The Reinvention of Love

by Helen Humphreys

  Dédé drops my hand. “We did that yesterday,” she says.

  “But we had fun,” I persist. “Did we not? And why not do something again if it was pleasurable the first time?”

  There’s a short silence.

  “Yesterday wasn’t the first time,” says François-Victor.

  “I might photograph in the garden today,” says Charles. He stretches his legs out, crossing his feet at the ankles. “Or I might have a nap.”

  He has grown plump, my eldest son. More often he declines a walk than accepts one. He is not like his father. Every afternoon, after he has finished his twenty pages, Victor will stride out across the cliffs to the sea to sit on the boulder he calls his armchair and gaze out over the waves, waiting to be inspired.

  But the exile has been so good for Charles! He has time to indulge his desires, time to explore his interests, and the naps serve as his inspirational pause between artistic pursuits.

  “Toto?” I say, turning to François-Victor. “Will you walk out with me today?”

  “Perhaps.” Toto does not like to disappoint, so he rarely commits to anything. I find this habit of his both touching and infuriating, so I refrain comment on it.

  “Dédé?”

  “No, Maman.” Adèle has lowered her head in a sulk. I put my arm around her shoulders.

  “Dédé, why don’t you go and fetch your embroidery, and I will help you with it. We could sit here in the sun. You could ask Sylvie to bring me coffee.”

  “Sylvie left,” says Toto.

  “For the day?”

  “Forever.”

  “So soon?” The maid was barely here two weeks, and it was so nice to have a French girl for a change.

  “Now it’s Abigail,” says Charles. “She’s older.”

  “Should last longer, then,” says François-Victor, and they both laugh.

  I ignore their comment.

  “Dédé, go and fetch your embroidery.” I give her a little push. “Never mind about the coffee.”

  “I’ll get your coffee, Maman.” Toto rises from his chair. I already know that he will not go for a walk on the cliff with me today, that this offer to bring me coffee is his apology for that. I am more than grateful to accept an act of kindness from my children. I squeeze his hand as he steps over his brother’s outstretched legs.

  “Thank you, my darling.”

  “D’accord, d’accord.” Adèle gets up reluctantly and follows François-Victor into the house.

  It is suddenly so quiet on the terrace. I can hear the creak of a gull’s wing as it flies overhead and the rush and fall of the ocean below.

  “Another day in paradise,” says Charles bitterly.

  “Yes,” I say to him. “Yes, I think it is.”

  We went to Jersey first, not Guernsey. On Jersey, they spoke French. It was as simple as that. Victor felt that the Channel Islands were pieces of France that had broken off and been cast into the sea, only to be plucked out and claimed by the English.

  In Jersey we rented a house that Victor christened Marine Terrace. Like this house, it had a view of the sea, and like this house, it was haunted. The ghost of a young woman who had killed her child paced the halls and sang in a sweet, melodious tone outside my bedroom door. She was known locally as the White Lady, and Victor became so obsessed with her that he started to write love poetry to her.

  We were under a spell on Jersey, I think, the long spell of Léopoldine’s early death. When we were in Paris, we could hold on to the memory of her. It was there in everything we saw, everything we did. Every room I entered in our apartment in Place Royale was a room I had been in with her. We did not have to work at remembering her. She remained with us. But here, out on the windswept Channel Islands, we could suddenly feel her gone, and so we tried hard to keep her close. Victor had the dress she was drowned in displayed in the dining room of Marine Terrace, and we held nightly seances there so that we might speak with her.

  Did I believe that she returned to us, that she tapped out words with the help of the table leg? No, I did not. The seances functioned as prayer for me. They created a space in which I could be with the memory of my beloved daughter. And they made me believe in the strength of our family. When we held hands around the table, I felt the love we had for one another, and for our departed, Léopoldine. I felt that we were solidly together again in those moments.

