BULLETIN FROM A WET PARIS

WHERE IS AUGUST WHEN YOU NEED IT?

I never expected to long for August. Traditionally it’s the month when tout Paris flees to the countryside in search of cool. This August, with the Olympics taking over, the exodus will be even more general, with ourselves in the lead. But after a spring of almost constant drizzle, with a persistent low-grade sinus condition turning half Paris into a community of sneezers and snifflers, not to mention the dust and noise of everyone getting their renovations done before the Olympics, August hovers as a dream of peace and heat.

The following is a chapter from The Year in Paris, published by HarperCollins in 2019, and still a favourite. Since it dealt with seasonal changes in the city, I wanted to call it A Year in Paris, but you know marketing departments. Think of it as an appeal to the gods of climate for the heat and calm and isolation of an empty city.

Paris 16me. August 1976. 26 degrees C. Dust fine as talcum sifts through shutters closed against the sun. It films the black lacquer of the Bechstein grand, makes even more slick the waxed wooden blocks of the parquet floor, coats the cream and green enamel of the kitchen's antique refrigerator and stove, grits between the teeth in the aftermath of a kiss.

The year is irrelevant, but men were wearing their hair long, the women theirs short. Flowered shirts and beads were the rage, and everyone seemed to be playing Elton John's Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me.

Céline and I hooked up at a party in Chelsea, London's equivalent of Greenwich Village. The hostess was her daughter, Kissy, a bosomy twenty-something with pretensions to art, though her real talent lay in having her cake and eating it, a skill she'd exploited to score a show at one of the pop-up galleries that sprouted around East London like mushrooms after rain, and expired just as speedily.

Her apartment showed more flair than her canvases. In a style best described as Moorish Whorehouse, she'd draped filmy fabric from the ceilings, turning every room into a tent under which incense blended with cannabis smoke in an exotic miasma.

Céline, slim and pale, with short dark hair, belonged to that percentile of females diplomatically described by the French as femmes d'un certain age. Her black silk trouser suit sometimes masked the shape of her body, at others clung to it, living proof of the suggestion that silk was invented in order that women could go naked while still clothed. What won me, however, was her voice. If French is the language of diplomacy, English spoken with a French accent is the language of seduction.

Once I found she was Kissy's mother, interest turned to fascination. A friend once confided to me a preference for "older women with a Past." I responded with the line spoken by Brigitte Auber, who played a hot young French woman in Alfred Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief. Mocking Cary Grant's preference for Grace Kelly over her, she asks "Why buy an old car if you can get a new one cheaper? It will run better and last longer." With Céline, those prejudices crumbled. Some relationships fly in air so thin that any conventional attraction would fall of its own weight. Ours justified the use of words like "enchantment."

After the party, we walked back in silence through the empty streets and climbed the six floors to my apartment.

"So bare," she said, looking around my living room. "No pictures?"

Bare? I'd aimed for minimalist.

She strolled into the bedroom and shrugged off her jacket. A slither of silk.

"You do not like a big bed?"

Queen-size had always seemed large enough, but now I wondered.

She began to undress. Lingerie to die for. Coffee silk, with lace along the edges.

"You have candles? No?"

She draped her scarf over the lamp. What I'd taken for black was deep purple. Shadows took on the soft bloom of a bruise.

Our affair germinated that night. Once she went home, I slipped across to Paris every few weeks to spend a weekend in her sprawling apartment in the seizieme .

Kissy kept a room there but never visited, at least not when I was around, and though a femme de ménage came twice a week to clean, all I saw of her was a fresh wax shine on the parquet and new linen on the bed. Woven so densely it felt heavy, as though soaked in water, each sheet was embroidered with an incomprehensible monogram, signifying Céline's marriage to a husband even less evident than the housekeeper; barely more than a phantom presence somewhere on the far side of the world.

Years later, in Le Divorce, the novel by American writer Diane Johnson, I saw my experience with Céline mirrored in those of her main character, an American girl who becomes the lover of a much older Frenchman. Revelling in the way he instructs her in the intricacies of life in Paris, she muses "If you didn't know where to look, you could pass your whole life with no sense of what you were missing." As far as France was concerned, Céline was as much teacher as lover.

That August, as usual, the month descended on Paris like a curse. Empty streets echoed to the clatter of jack-hammers as café owners rushed through renovations before their clientele flooded back in early September. By noon, it was too hot to move, to eat, certainly to make love, so we read and dozed, pressing to our foreheads the glasses of home-made limeade, beaded with moisture, that we drank by the litre.

In another room, a radio was tuned, almost inaudibly, to a jazz radio station. After a few bars of one tune, Céline opened violet eyes, and murmured a few words.

"......balayé par Septembre ,notre amour d'un été..."

They meant nothing to me then but I thought I recognised the singer's husky baritone.

"Is that Aznavour?"

"Yes. Paris au mois d'Aôut...Paris In the Month of August...."

At the time, I only caught the sense of the song. Later, I looked up the words, and their translation.

                      Swept away by September

                     Our summertime love

                     Sadly comes apart

                     And dies, in the past tense

                     Even though I expected it,

                     My heart empties itself of everything.

                     It could even be mistaken

                     For Paris in the month of August.

"Comme il est triste," Céline sighed as she listened. "Just right for Thermidor."

"Thermidor?" I said. "Like Lobster Thermidor?"

She punched my arm, but playfully. "No! Not like the lobster - or not only like the lobster, at least. Why is it always food with you? Or films."

"Tell me, then,"

She let her book fall and leaned back on the cushions of the couch.

"Very well. But first you must kiss me."

Dutifly, I obeyed her.

………In memory, I do so again.