We'll Always Have Paris (29 page)

Sometimes, when things are good between us, we amuse each other imagining French versions of other television shows.

‘French
Don’t Tell the Bride
– literally just an hour of menu planning.’

‘French
One Born Every Minute
– very boring because a patronizing obstetrician just comes in and orders everyone to have an enema and an epidural.’

‘Then afterwards the midwives lecture you on making sure you have sex with your husband very quickly.’

‘Someone asks about a water birth and everyone laughs uproariously and tells her it’s unhygienic.’

‘French
Apprentice
– no food-based tasks because it would be carnage, with everyone fighting for their own regional interpretation of the sausage.’

My favourite evening distraction is
Nouvelle Star
, a French
X Factor
with an eccentric judging panel composed of the tiny, apoplectic rock journalist Philippe Manoeuvre, 1980s
still-beautiful teen star Lio, gimlet-eyed and rude veteran funk performer Sinclair and my favourite, the pianist André Manoukian. I have something of a crush on Manoukian, who looks like
the tedious pop philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy’s sexier, plumper brother and has a penchant for quoting Roland Barthes at bewildered teenagers. André is my ideal kind of
Frenchman, with his excellent hair and great erudition: he represents what France does best (talking in immensely abstract terms while being sexy). Olivier isn’t really like this.

Olivier is very clever; he’s cleverer than I am. He has done an MBA in a foreign language and fought his way into demanding, highly paid jobs on his wits alone, but we never talk about
literature or art and he can read the same issue of the
Economist
in the evening for three months, because he falls asleep after thirty seconds. He’ll try anything – opera,
performance poetry, probably even Morris dancing – once, but most of the time, he doesn’t share my interests. Now I have the Internet, and I have Madevi, I feel this absence acutely:
how can I share my life with someone who has never read
Scoop
or
Cold Comfort Farm
or
Under Milk Wood
?

My vision of the life of a couple is skewed, I think, by spending too much time reading Simone de Beauvoir’s memoirs. For Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, culture is a joint
enterprise: every other sentence starts ‘
nous lisions
’ (we read). ‘We read Virginia Woolf,’ she says, or ‘We read all the young Russian authors’; then
she and Sartre discuss their reading, spurring each other on to new discoveries, and it all sounds idyllic. This, absurdly romantic a notion as it is, is what I want. It’s the model I know
from childhood too: my stepfather would trap us at the dinner table and read seventy-five lines of some Louis MacNeice something we have said has reminded him of, or some particularly revelatory
passage from Mary Midgley. We glazed over and my mother turned up
The Archers
, but sharing words, poems, thoughts, is how I conceive of a relationship and of a family and I can’t see
how we can achieve that. Failing that,
Nouvelle Star
night is our moment of détente. I put aside my laptop and we watch together, becoming deeply invested in the fate of Cedric,
Amandine and Ycare.

Apart from
Nouvelle Star
, the fun, vivid parts of my life and the sense of connection I crave are increasingly online. There I can be frank and raw and funny, but in real life I am
detached and impatient. All my energies are turned towards the blog and the people I have met through it; that space has become more important than almost anything. Going on the flattering feedback
I get, Internet me is far more likeable than real me: I am brave, or hilarious, the comments say and while I don’t really believe them, it’s gratifying. Nothing I do in my real life
generates this kind of response: my non-Internet friends are few and far between, my family are preoccupied with their own lives, beset by poor health, work and ongoing sadnesses, and I feel quite
strongly, at the moment, that Olivier doesn’t even like me. It’s no surprise, perhaps, that I become ever more dependent on this virtual validation.

It is not just my family that suffers either: my limited (at the best of times) commitment to the law dwindles as writing begins to seem like a real possible alternative career. Journalists and
editors contact me and I start getting commissions to write for magazines. An agent gets in touch to ask if I have ever considered writing a novel. Helen introduces me to her contacts.