  But strength in excess can easily swing to weakness. And when Victor wanted to have three seances a day and invite any stranger he found in town to come and join us—when he thought he had summoned not only Léopoldine but Jesus Christ, Shakespeare, Napoleon, and Hannibal to our house—I had to put a stop to the ritual.

  Now I can see that it was a mistake to have indulged it for so long.

  At one of the seances my youngest daughter, Adèle, met a penniless sailor named Albert Pinson. They quickly struck up a courtship, and now, even though he has been posted back to England and cannot possibly afford to marry her, she remains obsessed and will not stop trying to communicate with him.

  Toto brings me coffee. Charles goes inside to his darkroom. I wait on the terrace for Dédé, drink my coffee, wait some more, and then go into the house to search for her. She is by the window in the parlour, holding something up to the light, turning it this way and that. When I see the flash, I realize that she is holding the glass from her hand mirror, carefully removed from the backing.

  “He won’t see you in England,” I say. There is nothing out the window but the endless blue of the sea. “He can’t possibly see you from here.”

  Adèle won’t look at me. She is intent on her signalling.

  “Dédé.”

  “You don’t know that he doesn’t, Maman. You don’t know what he feels.”

  We were three long years on Jersey, three years of sitting around the pedestal table and watching it tap out the alphabet against the wooden floor. I had not realized how impressionable my youngest daughter was, how those seances had trained her to believe in the intangible.

  I slip my arm about her waist. “Come, child. Bring your embroidery out to the terrace. I will help you with your stitches.”

  HAVING FIRST BEEN EXPELLED from France, Victor was then expelled from Jersey in the autumn of 1855 for organizing a protest against a visit the English queen paid to his enemy, Napoleon III. Because Victor was expelled, we were all expelled, and so we came here, to Guernsey.

  I had thought that prolonged exile might dull Victor’s loathing of the emperor, but it has sharpened it instead. When he wrote his scathing pamphlet, Napoleon le Petit, he thought up many ingenious ways of smuggling it into France so that it might be read. It was stuffed into raw chickens, into carriage clocks, into bales of hay, into trunks with false bottoms, into shoes with false heels, into hollowed-out walking sticks and cigars. It was towed in sealed boxes below the waterline of fishing boats and thrown at night onto empty beaches. There was even an attempt to launch the pamphlet in balloons from the back of our house in Jersey when the wind was blowing towards France.

  The second exile has just confirmed everything Victor was convinced of when we first left Paris. He remains absolute in the righteousness of his convictions. I do not believe that we will ever see France again.

  My Adèle’s fingers are jumpy. They will not hold the stitches. I put my hand over hers to steady them.

  “You are nervous today,” I say. “You need some exercise. Come with me for a walk along the cliff.”

  Adèle puts the embroidery down beside her and leans into me. “Don’t leave me, Maman,” she whispers, and I put my arms around her and hold her close.

  “I won’t leave you, Dédé,” I say. “You never have to worry about that.”

  I am blessed to have my children with me. I am blessed to have their company long past my entitlement to it.

  Here on Guernsey, we have bought this house, Hauteville House, halfway up the steep hill from the town. It is the first house we have ever owned. Victor means to stay. He has been rede
corating it since we moved in. He has built on the top of the house a glass box where he works. He has constructed a fireplace into a giant letter H, and made a large candelabra entirely of old cotton reels. He is so clever, my husband! There are tapestries on the walls. The rooms are painted rich, deep colours. One of the rooms is entirely devoted to the display of decorative plates. The ceiling itself is formed of plates. Victor insists on doing all the work himself. I think that if he weren’t a famous author, he would be a famous decorator. He has such a gift for it! But I will admit to not liking the Latin mottos he has burned into many of the ceiling beams. He does this with a red hot poker, often late at night. I sometimes awake to the smell of burning wood and imagine that the house is on fire. But instead, in the morning, I will find a new mysterious saying. Last week there was one added to the small downstairs lavatory. Victor had already decorated this lavatory with painted peacock feathers, and I do not understand why he felt the need to burn the words “Error Terror” into the room as well.

