Free The Colonel's Daughter by Rose Tremain Page A

Foch and our blind father fumbling round it. Nobody wept. When told of the death, my brother had started to hiccup violently and he hiccuped for three or four days, waking and sleeping. I picked my spots and knew that I wasn’t ready for what had happened; death was too adult for me. And our father? He tried to bear himself like the soldier he was. But he became clumsy: he spilt food down his expensive clothes, he dropped and broke things. He also began to burble bits of poetry to himself, a thing which was absolutely uncharacteristic of him. I don’t know what poetry it was that he burbled (I was more familiar, at fifteen, with Keats and Shelley and Tennyson than with Victor Hugo or Rimbaud) but I had the impression that he was muddling one poem with another and getting lots of words wrong. It was a very peculiar time: the hiccuping and the poetry and my own unreadiness for grief.
    My brother, whose name I should have told you is Paul (mine is Jacques, a name I couldn’t stand at the English school because even the masters nicknamed me ‘Frère Jacques’, just as if this wretched song was the only bit of French anyone English could be expected to understand), quite often tried to cry. I suppose he recognised, as I did, that we had not merely lost our mother, but the whole half of us that was Cornish and Anglo-Saxon. We remembered her stately walk in galoshes over the sandworms of Constantine Bay, her fondness for the sound of the seagulls. ‘We may never see or hear another seagull,’ my brother whispered one night, in search of tears that refused to come. ‘Imagine poor Grandpa banging the seagull tin and remembering his dead daughter . . .’ We waited anxiously for the first sob to break through. (Mourning only needs one; the others follow obediently.) But he couldn’t cry. He masturbated till he fell asleep, leaving me wide awake with the images of our mother he’d successfully summoned.
    Grandpa’s seagull tin was one that I have never forgotten. I can see my mother sitting on the wall at the end of his garden, smiling as Grandpa came out of the house. In an old washing bowl, Grandpa collected all the bread crusts and the leftover toast and stale cake. He came and stood in the middle of the lawn and banged loudly on the bottom of the tin with a wooden spoon. He’d done this twice a week for several years. Every seagull from Padstow to Trearnon seemed to know the signal. In seconds, even before he began to scatter the bread and cake, they’d come flapping in, hungry, unafraid, noisy with their cry which, even when it’s near you, conjures distant oceans and faraway voyages. My mother sat on the wall and swang her legs and shrieked at them. Grandpa yelled, ‘Go on! Go on!’ as they came pecking and fighting. Paul and I ran up and down flapping our arms, as impressed by Grandpa as by a conjuror. We never knew Grandpa very well. Our father told us he was a reserved and self-disciplined man. But this is how I always remember him: surrounded by the seagulls, by the chaos he had caused.
    We didn’t go back to our English school after the funeral. We wondered if we would be sent back at all. Nobody said what was being planned for us. Our father stayed in his room, listening to the radio. Army friends called and the wives of army friends, who sometimes took him out for walks. He had an old manservant we called Blochot (I don’t know whether Blochot was his real name, or just some family invention) who did for him all the things he couldn’t do for himself. He seldom sent for us or wanted to be with us. In fact, he seemed to have forgotten us. We had one or two friends in the neighbourhood and we saw more of the parents of these friends than we did of our father. We spent weekends in the country with them. We went riding in the Bois. Now and again, we’d be taken to a meal in a restaurant.
    The rest of the time we were in our room at the