When I told Peregrine I was writing a book that was constantly turning into a love story set in an ugly house, he said, ‘First novels are autobiography and wish fulfilment. Evidently, one’s got to push all one’s disappointments and unmet desires through the pipes before one can write anything useful.’
I threw the pages out when I got home. But I tried in other ways, and kept trying per Peregrine’s wish for his daughters to be Zelda Fitzgerald, all the time. I walked along the river and spent money, and went to markets and ate cheese out of the paper with my fingers while I wandered around. I painted the pied-à-terre’s walls and covered its floors. I went to the cinema alone and bought dress rehearsal tickets for the ballet. I taught myself to smoke and like snails and went out with any man who asked me.
But I Wikipedia’d the other writer he had mentioned that day at the Orangery – I had not heard of her then – and I read her book, the one set in Paris. More often I was its main character, a woman who lies in a darkened studio thinking about her divorce for 192 pages. Wikipedia said ‘critics thought it well written, but ultimately too depressing’。
And – and so – I learned medical French, by immersion. Je suis très misérable. Un antidépresseur s’il vous pla?t. Ma prescription has run out et c’est le weekend. Le docteur: How often do you feel triste, sans a bonne raison? Toujours, parfois, rarement, jamais? Parfois, parfois. As time wore on, toujours.
*
I went home once, a month or so before I returned to London for good. It was January, wet and dark in Paris when I got back, the shop deserted like it always was between Christmas and Valentine’s Day. The American had gone home for a holiday and I worked there by myself, sitting catatonic behind the counter for hours and hours with a book unread in my lap.
The American came back, unexpectedly betrothed to a man, and fired me because I could not pay for all the books I had made unsaleable by cracking their spines and wetting the pages. I did not want to be in Paris any more. The reason I had gone to London was for Peregrine’s funeral.
He had fallen down the central staircase at the Wallace Collection and died when he struck his head on a marble newel post at the bottom. One of his daughters gave the eulogy and looked earnest when she said it was exactly how he would have wanted to go. I wept, realising how much I loved him, that he was my truest friend, and that his daughter was right. If it hadn’t been him, Peregrine would have been acutely jealous of anyone who got to die dramatically, in public, surrounded by gilt furniture.
On my final day in Paris, I ate oysters at the out-of-favour restaurant he had taken me to on my thirtieth birthday. Walking, afterwards, from the Tuileries to the Picasso Museum, I thought about a time we had said goodbye at the Gare du Nord. It was evening, the sky was violet. Peregrine was wearing a long coat and a silk scarf and after the kiss on both cheeks, he dropped his hat on his head and turned towards the station. The impression of him, walking towards its blackened fa?ade, the crowd of ordinary people parting in front of him, was so sublime I called out his name and he glanced back. Regretting it, even as I spoke, I said, ‘You are very beautiful.’ Peregrine touched the brim of his hat and the last thing he ever said to me was, ‘One does one’s best.’
At the museum, I sat for a long time in front of a painting that was his favourite because, he said, it wasn’t typical and therefore the masses didn’t understand it. Before I left, I wrote on the back of my ticket and when the guard was not looking, I posted it behind the painting. I hope it is still there. It said, ‘A Better Companion Didn’t Exist For Girls, Heartbroken etc. etc.’
The daughters sold the pied-à-terre.
14
INGRID MET ME at the airport, said ‘Bonjour Tristesse,’ and hugged me for a long time. ‘Oh my gosh, I’ve been sitting on that forever.’ She let me go. ‘Hamish is in the car.’ On the way home she told me now that they had picked a date, fucking finally, I had two months to put on, preferably a stone, but even half a one would do. ‘You don’t have to get me a gravy boat as well.’
According to a subsequent visit to conceptioncalculator.com, Ingrid got pregnant for the first time between her April wedding and the cocktail reception that followed at Belgravia. Winsome had every bathroom in the house renovated immediately afterwards, despite only walking in on Ingrid and Hamish in one of them.
Before, in the moment of waiting to go into the church, my sister turned back to me and said, ‘I’m going to do Princess Diana walking.’