He always said your school and pronounced Moth-er Soo-peer-ior (which was how one addressed the headmistress) and con-vent school with deferential regard, taking care to separate each syllable. As if the normal pronunciation implied that he was intimate with the closed world that these words evoked, a liberty he was not prepared to take. He refused to go to the school fête, even if I was in the play. This annoyed my mother, ‘There’s no reason why you shouldn’t go.’ To which he replied, ‘You know very well I never go in for all that.’

Quite often, there was a serious, almost dramatic tone in his voice: ‘Listen carefully to what they tell you at school!’ Afraid that my good marks, seen as some happy quirk of fate, would suddenly cease. Every time I did well in an essay, and later in my exams, he saw it as an achievement and with the hope that one day I might be better than him.52

I wonder when this dream came to replace his own dream, confessed once, to run a smart café in town, one with passing trade, complete with terrace and a coffee machine behind the bar. Nothing came of it: insufficient funds, a reluctance to start on something new, fatalism. What can you do?

He was never to leave his small shopkeeper’s world, irremediably split into two. On one side, there were the good customers, the ones who came to him, and on the other, the bad customers, the majority in fact, the ones who went shopping elsewhere, in the new part of town. The government was of course bracketed with the bad as he suspected them of wanting to ruin us by favouring big business. Even the good customers were divided into two groups. The good ones did all their shopping with us while the others snubbed us by dropping in for the odd litre of cooking oil which they had forgotten to buy in town. And even then, the good ones weren’t to be trusted: they were always afraid of being ripped off and would walk out on us at the slightest opportunity. The whole world was locked in a conspiracy. There was hatred and servility, and the hatred he felt towards his own servility. Deep down he cherished the dream of every shopkeeper: to be the only one in town to sell these goods. We walked one kilometre to buy bread because the baker next door didn’t shop with us.

He voted for Poujade for a lark, but without conviction: he was too much of a braggart for his liking.

No one could say he was unhappy. There was the café, always warm, the radio playing in the background, the stream of regular customers from seven in the morning to nine o’clock at night, prompting the ritual exchange of greetings: ‘Hello everyone.’ – ‘Hello only one.’ There 53were the conversations about the rain, people’s health, the dead, unemployment or the bad drought that year. Statements of facts, variations on a theme, well-oiled jokes to lighten the mood, c’est le tort chez moi, à demain, à deux pieds.5 Ashtrays emptied, tables cleaned, chairs wiped.