This morning, I slowly come to, and remember dreaming my father wasn't dead. ‘Am I going to have to kill him, then?’ I thought wearily - that dreary, awful duty of mine.

              I see myself -was I thirteen or fourteen? - standing opposite him at one end of our dining table, clearing the dishes after a meal. I don't know what he had said, to mother very likely, but I raise my hand and point my finger at him, I shout: “If you say one more word, I will tell you what I think of you, I will!” and he stares at me stunned, then looks away sheepishly without responding, slinks out of the dining-room, pursing his lips. Mother has stood rigid. I sense they are both frightened. I have a strange awareness of a power I didn’t know I had: what on earth did they think I was going to say? And where did I get that courage, that daring? Why wasn't I punished for my insolence?

              “I want to be shown respect!” he said vehemently on another occasion when we had argued. I remember retorting that I would respect him when I thought he deserved respect. These scenes, which I recall because they reflected my nascent and tentative coming of age, make me look strong and clear when I was none of those things then. I came to learn over many years that it is enough simply to appear stronger, clearer and slightly more aggressive than the enemy to be able to reclaim some territory: bluffing would do until I came true, and I was certainly not clear enough in myself to even bluff consciously at the time. My anger came from deeper inside me, somewhere I didn’t understand, while I would have explained it at the time by my duty -and my need- to protect my mother, which is nevertheless also true: all children protect their parents. And clearly he wasn’t strong, which on occasion gave me an advantage: he was shy, awkward, hesitant, and shifty. He rarely looked you in the eyes, and when he did, it sometimes seemed a ‘not-quite-there’ look that both doubted and withheld, often sad and self-conscious. His answers were usually evasive – “Yes, no, I don't know…” and gave me a sense of the fog he was in, which was contagious.  I came to notice the way he walked, disoriented, right foot and body to the right, left foot and body to the left, a yes-no of the body. Maybe the ground was not stable beneath his feet, and I grew to see that he had had no guidance, merely precepts, in childhood. On family outings, he would walk ahead of us on the pavement. Odile and I followed behind, holding mother's hand, and if she became aware of his aloneness -or a lack of symmetry- she would push us ahead: “Go and walk with your father”, and we would suddenly appear on each side of him, to his surprise, his two little daughters in identical coats and polite white socks.

              “Go and kiss your father goodnight”, mother would also remind us when bed -time came. So we did as we were told and finally went to bed, me wiping my cheek.

              Conscious of his own weakness, he would now and again attempt authority, but in daily matters mother's reasoned judgment usually prevailed, and his longed-for dominion over the household seldom materialised. He would at times announce a pronouncement by wagging his index finger for a while, then hector: “In life...” followed by some warning or definition, and would further delineate our world: “A meal is a ceremony!”; “A bourgeois house is a closed house!” – “Yes,” I would counter later, “une maison close!” (a brothel) to his powerless indignation.

              His authority a failure, he allowed himself on occasion to show his gentler feelings, indulging me with some extra pocket money  - “but don't tell your mum” - or sweet talk, when he would express himself in baby speech which, as I grew up, irritated and offended me : “Don't talk to me as if I am still a child!” . Most embarrassing was his question, uttered in private: “Who do you prefer, your mum or your dad?”  I remained silent, unable to give him the answer he must have yearned for. But when he pointed at me the three monkeys figurines sitting on a bookshelf covering in turns their eyes, ears and mouths, illustrating some philosophy or other that he might have cultivated and wished to impart to me, “A good philosophy for monkeys”, I replied.

              I was puzzled the time he cried: coming into my room to kiss me goodnight one evening, (mother would have checked: “Did you say goodnight to the girls?” if he had been in his study when we went to bed) he kissed me, then burst into tears. “What's the matter, daddy” I asked, embarrassed. “Nothing, it's nothing”, he said, rubbing his eyes and composing himself, “it's only some work I haven't finished.” I could relate to that. A little unnerved, I wiped my cheek as usual when he had gone and allowed myself to breathe again.

              After lunch, he always took a nap in his study, while Odile and I went back to school as we were day girls at that time. Then he left again for his practice, or the Court of Law if he was pleading a case. At weekends, we would have to be quiet, whisper, tiptoe during his nap, then occupy ourselves as best we could until the day's end. Playing with dolls had its limits, as they were shy of role-play and slept a lot, ever silent in their frilly little cots as good children should be. I preferred reading, more and more.

