Once her birthday has passed, I tell my mother about my investigations and ask if she wants to read the press clippings I have been sent. Like a displeased hen, she expresses surprise with an indignant cluck, before seating herself at my computer, which she is adept at navigating: she checks email daily, has a couple of favourite food and knitting blogs, and prints out her boarding passes.
At first she squints too close to the screen until I enlarge the front page of the newspaper for her. Widened in almost cartoonish child-like curiosity, her eyes travel to the date below the masthead and then back to me in surprise. She had always believed she was two when her parents died, which helped explain her total absence of recall of either of them. But now, it turns out, she was actually five, making her lack of any memory of their presence much more explicable as post-traumatic stress. She had simply blocked them out.
I watch her features rearrange themselves in light of this new knowledge. She reads on, mostly in silence, occasionally muttering in disbelief, making those strangled, guttural noises of disapproval that are so unmistakably French and sound like throat-clearing exercises.
When she finishes she pauses, swallows, sinks a little in the chair before saying with a half-hearted Gallic shrug, ‘I am still angry.’ She does not say, ‘It isn’t fair,’ but that is what I hear. Her life ruined in an instant, and for what?
There is so much to digest. Now I have an address—10 Avenue de la Grande Armée. Now I know that my grandparents had fought, that neighbours reported hearing a violent argument and female cries of distress coming from their third-floor apartment in Clamart, a south-western suburb of Paris that supplied the city with its peas. There, Roger had accused his wife of having an affair. Lucienne had taken their daughter to stay with relatives because she planned to go away.
Roger had discovered her intentions and gone to her workplace, the Pari Mutuel Urbain or PMU as it was known, a newly established horse-racing betting agency. Lucienne had arranged to meet her sister Jeanne Sachs at lunchtime. She had called Jeanne the night before, telling her that Roger was jealous, had accused her of being unfaithful with her brother-in-law and struck her. While he was asleep she had fled with thirty francs, leaving their daughter in the care of her mother-in-law.
When Lucienne emerged from her workplace, she and Roger began to argue violently about the money she had taken. Jeanne saw him draw a revolver and shoot her sister three times before turning the gun on himself. He died instantly. On his body was found a letter addressed to his mother, saying, ‘Forgive me. Everything disgusts me. My wife cheated on me six months ago. I prefer to die and drag the woman I adored with me to her death.’ After giving a bedside statement to police, it took Lucienne three days to die of her wounds at Beaujon Hospital on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. It was chilling to see her quoted in the article, to read her actual version of events.
After a long pause my mother rises from my desk.
‘I think I need to see for myself.’
‘You can,’ I offer, perhaps too quickly.
‘What do you mean?’ asks my mother, looking suspicious, as if she thinks I’m going to suggest we fly to Paris there and then.
‘I mean we could look now, with Google Earth.’
My mother may be computer literate, but she has never used Google Earth.
‘Perhaps the place where it happened is no longer there,’ she says doubtfully, though she knows full well that the street in question is a busy thoroughfare and has driven past it many times. She is hesitating, now that it is possible to look immediately; she is stalling for time, trying to absorb it all. It is too soon.
‘Maybe tomorrow,’ she shrugs and retreats to her room for a nap.
The next day after morning coffee, Mum asks, ‘Can we look?’ Her eyes are shiny with anticipation, her body squirming and fidgeting with impatience in my office chair while, leaning over her shoulder, I key in the street name and number. The avenue is a spoke off the Arc de Triomphe: smart, prosperous, bourgeois.
The image comes up quickly, revealing a corner building. The ground floor, where my grandmother would perhaps have worked, had become a prestige car showroom. The pavement is broad and for the briefest of moments I wonder about the blood that stained it on that day: how much of it there was and how long it took to be washed away by rain and street cleaners. There is a café with a terrace just next door. For a moment I think, as if I am planning a normal outing, ‘That’s where we’ll have a cup of tea when we visit,’ before I correct myself: why on earth would we want to linger there, of all places? I wonder, too, how many streets bear the invisible scars of forgotten brutalities: unmarked graves we walk over heedlessly.
