Hester's Story (4 page)

1939

Estelle knew, even when she was a very little girl, that there was something about her which upset her father. Henri was his name – Henri Prévert. He left the house each day dressed in a dark suit. He worked in a bank and
Grand-mère
said his work was very important. He was extremely tall and thin, and when he came into a room he filled it and it was difficult to look at anyone else. And to his little daughter he appeared enormous and she was frightened by his appearance. He reminded her of a scarecrow she’d once seen in a field, who’d worn a hat like Papa and also stood like him motionless, unbending.

He loved
Maman. Grand-mère
told Estelle that he did, and she believed her. Henri was her only child, but she had as much affection for her daughter-in-law as if she’d been her own flesh and blood.

‘The love between your parents,’ she told Estelle, ‘was a mad love.
Un amour fou.’

Grand-mère
looked after everything in the house, so that Henri’s beloved wife might have nothing to do but be with him. Estelle’s mother was English, and she had no relations except for her second cousin, Rhoda, who lived in Yorkshire. Her mother spoke to Estelle in English from the day she was born, and she found nothing strange about speaking in two languages. One of Estelle’s favourite stories was the one about how Papa met
Maman. Grand-mère
used to tell it to her
quite often and it was better than any fairytale, because it was true. Helen was a ballerina. She danced in the
corps de ballet
, and when Henri first saw her he fell so in love with her that he couldn’t think about anything else. He used to stand outside the stage door every night. After each performance, there he’d be, bearing a bunch of scarlet roses for her. Helen had many fans but this one was different. He looked very serious and he was also much handsomer than any other fan she’d seen. She spoke to him at last, and when she realised how much he adored her, she fell in love with him. They married very soon after they met and she never danced again.
Grand-mère
never said a word about her being sad not to be a ballerina any longer, but Estelle thought that she must have missed wearing all the lovely clothes and dancing on the stage in front of people and hearing them clapping her.

The house in the Rue Lavaudan was tall and narrow. Henri spent much of his time at the bank, but it pleased him to know that his beautiful wife was at home, waiting for him, longing for nothing but his company as he longed for hers.

Helen nearly died giving birth to her daughter, and Estelle’s father made sure that the child knew this, even when she was very young. Almost the first thing he said to her was, ‘You nearly killed poor
Maman
coming into this world, and you’ll tire her out all over again if you worry her now.’

Although Estelle couldn’t remember exactly when her father had said this, the words and the feeling behind the words never left her. She understood that he didn’t love her, not then and not at any time. Later in her life she understood a little of how this lack of love came about, though she could never forgive it. She, by being born, had changed the body of his
beloved wife into something gross and fat and unlovable. She’d torn it into a mess of blood and pain, and then she’d sucked from the breast that was his, that he wanted. How could he look at his daughter and not feel some sort of hatred?

The child loved her mother and she loved her
Grand-mère
and because her father was so busy, busy with his work, he hardly came into her life until after Helen’s death. As she grew up, Estelle invented memories of her mother. She made up an idea of her, almost a dream of what she was like, and inserted it into the times she could remember, when
Grand-mère
was her closest companion.

The house was always sunlit. The kitchen had pale yellow walls, and her grandmother liked to bake. Estelle used to kneel up on a chair and help her create patterns with apple slices on the
tartes aux pommes
she made every week.
Grand-mère
sang all the time, small snatches of parlour songs and operettas and the better-known arias from
Carmen
and
La Traviata
. She used to take the little girl for walks in the Jardin du Luxembourg, near the house, where they watched the puppet shows together and then sat on a bench under the trees while she told her granddaughter stories about her own father when he was a small boy. Estelle found it hard to match the person her grandmother was speaking of with the silent papa whose smiles for her touched his lips briefly and never reached his eyes.

On rainy days,
Grand-mère
let Estelle dress up in her clothes and jewels and even wear her high-heeled shoes. Best of all were the hats, carefully put away in striped hatboxes that lived in a special cupboard in the spare bedroom.

