Emily, whose words speak to me still

One of the benefits of retiring is that I have, over the last few weeks, renewed my acquaintance with a fascinating woman.

Actually, I think it’s more than a mere acquaintance. I like to think of it much more as a friendship.

It’s a one-sided friendship, I grant you that. Well, it could hardly be any other way. Because Emily, as I like to think of her though she’d be more properly referred to as Emilie, does not include among her stellar qualities – brilliance, drive, generosity – the rather practical one of being alive. In fact, she died well over 250 years ago.

Emily at work

As it happens, even if we had been contemporaries, I doubt my friendship would have been reciprocated. As a member of the French aristocracy, and an outstanding intellectual, she would have been unaware of my existence.

Emily may be one of my friends, but I would not have been one of hers.

None of that stopped me working on a novel based on her life. It takes the form of a confession, from her death bed, in which she reflects on all she has done or failed to do, the things that might have gone better, the things that could have been or actually were disasters. I was fascinated by the subject and got the whole thing written bar perhaps twenty pages some three or four years ago.

Other things then got in the way. Work was one, but that has finished. A different novel also held me up: this is the one where I make space available for Misty, our cat, along with Luci, our first toy poodle, and Toffee, the second and the most turbulent of the three, to express their views. These I have stolen from their diaries, and I’m proud of all three for their achievement: after all, most peoples’ pets can barely hold a pen let alone keep a diary.

The first book of their diary extracts (wittily entitled Through a cat’s eyes and dogs’ tales) is now complete and is only looking for a publisher (I say ‘only’ but that’s a far bigger undertaking, it seems to me, than writing the dratted thing in the first place). 

All three animals with Danielle
One of the illustrations by my daughter-in-law Senada

So now I’ve been able to get back to Emily. 

One of the pleasurable aspects of the book is that I’ve used her voice wherever possible. We have a lot of her correspondence, so I know what she actually said about certain events and people (not necessarily what she thought about them: as the politics of today’s world show, what people say isn’t always what they think).

She also wrote a lot, though she didn’t always publish it. For instance, she kept her Discourse on Happiness strictly to herself in her life, though we’ve published it since.

The best way of making sure of happiness, she argued, was to make it depend entirely on yourself. Study, she says, is the best way to achieve that aim. And yet:

…the passion which can give us our greatest pleasure and make us happiest, leaves our happiness entirely dependent on others: you understand that I am talking about love. This passion is perhaps the only one that can make us desire life, and make us grateful to the creator of nature, whoever he might be, for giving us our existence.

Emily had such a passion. The one great love of her life, among many other lesser ones, was for the most celebrated wit and polemicist of their time, Voltaire. But:

I don’t know however whether love has ever brought together two people made for each other to such a point that they would never feel the surfeit of pleasure, or the cooling to which ease and security lead, nor the indolence and half-heartedness which arise from familiarity and the long continuance of a relationship

That was the fate of her bond with Voltaire. Towards the end of her life, they were both indulging in affairs with others. Indeed, she fell pregnant at 42, a dangerous age at that time, as a result of an infatuation for a much younger and entirely inappropriate man. She died as result of an infection associated with childbirth.

Hence the death bed with which my novel starts. But it’s striking that gathered around it, as well as the young man who’d fathered the newborn daughter, there were her husband, always a loyal and supportive friend to her, and, whatever cooling there may have been in their relations, Voltaire, grieving his coming loss.

They remained attached to the end, then. Though Emily was clear that it was she who ensured that was so. There are loves so great, she tells us, that there’s never more than one in a century. Hers was one of those. And it persisted, returned or not, and despite any side dalliances they may have had. The soul that loves, she tells us:

… has to love so much that it loves for two, and that the heat of its heart makes up for what is in fact missing from its happiness.

Across the centuries, I’m as moved as ever by those words from an exceptional friend, however remote she may be.

Dates

By ‘dates’, I don’t mean the kind of meetings that people have which may lead to a romantic entanglement. Nor do I mean the fruit that grows on palm trees. No, I’m talking about a number of key moments in my life that have fundamentally moulded its shape and direction.

The first of these I can’t even specify exactly. It was some time in September 1981. Staying with friends in Eastern France, I met a nine-year old boy with whom I got chatting about the solar system. As one does. We even drew ourselves a diagram of the planets circling the sun, naming each of them.

One of the odder aspects of this meeting was that we shared a first name. That was unusual for France, where ‘David’ is mostly a name used by Jews though I, from England, where the name is far more common, was the Jew and he wasn’t.

They say that the quickest way to a woman’s heart is through her child, and it certainly worked in this case. David’s mother is Danielle and, 38 years on, our marriage has lasted since 11 January 1983.

The second date was 29 January 1983. That was the day David’s first half-brother, Michael, was born. If you’ve just compared those two dates, yes, there wasn’t much of a gap between Danielle and I getting arrived and Michael being born. 18 days, in fact. Danielle had to get divorced first. The judge who saw us commented, looking at her belly, that we would probably want him to reduce the time between decree nisi – the first stage of divorce – and decree absolute, the final stage after which one can marry – to the shortest possible time.

