We'll Always Have Paris (12 page)

In normal circumstances I love clothes. I love agnès b shirts and Margaret Howell trousers and anything that promises to make me look ice cool and insouciant like Inès de la
Fressange or
désinvolte
and boyish like Jane Birkin. It doesn’t work at all – I am short and curvy and I look like a prison warden in buttoned-up white shirts and
blazers – but until now that has never stopped me trying. I suppose my current dirty Gap jeans and T-shirts are a sort of mourning; an external expression of that feeling of being undone on
the inside. Even so, I’m confounded by my own inability to measure up: this is
not
the Parisian image I had imagined for myself in my teenage dreams. There’s a difference
between being Birkin casual and slatternly, and I am far, far over the wrong side of this divide. My lack of effort is viewed as disrespectful on some level and I am paying the price.

My problems go far deeper than the merely sartorial, though. My real problem, it transpires, is that I actually
am
English. I am so, so English. There is no French person inside me
trying to get out; there is just a bottomless well of Britishness, stewing like tea in a WI urn. This is revealed most strongly by my enslavement to the apology. Kate Fox describes what she calls
the ‘reflexive apology rule’ in
Watching the English
and every day on the streets of Paris, I demonstrate it. I can say sorry about almost anything and sorry is almost never
what I actually mean.

‘
Pardon
,’ I say automatically when someone stands on my toe in the métro. I mean ‘sorry’ here in the British sense of ‘you have invaded my personal
space and I wish to make you aware of this fact so that you desist. However, I do not want this exchange to escalate into unpleasantness or embarrassment for either of us.’ I am usually
ignored.

‘
Euh, pardon?
’ I squeak indignantly when someone barges in front of me in the bakery queue without any apparent awkwardness. I mean ‘What the fuck do you think you are
doing, you ANIMAL, is nothing sacred?’ but that is not how it comes across.

‘
Je suis désolée
,’ I say apologetically in Monoprix with a smile, handing over my €50 note, but when I do this, I actually make things worse.

‘
Pardon!
’ I protest when elbowed out of a shop doorway as I try and open my umbrella, or jostled in the Post Office (god, I hate the Post Office. Everyone in there is
furious all the time).

None of these is a real ‘sorry’: I firmly believe myself to be in the right. Olivier doesn’t have this impulse to apologize for everything. He is not particularly enjoying life
in Paris, but this part of it – the counter-offensive and the quicksilver reaction – seems to come instinctively to him. On weekends, I watch, lost in admiration as he negotiates our
way through the city with steely resolve.

On top of the apologies, there’s something wrong with the way I express myself. It’s not, strictly speaking, the language. I have a good ear and a natural facility and I am fluent in
French: until now, I have always enjoyed how good I am. But now, I am starting to realize, I am not
myself
when I speak French. I’m not funny or clever or fast. I don’t know
how to make the kind of jokes I make in English – blackhearted, self-deprecating ones – and on the odd occasions I have tried to make a joke it has been received with such blankness, I
have stopped trying. I am diffident, wary, slow to voice an opinion. I don’t play with language or enjoy it any more: I just want to pass. This makes an idiot of me: a boring, monotonous
idiot.

Faced with this unedifying image of myself and with the unremitting disapproval of most of Paris, I find myself thinking more sympathetically about expats, the kind of expats who live in an
insulated bubble of Marmite and Robinson’s Lemon Barley Water,
The Archers
on long wave and week-old copies of
The Times
.

I have always felt rather sneery about this kind of expat life – what is the point of living abroad and pretending you don’t? – but I am starting to see how you could draw some
comfort from preserving or recreating elements of home. It need not be all about a myopic insistence that your way is better, or a deliberate, proud display of ignorance. Perhaps, instead, it can
be a way to bolster your eroded sense of identity? The idea that the expat you is a lesser thing – less articulate, less able, less powerful – is hard to avoid, and if you can feel more
yourself by surrounding yourself with the familiar, who am I to question that?

I get a chance to see for myself, when I make a British friend of sorts.

