Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [47]
Almost effortlessly, she became bilingual, like her mother. Her schooling and her friendships were in French. Her home life, when her father was there, was in English. (Gerard spoke French like a man translating a dead language. Nicole couldn’t bear to listen to him; she’d cover her ears and sing loud nonsense when he tried.) Françoise flip-flopped between the two languages almost without thinking, as you might turn the pages of a book. Just now and again she’d forget and speak to her mother in French at dinner. Then Gerard would slap the tabletop, making the wineglasses and the maid jump, and bark, “In English, please, Françoise!”
Her father loved her in a prowling, anxious sort of a way. He called her Treasure but often seemed disappointed in her, like a miser with too small a hoard.
Nicole Mortimer was a famous beauty from a rich family. Françoise liked to kneel on a chair beside her while she applied her makeup before going out for the evening. The fastidious ritual and its materials — the lotions, the powders, the brushes in their shiny little scabbards — hypnotized the child. She would stare into the boudoir mirror, not breathing, during the tricky processes that transformed her mother’s eyes.
“Voilà!” Nicole would say, at last. “Qu’en penses-tu, Françoise?”
And Françoise would say, “Tu es belle, Maman,” and lean to kiss her.
But always her mother turned her face away.
“Pas de bisous, ma chérie. Tu vas gâcher mon lipstick.”
The slow calamity, England, began when Françoise was ten years old.
She came home from school to find Agnes, the maid (who was also Françoise’s nanny and best friend), in tears. From the hallway Françoise could hear her father talking loudly, in his terrible French, on the telephone. She found her mother in her dressing room, tapping cigarette ash into a tray already half full of butts.
Grandpa Edmund, her English grandfather, had had something called a heart attack: une crise cardiaque. He might die. They were all going to England soon. They might have to stay for quite a long time.
The train journey from Quebec to New York was boring and thrilling in equal doses. A black man with a shining face and a beautiful uniform served them dinner while Vermont blurred into darkness outside the window. He risked a wink at her when he poured her Coke from a frosted bottle. In the sleeping car, she insisted on having the curtain of her bunk open so that she could see where her parents were, across the aisle. Eventually she was jiggled, juggled, into sleep by the regular racketing of the wheels on the rails beneath her.
Of New York she had only two abiding memories: a huge ice-cream sundae in the cafeteria of a huge store (Bloomingdale’s?) and the vast black wall of the ship.
During the whole long Atlantic crossing, she felt slushy in her guts. One night, wearing a bib-fronted silk dress, she sat on a velvet-upholstered chair at the edge of the ballroom, watching the adults dance. The window behind her right shoulder framed an infinite moon track, shifting on the soft swell of the sea. The little orchestra was playing a waltz. Her eyes were locked on her parents. Partway through the dance, she saw her mother break away from her father and raise her hands and shake her head. She saw him say something angrily. Her mother hurried away toward the arched doorway into the salon, with one hand over her mouth. For a moment, her father stood islanded on the dance floor with his hands in his pockets, then set off after her. At the doorway, he remembered and came back. He stooped down to her.
“Bedtime, Françoise. Your mother is not feeling well.”
England was dismal. Sooty rain streaked the windows of the train that took them from Southampton to London. Cattle stood, like unfinished black-and-white jigsaw puzzles, in sodden fields, watching them pass. The compartment smelled of fart