12

MARRIAGE

After several aborted explanations from my father, I finally fathom that my parents are not married. I can’t believe it at first – why should I? They seem so established, as if they have always lived at the rue du Cirque, eyed by their disapproving relatives. But they’re really not married; they’re like Diane de Poitiers, John Lennon, Jacques Brel, Boris Vian rolled into one. Not married? I find this the most exciting news I have ever heard. I proudly tell everyone at school. But soon there is this problem with the American nuns.

Now when I bring back invitations to parent–teacher meetings, Poum and Alexandre no longer run to each other with the news, as if it were a party where they could go together to the nuns’ school with measured, grown-up expressions on their faces, where they could make polite noises of approval and contain themselves enough to clap with the right note of tepid enthusiasm, trying desperately to fit in, because they don’t understand anything, because they slip and slide and wander down the wrong aisle and kiss the priest’s hand and bow like Confucian scholars to the nuns and are chummy with the drunken gardener because he likes roses.

When I hand over the nuns’ invitation, my mother reads it upside down without putting her glasses on and then hands it over to Alexandre. They stare at it quietly, then at each other. It could be a death sentence or a tax invoice. Something happens to the air: it twists and turns, it’s like a chemical reaction – that’s when the paper is suddenly forgotten on my father’s desk, crunched into a ball, or can be seen magically fluttering away. Yet my parents haven’t moved an inch. The next instant, they are gone; they have scrammed. I hear the bedroom door slam happily at the top of the stairs. They are safe again. They have defeated the American nuns in a strange, paranormal way. Not ever having gone to school, it’s a weird new world for them. They often ask me about it as if I had been to the moon. ‘What did they say?’ ‘Have the nuns asked you about us?’ Sometimes when the bell rings I wonder if it’s not the nuns coming to get my parents to haul them away.

I can relate to their fear. They are right. There is a place called school in outer space where Alexandre and Poum’s world does not exist, because their world is ground into the dust by every heel in the schoolyard, by every teacher’s intake of breath, but especially by the sighs of Mother Garnier, the main nun, the aloof one who appears to hold their destiny in the palm of her hand. I see them only once in her company. They become abject courtesans, sycophants in some Japanese emperor’s court. They approach her like supplicants and she does not give them one smile. Tight-lipped, smooth-browed, she lets them into her office like repentant children. I hide behind a tree and ask the garden to help them. Boughs and branches are kinder, leaves and roots are more compassionate than a virtuous Catholic nun. When they come out, Mother Garnier walks them to the gate and I see them go like Adam and Eve clutching at their nudity. They bow over her American hand and whisk themselves away. After a few seconds, as I walk along the wall, I hear Alexandre’s high tones: ‘Well, that went very well! She was quite happy, wasn’t she? What a wonderful woman! A saint! An icon! You can see she has read the Magna Carta!’ Then his voice dies down. I hear his car’s familiar plunge into the wrong gear as frightened horns bark out while he swerves into the traffic. Then even the sound of them has vanished and school closes around me again.

I am a cosmonaut shuttling back and forth each day from one distant planet to the other. Another smooth-faced nun comes up to me and asks me what I think about sex. I know it has to do with my parents. She doesn’t ask any other child. I look up at her blankly. All I can think of is Madame Carmel, the concierge, and what I think of as ‘the underground organisation’. A year later, the American nuns no longer wear their habits and there is a course on sexuality. I tell my father about this and ask him what it’s for. He glares at me and jumps to his feet, runs to his typewriter and bashes at it. He can type faster than any living being – you can hardly see his hands whizzing over the keys. I love seeing him do things so fast and so sure, like the Wizard of Oz behind his curtain. Only my father is not a disappointment at the end of the Yellow Brick Road. He is truly there – the magic ruler of my childhood, holding the whole world in the palm of his hand. I watch him ram the carriage return, whip the paper out and sign his Hokusai wave of a signature. I watch him fold the letter manfully, put it in an envelope, lick it and stamp it fast with his pounding fist. Now he sighs and opens his arm and his leg to grab me close. ‘Catherine, you are not going to learn about sexuality on a blackboard. They must be out of their minds. Oh, no, no, no.’ He hugs me to him and I breathe his smell of honey. He eats about a kilo pot a week. The letter will be pinned to my pinafore because I am not trusted to remember. My mother walks in and he tells her the awful news: ‘The nuns have gone mad, Poum.’

I have always understood that the gods decide marriage and you can just as well be married to a swan or a bull as to a woman or a man. Surely marriage only means that the sacred words of the heart are said. But in the Paris of the sixties, married people and unmarried people are separated by a red sea of sin. Something scurrilous, embarrassing and painful is attached to the unmarried state, something I can feel but cannot name. I think of Sylvia’s parents, Mummy Joyce and Daddy John. They were married. They both slept in the same bed. They lived in the same little cottage where nothing was hidden or whispered. They breathed the same air. They had a child together, even two. Sylvia had a sister. Of course apart from that, things were different. Daddy John had to vomit in a potty because he had an ulcer. He drank wagon-loads of tea, while my parents drink wine. My father goes to an office and Daddy John preferred gardening. I try to find other parallels between my two sets of parents. The ones that are here now and the ones I have lost. Mummy Joyce kept her cigarette coupons in the sideboard, an ugly piece of furniture that seemed only to exist to house the millions of cigarette coupons. She showed them to me once and for an instant I had the feeling of what a millionaire really was. The stacks of coupons bursting in every nook and cranny of the sideboard suggested wealth, and possibility, like thousands of airplane tickets ready to fly you anywhere. Only they stayed in the cupboard; I never heard them ‘happen’. I didn’t understand what they were there for or what value or function they had. Mummy Joyce never used her cigarette coupons or won anything with them. But she was irredeemably married to Daddy John and all the cigarette coupons in the world couldn’t change that, nor the fact that even though Poum has never heard of a cigarette coupon, she and Alexandre are not married at all.

