Hester's Story Read Online Free PDF Page A

true. Helen was a ballerina. She danced in the corps de ballet , and when Henri first saw her he fell so in love with her that he couldn’t think about anything else. He used to stand outside the stage door every night. After each performance, there he’d be, bearing a bunch of scarlet roses for her. Helen had many fans but this one was different. He looked very serious and he was also much handsomer than any other fan she’d seen. She spoke to him at last, and when she realised how much he adored her, she fell in love with him. They married very soon after they met and she never danced again. Grand-mère never said a word about her being sad not to be a ballerina any longer, but Estelle thought that she must have missed wearing all the lovely clothes and dancing on the stage in front of people and hearing them clapping her.
    The house in the Rue Lavaudan was tall and narrow. Henri spent much of his time at the bank, but it pleased him to know that his beautiful wife was at home, waiting for him, longing for nothing but his company as he longed for hers.
    Helen nearly died giving birth to her daughter, and Estelle’s father made sure that the child knew this, even when she was very young. Almost the first thing he said to her was, ‘You nearly killed poor Maman coming into this world, and you’ll tire her out all over again if you worry her now.’
    Although Estelle couldn’t remember exactly when her father had said this, the words and the feeling behind the words never left her. She understood that he didn’t love her, not then and not at any time. Later in her life she understood a little of how this lack of love came about, though she could never forgive it. She, by being born, had changed the body of hisbeloved wife into something gross and fat and unlovable. She’d torn it into a mess of blood and pain, and then she’d sucked from the breast that was his, that he wanted. How could he look at his daughter and not feel some sort of hatred?
    The child loved her mother and she loved her Grand-mère and because her father was so busy, busy with his work, he hardly came into her life until after Helen’s death. As she grew up, Estelle invented memories of her mother. She made up an idea of her, almost a dream of what she was like, and inserted it into the times she could remember, when Grand-mère was her closest companion.
    The house was always sunlit. The kitchen had pale yellow walls, and her grandmother liked to bake. Estelle used to kneel up on a chair and help her create patterns with apple slices on the tartes aux pommes she made every week. Grand-mère sang all the time, small snatches of parlour songs and operettas and the better-known arias from Carmen and La Traviata . She used to take the little girl for walks in the Jardin du Luxembourg, near the house, where they watched the puppet shows together and then sat on a bench under the trees while she told her granddaughter stories about her own father when he was a small boy. Estelle found it hard to match the person her grandmother was speaking of with the silent papa whose smiles for her touched his lips briefly and never reached his eyes.
    On rainy days, Grand-mère let Estelle dress up in her clothes and jewels and even wear her high-heeled shoes. Best of all were the hats, carefully put away in striped hatboxes that lived in a special cupboard in the spare bedroom.
    ‘One would need ten lifetimes to wear them all,’ Grand-mère used to say, picking up a velvet toque, or a neat little red felt circle with spotted netting attachedto it, or one of the many straw hats with wide brims she wore in the summer. These were the ones Estelle loved best. They had flowers and bows and bunches of cherries glazed to a dazzling shine attached to the ribbon round the crown, and she felt like a princess when she put one on and paraded in front of the mirror.
    They looked at photographs too, and it was on those afternoons, sitting beside her grandmother on the sofa and