‘One would need ten lifetimes to wear them all,’
Grand-mère
used to say, picking up a velvet toque, or a neat little red felt circle with spotted netting attached
to it, or one of the many straw hats with wide brims she wore in the summer. These were the ones Estelle loved best. They had flowers and bows and bunches of cherries glazed to a dazzling shine attached to the ribbon round the crown, and she felt like a princess when she put one on and paraded in front of the mirror.

They looked at photographs too, and it was on those afternoons, sitting beside her grandmother on the sofa and turning over the stiff grey pages, that Estelle assembled an image of her mother. There were the photographs of her in various productions, dressed in a tutu and wearing a headdress of one kind and another. One of these, the best of all, was the picture Estelle took with her to England.
Grand-mère
put it into a frame and packed it among her clothes in the small suitcase she was taking with her. The photograph showed a pretty lady with her hair piled in an arrangement of waves on top of her head. She was dressed in a practice skirt and was leaning against a wickerwork skip, evidently backstage. A gauzy scarf was wound round her neck and she was smiling. On her feet she wore ballet shoes, and Estelle often wondered who had taken this photograph of her mother, who was obviously on her way to change her clothes after some rehearsal. She was smiling, and Estelle always imagined that the smile was directed at her even though she knew that this was impossible. She hadn’t even been born when the photograph was taken.

Helen died of pneumonia at the age of twenty-seven. Estelle was only five but all her life she remembered the sadness she’d felt at the time in the way you remember a distant illness. As she grew older, the pain grew less sharp – not so much a wound anymore but like a hidden bruise, only painful when you prod it.

When Papa announced that she was to be sent to England to stay with her mother’s cousin, it didn’t occur to Estelle to ask why. Henri did not consult his daughter, but she wouldn’t have expected it. You did as you were told, and Estelle wouldn’t have dared to object to anything her father had decided. Her grandmother spoke about the decision only once, as they were packing the child’s few belongings into a suitcase. Estelle was anxious about Antoinette, her doll.

‘I can take her, can’t I,
Grand-mère
?’

‘Of course, my darling.’ She sat on the edge of Estelle’s bed, and took the little girl on to her lap. Her eyes were red. Since Helen had died, she had wept so much that this was their normal condition. She said, ‘I will write to you every week, Estelle, and you will ask Mrs Wellick to read my letters, won’t you? Then soon you’ll learn to write yourself, and we can correspond like two real friends, two ladies. That’ll be lovely, won’t it? Oh, but I’ll miss you so much,
chérie
, I will pray for your safety and happiness. And you won’t forget your French will you, Estelle? You won’t become entirely English?’

Estelle shook her head. ‘If I stayed here, I could speak French all the time. Why can’t I stay? Why does Papa want to send me to England?’

She had an idea of England in her mind because of what her mother had told her. There was fog there, and rain and white cliffs.

‘Because,’ said
Grand-mère
, ‘he wants you to be with someone nearer your own age. Your mother’s cousin has a daughter who’s only a little bit older than you. It’ll be company for you. I’m getting old, and your father is always busy with his work. And your mother would have been so happy to know you’re going to be educated in England. Of course it’s best …’

Grand-mère
’s voice faded to nothing and she hugged Estelle to her so closely that the child could hardly breathe for a while. When she let her go, and started talking about Antoinette and how they were going to fit her into the suitcase so as not to crush her dress, Estelle could hear a sort of shaking in her voice and saw her eyes were full of tears. She was blinking a lot, to hold them back.

*

England, when she first saw it, was indeed a place with white cliffs. It seemed to her to be entirely grey – grey skies, grey sea, greyish buildings. They travelled to Yorkshire by train and she stared out of the window as the rain streaked across the glass in horizontal grey lines. When they reached the Wellick house, it was as though Estelle’s father disappeared almost before he arrived. One meal, a kiss and a brief hug, and then he was gone in the same taxi that they had taken from the station. Henri had asked the driver to return for him.

