Paris

I am settled down in the Dudas household now, and things have gone far better than I expected them to.

First there was the exit of Emilian, back to CERN in Geneva, and the construction of the new particle accelerator. Then Anne left for work on Monday and I was finally left alone with the kids, at last to get rid of the awful stagefright I was feeling about playing with them in front of their parents. We walked to Parc Heller to meet a friend of Julien's and spent a wonderful afternoon in the rare sunshine that has apparently been missing all August.

School started Thursday, so now my days are quite free - I walk the kids to school, twice a week they eat at home with Anne and I, and after school I look after them until Anne finishes work at 7pm. The two girls Diane and Maylis are twins, 6 years old; and Julien is 9. Contrary to what everyone seems to be imagining, they are not complete horrors. So far the task of telling the girls apart is made considerably easy because Maylis is ever so slightly shorter, and Diane has to wear a special corset to straighten her spine, for perhaps 6 months or so (and thankfully she doesn't seem to resent wearing it at all, even though it is cumbersome, not the least usually jabs at me when she sits on my lap, and she has to ask someone to loosen it every time she uses the bathroom). There are other little differences between them also - Maylis often wants to do the opposite of the others, and has a stronger tendency to tantrums, but she is wonderfully cheeky and bright with an imaginative energy. Diane (and sometimes I wonder if it is because the cumbersome corset makes her slower) was the first to attach herself to me, and takes a special delight in hugging me and kissing my hand, and is notorious for her aching slowness at the table. The girls both eat like birds, and Anne has expressed concern that they are underweight and quite small for their age. And then there is Julien, who is more obedient when he wants to be, but also much more mischievous and difficult to control when he doesn't. He has a rather good English for someone his age, which makes it much simpler to communicate, and I can ask him little questions and play games using more complicated words. The fact that I'm utterly hopeless with football is probably the main reason why he likes to play it so much with me. Yesterday evening when I was getting ready to go out they all looked at me in surprise (as I had been behind them every hour of the day for a week, apart from at school) and asked where I was going, and when I got back this afternoon Julien asked me in English if I'd had fun dancing, and the girls cried out with joy and crawled all over me and looked incoherently happy - I guess that is what makes it all so gratifying looking after them all, their loyalties are so simple and so quick.

I have a small pretty room on the ground floor, next door to a bathroom and the kitchen (luckily I'm stuffed full every mealtime so there's not much of a bonus there), which is extremely white with a narrow bench-bed. There is a small television in my room which only receives French stations, a radio and wifi internet. The house itself is quite beautiful though the facade is so ugly; flooded with light during the day, the living areas spacious and open plan with a balcony overlooking a low garden that hosts cherry tomatoes. Upstairs there is a plentiful supply of bathrooms, and the kids do their crafts upstairs, aided by two tables strewn with well-stocked supplies of paper, glue, scissors, rubbers, drawing utensils and cellotape.

And lastly of course is Anne, who I have been getting to know these past few days, especially since her husband has been away for the week. I am, of course, going through the 'honeymoon phase' (as Amber puts it). Still, everything I have gathered from seeing her with her children and talking to her myself tells me that I like her immensely, and that I can think to myself that it was not such a bad idea in the end to come here.

The first couple days were difficult - especially without a schedule, I felt lost and extremely uncertain about what I was getting into. I was afraid that I would find myself creeping around on tender hooks, afraid of doing something wrong and unable to assert my independence. I worried that I didn't talk to the kids enough, and that I would wind up the unwilling older daughter of a household.

However, things did change as soon as I realised that I was capable of playing with kids! It was something I was hoping to learn at some point, having spent a lifetime terrified of children, and never getting the chance to look after any when I was young. And after this happened, I didn't feel quite so helpless when Anne came home from work to make the dinner. I did not worry about asserting myself with them in front of her (in any case, I only imitate the things she pulls them up on, and the way that she says it), and the English is getting much easier. More often than not the girls tell me something in French and I have to persist in replying in English, sometimes dotted around with the little they do know how to say, but I think that it's a good sign they're trying to communicate with me.

