My mother, Lisa Zirner, Part IV
Escape
In 1972, my sister went up to Oxford and my brother was less and less in evidence. My mother and brother fought constantly while he was there and when she got angry, he would shut her in the cupboard until she calmed down. Our relations were strained too. I think she had given Simon the boot. He died in 1973, in his early fifties. There were the usual waifs and strays who turned up in the house, people she’d picked up in the pub. I was in my sixth form and did the cooking in the evening, often using Delia Smith’s recipes I culled from the Evening Standard or French recipes I found in my mother’s copies of Elle. I walked home from school so that I could keep the money she gave me for the fares. This meant I could afford a cup of tea with the other boys at the Salisbury Café in Salisbury Square behind Fleet Street. One of my friends lived off Sloane Square and I’d stop for a game of table tennis before I covered the last leg home.
It was an eccentric household: my mother was still teaching art A-Level. If you were very unlucky you would find yourself in the company of one of our models (I drew them too): there was Stan, a fitter at Gatwick Airport, and a skinny man who worked at a bank who wasn’t with us for a while because he had to be circumcised. There was also a fat woman who was the first naked woman I ever drew, at the age of thirteen. I wondered where her nipples were, but the pose was such that they were underneath her breasts, and I only saw them when she got up. They didn’t match people’s preconceptions of artists’ models. Partly because of them, there was a mattress in the middle of the floor in the drawing room, where there was also a polygonal cardboard table with matching chairs which had been one of Lisa’s several inventions, but it had not really appealed to any furniture manufacturers.
In my second-year sixth, a friend from school called James came to lodge with us because his family had moved to Hampshire. We distracted one another, which was not good news and that showed in our less than spectacular A-Level results. After that I was easy prey, I was a failure ‘just like your father’. I went to work in various temporary jobs, Harrod’s Bank was one, eventually becoming the depot clerk for Michelin in the Fulham Road. In March I joined my brother in Paris. I found a little work teaching English and considerably improved my French. My mother came to see me once, bringing a new pair of shoes to replace the ones which had become quite putrid. In August, I was picked up by my sister and her then lover and driven to Calais where he had a flat, then we went back to London.
My mother was alone in Nevern Square. She scarcely acknowledged my return. She must have worked it out that from now on she’d look after herself. I applied to Balliol (I had no idea that my father had a prior claim) and sat the entrance exam in November. My old masters agreed to look at my essays, and I took the exam there, but I did not go back to school. My future tutor, Colin Lucas called me soon after the interview to say he was looking forward to seeing me in October. My brother took the call. He knew I was with friends in Redcliffe Square and came bearing both news and gifts in the form of two bottles of champagne.
In the meantime, I taught O-Level art. Once I had been awarded my place I did more odd jobs here and there, and had a disastrous attempt to establish myself in Munich to improve my German for Prelims. I was having fun, and was happy to return to London. Meanwhile my mother had clearly made up her mind that she had had enough of England and her family and she wanted to travel, and settle somewhere else. We were more or less grown up, after all. She was simply looking for the best time to cut loose. I think she had decided to bolt at fifty, in 1977, but my going up to university a year late thwarted her, and she hung on for a few more months.
She was still bringing back her waifs and strays. There was an ancient Italian man who told us ‘I good cooker’ and cooked. He actually wasn’t very good (the food looked a bit like Monsieur Puer’s dinner) but he was enthusiastic and being a Neapolitan, there was always wine on the table. My mother did paintings to celebrate whatever had happened between them in Naples or Salerno. There was the execrable ‘Scrotum’, who spoke in anachronisms and used to tell us ‘I must avaunt!’ and another man we called the ‘Sixties Hangover’ because he had droopy viva zapata moustaches. Then there was a dull, well-meaning man who knew all about computers and who was called ‘Chompers’ because he made a noise when he ate; and an army major-type who arrived one day and said ‘I’ve brought you a copy of Lui, a new French girlie mag, Gerald, it’s wrapped up in my copy of The Times.’ I went to see a girl in Dorset at weekends to get away from it all. My sister was finishing at Oxford, but I think my brother was still occasionally in the flat, although he was working in the City.
