The Silent Hours Read Online Free PDF

would beam through the gap and we’d see all sorts of animals and strange-looking plants and trees below us. I imagine myself arriving in Australia through my hole and being made King of the People with all of them prancing about me, giving me their gifts from the wilderness and making me overlord of the land. Maybe King Kong lived there. Years ago, I saw a poster of King Kong, outside a cinema in Montmartre, and he looked fearsome, just the kind of animal you would imagine living in Australia. We’d go hunting for him and—
    There is a tap on the window just where my head is resting. I sit straight up and stare. It’s a witch at the window: her wrinkled face presses into the glass, mouthing words at me. Papa is staring ahead and Maman is hissing at me to ignore the woman, but I feel odd trying to do that when she is so close that I can see lines of powder in the wrinkles around her mouth. She taps again. I turn my head and talk to Dimitri but can’t think of anything to say, am just aware of her there on the other side of the glass. She stays there for what seems like for ever as I pretend-talk and will the car to move forward.
    Eventually the woman gives up and we finally get moving, breaking off into various side streets. All the shutters of the buildings are closed. It seems to me the whole of the city is on the road, not in their houses. My back is aching and Luc’s woken up and wants another game but we are all bored of playing I Spy. He is useless at it. He keeps spying everyone in the car so, after the first round of ‘M’ (‘Is it Maman?’ – a nod from Luc), we soon worked it out.
    We eat onion tartlets balanced on newspaper in our laps, and have grenadine with water from a flask Maman passes back. The tartlets are freshly baked and satisfactory but I prefer our normal hot meal. Maman says it’s impossible and Eléonore has told me to stop talking about it. I know Clarisse, our maid, packed up the silver earlier anyway, so we don’t have any cutlery even if we had been given something hot.
    Packing up our house seemed to take for ever. I imagined we’d still be doing it when I was ten. Clarisse went back and forwards, back and forwards, cleaning every room for a week, with Maman pointing at the things she wanted put in newspaper. Papa was never home: when we were brought down in the evening to say goodnight, only Maman was there to kiss us.
    We were only allowed one bag and one box of things so I had to choose carefully. Eléonore spent a whole day crying because Maman said she couldn’t bring Madame Delancy because she was too big and the china would break. I filled my box up full so Eléonore wouldn’t make me take her. She has enough dolls, anyway.
    When we were finally ready we stood in the hallway in our hats and coats, even though it was much too warm outside. The doorway to the sitting room was open and it looked peculiar, like it was already lonely without us. The furniture, a lot of it very old (Papa once told me that his desk had belonged to a cousin of Louis XVI) was covered in great big white sheets. You couldn’t make out where the sofa ended and the leather armchair that Papa sat on in front of the fire began. The chandelier still twinkled in the half-empty room from the sunlight that poured through the windows. It will have stopped winking now we have left and the shutters are closed.
    This thought makes me sad and I pinch Dimitri quickly so that his bottom lip wobbles. He doesn’t say anything as he knows Papa will get cross, so I grin at him. I can feel onion in my front teeth. He pushes his glasses up his nose and leans away from me. Luc is trying to stick a marble up his nose and Eléonore is talking to him in that gooey way she does, telling him not to. He rolls his eyes at me and I laugh. Papa catches my eye in the driving mirror and I quickly stop.
    I wonder how long we will be in the car. I wonder if the answer is the same as last week.
    We’d been in the kitchen when I’d