CHAPTER 36
The classes were various. Pascale introduced me first to those of nine years, and they were full of children with open eyes and minds. This was the language of Hollywood and television, of video games and popular music. It should be understood that in France films in foreign languages are not normally heard in their original form but with the words spoken by specialised French actors, so that the voice of the original performer is an unknown in my country.

I had asked Rollo if his contacts with the ferry company could purchase discs in England of those films I wished to watch, and I discovered that there were subtleties no overspeech could deliver. For example, the English seemed not to require a comedian to speak like a young girl or an idiot to be funny; they left their humour in the words and the performance.

That did not mean they were always funny, of course. The English are very strange people, who laugh at very strange things. There was one character, a Bean, and his humour was mostly visual, almost like French film: a M Hulot who shaved badly, perhaps. Other things were harder to understand, especially when they used accents from those parts of England with strong voices, such as Wales or Scotland, and I struggled to hear the words before I could comprehend the humour.

The classes, though: Pascale showed me those first with the sense of wonder, the delight in a new opportunity undimmed by the realisation of the work that would be necessary, and then we met the older students. Those were the ones who chose to study the subject, who truly wished to learn and engaged with the labour it involved. They were the extremities of a wide country of attitudes, from open eyes to open minds. It was those in the middle who became my challenge, the ones my skills were most necessary for, and the most frustrating.

I saw many who could have come directly from my old school without being changed in any way apart from some small changes in their mode of dress or the names of the singers who hissed loudly from the earpieces of their pocket music machines. They were neither voluntarily with us nor new to the routine of study, but bundles of hormones seeking gratification. All that I could see at first were the fists and feet that had tormented me, the voices that had accused. Pascale saw.

We were in the escape room, and she spoke to me over some poor coffee.

“Sophie, you have issues still, not so, with the teenaged boys?”

I could feel the pink in my face. “It is memories, Pascale”

“I understand, but these are not the ones who abused you, no? Take Jean-Pierre, for an example, Suchet, he is a problem, no? Always talking, always making the fool?”

“Yes, he is one. He never seems to be in any hurry to learn from us”

“Do you see where his eyes rest, Sophie? On the red girl, that Nadine Delaport, no? J-P has never had a little friend, has always been small, and now he grows, and the hair comes to his face. Last year his voice changed, but not always was it so, and he had to be the fool, the clown, as he grew too quickly, not so? And now, now he feels his piece grow in his underwear every time he sees Nadine, and he must sit in a certain way to ease the pressure. He does not know how to speak to her, but speak to her he must, so what emerges is stupidity, silliness, and he believes the films”

She grinned, and touched my arm. “Those films of the guns and cars, no? Where the man who gains the woman he desires must be as that American in the dirty vest whose hair has gone, with a bad joke and a gun, no?”

The grin became broader, and then she laughed. “Sophie, may I say something personal?”

“Of course, Pascale”

Her face became soft. “I am aware of your previous life, my dear. You know that, not so? It is at times like this, however, that I see exactly how little boyhood ever existed within you. These boys, they are a different species, no?”

I had to laugh at that, and the mood was brighter. “Pascale, I have spent years studying one foreign language, so at some point I should perhaps learn to understand that of the males!”

“It will become useful when you secure one for yourself, my dear!”

She saw my face change, of course, and so I had to explain all, and she was kindness made flesh.

“Sophie, this is the present, not so? This is where we must live, now and working for the future. You are not that schoolgirl, not now, you are Mlle Laplace, the prof, and…and you have all the right bits to avoid embarrassment. In ten years, will J-P still stammer over Nadine, or will he be a man, confident, with a grown woman beside him? And you, you were---forgive me. You were but a child, and so newly a woman, no, with this Benny?”

She gave an embrace to me. “Sophie, trust me in this, for I was also a girl, slow to understand the other species. This Benny, he will either reach his own adulthood or he will not. Many, many men never become adult, but stay locked into their childishness forever, and they produce children, and we must try and bring them to their maturity despite their fathers’ failings. That is your challenge, my girl, your duty as a teacher. Benny, he will either see or he will not, but you will grow”

She was, of course, right, and over the next months I learned to look beyond the leather blouse or the stupid hat, or the jean belted below the behind, and I did my best to find the child in each and help them to learn. That was my role, that was my duty.

