At mealtimes the slightest thing could spark off an argument. I always thought I was right because he was incapable of holding a rational discussion. I criticized his table manners and the way he spoke. Obviously, I couldn’t blame him for not being able to send me away on holiday but I felt I had the right to want him to improve his manners. Maybe he would have liked his daughter to be different.

One day he said: ‘Books and music are all right for you. I don’t need them to live.’

The rest of the time he led a quiet life. When I got back from school, he would be sitting in the kitchen, right next to the door that led into the café, reading Paris-Normandie, his shoulders hunched, both arms resting alongside the newspaper which was spread out on the table. He would look up: ‘Ah, here comes the girl.’

‘I’m starving!’

‘There’s nothing wrong with that. Take whatever you want.’

Happy to feed me, at least. We talked about the same things we did when I was a little girl, nothing more.

I imagined that I had nothing else to learn from him. His words and ideas held no currency in the French and philosophy lecture halls, or in the other girls’ living rooms with their plush crimson sofas. In summer, through the open window of my room, I could hear the sound of his spade regularly hammering the freshly dug earth.

58Maybe I am writing because we no longer had anything to say to each other.

When we moved back to Y—, the town centre was in ruins. Now it was full of small, cream-coloured blocks with modern shops that stayed lit all night. At weekends the local youth would hang around the streets or watch television in the cafés. The women from our neighbourhood did their Sunday shopping at the big food stores in town. My father finally got his white roughcast façade and his neon signs, while the café-owners with flair were going back to half-timbering, fake beams and old-fashioned oil lamps. The evenings were spent counting the day’s takings. ‘They wouldn’t come even if you gave the stuff away.’ Every time a new shop opened in Y —, my father went round on his bicycle to have a look.

They struggled along over the years, managing to achieve an acceptable standard of living. Our neighbourhood became working-class. In place of the white-collar workers who had left for modern flats with bathrooms, more and more people belonging to the lower-income group moved in, large families and young working-class couples who had applied for council housing. ‘You can pay me tomorrow, I’ll be seeing you around.’ The little old men from the hospice had died and their successors weren’t allowed to return drunk. There were no regulars now, just people who dropped in for a quick one and who kept to themselves, paying cash as they left. The feeling that now he ran a respectable business.59