petite anglaise

I am shelling peas in the kitchen while listening to some vintage Aphex twin when I realise that Tadpole has gone disturbingly quiet.

‘Sweetie? What are you up to?’ I call, peering over the bar, from which vantage point I can see the whole of our open-plan apartment. Save the bathroom and toilet, that is. There is no sign of Tadpole, however, and I have a sudden, irrational vision of her drawing 3D pictures on the bathroom floor with a tube of toothpaste.

‘I’m doing a poo!’ shouts Tadpole. ‘Well… Actually, I’ve finished doing my poo, and now I’m reading the book about the bunny.’

The people who designed our apartment thoughtfully built in some shelf space above the toilet, and this hosts our extensive ‘toilet book’ collection. Highlights include our Larson collection, the foreign editions of ‘petite’, several tomes by Desproges and ‘the book about the bunny’, a.k.a. The Bumper Book of Bunny Suicides. Tadpole loves poring over this, even though I hope/feel sure that she doesn’t really understand a) why a bunny would want to commit suicide, and b) how he’s planning to go about it in many of the instances illustrated.

‘You don’t have to read that on the toilet, you know,’ I tell her, when she emerges, finally, a full ten minutes later. ‘You can borrow books from the toilet library. As long as you put them back afterwards…’

Which is why this morning, I found Tadpole with her head bent over a copy of fellow blogger Andre‘s If You’re Happy and You Know It‘ at the breakfast table. Indeed, not just looking at it, but reproducing several of the doodles herself with the help of a biro she’d pilfered from my handbag.

I do hope Andre approves.

I introduced the idea of a new addition to our family several months ago, long before I began taking folic acid or dispensed with taking ‘precautions’. Tadpole was predictably delighted at the prospect of having a little brother or sister to fuss over and urged me to ‘put a baby in my tummy’ as soon as possible.

‘Will Daddy come to live with us when we have a new baby?’ she asks me, between spoonfuls of cereal, a few days after our first discussion. ‘So he can help us to look after it?’

‘Um, no… I shouldn’t think so,’ I reply with a frown. I’m about to ask her why she would think such a thing, when realisation suddenly dawns. In Tadpole-logic, I realise, Mr Frog is the only possible daddy and therefore it stands to reason that he will father all my children. Hence the assumption that he will be sharing the responsibility for caring for the baby, which he can’t very well do if he is living 400m down the road.

I take a sip of coffee before embarking on my explanation. Best to test my theory first, I decide. So I begin with a tentative question. ‘When I have a baby,’ I begin, ‘who do you think the baby’s daddy will be?’

‘Daddy,’ Tadpole replies, her scornful tone making it abundantly clear that she considers my question a foolish one. I sigh and glance towards the bedroom, wondering whether The Boy can hear us. He could be awake – after all, he just snoozed the alarm not twice, but three times – but there is no way of knowing for sure, as he seems to be capable of banging his fist on the alarm clock in his sleep.

‘Honey,’ I say gently. ‘When Daddy and I made you, we were living in the same house. Now I’m living with Manuel. I’m married to Manuel. So this time it’s going to be different. The baby’s daddy won’t be your daddy. It will be Manuel.’

‘Oh,’ Tadpole replies. She falls silent, processing this new information, then gives me a smile and a nod, and spoons more cereal into her mouth.

‘So the baby will call Manuel ‘Daddy’, I continue, thinking it advisable to press the point home while I have Tadpole’s undivided attention. ‘But you’ll still call him Manuel. And you’ll call your daddy ‘Daddy’. Tadpole nods again, her mouth full.

A few weeks later, when the future baby has become less an abstract concept than a grape-sized mini-foetus swimming in nausea-inducing circles, we are discussing the Easter holidays, when Tadpole will stay with Mr Frog’s parents for a week, as per usual.

‘When the baby is born,’ Tadpole says, ‘It will come with me to stay at Mamie and Papy‘s house, won’t it? Because they will be the grandparents of the baby too.’

I smile and shake my head. This is going to be more complicated than I thought.

Tadpole and I hurry along the cobbled street, hand in hand, trying to avoid the patches of black ice that have formed overnight. An anxious glance at my watch reveals that it is 8.28, and I quicken my pace.

Tadpole is chattering nineteen to the dozen about the coming day at school. ‘We’re going to do a travail que j’aDORE,’ she says, making me rather nostalgic for a time when I could feel such simple, strong emotions (and also for a time when ‘work’ consisted of doing a spot of colouring in without straying over the lines). ‘The maîtresse has made some sheets with a 2009 on,’ Tadpole continues, ‘and inside every number there’s the beginning of a pattern. And we have to take a different coloured pen for each number, and continue the pattern, and then at the bottom it’s written ‘Bonne Année!’ with a big point d’exclamation, and we have to copy it, to practise how to do writing on a line, and then…’

Meanwhile, I am making a to-do list in my head. I need to edit at least three chapters before dinnertime. I must pop by the pharmacy to pick up my folic acid. It’s market day on boulevard de Belleville, and I compile a mental shopping list (peppers, mushrooms, clementines, kiwi fruit (Tadpole’s favourite), bananas and broccoli). I ought to try and finalise some tentative plans for our coming weekend in Yorkshire, assuming the black ice and minus double figure temperatures expected in Paris later this week don’t ground our plane and scupper our plans altogether. I need to fix the dodgy starter sparky thing on the gas hobs and get a battery for the torch so that if I manage to trip the fusebox again, like I did yesterday, I don’t end up running around in the dark looking for matches while Tadpole attempts to eat her dinner in the dark, with predictably messy results. I need to give UK bank details to my agents, because if they take it into their heads to send any advance money over to me in France at the current exchange rate, I think I will cry.

‘MUMMY!’ shouts Tadpole, her eyes flashing with anger. ‘You’re not LIST-EN-ING to me, are you?’

‘I am!’ I protest, untruthfully. ‘You were saying how much you were looking forward to working on your 2009 picture! It sounded great. I was listening and thinking at the same time.’

‘No you weren’t,’ says Tadpole firmly. ‘You only listened to the beginning. You’re not IN-TER-EST-ED Mummy. You don’t really CARE about my 2009…’

I curse the day Tadpole became so scarily perceptive. There’s no pulling the wool over her eyes any more. Whereas I can still fool The Boy – punctuating his lengthy, blow by blow accounts of poker games with a few strategic ‘mmm’s’ or the occasional ‘mouais‘ without him seeming any the wiser – Tadpole has an uncanny talent for knowing precisely when and why my attention has strayed and pulls me up on it, every single time.

And that’s not all. ‘When you say “Mmm” it doesn’t mean “no” or “yes” or anything,’ she explained to me the other day. ‘It just means you’re not really listening. And when you say “we’ll see”, you really mean “no”.’

‘And how about when I say we’ll do something later?’ I enquire, wondering if my arsenal is now completely empty.

‘Well,’ says Tadpole, furrowing her brow. ‘Later is more difficult. It can means lots of things. Sometimes it means “in a little while”. Sometimes it means “the day after the next day”.’ She pauses, and for a moment I think I may just have got away with this one.

‘But usually,’ she adds sagely, ‘if you say we’ll do something later, you mean never.’