There is a scene in the fourth and final series of my favourite Netflix show, Call My Agent (if you haven’t seen it, do), where Noémie (Laure Calamy), the excitable girlfriend of producer Mathias (Thibault de Montalembert), asks him not to go to the afterparty for the César Awards that they have just attended, but instead to spend the rest of the evening alone with her. The scene takes place as they are walking together through late-night Paris.
The beautiful Noémie, probably in her 40s, is self-abnegating, funny, brave and insecure, and has, ill-advisedly, decked herself up for the prestigious ceremony to resemble a tinfoil-wrapped turkey.
Sanguine and a little preoccupied, Mathias agrees to forget the party. Noémie pauses, quickly unties the flamboyant silver dress she is trussed up in, then turns and runs, entirely naked (bar a pair of stilettos), along the banks of the glittering Seine, a magnificent, Rubens-esque woman, playful, joyous and utterly unashamed.
Blatant, idealised and romantic as it may be, the moment nevertheless felt entirely uplifting. In my increasingly wrinkled and weary home in stormy Dublin, I sat on the couch and drank my tea and watched the credits begin to roll as the screen filled up with an enormous barge gliding along the Seine, gradually being consumed by the low dark mouth of a bridge. (Listen, I told you the scene was blatant.)
The next morning I went walking at sunrise on a nearby beach and stood for a little while looking at the yellow sun emerge from a grey mist like an alien birth.
I walked the length of the strand, watching from under my hood as women (well, mainly women), thighs burnt red from the biting wind, ran into the sea to embrace the brine. I watched them submerge, swim and then re-emerge, the morning air misting from their open mouths, joyous, free.
You should be ashamed of yourself – the length of your <br/> tunic, the look on your face, the bite on your neck, the <br/> boy at the gate...
There are a couple of things that I plan to jettison after this pandemic, when we’re free again to wander the hills and vales of this country. I’m chucking out anything that feels even vaguely tight or ill-fitting (jeans, bras, judgmental acquaintances), followed swiftly by corporeal shame.
“You should be ashamed of yourself.” How many times did we, who traversed the long corridors of educational establishments in the 1960s, 1970s and before and beyond, hear that damning little phrase? It’s surely a phrase to unpick from our post-pandemic psyche, like lettuce from our teeth.
“You should be ashamed of yourself – the length of your tunic, the look on your face, the bite on your neck, the boy at the gate, the scent on your fingers, the cut of you, the state of you, the bare-arsed cheek of you.”
Adam and Eve, we learned from our catechisms (when we were smaller than seals and not much bigger than herons), were both naked, the man and his wife, and they were not ashamed. Then they disobeyed the commandment, ate from the tree of knowledge, had their jungly eyes opened, saw each other and were ashamed. So they scattered, tootie-sweetie, into the undergrowth, and sewed fig leaves together to make themselves aprons.
“Good God,” I thought, walking the tideline, watching the sun rise over the back of the islands and the yellow light weaken and disperse into the mist, “with that kind of murderous misinformation coursing through my memory, is it any wonder I never ran naked along the Seine?”
I read somewhere that to feel shame, you first have to view the norm as desirable. I read that, by middle age, norms have less force. (I don’t know about that – watching legions of parents in the park, in identikit leisurewear as they are temporarily released from home offices and homeschooling, telling little Amélie not to run over her brother on her microscooter, the current norms seem entirely entrenched.)
I also read – although I don’t, and refuse to, trust it – that self-consciousness can re-emerge again as we age further and start to worry about the appearance of our no longer youthful bodies.
I’d come to the end of the beach. I turned and walked back the way I’d come. The swimmers, gloved and hatted, sitting at a distance from one another under a pinkish concrete shelter, were drinking tea from flasks, all of them looking seaward like black-headed gulls. They greeted the new arrivals, who stood and peeled off layers of insulation before walking resolutely into the sea.
They were beautiful to me, these women, as wondrous and inspiring as the light on the Seine.