Her Father's Daughter Read Free Page A

disagree on the subject; but it’s the mother who decides, who has the last word, and the grandmother can only bow her head with a sigh; the child knows this, listening inquisitively to their conversations, or at least what she understands of them.
    As it happens, she abuses this freedom with relative restraint. What does she do? She only draws a little bit on the walls, the grey walls of their small apartment, with her colouring pencils; she fills the pages of the books she finds with mysterious symbols that appeal to her. She likes bringing these dead pages to life. She sings too, very loudly, at any time of day, tunes she has invented, with a warlike feel, particularly if her mother stops paying attention to her, to speak to the grandmother,for example. Then the child makes sure she’s listened to. Demands it.
    The child is temperamental, ‘spoilt’, in the grandmother’s words. She refuses to eat things she doesn’t like, particularly the little meals put together by the grandmother using whatever’s available, whatever the war has left them: cod stew, Jerusalem artichokes, semolina in milk.
    When the fancy takes her, the child gets down from the table without a word and goes off to play. Which makes her mother laugh.
    â€˜Leave her, just leave her,’ the mother says in reply to the old lady’s protests. ‘If only I’d had such freedom as a child…’
    She laughs to see the child so happy, watches her go with adoring eyes.
    â€˜You’re my darling, aren’t you?’ she calls after her. And the child, caressed by her gaze, turns round without uttering a word, agrees with a conspiratorial smile, rapturously happy.

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    The child doesn’t like her grandmother. Not at all. She doesn’t like that grey hair, that tight bun at the nape of the grandmother’s neck, those eyes which are such a pale blue they look transparent, those cool, drooping white cheeks, that flat chest, that immutable sadness, a sadness which weighs down on her old shoulders and diffuses a veil of gloom and boredom. The child doesn’t like the insipid smell of the old woman. She doesn’t like the hushed, monotonous, sensible voice, which never has any spark, any gusto. She doesn’t like the touch of the permanently icy hands when the grandmother’s making a dress for the child and wants to try it on her (how the child shies away then, how she screams that she’s afraid of the pins). And most of all the child doesn’t like the private conversations her grandmother has with the mother, her own mother, the child’s, her property, and she can’t see how her mother can conceivably be this woman’s daughter. She hates the old woman’s love for her daughter, the demonstrations of affection, kisses, gestures, words. She particularly loathes the name shecalls her, that pet name, Li, for Liliane. Sometimes, and this is the worst of it, the grandmother even says, ‘Li, my child.’ She is the child, and no one else, and her mother is Mummy. No other names. The child thinks there’s something odd, inappropriate, about any familiarity between the two women, anything that implies a special connection between them. And specifically, recently, the conversations from which she, the child, is excluded.
    But what she especially hates, what she can’t abide, is that her grandmother is a liar. Her grandmother lied to her once, and this the child has never forgotten.
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    The mother lied too that time. But that doesn’t matter. It’s not the same. The child doesn’t resent her mother for it.
    It feels like a long time ago. She can’t really tell any more. It was in the past. They don’t talk about it now. We’re not allowed to talk about it .
    It was an event the child didn’t understand. Something very peculiar. That she’s never managed to clarify. She still thinks about it sometimes. She settles under the