Ignorance (14 page)

No no no no no.

He refused to listen. He chased me off.

As a parting present he gave me some sticks of charcoal, some pencils, some oil pastel crayons. I hid them amongst my folded clothes at the back of my shelf in the bedroom cupboard. I twiddled a stick of charcoal between finger and thumb. Its thinness invited me to snap it in two. A stick in each hand, I’d beat him until he bled. How dared he abandon me?

I turned fourteen and left school. I could begin to earn my living, go out to work as a daily servant, like my mother. She said: be grateful for what you can get.

If I was old enough to find a job I was old enough to have a baby. If I had a daughter I’d call her Andrea. No, Andrée.

Once she got born she’d become herself. I’d have to study her, learn her. She’d summon me, instruct me. She’d gaze at me and tell me what she needed me to know. I’d listen to her babble and translate it. What would she be like when she reached the age I was now? Perhaps she’d sulk sometimes, as I did. But I’d coax the words out of her.

Andrée

 

 

I didn't know anything much about my mother. Her name was Jeanne: I clung to that. Could you miss someone you'd never met? Sometimes her absence felt solid as lentil purée, pressed on my heart like a weight on pâté. Sometimes she sneaked up, just behind me, blew on the back of my neck. I'd whisk round, trying to catch her, but she'd melt away on to the flagstones. I'd try to melt with her, but I'd be shaken back to life by Sister Dolorosa clapping her hands, snap out of it will you, and I'd lurch back into the convent kitchen, soapy scrubbing-brush dripping suds down my skirt.

On the day of my Confirmation, when I was thirteen, Marie-Angèle Blanchard showed me a photograph of herself and my mother. The nuns left us alone together in the parlour while they went off to sing Compline: Andrée, you're to keep your godmother company. Madame Blanchard said: we'll have a little chat, won't we, and you can tell me how you're getting on.

She plucked out pictures from an envelope in her black leather handbag. Now, Andrée, which is which? A glossy shot of her seven children, lined up, tallest to smallest, their smiling faces turned to the camera. All dressed in sailor suits, hands on the shoulders of the one in front. Behind them rose a grand house, a high wall topped with spikes. Oh, Andrée, surely you remember all their names? Now, you know who this is! A picture of herself outside the front door of the big house with its rows of shutters, another picture of herself standing on her wide lawn set with flowerbeds like a park.

My godmother fished in the envelope again. Her red nails gleamed like enamel. Her cheeks too. Two glasses of dessert wine, two slices of Sister Dolly's buttered honey cake, sweet words from Reverend Mother and the curé: our dear benefactress! So good of Monsieur Blanchard to spare you to visit us!

That spring day, despite the sun shining my godmother wore her fur coat, I suppose to show how rich she was, and black suede high heels. Gold clips swept up her blonde hair. In the parlour she tossed the coat on to a chair, peeled off her gloves, dropped them on top of the coat. Her pale green dress, crisply ironed, seemed brand new.

She pulled out a small photo with deckled edges. Her brows drew together: I'd forgotten there were any copies left of this. I thought they'd all been given away. That's your mother and me. Goodness.

The black and white print showed two little girls in bunchy pale overalls buttoned on the shoulders and tied at the waist with strings. They stood on the pavement outside a shop. Fair curls bounced around Marie-Angèle's plump face. My small, thin mother had wavy dark hair and intense eyes. I knew her family name was Nérin, and that she had abandoned me as a baby and run off, and that soon afterwards her mother, my grandmother, had died of TB. Knowledge I'd always had, part of me like my hands and feet. In the photo Maman was a little pale ghost. There and not there at the same time. What was she like? I'd put this question before, and always got the same answer. No better than she should be, Madame Blanchard said: she turned out badly, I'm afraid.

My pudding mother, released from her mould and not standing up properly but collapsing, like a drunk. Smelling of rum and vanilla sugar. Madame Blanchard snorted: after all my mother did for hers!

She was reciting her part in the ritual, so I recited mine. I said: but where did my mother go? Madame Blanchard said: how many times do I have to tell you! She went off to England to get a job. She wanted a fresh start. Remember you're not an orphan. You're illegitimate.

