The Price of Silence

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Copyright © Hélène Pascal 2021

First published in 2021 by Barnwolf Press

Revised, extended edition 2023 by Tivoli Books

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Dedication

For René-Jacques Baumer

Disclaimer

The author has recreated events, locales and conversations from correspondence, notes and memories. In order to maintain anonymity in some instances the author has changed the names of some individuals and places, identifying characteristics and details, such as physical properties, occupations and places of residence. The author does not assume and hereby disclaims any liability to any party for any loss, damage, or disruption caused by errors or omissions, whether such errors or omissions result from negligence, accident, or any other cause.

THE PRICE OF SILENCE

Prologue

London, 7th March 2019

Was it a leaf or a bird? They sometimes drop to the ground in the same fashion, the leaves barely turning at a slight slant. Leaves from the tall apple tree on the right litter the lawn in front of me like so many brass and copper coins in a fountain. No wind today, so they fall at long intervals, like reticent gifts. All is quiet. Apart from the bubbling of water on the top of the black egg-shaped fountain, there is no sound, unlike this morning when everything was a-flurry with squirrels and birds leaping about the place.

As if a squirrel had just jumped at my feet I am startled by an image of Odile standing next to me; I am eight years old and have found a role for myself: every Sunday morning I clean and shine my parents’ and sister’s shoes. Such a nice thing to do, left hand inside the soft leather, the right one busy in strong then gentle strokes with brushes and cloth, rubbing to a satisfying glow. I get approval, raise benevolent smiles – I have changed my life, I am mistress of that moment. Odile, all blond curls and three and a half years my junior, watches me finally polishing hers. She stands on my right and keeps still, looking at my face and hands in turn, detached rather than involved, a spectator. I would like comment, preferably praise, as I am an older, kind sister, looking after her needs, but she stays silent.

You see, Odile, I insist, I am polishing your pretty little shoes… What am I?

An idiot, she replies without hesitation – and doesn’t even run away for she knows I was never allowed to hit her. I may not even feel like it as this was a time when she often made us laugh with jokes or playful tricks and so she could easily remain in this role that day, and my own role was to laugh along with it: what a funny little thing she was! Except that one day she just stopped laughing, and lived thereafter in unseen chaos.

Even though I didn’t see much of Odile after childhood itself – our long internment in family life with its silences and moody rituals – my sister’s image has obdurately followed me like a shadow visiting me in recent years and presenting me with a magnified and at times distorted image of my own life and hauntings. It is recognisable: we shared a childhood in that family, that small town with its peeling walls and narrow pavements; that society born of the war world where, the Germans having finally vacated our area of the South-West of France in 1945 after a two-year invasion, suspicions of collaboration and secret feuds would have grown and fermented around us as in a subterranean world: few words and half sentences spoke long and deep in people’s hearts.

Like all children, Odile and I absorbed a great deal of the said, unsaid, denied and unexplained, storing the traumatic moments in our bodies for later examination, as they may choose to surface from their underground life through the pain they would later inflict, prodding us to dig ever deeper into that still-living soil. Childhood is a time when you don’t know you know, but the scars, more visible as we grow, will one day be picked open and bleed the truth.

I was born in July 1939 in elegant and prosperous Bordeaux just two months before it was occupied by the German army, and Odile in January 1943 in a small dreary town in the Pyrenees when the region was still in the Free Zone and our father was finally able to find a lawyer’s practice to buy with Mother’s money. We lived temporarily in the house of some kind, local people until my parents found a large first-floor apartment to rent in a house that faced the Gendarmerie Nationale – the Army Barracks – on the main road to Toulouse. There in that grey and bleak little town we all lived until Odile and I, one a few years after the other and following what seemed an eternity, at long last left home to go to university.

As children, Odile and I shared a large bedroom, our beds at opposite ends for some reason, so we could see each other but seldom talk and confide, and I must assume this was of our choosing although Mother would usually decide on the best arrangement. Later, I was given the smaller bedroom between what remained Odile’s bedroom and our parents’ bedroom and this suited me fine: I liked my privacy and we often argued anyway.

