Chapter 29 – in which our heroine listens to a lot of sad music, has a good cry, puts Gloria Gaynor on the CD player, and jolly well gets on with it

No, Delilah, there hasn’t actually been any Gloria Gaynor, surely, for I remember Lars emailed, when I was in a rough spot some three years ago: “Whatever you do, don’t listen to ‘I Will Survive’ – it’s a trap.” And there hasn’t been any moping around to sad music either – just a good, hearty dose of Lily Allen, with a Rilo Kiley cherry to top it off.

When the going gets tough, it appears, the tough get sweaty. Harking back to the coping mechanisms I adopted once upon a time – remember? The rough spot? Some three years ago? – the regimes are back in place: free weights and swimming on alternate days, oh, how I walk around now, in an aura of chlorine.

I spent the weekend with familiar faces, which did everything to make the city cheerier, and last night had Nora over for dinner –

(she saw the Lily Allen CD cover on the kitchen counter and said: “Who are you?” “Excoriate!” I said, “Excoriate!” but you cannot, because the Lily Allen album is good like silver lightning bolts and running in the streets)

– whereupon the chicken-chorizo paella was hot and bubbly and a success enough for three servings each.

Other small successes, none hot and bubbly:

• Not accepting £8.25 as an hourly rate for substantial editorial work. I want this job, but £8.25 is less than what I was being paid a year ago, as a temp around town, for answering phones or filing papers in alphabetical order. Negotiations are continuing. Truly, I am an Astute Businesswoman, and this seems an appropriate place to point out that some years ago I won a plastic typewriter on eBay once for seventy-five cents; the shipping was $12.95.

• Thinking about what else I want to do with myself, and realising that the idea of me as a travel writer seems both achievable and happy-making. The happy-making part is clear; the achievable part will need some work. Anyone know someone on the lookout for a girl with her iBook and her passport at the ready?

• Calling my electricity company and switching – you can do it too! It’s fun and it’s easy! – to the green tariff.

In other news, the boy arrives on the Eurostar in fifty-four minutes with the rest of his clothes and a proper stereo system, and a one-person household doubles in population. There is a bag of crumpets on the kitchen counter, because he likes crumpets.

We walked in the gardens, in Paris, in the Jardin des Plantes and in the Jardin du Luxembourg, we were free and easy and had pain au lait sandwiches and walked in the gardens while the statues bloomed in the late summer sun.



We had lunch dates in the middle of the week, because we could, with spicy salads and pink bean soups at the Pré Verre one day – “I had the soupe de haricots roses,” I said to Maud, and she said, “You ordered it because it was pink!” “Mmmyes?” I said, and I wondered how she’d known – or a brick au chèvre on a mound of green. The goat cheese was tinged with honey and mint, and hot, still, from the oven. That afternoon, at Café Léa, with Panda and Bastien, the boys were sneakers and five-o’clock shadows while deep pink petals fell on us from an upstairs balcony. The waitress brought out four small glasses of espressos later, on a slim silver tray. There were chocolate-covered almonds, too, one for each of us and two for me.



Another day we went for a fancy tea, like Japanese ladies, and I know I have said it before but it is not slight against the Japanese ladies, for, O!, to be a Japanese lady! In the cool insides at rue du Bourg Tibourg, we were sat just next to the selection of little baked somethings at Mariage Frères. “Y’a une Japonaise,” I said, as a Japanese lady came in for afternoon tea, and then, minutes later, as another crossed the tea salon threshold, “y’a une Japonaise.” “Y’a,” I said, when the next appeared, “une Japonaise.”



Sometimes we were out and about, for there was a city to see, after all, and I had a list – bouquinistes, I’d written in my notebook, Beaubourg and Palais de Tokyo, and Monoprix ; and sometimes we stayed in, comfortable on a collection of cushions under the little orange lampshade, while the wide, wild West of Jim Harrison’s Dalva thundered and sprawled about me.



At Hughes’s one night there were frozen pizzas and raspberry vodka-champagne cocktails, and at Maud’s one day there was a buttery brioche and pots of jams. Another day at Maud’s, a Sunday, there was a whole spread of teatime treats. We sat outside under the fig tree while her tea party guests tried, one after another, to convince her to convert her sunken backyard into a pool. “Ce sont de mauvaises idées,” she said, pleading for reason, but in our minds we were already inviting ourselves over to dip our feet into the crystal clear.