I show my mother how to get a 360-degree view from that corner and how to zoom in and look at the building and the area in front of it from every angle. But soon it makes us feel slightly seasick and we shut the program down. She does not ask to look a second time.
A few months later, we are in Paris together as part of a holiday in Europe. We eat and walk and look in shop windows and go to street markets and watch people from heated terraces, each contentedly nursing an overpriced Kir Royal.
Prompted by reading Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes about his wealthy ancestors, we plan to visit a house near the Parc Monceau that is now a museum dedicated to the life of a Jewish family who lived in similar Proustian opulence.
The Musée Nissim de Camondo is named after the last son in the family of wealthy banker Moïse de Camondo, who built himself a splendid palace at the height of the Belle Epoque, intending to leave it all to his son Nissim. But Nissim was killed in an air battle in 1917. Because his other children showed no interest in the arts, Moïse bequeathed his house and its collection to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. Later, all his relatives died at the hands of the Nazis, leaving no descendants. Like the dodo, the Camondos became extinct.
The exclusive address is not far from where my grandparents’ fate unravelled. If we are to visit, today is the day. I plan a strategy intended to look like a spontaneous afterthought. As the museum has lots of stairs and will be quite arduous, we make the trip easier by taking a taxi instead of the metro. As casually as possible, I mention that we will be near the Avenue de la Grande Armée, as if this were an unexpected bonus.
‘Oh, I know, I know,’ says my mother, huffily resisting being managed.
We visit the museum. Solemn, sad, a melancholy monument to gorgeous taste, the highest social position and dynastic tragedy from which wealth and status were no protection.
Afterwards we sit in a café, glowing with waxy round lights like multiple full moons, drinking dark hot chocolate so thick our spoons stand up in it, watching well-dressed children head for the park on scooters with smart parents dressed in long wool coats the colour of caramel.
‘I thought perhaps on the way home we could ask the taxi driver to go past …’
My mother shrugs her ambivalent assent. ‘Why spoil the day?’ her gesture says.
I feel a little guilty for persisting but if not now, when? My mother is eighty-four and we may never come to Paris again.
We drive up towards the Champs-Elysées, which is festooned with Christmas lights and fibre-optic sparkles that shimmer gaudily in patriotic bleu blanc rouge up the trees. Approaching the avenue where it happened, I ask the taxi driver to slow.
‘Would you like to get out?’ I say to my mother, preparing to ask the driver to wait.
But my mother shakes her head very definitely. At the last minute, as we reach the corner she turns away deliberately, almost defiantly facing the opposite direction, resolute and unblinking, as if, after all these years, she could wipe away the facts simply by refusing to look.
And because I am so busy watching her, keen to harvest the moment for any shards of emotional significance that might endow our stay with an extra layer of meaning and somehow bring us closer, I miss the chance to look until it is too late, the corner just glimpsed as we turn off.
Later, w
hile my mother is reading (on her Kindle, bien sûr) in our Paris apartment, I try to understand her reaction. Reality may be sharper than any image and offer sensations—noise, smell, movement—that Google Earth cannot convey, but she had already seen everything she needed to see in a satellite photo on a laptop twelve thousand miles away.
CHAPTER 9
The dandy
In his heyday as a successful company director, Papa’s wardrobe occupied double the space of my mother’s in a purpose-built dressing room. Never a follower of fashion, he adhered to the more conservative dictates of fine tailoring, and for decades his suits were always cut the same: single-breasted with a double vent at the back. No turn-ups on his trousers, ever. Only the width of his lapels and the slant of his pockets varied by marginal degrees. He also owned 122 Hermès ties. They were a lifelong extravagance and he cared for them so tenderly that he sent them back to the flagship store in Paris to be cleaned, believing no one in London was up to the task.
On school mornings, we had a regular ritual: my father would call me to his dressing room to pick out a tie and pocket handkerchief to complement his suit and shirt. I ran my fingers through the heavy silk twill tongues to make my selection from geometric patterns of animals, knots, flags, stirrups, keys, pennants and heraldic emblems on brilliant backgrounds of burnt orange, crimson, magenta and French navy. Selecting from the matching silk squares, I learned to contrast the kerchief with the tie for greater impact.
