by Adam Thorpe
‘Is Bagneux a hole, then?’
‘Well,’ he said, taking over the rod and pulling on it, ‘it’s become a hole.’
He swung the hook towards him and caught the clump of dripping weed with his outstretched hand, scattering evil-smelling water over my face.
‘Used to be a nice pretty little village,’ he went on, ‘when your grandad was a kid. Or perhaps when his dad was a kid. Then it got swallowed up. I’m sorry you had to be born and brought up there, really.’
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ I mumbled.
He didn’t hear me: he was grappling with the weed, which was sending black dribbles down his wrists into his shirt-sleeve, the rod held between his knees. There was sweat in his sideburns.
‘It’s not that bad,’ I said.
‘What isn’t?’
‘Bagneux.’
‘It’s a shit-hole, chum.’
I stared at the water, at the clouds of midges, at the line of tall thin trees on the opposite bank. It was a shock to me, to hear my uncle running Bagneux down like this. He usually praised it: he said it was a place you could do business in. Anyway, it was home. I didn’t really know anywhere else.
‘What I should have done, Gilles, was sell up and buy a farm and live a healthy country life, like our ancestors. We’re country people, originally, you know. From the Ariège.’
‘Is that near Paris?’
He gave a short laugh, more like a cough. ‘About as far from Paris as you can get. Pyrenees. The end of the known world. Mountains. Mountain air. Pine-trees. Snow. Teach you anything at school, do they?’
I shrugged. He put a cold, wet hand on my knee.
‘You’re descended from a dancing bear, chum.’
‘Really?’
He nodded. He was joking, as usual. Gigi used to watch dancing bears in the street.
‘Jesus, look at this stuff. Like knitting. Or maybe his handler. What do you think?’
‘His handler.’
‘They travelled all over,’ he said. ‘England. Switzerland. Even America. All they had, all these blokes had, was their bear. Leading it along.’ He showed this with his hand. ‘You know? On a sort of leash. And the bear with this sort of, what do you call it, on dogs. Muzzle. With this muzzle on. Because they were still dangerous, of course. That’s all they had, you see. Hard life, wasn’t it? One of them ended up in this little village outside Paris.’
‘When?’
‘God knows. Way back. We’re talking centuries, Gilles. He met this woman. Between you and me, I reckon these blokes must have got around a bit, you know? With their dancing bears.’
He winked at me. I didn’t know what he meant.
‘Anyway, it may be a load of rubbish. It’s what my grandad, Gigi’s dad – it’s what he’d tell me, at any rate. When I was tiny. Gigi reckoned it was a load of rubbish. The dancing bear bloke and this woman, they didn’t get married, you see. It’s the big family secret. Who cares? That’s why you’ve got a bear for a—’ He broke off and looked at me. ‘For a dad, chum.’
The weed lay at his feet in a black puddle. His hands were black and his red woollen tie spotted. I gave a tiny nod, although I was glad he’d said that. He squeezed my knee again. Then he grinned.
‘You know what we’ll do? You know what? We’ll stop at a fishmonger’s and pretend it was us who caught it. It’ll be a joke. We’ll buy a nice big trout and pretend we caught it. Eh?’
Together we trudged back up the track to the car. As he was packing away the rods, I stared at my reflection in the chrome of the Simca’s bumper, making my face expand sideways, enjoying my ugliness. I was an alien from outer space. I didn’t understand fishing.
I tried to work out, on the way back, where the countryside finished. There were pylons among the trees and certain fields would turn out to be seas of mud with earthmovers parked on the side. The view from the road was gradually taken over by buildings and walls, then opened again to flat, open land where cattle grazed and there were new factories with trucks and cars parked. The countryside didn’t finish like a country finished.
We stopped at a fishmonger’s. The walls of the village were black from the passing traffic, as if burnt by it. It started raining properly and we had to run over to where we’d parked the car, my uncle holding the big fish in its brown paper close to his chest. The Simca was full of us breathing loudly, the windows blurring as the engine started, both of us chuckling and making remarks as if we were two grown-up friends.