Michael deeply appreciative of my show of fatherly affection

He was right. At the time, there was no guarantee that the child (we didn’t know Michael’s sex before he was born) would inherit my British nationality if we weren’t already married. That was important if it was indeed a boy, since the French still had compulsory military service, a horrible waste of nearly a year, while the British didn’t. We did just manage to get married on time, sparing him that terrible fate. As it happened, however, the French had done away with military service by the time he reached eighteen.

Not that we regret having got married for all that.

The third date was 27 July 1984. That was when David’s and Michael’s brother Nicky was born. That completed that generation of our family.

Anyone who thinks that having a child doesn’t change your life clearly hasn’t had one. I always joke to new parents that they only have 25 years of anxiety ahead of them, but the real joke is that it isn’t a joke at all. There was a time when I was out every night at 2:00 in the morning walking around the estate where we lived, with Michael on my shoulders, while I pointed out various items of interest: the hedge, the lawn, the tree, the moon, all in the hope that he might eventually fall asleep.

Nicky was far less of a problem in the early years but developed a fairly rebellious character later. Somewhere, I still have the Post-It note from him, announcing that he was leaving us for ever, because he was sick of being treated unfairly, and he didn’t care how much we might be worried about his disappearance. And that was one of the lesser crises in our relationship.

One aspect of his rebellion that I particularly liked, however, was that he decided to grow his hair long. His brother followed suit. But when Michael changed his mind and had it cut short, Nicky stuck to his principles and kept it long. That meant that for years he’d be taken for a girl, right into adolescence when the loss of his childish looks left no one in any doubt that he was male, long hair or not.

What has never ceased to astonish me is that while most kids would resent having their gender mistaken, Nicky simply took it in his stride. When waiters in France asked “et pour Mademoiselle?” he would simply give his order, feeling it entirely unnecessary to correct their misapprehension.

And what of David in all this? Well, he’d grown from being “little David” until he stood significantly taller than me. Switching the names around seemed inappropriate, and “young David” as opposed to “old David” wasn’t an attractive option. As a result, he became Davide (pronounced like the French David, roughly Daveed in English), which he remains to this day.

He was an extraordinary asset, right up to the time he left for university. He was the best kind of big brother, so we could leave him in charge whenever we chose to go out, and it created a great relationship that has lasted to this day between the three brothers. On the other hand, in a moment of injustice towards him, we took a gift of our first ever dishwasher from my mother just three or for months before he moved out. So, for pretty much eight years, he had to do a colossal amount of washing up, and only got to enjoy a few months of a dishwasher before he left the household.

The next date of note was 11 January 2005. Now, if you remember the dates from the start of this piece, you’ll have recognised that date as Danielle’s 22nd wedding anniversary (by curious coincidence, mine too). Ironically, Danielle managed to forget that date every single year, rather refuting the common belief that it’s husbands who forget. A boss of mine once told me that the sure way not to forget your wedding anniversary was to forget it once. In my experience, I would turn up each year with a bunch of flowers and Danielle would say, “Oh, lovely! Is it our that time of year again, then?”

David(e) like to take a balanced approach towards parenting

Well, since 2005 she’s never forgotten. Why? Because our first grandchild was born on the day of our anniversary in that year. Thanks to Senada, his wife, and David, we’ve enjoyed the company of Aya for the last fourteen – now nearly fifteen – years. 

David(e), Senada and Aya
Enjoying the pleasures of Valencia, though not its best weather

She’s reached that painful stage where she has answers for all my wit (I think she regards most of it as little more than half-wit), and as often as not, she’s not just giving as good as she gets, but rather better (not an admission I find it easy to make…)

Nicky with Matilda

And the final date in this glorious list? Well, it’s Sunday, 18 August 2019. The previous evening, we had a text message, “Sheena’s waters have broken”. Twenty-four hours later, we’d dumped the dogs with our friend Begonia, who is always threatening to dogknap them anyway, and driven to the hospital in Madrid. It was great to see our second grandchild Matilda on the very day of her birth.

Sheena entertaining her new child's grandfather

David, Senada and Aya are travelling soon to see her. Michael, with our daughter-out-law Raquel, live in Madrid too so they’ve seen her many times already. And we, of course, have been up several times.

Danielle appreciating Raquel's display of daughter-out-law's affection

The next occasion will be the end of this month. I’ll be in Madrid to say goodbye to the company that has just decided to let me go (curious expression, that, “let me go”: I wasn’t trying to escape). I have to admit that seeing Matilda will go a long way towards making me feel less annoyed by the redundancy. Particularly as she’s learned to smile since last time I saw her.

Matilda's now smiling

And isn’t that what family’s for? Infuriating they sometimes may be, but overall family members are what make even annoying moments pleasurable.

Which is why those six dates matter so much to me…

The poignancy of memory

I keep on working through my old photos, a process constantly slowed down by the reawakening of memories of moments long past, of people long missed and of events long gone.