While my mother was away, we gave wild parties and lots of people crashed out in the various rooms or on the floors. Of course, my mother was livid when she found out. There was hell to pay if anyone was caught. One day some girl who was a contemporary of mine at Oxford, turned up to ask if she could pick up something she thought she might have forgotten in the flat. My mother smiled and let her in, and as soon as she had shut the door she growled, ‘Yes, go and fetch your bra, pants or false teeth or anything else you have forgotten!’ At Oxford once I heard another girl tell this story as it had been related by a friend and an indication of how terrible London was and I quickly understood it was a story about my mother.
My mother focussed on Greece, and used to disappear off to Athens returning with tins of olive oil and nice little biscuits that looked like owl droppings. For the time being I had a maximum grant at Oxford, but it always seemed to come in seventh week so I had to borrow until it reached my bank. My sister eventually ran off to Paris and my brother found a flat in Chelsea. We still had family Christmases. My mother bought all sorts of coloured liqueurs from Delmonico in Soho and once a year there were alcoholic drinks and a few bottles of wine and spirits in the house. She liked Warnink’s egg nogg (‘I like Warninks in the eveninks and the morninks’) and from the Hamburger Stores there was smoked salmon. Black rye came from the Polish baker opposite the Raymond Revue Bar. There was a stuffed carp on Christmas Eve and a goose on the big day. Special dishes were taken out and dusted down once a year for hors d’oeuvres and sweetmeats. After dinner we all played bridge, my mother quite badly. We didn’t go to mass then. Lisa refused all forms of ‘organised religion’ to the very end. When I sent some pious Catholic woman to her in hospital a few years ago, she complained the woman was ‘ugly.’
Lisa used to find excuses to visit me in Oxford. She enjoyed it there and came to parties if there was one going. I hope she brought me a cake, or some wine, or a bit of cash, but I can’t remember if she did. When I gave my first solo exhibition at the Union, she came along and hung one of her own pictures on the wall. When my sister was up, she had tried to sell a novel about the sexual gymnastics of undergraduates to a publisher, who turned up his nose at it. She astonished my contemporaries, whose own mothers bore little resemblance to Lisa with her youthful good looks (she was then in her forties) and her readiness to join in the fun, with a glass of wine in one hand and a cigarillo in the other.
My mother had a rare female friend at the time, Kate Wharton, the editor of the Architect’s Journal and ex-wife of Michael of ‘Peter Simple’ fame. I liked Kate, who not only taught me how to make a glass of tonic water taste like gin by dosing it with Angostura Bitters, she commissioned articles from me, which Lisa typed up. I was writing a bit for The Cherwell at Oxford, but they didn’t require typed copy. I could see why Lisa got on with Kate, albeit temporarily: she drank, and she was incredibly rude about her daughter. I had never heard any mother talk like that about her own offspring, not even Lisa.
My second and final long vac I spent in Paris, where my sister had taken a very grand first-floor flat on the place des Vosges for the summer. I had a bedroom overlooking the square where I could listen to the gentle plashing of the fountains at night and having decided I might apply to the Royal College to do an MA in illustration, I did rather more painting than history. There was a little money to be earned by guiding parties of American tourists and as the summer drew to a close, I hitchhiked down to the Var to spend some time with an Oxford friend and his parents near Draguignan.
My mother also quit London for the summer, spending it in her (then) beloved Athens. A friend of mine had rented the flat and when I got back to prepare for the Michaelmas Term, I found its various rooms occupied by a host of curious characters. In mine was the Troglodyte, a short, pale man, dressed permanently in black. He was mad about my room, which was also black, with silver paper on the ceiling. Lurch had taken over the old lodger’s room and I had to use the maid’s room for now. My friend had failed to collect the rent and when my mother returned there was also hell to pay. I realised now she was diverting as much money to Greece as possible to pay for her move. She refused to top up my grant, which was no longer maximum strength. This was all the more irksome because my arrangement to live out of college had fallen flat.
