All the Way Read Free

swimming.
    From this window she can see her house. She left a naughty doll under her little desk, hanging off the trestle.
    â€˜Without you,’ says Monsieur Bihotz, ‘I would never get out of bed.’ He makes her soldiers of buttered toast, with helmets drawn in the butter. He dips a soup spoon in a kilo-sized pot of jam. He makes her eat an apple. ‘Your mother said you eat fruit.’ He pushes the peeler in and flicks out the core. He screws on the lid of the electric coffee grinder. There’s a terrifying noise, the coffee beans jump around and disappear in a black cloud, and Lulu barks and barks. A giant hand screws on the roof of the house and she, Bihotz and Lulu disappear, pulverised.
    In the afternoon he would reheat the same pot of coffee, and say, just like Madame Bihotz used to, ‘Boiled coffee is ruined coffee.’ He also said, ‘The late Madame Bihotz.’ That’s what you say for dead people.
    â€˜He’s a little bit odd,’ her mother used to say. ‘But what would we do without him.’
    Given their timetables, it seemed just as easy for her to sleep at his place, during the week anyway.
    After coffee, they would go down into the basement to shuck the ears of corn. Straddling the edge of the metal tank, scraping the corn cobs between their thighs. He pounded the grains with a mallet, for the ducks. She used to go home covered in splinters and with corn husks in her hair. ‘A real little farmer’s wife,’ her mother would say.
    Madame Bihotz had been cremated. The late Madame Bihotz went up in smoke.
    Madame Bihotz is in the urn. Monsieur Bihotz sleeps with it , she explained to her parents.
    Her father sighed. ‘Isn’t there a proper nanny in the village?’
    â€˜Well, you could always look after her yourself,’ her mother replied.
    â€˜Extroverted,’ Rose says to her, ‘is when you laugh, you tell stories, you dance…Your father’s extroverted. Introverted is when you’re a bit sad, and you look mysterious. I’m introverted. My mother is extroverted. My father is introverted. Actually my family is the opposite of your family.’
    It’s five o’clock, hot chocolate time; Rose’s mother is in the kitchen. ‘I’ve made a fruit loaf, girls! How are your parents? I stopped by the shop the other day. Your mother has some pretty things there at the moment.’
    Rose’s mother wears boots that click on the wooden floor. She sits down at the table, between the bowls of hot chocolate, wearing her short, fringed skirt. She lights a cigarette. You can see her underpants.
    She’s always doing disturbing things like putting a gentle hand on the back of her neck and whispering, ‘So, Solange, how are you?’
    Yeah, okay.
    Rose’s mother always wears knee-high red boots, even at home. Those boots hold her to the floor like a magnetic field.
    Her father calls her a madwoman: ‘She’s a madwoman and an idiot.’
    â€˜If there was a problem, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?’
    Her head tilts beneath the gentle hand. And, inexplicably, she feels water pressing at the back of her throat and behind her eyes, as if she’s a jug about to spill over.
    Monsieur Bihotz picked her up at six o’clock. Rose’s mother insisted he stay for a drink. Rose’s father came in for a minute to say hello. He always made the same joke, in a nasty voice, about her and Rose, the princesses of Clèves, and no one knew what to say. Especially Monsieur Bihotz, who looked like he was encased in a bell jar that muffled his occasional utterances, and squashed him smaller and thicker. But with Rose’s mother Monsieur Bihotz behaved more or less normally. He had a Ricard and she had a whisky, and they clinked glasses.
    The others started in on her as soon as she arrived at school. It was inevitable. Everything was thrown off balance, tipped over. It was vicious: