Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle (52 page)

I had two feelings that night. The first was one of relief. If Victor had a friend to talk poetry to, then he would have no need to be constantly discussing it with me. I had initially been flattered that he valued my opinion so highly, but then I saw him have the same discussions with his friends, with my sister’s husband, with the fishmonger and the lamplighter. It was a discussion he was having with himself, except that it helped Victor to be able to have his inner conversations out loud. Like all his other listeners, I was required merely to hear his ideas, not to comment upon them. And if there was someone else willing to take my place in this, so much the better.

Later, Charles remarked on my silence during that first evening—how I had said not a word to him when he came for supper. It was not that I intended to be rude, or was uninterested in his company, but rather that I was so grateful he was engaging Victor in conversation, and that I feared anything I said would snap that thread. For the first time since we had married, I could have my own thoughts and not have to be reacting to Victor’s. I could sit over my needlework and muddle through my feelings, think about the events of the day or about my life so far, anticipate the pleasures of the evening, when, after our guest had departed, my husband would take me to bed.

I had nothing
but
desire for Victor in those days.

The second feeling I remember having that night was curiosity. Who was this young man who wanted so badly to make a friend of my husband? I watched him out of the corner of my eye. He looked a little like a bird, with his hooked nose and high forehead—like a bird of prey. And like a bird of prey, he was intent on his target. He wanted Victor to like him. He fawned and fussed, laughed a beat after my husband started laughing, repeated the same words back to Victor a few minutes after Victor had said them. How agreeable he was being! How friendly!

What did he want?

I asked Charles this once, when we were lying in bed in our hotel room, limbs entwined. Be honest, I said, because I felt that around his own ambitions, he was not always truthful.

I believed him a genius
, he said.
I wanted him to help me become a better poet
.

But this was not all. The feeling I had that first night was a feeling I sometimes had later on, once Charles and I were lovers. It was faint then, came to me like a whiff of stale perfume carried by the breeze.

What I felt that night was that Charles did not just want to please Victor, but rather that he wanted to be Victor.

Had I just exchanged one man for a lesser version of the same man? Was I merely a trophy to be flourished and fought over in this contest between Charles and Victor? Was everything really about literature after all?

This is partly why I prefer Charlotte. She would not confess our affair to Victor. She would keep it secret. She would keep it sacred.

The shouting has subsided. The voices are quieter. There is the clink of glasses. Now Charles and Victor are talking. They are drinking wine.

I walk back along the hallway towards my bedroom, not caring if they hear the creaking floor. I push open the door, sit down heavily on the edge of my bed. There is the carpet bag with its precious sentimental cargo—all that hopefulness I felt mere moments ago.

Would life with Charles really be different from life with Victor?

I put my head in my hands and weep.

By the time I hear his heavy tread on the stairs, I have stopped my crying. When he steps through my bedroom door, I am sitting up straight, composed, my hands folded demurely in my lap.

Victor has had all his emotion with Charles. They have fought and talked and drunk wine, like lovers in a spat. By the time he comes to me, he is spent. He stands there in the doorway, a shadow framed by shadow.

“You will end this,” he says. “I will not be shamed by your behaviour for one more instant.”

He doesn’t wait for my reply or even for my acknowledgment that I know what he is talking about. It is not a discussion. He takes it for granted that I have been eavesdropping. He turns and walks back down the hallway, back down the stairs. In a few moments I can hear the noises of his resumed packing.

Once when I was running towards Charles at the Jardin du Luxembourg, he grabbed me, in full flight, before I collided with him, and asked me if I was running towards him or simply fleeing Victor. Perhaps it was both.

When I was a girl, I had the ambitions of a boy. I could run and jump and ride a horse. I was good at drawing and good at writing. When I fell in love with Victor, I attached my ambitions to his own, craved his successes, wished for him to be a great artist. My own desires fell away when we married, when I became pregnant, when I had my four sweet children.

I didn’t think they would ever come back.

But somehow, my ambitions have returned as a single drive, as the force that compels me to love Charles and Charlotte and not Victor.

When I rush towards Charles along the gravel path of the Jardin du Luxembourg, just as I ran out into the meadow as a girl, chasing after my sister through the long grass, I am not in flight. I am hurtling headlong, with no way to stop the momentum I’ve gathered.

And what I want, what I long for, is not to escape so much as simply to arrive.

T
HE
H
UGOS HAVE MOVED.
I have not seen my beloved in weeks. Despite Victor’s order that I end my affair with his wife, I have no intention of doing so. The brief notes that Adèle has managed to send me reassure me that she has no plan to end the affair either. But we have encountered great difficulty in seeing each other as of late. Victor does not leave Adèle alone for a moment. I have had to write secret letters to her and leave them, under the name Madame Simon, at the Poste restante. She has sent letters to me by foot messenger, often using the same dim-witted girl who used to board with the Hugos. And despite his avowal that our friendship would not be affected by my love for his wife, Victor always treats me awkwardly when we meet. Thankfully, this is not often, as he has been kept busy with his change of residence and his new book about the Cathédrale Notre-Dame.

In the absence of my beloved Adèle, I write poems for her. I want to document our love. I don’t want to forget a moment of it—not a word, not a touch. The book is to be called
Livre d’amour
, and I have used real names, transcribed things that Adèle has said, noted our meetings in the church and named the hotel, the Saint-Paul, where we rendezvous for sex. I have disguised nothing. It is my heart laid bare.

But I will never have the volume printed, so I am safe to confess anything I want. The pages are my companion. The words carry my memory of love. They are for me, and for me alone—although I might be persuaded to show some of the poems to Adèle, if she insists.

It is a tragedy that this secret book contains my best work. I have always wanted to be a great poet, and here I must admit that I think Victor is a great poet. It is only his plays that I object to so strenuously. His verse is beautiful.

