We'll Always Have Paris (5 page)

The only problem is, in reality I find the fighting very upsetting. We have lots of reasons to fight, Olivier and I, hissing at each other in my tiny college bedroom (he comes over at least two
weekends a month), or racking up punishingly expensive silences on the payphone. He is deeply insecure about my new life in Oxford, and regards my friends and acquaintances with suspicion, verging
on outright hostility, his eyes narrowing every time I mention a male name. He wants us to be together all the time, every possible minute: this is his conception of love. I have to concede that
this is totally consistent with the French film version, but it is unreasonable and unfair and I am angry and frustrated. I need to have an independent life and make some friends without my
boyfriend looming sulkily; I know that is a reasonable desire, but I can’t convince him. He thinks he is being logical and
cartésien
, but often he sounds quite insane.

As for me, I am not good at fighting. For the first decade of my life my mother and I lived mainly alone (she and my father split when I was tiny) and we never fought, then my stepfather Joe,
who is the kindest, gentlest, most conflict-averse man I have ever met, moved in. My sister is ten years younger than me; I simply have no experience of fighting and I don’t really like it
either; I want everyone to get on. I don’t even like expressing mild dissent, or talking about what I want. Ideally, what I would like to happen is for Olivier just to intuit my feelings
without me having to say anything, and act upon them. This is often my default: staring hard at him and trying to convey my thoughts nonverbally, in the manner of a mournful greyhound. Can’t
you just
guess
? I think, desperately. I have not had much success with this strategy so far.

The fact that we are fighting in French adds another layer of complexity. I know what I need to convey: it is, basically, ‘back off’. I need to be able to explain to him, gently but
quite firmly, that there are more ways of loving a person than he has the life experience to conceive of right now. That not everyone is as simply and absolutely happy in the company of one other
person all the time as his parents and that for some people – including me – moments of separateness aren’t a threat or a problem but a necessity. ‘Look at my mum and
Joe,’ I want to say to him but of course, we’ve been together for less than a year and he hasn’t really seen enough of them to understand what I mean and I don’t have the
linguistic ability to make him understand. He’s staring at me all fiery and heartbroken and ‘back off’ seems too raw and too definitive. What can I say? I just don’t have
the subtleties of language at my disposal in French and I don’t trust myself to find them.

So rather than get it wrong, I just clam up. Obviously I know the words or at least, I know some words, enough words, but they feel so powerful to me, I am terrified of misusing them. I am hung
up on phrasing and tone and nuance, so instead of saying something that might come out wrong, or be misconstrued, I say nothing. I formulate and reformulate in my head – does this sound
right? Is this what I really want to say? – and while I do, the silence builds until I haven’t said anything for so long it feels too late. Unable to express my frustration, I turn it
inwards on myself. Sometimes I rake my nails through the skin on my arms and legs until they bleed, sometimes I bang my head against a wall. Sometimes I just storm off and sleep in the bath or
stomp through the streets of Oxford muttering to myself (obviously, this passes entirely unnoticed, most of the other people in Oxford city centre are also muttering to themselves). I’m
seething: I can’t reconcile these two incompatible lives and it makes me furious at myself.

I have, I suppose, a sort of breakdown. At the end of my first year, when exam stress combines with our continuing relationship meltdown, my hair starts to fall out – wisps, then tufts,
then handfuls. By mid-vacation, back in France with Olivier, the bedroom floor is entirely coated in an unsettling carpet of my hair each day. We go off to the hills outside Rome for a disastrous
holiday and the fighting gets worse, uglier, as bad as it has ever been – we scream at each other as we tour the Villa Hadriana, and drink too much cheap wine in thunderous silence in
trattorias. I behave abominably – I even hit him once. Some irrational part of me feels like the hair loss is his fault, and I’m bereft and furious and scared. When we get back from
holiday, I am still bald, exhausted and sick of fighting and I wonder if it’s time to give up. I didn’t really expect this relationship to survive and perhaps it has run its natural
course? Olivier is so incredibly certain we should be together and it has been flattering and gratifying and romantic, but he can’t be certain enough for both of us. We can’t stay
together through the sheer force of his will, strong as that is.

