The tick of the large clock filled the silence as Mr. Emsley sat with his hands crossed over the top of his prominent belly, trying to sum up Henri. He pulled open his desk drawer. “I need to wet my whistle. Care for a drink, son?”
Two tumblers and a dark-green bottle came out. There was a loud pop of the cork, followed by a pungent, smoky odor. Mr. Emsley poured Henri a glass and scooted it across the desk, then drank his in a single gulp. “Ahhh.” He shook his head, twirling the empty glass between his hands. “I suppose you’ve come to ask about your mother, and you have every right. She came to me the night she went missing. She needed my help. In the end, I failed her.”
Henri took a cautious sip of his drink. The alcohol burned his throat and gave off a fierce sting to his nostrils.
“She didn’t love me, but it was no matter. I had always loved her. I would have done anything she asked.”
It was hard for Henri to believe this man had ever been young and in love with the mother in his memories.
Mr. Emsley poured another drink. Again, he drank it in a single swig, running his tongue over his top lip and then drawing it back in his mouth. “I hid her in the town where my mother lived. My mother was not right in the mind. She was quite mad, actually. I promised Evelyn it would only be for a short while, that I’d come for her.” It had grown dark, not completely, but enough so that the objects in the room lost their definition. “But I never did. My father found a letter I’d written to Evelyn. He was a nosy man, my father, and a vicious one, a man who would not have his name tarnished with scandal. When he understood I was hiding Evelyn, he threatened to put my mother in an asylum. For years he’d wanted to lock her away, and he would have, if I didn’t agree to stop contact with Evelyn. He wrote a letter to Evelyn—in the hand of my partner—saying I was dead.”
Henri took another careful sip from his glass. Something in the story, in the dark room and stale air, unnerved him.
“I was going to go back for her.” Mr. Emsely whistled through his teeth. “I swear it. As soon as my father eased off, but it took months, and by that time, she was gone.” He held up his hand, turned it back and forth in the dim light as if checking his own existence. “My mother was so thoroughly convinced I was dead that when I arrived she thought my ghost had come to call. She thought it was very kind of me to take the time, and asked how I was getting on in heaven. She wanted to know if I was having a decent go of it up there with the angels.” He gave a long, guttural laugh and wiped his eyes. “Oh, my. She’s what I was left with in the end. A demented old woman who outlived everyone but me.”
Henri set his drink on the desk and leaned forward with his hands pressed over the tops of his knees. “You went back and my mother was just gone? No letter? No one saw her leave?”
Mr. Emsley shook his head. “Nothing, my boy.”
The room went quiet. For a while the two men sat in the dark, and then, softly, Mr. Emsley said, “She didn’t take her coat.”
“What?”
“Her coat. Left the house in the middle of winter without her coat. That’s always gotten to me.” Mr. Emsley stood up and went to the shelf for some matches, fumbling and knocking a few to the floor. “I looked for her.” He lit the lamp, drawing the wick down, a warm, circle of light softening the room. “Workhouses, brothels, factories. Places I was sure she’d never go. I looked anyway. Searched the city over.” His words were slightly slurred. “I still do. Not every week like I used to, but periodically, just to be sure.”
Reaching down, he pulled open the bottom drawer of his desk and took out a bulky object. “Her coat. I never had the heart to get rid of it.”
Henri touched the soft, brown wool. It was the same coat she’d worn walking in the hills those mornings when he watched for her return.
Mr. Emsley sank into his chair, his watery eyes glinting behind the glare of the lamp. “Take the coat,” he said. “And be so good as to leave me, please. There’s nothing more I can tell you.”
Henri scooted the coat back across the desk. “I’m much obliged, but it’s yours.” From his breast pocket Henri pulled a worn piece of paper and held it out. Mr. Emsley hesitated.
“It’s a sonnet,” Henri said. “My mother wrote it. I found it under my pillow the day she disappeared. I think you should read it.”
