Before he stuck up a sign banning le camera à l’intérieur, and subsequently le iPhone and encore plus, le baton de selfie, I was captured in the background of a thousand photographs, sitting behind the counter reading new releases or looking at the slice of the river visible between buildings if the only new releases were crime or magical realism.
*
Peregrine was the first person who visited me in Paris and, apart from Ingrid, the person who visited me most, only ever for the day, arriving before noon and leaving late. We would meet at a restaurant, Peregrine preferring one that had just lost a Michelin star because he considered it an easy form of charity, bucking someone up simply by lunching and, he said, in Paris it was the only guarantee of attentive service. Whatever time of year it was, we walked to the Tuileries afterwards and from there along the river and up into the Marais, avoiding the Centre Pompidou because the architecture depressed him, and on to the Picasso Museum, staying until Peregrine said it was time to find somewhere louche to drink Dubonnet before dinner.
I measured out my time in Paris by Peregrine’s visits. Probably he knew because he would never leave without telling me when he planned to return. And he always came in September, on what he called the anniversary of my sacking – by Jonathan, not by the magazine.
I was happy whenever I was with him, even on those anniversaries, except for the year I was about to turn thirty. Entering the forecourt of the museum, Peregrine said that he had been finding my behaviour all day somewhat challenging. Thus, instead of going inside, we were going to walk all the way back and he would describe his life at precisely my age; since I would find it a very grim picture, he said, I might stop feeling so despondent about mine and walking with dreadful rounded shoulders.
On the street again, Peregrine brushed his coatsleeves then said alright, well, and we started walking. ‘Let us think. My wife had just given me the boot, having found out that my tastes ran in a different direction and while Diana set about making sure I’d get none of our money or see the children again, I moved to London, into the awfulest room in Soho, became partial to various substances and was, in consequence, given the heave-ho by my magazine at the time. I was out of money in a day and forced to return to my family seat in Gloucestershire, where I was very much unwelcome, both personally and as one of my kind, and there followed the nervous collapse. What do you think?’
I told him it was quite a grim picture and I was sorry that he had been through it, and sorry that I had never asked him about any life he’d lived before the present one.
He said yes. ‘However, the benefit of exile – one was forced to clean up one’s act because Quaaludes simply could not be got in Tewkesbury in 1970.’
I said, ‘Like pesto,’ and put my shoulders back. Peregrine took my arm and we kept going.
*
Usually we parted outside the Gare du Nord but I did not want him to leave, and asked if I could go inside with him and wait until his train. We stood at a café counter and I told him that, although I was ashamed about it, sometimes I missed Jonathan. I hadn’t told anyone else.
He said there was no shame in it, none at all. ‘Even now I find myself recalling the years I was married to Diana with immense nostalgia.’ He sipped the coffee, set it down and said, ‘Per the original Greek definition of course, which is utterly unrelated to the way members of the public use it to describe how they feel recounting their school days.’ Peregrine looked at the clock and put money from his breast pocket on the counter. ‘Nostos, Martha, returning home. Algos, pain. Nostalgia is the suffering caused by our unappeased yearning to return.’ Whether or not, he said, the home we long for ever existed. At the gate to his platform, Peregrine kissed me on both cheeks and said, ‘November,’ and I knew it would be my birthday.
*
In between: I loved Paris, the view out of the pied-à-terre window, of zinc roofs and terracotta chimneys and tangled power lines. I loved living alone after the months at Goldhawk Road. I spoke to my father on weekends and Ingrid every morning as I walked to a café on the corner to get breakfast. I started writing a different novel.
And I hated Paris, the pied-à-terre’s red linoleum floor and the communal bathroom at the end of a dark passage. I was so lonely without my father, without the noise of Nicholas and Oliver and Patrick to listen to as I tried to sleep, without Ingrid. I hadn’t been there very long when she called and told me that Patrick had started dating Jessamine, which she found hilarious and I didn’t for reasons I couldn’t explain. But afterwards, the novel kept setting itself at Goldhawk Road and the protagonist, who I had made a man so it couldn’t be me, kept becoming Patrick instead. And then there was a girl. Everything that happened to her happened unexpectedly, and no matter what I did, she never seemed to be anywhere except on the stairs.