Added to that, my debts had been noticed and the college wanted me to pay the money back. I slept where I could, on friends’ floors and sofas, or on chairs in the JCR (the steward used to wake me with a cup of coffee). Colin Lucas was on sabbatical and the fellows’ decisions were communicated to me by my mediaeval history tutor, Maurice Keen, who reminded me that I was in statu pupillari and that I had to accept their decisions. When I made it as clear as I could that they could expect no money from my mother, Maurice thought it would be better to pretend she was mad. In the circumstances, however, he warned me that the likely solution was that I would need to go down and could only return when the debt was paid off. It was at this point that the Master, Christopher Hill stepped in. Christopher had always liked me, maybe less because of the brilliance of the essays I wrote for him than his unmistakable dislike of my tutorial partner. He also asked me to say that Lisa was mad. I replied that I could not (and I didn’t think it was true) I then quoted Luther’s (apparently apocryphal) line ‘Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders’. I found a note from him in my pigeon hole later: ‘While I am master of this college you will not go down.’
With the Master’s backing, the fellows agreed to make me an eleemosynary grant to cover most of the debt and I was to be kept on a tight leash, reporting to the dean once a week. The dean found me a nasty place to live on the Iffley Road, where the landlord tried to cheat me, then agreed to my moving out, once another student allowed me to use his digs while he spent a term in Paris. Later other friends located a whole house for me at the top of the Banbury Road, although I later had to share it with an American visiting professor and his wife.
In the midst of this sea of problems, I spent little time in London, where my mother was busy packing her bags to leave. She was assisted by ‘the Man from the Earth.’[1] Most of my things were thrown out. I can remember something of my birthday that April. My brother was there at the Ponte Vecchio in the Brompton Road, and then it was full steam ahead towards the final exams we called ‘Schools’. After Schools I stayed on till the last party and leaving a lot of things behind in a friend’s flat in North Oxford I took a few small possessions, spent the night with my brother in Fulham and caught the train to Paris. I left some things in the house where he was living, including a nice print by Turner of Oxford, a twenty-first birthday, possibly from Gavin Stamp. I never saw any of them again. A new era had just begun, a tabula rasa not just for me, but for my mother as well.
My mother kept a pied à terre in Grafton Street, off the Tottenham Court Road, and there she stored a lot of her books and a few of mine, together with some of my objets d’art. When she gave up Grafton Street she used to stay at the Chelsea Arts Club, where she had been a member for some years. When I was twenty-one, she hosted a dinner party for me there. She was rapidly disillusioned by Greece where she was sharing the favours of a young man in the market with a much older man, but once she had moved most of her stuff from London, she was forced to make the best of it. Neither my sister or I ever went to see her in Athens, but I think my brother did. She had friends there, painted, exhibited, she may have done a bit of teaching, but it wasn’t very long before she began to look longingly towards Paris. There were some sticky Christmases, when she stayed with my sister in Montparnasse. My brother would come over from London, but after a while we saw less and less of him.
In 1981, my sister left Paris to live with her husband and daughter in Battersea. My mother came and went, generally unannounced. She had her own circle of friends, some of whom I knew vaguely too. It was through me, however, that she met George Hayim, an eccentric homosexual man who lived almost next door in a flat overlooked by the ramp of one of the big cinemas in the boulevard. He possessed ground floor flats in Paris, London and Sydney and liked to decorate every inch of them with paintings, so that people would be tempted to look in at the window. When he saw the sort of beefy man he liked most admiring the paintings, he’d invite him in and cook him a meal. If he then looked amenable, he’d ask him to tie him up and slap him about. That gave him sexual pleasure and he’d reward him with a hundred franc-note. I did a few paintings for George who fed me too, but not being beefy, he never asked me to tie him up. When I introduced George to Lisa, she insisted on doing a mural too.
