Swimming Upstream (32 page)

Eaubonne is our home now, and has been for many
years. I moved out of Paris when Helena was a baby, seeking a bigger house for
less money along with the beauty and tranquillity of the countryside. I never
went travelling; I had no need. I found what I was looking for in Paris, in
Helena, in myself. I found a job translating journals and publications for a
small agency located in the tenth arrondissement and I have been there ever
since. The nature of what I do for a living means that I can work from home and
it is a life that suits me well.

The town is really friendly; I can't go to the
market without meeting friends on the way and a few more while I'm there. There
is a stall which sells olives and tapanade, candied fruit and nuts. There is an
Arabic couple who make their own patisseries. They are beautiful and delicious,
made of honey, nuts and “brick” (I can’t find a word for this in English). The
lady is incredibly fat but absolutely beautiful. Her skin is smooth and glowing
like honey and her eyes sparkle. She always serves mint tea free of charge to
anyone who buys her cakes.

 There is a beautiful forest nearby: the Foret de
Montmorency. It is busy at weekends, but less so during the week. Early in the
morning, or indeed whenever we get the chance, Helena and I take off with Lily,
our dog, running through the forest and alongside the lake, then up the hill to
a prairie with a big oak tree in the middle. It is rare to see anyone there. We
run up a big hill onto a shingle road with chestnut trees on both sides. In the
winter there are big Alexander beetles and big red slugs on the road. In the
summer there is pale coloured sand. The forest floor is very leafy and there
are lots of chestnuts and mushrooms. There are wild purple foxgloves growing
there and soft springy leaf mould which then becomes sand. There are snakes in
the banks, which scare me, and my fear makes Helena laugh.

She is an audacious girl, and there is not much
that fazes her. She has the indulgent and entitled air of many of her
generation; she is a normal eighteen year old, in fact. I am happy to see that
she is so confident and headstrong and, although it’s true that I also envy her
this, I am pleased that she is so comfortable in her own skin, that she feels
she has the intrinsic right to be here, in this world, in our house, in the
lives of those around her. I am glad she challenges me and demands to be heard.
I am glad that she feels safe enough to do so.

For the first time in many years, though, she has
been asking about her father. She wants to know everything about him and I
don’t know where to begin. How much do I tell her? How much does she need to
know? The whole truth? Or a half truth, a white lie? What, I am wondering, is
the right thing to do? When she was little it somehow wasn’t an issue. Along
with Father Christmas or the Tooth Fairy, it wasn’t that difficult to pass him
off as a creature of myth. And later, as she grew older, she just seemed to accept
without question that he was to remain remote and invisible, not entirely
unlike the one up in heaven. (“My Father, who art in England,” she used to joke
irreverently during the Lord’s Prayer). But now she is eighteen, a student of
the International Baccalaureate, and she is being taught to enquire. Her mind is
opening up to new possibilities and it is right that, before she ventures out
into the world, she should want to know where she came from. How can I blame
her for that?

When I first moved to Paris I took with me the
copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essay on Self-Reliance that Uncle Silbert had
given me. Heavily pregnant with Helena, I spent a long time in the Bibliotheque
Nationale searching through dictionaries, study notes and archives, and
preparing my own translation of the essay into modern English. I have found a
lot of comfort and guidance from it over the years. Its inherent irony,
however, is not lost on Helena, for whom I dug it out last night.

“He wants us to think for ourselves, to be
original, to refuse to follow the crowd. So why should we listen to him?” she
asked.

 We were sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee
with my friend Suzanne.

 “C’est vrai, c’est un paradoxe,” laughed Suzanne.
“Comme toi. Like you,” she said. Helena responded by sitting down heavily on
Suzanne’s lap and wrapping her arms tightly around her neck. Helena is tall,
and way too heavy for Suzanne’s petite frame.

“Stop it, Helena, you’re suffocating her,” I
reprimanded.

 Suzanne laughed and waved her hand. “Ca va.”

 “But isn’t it selfish?” Helena persisted. “To put
your needs before others, in the way that he recommends?”

 “Au contraire,” said Suzanne. “It is by having
respect for yourself and your own feelings that empathy for others is born.”

