We go for a slap-up lunch at a famous old place that has a view of Notre Dame. It is the sort of fancy restaurant where your feelings swing between inadequacy, embarrassment and resentment-and you overcompensate for the discomfort by spending much more than you had intended. We came because my father mentioned that he'd been to this restaurant at Christmas, 1958, following that detail with other, more lurid ones about his friend being chased by a nightclub owner's Alsatian around the Place Pigalle, and a desperate bid to make a stopped car run using a bottle of Black Label. It was one of those conversations after which you suddenly appreciate how little, really, you know about your parents.
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