Ever After Read Free Page B

the window, what should have been the proper response. I was nine. There he was, in all his pride, fifty-five years old—some twenty years older than my mother, medals on chest, cigar lit, Scotch and soda—a large one—poured. Some question of mine? Or some impulse in his own mind that seemed to raise the whole, daunting phenomenon of his soldierly past and his mysterious present duties, his aura of belonging to a world of great, glorious (but peculiarly awkward) things?
    He seemed surprised at his own words, as if he had not known they were stored inside him. He looked selfconsciously at his watch.
    “Whatever can your mother be up to?”
    Perhaps it was on that same evening—but this surely would have been sooner after our arrival—that I had asked him, point-blank, what were we doing, what was
he
doing, here in Paris? And he’d replied, with a sort of jocular, self-effacing gravity, “Oh—sorting out the world. You know, that sort of thing.”
    Only once can I remember his attempting to show me the sights of Paris. We had scarcely set out—our first port of call was Napoleon’s tomb—when an icy shower caught us, the first of a series which would turn our jaunt into a stoical exercise. I could not help feeling how I would much rather have been with my mother. How she would have turned a change in the weather into a positive pleasure.Wrestling, laughing, with an umbrella. Scurrying into the aromatic warmth of a café and ordering, in an Anglo-French that was infinitely more convincing if no more proficient than his, “
Un crème, un jus d’orange
,” and, falling back into expressive English, “and two of those wicked little tarts!”
    Seeing the sights of Paris with my mother! Shopping sprees with my mother in Paris! From her I learnt to see the world as a scintillating shopwindow, a confection, a display of tempting frippery. From her I learnt the delights of ogling and coveting and—by proxy and complicity—spending. I would go with her to spend money. To buy hats, necklaces, gloves, shoes, dresses, cakes. I would wait, perched on a velvet-backed chair, smiled at by the attentive
vendeuse
, while, behind drawn plush curtains, things slithered, rustled, snapped, to an accompaniment of sighs and hums. In the city of perfume we bought perfume. In the city of lingerie we pondered over lascivious creations of silk and lace. If they were meant expressly for his eyes, it only made his noble loftiness the more impressive; but I suspected—I knew—they were not. And in all this I was the adjudicator, the referee, the scapegoat. The oyster-grey or the rose-pink? “Oh, you decide, sweetie. No, you can’t?
Bien, tous les deux, s’il vous plaît, Madame
.” “
Tous les deux, Madame? Ah oui, d’accord. Le petit est bon juge, n’est-ce pas?”
    Coming out with her booty, she would hug me ardently, as if it were I who had enabled her so successfully to succumb. In the same way, prior to such purchases, when her eyes fell on anything particularly delicious and desirable in a window, she would squeeze me fiercely, conspiratorially, giving an Ooh! or an Aah! as if it were I alone who could tilt the balance between mere looking and rushing headlong into the shop. “But isn’t it just
heavenly
, darling?”I could have lived for, lived in that squeeze. Until I grew up and realised it was almost entirely selfish. She might as well have been hugging herself, or a handy cushion or spaniel.
    Sorting out the world! He should have sorted out himself and his own jeopardized household. Did he know—but he must have done from the very beginning, he must have known what she was “up to”—that while he was busy sorting out the world and “talking with the Allies” (another cryptic phrase, which made me think of some gossipy, over-neighbourly family) and I was busy at the little
école
for foreigners they found for me,
“Maman,”
as I’d begun precociously to call her, was busy entertaining or being entertained by