Authors: Sam Baker
I wasn’t ready to be a mother, I was pretty sure Art wasn’t ready to be a father again, and my family sure as hell weren’t ready for me to become a single mother. There was only one choice, and by the time I slid myself back under the sheets next to Art, I’d made it. My only regret was that I hadn’t made it before he came home.
Art was already dressed when I woke, sitting on the bed, staring at me with a smile on his face. He leaned in and kissed my forehead, a blast of his aftershave making my gorge rise. That and the jam-like smear at the edge of my vision told me a migraine was approaching.
‘Wake up, sleepyhead,’ he said. ‘I called the café. They’re keeping us a table.’
The café was on the corner, a zinc and Formica homage to fifties London that was newer than it tried to look but hung with enough original black-and-whites to be interesting. In the week it was full of Soho media types. At the weekend it was used by locals, and people who’d like to call themselves local.
‘Come on,’ Art said. ‘It will do us good.’
I ordered toast, which came with a slab of butter hacked straight from a packet, and Art attacked the full breakfast; stealing a piece of my toast to prop up his baked beans.
‘Been thinking,’ he said. He looked at me, in that fixed-gaze way he’d made a trademark, and I smiled back to confirm I was paying attention.
‘We should get married.’
‘Married?’ I stopped buttering my toast.
‘A child needs a father. A proper father.’ He put down his fork and picked up his tea, Earl Grey but in a solid white builder’s mug. ‘I want to do it right this time. I called Dad first thing and said I was going to propose to you. Mum’s delighted. You know it’s what she wanted. I thought we’d drive down to tell your parents after breakfast.’ He looked at me. ‘If you say yes, obviously.’
He grinned and looked round the café, signalling to the Spanish girl behind the counter that he wanted another cup of tea and I’d have a cappuccino. ‘I know this isn’t the most romantic place to propose …’
I looked at the floor, long overdue a good mop. I wouldn’t want to kneel there either. Not that Art would kneel, not in public, and not for something where he might get knocked back. I could see from his eyes he wasn’t entirely sure he wasn’t going to. He didn’t like embarrassing himself. He didn’t like being embarrassed.
‘Art …’
He looked at me intently.
‘Last night …’
‘God, I’m sorry, babes. It was too much, too hard and way too soon.’ He hesitated. ‘It was a bastard, this time. If I’m honest. The fixer wasn’t any good. The desk kept changing their mind. It’s a bloody mess. We know that. They know that. We’re just not allowed to say it.’
Reaching across the table, Art took my hand. ‘Let me apologise, OK? Please? It won’t happen again. You know I love you. We could be really good together. I mean, we are good. We’re a team.’
His brown eyes were full of remorse. He was right, of course. We were a team. Bigger and better than the sum of our parts. He never tired of saying it.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘OK, yes.’
He grinned his trademark grin and clicked his fingers, not loudly, but just loudly enough for the Spanish girl at the coffee machine to look across and see him make the universal cheque-signing movement of someone who wanted the bill.
‘Great,’ he said. ‘Drink up, and let’s go tell your parents the good news.’
Paris 2011
We married for the best of reasons. At least, I let Art convince me it was the best of reasons. Then the reason went and we remained. Art was furious when I miscarried, even more so than when I told him I was pregnant. As if losing his child was my fault. As if I could have stopped my body rejecting what we’d made. But we’d only been married a few weeks, and already I wasn’t sure that, if Art wanted to try for another, I’d agree.
I threw myself into my work. But each commission I got, every overseas job I took, made Art more tight-lipped and resentful. He hadn’t had a major by-line for a couple of years and that was eating at him. Afghanistan wasn’t the first trip he’d returned from without a front-page story and he was constantly being side-lined in favour of younger, cheaper journalists. Reckless kids with a smartphone, as he put it, who were already on the ground. So when an American news agency asked him to set up a European office for them in Paris, he jumped at it.
The first I knew of it was when I came home to find a brochure from a Parisian estate agent on the kitchen worktop.
