THE THIRD MONK IX

A story in more or less weekly instalments. The rest is here.

I can still close my eyes and see my bedroom, too - a small room at the top if the house, next to Marielle and Laura, up a narrow, uncarpeted staircase, the only handrail a rope slanting up the wall. My first room with a double bed. I sprawled in it, expanding limbs and mind, waking to a patch of sunshine on the bedcovers, through the shutters which I left half open, and the children's black cat, Obélix, sunbathing on my feet. Waking to the unfamiliar pleasure of days I didn't dread.

Padding down the stairs to make breakfast, I'd hear small bare feet behind me, more often than not, and they'd dance around me, warm and rumpled and talkative, as I spooned grounds into the cafetière and sliced the baguette into many little round tartines. On the kitchen table, spread with red and white checked oilcloth, they'd trace pictures with sticky fingers of what they'd be doing at school that day - the fizzing energy of little kids, flowing seamlessly from fact to fantasy, daft to deadly serious.

- Joanne's bringing her costume today. The maîtresse said she can show us.

- She's going to be a fairy.

- No, an angel.

- No, a fairy godmother.

- My fairy godmother lives under my bed.

- Mine lives in the bathroom, in the water tank. She's a water..., a water...

- sprite!

- Sprite, sprite, I'm a water sprite! Laura leaps and twirls, with arms outstretched, scattering imaginary water droplets, twirling into a sleepy Jean-Paul rubbing his eyes in the kitchen doorway. He sweeps her up and spins with her

- My little Laura-sprite! So bright, so early in the morning! He pulls a face at me over her head, puts her firmly on her chair, and sits down next to her, groping in the pocket of his threadbare plaid dressing gown for cigarettes and lighter.

Marielle intercepts Jean-Paul's grimace.

- Daddy's laughing at you!, she tells Laura baldly.

Laura's face creases in distress. Jean-Paul puts down his cigarettes, lifts Laura onto his knee and starts gently explaining that he's not laughing at her; he's laughing at how little girls wake up all in one go and start dancing and singing, but grown-ups take longer, need cigarettes and coffee first.

- Why? says Laura.

- This peach jam is PARTICULARLY DISGUSTING!, says Marielle loudly, feeling ignored.

Marianne would appear from her bedroom only when she heard me chase the children back upstairs after breakfast, and we'd take one girl each and chivvy them through washing and dressing.

It was barely fifteen minutes' walk to the maternelle, even at two- and three-year-old, stopping-to-remark-on-everything speed, but often we left too late to walk. After many nervous sessions in the village back-streets, practising driving on the right and the battered Renault's gearstick, uniquely planted in the dashboard, I agreed to venture on the short drive.

Oblivious to my fear of the mountain road, the back-seat passengers yelled 'go faster, we're late!' and competed to distract me.

- Look, there's Cécile's Mummy in  a yellow hat!

- Look, there's a baby goat!

- Look, there's a baby... crocodile!

At the school gate they piled out and I'd take deep breaths and eventually stop shaking, make a six-point turn, churning up dust, and drive back uphill even more slowly, allowing myself a glance at the golden hillsides, blinking, the sun in my face.

Marianne would be still in her nightie, almost invariably, still at the kitchen table, crumbling a piece of bread, when I got back. 'Getting used to the car?', she'd murmur wryly. It would take her until ten o'clock or so to face the day. Then she'd leap up and throw on some clothes and dash about with mop and duster, briefly the decisive person she might once have been, but soon tiring. By mid-morning, she's be making more coffee, luring me into the sitting room, wanting to talk or to play me a record.

- Moustaki? You know Moustaki? He was a lover of Edith Piaf's. And this is Serge Reggiani - he's an actor - reading poems by Jacques Prévert...

and the sun would climb over the hill while some dark brown voice and soulful words of  gentle disillusion worked their spell on me.

Moustaki, Piaf, Prévert, Reggiani

Comments

[Zinnia Cyclamen]

Gorgeous. The dialogue's coming along nicely ;-)

[udge]

What marvellous faces, thoroughly French; Prévert is particularly beautiful in that battered-dustbin-lid way. Nobody does gentle disillusionment as well as the French, it's the national mode.

[Zhoen]

Oui.

[Jean]

Udge, yes indeed! I think there's going to be a lot of gentle disillusion(ment) in my story, which takes place in the aftermath of 1968.