We used to go off to the curious salons of Anne de Bavière in the rue Vanneau, the widow of a Bavarian prince who assembled an extraordinary team of regulars around her table. One day my sister took Lisa and an Irish man she’d picked up and told Anne they were our father and mother. Apparently, the Irishman became a little too absorbed by his role. He even gave my sister some money to buy herself a present. Anne believed the story for a while, but finally dismissed it for being improbable.
Our meetings were not often friendly affairs. The brutal eclipse of any lingering idea of ‘home’ and the loss of almost all my possessions still rankled. I thought of Paris as my life, not hers. Once she wanted to prove some point and brought me some papers about her father. I rapidly copied them before she fetched them back. They were about ‘her’ family, not mine. They proved extremely useful later. I stayed on in Paris for another three years after my sister left, going back to London at Christmas 1984. I felt I needed to get something published and was just treading water in Paris. I stayed with my sister and her husband for a few months before moving into the house of an Oxford friend on the other side of Clapham Common.
I don’t know when Lisa began to spend more time in Paris than Athens. I suspect it was gradual. She soon started attending the etching studio where I had laboured under Maître Claude Breton for three years. She picked up work teaching English, she painted, she exhibited a bit too. Teaching English was what all three of us children had done when we needed money and her own mother had done it too. She eventually found a flat in Montparnasse and so the feeling of encroachment became more and more palpable. The flat belonged to a woman who eventually threw her out, causing her to lose a great many canvases and other possessions. When she came to London, it was still the old seven-hour train and boat crossing in those days, she stayed at the Chelsea Arts Club, and as I recall we had lunch or dinner with her there from time to time.
My father died in May 1986. He was being treated by a friend of mine. He had sustained brain damage when he fell out of his bath and banged his head, but the doctors had failed to notice a perforated ulcer. I had no idea how I should feel about the death of a progenitor whom I had last seen at the age of three and went to see a Jesuit priest at Farm Street, who told me that Redmond was irrelevant to me and that they would say a mass for him. My mother appeared in the Chelsea Arts Club shortly after and we joined her for lunch. I hadn’t seen her look so happy for years. She had not forgiven him one jot. Not long after there was a disastrous dinner with our former lodgers from the Earl’s Court Road, Mike and Jean Hoare who had become close family friends. Lisa annoyed me so much I think I walked out.
My life began to take off around that time. My first book was published in 1987 and for fifteen or twenty years there was plenty of journalism and a lot of travelling. If I was in Paris, I was generally there for work and didn’t stay long. If I was not lodged in some grand hotel, I stayed with friends in the 18e, the other side of the city to Montparnasse. I did arrange to see her from time to time. I recall going to the market in the boulevard Edgar Quinet and her asking for a pound of some fruit or vegetables, except that she asked for ‘un livre.’
The market seller was quick to point out her mistake: ‘Bah, si vous voulez un livre allez chercher dans une librarie, madame.’ An article can make all the difference.
By that stage Lisa had a granddaughter and a little later still my brother produced a son. Like the Old Hen, my mother wanted to spoil the girl, but my sister was not so keen. My mother sent her extracts from United Nations directives saying that grandmothers had the right to see their children’s children, but I am not sure that got her very far. My brother was actually living in Meudon, outside Paris at the time, so I doubt he was able to wriggle out of it so easily. It should be said that Lisa was very good at certain things, such as assembling boxes of curious presents that she had gleaned from pound shops, and which delighted her grandchildren by their number and variety. On the other hand, I wasn’t convinced she was any better with her grandchildren than she had been with her own. It would never have occurred to me to leave my children with her, for example, while I went off to do something else. I doubt my siblings would have done it either.
My own first child was born in 1997, and another arrived in 2002. Lisa came to England less often and we were seldom in Paris. In 1998, we spent a rare Christmas in Paris with my friend Tim, but I didn’t see Lisa who might have been elsewhere. On reflection, I think she often went to my brother in Suffolk. When my children were a bit bigger, they disliked Paris. It was a rebellion against my decision to send them to French schools.