I felt very happy, suddenly, but I couldn’t say why. The happiness poured into me as I wound down the window and felt the rainy air against my face, the fish on the back seat smelling of rivers and seas, my uncle half-singing some joky sailor’s song over the loud clicks of the indicator as we pulled back into the main road.
4
A few weeks later I got back from school to find my sister sitting in the kitchen, smoking with my mother. My mother’s smile was very strained. Carole didn’t smile at all; she was slumped sideways on her chair, elbow cupped in her hand. She was staring down at the floor, her hair falling in greasy curtains either side of her face. She looked even iller than usual, or as if she hadn’t slept for ages.
I kissed her hello and went straight upstairs to do my homework, even though I was thirsty. Nobody said anything about the baby. Carole hardly ever ate at the same time as us and would sleep in a lot, so it was almost as if she wasn’t there at all. I couldn’t see how she was helping my mother, who didn’t seem more tired than usual. Even when Carole was in her room, just next to mine, I felt that she didn’t want me to disturb her, so I didn’t.
One day I asked if Carole was ill. My mother looked at me, as if thinking about it.
‘Nothing serious,’ she said. ‘She just needs a good bit of home food. She just needs fattening up, dear.’
Carole certainly fattened up, eating packet after packet of one type of cream biscuit. One day she was ill – I don’t know what with – and a doctor with heavy black spectacles came to the house and was hurried upstairs. My uncle was seeing a client somewhere miles away. I sat on the bottom stair for ages, very worried. At last my mother came down, her face white and drawn.
‘Is she OK?’
‘She’s fine. What are you doing on the stairs?’
‘Just waiting.’
‘Go and find something to do outside, Gilles. Please. She mustn’t be disturbed.’
‘What’s she got?’
‘Nothing at all serious. Now please don’t get in the way, dear. Go and do something outside. Go on.’
To my relief, Carole was well again by the time I came back from school the next day, but the illness – whatever it was – left her more grumpy than ever, and she would even take her meals up to her room.
Our area of Bagneux was not very neighbourly and people kept themselves to themselves, but my mother would embarrass me in the shops by going on about babies, about how she had never put on much weight with her previous two and stroking her tummy. In church she would be more ‘discreet’, as she put it, but somehow there were always enquiries after her health, especially from the old ladies under their black shawls. One morning the oldest priest, so old and bent he took ages to climb up to the pulpit, gave a sermon about motherhood, calling the Virgin’s womb ‘the dutiful vessel’ and telling us about a pilgrimage he’d made to a cave whitened by the milk of the Virgin, her breasts so full that the milk had exploded all over the walls. Heads turned towards us and smiled and I wanted to disappear. For once my uncle was in church with us but he didn’t seem to notice. I wondered how the Virgin had put her breasts back together again after they had exploded.
‘O clemens, o pia, o dulcis virgo Maria,’ intoned the old priest, who kept knocking the newly installed microphone with his hand and making us jump.
My mother began to wear long flowing dresses that made her look romantic.
‘It’s not going to be like Tante Madeleine, is it?’ I asked Carole when we were on our own, one day.
/> ‘Tante Madeleine?’
‘You know. With Maman.’
‘Tante Madeleine copped it,’ she said. ‘No way is Danielle going to cop it.’
The way she then smiled and chuckled, as if at some private joke, reassured me more than any words. She was not much help to my mother. In fact, she was more of a burden than anything else, spending most of her time slumped on the sofa, reading women’s magazines or watching television under a cloud of smoke from her roll-ups. She hardly went out and listened a lot to music up in her room, replaying her old records. She and my mother hardly talked to each other. There was very little arguing. My mother never told her off, for a start. This amazed me.
Oncle Alain didn’t tell her off, either. In fact, he spent a lot of these four months or so out of the house, driving all over France in order to expand the business. Some weeks I was aware of movement in the house at night, of my door bumping as the front door opened and closed at dawn, of a whiff of Camel cigarettes and after-shave on the landing, but otherwise he might as well have been in England or America. Now and again I would surprise him in the showroom or find him in the office, as though he had materialised in there like the Invisible Man.
