Free The Colonel's Daughter by Rose Tremain Page B

top of the house, reading the ‘dirtiest’ books you could get hold of at that time: The Thousand and One Nights , the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam , soothing colossal, inarticulate yearnings with solitary orgasms in crumpled handkerchiefs. As my life has gone on, it has occasionally hurt me – yes, hurt me – that I have known so little about my brother’s sexuality. He has married two vain women in quick succession and kept his life with them secret from me. I remember the months in the room at the top of the house in the Avenue Foch, when every stirring of his penis and of mine was part of our shared grief, our shared confusion, our shared existence. And I remember of course the night of our father’s second wedding, the night we decided to grow up. We parted soon after that. Now we meet for dinner and our wives bicker about the price of clothes. If I dared to ask Paul about his cock, he would get up and storm out of the restaurant.
    It must have been in the spring that Pierrette arrived. She was a penniless person from a bourgeois family in Bourges. She had studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. She spoke a little very bad English. She didn’t seem to know what to do with her philosophy degree except teach. She came to our house on a four-month contract to coach us until the end of the school year, at which time our father would decide what to do with us – send us back to our English school or to some new school in France. Nowadays, of course, an arrangement like this would never apply. In the event of the death of a parent, a child might expect a week off school and it would then be deemed ‘in his best interests’ to send him back to endure the gleeful pity of his friends. We were lucky, then, I dare say. We were allowed to stay in Paris – and at home. We forgot the cold English school.
    Pierrette was twenty-three. Our father at that time must have been forty-two – the age we are now. Paul and I thought the name Pierrette was terrible. We couldn’t imagine that anyone with a name like Pierrette could teach us anything at all. ‘We’ll teach her!’ my brother crowed, ‘we’ll just speak English and confuse her and tell her the wrong meanings of words.’
    She was a neat woman, very much a woman at twenty-three and not a girl. She spoke precisely and ate tidily. Her belongings were sparse and plain. She had a white, intelligent face and wispy, rather colourless hair. Her eyes were black and small and she had a black mole on her upper lip. Her hands were also white and neat and ringless. She wore tweed skirts and plain jerseys and her winter coat was ugly and unfashionable. ‘Politeness!’ growled our father from the depths of his favourite armchair, ‘if you boys are not polite to this woman, there will be no summer for you!’ No summer? Simultaneously, our minds flew to the seagulls and our mother on the wall. Of course there would be ‘no summer’, whether or not we decided to be polite. Summer as we had experienced it could no longer exist.
    It never occurred to us, until we saw it happen, that Pierrette would fall in love with our father, and he, supposedly, with her. We thought Pierrette was just an episode in our lives, quickly gone and forgotten, like German measles. She was unsuitable as our teacher because she knew little Latin and her maths were second rate. She adored Pascal. She rubbed our noses in the Pensées of Pascal. All I can remember about Pierrette’s lessons is Pascal: ‘Jésus dans l’ennui . . .’
    Her arrival coincided more or less with Blochot’s illness. Blochot had glandular fever and though he struggled on, doing chores for our father, he was weak and silent and had to be encouraged to stay in bed. We tried to take his place, helping with tie-pins and bootlaces, searching for objects lost, tuning the radio, reading out wine labels, dialling telephone numbers. But I