My Animal Life(35)

All the same, I should have listened to his fears, and I should have kept the curfew. One night I came back ten minutes late and was shouted at, which made little impression. Was I trying to annoy my father or (more likely) unable to explain my need to be back by eleven to my glamorous new friends? The next night I came back at eleven-fifteen, escorted by all four members of the group.

The moon was high: I remember that. I can still see the moonlit road before me, lined with trees, for we were in the country, the hotel ahead of us and on the left. We five young people were spread across the road, owning the road, laughing and happy, though I had a little undertow of worry — I was late, but surely, not very late. Then I saw my father, in the distance, hurrying towards me, down the middle of the road, a small hurrying figure; getting bigger; here. It wasn’t easy to see his expression. My friends greeted him, in poor, polite English; he grabbed my arm, and wouldn’t let it go; they left knowing he was in a rage, and turned tail, diminished, going back towards the village.

I do not remember the fifty metres we walked, yoked together by violence, back to the hotel. He did not hit me till we got inside, having pushed me upstairs and into my bedroom. I will never quite forgive him for what ensued (though I must forgive him; I must. I do. If I don’t forgive him, it will never go away. After all, I was late, and he was terrified. Of what I had been doing, or what was being done to me.) He hit me by the window; I fell on the bed. He hit me, again and again, on the bed, inchoate with rage, inaccurate. On the arms and legs, on the side and shoulders, but I am pretty sure he also slapped my face. It would be consistent with behaviour I remember. And he shouted; don’t you have any self-respect?

What was my mother doing while this went on? My memory after this point is hazy, but there is no doubt that she knew what was happening, because it later transpired that the whole hotel heard. I think I remember her coming in, afterwards, as I lay there swollen and furious with crying. ‘Are you all right, Margaret? Are you all right?’ Yes, my mother came in. I do remember. And I hated her as well, for not stopping him, for not protecting me, for being one of a two-parent system which did not see I was a separate person and had a right to be respected. (My father should have understood there is no self-respect without respect from others.) I rejected her; I hugged my bruises. (And now I wonder if my father sent her. He must have realised he had gone too far. Now my mother had to sort things out, as she had to sort out all family troubles. ‘Aileen, go and see that she’s all right.’)

Next day was a nightmare. Life had to go on. We had to be seen in the hotel at mealtimes. The kind, attractive manageress stopped me on the stairs. Her face was serious. Was I all right? She was worried about me. It meant so much that another adult, not part of the family, bothered to tell me she was on my side, that something was wrong, that it wasn’t just my wickedness. Yet I also remember how eager I was to reassure her. Of course it was all right, indeed it was nothing. ‘Mais j’ai tout entendu,’ she persisted, grave. I heard everything. But I felt ashamed. I couldn’t get my father into trouble. Family came first. And it was all my fault. A large part of me felt it was all my fault.

The story I have just told is not the reason, the overt reason, for the breakdown I had. It was part of a pattern of behaviour I knew, only different because I was nearly an adult, and because it involved my sexual self so closely.

Lack of respect. That was what mattered. If only I had known enough to shout that back at him, when he was roaring that I lacked self-respect. What do children need? One thing daughters need from their fathers is respect for their sexual selves. Vic’s fear and desire made him crash through the wall. Fathers would do well to think the best of their daughters (I had done nothing; neither kissed nor touched; there were four boys, not one, they were my knights, my cavaliers, and my father was a sad and violent man. Part of me hates him for it still, a part of me that I strain to outgrow. Because he was my father, and loved me very much. I was his first daughter; he had had no practice, and would never get a chance to play that evening better. His feelings were tidal, and he was helpless.)

But if fathers think the worst, the girls have nothing to lose. We have already, irrecoverably, lost our reputation.

Life returned to normal, more or less, the first time someone laughed, at our table. Then the grim lid of gloom lifted away, and I was glad enough to see it go. Three or four days later, the fair came to St Aigulin, the summer fair, the village’s great event, which brought young people from all over the region. Perhaps inspired by guilt about what had happened, my father was almost eager for me to go. My curfew was extended to midnight. I remember what I wore, which I thought was high fashion, though it would only have made the grade in a French village: a knee-length, small red-and-black-flowered cotton dress, figure-hugging, with a Peter Pan collar, a short navy fitted jacket, which I soon took off, a long ‘chain pendant’, the metal indeterminate, which featured a many-armed Thai goddess, white fish-net stockings, navy heeled sandals. I felt like a chic seventeen-year-old, and for the French, I may have had that indefinable illusion of attraction that comes when one is seen as from somewhere else. I was the seventeen-year-old anglaise. It was a hot evening. We were all on heat.