It was something they had been expecting for years maybe, a load off their mind. Now they knew I wouldn’t end up with any Tom, Dick or Harry, or become a social outcast. He wanted his savings to go towards helping the 65young married couple. He hoped that this act of supreme generosity would iron out the social and cultural differences which separated him from his son-in-law. ‘There’s not much your mother and I need now.’

At the wedding reception, in a restaurant overlooking the Seine, he is sitting with his head held straight, both hands resting on a napkin in his lap. He is smiling gently, at no one in particular, as bored people often do when they are waiting for the next course. His smile is also meant to show that everything here today is perfect. He is wearing a blue pinstriped suit, specially made to measure, and a white shirt with, for the first time, a pair of cufflinks. The image is frozen in my memory. I had glanced in his direction while I was laughing with my guests, certain that he wasn’t enjoying himself.

After that he only saw us every now and then.

We lived in a resort town in the Alps where my husband had an administrative post. We covered the walls with hessian, served whisky as an aperitif and listened to sixteenth-century music on the radio. A polite word or two to the concierge. I slipped into the other half of the world, where everything else is mere backdrop. My mother would write, saying: ‘Why not come and stay for a few days, it’d be a nice break,’ afraid to ask us over just to see them. I would go alone, concealing the real reasons for their son-in-law’s absence, unspeakable between the two of us, and which I simply took for granted. What could a man brought up in middle-class circles, 66where people got degrees and cultivated the art of irony, possibly have to say to honest, hard-working people like my parents? Although he acknowledged their kindness, in his eyes it would never replace a lively, witty conversation, sadly lacking in their case. In his family, for instance, if someone broke a glass, they would immediately cry out: ‘Touch it not, for it is broken!’ (a line by Sully Prud’homme).

It was always she who came to meet me from the Paris train. She’d be waiting behind the barrier and would insist on taking my suitcase, ‘It’s too heavy for you, you’re not used to carrying things.’ In the shop there would probably be a couple of customers whom he’d stop serving for a second while he kissed me in his usual brusque manner. I would sit down in the kitchen while they remained standing, she by the stairs, he silhouetted in the doorway that led through to the café. At that time of day, the sun played upon the tables and the glasses on the counter; sometimes a customer listening to us was caught in a beam of sunlight. Away from home, I had stripped my parents of their speech and mannerisms, idealizing them. Now I was hearing their real voices again, loud and booming, the way they said ‘a’ in place of ‘elle’. I realized they had always been like this, without the ‘decorum’ and the language which I now considered to be normal. I felt divided within myself.