Each bedroom had French windows opening onto a wooden-floored balcony that ran the whole length of the back of the house and overlooked a garden shared with the other tenants downstairs. The toilet was situated at our parents’ bedroom end of the balcony so we all had to face the cold on winter days and the dark on winter nights when nature called. I remember, when little, carving with my nails into the soft plaster of the toilet walls the many haunting and hideous faces with large noses of ‘the Man with Horns’, (l’Homme à Cornes), who would come to get us if we weren’t good.

Good or not, I dare say now that both Odile and I met him.

This is what is so difficult to say, and yet it is the purpose of this book: to tell the story of two little girls’ early childhood abuse, emotional as well as sexual, in the veiled, alluded way it was recalled, mirroring the hidden and obscure ways it occurred, all of it in the ‘comme-il-faut’ silence of a middle-class family obsessed with propriety; how we struggled to grow up in our own different ways, suffering in ignorance the malignant after-effects of what happened to us in infancy and early childhood. This silence was sly, fog-like; penetrating of soul and limb, it put our voices to sleep, helped by Mother’s ceaseless demands and her troubled, insistent and confusing exhortations to forget, we must forget…

It is only in later years that the obscurity became more clarified, illuminated at first through traumatic visions. These had an appearance of unreality, detached as they were from current situations: I hold my little girl in my arms, lulled in a motherly contentment that has been hard-earned after years of drama, and all of a sudden images appear in front of my eyes, superimposed on the room’s furniture and objects, a shocking intrusion: a man in dishevelled clothes, panting, seems to be rubbing a small naked child against himself, oblivious, in a trance, and I want to scream because the man in front of my eyes is Jeremy himself, her father: I always felt his love for her to be his one redeeming quality and the reassurance that my baby would at least have a father, if not a conventional family. I recoil in horror, brutally struck by the odious presence of the images I am experiencing and immediately blame myself for allowing into my consciousness. They have invaded my mind like a blow, irrationally. I am going mad. It can’t happen again, it mustn’t.

– And who is the baby?

But it does, a few months later. I had consigned those odious images to near oblivion. My little child is five years old then, no longer a baby. She is in no danger, she is thriving. So who is the baby? I ask myself again much later, but at the time I curse myself in horror. The man this time is a new neighbour, an old man who has visited a little too often recently and I am overcome with panic, filled with rage and disgust at this invasion, this break-in.

This break-in: shall I say what rape is? I know what I am talking about: it is the unwanted breaking and entering of a body by another, a foreign body, an assailant of the integrity of your flesh as well as a life-long nightmare imposed upon your consciousness. It is always violent even if violence isn’t apparently involved, as fright can freeze your healthy responses, making flight impossible. Besides, a small child cannot flee, and I realised several decades later when I was in my early fifties, that I must have been around two and a half years old at the time if not much earlier.

I am not just speaking of physical penetration as of all the adjacent events of being handled, positioned, prepared for the act, that are always accompanied by the sly traumas of sounds or words, body smells and touching, and the invisible intrusion of foreign breath, each leaving inescapable marks on the soul.

As a virus within a cell, the act has entered your nascent consciousness and directs from then on what reality is for your slowly developing mind. It is poison but you have no way of knowing its toxic ways and feral nature or differentiating it from overall familial affection.

It is also simply malware, conditioning your future thoughts and responses, your dreams, desires and choices. Your compass has been twisted, and actions which you think are your own, thoughts you assume to be yours, have been compromised, warped by unwanted and misunderstood knowledge. What should be normal perception and course of human experience of relationships is instantly altered. You are programmed to be confused, defective, easily acquiescent, often feeling paralysed, psychologically infected with false understanding. You are split. And you are damned. Because, more often than not you will in the future have no awareness of danger or safety, taking passing interest for life-changing opportunity, and you will tend to trust the wrong people since you have never been protected and are unable to tell the difference.

Having been exposed to sensations that your consciousness was too immature to process, your body’s reactions falsified, you will tend to confuse sexual turmoil with desire and feelings, since the loneliness of abandonment has left you to be the prey of thoughtless and selfish others. And if you remain unlucky, you will ceaselessly look for love.

Trying for most of my life to find my way in this murky fog, I can attempt to report as I lived them the confused paths I took over the first fifty-odd years of my life, some of the wrong choices and judgements I made and those that were made for me. I can also describe many of the symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome, learned helplessness and dissociation in particular, which crippled me all my life without me realising it, hampering me in reaching my goals. In parallel with my efforts to understand the whys and wherefores of events I found hard to control, my younger sister Odile, equally damaged, chose a different path, but the harm done to us both had the most disastrous and long-lasting consequences.

