CHAPTER 6
It was indeed a wonderful Summer, but it had to end with the return of the August people and the imminent opening of the new school year. Everything had changed for me, and it was a delight. Our neighbours, the new ones, had only seen me as that tall and bony girl who had moved in with her mother and the big policeman, and the local shopkeepers treated me as just one more woman doing the morning bread run.

Shaving was a particular pain, for now that my days as Serge were gone it felt profoundly wrong doing such a masculine thing. The other surprise was my wardrobe.

Before, I merely looked to wear something that was feminine. Now, I wanted to wear the RIGHT things, and many would never be right for me. I was still growing, and shoes for one were difficult to find for me. Shoes of the sort I wanted, that is; there were plenty that would have fitted, but they were on the wrong shelves in the shops. Maman did her best, and Roland even found some uniform items that were big enough, for some of his female colleagues were more frightening than the dogs he sometimes worked with. And then I met my other doctor…

How my mother had managed it in such a short time, I did not know just then, but she had, and I was properly grateful. I had a number of meetings with the sparrow-like woman, a certain Madame Chinon. Never ‘Doctor’, never, ever, ‘Martine’, but I was always ‘Sophie’ and the courtesies of that woman at the desk were not extended to me, not once. She was never friendly, but not in any way that could be felt as a form of hostility. She had a job to do, it seemed, and I was merely a component to be evaluated, processed, tested and packaged for whichever shelf she felt should hold me. Matters progressed, that was the important thing, and one day in the middle of August she just said “Bring your mother next week, Mademoiselle. I believe she is your only guardian, am I right?”

“You are correct, Madame. Can I ask why?”

“I merely wish to inform her of my diagnosis, child”

And that was that. I was on the rack for a week, then, a week of wondering which doors might remain open. Maman, on the other hand, was bubbling with real or assumed confidence, and insisted on the day before, before that day, that I should have my hair styled. I felt very, very girlish as we waited for our appointed time, until the call came, this time just our family name.

Her eyes flicked up and down my mother’s form in a cold way, and then she shrugged and sat down.

“Madame Laplace…”

“Julienne, Doctor”

“Madame Chinon, Madame Laplace. I have observed what I need to of your child’s behaviour, their expressions, their concerns, and it is now for me to inform you of my findings”

‘Their’, not ‘her’. Oh dear. She picked up quite a thick file that I realised contained the same bundle of notes that I had seen Doctor Nivelle adding to.

“She has endured rather a lot of beatings, it would appear, and one of my areas of professional concern about her presentation was what one could call the reactionary, where she may have adopted a feminine persona as a result of some form of neurosis generated from such unpleasantness. I have seen much…more interesting things happen”

‘She’! I was going to make it through the day, make it to my life, after all.

“I notice that the child has understood my use of gender. Yes, I have today signed a letter declaring my diagnosis, which you will need to copy to all interested parties. It will certainly be necessary for her new school. Madame Laplace, may I assume you did not use the same method for gaining her place there as you did for my time with her?”

Maman blushed bright crimson, and shook her head. We were very quickly out of the door, and when I asked what the problem was she just said, very sharply, “Not now” before making a transparent attempt to change the subject. It worked, of course, for what we were doing was celebrating, and so we had a pastry and a coca, on a terrace as the tourists passed, and then she sprang her surprise. A back street, a small office, the Notary Public…and then the Mairie. She had clearly prepared, with all the papers we needed to hand, and in a sudden euphoric rush I gained officially my name, and confirmation of my place in school. So many obstacles, falling away like ninepins: could it all be like this? I walked out on clouds, but my mother always knows how to catch my attention.

“Lamb mice for dinner?”

“Oh, yes please!”

“Then we need a decent red, and I want some English bread”

Ugh. “What for? OH!”

Maman’s special dessert was something she had learnt many years ago, and it was probably the one piece of English cuisine that I could ever imagine liking. She would line a bowl with the thin, limp white slices and then put in mountains of berries, all sorts of different ones, and then chill it. Turned out, one would never know it had been made from something so unpleasantly taste-free because the tartness of the berries bit through everything. Lamb mice, a good solid red wine, the red of the berries to follow some camembert or perhaps Pont l’Eváªque…

“We will need another bottle as well, my sweet. We shall be royalty this evening!”

And so, with Rollo’s return, we sat in our garden as a family, and drank kir royale, and then ate shanks of lamb cooked so the meat drew up, leaving the bones as mouse tails to the little fat bodies, and I did my own potato gratin, with puy lentils, with a bottle of Médoc, and then the cheeses, and finally the domed delight the English call Summer Pudding, even though it is nothing at all like a pudding. We talked and we laughed, and my brother even flirted a little with me, I think, for it was hardly an experience I had previously encountered. I slept that night happier than I could ever remember. All was official, now, all was Sophie.

Early the next afternoon , I called in to the Café ‘la Marie Galante’ to see Maman, as she had insisted, and she thrust a piece of paper into my hand with some Euros and all but pushed me back out of the restaurant. I was shocked, and turned to her on the pavement outside the terrace. I kept my voice down, but I am sure she felt my passion.

“You are ashamed of me? You do not wish me to be seen at your place of work?”

I was almost ready to throw something at her. After all the pain, all the hope she had kindled in me, there came this rejection. She reached out and held my forearms, her hands strong from her years of work, of cleaning, of kneading dough, and I was hardly a Hercules.

“Stop, now! Stop this! It is not you, my sweet…”

She paused, for a few seconds, and then sighed. “There is a man, a gentleman. I did not wish for you, for my child, to see me in adultery, for that is what it is, in the eyes of the church”

I nearly fell at that point. My mother, my Maman, only thirty-eight years old, left by the sperm donor to struggle with two children, even if they were already mostly grown, a woman who had managed to feed and clothe us, to keep us as safe as she could, who had opened her heart to Sophie, to me? All those years of what I now realised must have been crushing loneliness, of shame that her husband would prefer a whore of a drunk to the mother of their children, and she was ashamed? I wanted to put all of that into words, to tell her that the holy Catholic church could go and sodomise itself, but the words wouldn’t come, and so I just stepped forward to hold her.

She sagged against the breasts I didn’t really have, the plastic that Roland had searched for in some odd shop, and she sighed. “That paper, my dear one, is important. It is the prescription for the medicines you will need. The doctor has been rather efficient, so run along now to the pharmacy. Soonest started, soonest arrived, no?”

Things were coming together in my head at last. “And that doctor…he would not, by any chance, be sitting in the café as we speak?”

She blushed again, and I understood now what had generated Madame Chinon’s reserve.

“Maman, there was no need. I could have waited, I have been waiting all my life”

She pulled back to look me in the face. “I could not have done so. You were dying before my eyes. And it hasn’t been that bad”

She suddenly grinned. “No, it hasn’t been bad at all. I had almost forgotten…Now, pharmacy, and then home. There is a pile of ironing awaiting you, and I know this because I did the washing of it all!”