‘Surprise!’ Art said, looking more like his old self than he had in months.
I should have been furious. How dare he make such a big decision without even consulting me? But he was so fired up, so much like the Art I’d fallen for, that all I felt was relief. I had been walking on eggshells for months. Making myself as small and invisible as possible so as not to enrage him.
And the truth was, Paris suited me too. I’d been asked to participate in an exhibition there, so I wanted to be close enough to work on it when I wasn’t travelling. It was my first exhibition since Shoreditch. That one had been called
children + naked
and caused outrage until the outraged realised every one of the young refugees in the pictures was clothed. It was their surroundings that were bare, their futures. Back then, back when I still took pictures of people, that was my thing, what I was most proud of. That my photographs showed people naked. Not without clothes. No. They were some of the most wrapped-up people on the planet, but naked before the lens, stripped back to fear, emptiness or resignation. Their nakedness was political, financial. Nudity is a first world luxury. Naked is to be without defence, clothes are not the issue, emotions are.
The exhibition was at the Musée du Luxembourg, one of the city’s smaller museums. It was an exhibition of Female War Photographers Since 1965 and I would have a whole room to myself. In fact, they seemed pleased to get me.
They’d opted for 1965, Art said, so they could shame the Americans with Vietnam, Iraq I and II, and Afghanistan. If they’d chosen 1950, which would have made more sense, they’d have had to include Indo-China and the war in Algeria. The French had behaved every bit as badly as the Americans had ever done in those.
I ignored him. I didn’t care. A week had gone into choosing the best of my photographs. I’d found a photographic printer who let me stand over his machines while he adjusted contrast at my request. Today was the day I delivered my prints to the museum.
I woke before
les enfants des écoles.
A rare occurrence. Usually their squeals from the playground behind our apartment permeated my dreams long before I opened my eyes. But today there was silence. I rolled over and fumbled for my iPhone: 7.45. The cacophony never started until eight when the mamans and the occasional papa delivered their offspring on the way to work.
Art’s side of the bed was empty, but not yet cold. Lying very still, eyes closed, I listened for telltale traces of life in our small apartment. I’d mastered the art of the understatement in the six months we’d been here. It would have been funny if the flat wasn’t so claustrophobic.
Deux pièces,
plus kitchenette and bathroom. With a bath, the estate agent told us several times. Looking from me to Art and back again, expecting approval.
Un bain!
Baths didn’t come cheap in Paris, apparently. If you could even find one. Especially not in a seventeenth-century square just west of Bastille. Film stars lived here, he said, feigning nonchalance. There was even one in the apartment across the hall.
Art had left for work. If he hadn’t, it would be impossible not to hear him, even at his most stealthy. Running water, the groan of our boiler, shoes on rocky tiles. Original, we were told, priceless, not to be damaged at any cost. I listened, just in case; but heard nothing except next-door’s boiler, and a baby wailing below. Always the baby.
Always crying.
Always hungry for something.
There was only one way to escape its wail. I threw back the duvet and dashed across cold tiles to the bathroom, showed my teeth the toothbrush, ran a flannel over my face and avoided looking in the mirror. I knew what I’d see. What I’d seen ever since we’d moved to Paris. Dark circles beneath my eyes, growing daily as sleep became ever more elusive and my migraines more frequent. The last time I’d looked at the clock it was four a.m. Even then, I slept fitfully.
Grabbing my running kit from where I’d dropped it, in a ball in the corner under the basin, I sniffed cautiously at the T-shirt. Not exactly fragrant but it would do. Maybe today, after I’d delivered the photographs, I’d face the laundrette.
The flat was too small for a washing machine. It was too small for a freezer. Even the fridge was tiny. The location, of course, was fabulous, the view into the courtyard below, picture-postcard. We lived right in the ancient heart of the most romantic city in the world. It didn’t seem to be rubbing off.
