The Looking Glass by Michèle Roberts

Author:Michèle Roberts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

Geneviève

The only thing to do was to get out of there as fast as possible. I fled from Madame Montjean’s house, from Madame Montjean’s husband, from Madame Montjean’s sick child. I escaped what the curé would have called the future or possible occasion of sin, by putting distance between myself and it, but I took with me the memory of Madame Montjean’s face, of Madame Montjean’s voice. Etched into my flesh like acid, a burn of shame.

Frédéric had backed off, stood leaning against the wall. Now he shouldered forwards. Perhaps he was going to hit me. I hauled up my disarranged clothes then flung myself at the door. My legs were shaking but I managed to get out. Somebody was howling but you couldn’t hear the noise.

The air seemed full of collisions and cries. Then came a long moment of silence. I avoided whatever happened next. Leaving the two of them facing each other in the bar, I darted out into the kitchen and upstairs into my room. On the top shelf of my cupboard reposed my neatly folded woollen cloak, and, on the one below, my leather purse, swollen with coins. I grabbed these, then slunk downstairs again, out of the back door, across the yard, and into the street.

The village drowsed in its afternoon hush. I saw no one as I blundered through it with my belongings scrambled under my arm. My breath heaved and sawed painfully in my lungs as I ran; tears and snot flowed down my cheeks; all my bones scraped. Moments later I had got past the outlying cottages and was heading away from Blessetot, up the steep chalk road that led inland. When I met the main coast road, I turned right into it and began to make my way towards Etretat.

I trudged along with my apron pulled up over my head, a makeshift veil, so that my head and shoulders were screened from the hot sun of early afternoon. Behind this shelter I could cry in private, with no one to see me. With luck no one would be able to say which way I had gone.

Arriving in Etretat, I made for the orphanage, not knowing what else to do. I was dull and stupid from so much weeping, from walking through the hot afternoon. My feet led me to the pointed gate in the high wall, and my hand, of its own volition, stretched up and tugged the iron bellpull. I had no idea what I was going to say to Sister Pauline. Words were something I seemed to have left behind. But convent rules saved me from having to dig for language. The nuns’ routine was not to be broken by chance visitors arriving as supplicants. The portress who peered at me through the tiny barred window that flew open in the gate was a young sister whose bony face, framed in the well-remembered white coif and black bonnet, I did not recognise. Her hand, resting on the catch of the casement, was looped with a rosary of black beads.

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