hands formed into fists—Luc would no doubt have chuckled had he seen them—fists as helpless as those of Marcel. In one of these fists was the letter, crumpled into a ball. Until now, she had kept every letter he had written her, tied up with a pale blue ribbon in a packet.
She described Luc as mon mari, but if she knew English that language’s equivalent would strike her as far more apt, with its allied meaning of one who manages a farm: the verb to husband, to govern thriftily and well.
Luc did not love her, she saw that clearly. He loved the idea of her, the image of her in her pale gown, gliding down the stairs, her blonde hair upswept atop her head, with a few errant tendrils tumbling down. He loved her laughter, her charm. He loved the words “my wife,” he liked to escort those words to gatherings, to introduce them to his colleagues and connections. He liked to slip the hand of those words through the crook of his elbow and give them an affectionate pat. (The fault was not entirely on Luc’s side: she had fallen in love not so much with Luc as with his adoration of her.)
The wind made the hairs on her arms stand up on end, while beads of sweat gathered in her pores.
A quarter of an hour later, Marcel had indeed worn himself out with crying and fallen back asleep. M. Dupont had delivered the miller’s bill to the institution, and Albert had just said to Mme. Vidal, who had chided him for arriving unannounced, “Oh, but I wrote you! I’m sure I did.”
“No matter.” Even with the financial assistance given her by her son-in-law, she was not in any position to turn away guests. Moreover, not having seen him since the start of the war, she had assumed him dead. She supposed it about all young men unless she knew otherwise. Easier to jumble all those bones into the mass grave of her imagination than to wonder about each one: Did he survive? Is he staring at the wall in some veterans home in the countryside? Here was one resurrected.
His arrival did mean that she would have to turn her bedroom over to the two young men, sleep in the sitting room.
“Oh, there’s Elise!” Albert cried, recognizing her sky blue frock.
“No. Elise, she…”
“Oh,” Albert said, putting his hand on Mme. Vidal’s shoulder.
“Three years ago…the Spanish,” using the local name for influenza. Mme. Vidal withdrew herself from Albert’s touch, fearing loss of her composure. “That’s Simone.”
In the autumn of 1918, it seemed that death, that old glutton, had finally had his fill, pushed his chair back from the table, patted his rotund belly, lit a cigar, said, “I couldn’t possibly eat one more thing.” But then he caught a smell wafting in from the kitchen. Light and clear, the perfect thing after the meal he’d just devoured, those lads tasting of mud, quite on the gamey side. He cleansed his palate with ruddy-cheeked farm boys too young for the army, their fresh-faced sisters, old women smelling of apple blossom bath powder, barefoot imps with gap-toothed smiles from the slums of Manchester and Berlin and Bombay. How quickly they went down, clean as a fruit sorbet.
Elise came home from a hike one afternoon, her cheeks in high color, sat down, put her hand to her breast, and spoke her last full sentence, “I’m rather flushed.”
Simone had been the one her mother had fretted over: not only too thin, but given to bouts of melancholy and novel-reading. Consumption seemed inevitable. A cough caused her mother to banish her to the sleeping porch so that the winds could carry the tubercle bacilli away. Simone’s good health did not prove her mother wrong: quite the contrary, it was evidence that Mme. Vidal’s methods had been successful.
Mme. Vidal swiped her hands against each other, shaking off the dust of the past. “Yes, yes, and Simone is now married woman.” As if on cue, Marcel began to wail. “And I am now a grandmama. Walk up to meet her, Cecile can see to your things.”
“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
