There were politics too, how’s it all going to end (the Algerian war, the Generals’ putsch, the OAS terror attacks), his assumed intimacy with the great Charles.61

I entered the École normale for schoolteachers in Rouen to train as a primary school teacher. I was fed – overfed one could say – and my laundry was done for me. There was even an odd-job man to mend people’s shoes. Free of charge. My father seemed to respect this system, in which everything was subsidized. The State was offering me a place in society from the start. He was at a loss to understand why I dropped out before the end of the year. He couldn’t see why I had given up a haven of security, where I was being fattened up like a goose, simply because I wanted to be free.

I spent a long time in London. When I was away from home, I was certain of his affection for me, which I saw as something abstract. I was beginning to live my own life. My mother kept me informed about what was going on in the neighbourhood. It’s turned quite cold down here I hope it’s not going to last. Sunday, we went to see our friends in Granville. Old Mrs So-and-so died she wasn’t that old only sixty. She never joked about anything in her letters, it was bad enough finding the right words and expressions. She hadn’t learnt to write the way she spoke, that would have proved even more difficult. My father signed the letter. I replied in the same neutral tone. Any attempt at style would have been taken as a way to keep them at a distance.

I came home, then left again. I was studying literature in Rouen. They argued less, just the usual reproaches, out of habit: ‘I don’t know what you do, hanging around at the church all day,’ or ‘We’ll be out of Orangina again and we know who’s to blame!’ Although he still 62had plans to do up the place, he lacked awareness of the radical changes needed to attract a new clientele. He made do with his own customers, those put off by the pristine stores in the new part of town, where the snooty salesgirls looked you up and down. No more drive. He had accepted the fact that his business was merely a means of survival which would disappear when he died.

He decided to enjoy life. He got up later, after my mother, did some light work in the café and the garden, read the newspaper from cover to cover, held long conversations with everybody. He would allude to death through maxims, we all know what’s waiting for us. Every time I came home, my mother would say: ‘Look at your father! He’s like a pig in clover!’

At the end of summer, in September, he catches wasps off the windowpanes with his handkerchief and throws them on to the burner of the coal stove, already lit despite the time of year. They die twisting and turning while their bodies are slowly consumed.