The place looked completely empty to Estelle. It was raining when they arrived, and the sky was so low and grey over the purplish hills that she felt she could reach up and touch it. There were a few sheep grazing on the moor and what her father called ‘a village’ was two streets, a church, a grim-looking grey stone school house, one shop and a tavern of some kind called a ‘pub’, her father said. Her mother’s cousin lived at the far end of the village. On the drive from the station, just before they reached their destination, they passed a big house. Estelle looked at it through the bars of its tall, wrought-iron gates and wondered who lived there. Paula, Estelle’s cousin, told her later that it was called the Witch’s House and that it had been empty for years, spiders and bats the only company for the
ghosts who lived there, and hooty owls nesting in the trees that grew behind it.

Estelle first saw Paula looking down from the upstairs front room window as she and her father got out of the taxi. She had a narrow face, a long nose and thin lips, and her brown fringe fell on to a wide forehead. She looked cross, as though she wasn’t a bit pleased that her French cousin was coming to live with the family, and this, Estelle realised quite quickly, was entirely true. Paula thought of her as a nuisance and treated her from the very first with complete disdain and dislike.

Mr and Mrs Wellick – Auntie Rhoda and Uncle Bob – weren’t unkind. Estelle only realised much later that they had little aptitude for conversation or laughter and exchanges with them from the very first day were formal and wooden. Whatever came out of their mouths sounded to her like sentences repeated from a reader, or textbook.

This is your room, dear … we hope you’ll be very happy with us … we’re sure you’ll be a good girl … eat your nice tapioca pudding now
. And on and on. Those puddings made every meal a torment. Wobbly or gelatinous or gritty white concoctions appeared regularly on her plate and she found them disgusting. As she swallowed each mouthful, she tried hard to think about
Grand-mère’
s pastries and lemon mousse, her
pots au chocolat
, meringues and profiterôles – everything delicious she’d ever eaten.

The house was colourless. Curtains of a dark non-colour hung at the windows; the paintwork was a lighter shade of nothing; the carpets were trying to be green but failing miserably. Auntie Rhoda and Uncle Bob dressed to blend into their surroundings in washed-out grey and a thousand variations on beige.

The Wellicks did their best. Bob Wellick went into
Keighley every day to work as a clerk in an accountant’s office and returned at night. Auntie Rhoda stayed at home and looked after Paula and Estelle.

Estelle felt a desperate longing for France that she didn’t have the words to express. On her first night in England she lay in chilly sheets, with Paula asleep in the next bed, and stared at the ceiling. She thought of the taxi, driving away down the road with her father, who never looked back to wave at her, even though she’d stood at the gate for a long time staring after the car. It had truly happened – he’d left her in this place all on her own. Until the moment when she saw the car disappear into the mist that seemed to have fallen while they were drinking tea with the Wellicks, part of Estelle believed that perhaps it wouldn’t happen, that Papa would say
Right, my dear. Drink up your milk and come home to Paris with me
.

She felt she was nowhere; not in her home, not in some other home, just in a sort of limbo, a non-place that she would never get used to. Where was
Grand-mère
? Was she thinking of her? Did she miss her? Estelle imagined her grandmother in the high bed at the Rue Lavaudan, with lace-trimmed pillows heaped behind her head, and the thought made tears run down her cheeks. They made puddles under her neck and she was too miserable and scared to call anyone. Also she knew, young as she was, that she didn’t want Auntie Rhoda coming to comfort her. She knew that her cousin’s presence would make her feel worse, not better, so she swallowed her sorrow and, for many nights after that, she’d wait until Paula’s breathing slowed and deepened then cry herself to sleep.

In the end, she became accustomed to her situation and accepted it. She ate, she slept, and eventually she went to school in the village. She became silent because Paula, who was supposed to be her friend and
companion, made it quite clear from the moment Estelle moved in that she was quite simply not interested in her. Paula was sly, and Estelle’s days were filled with tiny little pinpricks of unkindness that she could not have legitimately complained about without appearing to be what Paula and her friends called a
tell-tale-tit
.