The word rolled on my tongue like a ball of spit, slimy-sour. Did other people hear with their mouths? I thought with mine too. If only the school had been made of pastry I'd have eaten it all up brick by brick and learned something. That day Madame Blanchard gave me a rosary with brown wooden beads glossy as chocolate beans. Bite your way around the Sorrowful Mysteries, girl. Flagellation crunch swallow. Crucifixion crunch swallow. Spikes driven through your palms your feet crunch swallow.

Madame Blanchard nipped the photo back from me and tore it into little pieces. I cried out. She said: I don't need it any more. It's better that way. No use dwelling on the past. You've got to live for the future. You know I worry about you so much. I pray unceasingly that you won't turn out like your mother. The pudding erupted from its fluted tin, dumped itself over her head, cloaked her in hot batter buttoned with sultanas.

The door opened and the nuns came back in. I stood up, moved out of the way. Bits of talk fell on me, hot splashes of batter. Good Catholic home. Modern girls.

Confirmation marked the end of my schooling. I stayed on at the convent, working as a live-in servant, which Madame Blanchard thought best. I agreed: the outside world felt prickly. Everybody in town knew everybody else and so everybody knew me. They pursed their lips as I banged past with my basket of bread. I tied on a blue headscarf, knotting it behind my head as the postulants knotted their black ones, and tried to become invisible. My mother was a ghost. I wanted to be one too.

I hid in my stone shelter. Along stone corridors I drove lines of schoolchildren. Swing your arms, step out one two one two and try to kick Fatty Andrée in the back of the knees. Up and down the black tarmac playground enclosed by high walls, secured by a bolted gate.

Locked doors held us tight. Most people in town had put bars on their ground-floor windows straight after the war, Mother Lucie explained, to keep out the homeless and jobless men who roamed about. Groups of tramps, red-faced and shabbily dressed, silted up the corners of the park. Some of the homeless men lived in a hostel near the parish church, where they ran a
dépôt-vente
, selling donated furniture and so making a bit of a living. Others slept rough. As children we feared all of them. Ne'er-do-wells. Crazies. Thieves. When we went out for exercise we kept close in our neat crocodile and hurried past them. Wild men, who lived outside the rules, who might lunge at you and touch you. At least there were people worse off than I was. Nonetheless they claimed me: hello, little girl! Sometimes boys kicking footballs jeered at me: how's your mother, Fatty Andrée? Fatty batty Andrée! Your mother!

Now that I'd begun working as the convent servant, I had to go out in public whether I wanted to or not. I had to run errands. People nudged each other in shop doorways as I went by. Their sly glances said something, which I couldn't understand, about the war and about my mother. Against their nasty looks and hissed words I built a wall of family. I gave myself a gallant, eagle-eyed father, a hero of the Resistance. I gave myself soldier grandfathers, ranks of them stretching back and back. When anyone insulted them they kicked them up the arse. Take that, fuckwits.

I escaped the town whispers by scowling at the ground, pretending I hadn't heard. I took back routes down flights of stone steps tucked in between buildings. I dodged through narrow alleys. I hopped past bombed houses, open-fronted and roofless. I watched the streets change, as wartime damage was gradually repaired, rubble cleared, the clumps of old tenements beyond the bridge torn down. Three-storey blocks of flats, neat villas, reared up in their place, tidy and sharp-edged. A
Monument aux Morts
was built by the veterans' association, listing the dead men's names. Their children swelled the numbers in the orphanage. Rows of ancient plane trees were lopped, replaced by long beds of evergreen shrubs and bedding plants. Soon only the old people would be able to remember how the town had once looked and what had gone on in it.

When I prodded her, Mother Lucie sometimes dug up a few more memories. Car headlamps having to be painted blue. Eating animal food such as maize cobs and parsnips. But her mind was wandering now. She never reached the point of her stories. In the cupboard, she would say. Or: I thought they had such nice little coats. Her rambling tales trailed off into silence. Once she said: their mother obviously took good care of them. I asked: so what were they doing in the orphanage, then? Mother Lucie shook her head.

The convent rattled with nuns; a pepperpot with too few peppercorns. Sister Dolly pointed to a high kitchen shelf, a stack of white china bowls we never used. She had to make do with the helpers she could get: good-for-nothings like me. She sucked in a whistling breath through her teeth, turned back to the sink. Big enough to wash a cow in. The plughole gaped like a huge mouth. When you pulled the plug you might gurgle down the waste pipe along with all the dirty water. Then you'd swill along the sewers and drown, with your mouth full of turds.

