‘All in all, I’d have preferred a chocolate on the pillow,’ said Connie, swatting them away.
‘Perhaps it’s fibres from the carpet,’ I suggested hopefully.
‘It’s everywhere! It’s like the chambermaid’s come in with a sack and strewn it.’
Suddenly weary, I fell backwards onto the bed, and Connie joined me, the covers crackling with static like a Van de Graaf Generator.
‘Why did we choose this place again?’ said Connie.
‘You said it looked quirky on the website. The pictures made you laugh.’
‘Not so funny now. Oh God. Sorry.’
‘No, it’s my fault. I should have looked harder.’
‘Not your fault, Douglas.’
‘I want everything to be right.’
‘It’s fine. We’ll ask them to come and clean again.’
‘What’s French for pubic hair?’
‘I never learnt that. It never came up. Rarely.’
‘I’d say, “Nettoyer tous les cheval intimes, s’il vous plaît.”’
‘Cheveux. Cheval means horse.’ She took my hand. ‘Oh well. We’re not going to be here much.’
‘It’s a place to sleep.’
‘Exactly. A place to sleep.’
I sat upright. ‘Perhaps we should get going.’
‘No, let’s close our eyes. Here.’
She took my hand, rested her head on my shoulder, our legs dangling over the edge as if on a riverbank. ‘Douglas?’
‘Hm?’
‘You know the … conversation.’
‘You want to talk about that now?’
‘No, no, I was going to say, we’re in Paris, it’s a beautiful day, we’re all together as a family. Let’s not talk about it. Let’s wait until after the holiday.’
‘Okay. Fine by me.’
And so the condemned man, presented with his final meal, is reminded that at least the cheesecake is delicious.
We dozed. Fifteen minutes later a text from my son in the adjoining room woke us to say that he intended to ‘do his own thing’ until dinner. We sat up and stretched, brushed our teeth and left. At the reception desk, in French so riddled with errors, guesses and mispronunciation that it was almost a new language, I informed the desk clerk that I was destroyed but there were many strange horses in our salty bedroom, and we walked out into the Paris afternoon.
Connie was still laughing as we crossed from the 7th to the 6th on the sunny side of rue de Grenelle. ‘Where on earth did you learn it?’
‘I’ve sort of made it up myself. Why, what’s wrong with it?’
‘The vocabulary, the accent, the syntax. You always get caught in these est-ce que loops. “It is that it is possible that it is that the taxi to the hotel for to take us?”’
‘Maybe if I’d studied it, like you …’
‘I didn’t study it! I learnt it from French people.’
‘From French boys. From nineteen-year-old French boys.’
‘Exactly. I learnt “not so fast” and “I like you but as a friend”. I learnt “can I have a cigarette?” and “I promise I will write to you”. Ton cœur brisé se réparera rapidement.’
‘Which means …?’
‘Your broken heart will soon mend.’
‘Useful.’
‘Useful when I was twenty-one. Not so much now,’ she said, and the remark lingered a moment as we reached St Germain.
When Connie and I first came here, in the days when we referred to ‘dirty weekends’ without irony, we were dizzy with Paris, drunk on the beauty of the city, drunk on being there together and also, more often than not, literally drunk. Paris was all so … Parisian. I was captivated by the wonderful wrongness of it all — the unfamiliar fonts, the brand names in the supermarket, the dimensions of the bricks and paving stones. Children, really quite small children, speaking fluent French! All that cheese and none of it Cheddar, and nuts in the salad. Look at the chairs in the Jardin du Luxembourg! So much more poised and elegant than the sag and slump of a deckchair. Baguettes! Or ‘French sticks’ as I called them then, to Connie’s amusement. We carried great armfuls of baguettes home on the plane, laughing as we crammed them into the overhead lockers.
But a branch of The Body Shop is much the same worldwide, and sometimes the Boulevard St Germain seems not that far from Oxford Street. Familiarity, globalisation, cheap travel, mere weariness had diluted our sense of foreign-ness. The city was more familiar than we wanted it to be and, as we walked in silence, it seemed some effort would be required to remind her of the fun we used to have, and could have in the future.
‘Pharmacies! What’s with all the pharmacies?’ I said, in my wry, observational tone. ‘How do they all survive? You’d think, from all the pharmacies, they’d be in a constant state of flu. We have phone shops, the French have pharmacies!’
Still she said nothing. Crossing a side street, I noted the gutters were flowing with fast-moving water, sandbags blocking strategic drains. I had always been impressed by this particular innovation in urban hygiene, seemingly unique to Paris. ‘It’s like they’re rinsing out this immense bath,’ I said.
‘Yes, you say that every time we come here. That thing about pharmacies too.’
Did I? I wasn’t aware of having said it before. ‘How many times have we been here now, d’you think?’
‘I don’t know. Five, six.’
‘D’you think you could name them all?’
Connie frowned at the thought. Both of our memories were deteriorating, and in recent years the effort required to recall a name or incident felt almost wearyingly physical, like clearing out an attic. Proper nouns were particularly elusive. Adverbs and adjectives would go next, until we were left with pronouns and imperative verbs. Eat! Walk! Sleep now! Eat! We passed a boulangerie.
‘Look — French sticks!’ I said, and nudged her. Connie looked blank. ‘When we first came to Paris I said, “let’s buy some French sticks” and you laughed and called me provincial. I said that’s what my mother used to call them. My dad thought they were barbaric. “It’s all crust!”’
‘That sounds like your father.’
‘The first time you and I came to Paris, we bought about twenty and carried them back on the plane.’
‘I remember. You told me off for nibbling at the ends.’
‘I’m sure I didn’t “tell you off”.’
‘You said that’s what makes them go stale.’
And we were silent again, turning north towards the Seine.
‘I wonder what Albie’s up to,’ said Connie.
‘He’s asleep, probably.’
‘Well that’s all right. He’s allowed.’
‘Either that or he’s trying to work out why there are no mouldy mugs on the windowsill. He’s probably there now, burning cigarette holes in the curtains. Room service! Bring me three banana skins and an overflowing ashtray …’
‘Douglas — this is precisely what we came here to avoid.’
‘I know. I know.’
And then she slowed and stopped. We were on rue Jacob, standing near a small, somewhat ramshackle hotel.
‘Look. It’s our hotel,’ she said, taking my arm.
‘You remember that.’
‘That trip, I do. Which room was it?’
‘Second floor, on the corner. The yellow curtains. There it is.’