Somehow, though, we carry on. Olivier seems to mellow as I start my second year and he’s tender and solicitous and patient as I trail from dermatologist to psychologist, helping me manage
my horrible salt-free diet and my medication, encouraging me when I get low and coaxing me to take better care of myself. I am in worse shape than I have ever been at this point: bald, plump and
moon-faced from high doses of steroids, obsessed with trying not to gain more weight, dozy with sedatives and behind on my work. I go to hardly any tutorials and I manage to learn absolutely
nothing about the eighteenth century. I eat only Marks & Spencer diet ready meals and I drift around my shared house, barely interacting with my housemates. I can’t drink with all the
pills I am taking and I feel so tired all the time, I crash out at nine every night. Olivier is utterly solid through this time. He gets on slow ferries and packed coaches to visit me without
complaint and when he arrives, he doesn’t pick fights or get angry and suspicious. He cheers me up and cheers me on and makes me feel as if I am still as beautiful to him as ever, puffy and
cross in my ginger wig. He is funny too, happy to put on my sister’s platform shoes and an eyeliner moustache just to amuse me (he does this, one Christmas, just for the hell of it).

The time I spend with him in Normandy in the holidays, thankfully, is mainly very peaceful. Olivier is no longer frisking fifteen-year-olds for marijuana; he has a job in an engineering firm in
a sleepy Normandy town called Elbeuf where the average age seems to be sixty-five, and has exchanged his Kiss wallpapered murder hovel for a much nicer flat with high ceilings and pretty
wrought-iron balconies. We sometimes fight still – I sleep in his bath a few nights here too – but gradually we seem to learn how to be a little gentler with each other as space and
time do their work.

Olivier leaves for work early and I doze, make breakfast and read the piles of Zola and Proust I have stacked by the bed. The very best thing about my degree is how many French novels I get to
read and call ‘work’. Zola is a gift for a historian because he placed himself at the heart of every current and preoccupation of his age and then wrote a book about it. Over the twenty
novels of the Rougon-Macquart cycle, he tries to set out his then-modish theory of hereditary degeneracy (that hereditary character flaws, habitually revealed in physical characteristics, are
inescapable and worsen over generations) and to critique the social mores and political impulses of the Second Empire, from labour relations to anti-clericalism, Impressionism to the
Franco-Prussian war. I gobble up their thundering unsubtle prose, spending hours lost down the mines (
Germinal
), among the bonnets in a Parisian department store (
Au Bonheur des
Dames
) or drunk, filthy and starving in the cupboard under the stairs (
L’Assommoir
).

Proust is trickier, but in those quiet Elbeuf mornings I can slow my heartbeat and my reactions sufficiently to get caught up in his waterfalls of words, the textures and the wallpapers, the
brocades and silks, the elegant evocation of longing. I love the shapes of Proust in my mouth: often I read passages aloud in the echoing, high-ceilinged bedroom for the sheer physical pleasure of
it. It helps me remember what I love about France, and why, and I start to get excited about work again: I want to read more, see more pictures; think harder.

When my head starts to throb or I get hungry, I go out and buy myself a cake (a
flan
usually, my favourite) and a copy of
Voici
, the salacious cheap gossip magazine whose front
cover is often given over to apologies to the celebrities they have libelled, to find out what is happening in Johnny Halliday’s marriage: I continue to maintain an equal opportunities
approach to French culture, high, low, and anywhere in-between. I walk down to the river, where in the way of small provincial towns everywhere, old people on benches stare fixedly at me.
Sometimes, I go to the cinema down the street for a matinee of whatever adultery-based comedy Christian Clavier has made most recently (the oleaginous Clavier has by the mid-1990s replaced
Gérard Depardieu as the Actor For Whom a Quota of Film Appearances Seems to Be In Force). More often I stay at home and watch TV.

Some extraordinarily terrible things happen on French television, I discover: things that shake my faith in the superiority of French culture. Between the dubbed German cop shows and
Love
Boat
repeats, the home-grown material stands out as infinitely worse. I watch a lot of sitcoms of brain-liquefying stupidity, including
Les Filles d’à Côté
,
in which three shrieking harpies attempt to seduce their American neighbour. This would be grotesquely sexist were it not for the existence of a male equivalent,
Salut Les Musclés
,
which is even worse (the Musclés, five single, be-mulletted musicians, share an apartment and high jinks ensue). The worst of all, though, is Patrick Sébastien. Gurning, sinister
humourist Sébastien has a stranglehold on Saturday night television, keeping it stuck in the worst of the seventies through the sheer force of his personality. His shows feature accordion
solos, bare-breasted circus acts, risqué songs stuffed with unfunny double entendres, Sébastien himself in awful prosthetics, and communal rugby chants. Who on earth is watching this
stuff? It’s as if there is a whole other France I can barely imagine out there and it has atrocious taste. The one thing I can rely on is the lunchtime news.

