My Hundred Lovers Read Online Free

Sam, confided to my great-great-grandfather his belief that dreaming was better than reality. The journal in which my forebear noted this comment has now been lost but I remember reading this journal in my twenties and being struck by how my relative kept missing the point. For example, on the day he married Mademoiselle Emilie Joubert—the daughter of a baker from Angers and believed to be descended from Huguenots—he failed to mention his marriage at all, noting instead the specifics of the weather.
    Perhaps it is my splash of French blood, bequeathed to me by the long-dead Mademoiselle Emilie Joubert, which leads me to the adoration of the croissant. But perhaps poor Mademoiselle Emilie Joubert preferred a crusty tartine over a croissant? A baguette fresh from the oven, split in two, spread thickly with butter and jam made from red berries, dipped in a bowl of warm coffee.
    Perhaps when she found herself living in a tent next to a stream in the middle of Victoria, Australia, because her new husband believed there was gold in it, she dreamed of tartines. In the early, bird-filled mornings she might have woken to find the smell of them in her nostrils, so rich, so true, that it hurt to realise her own memory had been baking them. There was no oven, no father standing next to it, no fine, flowery Viron flour turned by heat into the smell of love.
    Where are Mademoiselle Joubert’s phantom tartines now? Where are her body’s memories, her cherished recall of freshly baked baguettes which smelt like love?
    Mademoiselle Joubert’s husband never wrote down her memories. In his journals he noted the sky, the gold, the manful snores of Ned Kelly, but all Mademoiselle Joubert’s bodily store—her recall of flour, with its residue of ash which left a fine powder on her fingertips, of the sharp, singing taste on her tongue of fleur de sel de Guérande , the champagne of salt, and especially the smell of bread and love in the morning—have disappeared.
    I once loved the fragrance of leather in the handbag shop where Nana Elsie spent her working life.
    I absorbed into myself the rich scent of cured animal hide, redolent of distant grasses, plains and valleys. Leather smelt of love in that dark cave of a shop of fine Italian leather goods in every shade of cream, brown and black, that cave of shiny gold buckles and folds of softest suede.

FOURTEEN

Mother’s red fingernails

    MY MOTHER WAS A PRACTISED back scratcher. She kept her nails long and one of the great thrills of my life was discovering that the nail file she used to keep the edges of each nail rounded and smooth was made of diamonds. The earth’s most precious stone, pressed into service so that my mother might keep her fingernails tidy.
    She let me inspect the nail file, shot through with brilliance, with glittering flecks that flashed like stars. The file finished in a cruel tip, curled like a hook, which could easily scoop out an eye.
    I would sometimes lie face down beside my mother on the bed or the sofa and pull up my top in a wordless signal to her that I wanted my back scratched. More often than not she would bat me away, too engrossed in whatever book she was reading. She was a great reader, anything from Peyton Place and Gone with the Wind to Love in a Cold Climate. She was particularly fond of Dickens. But sometimes she would smile down at me in a preoccupied, absent-minded way and reach out to run her long, red-painted nails lightly over the skin of my back. Her fingernails drew intoxicating patterns, arabesques and whirls, inducing wafts of sensory pleasure that stupefied me. Sometimes they passed across the surface of my skin in loose, feathery circles, and sometimes they traced a firmer line that followed some secret path only my mother knew. Occasionally her fingernails moved too close to the small of my back, to the place that tickled, and then my whole body arched in an ecstatic involuntary