Mr. Emsley tugged at the chain around his neck, his spectacles jumping up and down. “Can’t read a thing in this light, not even with these.” It wasn’t true; he just knew he wouldn’t be able to get through it without making a fool of himself.
Henri held the piece of paper under the lamp. He remembered Colette standing in his apartment the day she found it, taunting him. Colette had thought it was a love poem, and when Henri had reread it he realized his mother’s words weren’t fraught, but hopeful and eager, like a woman in love. Now he understood why.
Henri cleared his throat.
DEAR CHILD, DEAR BOY
Dear child, dear boy, one whom I call my own
Whose first affections thou showed to me
Before ever I, could show it to thee
Entwine all of thyself in the unknown
Then you will tremble not when truths awake
The tempted soul to find, not grief but strength
In wakened hearts that go to many lengths
To seek the love we tried so hard to break
From slumber deep I wake to take my flight
In haste I flee for new fledged hope is near
Grieve not when I have gone away, my dear
As colors wane and darkness takes the light
Look to find sweetness in the passing
For something tells me love is everlasting
“I never fully made sense of it until now,” Henri said quietly. “The second quatrain was most certainly written for you.”
When he looked up, Mr. Emsley was smiling, and there were tears in his eyes. “Thank you. Thank you for that, my boy,” he said.
And Henri could see that he meant it, and that those words made all the difference.
* * *
That night, Henri slept deeply without any dreams and woke refreshed and confident, ready to head into the busy street to find his father’s lawyers.
It was simpler than he’d imagined. His name had never been officially changed. Legally he was, and always had been, Henry Aubrey. After obtaining a certified copy of his birth entry from the General Register Office and signing his English name on a number of crisp, white documents, Abbington Hall was his. He was also bequeathed a large sum of money, some from royalties from his father’s books, but mostly from an estate in Essex that had been sold off years before.
As Henri walked away from the lawyer’s, navigating the curving streets, swept up in the current of foot traffic, he felt strangely giddy. He wasn’t concerned with the money, or the estates. He wasn’t thinking about Leonie or the children and what it would mean for them. All he could think of was how he could now help Aimée. He could take her from that dreadful house and bring her to Abbington Hall. He could support her. She could paint freely. She wouldn’t be dependent on Lady Arrington anymore, or her papa.
But when Henri arrived at Sussex Place and pushed his way through the tall iron gates of Lady Arrington’s, he found the house dark, the windows shuttered, and the curtains pulled closed. Three times he rang the bell, but no one came. He waited, pacing the street in front of the menacing black gates for over two hours. Eventually, he became so discouraged that he trudged back to the inn.
Every day, for the next two weeks, he went to the house on Sussex Place, but it remained shut up. He wondered if they’d gone away to the country, or the seaside. Lady Arrington did not strike him as someone who ventured off to fresher climates, but if they had gone away, he would have no way of finding them.
He drank, night after night, in the same dingy pub down the street from his inn. Single men huddled over tables, sometimes in twos, but never in great, lively groups like in the Parisian cafés. There was no banter,
no uproar of laughter or outbreak of accusation, just a melancholy exhaustion, as if these men had no energy for the most menial of conversations.
One night, Henri sat in his room, thoroughly drunk and yet strangely lucid, all of his jumbled thoughts of the past few months condensed into a sharp picture.
He saw Aimée’s pale, shadowy figure wandering the rooms of his monstrous, foreboding childhood home. He thought of her paintings, of all those babies, and he realized then that she’d be just as miserable at Abbington Hall with Marion Gray as she was with Lady Arrington. The truth was—she’d said so much herself—that Aimée didn’t care where she lived. It wouldn’t make any difference at all.
This was when Henri realized the truth of what he had to do, but it was too troublesome to dwell on, so he swept past it, brushing it off so quickly that he wouldn’t think of it again for months. And when he did think of it again, it would feel as if he was coming upon it for the first time.