He bought expensive items for the house, too, which would arrive by a lorry in cardboard boxes: a combined radio and gramophone in a small walnut cabinet on four spidery legs, for instance; or a large food mixer which could, according to the instructions, perform thirteen functions, from pulverising to mincing to chopping. A new suite arrived to replace the old-fashioned chairs inherited from my grandfather. It was clean and plain, with thin steel legs ending in small coloured balls, reminding me of the type of seating used by space pilots in telly series. He also bought a special folding table called an ironing board, so my mother could watch television in the sitting-room instead of using the kitchen table. All this was, according to my mother, paid for in instalments. I had no idea what an instalment was.
‘The business is doing very well, of course,’ she said, although there seemed to be fewer clients coming to the door and the showroom was often cold, my mother forgetting to switch the heating on. The wall of boxes at the back hardly changed, and I wondered if my mother had noticed. She was much less involved in the business these days; she had taken a part-time job in Bagneux with a church charity for the deaf and dumb and was trying to learn sign language.
She’d practise it after supper, hunched over a book in the sitting-room.
‘Is it difficult, Maman?’
‘Very,’ she said. Her hands moved about as her lips moved.
‘Is that a swear-word?’
‘Don’t be stupid, Gilles.’
‘It looks like one.’
‘Go to bed, now, dear.’
‘Is Papa back tonight?’
‘No. He’s in Marseilles.’
‘Does he mind you having a job?’
‘Of course not. He prefers me to be more independent.’
My sister, on the sofa, gave a little chuckle. My mother looked at her sharply.
‘It’s what men like in women these days, dear. They like them to have their own interests, not to be stuck in the kitchen all day – he read all about it in a magazine, he told me. “The Qualities of the Modern Woman”.’
My sister was still smirking.
‘Doesn’t he want you to help him in the business any more?’ I asked, not wanting to go to bed just yet.
‘Mademoiselle Bolmont does a much better job than I ever did,’ she said.
‘He said she was no good, Maman.’
‘She makes mistakes, but no more than I did. Anyway, it’s charity.’
Mademoiselle Bolmont was paralysed in the legs. She did typing and filing from home.
‘She does it for virtually nothing, you know,’ my mother added.
‘That’s charity,’ my sister said.
There was a silence. My mother was blinking at the television, although it wasn’t on. She often ignored Carole’s remarks.
‘He doesn’t like me interfering,’ she said. ‘He does it his own way, you see, dear. Much healthier, like this. We did argue, Henri and myself. He was a great stickler, and I had my own ideas. Much healthier, like this.’
There was a little snort from the sofa.
‘Anyway, Mademoiselle Bolmont needs to occupy herself, poor dear,’ she added, again ignoring my sister.
Then she started talking about the boudin blanc she had bought from the butcher (whose son, Christophe, was becoming my best friend), and Carole joined in almost normally. She was eating one of her buttery biscuits and there were crumbs on the sofa. She’s full of sloth, I thought, full of the sin of sloth. Her face was getting plump, and she’d walk slowly about the house in a long dressing-gown that smelt. She had a habit of spraying her hair in the kitchen just before a meal, to make her hair go stiff. The food would then taste of the spray, but my mother never said anything.
And so it went on for weeks. Gigi and my aunt came to lunch now and again in Gigi’s old car, and Gigi would advise my uncle on jobs he needed to do around the house. Tante Clothilde never stopped talking in the sitting-room with my mother about babies – Tante Clothilde had never married and so couldn’t have any herself. When she opened her mouth, all you could see were her bottom teeth, which were yellow. My sister would sit there flicking through a magazine, grunting now and again, a funny smile on her face. It was always too hot because Tante Clothilde was prone to chills, and I was slightly frightened of Gigi. He was tall and stood as if he had a rod down his back – not like an old man at all. He could be very severe. His limp made him severer, somehow, and he hardly ever smiled. Every visit he would go outside by the front door and pat the porch’s concrete sides. They were painted pink and went up at an angle from the wall to the porch’s little cement roof.
