My daughter is finding it hard to get to sleep: nothing I suggest seems to help. "What's your first memory?" I ask, sitting on the end of her bed. "Being chased by chickens," she says.
She lies down and I conjure further scenes from that holiday more than a decade ago. Soon I am telling her a tale she appears to have never heard before: my memories of her as a small girl.
She loves the specific details of her childhood that summer: the things she said, the people she knew then but does not know now, and the idiosyncrasies that help to make sense of the person she is today. I talk about the times that she has forgotten because she was so young, and before I know it she has closed her eyes. I turn out the light.
Downstairs, I feel a rare sense of having done my parental duty well. There is, I believe, something very wonderful about using memory and reflection to comfort. Far too often I've viewed the past as a dark corner of remorse, regret and lost chances, but now I can see it as something to relish and approach without fear.
Often on my own in the evenings, I try to invite memories of the past to occupy the emptiness. Some of them are painful or sad, but often only because I choose to make them so. I think of what my aunt recently said to me when she heard about the reasons for R and I separating: "You married him knowing that he was an alcoholic, though?"
She has never been one to sprinkle sugar on her words, but it's refreshing really. Yes, perhaps I did. But I chose to love him from the start.
I have a strange desire to tell her the following story, or simply as a way of reminding myself that human behaviour or emotion in a relationship can seldom be described as simply being good or bad, happy or sad. In my marriage to R, there are no villains.
It is summer 2003. R and I have been seeing each other for three months. My mother has come to look after my daughter while R and I go to Paris for a couple of nights. I have visited before, but always as a slightly awkward tourist who never knew on which side of the Seine she was standing, and was baffled as to whether the Left Bank was a place, station or both. But R knows Paris well and he's taking me on an ad-hoc tour of the city in which he grew up.
We walk all day, the August emptiness of the city so pleasing. I'm wearing sturdy footwear, thank God. We eat dinner in a place that his parents recommended, and end up as the oldest customers in a student bar where everyone smells and looks like the boys I used to fancy at college.
We walk more, warm with drink now, past Dior, Chanel, Louis Vuitton towards the Arc de Triomphe, and I sing a bad rendition of Aux Champs-Élysées. I spot a tiered, frothy wedding dress in the window of a boutique. I tell R that I'd like to wear something similar if we end up getting married. He takes a photo of me eyeing up the monstrosity, and I wonder now if I really did like that dress, or if the drink had skewed my taste.
At the hotel room, R removes my shoes. I lie on the bed, face down. He goes to the bathroom to brush his teeth and when he returns, I have disappeared.
"You'd fallen down the middle of the two beds, but you were snoring happily," he says the next morning, kissing me.
That evening I had been drunker than R. He was the responsible one, who cared for me and hoisted my dead weight up off the floor and back on to the bed for a better night's sleep. These were all right times, times when we didn't think too much or feel the need to pull to shreds every little problem that came our way. We didn't have many issues then, or they hadn't come to light. Just one child between us, a paying job each and the energy to fulfil what small dreams we had.
R had the alcoholic in him back then, for sure. But there were more than fleeting moments when we were OK together. Looking back, we took care. The way he took my shoes off that evening might seem small and insignificant now, and though at the time I was too numbed by drink to notice, I will always remember it as an act of love that I had not experienced from any man before.
There really are no regrets.
