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Uncle Sam, or plain Sam Ellison as he then was, who had his own recipe for sorting out the world, expressible in one single, vulgar word: plastics? In
Maman
’s defence, it could be said that she too was engaged with the Allies, Sam being American. And in Sam’s defence, it could be said that, fuelled as it was by rank commercialism, he too had a sense of mission.
    “It’s the stuff that’s gonna mould the future. I mean, literally. Anything from a coffee cup to an artificial leg, to the sock that goes on it.”
    “And then there’s plastic surgery.”
    “No, that’s kinda different, sweetheart.”
    (As my mother, an expert at lash-fluttering
fausse-naïveté
, well knew.)
    He must have known. If I could sniff these matters out, even in their early, covert stages, then he— But then I was a virtual accomplice. When I emerged from my
école
in the afternoon to see Sam just dropping
Maman
off from a taxi, or made my own way home to find her in a distinct state of having hastily bathed and dressed, I would receive not guilty looks but one of her swift, smothering, implicatinghugs—essentially no different from her shopping hugs. Thank you for letting me buy that dress—isn’t it gorgeous? Thank you for letting me fuck Sam—isn’t he
divine
? And, yes, that word had only to spring from her lips and I believed it to be so. I thought Sam—six feet of hard-muscled American avarice—was divine, and I thought
crêpe suzette
and
tarte tatin
were divine, and I thought oyster-grey silk cami-knickers were divine, and I thought my mother’s laughter, the sheer, vicious gaiety in her eyes, was divine.
    “Do up my buttons, sweetie, would you? There’s an angel.”
    A whole world existed in which men did up the backs of women’s dresses at four o’clock in the afternoon.
    I can see it now, that apartment above the Rue de Bellechasse. Its ponderous furnishings, its tarnished chandeliers, its diplomatic decorum under perpetual threat from my mother’s chatter and laughter, from her gusty scurryings from room to room, and—but this was hardly a threat—from her magic snatches of song. I learnt never to ask, never to prompt, never to wait. Only to recognise the likely moments: in the evenings when the traffic outside began to toot in a distinctly perkier fashion; after one of her unspecified “lunch engagements”; in moments of lingering and meaningful
déshabille
. Lights coming on in the streets. Wafts of scent. The gurgle of bath water running and, above it, lilting, throbbing:
“Dove so-ono i bei momeenti …”
    And what world was he sorting out? Some new, rebuilt world which would one day be unveiled to the dazzlement and shame of such backsliders as Mother and me? Or some old, dream-world restored, in which implacable British sergeant-majors bawled for ever over far-flung paradegrounds and men followed well-trodden paths to glory and knighthoods?
    He was fifty-five. And I had the insight of an infant. But it seems, now, that I could have told him then: that world was gone. An axe had dropped on it.
    And yet—Paris was still Paris. Even the Paris that a year ago had emerged from four years of occupation. The chestnuts kept their ranks; café tables spawned; a thousand mansarded roofs glinted in the autumn sunshine, without a bomb-site among them. By the following spring, Paris had the air of something simply resumed. It was only winter, not a world war, that had passed: shutters flung open; awnings lowered; bed linen hanging from upper windows; merchandise once more filling the shops, to be pillaged by my mother.
    Paris. April in Paris. I had never seen Paris before, and yet even at nine years old I had this recurring sensation of encountering a vision made fact. If the
trompe-l’œil
Paris of
La Bohème
was an illusion, then on my journeys on foot between our apartment and the
école
, journeys which took a meandering form and had something to do, I suppose now, with a sense of having lost the right path with