Things changed in 2003. I lost two-thirds of my work and two-thirds of my income, and the next year it got worse. I had more time, but less money. The situation eventually stabilised, but it never returned to what it had been in the golden years. In September 2004, I was in Provence but had to go up to Paris to sign a contract for a translation of my biography of Brillat-Savarin with a small publisher in the rue St-André des Arts. After the deal was done (something I was later to regret), I met up with Lisa at La Palette nearby. The wonderful Jean-François was still working in the café then. It was my first French contract and it seemed to be something to celebrate. After that I began to see Lisa more often. I met up with her in 2005 before a broadcast marking the anniversary of the 250th anniversary of Brillat’s birth. As usual she regaled me with tales of her sex life, although she was already knocking eighty. Her interest in sex was irrepressible. She worked for a museum dedicated to eroticism in Paris, and exhibited mildly pornographic pictures there. She illustrated at least one novel by the marquis de Sade. She was cross when this source of income eventually dried up.
Talking of age, it was about this time that she falsified her papers and knocked ten years off her life. I am still not aware of how she did this but I think she tampered with her birth certificate and then used the document to apply for a new passport and carte de séjour. She dyed her hair black or red and kept herself trim, and hoped that no one would twig. For a long time, they didn’t, but when they did, she was in big trouble with the police.
She went back to Vienna once and stayed with Gisela Müller, her first cousin and daughter of her uncle Walter who had died in El Salvador in 1963, leaving a young wife and a baby daughter called Esperanza. At that stage Lisa had an idea that she might return to live in Vienna because she had decided she now hated the French. Gisi lived I think in Mauer surrounded by quite a lot of furniture that had belonged once to the family. She was seven years younger than my mother and had owned a successful chain of shops selling handbags. They quarrelled and the visit was predictably not a success.
When she was eighty, Lisa came to England for the last time. She stayed at the Chelsea Arts Club and spent a day with us. She went for a walk on the Heath with the children and my wife drove her back to the club. She was still half in love with modern technology and filmed the children on her camera. Back in Paris, she went to demonstrations and found herself the oldest person there. She kept abreast with the news by occasionally listening in to a transistor radio that was on, morning, noon and night making for her occasional visitors little more than a sort of permanent buzzing noise. More and more she was a victim of Paris’s mean streets and was mugged several times getting money from cash machines. She caught pleurisy, and was at death’s door for a while.
When she was thrown out of her flat, my brother and sister helped her to move into the Maison des Artistes in the rue du Montparnasse. At first, she had a room that was clearly too small for her, but she managed to get one of the highly prized, but more expensive dupleix apartments on the top floor, where there was a bedroom and bathroom up a spiral staircase and a salon-cum-studio downstairs alongside a tiny kitchen. When I was there less than a year ago, I noticed for the first time that the residents had the use of a nice little garden and a private restaurant. My mother didn’t socialise much with the others, many of whom seemed to be frightened of her moods. It was still a squash with all her canvasses, but there was space out on a gallery where she could sit and eat when the weather was good, but she never seemed to use it.
From the start, I had an ally in the gardienne, Delphine, the wife of a policeman who worked in Toulouse during the week. While she was there Delphine let me know what was happening and alerted me to the various crises that affected her declining health. When Lisa stopped paying her telephone bill, and the line was cut off, Delphine would take her messages or go up with her own mobile so that I could speak to my mother directly. Lisa was quite horrid to Delphine, and physically attacked her more than once. Delphine pointed out, in exasperation, that she had always tried to help when it came to transporting and selling her paintings, but with time she lost patience and let Lisa stew in her own juice.
In 2016, I visited her in her little flat. I was going on a trip to the Loire with my usual host in the 18e, we were due to explore the vineyards of Chinon where another friend had acquired a vineyard. It must have been the first time I had been up to her flat, before then I had always arranged to meet her in a café. She had some sort of lamb stew on the boil, and offered me some. I took her out instead, but found it hard to find anywhere open in the rue du Montparnasse. We went to a Belgian chain instead and she had moules frites and a glass of Irish whiskey. In those days I’d take her whisky. She was sensible about it and didn’t drink much, just a tot in the evening. That afternoon I walked back to my friends’ flat in the rue des Martyres. It was a long walk but there had been something quite traumatic about that visit, and I needed to see my Paris, not hers, by revisiting certain streets and buildings which had once been important parts of my life. My friends had invited a face from the past to dinner. That helped too.