Sometimes, Papa would ask me to pick out cufflinks from a suede-lined box on one of the polished timber shelves where he also kept clothes brushes, fine-denier silk socks rolled into a fist and neat piles of cashmere fringed scarves. I’d insert the cufflinks in his starched double cuffs. His initials in gold were favourites, matching other elements of his monogram mania: to him the B logo on Bally shoes was really B for Baum, just as the H buckle on an Hermès leather belt was H for Harry. As if to confirm his identity, he had his initials embroidered on all his shirt pockets.
Although he drew the line at bespoke shoes, he made annual trips to Hong Kong to be measured up for a dozen suits. In the 1970s, he favoured a fabric called sharkskin, which had a greenish sheen when it caught the light, resembling a ripe bruise.
On all but the rarest occasions, Papa dressed formally. The most casual he ever got was wearing a cashmere V-neck sweater or a brushed-cotton checked shirt at weekends. He never owned a T-shirt and despised jeans. His shoes were always city shoes, smart leather loafers and slip-ons that he even wore to the beach and in the snow if he had to, or, when he came to Australia and ventured, under duress, into the bush.
Sometimes on Saturdays, if we had errands to do in the West End, we would divert to Jermyn Street and window-shop the smart menswear vitrines, occasionally venturing into those dark, timber-lined, clubby dens so he could try on a jacket. I loved fingering the bolts of wools and worsteds, the obsequious deference of the tailors with the tape measures around their necks as they took their brisk measurements while trying to wheedle my father into ordering something made to measure: ‘A new overcoat, Sir? A dinner jacket perhaps?’ As I got older, I enjoyed the ambiguity of my identity on these visits, leaving the salesman to speculate: was I the gentleman’s daughter or his much younger girlfriend?
Unusually, my father was as enthusiastic shopping for my mother as for himself, confident enough to do it even when she was not there. On his annual business trip to the US, he would spend half a day at New York’s best department stores, gathering up bulk purchases of nylon stockings, bathing suits, nightdresses, housecoats and blouses, with varying degrees of success. He had louder taste than hers, choosing gaudy patterns that were large and vibrant, when she preferred smaller, less showy prints. He also favoured a touch of the military in details, like epaulettes and frogging for her coats and jackets. Over time she coached him and gave him precise instructions which he grew more and more adept at following. Sometimes he tripped up on size, for which he came up with an ingenious solution: a blow-up doll available in several sizes that could be inflated in front of salesgirls? Happily, such an item was not for sale.
When my mother was present on these sprees, he liked to play the bountiful patriarch: ‘Darling (pronounced Dah-link), if you like it, have several …’ was a common refrain, as he encouraged her to buy three or four pairs of shoes, or several cashmere sweaters or silk blouses in different colours. As a result, my mother always looked immaculate because her clothes suffered little wear and tear.
His one regret when it came to showing off the ornament of his beautiful French wife was not being able to afford to buy her a truly opulent full-length mink coat such as the luscious one that belonged to my flamboyant Italian godmother Luciana. An enthusiastic pioneer of bling, she wore her chocolate-coloured fur dripping with diamonds, even to the little trattoria down the street from her apartment in Venice.
On holiday with Luciana and her laconic Yorkshire husband, I was allowed to play dress-ups with her slinky sequined clothes and jewelled accessories. Accompanying it all with a raucous, macaw laugh and cigarette-infused rasp Luciana taught me can-can high kicks and not to be afraid of a full-length mirror, encouraging me to twirl unselfconsciously, striking vamping poses to work out my best angles. She was the closest thing to pure uncomplicated fun I had ever met in an adult and I adored her. When my parents were with Luciana, her effervescence infected the atmosphere. She was built for laughter with a whisky chaser.
