Your life story becomes a book to pass on

The departure has stayed suspended in my memory like a note that refuses to fade. A Tuesday, as it happens, leek soup day. My mother had poured the soup into my bowl without a word, as if nothing were happening. My father, behind his newspaper, hadn't looked up.

I was nineteen, with a pressed-cardboard suitcase bought at the Saturday market, and almost nothing inside: two shirts, a pair of Sunday trousers, a razor, and a cousin's address in Paris scribbled on the corner of an envelope. That was, more or less, the full list of everything I owned.

The 6:42 train passed at the end of the lane. All my childhood I had heard it whistle without ever getting on. That morning I walked to the station through the fog, and I remember a strange thought: in Paris, perhaps the fog would no longer smell of beetroot.

My father didn't come with me. Thirty years later he admitted that he had stayed at the window, newspaper trembling, until the train had disappeared.

At the Gare du Nord, the platform swarmed with a life I didn't know. I waited two hours for my cousin. He never came. I spent the first night in the waiting room, suitcase under my feet, eyes fixed on the door as if my life still depended on someone walking through it.

The next day I found work. Rue de Flandre, a building site hiring by the day. All you had to do was be there at six and look sturdy. I looked sturdy. I carried cement for fourteen months, and the sound of shovels became the sound of my new life.

What I never told anyone, not even my children, is that one January evening I almost went home. I had got as far as the ticket window, the fare in my palm. Then I thought of the leek soup, of the bowl set down in silence, and I walked back to the Rue de Flandre.

Three years later, one autumn evening, I met a woman outside the cinema on the boulevard. She was waiting too. Her date didn't come either. We laughed at the coincidence, then had a coffee, then built fifty years of life together on that same kind of waiting.