Jill is the first, the only, person apart from the grass-monitoring guards to talk to me in the Parc Monceau. I am walking slowly along one of the alleys in Theo’s wake as he picks up
small stones and keeps up a perplexing monologue about dragons, Louis strapped to my front, when I hear someone speaking English. It is a woman of about my age, short and dark, with a little boy
who must be about Theo’s age, and a baby in a pram. It’s a bit like looking at myself, except she’s Scottish. I sidle closer and start speaking to Theo quite loudly in English,
hoping she’ll overhear.

When she looks over, I smile, tentatively.

‘Are you English?’ she asks me.

‘Yes!’

And just like that, I have an ally.

It’s not that Jill and I become great friends: we don’t have that much in common and we’re both at the frayed, desperate end of our tethers with very little to offer, but
there’s a sort of comfort in that. Jill lives with her kids in a chaotic, messy apartment round the corner from my chaotic, messy apartment. She is married to a French engineer, but he works
in Toulouse and only comes back every six weeks or so. She has been living in Paris for four years already, but she does not seem much more integrated than I am, which is worrying.

‘So, do you know many people round here?’

‘Just the ones in the building, really.’

The inside of her flat is as English as an embassy staff lounge. The boys watch videotapes of CBeebies her parents send across from Aberdeen every week and the coffee table is spread with copies
of
Heat
and
Hello!
When she makes me a cup of tea, she pulls out a packet of chocolate HobNobs with a flourish, like a conjuror bringing out a rabbit from a hat.

‘Shall we watch
EastEnders
?’ she asks me one day when the boys are busy with a game. I agree, and we sit on her saggy sofa and watch Den and Chrissie slog it out on screen
as we nurse mugs of PG Tips. It’s very weird, but undoubtedly comforting.

Jill has dabbled in the expat community, the coffee mornings, NCT groups and bake sales, but she tells me they all happen in the interior-decorated apartments of American bankers’ wives
over on the Left Bank, a tricky multiple métro ride away, and anyway they aren’t places she feels welcome or at home. I understand that and can’t imagine wanting to join in this
world of matching china and playdates, so we form an alliance of convenience. I call her when we are heading to the park and she does the same, then we walk together and chat desultorily about
developmental milestones or where to buy jelly. This isn’t how I ever imagined my social life in Paris but, it turns out, I’m extremely glad of it.

Stopping work barely registered at the time: there was so much else going on, it seemed largely irrelevant, but now, with Louis approaching six months, this is new territory
for me. By the time Theo was this age, I was back in the office, eating canteen cereal at my desk in the mornings, billing hours of spreadsheet crunching tedium, exchanging half-hourly emails full
of gossip and moaning with my favourite colleague Laurie and, most importantly, earning money.

I had no idea earning my own money was important to me until now, when I have none. Nothing we have is mine: I do not even have a bank account of my own here so everything I buy – socks,
deodorant, cakes for lunch – comes from Olivier’s salary and it feels like another part of my identity is being chipped away. It turns out it is very easy to claim that you are
indifferent to money when you have enough of it. I hate not having any: it feels shameful and a bit pathetic.

The temptations to spend money are not that numerous – I am too scared – but my real weak spot is food. At weekends Olivier and I go out down to the beautiful market on the Rue
Poncelet. The market is five minutes from our flat, and I walk through almost daily. It starts off with a trickle of good-looking food shops. There’s a flouncy gilt-fronted traditional bakery
with queues out along the street, an Austrian deli-café with a window full of strudel and sachertorte, a coffee roaster, and the hymn to mould that is the Aléosse cheese shop. After
that the market starts in earnest with stacks of fruit and vegetables: traffic light bright mandarins, velvety purple artichokes, long pale tendrils of frisée and fat green grapes. Round to
the right in Rue Bayen are three huge fish shops tended by wisecracking men in waders and floor-length blue-and-white striped aprons, fussing at their iced display of pink prawns and inky sea
urchins or tending to tanks of crabs and lobsters (spiky prehistoric spider crabs and smooth blue colossi) with claws secured in rubber bands. Opposite the fish shops are a couple of open-fronted
traiteurs
, selling roast chickens and quail and racks of spare ribs, round yellow sauté potatoes and giant terrines.