              When he drove to Toulouse to plead a more important case, I remember praying he wouldn’t come back, there would be an accident: then life would be good, mum would stop crying, there would be no more arguing, we would be safe. But he always came back. He would announce his arrival by whistling on three notes. Mother greeted him, dinner would soon be ready and it was always delicious even when it was a simple omelette. I admired without envying her the care she took over her meals”. “I don’t want him to be able to reproach me for anything!” she said sometimes, fretting with anxiety, as if defending herself. “Is it nice?” she couldn’t help asking. “Umm, it was better last time”, he condescended. She winced.

               His health often seemed to worry him although he was rarely ill, and then only with minor chest complaints. Red meat was de rigueur, this was a French household after all, so we ate steak regularly, because it was 'good for us'. There was implied a feeling that the blood-redness of the meat would transfuse into our veins, making us strong and healthy. When a chicken was killed -we had a small chicken coop- the blood was kept for my father who liked it fried in a pan like a pancake. I can still see the scene the first time I saw mum cook one: it sizzled in the pan, the minute it met the oil, the heat, and spread to a dark full moon, with small volcanoes made by bubbles. A trembling in her hand, mother pricked it with a fork, a little harshly, irritated as I stood watching, my head at her elbow, asking: 

                              - Who is it for? What is it?

                              - A blood pancake, she said, and shook it a little strongly, it nearly spilt. 'Your father likes it', she added, an eyebrow up, tight-lipped, then complained: “To make him strong.” And I could hear her silent prayer: “Let it not work, please God, let it not work.”                  

              Not knowing she was herself strong gave my mother other weapons; she would be the trembling victim, and her tears and cries would guarantee her her daughters' adamantine loyalty.  In part because he was petty, also because he owed her what he had, father took his revenge and assured his supremacy by both humiliating her and depriving her of money. Even the housekeeping was the subject of arguments that we heard through my father's study's door, mother pleading that he hadn't given her any money that week, which he usually denied. She would come out of his study wrecked, defeated. She would later kiss and hug Odile and me, saying we should be good and well-behaved, and polite with daddy. We cried, kissed and promised. Sometimes, he would refuse to give her any money to buy clothes she needed, even though she had given him for safe keeping the money she had left after the purchase of his practice. At other times I recall mother's voice shrill through the door: “No! No! You can ask me for anything but not that!” followed by more tears. I didn't dare to wonder what.

              He had perfected a very subtle act at meal times: mother would cook lunch, serve us all. He would watch her silently as she ate, critically focusing on her mouth as if she was eating noisily. He was playing 'gentry' to her 'shopkeeper's daughter'. She would wince again, as if slapped. I would make mental notes, become little by little more radicalised: come the Revolution!  He did, at the time, scornfully call me 'the rebel'.

              Since he did not normally look at Odile's school books or mine, I cannot see that either of us received much comment or encouragement. Besides, he relied on our mother to take care of these things. She reminded us he came home tired after a long day's work. It seems true to say that work took up all his time and he had no interests outside. When I started secondary school, I naturally continued to go to the Lycee, the guarantor of Republican rights. I cried bitterly over Latin and Maths, was puzzled by Chemistry, but showed liking and aptitude for French and Languages. Overall though, results were not brilliant. The social mix was unavoidable, and when I came home one lunch time and asked at the table what 'fucking' meant, my parents looked at each other with consternation and I didn’t get an answer. I was soon whisked off to a convent school nearby, run by nuns of the order of the Holy Family.

              Looking back on it, the convent school didn’t feel very different from home in atmosphere or style. There were, of course, do's and don'ts, duties. It was also fairly joyless, except that the other girls knew how to run and play ball games at break time and I didn't: almost a sin, not playing was a sign of ‘bad attitude’; conversations with a single friend were always broken up with remonstrations and exhortations to go and join a group. I much preferred to have a friend to chat with: there were secrets of sorts as we were all approaching puberty, and older and more precocious girls warned us about periods. They spoke of a time at once dismal and vaguely exciting, when we would bleed every month, possibly feel a lot of pain, and have to wear between our legs thickly folded pieces of towelling attached by safety pins to a cotton string around our hips.