But back to Anne. In my small opinion, I think she is a wonderful mother - she always speaks to her children softly and gently, saying 'ma cherie', and explains patiently why she tells them not to do something, answers all the questions that they ask her every hour of the day, always with the same voice, the same calmness. She seems to have spent the bulk of her income on buying educational books, and craft tools and posters of the skeleton. She seems to delight solely on keeping her house clean, looking after her children and making wonderful food. She says that she loves her job, but only so long as she can be an orthodontist for children, as she says the adults are boring. In many respects - her small thin calloused fingers, and her dedicated neatness, a preciseness that belongs to a personal, logical yet inscrutable world, her tendency for a sudden openly childish delight in small good things, and the deftness of her actions - she reminds me of mum, and perhaps this has helped me best to appreciate her so much.

In the evenings after the kids have gone to bed I chat to her in the kitchen for an hour, and one lovely afternoon I sat at the kitchen table and she taught me how to make quiche lorraine - I have a few times mentioned wanting her to teach me some dishes, so she delights in explaining to me the mechanics of a sauce, or marinated chicken, or a soup. She is just as concerned about my French education as her children learning English, and today I filled out a test to send to a local teaching group.

On Thursday I took the metro to the west of Paris to visit Amber, which was wonderful (a jazz singer I met in Edinburgh last year, and who is also au pair here, but finishing soon). She has a beautiful tiny studio apartment on the second floor with views over pretty old buildings, and little postcards of Toulouse-Lautrec cats stuck on the walls. We spent the whole day together in her living room drinking tea, talking about books and music, and listening to her newly written songs. It was lovely to see her again, and hear her lovely rich warbling voice burbling over the guitar, to help her think up a set for her open-mike night I will go to this weekend. I remember well going out with her and some of her friends one night in Edinburgh, all of whom I had never met before but liked a good deal, and wishing that I had more friends like hers and herself who I could meet regularly. She is one of those people who immediately makes you feel easy and comfortable, and yet is so full of tender insecurities that one is aways appealed to her appeal for humanity.

On Friday night we went together to a swing dancing club - I had dressed up for the night with a cream tailored dress from Vietnam, a black sash tied about the waist. We bought a cheap bottle of truly awful red wine and drank it by the Seine from plastic cups, 'blinded' occasionally (as Amber puts it) by the stark spotlights of the tourist boats. We talked about giving her a stage name, but in the end could think of nothing better than the wonderful earthy heavy-soft Creole warmth of her given name - Gougis - and passing by the Saint-Michel fountain and the gloriously immortal uplifted arms of Notre Dame we followed some cobbled streets of tourist bars to the club. She had friends waiting to meet her at the black cellar-like entrance, all of whose names slipped like butter from my mind as soon as I heard them - apart from Emmanuel the gypsy-jazz guitarist who prevailed to withstand us the whole night after the others left late. The club lay underground, with a small dancefloor equipped with an old but tireless band who played us late into the night, and I was grateful for the tango I had done in Edinburgh. I remembered crudely the way of following your partner, and the basic foot movements that passed me reasonably enough to dance in time. I find it difficult dancing to rock or club music, but I adore dancing with a partner, closing my eyes and the sudden moment in which the body forgets its cautions and responds only to a pair of hands, a set of tapping feet.

We stayed in the city until 5:30am eating crepes and drinking tea, my voice shot to hell from babbling emphatically all night in French and English, and from the previous few days of illness. I get far too excited when I am drunk, or in the company of a lot of young people, and invariably I must have embarrassed myself somehow or other before Amber's sweet and eager friends. All the same it was a beautiful evening - and afterwards, my moments of golden reprieve, I walked through the ville d'Antony touching the leaves of the hedges and listening to music, and thinking how I must learn to sing Bert Jansch's Rosemary Lane, filled with an overflow of softness, warmth, humor, gratitude, wonder - and light.

Jocelyn once found a wonderful passage in the introduction to a book while we were in Thailand, that went something like, 'a famous dancer was once asked to explain a certain dance in a few words, to which she replied; "if I could explain it in a few words, why would I go through the trouble of dancing it?"'