Helena thought about that for a moment. “What are
you like if you have no empathy?”

“Antisocial,” said Suzanne.

 “You mean like people who commit crimes, hurt
other people?”

“Yes, that’s right. They can be very charming,
give the outward appearance of being interested in you. But in reality they
don’t have that capacity. These people are cut off, disconnected from their own
feelings, and if they don’t know how to feel for themselves they can’t feel for
anyone else either. In the extreme, they are psychopaths.”

“So why don’t we just teach them how to feel
instead of locking them up?”

 Suzanne smiled. “Have you ever thought about
running for President?”

 “No,” said Helena. “I have only thought about
running.”

 I smiled at my daughter and went to the stove,
poured more coffee. Suzanne patted Helena’s knee. “You are a true philosopher,
mademoiselle.”

“I think his essay is like anything else you read,”
I said, setting the coffee cups down on the table. “You have to take the parts
that resonate with you and leave the rest.”

 Helena nodded. “Okay. Well, I certainly agree
with him that you have to be who you really are. And you must tell the truth,
even if it hurts, absolutely. Living a lie, living in denial, it’s not fair to
anyone, least of all yourself.”

 I turned to face her. “You really believe that?”
I asked.

“Of course” she said. “Don’t
you?”

Today has been one of the first real days of autumn after
a few hot weeks of summer and there was that chill in the morning air which
always stirs something inside me, reminding me of new school books and new
beginnings; of childhood walks in the forest and crunching fallen leaves
followed by hot cocoa, drop scones and chilblains by the fireside. I got up at
dawn with Helena and we ran with Lily, through the forest and past the lake,
where Lily always goes for a dip before running on to catch us up. The lake is
beautiful. It is grey-blue and glistens white. From a distance the seagulls
look as if they are part of the sparkle until Lily arrives and the birds get
frightened and suddenly fly off. There are bulrushes and tall soft grasses near
a little castle, with ducks and their babies nesting amongst them. In the
summer there are a few coots and lots of little turtles, which come out of the
water to lie in the sun.

I watched Helena as she ran ahead of me round the
lake, dipping through the bulrushes and up the hill, and I came to a decision: I
must tell her the truth. She may despise me. She might not understand. But it’s
a risk that I must take.

It’s now evening, cool and dark. It’s Friday night
and we are at home in the kitchen, preparing a supper of the food that we both
love: salad with endives and avocado and a garlic vinaigrette, goat’s cheese,
fat juicy olives and delicious crusty baguettes from the Boulangerie on the
corner at Place Aristide. Helena is setting out glasses and cutlery on the
table and pouring thick red wine and she is telling me about her day. I watch
her from where I am standing near the stove. She is very beautiful. Of course,
I would say that. I’m her mother. But it’s true and I can never quite believe
that she is mine.

“What?” Helena asks, churlishly. “Why are you
looking at me like that?” She shrugs a pile of ironing off the kitchen chair
and onto the sofa, sinks down onto it and picks up her fork.

So where to begin? I contemplate this as Helena
tips a pile of dripping leaves onto her plate and pushes a piece of bread into
her mouth. I sit down at the table beside her and fiddle with the stem of my
wine glass.

“I’ve got something to
tell you,” I hear myself say.

So now it’s late and I’ve told her the whole story. The
bread, cheese and wine are gone and the salad bowl is empty. The blinds in the
kitchen are still open and the empty blackness of the sky framed by the window
above the stove reminds me of a photograph that is yet to develop.

It seemed right to begin that day, that wet spring day
in 1992, the day that Catherine walked back into my life. That was the point,
it seems, that my life began to unravel. And that, of course, is the day that I
met him for the very first time. I wonder briefly, for the millionth time, how
different things might have been if the pool had been shut, say, that day. A
power failure. Heaters, or something. Or if, on the way home, I had crossed the
road at the traffic lights as I should have done, instead of running into the
road. But then I would be living in a world without her in it, and my
imagination stops right there. I can’t see my past, or my future, without
Helena. It just isn’t a place that I would ever want to be.