On my own, I never buy anything. Partly because it intimidates me, but also because everything is terribly expensive: it’s Selfridge’s food hall in disguise. This means that on
weekends with Olivier, I am desperate to go and get lovely things and this leads to a kind of stand-off.

‘Couldn’t we make our own?’ he says, blanching at the prices of lasagne in the Italian deli as we walk through the Saturday morning shopping crowds, and I narrow my eyes at him
or go all coldly polite. I want nice things now and again and perhaps even more than that, I want acceptance from the snotty local shopkeepers. Olivier wants us to live within our limited means. A
fog of unspoken tension sits around us and I can see only one solution: I need to get a job.

This should not be impossible. The whole point of doing European law was so that I could be employable in places other than England, and Paris has plenty of firms doing the kind of work I
specialized in. But my sister has gone back to the UK to prepare for starting university, so before I can even start looking, I need to arrange at least a few hours’ childcare a day.
I’m confident this will not be a problem. French pre-school childcare is famously wonderful, isn’t it? Universal schooling from age two, exquisite three-course meals for toddlers,
smocks, quaintly shaped cursive script.

It isn’t like that for us. French state nurseries are indeed a nirvana of low-cost high-quality full-time childcare, but in Paris the demand for places outweighs availability by a factor
of ten to one and draconian civic regulations mean there is virtually no private childcare provision apart from
nounous
, nannies. We know people who have campaigned daily, at the town
hall, for months on end to try and wangle a nursery place. Olivier’s friend Eric is one of them and has secured prized places for his two children at the nearby Étoile
crèche
. ‘You need,’ he says confidently, ‘to make their lives hell.’

I certainly have the time to do this, if not the temperamental suitability, so I head off to the town hall, the
mairie
, with a file of birth certificates, proofs of residence and health
insurance documentation.

The
mairie
is an ugly 1970s concrete monolith. Inside, it smells of dust and disinfectant and promises the systematic abuse of microscopic amounts of power. I follow some approximate
signage for the ‘
Section Petite Enfance
’ and end up in a dark corridor with a green linoleum floor and large empty offices on either side. I walk, tentatively, from office to
office, looking at the signs on the doors, trying to find the right official. Finally, I track him down to an almost empty open-plan space at the end of the corridor. The desks are oddly configured
in a sort of square, with a high, front-facing counter at which the supplicant (me) stands. I can barely see over the top, but behind it is the top of a dark-haired head, bent over a pile of
paper.

‘Hello?’

No movement. Chastened by my months of reprimands, I wait, meekly uncomplaining. Eventually, after what feels like several minutes but is probably barely thirty seconds, the head lifts slowly,
emerging from a brown roll-neck sweater in the manner of a tortoise cautiously emerging from its shell. It is a middle-aged man looking at me. I smile; he does not.

‘
Bonjour, monsieur
.’

Olivier has impressed on me that this is our big chance to win sympathy and to position ourselves as deserving of the arbitrarily bestowed bounty of a
crèche
place.

‘I would like to, er, enrol my son on the
crèche
waiting list. Is this, er, the right . . . ?’ My voice trails off.

Without speaking, the tortoise extends a hand to the grey filing cabinet that fences him in on the right, opens a drawer and extracts a wodge of papers. With a light slap, he places them on the
counter, a lidless blue Bic on top.

‘You must fill these in.’

‘Great!’ I sound nonsensically happy with my forms, like a simpleton. ‘Can I stay here to do it, or . . . ?’

The tortoise waves a weary hand in a gesture I intuit to mean that if I so please, I can stay. Whatever floats my boat. The head retracts back into the polo neck, out of sight.

I start to fill in the boxes. I am fully prepared, with my file of supporting documents, to provide the required information on my maternal grandparents, blood group and immigration status,
removing each document as required and filling in the relevant box with nerdy satisfaction. I am conscious, however, that I am not actually doing what I promised I would: pleading our case. I need
to man up.