Her Father's Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page B

came to see what was going on, she found her parents in each other’s arms. The thin man and her mother. They hadn’t moved from the landing. Then the child was noticed, standing beside them, in silence. The husband stepped away from his wife for a moment to take the child in his arms and kiss her. He picked her up and kissed her. What he said, no one remembers, but it was nice. He didn’t say ‘young lady’ this time. Didn’t use that urbane tone of voice. And then he put the child down again and turned back to the mother.
    The child was put to bed earlier than usual that evening.
    When she woke the next morning, she’d sort of forgotten. She wanted to go and see her mother as usual,but when she opened the door to her bedroom, she remembered things: there in the double bed, still fast asleep, were two people, her mother and someone else. Her father.
    The child closed the door again.
    So. He was there. She had a father.

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    A very strange thing for the child, having a father. A father who’s there. At home. All the time. Morning, noon and night. He’s all you can hear now. And that smell’s everywhere, the peculiar smell of that wooden box from the first day, the smell of tobacco, and of the pipe he smokes from the moment he wakes up, champing at it the whole time, making his mouth slope slightly to one side.
    The child watches him surreptitiously. And the more she studies him, the more surprising she finds him. He no longer looks anything like the photograph which still has pride of place on the sideboard, the picture of the young man who looks so sad and gentle, ‘your little daddy’, as her mother used to say. You’d think it wasn’t the same person, and yet, if you look closely, he’s recognizable. But it feels almost as if he’s become the father of the sad boy in the photo.
    There he is, sitting on the sofa in the dining room, drawing on his pipe with a funny little sucking noise, watching everything with his cold blue eyes, eyes as serious as the words he uses.
    There he is, so thin, with his great big legs, and his great big hands with their odd covering of freckles, and the pallor of his long bony face. He does nothing. He stays there, smoking, motionless. He watches. He watches everything. He sees everything.
    When he talks it’s impossible to tell whether he’s angry or joking. His words are always rather knowing, but never the same: gentle one minute, abrupt the next, tender with the mother one minute, formal with the child the next. And then suddenly aggressive. Brutal. Violent.
    It’s surprising. It’s frightening. Sometimes very frightening.
    The father is still ill, apparently. It will be a long time before he can go back to work with the insurance company that employed him before the war. The mother whispers in the child’s ear that she must be very good, because of daddy’s nerves , she must be careful . What that means, the child will fairly soon come to understand.
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    The first time her father flew into a rage, she was terrified. Now she knows, but she’s still very frightened every time it happens.
    The father has sudden, terrible, unpredictable tempers. Lots of things make him angry, big things too complicated for the child – she catches words at random, the war, the camps, the Stalags, the French, the Germans, Pétain, the collaborators, the black market – and others she understands better, more familiar, relating to what’s going on here, at home, his home, the father’s.
    Because this apartment, the mother’s and the child’s home, is his , apparently. And he may well be happy to be reunited with the wife he loves, but he’s not at all satisfied with how his household is run, with the mess in the apartment, or more particularly with the terrible way she’s been brought up, her, the child. A disaster, he says. He didn’t like the graffiti on the walls at all,