Chapter One

London, 15th July 2003

The small town in the French Pyrénées where Odile and I grew up looked for all the world to seem as if it was ashamed of itself: drab houses of grey and dirty brown, shutters and shop fronts unpainted for years if not decades – it might well have been. The war years cannot have helped, with eventual German occupation in 1942 when they finally crossed into the unoccupied zone and invaded the South of France.

I have often wondered what makes the spirit of a place, where the natural architecture of a landscape seems to predict, since it contains it, a future tragedy, a cataclysm: I think of Glencoe in Scotland, the Cathar region in France. Nothing as theatrical qualified our very provincial environment, but the very dullness and dinginess of the town leaked nevertheless into people’s souls, with symptoms varying from ennui and depression to simple daily boredom. Mostly, I remember the hopelessness, the dead-insideness of the place. The silence.

Being a little child did not seem to help: Daddy was unresponsive and silent and Mum seemed sad and anxious. You couldn’t run or you might fall, nor jump, you would get too hot, nor play since you would get dirty. I realised much later that I never knew how to play. Looking back, neither of my parents looked as if they had played much themselves or would have even known how to.

The seventh of nine children, my father was born in 1903 in Toulouse in a genteel and strict family of lawyers. He was a young boy when his father died, and an uncle helped him later to study law. Neither his education nor the spirit of the times encouraged him to complain, but I think he was aware of the sadness of his youth. I remember him whistling in the bathroom a tune – from Madame Butterfly? "Toujours sourire, le coeur douloureux… and my mother raising her eyes to the ceiling in exasperated mockery with an air of saying: What has he got to complain about? His suffering is nothing compared to mine…" and sighing, shaking her head.

His own mother, who remained small and slim despite bearing nine children, was a stern, strict but dignified woman who never complained and lived to the grand age of ninety-seven. I have no recollection of her smiling with joy, and she sent Odile and me ‘to the corner’ once for playing with water at the garden tap. I asked her when I was adolescent:

Granny, did you want all these children?

One took them as they came, you know.

So it was possibly a good thing my grandfather died after number nine, I surmised, imagining her exhaustion.

My father as an adult was of average size and slim-built, his rather thin hair slicked back, a duller shade of blond in his grown-up years, with hazel eyes. Women friends – they told me so approvingly – thought him handsome and particularly distinguished; certainly his suits emphasised his distinction, all in different shades of grey with thin stripes of cream or Prince of Wales checks. ‘L’élégance anglaise’ was much in favour then and suited his position in society: to him, being – having strived to become – a bourgeois, was an achievement.

He had no idea that my generation was growing up rejecting almost everything of the bourgeois culture, its self-satisfaction and self-serving narrowness of spirit. To him, his status was a reward for his hard work and had to show: he would almost always wear a grey felt hat with a trim adorned with the tiniest pheasant feather, a beige overcoat – later bought at Burberry’s in Bordeaux – and fine leather gloves.

The car had to match his elegant but sober propriety and was usually black with a dark grey interior. Odile and I called it: ‘the hearse’. He wouldn’t hear of a pale blue car, the only colour on offer in those days, having to look serious at all times, ‘un Monsieur’, betraying all his insecurities by looking stern in public, only allowing himself to relax and laugh with close friends.

It was a blessing that the French were free to enjoy good food and drink; indeed, if gluttony was mocked, the joys of eating were never proscribed by the Church. This particular pleasure of the flesh being reasonably sin-free allowed good cheer and made gatherings with friends pleasant occasions, but while Sunday lunches ‘en famille’ were often sinister with my parents not talking to each other while expecting Odile and me to look happy, it was at least possible to rejoice at the wonderful meal of roast chicken and fine chips cooked to perfection, followed by sumptuous gâteaux my father went to buy at the best pâtisserie in town, putting a suit on again for the occasion. Odile and I having had to attend the eleven o’clock mass by ourselves, always a cheerless event, felt we deserved this weekly treat: we were good and obedient children, as our parents had had to be themselves; the gratification of good food gave us all a sense of existing at a most reassuring level.

