Читать книгу A Woman, In Bed - Anne Finger - Страница 21

Maybe

Simone lay awake all night. Despite the promise she’d extracted from Jacques—just for tonight—she hoped to hear his footsteps padding down the hallway, stopping outside her door.

At dawn, she heard the creaking hinges of a door being opened—slowly, slowly, so as not to awake the rest of the house—and the sound of bare feet creeping down the stairs. She raced after them.

“We were trying to be so quiet,” Albert whispered.

“I was—awake with the baby. Yes, yes, awake with the baby!”

Jacques squared his rucksack upon his shoulders, shifted his weight from one leg to the other. “The train.”

“I’ll walk to the gate with you.”

Albert raised an eyebrow. Although covered ankle to chin, wrist to wrist, she was nonetheless in her nightclothes. “Oh, no one will see me,” she said, and looped one of her arms through each of theirs.

At the gate, she said, “Maybe…” allowing her voice to trail off.

It was Albert who responded: “Yes, perhaps we’ll be able to stop back, after our visit to Carcassonne.”

“Oh,” Simone said. “Oh. But it would be quite out of your way.”

“Yes,” Jacques agreed, glancing at his watch. “We mustn’t make promises,” Jacques stopped himself from completing his sentence: we can’t possibly keep.

“No,” Albert said, kissing her hand with a flourish. “We are poets, and poets don’t make promises, they have dreams. Right, old man?”

“Right,” Jacques said, and then they were gone, leaving Simone standing at the gate.