abandon, taking unwise late-night trams and even less wise late-night walks
through the city, then get home and fall asleep with my shoes on. I feel untethered, although I suppose that was sort of the point.

What does tether me is the boys. When they are with me, our days have a rhythm I find intensely reassuring: we walk to the tram in the mornings and I ride the two stops to school with them, then
walk back with the dog and work all day. In the afternoons, I pick them up and hand over some small change for the vending machine and we walk back home, an awkward shuffle of school bags and
Kinder Egg wrappers and the dog winding itself between our legs, Louis hanging off my arm and Theo telling me about Mexican wrestling or the monster he has been drawing. After they do their
homework, there are cartoons then dinner, a story and then bed, and once they are tucked up I tidy up and do the washing, pairing socks and folding T-shirts, straightening the basic building blocks
of family life. These basic and necessary things feel vital to me: the routines I felt were burying me alive a year ago are what keep me afloat now.