Our mother strove to be the perfect housewife, aiming for a high standard of cleanliness in the home, elegance in her appearance and accomplishment as a cook. My father’s comments, designed to humiliate her, could drive her to tears until their friends’ high praise would silence him, so she loved entertaining, and on those occasions, out would come the silver, the crystal glasses, the little bunches of flowers in tiny individual vases, the fine embroidered tablecloths and napkins.

She was born in 1916 – thirteen years my father’s junior – in Limoges, the daughter of an enterprising jewellery-maker and businessman who got rich not merely as a shopkeeper and entrepreneur, but casting gold bars for the State and wisely investing in property. He was of average height but imposing, dark-haired with a thick moustache, and it seems that he enjoyed elsewhere a jollier time than with his family. His wife, though, was beautiful with her smooth black hair and large blue eyes. They had three daughters.

My mother being the youngest and seemingly surplus to requirements was sent away after birth to a wet-nurse in the country: her mother wished to have an active life and running her husband’s shop and looking after the two older girls gave her plenty to do. My mother adored her foster mother’s family and was possibly rather spoilt while feeling abandoned by parents she visited rarely. She remembered her mother kissing her only once and was returned home when she reached school-age, sorely missing her foster mother’s affection.

Both her parents died of strokes a year apart when she was in her early teens and she must have felt an orphan for the second time. Her older sister, recently married, was forced to take her in but made her life so intolerable my mother swore to marry the first man who asked for her hand. This she did, and she wept as she confided in me one afternoon, at great cost to herself both emotionally and financially as she had indeed become a very rich and therefore desirable young woman. I can only see, now that I have attained myself a degree of understanding and compassion, that being forced to have frequent sexual intercourse with a man she didn’t love must have seemed to her as no less than repeated rape, conditioning her to life-long distaste if not hatred for the act. Exceptionally beautiful with her black hair and blue eyes, she was also needy and naive, a dangerous combination at all times.

The man she married, Louis, was a qualified lawyer without the fortune required in those days to buy an existing practice. Louis obviously thought my mother would provide but got side-tracked by his addiction to gambling and philandering. A visiting aunt found her in despair one day and rescued her, helping her to get a divorce as well as some basic qualifications at a secretarial college.

The first time my father set eyes on her was in Bordeaux where they both lived. Driving along one of the main streets full of smart shops and cafés, he got distracted by the gorgeous young woman walking on the pavement, and crashed his car into some road works ahead. She burst out laughing and they started chatting; he was so distinguished…

They lived together for a few years, marrying in January 1938, eighteen months before I was born. Odile and I never saw any photographs of their wedding, which puzzled me and remained unexplained for a long time. There was, in those stern Catholic times, a certain incompleteness and in this case shame associated with civil marriages – and she wouldn’t have been wearing a white dress… Having been married and divorced before also meant that they were both excluded by the Church from receiving sacraments – including that of a religious marriage.

Free to find his fortune again and after some prevaricating which I couldn’t explain to myself for a long time, my father decided he was making a perfect choice. For her, who had missed out so much on family love and care, this much older man offered a mirage of safety: a parental figure, he would protect her, while she would also raise her social status in her own eyes by marrying into a family of lawyers: coming from a shopkeeper’s background wasn’t quite respectable enough socially in those very conventional days: you served people… . She naturally offered to sell some of the property she had inherited from her parents to finance the purchase of a practice. In the middle of the war, he eventually found one for sale in that ugly little town in the Pyrénées. This is when, once Mother had paid for it, he put his sole name on the deeds, robbing her instantly. Having taken care to have their marriage contract subsequently drawn on the basis of separation of assets instead of putting them in common – as would have been at least grateful – she lost all recourse under the law.

Did it seem as if the past was repeating itself?

I can imagine her heart sinking at the sight of the dreary provincial town where father was taking us, and remember her frequent complaints about the dull and unsophisticated environment she was –we were – obliged to live in: it was a market town, all these peasant farmers… . He promised her to move his practice to Toulouse, a large and beautiful city not far away, once his situation improved, she would have to be patient, but they kept that dreary flat opposite the gendarmerie, much to her despair, until after Odile and I left home for university.