Helena is sitting still, looking at the table. She
is silent for several minutes. Finally, she says, “So he raped you.” Her voice
cracks slightly as she speaks.

 “Yes. In law, he did. If you believe that, of course.
That I didn’t give consent. Remember that this is my story. He may tell it
differently.”

 “How? How could he tell it differently? How could
you have given consent? You were knocked out by that punch. The punch that
Catherine made. Everybody saw that - Zara, Shelley, everyone, including him.
That’s why he did what he did. He took advantage. It’s obvious.” She shakes her
head.

I nod and look up at her, both grateful and full
of admiration for her certainty, her lack of doubt. I study her face. She has
the same tall, athletic body as her father, and has inherited his hazel eyes
and sandy hair. Other than that there has never been any obvious connection
between the two of them, and I have never felt his presence in her at all.

“So, that’s it?” asks Helena sadly. “I’m the
product of a rape?”

“A gift. The one good thing to come out of it,” I
tell her. “You know how much I love you. You changed my life.”

Helena is silent again.

“Look, I considered telling him,” I say. “But I
knew that if I did it would be irreversible. I just didn’t know what would
happen - to me, to you, to Catherine.”

“I didn’t say that you should have told him.” Helena
fiddles with the stem of her empty wine glass, rolling it between her thumb and
forefinger, twisting it first one way, then the other so that its base rolls in
a heavy semi-circle across the table top, threatening to topple over and break.

She hesitates. “So, what was he like?”

 Of course I didn’t know him well. So all I can
tell Helena is the little about him that I do know - snippets that had mostly
come from Catherine. I know that he liked cars, he liked sport, and that he had
had to give up his swimming career because of a sports injury. He was bright, interested
in politics. And he had a good sense of fun. It’s hard to explain the nice
things about him in terms that don’t contradict what I have just told her. But
nothing will alter what I know to be true: that my life, and Helena’s - and
Catherine’s too - would all have been altered immeasurably by his knowledge of
her existence and not for the better, I am sure of that.

“So that’s why you left England?”

 I nod. “The main reason, yes, in the end. I could
have stayed. With Zara and Tim. But I was never sure if Catherine would try and
get in touch. Or him. I couldn’t live like that, never knowing when I was
pushing your pram down the street, or leaving the house, if he was going to
pull up outside or knock on the door and put two and two together.”

 Helena sets her wine glass down on the table and
looks up at me in silence.

 “But you’re an adult now,” I continue. “It’s your
call.” I take a deep breath. “So, do you want to find him? Do you want to meet
him?”

Helena pauses, looks at me, then shakes her head. “Non,”
she says. “Ca ne vaut pas la peine.” It’s not worth it.

Or, as it translates
literally, it’s not worth the pain.

I heard once that all stories end with one of three
things: forgiveness, revenge or tragedy. I have spent some time lately
pondering which my ending is, or will be.

 Forgiveness, so it’s said, is the Christian thing
to do. But I don’t believe you have to forgive to be happy. Why forgive, just
for the sake of it? That seems like a cop out to me, a betrayal of the self. Not
forgiving changes things for ever. But not necessarily for the worse. Non-forgiveness
is my shield against the loss of self. It is something that I will carry with
me always.

 Revenge? Not necessary. I have learned to live
with injustice. I have wondered, in passing, if my revenge has been my absence,
my stand, my decision to deny Martin his child. But I know that if that were
true, then it is only a small strand of what happened; my primary motivation
has always been the desire to protect my child and, yes, to protect myself,
too. As Uncle Silbert said, it’s all about knowing your own truths, and not
needing a defence, or a second opinion.

 Tragedy? On the contrary. Mine is certainly not an
unhappy ending. And, in spite of the losses that both Zara and I have endured,
we have been left with our friendship. That is something I will always cherish.

We see her often. Sometimes when she is well, she
will get herself to Waterloo and onto the Eurostar and she will stay for weeks
at a time. Other times when she can’t face the journey we will go to her. She
still lives in London, in Clerkenwell, in a supported housing scheme just of
Goswell Road. It’s a little crowded when we are all there together but none of
us mind and Helena is used to Zara’s ups and downs.