There was a sense, already, in Paris, even with the sun hot on the backs of our necks, that we were smiling and squinting into the last days of summer. The signs in all the shops greeted us, heartily, with a jaunty “Bonne rentrée !”, while the groups of schoolkids gathering outside the sandwich shops in the midafternoon made it clear a new season, a new year, was underfoot. I’m not sure I understood that feeling, though, of the greyness creeping in, though I remember now there was that day the sun hid, and there was a bite in the air, and I remember I groped about, in my mind, in a muddled discontent. My body seized up the day we came back to London, and I retreated under white sheets to close my eyes and breathe deeply.

“It feels a little weird to be here,” I emailed Hens. “A bit of a sense of, one year’s gone by and I’m in the same place I was a year ago – unemployed, visa questions still up in the air...” “Am seeing Nai for a coffee this afternoon,” I wrote, “which will be nice, and which will not be exactly the same as one year ago, since I didn’t know him one year ago. Which means, essentially, that what I have to show for one year in London is...Nai.”

Thing is, it’s a pretty nice feeling having Nai to show for one year in London – Nai and Marc and Emily and Dan, Suz and Hens, so many cakes and parties and general sitting around and nattering, and those days when it seemed like things were always good. Nai and Marc and Emily and Dan, the posse has – I didn’t expect it, but it turned out A-plus – always been easy like skipping down the stairway to a sun-filled street. Work-wise, though, I’m pissed off and tired because people told me London was going to be difficult before I got here, and I brushed them off thinking I was better than that. Maybe the joke’s on me, then, because oh, hell’s bells, has London been difficult. Trying to find a job that means something has felt like hitting my head against a brick wall every day for a year. I wonder when it’s time to stop trying, and I wonder if the time is now.



It feels like I’ve been walking about with all nerves exposed for days, when really I haven’t even been back a week. There have been many cups of tea, which has been quiet and helpful. Late Wednesday, at the Elk in the Woods, I cupped a mug of mint tea on a gilt-edged saucer. Late Friday, with girls from home, I sipped a cup of peppermint tea to go with a strawberry crostata. This afternoon we shared a pot of a pleasing blue tea, Emily and me, at Yauatcha. There was a three-mushroom cheong fun, too, and fingers of sweet pickled cucumbers. There are times I think that if I stop trying to jam the pieces into place, the puzzle will sort itself out.

London again. A month away made me forget where the dishes are. I mean, OK, kitchen, but where in the kitchen?

We got back yesterday afternoon – no bills! and a month of weekly magazine subscriptions! – and I fell asleep almost immediately. We went for a gander around the neighbourhood later, and it kept taking a second longer than usual to remember if we needed to turn left or right. We found our way to Earlham, finally, and I said, “This could be...great?” “This is weird right now,” I said, “but it could be great.”

I don’t know if it is weariness or ambivalence or all of it that is colouring the general apprehension about facing London again. A month of holidays sure puts you out of touch with the daily grind. Plus, the daily grind has ground itself anew: Maison Bertaux, the crumbly old teahouse that’s, seemingly, been on Greek Street for a hundred years, has opened a bright white half-teahouse in the shop space next to the original. “Um,” I said as we came up to it, and “Oh,” I said as we passed it, and “Well,” I said as we walked by, my head still turned in surprise.

Also, there are two new free newspapers being handed out by earnest paperboys all over town. Olive spent the evening doing an explication de texte on each of them – “So trashy!” he would say, breaking his silent concentration – before he said, concluding: “London Lite is better than The London Paper – it has more gossip.”

This morning I am still hovering in that half-space between Paris and London, but I understand there is a bank overdraft of five pounds eighty I need to go deal with.

“Would you be sad,” I said to the boy, “if I blogged this photo?” and he came over to look over my shoulder. “Mon sublime torse,” he said, considering. “Mon beau caleçon, chuis en train de lire mon bouquin de Romain Gary.” “Vas-y,” he said, “blog it.”

Boys. They know things, some of them, and some of the things they know are how to jump thin-sliced potatoes and string beans in a pan with bits of onions burnt like sugar.

We are trying, these days – and really there is only today left – to eat all the food in the house before we leave.



The giant chèvre went towards a goat cheese and tomato tart. We thought there would be leftovers, but we ate the whole thing while France scored three goals against Italy in the football Wednesday.

We unearthed, in the freezer, (Olive’s stepmother has a penchant for frozen foods), (few of them ice cream), turkey fillets for a mustard–crème fraîche stir-fry and cauliflower florets for sauté-ing in butter. We haven’t done too badly, altogether, with the surprises in the deep-freeze, but I think the frozen blocks of cream-flavoured spinach are going to have to go in the bin.