My father, who had little idea of how to be a father, furnished our lives lightly like a visitor who came for his meals, would occasionally smile and say: I hope you are being good and obedient, huh? but more often ignore us. Good moods came more easily when friends arrived for a game of bridge or acquaintances visited, and you wouldn’t have found anyone to believe my parents weren’t a cheerful and happy couple, so strong were social pressures to present a good front. Besides, those moments took them out of their own wretchedness.

Mother, who hadn’t had a real family life either, at least attempted to invent one, though it isn’t surprising that it owed more to form than content; her insecurity was a constant strain, forcing her to reassure herself and the world that they were a respectable family by following society edicts tensely and to the letter. However, the marriage was unhappy and eventually, as it was believed in those days that a second child could steady a couple’s bonds, Mother gave birth to Odile in the middle of the war, in January 1943. A few months later, one fine summer’s day, the German army rolled its lorries and troops into the large courtyard of the imposing brick buildings of the Gendarmerie Nationale across the road. I was only three and a half years old but could feel her terror as she and I watched through the smallest gap between the wooden shutters of our dining room: how would the German soldiers deal with the population? Thank goodness it seems they were on orders to behave themselves so I now merely remember the pleasure of reaching out for my first wild cherries in a friend’s garden where Mother rushed us for refuge that day.

If she aimed at beauty and elegance in the home, Mother did not leave the garden unattended, or at least the left side which belonged to us. It was mostly a working garden in those years of occupation and rations, but she had created a square rose and peony bed closer to the house where I had moments of wonder as I delicately separated their petals, working my fingers towards the stamens in the hope of finding a serendipitous and precious-looking beetle. I still see her, a town woman, growing vegetables, peas and beans as well as raspberries, redcurrants, strawberries. She made blocks of soap with saponaria plants that grew on the edge of the path and wove for herself lovely summer sandals out of raffia with soles of cork: women’s magazines were always full of good advice and women were as always, closer to life, sensible and practical.

The Occupation, peaceful locally at least on the surface, presented my parents with daily fears: every morning we could watch enemy soldiers in their dull green uniforms (we called that colour ‘caca d’oie’: goose poo) marching towards some open fields beyond, singing fierce songs, and we trembled at the sight of the shaven heads of the Central Asian prisoners known as Mongols the Germans were using as guards, I learned later they had a fearful reputation for raping women and girls. I recall Father was at one point tempted to work for the enemy and Mother having to use all her arguments to prevent him doing so. I found myself once, a five-year-old near the end of the war, collecting our ration of sugar for the week from the grocery store two doors away, being watched by a young, blond-haired German soldier who tapped my cheek gently: he was supposed to be a dreadful man, never to be spoken to; I was so confused. Nothing, but nothing, was ever as it seemed. Maybe God knew what was truly going on? We were taught to pray to Him when little, and before going to sleep we would kneel by our beds and say with concentration, before jumping in:

– Baby Jesus, I give you my heart. Please bless daddy and mummy and all those I love. Amen.

We were taught that He cared, but why do we suffer so? Priests spoke of mysteries, leaving the field open, and Mother had prompted me a few times, when I was in tears for some reason:

– One must forget, one has to forget…

– Forget what?

I have forgotten.

Some Sundays differed from the housebound norm by family car trips to Luchon for lunch with Viktor and Maroussia, pleasant and talkative White Russians who I recall were very loud, Viktor being a little deaf. He was a barrister and spoke a spectacularly literary French; Maroussia had been a dancer before the war and looked very beautiful in the photographs I have left. Luchon, a grey town in a valley ensconced between the dark green mountain sides of the Pyrénées, with slate roofed chalets and damp gardens, seemed oppressive and claustrophobic, sunk in the winter mist which hid the view of peaks you would have had to climb very high to see.

After lunch, Odile and I were let loose in our buttoned-up coats in the streets of the sleepy town: ‘You can just walk around,’ Mother had said, so we did, trying to distract ourselves gazing at smart shop windows as Luchon was a spa with many summer visitors. On the few occasions I managed to see the mountain sides close to, I was awed by the stony and gritty slopes which didn’t seem to invite climbing, so steep, dark and hostile did they look to me. I knew some people loved climbing mountains, attacked them joyfully with good cheer and optimism, anticipating the rewards of reaching the top, having gained the freedom of an unimpeded view on vast snowy peaks.