Christmas came once again, and we made of it a true family event, as we had those years before. We had two households now, two mistresses of their own home, and it was so touching how my sister tried her very best to persuade our mother to let her prepare the feast for the holy day itself. Maman pretended to bristle with pride.

“Who is the mother here?”

Rollo lay back in the sofa with a beer, shirt as loose as ever. “You are, of course, but that will not always be true, eh, Maggie?”

Maman stared at him. “This is true? Maggie is…?”

Margot made no with her head. “No, Maman…”

Our mother started up at this. It was the first time she had heard that word from my sister. Margot smiled.

“No, Maman, I am not with child. I have studies to pursue yet, and they will take a couple of years, but yes, once we are settled, once I am finished, we will seek children of our own”

Papa looked across at Rollo, the way he reclined, and laughed. “I will assume, however, that you are practising hard in how to procure these future children?”

As one, Margot and I shouted “PAPA!” but Rollo, he just lay back and smiled, in a very satisfied way, and looked at the smile with which my mother answered his.

“Ah, and Guillaume, we are not the only diligent students at this activity, no?”

My mother’s smile said it all, and I remembered her words, years before, as she pursued her affair of convenience with the doctor on my behalf. She was a woman, mature, not old, and Papa was a man, and far from too old, and…

In the end, Margot succumbed, and we had our dinner at the old house for the holy day, and a meal at the sunflower house, as I increasingly thought of it, for St Sylvestre. The Clermonts joined us, and the Gilets, and it was then that Elle announced that her own practice had borne fruit, and they were due an addition to their household in July as a best guess. So we celebrated the death of that old year, and the new life that came to the calendar and to my oldest friend. One Christmas only, just one, surpassed for me the joy of that year’s, and that had been my first, with my new shoes that were already old, filled with small gifts from my family. And it was only because that year had indeed been the first that it outshone others.

School called to me once more, in the mist and cold, the rain and the bits of hard ice that blew in from the sea, and I held the Christmas joy to me as a warmth to see me through the Winter and reach deeper to the souls of my pupils. Pascale was using me as she had described that day she enlisted me to work with the English people, to help those most in need of my aid rather than ease smoothly through my work with the gifted. I worked with them too, and it was wonderful, for they grew wings and flew further than I could have imagined, but it was the slower students who gave me my rewards.

There are joys in teaching, and the purest is to see the comprehension dawn in the eyes of a child who has been condemned as unable to learn. I worked like that all through that school year, all through the Spring and into the beginnings of the Summer, and at least three of those I struggled with achieved marks for a Bacca that astonished them.

It was so simple, in the end. They were dressed as hoodlums, and they spoke as if they were in bad films, but what I saw was myself. These were not gangsters hiding in the dark to attack and violate, these were children wearing a costume. They were myself, for I had worn Serge so badly for so many years I understood the need for hiding, and I could see further than their skin or their costume.

It was that day, the end of the school year, that I saw what the joys of my work were. That last day, when all of our class had departed and Pascale and I were left in the room alone to sigh and stretch our bodies, and there was a knock at the classroom door.

In came Mohammed Benazzi, one of our leather clothed boys, with the scarf tied about his head under the cap that claimed to come from New York, and he had his hands behind his back, and I am sure that if his skin had not been so dark I would have seen the blush that was surely there. He came up to me, and stammered out a few words.

“Mademoiselle, it has been…you have…my father, he is pleased, and without you…”

There were flowers, in a great bundle, and a card to say thank you, and the flowers were slightly damaged from being all day in his locker, but I did not care. I kissed his cheek and he almost ran from the classroom.

Pascale just smiled. “You see?”

So, as July arrived we bundled all into two cars, all five of us, and we set out on the journey, which brought us past cities and fields and a cheap room, until the familiar shape of the Canigou reared before us as the sea glinted under the blue of the air. Roser awaited, and as she saw my smile she returned it.

“So my granddaughter has finally returned to me?”