Читать книгу A Woman, In Bed - Anne Finger - Страница 12

Wind

“Albert!” Simone cried, “Albert! Albert!” She raced down the path towards him, sending pebbles skittering, crunching cypress needles beneath her feet. As she ran, she allowed the wind to carry off her husband’s letter.

Albert was surprised at her pell-mell race towards him. It wasn’t something he could imagine the Simone he knew before doing—motherhood had released a hoyden she’d kept well hidden.

He quickened his pace, his footsore companion trudging behind.

She threw her arms around his neck. He wrapped his arms around her, lifting her off the ground, swinging her around: an embrace a brother might give his kid sister. He pressed himself against her, making her breasts, swollen with milk, ache.

Simone slipped her arm into Albert’s and, her head against his shoulder, they walked towards Jacques, who leaned against a boulder to await them.

When they were a couple of yards from him, a gust of wind caught her skirts, sending them up around her, as if she were drowning in that expanse of blue. Jacques glimpsed the dark triangle of her pubic hair, her legs.

“Oh,” she cried, tamping her skirts down with her hands. It seemed they might become a parachute, the wind billowing them into sails and lifting her into the air, buffeting her away. She’d drift over her mother’s house, calling down, “Le vent! The wind! Goodbye, Mama! Goodbye, Marcel!” Who knew where she might end up? The scirocco might die down as suddenly as it had sprung up, and she’d be sent on an earth-bound plummet. Or she might waft down, landing in Aix or Lyon, a wind fallen gift from the heavens.

It was only Albert, tethering her to earth, who kept her from rising.

Jacques had smoothed down his hair that morning with a cream and the resulting stiffness of his locks caused two tufts to rise on either side of his temples. This, combined with the shape of his face—an inverted triangle ending in a tapered chin—gave him a slightly diabolical mien. The irises of his eyes were so dark they were nearly indistinguishable from his pupils.

“Allow me to present my dear friend, Jacques Melville. Simone Vidal—”

“Clermont.”

“Ah, yes, she has broken my heart by marrying.”

Unlike Luc, who had clicked his heels—although of French stock, he had been raised in Alsace—and bent to kiss her proffered hand, Jacques extended his own hand in return. By this gesture, he showed himself as a modern man who had thrown off prewar fustiness.

It all happened in a fraction of a second:

His hand, in the empty air, a few centimeters from hers, waited. He allowed it to rest there, thereby forcing her to lean forward, to be the one who grasped hold of his hand. He returned almost no pressure. His hand was so soft that it reminded her of touching her husband’s genitals when he was unaroused. There was an air of ironic detachment in his manner, as if he were an anthropologist who had spent so long in the field he now viewed the customs of his own tribe as curiosities. Simone relaxed her hand. Just when it seemed it might slide away from Jacques’, he squeezed it, hard enough that the shadow of a wince passed across her face, while a wry half-smile crossed his.

And then it was over. The smooth waters of the everyday closed above them.

Linking arms with both of them, Simone chattered about the other guests—an Alsatian bird watcher who made bird calls at the table; a British major, a summer visitor of many years standing, who had become quite forward with Simone of late: “I suppose he’s heard married French women are known to take lovers and wants to put himself first in line. Oh, it’s quite sickening.”

“Ah, Simone, your gallants are here, to defend your honor!” Albert stepped backwards and made a mocking bow. “Aren’t we, old man?”

“Certainly,” Jacques said drily.

“You’ll have to indulge my friend. He’s a genius.”

“You flatter me,” Jacques said, not bantering, but flat out. He was not about to make his intellectual prowess a joking mater.

When Simone returned with Jacques and Albert, Cecile greeted her with, “Your mother’s got a headache, she’s lying down upstairs.”

Her mother, who’d risen when she heard their footsteps coming up the path, appeared in the doorway as Simone reached the top of the stairs. “Just because you got up on the wrong side of the bed, you needn’t slam the door and give us all headaches.”