Lisa’s real decline began when she had her hips replaced. For weeks she was parked in a hospital in the east of Paris, sharing a room with women she was loudly rude about on the telephone. The nurses were not spared either. It must have been 2017. I was taking my son to stay with my former schoolmaster Robin Barrow in Vancouver, but she was frightened and for a month I called her daily. The problem with her falsified papers had already emerged and the police were asking questions about her carte de séjour. Apparently, they laughed when they realised that the most probable motive was vanity: she can’t have been the first woman to prune a decade off her age.
Two years later, in 2019, the whole family went to Paris during a heat-wave, when the thermometer climbed to over 42C. Lisa seemed to have recovered from the ordeals of hip-replacement, and even had a bottle of champagne to greet us. It was Mumm: her little joke, but not a very appropriate one. Not only had she never been called ‘mum’, she wouldn’t even let us call her ‘mother’. I can’t remember calling her anything other than ‘Lisa’.
She took us down to a cafe on the corner of the rue d’Odessa and the boulevard Edgar Quinet. The manager seemed to like her. He told me that they looked after her there. When she disappeared two years later and no one could find her, I rang them and they denied all knowledge of her. It was so hot that year that the railway lines buckled. The weather broke two days later but I failed to get to her a second time before we left for friends in Brittany.
Lisa’s isolation meant that she never really seemed to be in danger from Covid. She had very few teeth left and a constant inflammation of the gums which meant that there were only certain things she could eat. She used to go to Monoprix across the boulevard, and mix pasta and salad for her lunch. The rest of her food was delivered to her cold by an arrangement with the local council. She complained bitterly about the food, which did indeed look nasty. Before she was taken into the Hôpital Broca for the last time they tried to get her to install a microwave so that she might eat hot food for a change.
I visited her every six months by then. For a quarter of a century, I had joined a house party in Provence twice a year in February and September. At first, we had flown to Marseille, but it was altogether nicer to take the Eurostar to Paris, meet up with the others by the Gare de Lyon and travel down to Avignon together on the TGV. If we took a slightly earlier train, it meant I could detach myself from the party and nip over to Montparnasse to see Lisa. I’d take her a few little things she liked: whisky, or home-made jam. If there was time I’d buy butter, fruit or fruit juice, as she went out less and less.
Delphine left in 2022, and I no longer had a friend in the building who could give me a fair assessment of what was going on. The building’s administrators were dreadful. Over the years Lisa was there the lift was often out of action for weeks, and the ancient residents had to descend eight floors via the stairs if they wanted to go out, and worse still, climb them again on their return. Outside, Paris was a more and more hostile place with hordes of asylum seekers living in tents on the periphery and hungrily roaming the streets.
Lisa had not been paying her bills, and in her frail state the social services proposed to make her a ward of court. As a result of falsifying her papers, her position was ‘irregular’. Without papers, she couldn’t travel beyond France’s borders and she couldn’t be taken to a state-owned EHPAD or home. She complained that she hated France and wanted to go back to England. The wheel had turned full circle. My brother and sister called in her bank statements in order to see if anything could be put in order to help the authorities. That year they met up in the Café Sélect where Lisa was supposed to hand over her bank statements. She lived about a hundred metres away, but on the way back she tripped over the kerb and broke her leg. Someone must have called an ambulance and she was taken to the Hôpital Cochin nearby, but as far as we were concerned, she was lost for about four days before Delphine located her in the hospital.
I had posted a happy picture of Lisa on the Internet, taken by my sister earlier that year. I called the police, bars and local shops, it was a fraught time. It was shortly before the September trip to Provence and I was able to visit her in hospital, where she seemed cheerful and much as she had always been, but she had broken her leg badly and she needed ‘réeducation’. That meant being sent to the geriatric hospital, the Hôpital Broca nearby. She was there for months, a stay that fully broke her spirit, and after a certain time she had no desire to live. She made herself as difficult as possible in the hospital and demanded to be let out so that she might die. There seemed to be a tacit agreement when it eventually happened that she had indeed been released to die surrounded by her own things.