PARIS 1878
Chapter 29
Things were dismal in the Savaray household. That first year after Jeanne was born, Madame Savaray held on to the hope that Aimée would return the following spring as planned. But Aimée did not, and her letters, over the years, had grown short and indifferent. The last one had read: Doing splendidly, dear Grand-mère. Painting away and keeping to myself. Regards to the family, Aimée.
Splendidly? Madame Savaray didn’t believe a word. And Lady Arrington’s letters were just as vague and formal, with absolutely no real information to speak of. Something was terribly wrong, Madame Savaray could feel it, and if it weren’t for her useless knees, she would have gotten on a boat and gone directly over the English Channel to find her petite-fille.
As it was, Madame Savaray could hardly walk anymore. She managed without too much trouble around the house, but a simple outing, a short walk in the park, would do her in and she’d have to keep to bed for hours.
When she took her yearly trip to Thoméry in May, her right knee swelled to three times its normal size. She’d gone every year since Jeanne’s birth, on a Sunday morning when the family would be at church. There was a wooden bench in the square with a perfect view of the church steps where Madame Savaray could sit in her black dress and veiled hat. No one took any notice of an old woman enjoying a nice, spring morning. That was one benefit to being old. People rarely noticed you were there at all.
The first year, Jeanne had been a fat, happy one-year-old propped on Leonie’s hip. The next year she was an adorable, toddling thing in a white dress with a shiny, lemon-colored ribbon around her waist. And this last year, well, Jeanne just couldn’t get any prettier with those dark, bouncing curls and plump, rosy cheeks.
From her bench, Madame Savaray leaned forward and tilted her sunshade back so she could watch Jeanne skip up and down the church steps. The little girl kept stroking the blue satin streamer on her straw hat, causing the hat to tilt lopsided on her head. Jacques, wearing pink-and-white-striped trousers and a blue blouse, reached up and set the hat right before taking his sister’s hand and leading her carefully down the stairs.
He was six years old now, and a serious, resolute-looking child. Madame Savaray could see Colette in him, the part that balanced the sensitive, diffident side of Henri. It was a determination in Jacques’s walk, in his expression, and this strength pleased Madame Savaray. It was so much more acceptable in a man, for better or for worse. It would serve him well in life.
All of this she observed from her bench, watching as the family made their way down the church steps, lingering outside to speak with friends before waving good-bye and starting down the road toward home.
Long after they’d gone, Madame Savaray sat on, filled with a longing so painful it made her think she’d rather lie down in that church graveyard than return home.
When the sun was high in the sky, Madame Savaray set out on the long road to the station, scolding herself for wallowing in loneliness and trying to ignore the explosions of pain going off in her knee. She refused to hire a carriage. It was a small town, and she would be more conspicuous in an open carriage. She didn’t want to draw attention to herself, and she certainly didn’t want Leonie and Henri to think she was checking up on them. Though that was precisely what she was doing.
* * *
It amazed Colette that Aimée had been gone for over three years, and that Jacques had been gone even longer.
For a time she thought things might go back to the way they were. She imagined that Henri would be unable to care for the child, and he would bring Jacques home. Once their son returned, Auguste would forgive her. He would call her back into his room. She would throw her soirées again, and Aimée would come home.
None of this happened. After a time, Colette understood she would never come back from the loss of Jacques. His absence had sprung the memories of her other lost children wide open. Now all four boys—the two who died in infancy, and precious little Léon and Jacques—blended together, and she no longer tried to sort out one from another. She remembered little hands and feet, the arc of a rounded head in her palm, a forehead soft as milkweed, a pitiful whimper, small gurgles, and piercing cries.
At times Colette tried to dig up her anger, thinking she might revive herself, but it was as if her rage had collapsed into a heap of self-deprecation intent on tormenting her. And Colette was vigilant about this torment, reminding herself of all she’d done to deserve it, thus preserving her hard edges and biting personality.
