Perfectly Ordinary People(105)

And Guillaume in all this?

Well, exactly! That’s what made everything so complicated. Because we had Christophe in the equation, too, plus Guillaume tying the two of us together.

I knew that I’d never give Guillaume up, but I had no idea what Christophe wanted. He’d been raising him as if he was his child for five years too, and yet we’d never discussed their future. So we agreed, in the end, to meet up the next day and talk it all through with Christophe. And we agreed we’d have the conversation in English so that Guillaume wouldn’t understand what we were saying.

I walked back to Vauxhall to tell Christophe all this, and that led to a pretty fiery discussion between the two of us. He’d already been thinking about all the possibilities during my absence, so we gave Guillaume a sheet of paper and a pencil – he loved to scribble – and went out on to the landing so that we could talk.

‘I know that now you’ve found her you just want me to vanish . . .’ Christophe said. That was his opening gambit! It was so aggressive that I was stunned into silence for a bit. I hadn’t been expecting that at all.

I tried to explain that wasn’t what I wanted but, as if he hadn’t heard me, he carried on arguing with this other version of me inside his head, saying he knew it was what I wanted, and he’d already thought about it, and that he’d love to give me what I wanted, but he just couldn’t do it because he’d realised that he would miss Guillaume too much.

After a while I managed to calm him down to the point where he could hear what I was saying, and he asked me, sounding jealous, sort of challenging me, to deny that I wanted to be with Ethel. I admitted that obviously I did, but I had no intention whatsoever of taking Guillaume away from him.

‘So we all have to live together,’ he said. ‘That’s the only solution I can see.’

I was so happy I threw my arms around him, and then did this little dance on the landing.

I asked him then where he wanted to live: in London or back in Mulhouse, or some other place that we hadn’t tried yet, and he made me laugh by saying, ‘Vauxhall. I want to live in Vauxhall. Preferably I want to live in the Vauxhall Tavern.’

So the discussion the next day with Ethel turned out to be a terribly simple one. Both she and Christophe wanted to stay in London, and I didn’t care where I lived. As long as I could be with Ethel and Guillaume, I would have lived on the North Pole.

And Christophe?

Yes? What about him?

Did you still want to live with him?

Oh. I . . . He . . . Look, if I’m honest, perhaps not. After five years, I felt a bit sick of him. Does that shock you? I wouldn’t have minded a break. You know, you mustn’t ever tell him this. Or print it, for that matter! But that’s the truth.

OK. But you said you danced for joy when he said you’d all live together.

Well, yes. Because any other configuration was impossibly complicated. What I wanted was to live with Ethel and Guillaume. But I wouldn’t, couldn’t, ever have tried to take Guillaume away from Christophe, or Christophe away from Guillaume. Plus, two women living together, in the forties, with a child . . . it wasn’t just frowned upon, it would have been almost impossible to even find somewhere to rent. So Christophe being happy for us to all live together solved almost every problem we had. It provided a very neat way forward.

So that’s what happened. And it all worked out pretty well.

You all just moved in together?

Yes. Irene’s husband had a brother, Tom, and he rented us a flat he owned above a Lloyd’s bank. We used to joke about drilling down into the safe . . . It was only a dingy two-bedroom place, but it had lovely high ceilings. Anyway, it felt like a palace to us.

Christophe and I rented it as a couple, and we had my ‘cousin’ Ethel come and live with us.

Did you have to lie in that way?

Oh, of course we did. There was no way we could have lived as an openly gay couple. And Christophe needed the cover too. The police raided the bars and the cruising grounds he went to all the time. They were always stomping in and whacking everyone with their truncheons; rounding men up and throwing them in prison. And of course, Pierre was terrified of that because of what had happened to him in Mulhouse. So our fake marriage reassured him because he thought that if anything happened I’d be able to save him all over again.

And did you all work?

Yes. Christophe got a job working on the rebuilds.

The rebuilds?

Yes, all the houses that had been bombed, I think it was one in three houses or something. The scale of destruction was mind-blowing, and they all had to be rebuilt, and they all needed re-plumbing. So Christophe got a job almost immediately – he answered an advertisement in the newspaper, I think, and ended up working for Walter and Sons plumbers. The sons had both died in the war but that was what the company was still called. People were always assuming his father was Mr Walter. He worked for them for a decade. Ethel carried on as a seamstress for Polly Peck and I was a stay-at-home mum. But I did piecework from home for Polly Peck, too. Officially, Ethel got paid for doing overtime, but secretly it was me. So between the three of us we got by.

Did Guillaume have to go to school at some point?

Yes. I home-schooled him until he was seven – because, of course, he didn’t speak English at first – and then through a friend of a friend, it was something to do with Irene again, I think, we got him into the local primary school. And then, when he was ten, we managed to enrol him in the French Lycée. And that was just amazing, because it was a brilliant school, plus he got to use both English and French. The original school buildings had been used by de Gaulle for his government-in-exile during the war, too, so that had a sort of poetry about it. I liked the idea, anyway.