By then the changing political and economic climate post-Brexit meant that the train was proving less and less easy to justify in terms of price and we reverted to the cheaper solution of going to Provence by plane. In 2022, a friend lent me his flat in Paris in August. At the last moment I forgot to pack his keys and ended up staying in a nasty hotel opposite the Gare du Nord. Once again, Paris sizzled. I allowed three hours per visit and brought her fruit and fruit juice, butter, whisky and the other things I knew she liked. She was low, but on both days, she allowed me to take her down in the lift to visit a café in the street. I think this was the last time she ever went out except in an ambulance.
After my visit I needed to exorcise the experience again, and despite the heat I walked as far as the Louvre before I got on a bus. I took shelter in the church at St Germain des Près, and found an old fashioned tabac in the rue Bonaparte where I sank a couple of demis and talked to the barman. It was August. No one was in Paris. I ate in a Chinese restaurant with a book. The second day I discovered her poring over photograph albums. She found it hard to recognise her grandchildren and made lots of mistakes. She showed me a faded, fifties picture of a doctor with a vaguely familiar Scottish name: ‘He wanted to marry me, but he didn’t want my three children.’ As ever, we were still held responsible for ruining her life. By some strange coincidence, my Australian editor was in Paris and had tracked me down. He was waiting for me on the boulevard Edgar Quinet. I was grateful for his company, and lunch.
Frequent reports came through from Paris that she was mentally and physically deteriorating. She was increasingly abusive towards everyone who came to see her, even the girl who came to clean up after her. When I saw her again, she had very little to say, although there was no evidence that her mind was gone. My daughter visited her at the new year and found her in a similar state.
Last year I managed to remember the keys to my friend’s flat and I planned a similar two full days in Paris before going on to Bordeaux to see the friend who used to live in the 18e. It was in the mid-thirties again. I made my way to Montparnasse and stopped in Monoprix to buy fruit. When I arrived no one answered the door, but it was possible to turn the lock from the inside by reaching in through the kitchen window. There was a heap of unconsumed food which had been simply left there, but no water to be seen. I called out, but there was no answer. I went upstairs and found her, more dead than alive and almost incapable of speech. I gave her orange juice and some punnets of raspberries. Because of the heatwave there had been no small bottles of water in the supermarket, just two-litre bottles.
I made angry calls to those responsible for her. There was a vague repost that this was what she wanted and the reason why they had agreed to release her from hospital, but it transpired that they did not even know that the flat was a dupleix and that leaving food for her was of no use because she was too weak to go downstairs to fetch it. The nurse went to see her that afternoon. The next day she could speak a little bit. She had eaten the raspberries and showed me the empty punnets. I agreed to come to see her when I got back from Bordeaux. She smiled. This was the last time I saw her.
The nurse called me in Bordeaux two days later. Lisa had had another fall and they had taken her back to Broca. She was undergoing the usual tests. At least she was safer in hospital. She recovered her ability to speak. Her mind never went, although there were occasional fantasies, in one she told me she owned a flat on the other side of the boulevard de Montparnasse. When I looked up the address, I found it was the swimming pool at the Collège Stanislas, a famous private school. I spoke to her on the telephone but there were always long silences. At Christmas I sent her paper and pencils so that she might draw the nurses, as well as some Maigret novels. My daughter saw her twice at the new year. My sister was the last family member to see her, on 23 February. She sent me a picture of Lisa looking quite normal, with a smile on her face. I called her on her birthday, but she sounded morose again. I told her I was booked onto a train on 11 June and I would come on the 12th and 13th, but she didn’t live that long. She finally escaped us all on 9 May.
Giles MacDonogh
25 May 2024
[1] Possibly the best of her names, he was a hairy little man, a proper Nibelung, who worked for the Friends of the Earth
.