The Girl Below(6)

The most thrilling guests at the party were Jean Luc and Henri, who had come all the way from Paris by ferry and train. They were younger than my parents, perhaps in their early twenties, with long, raffish hair—though my dad had that too—and they smoked a ton of Gauloises. They told each other jokes in French that I knew were dirty from the way my mother made furious hand signals when they told them in front of me.

I thought of the Frenchmen always as a pair, but around Jean Luc in particular, I felt strange. I wanted his attention, but when he gave it to me, I just needed to pee. I think Mum felt something of the same thing because around him she smiled too much and fiddled with the curls on her wig. When Jean Luc came out of the bathroom in a pirate waistcoat—bare chested and exposing a trail of tiny hairs that disappeared under the waistband of his leather pants—she spilled red wine on her dress and rushed off to make sure the chicken vol-au-vents hadn’t caught fire in the oven.

Henri was dressed as a crash victim, with a bandage wrapped round his head that oozed tomato ketchup. He didn’t make Mum blush, but I think she liked him better, especially after he spent the afternoon polishing our mismatched wineglasses and poking skewers of cheese and pineapple into an orange. The evening before, Mum and I had stayed up late making crudités and a vat of pink taramasalata. But overnight in the fridge the taramasalata had formed an orange crust. When Mum tried to fix it with lemon juice, it curdled, and she had burst into tears before throwing the whole lot out. She was worried there wouldn’t be enough to eat almost as much as Dad was worried there wouldn’t be enough to drink. Five minutes before the party began, he dashed to the off-license for more supplies and was still out when the first guests arrived.

Pippa brought Lulu, her friend from the polytechnic, who would babysit sometimes if Pippa was busy. Lulu was a stunner. Dad was dressed as a pilot and the minute she arrived he made an embarrassing fuss over her and frisked her French maid outfit, which ended at her bottom in an outbreak of frills. Pippa came dressed as the singer from Blondie, her spiky black hair covered by a platinum wig, and the change made her act in a way that was sassier than usual. When Dad patted her on the rump, she cuffed him round the ear and he smiled a little too warmly.

Esther and I had been told we were allowed to stay up until ten o’clock, but when it got that late no one told us to go to bed, so we sneaked around the kitchen taking sips out of abandoned paper cups. Out of revenge for upstaging my costume, I handed Esther a cup of red wine with a cigarette butt in it, but when she didn’t see the butt and drank from it, I worried she might die, and told her it was there.

Trying to get all the wine out of her mouth, she had just about choked. “No wonder you don’t have any friends at school,” she said, adding, “four eyes,” to drive home her point.

Tears pricked my eyes. “Four eyes are better than two,” I said, even though the retort made no sense. I wasn’t clever at being friends with people and always said dumb things and got teased. Mum said I had a thin skin because I was an only child, but I didn’t see how having brothers and sisters could stop other children from being mean.

After the cigarette-butt incident we gave up on sneaking drinks and hung out in the disco room. It was dark in there—the floor lamp glowed from under what looked like Mum’s dressing gown—and the music was so loud it hurt my stomach. We crept in near the back and hid behind the sofa, where we had a good view but were largely invisible. On the improvised dance floor, adults collided with each other in time to the music, while others bunched together on couches as though trying to keep warm. Surrounded by attentive men, Pippa and Lulu formed a nucleus at the center of it all. The whole night, Dad had been pitching drinks into their hands, with Jean Luc and Henri rushing in to fill the gap when he wasn’t around. Now the Frenchmen leaned in with their hips and whispered secrets into the girls’ hair.

“What the devil are you doing behind there?”

It was Dad, his pilot hat on back to front. He picked us up, one under each arm, and carried us, kicking, from the room. When he put her down, Esther looked stunned—even more so when he shooed us out the back door and closed it behind us. “My father would never treat me like that,” she said, her whisper outraged.

“At least my parents are still together.”

In the garden, Mum had put up the Wendy tent, and laid out cushions and sleeping bags. I gave the one with the broken zipper to Esther, and snuggled into the other but didn’t feel sleepy. It was dark in the tent, and we were soon telling spooky stories and squealing, which led after an hour or two to a thrumming noise inside my head and then a pinching headache.