She gave up embroidery and took up the piano. She had always played, but not well. She hired a young, eager teacher whom she took to her room on their second lesson. That lasted a few months, and then she gave him up as easily as she’d given up embroidery. There had been no one else since. She hadn’t even enjoyed it. It was just something to do.
She considered learning to draw, but she feared that would remind her too much of Aimée—whom Colette missed more than she’d admit—so she decided against it and kept at the piano. She didn’t need a teacher anymore, as she was playing very well. At all hours of the day, the house was filled with her music. Sorrowful, delightful, maddening, intimate. The sounds of an emotional life she no longer lived. She’d be flushed when she finished, vibrant, exhilarated, with a feeling of excitement as if there were a roomful of people waiting to applaud her.
Sometimes she caught Auguste listening in the doorway with that look of inflamed desire that their arguments used to ignite. A few words might pass between them, formal, polite, nothing of the truth. Nothing of the torment Auguste was going through, the regret and misery, the loneliness. Nothing of Colette’s collapse, of the anger she’d turned inward, and how it was eating at the very core of her being. A nod, a reluctant smile from one or the other, maybe a question about supper, or how the new maid was getting on, trivial things that made no difference.
Then they would part, and one of them might feel the urge to turn back, but neither would.
* * *
It was in the spring of 1878—the spring Henri went to England and the Exposition Universelle came to Paris—that things changed.
Colette had no intention of going to the Exposition. Everywhere, grand, elaborate parties were being held. She’d heard Édouard Manet’s was going to be especially magnificent, and this roused something in her, but she had not received an invitation. The Savarays were rarely invited anywhere anymore—after so many refusals people had given up—and Colette did not care to step out and be snubbed by the society that had once relished her company.
Madame Savaray told her she was being foolish. “I’m not going to let you sit around bemoaning not being invited to some garish party.” She slapped her hands together. “We’re going to see the exhibits. It’s the event of the year.” She turned to Auguste, who happened, on this occasion, to be in the room. “And you are coming with us. We will step out together. We’re still a family, after all, and if I am willing to throw myself into the crowds with my bad knees, the two of you can stand a little snubbing from people
you never cared for anyway.”
So they went, Auguste taking Colette’s arm and leading her through the swollen streets, past musicians and dancers and acrobats, flags flying from windows by the thousands, bodies pressing and knocking into them on all sides. The thunderous commotion was overwhelming and thrilling at the same time.
Swept up, Auguste and Colette allowed themselves to fall back into a time when they’d been a part of the social community, when this was what had been important. They stood a little straighter, smiled a little wider, and nodded to everyone they passed, the long feathers on Colette’s hat bobbing forward, Auguste tipping the edge of his hat with his fingers.
Seeing the art exhibit brought back particular memories. Colette remembered the dress she’d worn the year Aimée was in the Salon de Paris, the tight bodice and all that trim. She’d felt grand that day, spectacularly important.
Auguste also thought of Aimée, but with a good deal of remorse, which he worked through by reminding himself—standing in front of a painting of a quiet sea—that sending her abroad had been the right thing to do.
Taking in a vivid Japanese painting, Madame Savaray imagined how their lives would be different if Aimée had never seen Henri’s painting at the Salon de Paris all those years ago. What if Aimée had simply passed it by? Walked out into the garden and never looked back? Henri might never have been found. He might have stayed lost to them forever, and in this way they wouldn’t have lost Aimée. They most certainly wouldn’t have lost Jacques.
Looking at her son, tall, thinner than he used to be, but still strong and self-possessed, Madame Savaray felt proud. She watched him take Colette’s arm and whisper something in her ear. Despite his fickle nature, he was loyal.
She turned back to the painting, thinking how much she liked these Japanese artists. Their work was clean, simple, and delicate, with meticulous lines and clear, vibrant colors. She wished life were that clean and simple, that radiant without the frills. She shook her head. The Savarays had never had a chance at a life like that. It wouldn’t have mattered if Henri had stayed lost, or if her son had married a simpler woman, chaos would have found its way in.
Girl in the Afternoon Page 19
