Unravelling Oliver(17)

It was Tante Cécile who spoke to me about how to be a woman and who gave me napkins when menstrual blood first appeared. I thank God for that, because my father was old-fashioned in a lot of ways and could not have countenanced such a conversation, although he proved to be quite the feminist in other ways later on.

I was decidedly average at school but got respectable grades upon graduation. Papa thought it was time for me to go to university in Bordeaux or Paris, but I was not a city girl and could not imagine myself adjusting to life beyond my friends, my father and Cécile. The village girls were not going to university and I thought of myself as one of them. They would mostly end up working on our land in some capacity, so I did not want to mark myself out as different from them. They were good, honest people. Besides, we could not afford three years in the Sorbonne, and I thought that anything I needed to learn, I could learn in Clochamps. I had no ambition to be a doctor or a lawyer, as my father had suggested, and I dreaded telling him this. When I eventually did, his relief was palpable. My father and I had become very close, and he depended upon me more as he aged and his health gradually began to fail.

It was arranged that I would work as secretary to the maire, a token job really that took up five half-days a week, although it was rather more demanding to dodge his roaming hands successfully for the ten years I worked there, usually by reminding him loudly of his obligations to his wife and children and by pointing out how very old he was.

I never breathed a word of this to my father. He would have been horrified, and I was strong enough and confident enough to deal with the old buffoon.

In the afternoons, I returned to my father and Cécile, and helped with the work of maintaining the land and the house as we began a painstaking restoration project.

I had a social life with the other young people in the village, and I attended all the local carnivals and dances, but I did not want a boyfriend. I was sought after by the local boys, and I certainly flirted and exchanged kisses and probably was quite a tease, but I did not fall in love. I cannot understand why, as most of my friends fell in love many times before they married and several times afterwards, but at the back of my mind, I always wondered, Would Papa like this boy in his house? Would Papa like to see me marry this boy? Could Papa live with this boy? The answer in my head was always negative. My female friends pitied me, I think, as I attended one wedding after another, assuring me that I would be next, suggesting their cousins and friends as potential partners, but I was happy alone.

The next decade saw the recovery of the vineyard. My father was something of a legendary figure in the entire region. Mostly the villagers felt tremendous guilt that they had done nothing during those terrible years, although we understood their fear. Even known collaborators bent over backwards to help us, and Papa accepted their help graciously, knowing that he was doing them the favour. We drew up plans to restore the house to its former glory, although it was a tediously slow process and, as it later turned out, a futile one.

By the time I was thirty-two, my beloved Tante Cécile had died peacefully in her sleep and my father was bereft again. I, too, felt grief, but whether my father and Cécile were lovers or not, they were certainly confidants and, I suspect, I was often the sole topic of conversation. Cécile thought my father was wrong not to insist that I go to university. She thought I would never meet a suitable husband in our provincial little corner. After she died, Papa began to worry that she was right. It worried him enormously that I was childless. By then, I had had a healthy number of assignations, and had long since lost my virginity to our butcher’s nephew Pierre, who came to spend a winter in Clochamps and begged me to marry him at the end of it. It was an intense affair but I saw no future in it, and poor Pierre left the village with a broken heart. Papa had begged me to marry him, or indeed anyone, but I resisted, insisting that I did not want a husband and would never marry. Papa surprised me then by lowering his expectations, suggesting that I take a lover instead. I was shocked, not by the idea of having a lover, which was an entirely acceptable concept, but that my father had suggested it.

‘But you need a child!’ he pleaded. ‘When I am gone, there will be nobody! I am getting old and tired and you are here to care for me, but who will take care of you when you are old? Nobody! Who will take care of this estate?’

I had to concede his point. But looking at the potential gene pool in the village, I could not think of anybody who I would want as a father to my child, except Pierre and he had married and moved north to Limoges.

It had now been six years since my liaison with Pierre. He was strong and handsome and was interested in old maps and books. I began to regret not accepting his proposal, which I think had been sincere. He had not ever met Papa, but they had shared interests, for example books and me, so they might have been friends.

Pierre visited his uncle once a year, and there was the small matter of timing within my cycle to be considered. I know it was deceitful of me, because perhaps I could have told him the truth and got the same result, but I was afraid that Pierre’s inherent decency would preclude him from cheating on his wife if I had baldly made my request. All Pierre’s qualities were of the kind one would want for one’s child, is that not so?

I set out to seduce Pierre, but my window of opportunity was brief as he was only around for two weeks to take lessons from his uncle, the longest-established charcutier in the region, and I had only four or five possible days within that frame to get pregnant.