20

WHITE KNICKERS

I am stunned when I realise that my father had a childhood too. Like Mount Fuji in Hokusai’s paintings, he’s always existed, as he is – smoky in the distance, honey-scented up close – but, when it finally dawns on me that he was once as small as I am, his childhood self comes rushing at me from the other end of the telescope.

He lived in the country, he says. Somehow I know that; it shows in the freedom of his stride, in the way he breathes so deeply when Paris is no longer in the air. It shows in his Viyella shirts, grey wool trousers, Harris tweed and brown shoes that immediately belong when we go to woods and fields. His seven brothers and one sister also appear, filling the empty stage around him.

Twice a week, he was sent to Paris for religious instruction and took the train back home on his own. He was still very small. When he got off and started walking through the fields, the unfamiliar shape of his bowler hat bobbed along the hedges, floating through tree foliage, sharply defined in the late glow of dusk. Hatless country boys would wait for him somewhere along the way, to laugh at him, jeering, taunting, before jumping right in his path to take swipes at him. But he trudged on, his heart beating louder than the thud of their boots. He can’t remember why he was made to wear that ridiculous hat.

‘Why didn’t you take it off?’ I ask. ‘You could have put it back on when you were close to home.’

His eyes are full of shame.

‘I don’t know.’

And then I remember the time I was tied to a tree in the playground by two of my schoolmates who had me repeat over and over ‘I am stupid’. I let them do it. I obediently trotted out ‘I am stupid’. It felt natural, as if I were a captured Carthaginian and they were all Romans. When the bell rang, they finally released me in an eerie silence.

We’re on the road. He lifts his two hands off the wheel. It looks like he’s trying to catch an invisible ball. We swing this way and that in the traffic, a blood cell flowing higgledy-piggledy down an artery.

‘Do you know how your grandparents fell in love, Catherine?’

Drivers swerve past us blasting their horns. With an absent-minded flick of the hand, he sends them on their way. He doesn’t even wait for me to shake my head.

‘Your grandfather, Pierre, had just finished L’École Polytechnique and L’École Saumur. He came out seventh in his class at Polytechnique and first at Saumur. Polytechnique is the greatest of French schools, for thinkers and scientists. Saumur is a prestigious riding school for elite riders. He did that to take a rest from Polytechnique.’

As if he were on a train platform with only just enough time to explain these things, his voice is slightly breathless. My grandparents, long dead before my birth, stop receding into the mist. He brings them back, throwing me measuring glances to capture all my attention. Of course, he could choose to tell me about them on any other Saturday, but now is the slot, the right moment.

‘Then, suddenly, Pierre’s mother decided it was time for him to be married. She was a widow, dressed in black from head to foot, with a sitting room crowded with furniture – like sheep pressing against your legs. Your mother would rather be able to cycle through hers.’ He’s always explaining my mother, the strange bird he lives with. ‘Your mother has never sat on a bike or a horse; she has never swum, she can’t drive, but she needs the space to do all these things in her own home …’

He chuckles, then clears his throat.

‘Pierre accepted her idea on principle. He was raised to pander to his mourning mother, who for years had been wedded to her mourning clothes. One afternoon, he was duly invited with his mother to a little gathering, called an entrevue, which was thrown to ease matters for the meeting of interested parties. The eldest daughter of the house was the candidate for marriage. Their two families had married many times before in the past. Do you know, Catherine, you probably have more Chabannes blood in you than Saint Phalle blood?’

Blood is a leitmotiv for both my father and mother – blood on scaffolds, blood gushing from wounds, crusaders wading through blood in the streets of Antioch. Blood is more important than papers, than petty arrangements. Blood makes things real. Blood is what you are.

There’s a silence, maybe because the question feels open-ended.

‘The girl was called Henriette.’

Instead of being completely immersed in his story, my thoughts dash about faster than swallows. I am remembering another entrevue, where my mother was ushered by her family into the arms of a retarded imbecile. I stare at my father, but he doesn’t seem to see any correlation. Each story lives in a watertight compartment of its own. Now we are with Pierre, my grandfather; there is nothing else.

‘Afterwards, his mother asked him how it went …’

He pauses and reels me back in with a look.

‘… He answered that it went very well. When she pressed him further, he added: “But it’s the younger one I want.” This created a small scandal. But nothing could make him budge. The younger sister was your grandmother – Catherine. I gave you her name. She had fallen in love with him too. They had to wait until her eldest sister got married before they could get engaged.’

He smiles at me triumphantly as if a mathematical equation has been solved.

‘Straight after their wedding they buried themselves in the country and produced nine children.’ My father catches my arm. ‘They’d always go upstairs for a siesta after lunch.’ He smiles. ‘To be alone with each other.’

