Here’s a memory. I’m in the top class of the prep school. The children in the first class look like babies and I can hardly believe I was that small. I’m as tall as my mother and I feel like an oaf. Felix, you once said to me your mother couldn’t see you for what you were. I don’t think my parents saw me at all. I was dressed. I was washed. I was given food and talked to, but I wasn’t a person. I was a pet, sometimes irritating, sometimes delightful but most of the time forgotten about. When I left home I was angry about this. I was so angry I wanted to forget about them. I wanted to eradicate them. Especially my mother.
My mother sat there at social functions like a sorbet, but afterwards tore each guest to pieces. They were fat, ugly, badly dressed. My father laughed because she was funny; she was a great mimic, she could capture a person’s tone of voice, or their posture, and she found it funny too. It sent her into shrieks of laughter. When she laughed like that it terrified me. One day she would laugh about me, I knew it. I could already hear her: ‘That Mireille, with the freckles, that beanpole, darling, socks with sandals, did you ever, have you ever seen such a specimen (people were always specimens to my mother)? Have you ever seen such a frump!’ I felt ashamed. By my mother’s shallowness and also by my father being taken in by it.
Hugo was ambitious. With Alan Crawford he became involved in property development in the south of France. After St Tropez had become fashionable the whole coast from there to Nice was gradually submerged under ugly holiday apartments. My father’s name was Devereux, and his grandparents were French. He spoke French, he understood French ways. He saw a way to make money and didn’t hesitate. I used to believe I was like my father because I knew I was entirely different from my mother, but now I know I was so different from both of them. What they ate, what they wore, what they bought was of paramount importance. My mother was so status-conscious she would throw away her curtains, have a baby, move house, if it would improve her standing in the eyes of other people. She was an excellent acquisition for my father.
I am silent and shy. I read in my spare time. I am learning to read French and I can speak it. I pray every night. Please God, can I have a friend? I want a friend but I don’t know where to start. It’s nearly the end of the summer term, it’s hot and we have lessons outside in the playground, but Miss Tanner is lethargic and the pupils are half asleep. She tells us we will go on a trip to the Roman baths and all the class go, ‘Oh no, not again!’ But I have never been. My parents have never taken me. They only take me to places where they want to go. I have been to France more than seven times. I have been to Nice, Cap Ferrat, Toulon, Menton, Grasse, Cannes. When I say these names to my schoolmates their eyes widen. They have been to Torquay, Weston-Super-Mare, Dawlish, Paignton.
When we go to the baths Miss Tanner gives us a long speech about Romans, watercourses, hydro systems. Underground and indoors it’s hot and sticky. I can make no sense of the stones. Then we are herded out to the great baths, and there they are. The golden pillars, the greeny water. The steam rising. The water pouring out from the spring into the basin, a constant gush of water. I have seen this before, of course I have, at the Ferrou. Again I feel that shiver. I put my hand into the stream of water, expecting it to be cold, but it isn’t, it’s warm. Not hot like a tap, but warm like a pond of water on a beach, like a cup of thé citron left on a café table. The temperature of tears.
Here’s another memory. Going back now. I’m wearing a white cotton dress, white socks and black sandals. I’m sitting on a wicker chair outside a café. The chair has a band of green around its edge. It’s an uncomfortable chair and sticks to my legs. I’m drinking citron pressé out of a long glass, trying to keep the spoon out of my nose. I’m so hot. I’ve never been as hot before and we are in the shade. The café is in a street. There are people everywhere, talking, and I don’t understand because it’s French. A smell in the air of fish and scent from the purple flowers that trail over the wall. All colours are brighter. Hugo is in white, so bright I can hardly look at him. He is laughing. His sleeve is rolled up and his arm is brown. He is talking French. My mother is in the shade, dressed in mint green like an ice cream but one frozen so hard it won’t melt. She is wearing dark glasses. She crosses and uncrosses her legs. She is smoking a cigarette, slowly, like somebody who wants to enjoy all of it. Then Hugo jumps up and comes round the table and kisses her forehead. Her expression does not change, but they hold each other’s hands and squeeze tight. I can see their knuckles becoming whiter.
My parents are dead now, but they stay young in my mind and I think I now understand their passion. It was about owning. Each wanted to possess the other. Without my father my mother was half a person, bored, flicking through magazines, telling me to sit up straight and not slouch, but when he walked into the room a look came over her face of complete radiance. Suddenly the way she sat and the way she talked was aimed, I can see it now, at dazzling and overwhelming him. In the end there was nothing he could see but her and nothing she could think about but him.
We are due to go to France for nearly all of the holidays. My father is working on a project on the coast. The previous summer they bought the Ferrou and it stays there. One dark pool. One unmodernised hut. They want to build a holiday home, with a swimming pool feature under the great rock. I have seen the plans. I know about building plans because when we return from France we will be moving into the new house my father has designed. He talks about this new house, how it will bring him a great deal of attention. It has a fountain courtyard and a garden, sweeping down a hill. It’s all my parents talk about these days. New houses. My mother’s going to sell the furniture in Bellevue. It’s old-fashioned and that is bad. Everything in my room is also old-fashioned.
It’s Sunday morning and I come down for breakfast. My father’s up and dressed in his cricket clothes. He’s going to play cricket later. They have been discussing the new house. He looks at me thoughtfully, which he rarely does because my mother usually diverts his attention. He says, ‘Why don’t I take her to see the site? It would be good for her education.’
‘Trampling about in mud?’ says my mother with a sneer.
‘I won’t get dirty,’ I say, because spending time alone with my father is a treat.
She looks at me as if there is nothing right about me. ‘Go on, turn her into an architect. She’s such a brain-box.’
We go in the car across Bath. It’s not sunny. It’s humid and overcast. My father tells me about drainage problems, but I’m thinking about the new house, the magic castle. ‘Here we are,’ he says, but I don’t see anything. A drive of mud, as if a finger has scraped into the earth to taste it. We get out of the car and walk across the mud, which is soft like paste and sticks to my shoes. In front of us is a pile of grey concrete bricks. It looks like an air-raid shelter or a public lavatory. This is the house. My father tells me about the cunning design. It’s layered down the hill and this is the first level. It’s flat-topped and squat. We go inside. But it’s just concrete and more concrete. Wires coming out of the walls, holes in the floor as if its innards are being operated on. I feel cheated. I hate it. I would rather live in a little hut like the Ferrou, even though there is only one tap, because it is golden and private. This place is a prison. My father tells me where the kitchen is going to be and the lounge. We go outside through more mud and puddles of water. There’s a view across a smudgy valley. The hill rolls down to a wooden bridge across weed-filled water. I look at the bridge, then I run, right down the hill. My father shouts after me, but I keep running. He catches up with me on the bridge. He is hot and cross in his cricket clothes. ‘You silly girl, what are you doing!’
He’s not often cross with me and I burst into tears. ‘What’s up? What is it, my special girl?’
‘I don’t want to live here. I want to live in France.’
Mireille walked into