The Knitting Circle by Ann Hood Read Free Book Online Page B

about the children, who I missed sorely. Especially the little one, Bébé. By this time she was eight, but small like her mother, with that fine hair that tangled easily and skin so fair that the pale blue veins shone just beneath. She carried a doll, Madame Chienne, everywhere with her. A rag doll that was loved away in spots, like my own dog Pal. Véronique was more polite, but less imaginative, and though I got on well with her, it was Bébé whom I adored. Claude brought me pictures that she’d drawn, and read me little stories she wrote. And I suppose in my fantasy of Claude running away with me to a place with golden sunshine, Bébé came too.
    “Denis wanted me to go to a small village near Marseille to apprentice with an old man who Denis himself had worked with. This man, called Frère Michel by everyone, was famous all over France for his cannelles, the small sweet cakes made by nuns in the fourteenth century with vanilla bean and rum and egg yolks. They are made in special fluted tulip-shaped molds, and Frère Michel still used the wooden ones his own grandmother had used.
    “I thought, I must go and take Claude with me. The only image I had of the south of France was one I had invented from van Gogh paintings and travel posters that hung in a travel agency window near the bakery. I could imagine walking through fields of towering sunflowers with Claude, or wandering the Roman ruins together. I could imagine the two of us plunging into the blue sea naked, then drying in the hot sun on pink rocks. But I could not see myself without him.
    “So I let Denis talk about Frère Michel and cannelles, nodding as if I was considering the offer, until the day I realized that I was most certainly pregnant. On this particular morning, I awoke sweaty and suffocating in the hot apartment, and I felt a flutter, like a butterfly had burst from its cocoon and set off in flight. I put my hand to my stomach and my butterfly fluttered against it.”
    Instinctively, Mary paused in her knitting and placed one hand on her own belly, as if she could feel that familiar fluttering, the first sign of a baby there. She remembered lying in bed with Dylan and gasping slightly, taking his hand and pressing it to her stomach.
    She nodded at Scarlet before she picked up her knitting needles once again.
    “My first impulse was to go immediately to Claude. At this time of the morning he would be teaching, and I got up quickly to dress and meet him at his classroom with the news. The happy news. On the bus to the university I made a plan in which we went together to the south, and we lived in that small town near Marseille, and I baked cannelles and madeleines, and Claude wrote the book he always talked about writing, and there in the plan was a little girl, not unlike Bébé. And a small house near the sea. And almond trees, and olive trees, and wild fennel.
    “But as I raced up the stairs to the building where he taught, something struck me and sent a shiver through me even on such a relentlessly hot day. I remembered clearly when I’d had my last period, and it was back in June on an evening when Denis and I were still lovers. I sat hard on the steps, feeling the heat of the sunbaked stone through my thin dress, forcing myself to think. But I knew that had been my last period, and that two weeks later I had slept with both Denis and then, in that first weekend together, Claude.
    “That flutter rose in me again, this time filling my throat with bile. Around me, students rushed, carrying armloads of books, speaking French and German and Spanish. I could smell their sweat and their cigarettes, and again I tasted vomit.
    “I don’t know how long I sat there before a cool hand touched my bare arm. I looked up into Claude’s face. He was wearing his glasses, those funny rimless half-glasses, and his blond hair was matted across his forehead.
    “‘Rouge,’ he said softly, ‘did I forget that we were going to meet?’
    “I shook my