His parents’ passion glows on his face like a reflected sunset. He glances at me.

‘I was a child of love, Catherine. Just like you.’

‘And they had nine children, like you did.’

‘No, ten, if you count the baby Benoît who died at birth.’

We both think of the baby Benoît a while, then Alexandre cheers up.

‘When I was about nine, my father took me to the theatre for the first time. Living in the country, this was a stunning event for me. It was a comedy. I laughed so much, I got up in the middle of the play and yelled: “Stop it, stop it! I can’t bear it anymore!” There was such a pandemonium they had to stop the whole thing for a few minutes, for even the actors on stage had collapsed with laughter.’

‘Did your father tell you off?’

‘No, no, of course not.’

Now he has parked with one swift screech of the brakes. Leaving the car askew behind us, we are walking to church: St Joseph’s on Avenue Hoche, an American church where none of my parents’ old aunts are lurking. My mother always has a terrible headache on a Sunday and stays in bed all day to prove it. We both know she doesn’t like Mass very much. She’s like Voltaire, who spent most of his time tucked under the quilt, reading and writing with a floppy nightcap on his head, receiving flying visits from Frederick II of Prussia at his bedside. My father looks at her with a half-smile and never tries to convince her. Her bed is her boat and she can sail off in it at any given moment.

The priest drones on and on, people bob up and down. My hand is sheltered in the pocket of my father’s tweed jacket. As soon as the hymns start, he sings gustily, with me riding his syllables as best I can. When people go to communion, they don’t come back to sit next to us again. He doesn’t receive communion but sends me off to the altar, pushing me forward like an emissary, a scout, a double agent. I rather like the break in the proceedings. The look on the priest’s face is lonely and sad, swimming out towards the shore of faces before him, without quite reaching them. When I return to our now empty pew, my father pats me on the back. After Mass, we duck out quickly and walk out into the sunshine.

‘Do you think it hurts the priest’s feelings when you don’t eat his communion?’ I ask.

My father shakes his head.

‘I will next week.’

I look up, surprised. I have never seen him receive communion. He nods.

‘Yes, your mother no longer wants to sleep with me because she is fifty.’

There is sleeping and sleeping. Some sleeping has to do with sheets. Other sleeping has to do with skin.

‘Is that why you didn’t go to communion?’

He nods.

‘It was a sin, you see.’

He looks at me expectantly. I don’t quite understand, but I nod back. Sometimes the caravan can’t be stopped or bothered. We get back to the car and in no time we are on an autoroute, my father driving straight ahead. Soon the country laps against the car windows and we are away, well away from everything.

Flat fields on either side of us iron out Paris and make everything peaceful. My father drives so long that soon dusk is upon us. We only stop on our journey to raid a supermarket. We buy pyjamas, a nightdress with bears on it, instead of the plain Viyella one I usually wear. We buy a razor, razor blades, toothbrushes, toothpaste. Each ordinary object appears more exciting and exotic than the last. The car feels like our house now.

‘You know, sometimes I’d wait hours in the street after my lesson just to spend a few moments alone with your grandmother before her train arrived.’

‘What did you talk about?’

He looks at me as if the wonder of it were impossible to transmit.

‘I’d walk next to her along the platform. Sometimes she would even hold my hand.’

In the car, with the drone of the engine, my grandmother swims out of the past, breaking into the surface of our day.

‘Was she different when she was alone with you to the way she was at home?’

He turns his body towards me and we stare at each other. He talks when he has righted the steering.

‘She … was severe, nearly cold, some people said. They were frightened of her. But she was never different. Always herself. There were great wells of tenderness … To be with her, to walk at her side, was enough. Even if she said nothing, nothing at all, even if she appeared … severe … cold … she wasn’t, not at all.’ He sighs. ‘She was very busy. We had so little time alone together. Every minute counted. I remember every single one I spent with her.’

Even his face has slightly changed shape, as if he were morphing into someone he has nearly forgotten.

‘She was interested in herbs and remedies. She had studied graphology. That’s the art of reading handwriting. People write in many different ways and it reveals who they really are.’

‘Do you think she wanted to know who people really were?’

He frowns.

‘Maybe. Your grandfather was sending all his sons away. Soon I would be the next one to go. I think I was her favourite.’

I nod. I see them sitting on a bench to wait for her train together or strolling on the platform. There is something unendurable about the joy of it, something sacred.

He takes a deep breath.

‘Once we were walking along, something floated to the ground at her feet, next to the hem of her long skirt. She bent swiftly and stuffed it in her bag …’ He stops impressively. ‘They were her knickers.’

‘Didn’t she say anything? Did she laugh about it?’

‘No, she said nothing at all.’

‘Did she get on the train?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I walked home.’

We are quite alone in the car with the fields on either side, and her train has just left all over again.