Free The Dreamers by Gilbert Adair

Normandy coast. And though, on earlier trips, when his children were children, his wife had remained in Paris, her presence was now required at his side, should ever, at some eternal twenty-past or twenty-to the inspirational hour, the capricious guardian angel of his Muse decline to alight on the virgin page.
    The children, he insisted, could be trusted on their own. They were mature, intelligent beings. Besides, there was his sister, a maiden lady in her early sixties, to ensure that all was as it should be.
    And, time and time again, he would be proved right. He and his wife would arrive back to find the flat in shipshape order, their offspring conscientiouslyengaged on homework, translating Virgil or working out some mathematical puzzle involving pipes, wash basins and dripping taps.
    Unguessed, undreamt of, was the metamorphosis which the flat and its occupants had meanwhile undergone . For each such departure of their parents would leave the two young people to their own devices. Many, various and wonderful were these devices, and both Théo and Isabelle, at least since their adolescence, would avail themselves of the physical and spiritual freedom vouchsafed them. Like gamblers who, deprived of their cards or dice, will bet on car registration numbers, on the speed at which raindrops slither down a window pane, on anything at all, they needed nothing but a mutual, unconditionally offered complicity to descend to their private shades.
    Venturing into the world at large, they dipped their lights as a car will dip its headlamps when encountering another on a nocturnal highway. Thereafter, when once the door to the world had closed behind them, these same lights would blaze out brightly, blinding the naked eye.
    What was to happen, then, was not a new occurrence; if their folly this time was more acute, it was maybe thatin Matthew they had at last found a child for their incestuous cradle.

The first few days were uneventful
    The first few days were uneventful. Every morning, in the kitchen, they breakfasted on cold cereal, undaunted by the fragments of dried cornflakes with which the sides of their unrinsed bowls would become encrusted. Then Isabelle would accompany her brother on his mobylette to the lycée which both of them attended, while Matthew took the metro to his own school in the suburbs. Every evening, on their return, shedding overcoats , jackets and scarves over the hallway floor, they withdrew into the
quartier des enfants
and gave themselves up to the increasingly compulsive sessions of Home Movies, for which they had now started to keep a score.
    These were blissful days for Matthew, who would sometimes, on his way back from school, travel by metro no further than Denfert-Rochereau. From there, with a springing step, he would walk the remaining distance to the flat, titillating himself with the prospect of spending yet another evening in the company of his beloved mentors and tormentors.
    Inevitably, though, things couldn’t last too long asthey were. For this is how a drug works. It ensnares its victim with the finesse of a card-sharp, letting the future addict win a few hands before moving in for the kill. Théo and Isabelle were born addicts, addicts to whose cravings the cinema and each other were the sole opiates ever to have presented themselves. And Matthew – who, had he not left San Diego, would doubtless have married some childhood sweetheart, some winsome flirt, all patience, gratitude and guile – Matthew had once and for all pledged himself to their unstable fortunes .
    The first phase of Home Movies, its prehistory, was therefore of fairly short duration, and it wasn’t long before Isabelle, exasperated by having to wait for chance to strike unbidden, decided to force the issue.
    One afternoon, wearing white overalls, an improvised white turban and a pair of white-rimmed dark glasses, like some thirties Hollywood actress snapped in a relaxed pose on the veranda of her Bel Air mansion,