‘Designed it myself,’ he said. ‘Very modern, your grandmother thought it was. I told her it was just practical, it’s only the top of you what gets wet.’
The pink paint was peeling. He would always tell my uncle that it needed doing. My uncle would always say, ‘As soon as I find my ammo, General,’ in his loudest voice, and chuckle – though I felt he was annoyed underneath.
I was given the job of dusting the vacuum cleaners, and found quite a lot of dirt under the handles. I dusted the life-size cardboard woman, too: her face was pale blue, by now, as if she was turning into a ghost. I stood facing the window and flew through outer space. I wondered if they would call the baby Nathalie, if it was a girl.
One afternoon – it was early in the New Year, and cold – I went over to the desk behind the dust-covered rubber plant and looked, perhaps for the first time, at the papers scattered there. They were mostly orders and carbon receipts dated 1965 – the year before last! Since the summer holidays I had noticed only three boxes taken from the wall of stock. I knew my uncle had developed the after-service side, acting as an agent for repair people; this, I thought, must have taken over from the selling side. This was why he had hired Mademoiselle Bolmont, to deal with some of the paperwork while he was driving about. She had been paralysed in a car crash, but before that she had been a secretary in Paris.
Now and again my mother and I would visit Mademoiselle Bolmont and she would say how glad she was to be kept busy, and how wonderful Alain was. She had long, auburn hair and big blue eyes and looked a bit like the cardboard cut-out woman in the showroom. I felt guilty, though, at my feelings about her paralysed legs, the wheelchair, the smell of staleness around her: if I thought about them too much, at home, I put myself off my food.
Mademoiselle Bolmont talked a lot. Talked and talked. She seemed to talk with her bust, in fact. She had a pink furry cardigan rolled around her neck, and her sparkling eyes and bright lipstick could make you forget the deadness below her waist. She dressed, my mother told me, in the fashions of the 1950s, with a huge bow lying in the lap of her long dress, and had won a beauty contest years back. She wasn’t very old, though – a bit younger than my mother, in fact. I w
anted to make her walk, to do as Christ did and touch her and make her walk. She served coffee and little chocolate whirls and repeated again and again how wonderful Alain was – she made my uncle almost materialise in the room, she praised him so much.
‘Madame Alain, you are blessed. And now you are doubly blessed.’
‘Oh? Why doubly blessed?’
‘Ah, Madame Alain,’ sighed Mademoiselle Bolmont, looking up at the ceiling and fluttering her fingers, ‘you are to accomplish a husband’s dearest, sweetest wish.’
I knew that Mademoiselle Bolmont’s fiancé had been killed in the car crash, which was why she was blowing her nose and apologising.
‘Don’t apologise, Mademoiselle,’ said my mother. ‘It’s quite natural.’
‘Yes,’ said Mademoiselle Bolmont, wiping her eyes, ‘the main thing is not to grumble. No one likes someone who grumbles.’
Back home, in my room, I imagined touching Mademoiselle Bolmont to make her walk, running my hand over her auburn hair and her thin cardigan. I was astonished to feel the pleasure of it creeping down from my heart through my tummy and into my private parts. This made me feel very dirty. I had four or five lists of sins for Confession, on separate pieces of paper. These were numbered so that I wouldn’t use the same list two sessions running by mistake – although I’m sure the priest didn’t have that good a memory, since I only went to Confession every three or four weeks. I added ‘Unclean Thoughts’ to the list that had the most trivial of my trivial sins on – Stealing a Cake, Not Saying Good Morning To The Old Lady Up The Road, and so on.
‘Do you regret them?’
‘Yes, father.’
‘Go, my child. And sin no more.’
‘Amen.’
Early in February I was very surprised to see Gigi standing by the school gates at the end of the day.
‘You’re coming home with me. Tante Clothilde’s got a nice supper ready.’
We got into his old Dauphine with the GIG plaque on the back window and drove off to Le Bourget.
‘Is Maman OK?’