Read Online Ignorance by Michèle Roberts - Free Book Online Page A

supper, you stay here by the stove and keep warm.
    My brother folded his hands, put on a pious expression and recited his lesson: oh dear Marshal Pétain I’m such a good boy, if I’m top of the class will you give me a toy? He bent double with laughter. I tapped his cheek, pushed him out of the way, laid the table, brought in the soup. My father came in and then Maurice arrived, as I expected he would, to drink soup with us. He shook hands with my parents, handed Maman a couple of food coupons. She nodded at him to sit down in his usual place next to Papa. He had his own napkin now, his own raffia napkin ring.
    Marc gazed at him with admiration. We all did. His clothes, as ever, looked expensive and new. His navy suit looked freshly pressed, his fingernails looked very clean. Who laundered his shirts for him? His landlady, perhaps. Or that saucy girl, whoever she was, who sometimes left a dark hair on his collar. A buxom landlady, with crimped blonde curls, a woman of the world. Her man away. Lonely at night, no doubt, lying awake, inventing excuses for calling Maurice into her room when he came back of an evening. Simpering at him, asking him to adjust the wireless set or fix the blackout more securely in place. Whereas the forward girl would be a blowsy brunette with a reddened mouth and cheeks. Whether blonde or brunette, the laundress was someone for whom he procured big packets of starch. His collar and cuffs, thick unfrayed poplin, gleamed crisp and white.
    He glanced across the table at me, winking, as I passed the soup plates. Papa said: give me some bread. Maman offered him the basket. He said, as he always did: bread! Putain bordel ! You call this bread? We all knew perfectly well that bread now meant a sawdusty composite scratched together from bakers’ rations, bulked out with nameless substitutes. Papa made the same complaint at every meal. Maman said: why do you have to go on about it? Why remind us? Papa said: the word bread should mean bread. His mouth worked. His face flushed red. I clasped my hands together under the tablecloth, praying he wouldn’t start shouting, and stared at the greasy water in my plate. Maman said: eat up! Don’t let it get cold! My brother chewed his bread and read the comic laid over his knees, out of my father’s view. Maurice fingered his moustache. Glossy black brush looking newly trimmed. I wanted to reach out a forefinger and stroke it. I pleated and unpleated my napkin in my lap.
    My parents began discussing the news, that’s to say Papa talked and Maman half-listened as she spooned down her thin soup. She glanced at the empty bread basket. Tomorrow she’d have to queue for hours again, and perhaps no bread at the end of it. She interrupted Papa: you spend too much time thinking about the war, no wonder you feel so dismal. Papa jerked, and frowned. The muscles at the sides of his mouth started to twitch. I braced myself for him to start bellowing. Maurice smiled at my father and said: so what’s the news?
    These days Papa’s nerves were worse. He kept to his chair by the stove, leaving most of the work of the shop to my mother and me. We were the ones who had to put up with customers’ grumbling whispers: we cheated on weights and prices, we watered the milk, we kept certain goods out of the window. Papa would shout: tell them I’ll know what to do! An empty threat: he was the one who’d get into trouble. Now he threw down his napkin and started off. Usually, like Maman, I ignored his rants. But because Maurice was listening politely, I listened too. France, with enemies in her midst gnawing her like woodworm, needed loyal sons to restore her to vigorous and fruitful life. We’d been weakened by letting in too many immigrants, aliens, refugees. Now we were paying the price. That the Occupation could have happened at all demonstrated our rottenness. On and on he fulminated to the sound of our swallowing, the rustle of my