Sister Dolly picked up a slimy-looking dishcloth, frowned, and wrung it out. She said: doubting Thomases, girls today. They want to go off and train for jobs. Her face sagged. She flung the dishcloth back in the sink: you haven't rinsed it properly. Kneel down and say sorry.

The cold floor struck my knees. I stared up at the little lumps on Dolly's nose, the red blotches on her pale cheeks. She picked up the saucepan I'd just scoured and put on the rack to drip, upended it, inspected its dented aluminium bottom: you call this clean?

Dolly kicked me into shape, gave me plenty of housework practice. Get a move on! Hauling my bucket I plodded along what seemed kilometres of shadowy pathways, vaulted and windowless. Everywhere was dimly lit, in order to save electricity. Stretching away into darkness, all the clammy stone corridors looked the same. Staircases rose at both ends, connecting them floor by floor. Thanks to my labours, they all smelled of polish and
eau de Javel
.

For daily Mass, I joined the black-scarfed postulants in their chapel. Most were local French girls. Just one or two arrived from England every year. A grille separated us from the altar, the golden tabernacle. Beyond this, an identical grille guarded the chapel opposite of the novices and the professed. At right angles to both these chapels, facing the altar, the schoolchildren and the orphans knelt in their rows the length of the nave. The postulants and the nuns formed the outstretched wings of a bird and the children its body, the rounded tabernacle its head. A dove, like the Holy Ghost in the picture on the kitchen wall. Rising up in the sweet smoke of incense, smashing its way through the roof and up into the sky, shaking off anyone who didn't cling on tight. I gripped its black and white feathers and flew with it. High in the sky the bird turned into a winged golden mare. Her name was Horsechild. She pranced past the women whispering over their shopping baskets, kicked at her enemies with golden hoofs and bashed their heads in and then took off with golden mane and tail flying and never got caught.

Coming out of chapel, I had to tail meekly behind those holy slugs, the postulants. I had to keep to the back stairs, the back corridors, use the back door, never the front. No short cuts allowed through the old part of the convent. The entrance hall here, with its twisting oval staircase, was out of bounds. Once a week I made an hour's visit to it, swiping at spiders' webs. The Bishop, visiting Reverend Mother, wouldn't want to catch sight of a fat, sweaty girl, with a red face and red hands, lugging pail, mop and broom. After I'd made the gold-brown parquet shine, after I'd dusted the white porcelain stand, with its pot of pink cyclamen, at the foot of the stairs, I had to retreat. The wrought-iron handrail and marble steps curved up out of sight.

What's up there? I asked Mother Lucie on one of her good days. Sunshine seemed to help her get herself back. Light slanting in through the high windows knocked on her mind and re-opened it. Batty old Mother Lucie. Much battier than I was.

The nuns' recreation room had a bare floor, a black funnel-like stove at one end. We sat there on two wooden chairs, under a huge crucifix. Mother Lucie stitched at a black woollen stocking pulled over a darning mushroom. She stared at her needle, its eye threaded with black. Just lumber rooms, she replied: we haven't the means to restore them. All in disrepair. Nobody goes up there now. She held out the stocking to show me her neat, close darn. Now you try.

Her black woollen shawl looked as crumpled as the skin on her creased face. I wanted to bend forward and put my cheek against hers, lay my head on her knees and have her stroke my head. She reached out and gave me a push with her gnarled hand: come on, stupid child, concentrate.

At night the convent came alive and breathed, guarding a secret, holding me off, but I managed to slink inside it. In my dreams I wasn't fat but lean and nimble. I leaped up the curving stairs that rose from the convent entrance hall, arrived on the top floor, entered the attic. A long, narrow space, like a corridor, linking the convent and the school. Somehow it led into the attic of the house next door. Something unknown and nameless lurked here, blocked my way and trapped me. Fear stuffed itself down my throat, choked me. The convent and school buildings were separated by a thick wall from the house next door. Only at the very top could you get through. Each time I tried I'd wake up bleating and shaking in a tangle of coverlet.