What I want to know, though, is how many cans of tuna a kitchen cupboard can hide. We had a tuna salad one afternoon, and then another. We are having penne in a tuna-tinged sauce tonight. There are – remember the salad! Remember the salamo! – tuna leftovers still for the train tomorrow.

This just in! – and oh, is this, this sweet, instant gratification, what it’s like to live on a twenty-four-hour news channel – This just in!: The boy has just cleaned us out of chorizo.

Upstairs there’s Suzon, whom everyone calls Mamoun; and Annie, who invited us for a drink; and Johnny, who’s a cat. Annie upstairs invited us for a drink on their cool-tiled terrace, so we took the stone steps up with a plate of cake.

Suzon is ninety-nine this year. Her hair is white and wispy all over. She remembers being in Northampton in 1965.

Annie – (she is a daughter. There are other daughters, even daughters of daughters – it gets that way when one is ninety-nine.) –

Annie punctuates her sentences with drags on thin brown cigarettes that smell like cigars. “Je me suis mariée tôt,” she says. Drag. “Trop tôt.” Grin. When she got married – the first time, anway – she told her father she wasn’t having the wedding in church. “Your husband,” he said, a staunch Catholic, “will always be to me your concubine; your children bastards.” She laughed, Annie did. Her father went to her civil ceremony. He went on to love her husband. He loved her children.

They found an old family photo album recently. “Dans la famille,” Annie said, “il y avait de jolies femmes.” She smoked. “Pas toutes.” “Il y avait aussi,” she said, “de jolis hommes.” Smile. Drag. Grin. “Pas tous.”

She has a laugh like someone who has long smoked thin brown cigarettes that smell like cigars. Her terrace looks out over ours, over the sea.

We went for a walk in the gardens at the Domaine du Rayol. I packed two coconut macaroons for just-in-case.



Someone lived here, once upon a time, several someones, in the big house, where they had dinners, probably, silverware and candles, and white dresses. There’s a beach house, too, with steps down to the sand, and a gardener’s house with vines growing over the doors. They have a hunting house, where once upon a time there were rifles, probably, and leather stained a deep brown from use.



They’ve organised the grounds now for a walk-about among the gardens of the world. There are cacti now – I don’t know if there were cacti then – and banana trees and palms like home. Surprisingly, there were very few bugs that bit.



We strolled in the shade of the great, sweet-smelling eucalypti. We took the dirt and stone path all the way to the edge of the world, where the trees leaned over the shimmering sea. Water like this on a day like this, you want to float on your back all the way till the never-end.

I’d wondered if, after a week and some of the parents – adults, you know – around all the time, if we would turn, in our sudden solitude, savage; if we would fight each other for the last Coco Pops cereal bar left in the pantry; if, in stinking rags, we would burn the house down and dance around the bonfire.

Turns out the house is still standing, we do the laundry and hang it out to dry under the low fig tree, and we make tarts, sweet and savoury. There is ratatouille tasty one night and tastier the next. On Mondays or Wednesdays, there may be pizza from the big red van, down in the village, next to the petanque players. The pizza is made, in his big red van, by the ex-village postman. He has a wife, a belly and a wood-burning fire in his van, this last of which sounds like just about time for the lights and sirens to start flashing “Danger, Will Robinson!” but maybe living by the sea plays down such incendiary imaginings. I suppose the man could just drive straight into the water, should things go awry.

The tarts, the ratatouille, the thin-crust pizza – and I have just found lamb steaks in the freezer! – plus, there are yoghurt and fresh peaches at breakfast, or figs and Fjords after dinner. I don’t know what a Fjord is, exactly – it is a cousin of yoghurt, clearly, but other than that, well. The little Fjord pot reads “spécialité laitière” – “dairy product”, essentially, or, if accompanied by spirit fingers, “dairy specialty” – which is not so much help, and the only other hint is the picture, on the peel-off top, of two men dressed as penguins. What?, French people, what? I have the special yoghurt-like tendencies, I have the penguins, but I cannot tell you more. Olive’s father and stepmother left the fridge full of Fjords before they parted for the big city sometime last week. While they were still here, though, the stepmother would say, after dinner: “Quelqu’un veut un dessert ?” Her hands were usually clasped, at this point. She was calm, always, and I realise now what I couldn’t quite put my finger on then – the strange something in the air – it was that she was without the excitement dessert usually brings. “Quelqu’un veut un dessert ?”, she would say, then she would pause before saying: “Moi, je voudrais un Fjord.”

I tell you what, I’m not denigrating the Fjord – the Fjord is nice and all, it goes very well with fig jam or a slice of banana tart – but the Fjord, he is no Tropézienne.