There was a morning in 1982 when Danielle announced to me that she really ought to have a pregnancy test. By the time the afternoon was nearing its end, I’d forgotten all about it and when I rang her I began talking about all sort of indifferent matters. Eventually she interrupted me:

‘Don’t you want to hear about the test?’

I managed to bite off the words ‘what test?’ and simply answered, ‘Oh, yes, of course,’ although her tone of voice made it fairly clear what the result had been.

‘Positive,’ she told me.

It wasn’t a shock but it certainly was an overwhelming piece of news. The kind that you know at once is going to leave absolutely nothing the same. And, from this first intimation of his arrival, I have to say that Michael has affected the nature of my life pretty fundamentally ever since (aided and, I like to think, abetted by the arrival of his brother Nicky just eighteen months after him).

One of the first things we had to do was get married. I appreciate that these days it’s far from unusual to have a child outside marriage, but this was 1982 and the dear, sainted Maggie was Prime Minister and making it ever more difficult to acquire British citizenship. We didn’t know the sex of the child at that time. The problem would arise if it was a boy, as indeed turned out to be the case: the French still imposed on young men that ghastly waste of time known as military service and if the child was born, even in England, he wouldn’t inherit British nationality from me – and therefore the escape card from the French military – unless I was married to Danielle first.

As it happens, by the time he turned eighteen French military service had been reduced to a day and he did it anyway. Though it turned out to be as complex as getting married had proved nearly nineteen years earlier. Which is another memory that brings me great pleasure...

So we didn’t actually need to get married, although I’m not at all sorry we did, 36 years on…

The problem with getting married was that Danielle needed a divorce first. You know the Oscar Wilde saying about a second marriage proving the triumph of hope over experience? Danielle was about to demonstrate it.

Her first husband made no problem about the divorce but he spoke no English and all the documents were in that language. It proved difficult to get him to sign in the right place, but eventually he did. We were married on 11 January 1983 and Michael was born on the 29th, so it was a close-run thing.

Incidentally, thereafter I became the specialist in remembering our anniversary, Danielle in forgetting it. That lasted until 2005 when our first grandchild – Aya – was born to my stepson David and his wife Senada also on 11 January. Danielle’s never forgotten Aya’s birthday so she now remembers our anniversary too.

It was a small wedding organised in a hurry. We had some close friends and family there and naturally took photos of them.

Leonard, my father, to the left in his trademark black tie
Alasdhair to the right, in a far-from-trademark beard
The smiles reflect their personalities...

The one I came across the other day was of my father and my old friend Alasdhair. My father was a man of extraordinary gentleness as well as courage and he was an inspiring presence in my life. Alasdhair I had met when we were both 13 and we had remained close through our school days and university. Later, he moved to the US but we kept in contact all the same, seeing each other from time to time but, above all, each remaining a constant known presence in the life of the other.

The photo therefore represents some precious memories to me.

But they are poignant too. My father lived only just over four more months after that picture was taken. Alasdhair did better but succumbed, to cancer, just over two years ago.

The joy is tinged with sadness. I suppose that’s what the passage of 36 years is bound to bring. But the pleasure of finding the photo was undiminished for all that.

Misty and the season of mists

Our Scottish break kept up its cultural joys for us, when we went into the John Muir house in Dunbar. That’s Muir as in Muir Woods, for those of you more familiar with the joys of California than those of Scotland.

We were there to see our daughter-in-law Senada’s latest creation: silk embroidery of a tracery of branches, displayed on a skylight so that when the sun shines (it happens in August, even in Scotland. Sometimes) it produces a pattern of light that brings a sense of trees – so dear to Muir – into the room, and splashes their shadow on the walls.

In Muir House: Senada's silk creation casts its light on us all

But then the holiday was over and we headed back to find our new little house. The cat, Misty, has now settled in well. He seems as happy as we are to be out of rented accommodation, to the point of having reverted to kittenhood: he’s taking to playing with things again in a way he hasn’t done for years. He also loves the windows, sitting for hours looking out of them. It must give him great satisfaction to know that, with his cat flap, he can get out there when he likes so doesn’t have to until he feels like it.

Misty: a cat will play with anything when he reverts to kittenhood

Not that he’s changed character at all. He still doesn’t come down to eat until I come down in the morning, even though he doesn’t need me to get access to his food. And while he seems perfectly happy with using the cat flap generally, if I’m around he likes me to let him out anyway. So if I don’t react fast enough he shows me his displeasure in the time honoured way, with a gentle swipe of the claws or nip of the teeth.

The other time-honoured tradition that we’re enjoying is the wood fire: we’ve put in a great new stove. Beautiful to see it lighting up the room in the evening.

Glorious. But in August?

Beautiful, that is, until I think that it’s still August (just). How the heck can it be that cold? Last night on the way home from the station I was sorry not to have gloves; this morning in the park with our dog I was sorry not to have worn a heavier jacket.

Oh, well. Autumn’s in the air. We may not have had a summer (unless we count that fortnight in March, and the Olympics), but we’re back on the way towards winter.

Life’s rich patterns, the rolling of the seasons. At least I have the joy of my cat teaching me manners and a fire to cheer the evening. And the memory of beauty in Scotland.