But . . . it never happened!” said Peter van Diemen.
“It might have.”
“Well, anything might have. But where’s your evidence?”
“Cocteau was in Paris. He went to places like Le Chat Qui Fume with Morand and other friends. . . .”
“But we don’t know that your grandfather was ever even in Paris. Let alone that he met Cocteau.”
“I’m not saying he met him.”
Peter’s expression showed how little he thought of such hair-splitting. “You can’t simply invent things.”
“How do you account for his behavior then? The decision to volunteer. The fascination with Paris. The refusal to return to his wife.”
“I don’t have an explanation. A few speculations, perhaps.”
“Like what?”
“Well . . .” He laid a postcard on the table. “This was in the documents you gave me.”
The photo side showed a naked baby, facedown on a rug. I turned it over. Someone had written in a studied, looping hand, “To My Daling Dady From his Darling little daughter Stella Baxter 74 Catherine St Leichhardt June 10th 1917 Send me a big doll dad.” It was addressed simply “Private W A Baxter on active Service abroad.”
“This must be my aunt then,” I said. “Dad’s little sister. We always called her Mary.”
I tried to square this infant with the bulky lady who’d been a fixture of my childhood and adolescence.
“Do you know when she was born?” van Diemen asked.
“No idea. From the look of this card, about 1916.”
“1917. February 6, to be precise.”
“So?”
“This would mean that, assuming a normal pregnancy, she was conceived in May of 1916. Archie volunteered in May 1916.”
“Meaning . . . ?”
“Getting your wife pregnant doesn’t suggest a man who wanted to cut all ties with his family. Quite the reverse, in fact. He would have sailed in October knowing she was expecting.”
He sorted through the papers.
“Another thing . . . I found this.”
It was a smudged copy of a three-line death notice from a newspaper.
BAXTER. June 2, 1913, at his parents’ residence, 11 Catherine-street, Leichhardt, Claude Hector Robert, dearly-loved infant son of Mr. and Mrs. Archie Baxter, aged 5 weeks. “A bud In heaven.”
“The house number is wrong.”
“How many Archie Baxters can there be on one street?”
“So my grandfather lost a son, almost at birth?”
“Not one. Three.” Another paper. “This is his death certificate. He was sixty-one. Cause of death—auricular fibrillation, myocarditis, and hypertension. And look; under ‘children of the marriage,’ it lists John, your father; Neville, your uncle; and Stella Mary, your aunt, as living and ‘3 males, deceased.’ ”
He laid his hand on the papers.
“You know what I see here? A man who suffered a great deal of loss. Three sons dead in infancy. From what you say, a difficult domestic situation. A job he didn’t like. I see a man with a tendency to high blood pressure; probably inclined to mood swings; not an easy man to get on with.”
“My cousins tell me the same thing. My father too. He had to move away from home as a boy, to live with another family.”
“Some men respond to stress and loss by remaining and accepting. Some grieve and brood. Some run away. I would guess Archie belonged to that last group. He left his father’s farm for the city. He left his wife for France . . .”
“And when he came back, he left her again, to try running his own business.”
“I found out something about that too. You said he made condiments? Remember the branch of your family that set up a successful business in Scotland making canned goods and preserves? Look at this.”
It was a printout from the Wikipedia entry for the Baxter company.
Baxters is an international food company, based in Fochabers, Moray, Scotland. It has its roots in a grocer’s shop opened by George Baxter in 1868. Baxter’s shop became known for supplying pickles and preserves in the early 20th century, when Baxter’s son and daughter-in-law began preparing their own beetroot and selling it to other grocers.
“Pickles and preserves. Not far from condiments.”
I remembered that someone told me Archie made very good pickled onions.
“You think he was trying to repeat what his . . . uncle? cousin? . . . achieved?”
“Don’t you think it’s possible?”
“Yes, it’s possible. But what about la cité des ténèbres and San fairy ann?”
“Things he read. Things he heard. Who knows? Every life is a mystery. Sometimes one has to embrace the inexplicable.”
When I got home, I walked out on our terrace and looked across the roofs of Paris toward Notre Dame.
Archie had never lived in France. But here I was, two generations later, with a French wife and daughter and an apartment in the heart of Paris—a city in which I had never meant to settle but to which I had been drawn from the other side of the world.
Drawn by what? A gene? A fragment, lodged somewhere in the genetic record, of my grandfather’s need for another and better life in a country far from his own?
I might never know what Archie hoped to find in Paris or what he had found here. If it was to forget his life and family, to start again as his own man, he had come to the wrong place. In the city of Cocteau and Proust, the past was as real as the present. This is a city that remembered. Far from rejecting pain, it embraced it, transformed it. I loved it for that—loved it as one preserves the memory of lost loves and remembers with nostalgia rather than regret the illusions of youth. I loved it as had Rimbaud. He spoke for all us newcomers when he wrote in “The Drunken Boat”:
If there is one water in Europe I want, it is the
Black cold pool where into the scented twilight
A child squatting full of sadness, launches
A boat as fragile as a butterfly in May.