Читать книгу A Woman, In Bed - Anne Finger - Страница 7

Hunger

Simone Clermont stood in the larder of her mother’s house, the door ajar a crack to let light in. Marcel had sucked her dry and he was now sleeping, dazed on the laudanum of her breast milk. She overheard her mother and Cecile, the kitchen girl, making supper for the boarders, pots clanging, the grumble and murmur of their voices, the chop-chop of knife against cutting board. In the dim light, she could make out the bags of flour and sugar, the jars of preserves—apple, raspberry, quince. The tub of butter. Supper was three hours away, and she was starving. She would have been perfectly within her rights to march into the kitchen, make straight for the icebox, help herself to the remains of last night’s beef stew or the leftover trifle. Her mother might cluck and fuss, though she was in Simone’s debt. But like a naughty child, she had sneaked into the larder. She wanted to leap up and pull the ham down from its ceiling hook, gnaw hunks free with her incisors: eat and eat and eat until billows of flesh hung from her. Nature, that old hag, wanted to have her way with Simone. She was like the goose being fattened up for Christmas dinner, who came waddling across the yard, honking with delight as gruel was slopped into its trough, past the tree stump that served as a chopping block with its faded sepia stains of blood that had pulsed from the necks of chickens, ducks, this goose’s progenitors. What was in store for Simone? She had as little sense as that wambling goose, only a premonition that nature was up to no good.

If she were to eat the entire jar of raspberry jam she was holding in her hand, she wouldn’t be satisfied. She shoved it back on the shelf. Stalking out of the pantry, she called, “I’m going out for a walk.”

Her mother appeared in the kitchen doorway, knife in hand, the blade glistening with the membranes of the rabbit they would dine on that evening, calling out to Simone’s retreating back, “Oh, don’t take the child out in this wind.”

Simone turned on her heel. “I’m not taking Marcel. He’s asleep.”

“And if he wakes up?”

“He wakes up. You can pick him up. Or let him cry.”

Her mother regarded her daughter’s broad rump with satisfaction. Simone was no longer a slim-hipped wraith floating through life. Her thickened hips were ballast, weighing her down, steadying her passage.