CHAPTER 8
I left his office en route to my first class, which was English. I had done as well in Caen as could be managed when trying to study as things are thrown at you from behind or as someone tries to set fire to your shirt with a cigarette lighter, but this class was to be a different experience. I knocked at the door, as I was making a belated arrival after my little meeting, and at the invitation to enter I did. The teacher was a woman of a certain age, with what could have been the widest hips I had ever seen on someone not actually obese. Grey curls above a pair of pince-nez, she smiled and her whole face fell into the wrinkles of an elderly apple.

“You must be Sophie Laplace, not so? I am Madame Calvet, and I do believe you know some of these young people already”

Margot waved from a double desk and indicated the seat vacant beside her, so I shuffled my books from my arms to the space and took the seat she indicated.

“Sophie, can you please rise? Just a social formality, but please let us know something of your life”

I stood, looking around me, and I didn’t see the hostility I would have expected in my old school. Keeping my voice low, I gave them a short life history.

“We are new here, moving from Caen. There is my mother, and my older brother Roland, he is in the PAF, so it is all very new and bright, and I like languages, and words, and art, but I am not so clever with things like mathematics. Number do not speak to me”

Mme Calvet smiled again. “If you like languages and words, I can ask for no more. Do you like your new home---ah, your smile is the answer to that one”

“Madame, we have a garden at last, and it is indeed a delight.”

“Thank you, Sophie. Now, my young ones, we are to consider the operation of the imperfect and the habitual past in English, because those strange people use them very oddly indeed…”

And so the morning went, from class to class, my books gradually mounting in number until I had some in my bag and others clutched to my chest. We seemed forever to be giggling as we moved from room to room, and it was indeed the delight I had described to Mme Calvet, being myself, being taken at face value. It was, of all people, Elle who brought me down to Earth. We were in the girls’ toilets, on my fourth day, doing what girls do. I had quickly discovered that such things did not merely consist of urination or other necessary functions, but extended to make-up maintenance and, to be plain, socialising. Even when sat on a toilet (and thank all holy things we were not obliged to use elephants’ feet; the toilets were more modern than my old school had had) the conversation and giggling would continue.

Elle and I were standing together at the mirror, applying the mascara I had begun to love because of the way it transformed my eyes, when she spoke.

“Sophie…there are no others here, so may we talk?”

“Of course, my little girl friend who isn’t my little girlfriend”

She winced, which puzzled me. “Yes, a joke can often be less funny when something hides beneath. I must be direct. What are you, my friend?”

I must explain here for those who do not speak my language, so please understand that this is important. There are nuances that arise because of its structure, and one of them is in the possessive form of the pronouns. These days, I am able to explain in clever terms how this works, how the English differ from us, as do the Germans, but it is really a simple thing. Because ‘friend’ starts with a vowel, the word for ‘my’ must end with a consonant, and so it is the same whether the friend is male or female. With the addition of the word ‘little’, one can specify the sex of the friend concerned. What Elle had said to me was chilling. ‘Mon ami’, not ‘Ma petite…’

I lowered my brush and looked at her, and there was a frown line between her brows, and I held myself for just an instant before I had to let the tears fall. She cast her eyes quickly around the room and then seized my elbow, tugging me into one of the cubicles and pushing me down onto the seat so that she could look me in the eyes. The toilet tissue served to wipe my face, as she let me weep, saying nothing, but holding my hand until I had come back to myself. I brought my breathing back to steadiness, and asked the safest question I could frame.

“What is it that you are thinking, Elle?”

She was moist in her own eyes, and she shook her head. “I do not know, Sophie, I really do not. It was just yesterday, in the sun, and I am smaller than you, and I looked up…and I do not know what you might be, but there were hairs, stubble, just here…”

She pointed to the very underside of her chin, and I felt what she meant under my own. She continued.

“I wondered, yes, what this meant, and then I looked at you more closely, and the joking on our first day, and your feet, and your hands…No! No, I am not trying to make this a joke, but I suspected, and so…”

She took my other hand in hers. “I wondered, because something like this is, you know, very interesting, very unusual, and if I was wrong, if I said things to hurt, I would not be a good friend, and I asked…”

She squeezed my hands, seeming to choose her words with as much care as she could find. “I asked a friend to ask another friend, if they had heard of a Laplace at the old school you had, and they said there had been two, and I did not ask if one was a girl, but they told me of Roland…and of Serge, and I did not say to them ‘do you not mean Sophie?’ because that told me, and…”

Her own tears began to fall then. I could not speak, but Elle managed. “And I cannot see a Serge in your eyes, only in your hands and your feet, and I believe there is only a Sophie in your heart, and I am so very, very sorry, but I just had to know”

The rest was tears.

Eventually, we were spent, and helped each other to clean up. I felt dangerously calm, the calm of the condemned on the scaffold. “What now, Elle?”

She applied her own cosmetics, as if we had not experienced the previous ten minutes, and spoke looking straight into the mirror.

“What now, my little girl friend? Now, we see how we can let Sophie live. I cannot imagine what pains you have had, but I know one thing. I am no boy, and they are strange and foreign things, much as I enjoy them. They are like horses, yes?”

Suddenly she was laughing. “But more fun to ride, no?”

Her laugh stopped abruptly as she turned to look at me. “But no, you would not know, would you? Oh, Sophie, what I meant was that while I like boys, they are beyond what I can understand, the way they think, the things they say and do, and you, you have been made to live in one for all of your life, and even the Father has not told us of a hell so awful. How are you still here?”

I sighed. “Family, Elle. My mother, my sweet brother, yes? Even when he swears and blasphemes, he still is more love in one place than I could ever hope for. Without them, well, I do not know”

She screwed her brush back together with an air of final decision. “Then we shall help them out. I shall help them out. Look, Sophie, who else knows?”

“Ah, two doctors, my mother and brother, the Head, and the Mayor’s office, and depending on who the old bitch has told, perhaps some people in Caen”

“You swear now, girl?”

I forced a grin. “For Mme Blanchard, I may make an exception”

Elle took my hands again after I had repacked my cosmetics. “Look, this is only a suggestion, and I will not do it without your agreement, but…well, my mother, she was from Paris, yes? And she…”

I was amazed. My little friend was slowly turning a rather fetching shade of pink.

“Continue, Elle”

Deep breaths. “This is my secret, yes? For nobody else? They all think she worked in a clothing shop, but she was actually…My father saw her naked before they were married”

“Pardon?”

“She was a dancer, yes? Not a whore of the street, nor a whore of the stage, just a dancer, and that meant that she didn’t wear very much for work, and my Papa sort of got an early viewing, as he says, like picking a racehorse out in the paddock, and he jokes that it was the best wager he ever made. Look. She has worked with…all sorts of people. I would like to take you home as a friend, yes? Then, if all is as we might hope, then perhaps, Maman, yes, might be able to help with…”

She tapped herself under the chin and then cast her gaze very directly and obviously further down. I couldn’t do anything else but hug her. We were very nearly late for class.