15

LAMPS FOR THE DARK

‘We don’t have much time left, you know!’ my father announces with a big smile.

‘Why?’

His pale blue eyes settle on me. ‘Why, Catherine, it’s obvious! I’m fifty-six years older than you and I’ll die soon.’

‘Oh, don’t die,’ I beg.

‘Nothing to be afraid of! When I’m dead, I’ll come and sit on the end of your bed every night. I promise.’

‘Couldn’t I die with you?’ I suggest. Surely death can’t be half as scary as school.

He shakes his head and hugs me tight.

‘No, you have a long life ahead of you, my little one. Like I have a long one behind me.’

Something in me knows he misses the Resistance, the sound of German boots on the cobblestones, the bombs on the back of his bike. During a wave of protests on the streets of Paris, he’s particularly excited. One evening he runs into my room, grabs me, saying to my mother on the way out: ‘She has to see this, Poum.’

Poum, my mother, her nose in a book, nods gravely and waves him off. We follow a protest march, walking alongside burnt cars and barricades. Our eyes stinging with the tear-gas grenades, he heaves a small sigh of what feels like relief. I am the only child about. When people point at us, he just ignores them and, as we sidestep an upturned police van, comments conversationally: ‘You know, Catherine, for cavemen, winter didn’t seem to end. They were expecting the sun to leave altogether. Fire hadn’t been invented yet, you see. Huddling together, they thought night would never stop eating away at the light, making days shorter and shorter, until it petered out completely and left them in total darkness.’

He chats through the cosy pim-pom of the French sirens, which have no stridency and seem to come straight out of a Noddy book. When we’re yelled at, he waves at students and policemen alike and ducks under banners, just as he does in museums when he wants to show me something behind a red cord.

‘Were they very afraid in the dark?’

The darkness in my bedroom is already scary enough. Darkness in a cave in the middle of the forest sounds much worse.

‘They were terrified. Think of the bears, the wolves, the snakes which would come creeping up to eat them.’

He looks at me thoughtfully.

‘Did the light come back?’

‘Why, Catherine, obviously! Winter ran its course, and then it was spring!’

Things are always obvious to Alexandre, but not so much to me.

It’s long past my bedtime when we stroll back to the apartment, both smelling of smoke. The red velvet armchair is still cradling my mother, who is reading in a pool of yellow light. As always, she waves my father back as if he were returning from the Crusades. He descends on her and I see her hands flutter ineffectually behind his head. Then she announces she’s going to bed. We both stare at her as she trots up the stairs with her heavy book under her arm. I go and curl up in her armchair to be in the smell of fresh flowers she always leaves behind her. Then I realise my father has moved on to the library, and I slither in after him. The small book-lined room has velvet curtains of burnished yellow. The grey corduroy armchairs and sofa all loom hugely. The high-backed wooden seat with twirly legs, upholstered in yellow velvet, is always askew as if left in a hurry. The table with its drawer and its own twirly legs has welcomed many elbows and the scratching sound of many pens on its shining, tortured wood. The copper lamp under its green shade shines a secretive light on the typewriter and the messy piles of books and papers. The room is a world in itself, a yellow womb of golden safety. It’s the warmest, cosiest room in the apartment. We can still hear shrieks from the streets behind the walls. But my father has forgotten all about the protests. They were a bit tame for his taste.

‘Look,’ he says, interrupting our silence to lunge forward and grab some brownish burnt-looking stones off his bookshelf. ‘Here are lamps that belonged to the people of the Palaeolithic.’

He points at two tiny holes, one in the middle and one at the narrow end.

‘See, this is where they poured in the oil and this is where they lit it.’ He lifts them triumphantly. ‘When cavemen discovered fire, Catherine, their big problem was how to keep it. So they made these little lamps and felt much better.’ He looks at his watch. ‘You might as well go to bed now or we shall have Sylvia descending on us any minute.’

My father is not afraid of Sylvia but he always obeys her. She has looked after me since I was two, but I think she has been there forever and always will be. Sylvia could just as well be my mother – but something always happens to make me remember who Poum is.

Sometimes, at night, while Sylvia is in the kitchen making herself a cup of tea, my father comes to see me and starts growling in the dark. I laugh at first, but soon I am huddling in a corner, and my yells of terror bring Sylvia into the room. ‘It’s not good for the child to be scared out of her wits,’ she tells him, fumbling for the switch. Alexandre, still growling, catches me and hauls me upwards, high against his chest, laughing. When Sylvia turns the light on at last, he pretends to be penitent and, with one last hug, vanishes. She sighs. Sylvia likes him and disapproves of him at the same time.

She is very silent when I get back to the room we share. She is cross, I can see. I slide into my bed. Tomorrow, I know, she’ll tell my father off. He will beam at her and she will shrug and shake her head.

My head should be full of the screeching brakes of police cars, of fires, of people running and yelling, but all I can think about are the cavemen staring at the big, dancing shadows of their lamps on the walls of their caves. As I snuggle into my pillow and feel sleep coming to get me, I’m so relieved the cavemen managed to keep their fires alive and didn’t have to stay in the dark.