Читать книгу A Woman, In Bed - Anne Finger - Страница 8

Wind

Her mother blamed her daughter’s restlessness on the scirocco, the hot wind that began in the heart of Africa, swept across the Sahara and the Mediterranean, bending the heads of the royal palms along the Boulevard du Littoral in Cap d’Antibes so they resembled a line of giraffes with necks curved downwards to munch on low leaves.

Simone had to shove hard against the wind to open the door. A determined foe, the wind caught her skirts of pale blue, threatening to lift them up over her head. Simone, grabbing her skirt, let go of the door, which slammed with a resounding crack, echoing throughout the house.

Later, there will be a row:

—Just because you got up on the wrong side of the bed, you needn’t slam the door and give us all headaches.

—I didn’t slam it. Why must you always think the worst of me?

The cat, lurking at the corner of the house, startled by the sound, leapt. The cat was in love with Simone, with her smell of breast milk and yeast, with her disregard for the gifts of sparrows and field mice left for her on the stone doorstep every morning. The cat was not a pet, it had simply taken up residence in the barn. A good mouser, as its belly gave evidence.

Simone’s frock was not just out of fashion but ungainly. Sick of the maternity chemise in which she’d lumbered through the last months of pregnancy, the months since Marcel’s birth, but unable to fit into her regular clothes, she’d rummaged through the closet of her old bedroom, and pulled out this dress, which had belonged to her dead sister Elise, moving the buttons over on the sleeves, hitching up the excess fabric with its belt. The sleeves flopped about her arms like deflated balloons, the skirts worked their way free of the sash, threatening to trip her up, so her locomotion was almost Chaplinesque: she took a few steps, then hitched the skirt up on the left side, a few more steps, then gave a yank to the right. It was so hot she had dispensed with undergarments, save for the fortified nursing brassiere.

Marcel, cast out of the nirvana of sleep by the door’s bang, mewled twice and then drew in a deep breath, preparing to let loose with a wail.

Simone, pausing at the back door, scanned the road for the bicycle of the postman, M. duPont. He was a kilometer distant, pausing at the crest of a hill, ready to savor the moment when gravity would reverse its effects, no longer a force to be struggled against but one which would send him gliding down.

He will have a letter for me, Simone told herself. She had finally, after laboring over many drafts, told her husband, Luc, how the birth of their son had shaken the foundations of her being. She could not bring herself to write, My cunt throbs when Marcel nurses, while my mind is filled with unwholesome fantasies. I have come close to stimulating myself for relief while nursing. I am becoming a monster. You must come to me. Or let me come back to you, even if there are fevers in Turkey that put our child’s life at risk. Instead, she had written: “I fear for my emotional balance. I cannot tell you how desperately I long for you, need to be with you.”