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.”
Simone changed for dinner out of that ridiculous dress of Elise’s—really, what had she been thinking?—and into a silk hobble skirt the dressmaker in Constantinople had run up, copying a Poiret design from a fashion magazine—although she’d grown too stout to fasten the hooks and eyes. She tried to get into her pre-pregnancy corset, but even with all her tugging and pulling, it wouldn’t fasten.
Elise’s corset had to be around here somewhere. At twelve, Simone had watched her elder sister grappling with the hated contraption, with its sweat-yellowed laces and the tears in the satin where her fat had fought against it, rubbing the red marks it left on her flesh when she freed herself from it.
After her death, some of the townspeople had advised burning her bedding, her clothes, while others had expressed horror at the notion
—Oh, no, the smoke will carry it into the air, it will be everywhere.
—Better to bury her things.
—Ah, and have it get into the soil itself, we’ll never be free of it.
When she opened the top drawer of Elise’s bureau, the smell of her sister rushed out at her, and she slammed it shut.
She covered the gaping waistband with a tunic.
They gathered in the parlor before dinner and then went in, the gentlemen escorting the ladies. Albert was the one who took her arm. Jacques squired two giggling daughters from Lyon. It was a small enough thing, Albert being the one to take her into dinner. And yet—if only she could have slipped her hand through Jacques’ arm. Tears welled in her eyes—her innate moodiness no doubt exacerbated by the weather, her maternity. She swallowed hard, determined to keep her emotions in check.
Fifteen people were seated at a table meant, at most, for twelve. Throughout the dinner a chorus of pardons and excusez-mois was murmured as elbows butted against one another. Mme. Vidal frequently rang the bell which summoned Cecile and whispered to her to clear away whatever she could.
Present that night at table was, in addition to the families from Rouen and Lyon, the retired British major who had spent his summer holidays chez Vidal for over a decade—with an interruption, of course, for the Great War. He greeted each newcomer with the sentence, “Je parle tres bien le francais,” although he seemed to feel that correct pronunciation and intonation were affectations. Also, the female birdwatcher from Alsace, who carried on a monologue, “…at first I thought it was a peregrine falcon, but when it took wing I realized it lacked the requisite white throat. And then…” quite oblivious to the fact that no one paid her the slightest mind.
Mme. Vidal had been forced to take in lodgers when her husband, a commercial traveler for the wines of the Château Cabrières, had died unexpectedly. At first, she had trouble attracting customers—there was ample competition for paying guests, especially in the off-season, and it seemed that she might have to throw herself on the mercy of her peasant family. The laws of familial obligations would have required that they be taken in, but Mme. Vidal and her two daughters would have been expected to share a single bed in a room under the eaves, the girls to slop the hogs and feed the chickens, winnow the hay—the one who doesn’t work, doesn’t eat—their skin turning brown, their hands growing calloused and their prospects for marriage, save to some country bumpkin, dim. Elise, with her child-bearing hips and strong shoulders, would have been the more favored in that department.
But then Mme. Vidal let it get about that at her lodging there was a charming daughter, Simone. (The elder daughter, Elise, a good-hearted, flat-footed sort, was not mentioned.) Granted, Simone was no great beauty, but then again she had none of the haughtiness of those who saw themselves as a reincarnation of Venus. Comely and flirtatious, she was just the thing for the salesmen and railway inspectors and army officers on leave, far from home. And not just for them—when the summer holiday makers descended, Simone formed passionate friendships with the daughters, with long walks on the windswept strand, and the exchange of pressed flowers and sentimental poems, so that the next season, when the besotted daughters declared that they simply must return to the Vidals, their indulgent papas gave in, overruling the wives’ protestations that this year they had hoped to go to the mountains.
Simone’s life had not been all flirtation and romance. She eviscerated and plucked chickens after Elise had chopped off their heads. Afterwards she’d find pin feathers stuck to her face, flecks of chicken blood. At dinner, she and her sister each took a wing, their mother the back, leaving the breasts and thighs for the boarders. There were linens to be changed, pots to be scoured, greengrocers and fishmongers to be haggled with. Dishes to be washed, passageways to be swept. At the end of the evening, a lodger was sure to appear in the just-cleaned kitchen and say, “I do get a bit peckish at bedtime and was wondering if I might poke about in the icebox.”
After the war, her mother read aloud to Simone the statistics about the dearth of marriageable men, thrusting under her daughter’s nose the bar graph in the newspaper: the topmost line representing the number of able-bodied men of marriageable age, and the line underneath—five times as long—the number of women. Simone was to understand that she was one of the infinitesimal black dots which made up the lower line, each point a single, love-starved woman.
“There simply aren’t enough men left. They say for a while at least, we’ll become like primitives and one man will have many wives. I suppose the church will have to go through some folderol and allow it. …”
Her mother turned the most casual of conversations into a dirge—a one-woman Greek chorus—staring into the middle distance, gazing at a future in which crow’s feet would appear at the corners of Simone’s eyes, her winsome laugh grow brittle, and the dewy virgin would become the desiccated spinster, until at long last Simone’s hymen would be broken, not with a thrust from her lawfully wedded husband’s member but in her grave by the relentless mouths of worms and voles, maggots and slugs hatching in her womb.
Like a prince in a fairy tale, Luc Henri Clermont had appeared in his cream-colored linen suit, clicking his heels and doffing his hat.
When Simone, great with child, was sent from the miasmas of Turkey to lie-in safely at home, Mme. Vidal understood the balance between the two of them had shifted, given that she was now assisted financially by her son-in-law. Simone, a matron, could hardly be expected to bewitch as she once had. Still, she might have made a bit of an effort to rouse herself from her sullenness, so when the woman from Rouen asked, “How much longer