Together in adjoining lavish hotel suites, Luciana and I rehearsed showgirl routines to perform as after-dinner floor shows for the benefit of my parents; childless, she was as much a child as I, refreshingly uninhibited by age when it came to silliness. She told saucy jokes and sprinkled conversation with liberal, genuine ‘mamma mia’s.
I loved to stroke Luciana’s mink, pretending it was a living creature. My mother didn’t care that she did not own one, perfectly content with a shoulder-covering stole, which she wore less frequently as it fell out of fashion. As her sympathy for animal rights increased, she sometimes hissed at women wearing fur in the street or said ‘dégoutant’ (‘disgusting’) loudly within earshot. Though she felt deeply guilty about a pair of sealskin boots, she continued to wear them as an act of penance.
Inexplicably, given his background, my father was enthusiastic about my mother adopting the traditional dress of Austria, which suited her voluptuous, narrow-waisted figure. The Tyrolean dirndl with its fitted low-cut bodice accentuated her ample bosom, while its full skirts concealed her wide hips. He bought her two: a daytime version in black with a white blouse and hausfrau red apron; and a full-length evening version in shades of deep mauve, offset by a necklace of amethysts and turquoise, which she wore to the opera, drawing many an admiring gaze.
Why, when he loathed manifestations of Austrian nationalism so that the sight of a loden coat was enough to make him froth at the mouth with rage, did he encourage her to dress like a chic version of Maria in The Sound of Music? It’s not as if you’d catch him in lederhosen or a boiled wool jacket with contrasting piping, horn buttons and toggles. To this day, the question mystifies us both.
The dirndl was also inflicted on me, reinforcing the notion that I was a doll to be dressed in various costumes. I also owned a painted silk kimono, complete with tortuous Japanese socks with their separate big toe, and absurdly fiddly side fastenings and a stiff cinching obi girdle with a large bow at the back. My mother liked to photograph me in this get-up with my hair pulled into a geisha’s bun, standing near her latest ikebana arrangements, waving a pleated and gilded fan, while balancing on the lacquered wooden shoes that completed the look.
Maman’s dramatic bone structure made her especially suited to hats. She wore a mannish riding bowler, a blue felt trilby, a Cossack-style fur and an assortment of straw hats from Thailand and Mexico. I was less confident but was given little choice. Despite protestations and tears, my mother insisted that I wear a black velvet beret with pompom and grouse feather as a teen. With the beret til
ted at a perilous angle and hooked under one ear, I felt that bloody feather was like an arrow telling the world to look at me when I least wanted attention. But later on I loved rummaging among Maman’s hat boxes, finding the petalled and feathered confection she wore for her wedding. In my twenties I appropriated a fluffy fox-fur toque that made my head look like a chocolate truffle.
My mother’s taste in clothes spanned classic suits and folkloric ethnic wear: heavily embroidered peasant blouses, full skirts, quilted Indian jackets. She loved colourful paisleys and geometric prints but also neat twinsets, fitted jackets and evening wear that showed off her voluptuous cleavage and slim waist. She was elegant and stylish, a bourgeoise soignée, rather than a sexy groovy mum (or what today would so inelegantly be called a MILF).
When younger mums embraced the latest Carnaby Street look, wearing tiny miniskirts with broad belts slung loosely over their hips, with newly Sassoon shagged hair and wet-look patent boots, my mother resisted the fickleness of fashion: her hemlines never rose above the knee. Like any Frenchwoman she knew what her assets were and maximised those while concealing the features she disliked.
Once a year, when we were in the south of France for the summer, my father would take my mother to have a couple of new suits and dresses made at Fernand Desgranges, a second-tier couture house that was more affordable than Chanel. There, he took an active interest in selecting cloth and approving finishes and trims. When it was time for the final fitting to fix my mother’s hems, Papa would appropriate the seamstress’s velvet pin cushion from her wrist and get down on the ground to mark his preferred length, as my mother turned slowly on a raised plinth. I found these sessions excruciatingly boring, but now they are vivid in my mind—the only time I ever saw my father comfortable on the ground (he was useless at picnics), his face tilted upwards in admiration of his chic wife.
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