Caught up in the excitement of everything, I go a bit off the rails. I don’t have to be a lawyer all my life! I have found something I am genuinely good at and it feels amazing. On top of
that, I have a new, exciting, delightful group of friends who are showing me how much bigger and better my life can be. I interpret these events as an expression of manifold destiny: I am supposed
to be doing this. My French period is over and now it is time for me to reaffirm my Englishness and forge a new life.

With this sense of destiny comes a growing conviction: Olivier and I need to split up. The distance between us has become too great and I don’t have the will to try and bridge it. It seems
suddenly very simple and I am quite, quite determined that it is the right, indeed the only, thing to do.

Splitting up is nothing like it looks in films. I thought we (I) would just decide and then it would be done, but it doesn’t work like that at all, it turns out.

First we get a dog, in the manner of people having a child to save their marriage. I have wanted a dog for such a long time and now I have reduced my hours at work (I am only working two days
now, to concentrate on writing; Olivier has been utterly supportive of this even though it means I am barely earning anything as a result), I can finally do it and Olivier is keen, so we do, on
impulse, in the cold dark days of early January. I collect the puppy from a farmhouse in a gloomy hamlet somewhere north of Amiens: it’s a whippet, that classic signifier of Yorkshire, but a
French whippet, which seems appropriate. The children are thrilled of course and for a couple of weeks we live in a cloud of oxytocin puppy-bonding bliss.

In the longer term the dog, Oscar, does not repair our rift; if anything, he makes things worse. While undeniably sweet, he is also an incontinent, shoe-chewing, demented mess, which is not
exactly what Olivier wants more of in his home. Between the puppy and writing, I devote no time whatsoever to keeping the house from descending into squalor, then when Olivier arrives and casts a
jaded eye around the dirty coffee cups, chewed tennis balls and shredded paper, I am defensive and snappy. When he suggests I could spend less time blogging, I feel a steely resolve not to do
anything of the kind. I’m not trying to provoke him, but the blog feels as vital as oxygen and I just can’t imagine not doing it. Instead I stay up after he goes to bed, writing and
chatting with Madevi until my eyes can’t focus, then sneaking into the bedroom in the dark. I hate where we are – what kind of relationship is this, where I’m playing the mutinous
teenager and he’s the parent? – but I make no attempt to try and improve things. In my head, I’ve already checked out.

We have a proper fight in February, during which we explicitly discuss splitting up (though ‘discuss’ is the wrong word, it’s a mess of fear and anger and not very many words,
both of us circling a black hole), then immediately thereafter, we have to go on a long-arranged skiing holiday with Olivier’s parents, the six of us in a tiny Alpine apartment, where it gets
dark at four. The chaos and upset mean that we forget to bring any clothes. ‘We look,’ I write on the blog, ‘like the survivors of a natural disaster from which fleece was
mysteriously spared.’ In the face of this potentially hideous situation, Olivier and I acquit ourselves pretty admirably. It’s obvious we can’t talk in any serious way, so we are
kind to each other and just get on with things. We have breakfast with Yves and Jacqueline, we dress the boys in their many layers, retrieve forgotten gloves and poles and carry their skis to the
Spartan-inspired École de Ski Française classes (where pick-up time brings an extra frisson, as you are never sure whether they will just leave your child on a mountain to die because
his skis are insufficiently parallel), then we go off and ski ourselves.

Skiing is one of those French things I cannot embrace. The whole business is alien to me: I find the idea of exercise for fun repellent and I have always thought France was fairly enlightened
about this, but skiing seems to be the exception, because here is all of Paris, exported to the Alps in brightly coloured performance fabrics, exercising. I don’t understand how the stylish
French can associate themselves with an activity that requires such awful outfits. Beyond that, my balance is atrocious and the terrible, selfish, non-queue for the ski lifts where everyone jostles
and elbows their way to the front causes me almost physical British person pain. I do not like most of the supposed consolations of skiing, all those queasy cheese-based blow-outs,
tartiflette
,
fondue
and
raclette
, and there is a limit to how much mulled wine I can drink because I need to keep my wits about me to avoid the murderously careless
teenagers on snowboards. I just can’t fake Frenchness here: I ski like a startled crab, stiff with terror as Olivier and his father swish insouciantly past (his mother wisely sticks to
bracing Alpine walks and taking in the sun in a deckchair, trousers rolled up to her knees). Even back in the apartment the combat continues: the constant friction of man-made fibres creates a
crackling halo of static electricity and I get repeated shocks from the metal door handles. I hate skiing. Olivier, of course, is brilliant at it: quite often he’ll ski backwards down a hill
to encourage me as I lurch erratically towards him, whimpering.