The lunchtime news on TF1 is presented by a genially avuncular man called Jean Pierre Pernaut, and it is more like a Gallic version of
That’s Life
– all heartwarming animal
rescues and oddly shaped tubers – than a serious news programme. The emphasis is on France’s regions, their produce, particularities and
patrimoine
(heritage), and this is
deliberate. Pernaut was once quoted in the weekly magazine
Télérama
saying, ‘The one o’clock news is a French news programme intended principally for French
people. If you want to know about Venezuela, watch Venezuelan TV. If you want to know about Sudan, watch African channels.’ It is entirely normal for the principal headline on the one
o’clock news to be the weather, followed by anything from cherry-stone spitting competitions or chocolate bunny makers to – the daily financial paper
Les Echos
suggested in
exasperation – ‘a Béarnese sheep bell maker’. It is ‘a giant comforter’
Les Echos
continued while left-wing broadsheet
Libération
evokes ‘a news broadcast in muddy clogs, revering pretty landscapes, forgotten crafts and
la maouche ardéchoise
(a vaguely obscene-looking sausage) the way granny used to make
it’.

In my delicate state (I am still on antidepressants and high doses of steroids), the giant comforter is perfect and I sink gratefully into its marshmallow-like embrace. In my vacations, I follow
the reassuring rhythms of the TF1 year assiduously, from the September reports on the worrying increase in the weight of school bags, through a winter of flu vaccines and opening ski resorts. At
Easter I watch several days’ worth of reports on trends in Easter chocolate (is fruit more popular this year? Animal motifs? Bright colours?) and the Paris couture shows are genuinely
absorbing. The more parochial esoterica I absorb, the closer I feel to Frenchness. I want to get all the cultural references effortlessly when we go out and Olivier’s friends are chatting,
and this is how I insinuate myself into the interstices of French low culture:
Voici
, the TF1 news and soap operas. I’m assiduously attentive too when Olivier tries to bolster my
cinematic education with a selection of classic comedies. We watch Louis de Funès’s magnificently silly
La Soupe aux Choux
, in which two elderly peasants are visited by a
Martian, and
La Vie est Une Longue Fleuve Tranquille
with its deliciously horrible bourgeois Catholic family, all neat side partings, guitar-playing priests and repression.

In the evenings, we drive out along the Seine as the sun sets, the river flat and wide and Monet-hazy, banks dotted with willows, cow parsley waving in the breeze. We eat the cheapest set menu
in half-timbered and chintzy fish restaurants and splash out on a bottle of Sancerre. Sometimes we drive out to the coast to a soundtrack of George Brassens and sit on the uncomfortable pebbly
beach at Dieppe or search out cider farms and cows to admire in the lush greenery of Basse-Normandie. Sunday lunch with Olivier’s grandmother remains a fixture. Although she has moved into
sheltered accommodation, standards have not slipped remotely and the
armoire normande
full of biscuits and chocolate squares and lace doilies has accompanied her (it takes up half of the
living space). We eat and then watch
Inspecteur Derrick
, the dubbed German detective series she loves, squashed up on her tiny sofa. We pitch a tent in Olivier’s grandfather’s
field on a blustery Normandy cliff top and play dominoes with his other grandmother, who cries when she loses, then forces you to play again.

Gradually, our periods of tranquillity lengthen and we settle into something more comfortable: he trusts me now, finally I think, and I have seen how magnificently kind and loyal he is. We have
weathered the worst of a long-distance relationship and both our insecurities have subsided. I feel a bit shattered by the past few years – I am bald now, for god’s sake – but I
have realized I do not want to conceive of my life without this man. We have become interwoven in each other’s lives, with family weddings and holidays and the delicate business of where to
have Christmas. Olivier’s parents are completely accepting of me (he does not really give them any choice in the matter, but they are lovely nevertheless): Jacqueline provides me with special
mayonnaise and aspic-free foods and I am invited to more and more of their gatherings of the clans. On my side, I think my illness has short-circuited some of my parents’ reticence and given
them a chance to see Olivier’s essential kindness. My mother treats him as an ally and in the warmth of her regard – her love is a wonderful thing – he relaxes and blossoms, shows
them he can be funny and relaxed as well as fiercely loving. As my finals approach and then pass, we can begin to think about what happens next.