  But the phrase I mind the most is the one carved into the wall just outside the dining room. Ede I Ora. It is what you see on your way into the dining room, and I think it would be much more appropriately placed within the room itself, so that you might see it on your way out. Eat. Go. Pray. The way it is positioned now makes it seem as though you will enter our dining room and be poisoned, and I feel embarrassed on those evenings when we have guests.

  Tonight, mercifully, there are no dinner guests. It is just the family sitting round the massive oak table.

  “Did the work go well today?” I ask Victor. I ask him this every evening. Every morning I ask him if he slept well. These two questions, and the corresponding answers, are sometimes all we have in the way of a day’s conversation. We know each other so well, there is no need to talk at length! If Victor is feeling uncommunicative, he will answer simply yes or no. If he is feeling generous, he will elaborate.

  “Very well,” he says tonight. “In fact”—he puts down his soup spoon—”I feel magnificently inspired from my walk today, and I think I would like to work on the biography this evening.”

  Victor’s work is constant and self-generating. He could happily remain at his desk day and night, but the rest of us have had to take up various projects to keep us occupied during the exile. Charles claims to be learning to be a photographer. François-Victor busies himself translating the complete works of Shakespeare into French. Adèle is working at her embroidery, and playing the piano and composing music for it. I am writing a biography of Victor. Well, I am writing the biography, but Victor is helping.

  “Of course,” I say.

  “Can you begin right after supper?”

  “I can.”

  “But, Maman,” says Adèle, “you promised that you would listen to my new piece of music tonight.”

  “Can I not do both?”

  “No,” says Victor, waving his soup spoon in the air. “I will not have my thoughts interrupted by that great wooden beast.” He furrows his brow, puts the spoon down again beside his soup plate, and fishes in his breast pocket for a small notebook. He swivels in his chair so that his back is to his family and writes down what he has just said. He is so clever, my husband! He says so many witty remarks, and all of them will end up on the pages of his novels.

  Adèle has her head bowed. I pat her arm, but she jerks it away from me.

  “No matter, Dédé,” says Charles from across the table. “You can help me in my darkroom tonight. I think I have taken some good photographs of the garden this afternoon.”

  The biography is massive, and we’re not even up to the production of Hernani yet.

  Victor likes us to work on the dining-room table, after all the supper dishes have been cleared. He spreads out the pages of the biography and walks the perimeter of the table, surveying them. Sometimes he moves the pages into a different order. Sometimes he dictates a phrase or series of phrases, which I, seated at one end of the table, copy down. After we have finished working for the evening, Victor will gather up the pages and hide them behind the wood panelling in one of the secret cubby holes that he had built when he renovated the house.

  There is a restlessness to him tonight that makes me wonder if he really did go for his usual walk today. He moves quickly round the table, not settling on anything, his movements bending the light of the candle first one way and then another.

  “We will write a single day,” he finally says, stopping just behind me. I can feel the heat from his body at my back.

  “The day of the Hernani battle?” I say, eager to move the narrative along. At this rate, we will have to do six volumes just to get to this present moment.

  “No,” he says, and he bends close so that his mouth is right next to my ear. “We will write about the first time we met with Sainte-Beuve, that night he came to our apartment on rue de Vaugirard. You must remember that night, Adèle?”

  “No,” I say. “I don’t. Not at all.”

  “Come now.” His breath is in my hair. My hand tightens on the quill pen. “You must have a perfect recollection of the first time you caught a glimpse of our dear friend.”

  “No. I don’t remember anything.”

  There is silence, and in that silence, I can hear the growl of the ocean against the rocks and the tick of the clock in the hall. I can hear the quickened breathing of my husband, and the slick beating of my own heart in my chest.

  “We were young and happy,” I say. “That is what I remember. We were young and happy, and I wanted more than anything to be the mother to your children.”