Ramming my feet into my trainers, I did a circuit of the flat, checking the wonky electrics, turning things off, unplugging. Art was obsessed with the flat’s electrics, their Europeanness being a serious flaw in his eyes. Ditto the plumbing. Satisfied, I double-locked the door, pulled at the handle to be sure, and ran down the sweeping stone staircase, waving to the concierge, who was dusting the banister as I passed.
Almost as soon as the ancient wooden doors – original, they’d survived the revolution according to the letting agent, he didn’t say which one – clicked behind me, my spirits lifted. There was something about the apartment that weighed on me. Not instantly. I usually felt fine when I went to bed, but by the time I woke, assuming I’d slept at all, I could feel its thick stone walls closing in on me. Eight-foot-high ceilings pressing down like a medieval torture chamber. The building had seen a lot in its three-hundred-odd years. I hoped it hadn’t seen that.
Place des Vosges was deserted except for two other runners doing circuits and a street sweeper making a circuit of his own in the opposite direction. I crossed Rue St Antoine and wove through the village of St Paul to approach the Seine. Same route every day. Not at first. Initially I’d felt a moral duty to explore. Then it was a different route, in a different direction, each morning. But then I found this one. Through St Paul and across Île St Louis. I liked it, and that way I saw the same faces each morning. I liked the sense of knowing people but not knowing them. Not exactly disinterested, just Parisienne. Anonymous. I liked that. It was something I’d lost since meeting Art.
‘Bonjour, madame.’
‘Bonjour
.
Comment allez-vous?’
My first locus of the day; on the Pont Marie, where bridge met island. The elderly woman with the kind of chic grey bob I could only dream of waved her hand in greeting before bending awkwardly to scoop the poop of her ill-tempered over-trimmed schnauzer and dropping the bag daintily into her Chanel tote. One day, I would ask to photograph her. One day. Not today. I would see her again tomorrow. And the next day. And many days after, probably. What was the hurry?
On the Left Bank, I took the steps down to the river two at a time and ran along the cobbled quay, feeling my muscles work harder on uneven ground. The walkway teemed with runners and dog walkers. A silent community of early morning movers.
To me, a relative newcomer, Notre Dame rearing above us was spectacular, to them simply wallpaper. Under the next bridge, red setter woman appeared. Mustard Crombie, dark, cropped hair, flanked by two dogs. As usual, Victor, the more relaxed of the animals ran loose, giving me as wide a berth as possible. Hugo – who could not be let off his leash at the best of times, she’d told me a few weeks earlier – strained, desperate to get to me. I jigged backwards, butting up against the wall as he reared, teeth bared.
‘Pardon, madame! Pardon!’
she cried. She couldn’t understand it, she said. Hugo was not a good dog, but he did not behave like this. Every day I ran I saw the red setters. Every day Hugo was the same. They weren’t alone. There were dogs everywhere at that time of morning and to a terrier they gave me a wide berth. But only Hugo ever attacked. It made no sense. Dogs used to love me. Not any more. It had been that way for three or four years now.
Beneath the Pont Neuf, I stretched my hamstrings on the blocks that lined the bank. Two
sapeurs-pompiers
jogged past, neither breaking a sweat, although their pace was twice mine.
‘Bonjour, mademoiselle,’
the dark-haired one called out. Another ritual. Another locus in my day. I smiled, perhaps a little too readily.
‘Bonjour, monsieur.’
His dark eyes crinkled and I could have sworn he winked.
Beyond the
sapeurs-pompiers’
boat, a cluster of houseboats was waking up. An elderly woman and young girl sat shrouded in blankets on a deck, clutching steaming mugs, as they stared across to the Right Bank in companionable silence. At the furthest point of Île de la Cité two lovers sat, locked in embrace. I glanced at my watch. Nine a.m. Either an early morning rendezvous or very, very late. Feelings surged up inside me. Squashing them, I ran on.
At the Pont d’Amour I took the stairs up to the road and slowed to a jog as I crossed the bridge of locks. I don’t know when the lock thing started but now the bridge was weighed down with them. Heavy with the hopes and expectations of a million lovers.
It wasn’t hard to see why. What was love without superstition?