The Tropézienne you get from Filigheddu the boulangerie-pâtisserie. You stop on the way down to the beach, you tell the nice lady to reserve you one for the way back up, you pick it up in a pink box on the way back up. Later, up the hill, after post-beach showers, you eat it cold from the fridge. The Tropézienne is pastry and cream, see, so you eat it cold from the fridge. You eat it sitting down, for if you were standing up you would FALL OVER from the WONDROUSNESS your mouth is experiencing.

It is like a giant chouquette – do you know the chouquette ? – the chouquette is a small ball of pastry with bits of sugar embedded in the top. It is just light enough – for otherwise it would float off into the wind with fairy wildflowers in the summer – and just sweet enough. You cannot have just one chouquette, and they don’t sell them singly, anyway. You buy a paper bag of chouquettes from the nice baker man, you wait in line and hope they don’t sell out by the time you get to the head of the queue –

the Tropézienne, hence, is like a giant chouquette, sliced in half horizontally, and then filled with cream. Cream like clouds, cream like a blanket of clouds. So, okay: a cream sandwich, basically. I know it doesn’t sound like something special, but it is, friends, it is. And it’s not rocket science, but it sure can send a girl to the moon.

We swam out to the float today. There is a float, see, floating, bobbing, all inviting-like. We swam out to the float and clambered on top to sun ourselves. We looked over the edge to watch the fish swim by.



Shit. I mean, COME ON. There’s no fancying it up: the beach is great. It is a little one, but it is all we need. The umbrellas are stripey. The bar sells ice creams. The rocky cliff turns into steps. If we are lucky, (we are lucky), we have remembered to stop at the boulangerie for a raspberry beignet and a raisin snail.

A less lucky day, there were jellyfish instead of jam doughnuts.

Today was not that day: today we swam out to the float and watched the fish swim by. The water is calm and clear these days, clear enough that you can see to the bottom, where it looks like someone – the lobster-in-charge, I assume: he would have a moustache, like someone in charge – has raked the ground clean. The fish were silvery, or maybe it was just the light.

There is always sun, you wake and there is sun. There is sun through the branches of the fig tree, there is sun on the terracotta roofs descending toward the beach, there is sun on the terrace, on the mustard-yellow railing with its metalwork like waves. You watch the sun make its way left to right across the sky, you learn to tell the time of day based on how much sun is left on the wide wooden planks.



Monday we took the train from Paris to the coast. “En direction d’Hyères,” the conductor said at every stop, and I kept thinking he was saying “En direction d’hier” – towards yesterday. Truly we are timeless here, in these hills that are populated only halfway up, the rest of the space rocky and wild. The plants are tenacious, the trees scratchy-barked. Butter-yellow flowers with pointy petals grow straight out of stone. “C’est là où on a vu un sanglier, une fois,” Olive said, pointing to the curve in the road, and I peered up the scrubby slopes for a boar pawing the ground, snorting fire.

I never know what time it is, what day. “On est vendredi aujourd’hui ?” I ask, and the response is a general “Oui, euh, ben, je sais pas, oui.” We wake late, we make a small coffee, we make another small coffee, we stretch. We are summer inside and out, the sun is in us and around us, and there is the water, the sea, the big blue; there is the Mediterranean, deep blue, cobalt, azure, marine – of course – on and on till it turns into sky.



Down at the beach – and it is curious: you have to go uphill to go downhill – but it is worth it, because the walk downhill takes you through the village, with its one restaurant, its one newsagent, its one little boulangerie-pâtisserie, its one littler butcher – and downhill through the village means stopping, on the way, at Filigheddu the boulangerie-pâtisserie for an eggplant fougasse or an almond croissant, or a small paper sack of Smurf-flavoured Haribo –

– and this reminds me that I was talking to Mowmy this morning and she said, “Oh! So it is a really small village.” “Yah,” I said, “small.” “So every morning you go down to the beach and buy fish from the fishermen?” she said, because she is curious in so many ways. “Mmm,” I said, and I liked her very much, “no.” “There is a supermarket,” I said, “a small one.” “Cheh,” she said, “so boring.” –

down, I was saying, at the beach, one of us has a blue towel and the other a red one, we scream and laugh in the waves, and the sea, for all its rich, rippling blueness from up in the hills, drips off our skin, glistening, transparent. There is a painter in Alessandro Baricco’s Océan Mer who paints with sea water. His paintbrush sweeps across the canvas, the wind dries the surface, nothing remains that can be seen.