We'll Always Have Paris Read Free Page B

juvenile sniggering. Aurélie’s return trip to England does not seem to affect her anything like as deeply, either. We take her to a damp National Trust cottage in the Lake District,
where we introduce her to our traditional holiday pursuits: long, sodden walks, the occasional visit to a tearoom and a great deal of solitary reading, occasionally punctuated by a hysterical (to
us) game of Racing Demon. Each morning, Aurélie rows gloomily across the lake in the mist to maintain her ‘
poitrine
’. She seems distinctly less excited than the rest of
the family by the momentous discovery of a dead mole by the back door, or by the large tick lodged in my sister’s shoulder. She does, however, learn that ‘
cagoule
’ has
another meaning in English, so the trip is not entirely wasted from an educational perspective. On our return to York, we take her to the newly opened multiplex cinema, and to my friends’
houses for viewings of
Single White Female
and Spar popcorn. My male friends stare at her in open lust, a fact Aurélie accepts with a total and complacent absence of surprise. It is
true that she is magnificent. The problem is that she is also very boring. We part without regret at the end of her stay and soon our correspondence dies an inevitable death.
    For me, however, the die is cast. Casablanca, Aurélie and Karim have shown me the transformative power of abroad: being in another place and speaking another language has allowed me to be
someone else entirely. If my identity can be up for grabs in this unexpected and welcome fashion, then I can pursue my plan with every expectation of success: I will become French.

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1, 2, 3 Soleil
    When my placement comes through for my
assistante-
ship, my stepfather Joe looks it up in our huge
Times
atlas and shows me, then I laugh, hollowly. Madame
Cockroft would be happy: I am going to sodding Normandy. Will my knowledge of the nuclear power stations and cheeses, the industrial hinterland of the port of Le Havre and the meadowlands of the
Pays de Caux finally be put to good use?
    I am going to be a classroom assistant in a secondary school on my year off and the school to which I have been assigned is in Canteleu, on the outskirts of Rouen in Normandy. Joe, who likes a
task, researches Canteleu, cycling down to the library, returning with several reference volumes plus the collected works of Guy de Maupassant and Flaubert, both of whom have Normandy connections.
Flaubert’s house is actually on the outskirts of Canteleu it transpires, and has an illustrious literary past, having welcomed Zola, Turgenev and George Sand among others. Canteleu was a
pretty, bucolic Normandy hamlet back then, a short carriage trip from Rouen. Emile Zola, attending Flaubert’s funeral, describes it as ‘
un coin touffu de la grasse Normandie qui
verdoie dans une nappe de soleil
’, a densely planted corner of fertile Normandy, blossoming under a carpet of sun. Modern Canteleu is a whole other story, as I will soon discover.
    I arrive in Rouen by train on a Sunday afternoon in January after a two-day induction course during which I learn nothing, except that red wine is fantastically, improbably cheap in Paris and
that no one here cares if I am old enough to drink it. It’s sort of terrifying the way we are all just left to our own devices to find our way to our schools, but I manage to acquire a ticket
and find a train (no one else is heading in my direction, since most of the other
assistantes
are based down south). Sitting by the window, I watch as the Paris
banlieues
give way
to orchards and farmland, and I track the wide meandering willow-lined course of the Seine. As we near Rouen, the fields give way again to several miles of flat industrial wasteland, illuminated in
the gathering darkness. When I alight, uneasily, at the station the English teacher, Madame Martine, is waiting for me, as arranged. She is a wispy woman in her fifties in a brown roll-neck, with
an air