Mummy Joyce once drove somewhere with me. I can’t remember why I was in the car or where we were going. But we were alone together for an hour or two, which never happened because she was usually too busy baking cakes or being a private nurse or listening to the radio or making jam to be with me. But this time, her car drove us through the afternoon, past rows and rows of parallel English houses and twisting roads and briar lanes. She told me she had loved a man called Mr Swan. She was going to marry him but he died in the war, so she married Daddy John. Once she went back to see Mr Swan’s mother with her two little girls, one of whom was Sylvia. Mr Swan’s mother broke into tears when she saw them and said they could have been her granddaughters.

I understand that Mummy Joyce’s true love was Mr Swan. I know that’s why Daddy John kept vomiting in a potty, why they were both imprisoned in front of the television or on their own in the shed or in the kitchen. I know that’s why the bathroom was never clean, even if I washed it so it smelt nice for them when they brushed their teeth. I know marriage has nothing to do with love. Love was in the greenhouse where small spiders slept in dusty flowerpots, where the dry, sunbaked, mouldy smell met the warm green womb, replete with carefully mothered seedlings, young shoots and moist earth. Love was in the larder with the library of jam pots each with its name in a beautiful serif, coiffed with a frill of cotton. Love was in the shed, sleeping in the wood shavings, near the cosy tools worn smooth by Daddy John’s hands, old friends, waiting for his familiar touch. Love was lying in Mr Swan’s grave. Mummy Joyce retired into garrulousness and frivolity and Daddy John into his blue-eyed silence. They never met though they lived side by side. Mummy Joyce was a good woman but her presence in the house wasn’t loving, it was busy – as if busyness replaced care.

Poum couldn’t handle Daddy John. They both seemed to know she was some sort of fraud, some Briseis, pretending she was still in her father’s court when it had long been burnt to the ground, salt poured over its ashes so nothing would grow there. The compassion in Daddy John’s eyes made her fumble in his presence. Daddy John was the king of an invisible castle of simple truths and devastating reality. He knew her family were a gang of liars. When he happened to meet them, he retreated to his shed and took me with him. I would sit in his wheelbarrow and watch his hands repair and smooth broken bits of wood. There were mice in his shed but they didn’t scare me when he was around. He wheeled me back and forth and we talked about robin redbreasts and rain and chives so tall and bright with dew and how it was good to be a socialist even if he did stand up for the Queen when she appeared on television because she was a good woman and represented good old England. To make him feel better I told him I also vomited every time I had to go to school and, with tears in his eyes, he hugged me tight. I don’t know if he was crying for himself or for me or for us both. Sometimes I wished I belonged to him and we could live in his shed and I could sleep in his wheelbarrow.

My relationship with Daddy John happened in the garden, in the greenhouse, in his car, in the sweet shop. We couldn’t relax unless we were alone with the tread of our footsteps and our hands resting in each other’s palms. Something healing and quiet happened then as if the rest of our lives were a hurry and a waste. We both liked to walk slowly, hold hands and sit by the pond near the water lilies. We both wished Mummy Joyce would stop speaking so loudly. We both wanted to stay and belong, but life was carrying us far away from each other. Daddy John was a real place for me. To which real place can my mother return? Or has it vanished like Odysseus’s men in The Odyssey?

Once Alexandre and Poum have informed me of the guilty secret about their not being married, Alexandre again insists that I am in exactly the same position as William the Conqueror and quotes Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples: ‘From this irregular, but romantic union, a son was born: William.’ He holds his finger aloft: ‘Irregular, Catherine, not illegitimate. You are out of wedlock, but you carry your father’s name thanks to the Magna Carta.’ He drops a kiss on my brow: ‘Whatever anyone says, remember that you have Bordeaux wine in your veins.’ This is why my mother was rushed to England: so I could be born on British soil and have an English passport. I understand now that this is why I had Sylvia and lived in a cloud of English before ever speaking a word of French. It all seems fine by me and the exotic allure of it does not wear off. To think that all the long faces I have seen were only about this: my parents are simply not married. Rather than the carcass of the mammoth I expected, I am landed with the skeleton of this mouse in the cupboard. There must be something else, some darker secret straight out of the Escurial, they have not yet revealed. When I ask why it matters so much, Poum makes the sign of the Cross and my father reverts to the Magna Carta. Reality recedes once again. When I try to reassure them both and say that I don’t mind at all about them not being married, they wince. Neither of them can bear to hear the word ‘marriage’.

Just after the war, rules and regulations went out of the window, even for two people whose families went back to the Spanish Inquisition and the Crusades. But the war has long been over and my appearance on the scene gives them a new crime on two legs to mull over.

Marriage casts the shadow of the valley of death upon my parents. There are so many adepts of marriage around. Big Brother is nothing next to them: policemen, lawyers, teachers, old aunts, nuns – eagled-eyed grown-ups at every corner.

In three seconds flat, they know my parents are frauds.