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Authors: Kate Taylor
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corridor. On the orange-tiled platform
Direction Nation
, where the train reaches a terminus before starting back down towards the Left Bank, it disgorges passengers onto the right track before opening doors to receive new ones from the left. If you time your arrival carefully enough, you can elude a pursuer by running right through a car during the few moments when the doors are open on both sides. Even better if he manages to get onto the train only to have the exit doors across from him slam in his face. Turning to go back the way he has come, he will find those doors closing too, and while his prey laughs delightedly in the background, he will be carried down the line to the next stop, Kléber.
I have pulled off that trick on at least one occasion, but David is no fool and times his quick passage through the doors correctly, catching up with me on the other side. He tags me with a hand on my arm and keeps hold of me, panting heavily with the exertion of the game and unsure what to do with his prize.
Sylvie, the instigator of the afternoon’s activities, rounds a corner from the other direction, calling my name in French:
“Marie, Marie.”
I am Marie, after my grandmothers—Mary, a shrunken little Englishwoman hidden away in an old-age home in Liverpool, and Marie, an elegant Quebec dowager retired to a cottage on the shores of a Laurentide lake. Marie is justFrench for Mary, the Virgin’s name, a plain enough label in English, slightly prettified by its rendition in French as
marie
. But say it in English—mu-ree—and it’s a silly, pretentious little name that makes me think of the tunes from American musicals that my father whistles, or of a bleach-blonde hairdresser in a Liverpool beauty shop I once visited, under protest, with my mother. I am
Marie
, but would rather not be Marie.
My father’s family sailed to Canada from Normandy in 1690, at least that is what
Grand-mère
says. My father reversed the voyage in 1960, making a young Quebecker’s pilgrimage to the motherland and stopping in Paris. He met my mother in a gallery of medieval ivories at the Louvre, and fell in love with a hesitant young Englishwoman who spoke bad French and worked as a nanny for a Parisian family. They were married within a year, and stayed in Paris, partly out of romanticism and partly as the first of my father’s many concessions to my mother’s desires. She wanted to remain close to her family in England, and so they compromised on France: his language, her side of the Atlantic.
At home, the three of us speak together in English. My mother trips along in the proper middle-class accent she was taught in her Catholic day school; my father offers a flawless version of the flat North American tones he learned from
les Anglais
of his youth in Montreal. My accent hovers in between. My mother calls it mid-Atlantic and I have an image of a rocky island somewhere west of Britain filled with people who speak English the way I do. In French there is no choice. The soft, sweet drawl of my father’s Canadian tongue is an impossibility. I speak as my Parisian classmates do, with unctuous u’s, rolled r’s and
t’s
spat out like orange pits.
We live in France like permanent tourists, forever visiting, noting and distinguishing, savouring the culture yet holding ourselves aloof. “In England…” my mother will begin, as she remarks on a difference in custom or habit—the hour at which people eat or the age at which they marry. “Now, there’s something you’d never see in Canada,” my father will pronounce at the sight of everything from a Gothic cathedral to a boy pissing in the street. Our weekends and holidays are filled with museums, churches, and castles, as though perhaps our stay in this fascinating place would not last forever. My father sells antiques; my mother practises self-improvement; all three of us, we believe in art.
And so it is that a hundred French villages will live forever in my mind’s eye. Shaded
Direction Nation
, where the train reaches a terminus before starting back down towards the Left Bank, it disgorges passengers onto the right track before opening doors to receive new ones from the left. If you time your arrival carefully enough, you can elude a pursuer by running right through a car during the few moments when the doors are open on both sides. Even better if he manages to get onto the train only to have the exit doors across from him slam in his face. Turning to go back the way he has come, he will find those doors closing too, and while his prey laughs delightedly in the background, he will be carried down the line to the next stop, Kléber.
I have pulled off that trick on at least one occasion, but David is no fool and times his quick passage through the doors correctly, catching up with me on the other side. He tags me with a hand on my arm and keeps hold of me, panting heavily with the exertion of the game and unsure what to do with his prize.
Sylvie, the instigator of the afternoon’s activities, rounds a corner from the other direction, calling my name in French:
“Marie, Marie.”
I am Marie, after my grandmothers—Mary, a shrunken little Englishwoman hidden away in an old-age home in Liverpool, and Marie, an elegant Quebec dowager retired to a cottage on the shores of a Laurentide lake. Marie is justFrench for Mary, the Virgin’s name, a plain enough label in English, slightly prettified by its rendition in French as
marie
. But say it in English—mu-ree—and it’s a silly, pretentious little name that makes me think of the tunes from American musicals that my father whistles, or of a bleach-blonde hairdresser in a Liverpool beauty shop I once visited, under protest, with my mother. I am
Marie
, but would rather not be Marie.
My father’s family sailed to Canada from Normandy in 1690, at least that is what
Grand-mère
says. My father reversed the voyage in 1960, making a young Quebecker’s pilgrimage to the motherland and stopping in Paris. He met my mother in a gallery of medieval ivories at the Louvre, and fell in love with a hesitant young Englishwoman who spoke bad French and worked as a nanny for a Parisian family. They were married within a year, and stayed in Paris, partly out of romanticism and partly as the first of my father’s many concessions to my mother’s desires. She wanted to remain close to her family in England, and so they compromised on France: his language, her side of the Atlantic.
At home, the three of us speak together in English. My mother trips along in the proper middle-class accent she was taught in her Catholic day school; my father offers a flawless version of the flat North American tones he learned from
les Anglais
of his youth in Montreal. My accent hovers in between. My mother calls it mid-Atlantic and I have an image of a rocky island somewhere west of Britain filled with people who speak English the way I do. In French there is no choice. The soft, sweet drawl of my father’s Canadian tongue is an impossibility. I speak as my Parisian classmates do, with unctuous u’s, rolled r’s and
t’s
spat out like orange pits.
We live in France like permanent tourists, forever visiting, noting and distinguishing, savouring the culture yet holding ourselves aloof. “In England…” my mother will begin, as she remarks on a difference in custom or habit—the hour at which people eat or the age at which they marry. “Now, there’s something you’d never see in Canada,” my father will pronounce at the sight of everything from a Gothic cathedral to a boy pissing in the street. Our weekends and holidays are filled with museums, churches, and castles, as though perhaps our stay in this fascinating place would not last forever. My father sells antiques; my mother practises self-improvement; all three of us, we believe in art.
And so it is that a hundred French villages will live forever in my mind’s eye. Shaded
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