  This is true and we both know it.

  Victor exhales and the candle flame leans away from us.

  “The battle of Hernani?” I say. “We could work at documenting that day.”

  “Wasn’t Sainte-Beuve there for that?” says Victor, but he moves away from me, continues down the table, and I know he has lost interest, so I can lie without being caught.

  “No,” I say with conviction. “I don’t believe he was.”

  That night I cannot sleep. I lie awake in my room, listening to Victor prowling around the darkened house. Usually he sleeps in his room upstairs, right next door to where he works, so he can rise in the night when inspiration strikes. For him to still be downstairs means that he has decided to redecorate something, or that he is going to burn another saying into the rafters of Hauteville House. I listen for the sounds of furniture moving. I sniff the air for the smell of scorched wood. But there is nothing. Perhaps it is the same restlessness that Victor displayed earlier this evening and he is trying to calm it by pacing. There must be something troubling occupying his thoughts.

  I think back to our apartment on rue de Vaugirard. It was small and confining. The fire always smoked, and the cooking smells were cloying. There was constant noise from the joinery downstairs. But that is not what I dwell on. Instead, I remember how Victor and I shared a bed, how we were rarely out of each other’s arms, how his presence across the room would lift my blood to attention.

  We might as well not be the same people at all.

  It has been years—no, decades—since we shared a bed or had rooms near to each other. I have slept next door to little Adèle ever since she was born, and Victor has made sure there were at least several rooms, if not floors, between us. If he entered my bedchamber now, I would be as alarmed as if he were a stranger.

  That night on rue de Vaugirard, we were just sitting down to supper. I looked forward to our meals there. They were a welcome pause between our episodes of lovemaking, and they served to make me hungry to return to bed. I don’t remember the meal. It would have been something simple. We did not have money in those days. Victor was a struggling poet. Soup or stew, perhaps. Maybe some bread and watered-down wine. Often we didn’t even have the money for that, and my sister, who lived nearby, would bring us round what was left of their dinner for us to eat. In spite of that, I don’t remember ever feeling pity for our circumstances.

  We were sitting d
own to dinner. The joinery had closed for the day, and there was no more sawing and hammering, only the lingering smell of sawdust in the shared stairwell. We were sitting down to dinner and there was a knock at the downstairs door—a timid knock, such as a child might make.

  I must have fallen asleep. I wake up to the sound of knocking. It comes from the room next to mine. Dédé is trying to contact her dead sister in the spirit world. Every night she taps on the wall by her bed until she gets the response she has been waiting for. She has been doing this since Léopoldine died, even before the seances in Marine Terrace. She taps, a frantic patter like the sound the heart makes after exercise, the beats so fast they are almost aflutter. She taps and she waits, and in the silence before she knocks again, she is answered.

  I try to stop Dédé from contacting Albert Pinson, but I am not able to tell her not to reach out to Léopoldine in the afterlife. This is the space she makes at the end of every day to be with her sister, and what right do I have to forbid this?

  The house is quiet except for Adèle’s tapping. Victor must have gone upstairs. There will be no strange Latin phrase awaiting me when I rise. His restlessness has found no earthly form tonight.

  With morning, there is purpose.

  “I am going up to the clifftop today,” I say to Dédé at breakfast. “I would like for you to come with me, but I am going whether you come or not.”

  “I will go with you, Maman,” says Dédé, her sweet nature returned. “And I will pick a very beautiful bouquet for you to put on your nightstand.”

  But when I go to collect Adèle after lunch, she is writing a long letter to Albert Pinson and will not be persuaded away from it.

  “Could we not go later?” she asks, looking up at me from her work, her eyes wild and her fingers stained with ink. I can see a small stack of completed pages at her left elbow.

  “But this is the best of the day. Right now. This moment. The heat will be gone later.”

  “Tomorrow, then, Maman. Tomorrow most definitely.” Adèle lowers her head, already lost to me.