Ann Hood - The Knitting Circle - The uplifting and heartwarming novel you need to read this year

Mary thought of her own father, an insurance salesman who, other than his clients, seemed to know nobody. He moved through the world alone, circling her mother and Mary, a shadowy, quiet man.

Scarlet said, “They sent me pictures in a big envelope that one of the children had decorated with a border of flowers drawn in pen and ink. I wondered where I could get my pot in Paris and what I would do with the children and if they spoke any English. Their faces in the photographs seemed blank and uninteresting. The mother looked severe. But the father, Claude, looked like Gérard Depardieu, a big hulking guy with a bulbous nose and unkempt blond hair. Sexy and French.

“I left for Paris right after Christmas. When the plane was landing I looked out the window at the gray overcast city still lit up and something settled in me. I knew somehow that this was really where I belonged and that I would never leave.

“I know it sounds like a schoolgirl’s fantasy, but when I met Claude I knew that I would be with him somehow, that we would be connected forever. The wife, Camille, was not stern like in her photograph. She was actually quite pretty. A petite woman with that style that Parisian women have. I remember her coat was tangerine, and thinking how odd that would look in Cambridge among all the ugly L.L. Bean down coats everyone wore there. Her blond hair pulled back in that perfect knot, and her eyes always lined in black, and her skinny legs in their black stockings beneath that coat. She was aloof, and she smoked too much, but she wasn’t stern.

“The children were fine and we took to each other right away. I taught them how to knit, and we made blankets for their dolls and little hats for their stuffed animals. I would walk them to school and then go to French lessons for two hours and then run errands for Camille. I was alone in the apartment, a cramped two-story place in the twelfth arrondissement filled with really ugly antiques, until two o’clock, when I went to pick up the girls at school.

“At first I stayed in my room and watched television. But before long I began to wander the streets. I had a pass for the Métro and I would ride it all over and then get out and walk around, into cheese shops and pâtisseries and vintage clothing stores. One day I ran into Claude in the Latin Quarter. He was sitting having a carafe of wine at a café and he motioned for me to join him. We spoke to each other in English, which felt very foreign to me, and exotic. Claude spoke fluent English. Camille did not speak any English, and the children studied it in school but spoke it badly.

“We began to meet on Tuesdays, which was his free afternoon. Together we explored the city, speaking English like it was our own secret language. Then I would go and pick up the children, and once the weather turned warm we would go to the park and ride the carousel. At home I helped make dinner and ate with the family and helped to clean up and give the children their baths and then I went to my room. Claude ignored me during this part of the day. Our few hours together on Tues-days seemed like a dream, unconnected to anything else that happened.

“This continued for two years. The schedule like that and the Tuesday meetings. Over time I lost my baby fat and I began to dress like the women I saw on the streets. I grew my hair long. I stopped taking my French lessons because I was fluent really. So my free time was plentiful. I befriended a baker named Denis. His family owned one of the oldest bakeries in the city, and I would go there for my favorite baguette to nibble while I strolled.

“Soon Denis and I became lovers. He was a distracted young man, careless with everything except bread. But we would go dancing and to his small flat above the bakery and I felt very romantic, not in love with Denis, but romantic. Perhaps in love with the city and this simple life I led there. Sex with a handsome Frenchman! Fresh baguettes and wine in bed! His hands always had flour in the creases and I would trace them, pretending I could see into the future.

“One night I said, ‘Teach me to make that bread I love.’

“So we went downstairs and he showed me. Watching a man knead dough and create bread from just flour and water and yeast is the sexiest thing imaginable. Because he had to be at the bakery at four a.m. to begin baking the bread, he always brought me back to Claude and Camille’s around three. But this morning I stayed and made the bread with him. It was as if my hands had finally learned what they were meant to do. I could feel the change as I worked the dough. How it grew less sticky. How it took new forms and properties. When I got home it was almost six and I was giddy. I would be a baker. I was meant to be a baker.

“I had forgotten that Camille and the girls had gone to meet Camille’s parents for a weekend in Brittany, on the coast. So when I quietly entered the apartment and found Claude sitting there, obviously awake all night, I thought something terrible had happened.

“I even forgot to speak English. I began to tell him, in French, about my discovery, how I had to find a baker to apprentice with. My hands tingled from the feel of the dough in them.

“ ‘Rouge,’ he said—privately, that’s what he always called me; he didn’t think Scarlet suited me. This name, he told me, it’s too ridiculous— ‘I thought something terrible had happened to you. I thought you had been killed or hurt.’

“His English sounded, oddly, harsh.

“ Je suis désolée ,” I said.

“He covered his face in his hands and began to laugh. ‘I think you’ve been savagely murdered and all the while you’ve been baking bread.’

“I didn’t see what was funny. But I forced a smile. I caught a glimpse of myself in the oversized mirror and saw that I was covered with flour.

“As if he read my mind, Claude said, ‘You have flour everywhere.’

“And he got up and walked over to me and began to brush the flour from my sweater and my hair and my arms. That was when it began, the thing I knew would happen. I have wondered many times over the years how I knew with such certainty that this man and I were to be linked forever. And I have never been able to find an answer. I was so young when I arrived in Paris. And unsure of so many things. Yet this one thing I knew absolutely.

“That weekend, with Camille and the girls away, we made love in that particular way that new lovers have, as if nothing exists outside each other.

“This was long ago now. Twenty-two years. What I remember is Claude making us an omelette and how we ate it in my bed, cold. I remember how thoughts of running away with Claude began to fill my mind. I remember how on Sunday afternoon he held my face in his hands and said, ‘You know you must leave here, Rouge. We cannot be like this with Camille and the girls.’

“He didn’t mean, of course, that I had to leave right then. But that is what I did. I packed my suitcase, the same one that I had arrived with two years earlier, and I left that apartment with Claude’s fingerprints and kisses all over me. It was raining, a warm rain that diffused the lights of the city. Like the blurry colors of a Monet painting. Like tears. I went to the only place I knew to go: the bakery.

“Denis took me in. I told him I had fallen in love with someone, that I needed a place to stay for a while. He said something like, ‘ C’est dommage ,’ nothing more than that. I slept on his sofa and helped to bake the bread. And I began to meet Claude in his office in the afternoon, where, on a scratchy Persian rug, we would make love to the sound of a typewriter pounding in the office next door and students rushing down the hall, arguing or worrying or laughing.

“I went on this way, in a happy blur, for a month or so. Summer came and I learned to bake croissants and pain au chocolat, the intricacies of butter and dough, the delicate balance of sweet and sour. I did not ask about Camille, though I did inquire 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.