But in this hostile environment and at this most awful time, Olivier and I look after each other. We roll our eyes and make jokes, we sneak off for bad, expensive white wine in bars manned by
surly Alpine alcoholics and we take the boys swimming in the horrifyingly cold outdoor pool. When I get tired on the mountains, Olivier waits for me and when I get paralysed with fright in narrow
couloirs
, between rock faces and vertiginous cliffs, with leathery Parisians whooshing past me on every side, he coaxes and encourages me, helps me down, then installs me in a café
with a hot chocolate. Sometimes, when the sun is shining, making the snow sparkle, and we find a quiet slope, I can almost imagine enjoying it. In the evenings, Olivier’s mother cooks and
then there is the usual box of cakes: coffee éclair for Yves, chocolate for Olivier,
flan
for me. There is no wifi, of course, so, chased away by ancient dubbed action films and
wooden home-grown drama series on the TV, I read, while he dozes beside me. It is peaceful and humane and I feel hopeful for us.

But once we get home, the tension ramps up again as we revert to our current, unsustainable norm. I return to the Internet (while we were away my blog was selected as one of
The
Times
’s Top 100, bringing me more attention than ever and a pressure to produce good new material) and Olivier gets frustrated. We also do unhelpful things like go and look at other
houses, as if a bigger garden might fix all our problems.

At this point, I also become infatuated with a married man.

The married man is from the Internet, of course he is, and perhaps more important still, he is English. He emails me via the blog and I email back and we strike up a conversation that becomes,
over a couple of months, more and more flirtatious and intimate. When we finally meet, it is in the almost parodically English setting of Claridge’s bar.

I note the similarities between us, delightedly, both generic and specific. We are more or less the same age; he has two small children, has lost a parent and is married to someone who
isn’t English. But it’s also about the fact that we both grew up watching
Saturday Swap Shop
, drinking Ribena and eating Bourbons. We’re drawn to music by pasty
undernourished northerners with guitars, read the
Guardian
and like football. By the time we meet, I have already been seduced by the self-evident rightness of it, the simplicity of
interacting with someone like this and the neat way our cultural baggage fantails. This, I tell myself, as we trade barbed witticisms, is the kind of person I am supposed to be with. Someone who
gets
me. This is how British people find a mate, with teasing and booze and no discussion of our feelings.

Obviously it would be much more French just to have an affair with the married man and stay together. The national predilection for adultery, from Madame Bovary to Jacques Chirac (who is
famously nicknamed ‘Monsieur 3 minutes, shower included’), is one of the most enduring of French clichés. But, oh, anything but that. For all its beauty (and it is
so
beautiful, especially about rural Normandy: the lacy effect of the dew on cabbages; the silvery bark of the willows reflected in the still, deep water of the river), Madame Bovary is so sad.
It’s desperate really: Emma is a horrible creation. She’s in love with the idea of love and after the initial thrill, disillusionment comes swiftly: nothing ever comes close to her
reading (‘it was all love, lovers, sweethearts, persecuted ladies fainting in lonely pavilions’). I know I could be an Emma, sulky and bored and destructive in my provincial comfort. I
can’t bear to be an Emma, despite my name.

Even so, there seems to be a current of French thinking in which affairs are presented as the enlightened solution to long-term relationships (which are desirable, essential even, but impossible
to sustain). I have read Lucy Wadham’s fascinating and clear-sighted
Secret Life of France
, in which after-dinner orgies and civilized
cinq à sept
arrangements are
the norm for at least a section of the metropolitan bourgeoisie. Adultery is the
cartésienne
way. At one point in our discussions, Olivier even says to me: