Undressing Emmanuelle: A memoir. Sylvia Kristel

that Aunt Alice stole frequently and had done so for ages. My father said nothing. Aunt Alice left, mortified.

      Aunt Mary flew off the handle, badly this time. She couldn’t bear the changes. She put an end to her overly quiet convalescent life, leaving for Italy in an unknown car, with no luggage. She thought she’d escaped. She spent a fortune. Then she came back, saying she had seen paradise, had discovered a country where everything was song and sparkle. She gave herself to one of the locals in a similar fit of enthusiasm. Having thought herself infertile she fell pregnant aged forty. Her rounded belly put a constant smile on her face. Hanny decided to complete my father’s isolation by throwing Aunt Mary out on the grounds of immorality. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black – I found out she’d met my father in a seedy bar where she worked as an occasional hostess. By day she was an accountant, by night she hunted for prey – and she wasn’t the type to come home empty-handed.

      She’d never had a child. Perhaps she couldn’t. She hated childhood.

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      I’ve had enough of Hanny badmouthing my mother, loudly enough to ensure that I’m aware of her daily discrediting campaign and continual bewitching of my dependent father. She walked in on him and me laughing today. It must have been too much for her.

      ‘It’s Sylvia or me!’ she tells him.

      There’s talk of placing me with a foster-family.

      I phone my mother in tears and she responds: ‘Come back, your coffee’s waiting.’

      She couldn’t just say ‘I’m waiting’. My mother hid herself behind stock phrases. Her coffee – hot, strong, and always ready – was given as if it came from her own body. It was her attention, her warmth; it was my mother.

      I came back, after six months at the hotel.

      When my mother opened the door she opened her lips too, giving me a wide, unfamiliar smile.