the bombardment – mostly civilians like Christiane, who lived in the accommodation that had been built to house the workers close to the Renault factory. Claire would never have married Laurence Ernest Redman and they would never have had the daughter that they named Felicity. As I trace those fine, fragile threads of fate back across the years, I am more and more astounded that I am here at all.
Life can seem so very tenuous sometimes. But perhaps that fragility is why we treasure it so. And perhaps it is our profound love of life that makes us so terrified of losing it. Mireille didn’t hesitate to go back and find Claire. Vivienne would have gone in an instant as well, if she hadn’t had to stay behind. And I can only imagine the dogged determination that kept Mireille going as she gritted her teeth and practically dragged Claire, dazed and bleeding, from the other side of the city back to the safety of the apartment in Saint-Germain.
So, if we cling on to life so hard and value it so much, how deep do depression and despair have to drag someone before they reach a place where they can’t bear to go on? It must have been a slow descent into hell that my mother endured before she could bear it no longer and ended the pain with a couple of handfuls of sleeping pills. She washed them down with the remnants of a bottle of brandy that had sat on a shelf in the kitchen for several years, bought by my father in happier times and used to set light to the pudding on the Christmas table.
When I’d managed to break free of the hands that held me at the front gate, that day when the blue lights of the police car illuminated the dusk in front of my home, I ran inside and saw the empty bottle on its side on the floor, next to the sofa where a paramedic in a hi-vis jacket bent over my mother’s body. As more hands grabbed me and pulled me away, all I could think of, at the sight of that bottle, was having been entranced by the will-o’-the-wisp blue flames that danced around the dark mass of sticky fruit, transforming it into something magical. Blue flames that flickered like the blue lights of the police car which someone gently lifted me in to, while I waited for my father to come and get me. I knew that he would take me to a house where I wasn’t really wanted, a house where I certainly didn’t want to be. My mother had abandoned me to that fate. All of a sudden, I felt those flickering blue lights burning me, engulfing me in flames of shock and anger and pain which felt as if they would consume me completely. A police woman crouched in front of me, beside the open car door, holding my hand, trying to soothe me. I leant forward and threw up into the gutter, narrowly missing her neatly pressed trousers and shiny black shoes.
I see now that it’s one of the paradoxes of life that if we love it so much that we are frightened of losing it, it can make us live a half-life, too scared to get out there and live whole-heartedly because we have too much to lose. In the same way, I think I protect myself in relationships, too scared to love whole-heartedly because then there would be too much to lose there too. I think of Thierry, of how drawn I feel to his calm, quiet presence and yet I feel myself drawing back, not letting myself fall in love because I’m afraid that there’d be too much to lose. I wish I had the courage of Claire, Vivi and Mireille. Then maybe I’d be able to live – and love – wholeheartedly.
To shake off these morbid thoughts, I head to my usual refuge in the elegant sixteenth arrondissement. The trees are bare now, in the park that surrounds the Palais Galliera, and the ribbon-like flower beds that surround the fountain are planted in shades of deep purple and dark green. There’s an exhibition about one of France’s oldest fashion houses, Lanvin. I immerse myself in the world of its founder, Jeanne Lanvin, drinking in her beautiful creations. I stand for a long time in front of an evening gown in the iconic deep blue that was one of Lanvin’s trademarks. It has