Still,
Livre d’amour
is a good book. I know it is.
It is my life, in love and stagnant. / An absence of pleasure, on a base of happiness
. And it is Adèle’s life. I have complete freedom to do as I please. I tell not only our secrets, mine and Adèle’s, but
her
secrets. Stories of her youth, and stories of her marriage to the “dark husband.” I write hoping that
you will always be this Adèle whom I love
. I write of
our short joy / our long delay
. Sometimes the poems seem as real as though I am living the moments again.
It is the hour when you should be taken back. Here, give me your hand. Let us pretend we have tomorrow
.

I talk about each time we have met, what happened, what was said. I have even written a poem to little Adèle, young Dédé. Since she is so small, she is often the one child who accompanies us on our walks through the orchard. There is no chance that she will relay anything of our meetings back to Victor, and the fact she is my godchild means that I am more fond of her than I am of Adèle’s other children.

Delicious child that her mother sends to me, / Last born child of the husband whose joy I broke; / Her face lit up by twenty moons
.

More than once, Adèle and I, lost in our passion, have neglected the cries of the child.

Your mother and I are burning meteors. / So many storms have passed since your innocent hour. / We cannot be the shelter you need
.

I have ended this poem with a direct address to little Adèle, to a time when she is old enough to read and understand my words, because even though I am showing my book to no one, perhaps I will give this one poem to my godchild. It is not just that she is my godchild that makes me so fond of the girl. She has her mother’s name. She was born shortly before our love began, so she has grown with that love. I like her nature and feel that it resembles mine. Sometimes I even entertain the fantasy that she is our child.

Once, when we were all sitting in the garden and Adèle was afraid that Victor would come out to join us at any moment, she was holding little Adèle tightly on her lap when what she really wanted was to embrace me. The little girl cried out, “Mother, why do you love me so much today?” as though she knew, as though she felt what her mother was really feeling.

Love your mother, child—but here is the bitter thing. / The fire which we crave also devours us
.

I am fond of particular lines, particular images. I have described the bat as “the swallow of the night.” I have said, “When wisdom is painful, it is wiser to be unaware.” And I have returned again and again to the lovers, to Adèle and myself—comparing us to Orpheo and Eurydice, lamenting our separation, rejoicing in our union.

Other lovers had, in their walk, more flowered paths, the happier trance. / And made around them, better singers of the birds
.

It makes sense that my great love would yield a great work. How could it be otherwise? It would be an insult to Adèle to write mediocre poems about her, to find her only mildly inspiring as a muse. I am a writer. The proof of how I am feeling is always in my pen.

I sit in my room, late into the night, with sheaves of paper and pots of ink. The drips from the guttering candle seal my words with wax. The breeze blows in from the open window and ruffles the pages. I think of my love, streets away now, and I write to bring her close again. Words are the rope with which I haul memory back.

Doesn’t everyone have a book of love to write? I look up from my desk and see, through the crack in the drapes, the flickering candlelight in the houses across the way. What if each of those people in each of those rooms is engaged in the writing of a
Livre d’amour?

And then another thought occurs to me. What if my book of love is just too good to keep private?

A
DÈLE MEETS ME
in the Jardin du Luxembourg. She has Dédé with her, is dragging the girl along the path to where I wait for them on a chair in the shade. If I was another kind of man I might leap up when I see her hurrying through the grove of trees, rush out to meet her. But it is one of my great pleasures to watch my lover come towards me, and so I sit and relish the full moment, listen to the scuff of her feet on the gravel path, the birdsong in the air around her.

We don’t embrace. She flops onto the chair beside mine, letting go of Dédé’s hand. The girl slumps down onto the dusty ground.

“I can’t stay long,” says Adèle. “Victor is watching my every move. He might even have followed me here.” She scans the avenue of trees anxiously, and I do the same, fully expecting to see the compact figure of Victor Hugo crouching there.

“I’m so sorry,” I say. “Telling Victor of the affair is perhaps the stupidest thing I have ever done.”

“I don’t blame you,” says Adèle, and I think (not for the first time) how she is a much better person than I am. If the situation had been reversed, I would definitely have blamed her.

“I don’t blame you,” she continues. “It just makes everything more difficult.”

“But if I hadn’t told him?”

“The fact of Victor would remain,” says Adèle. “Whether he knows about us or not, he’s still an impediment to our happiness.”

“He insisted we would remain friends.”

“He calls you a twisty little cheat.”

I look down at Dédé. She’s playing in the dirt by our feet with a stick and a beetle.

“Come away with me.”

“Where to? You have no money. I have no money. And then there’s the question of the children.” Adèle also looks down at her daughter, and Dédé, feeling our gazes upon her, looks up and smiles at us both.

“And besides,” says Adèle, “Victor is making plans for us to go away.”

“Where?” That shrewd versifier. It is a pre-emptive move to take his family on a holiday.

“Some friend has a château in Bièvres, and he has made arrangements for us to go there for the rest of the summer.”

Bièvres is not that far away from the city. It is a small town about an hour south of Paris. But it is small, and if I followed the family there, I would be noticed.

The rest of the summer is a very long time.

“Well, I will go away too,” I say. “To Belgium.” It’s the first place that comes into my head, and the truth is that I can ill afford to go anywhere at the moment. I must remain chained to my desk at the
Globe
, writing my reviews.

Adèle squeezes my thigh. “I love it when you’re petulant,” she says. “You get such a haughty look.”

I reach across and squeeze
her
thigh and feel, through my fingertips, the shock of desire beginning its crawl along my nerves.

“Damn him,” I say.

“I’ll write to you in Belgium,” says Adèle. “I should be able to manage that.”

Now, because I mentioned it in a moment’s rashness, I’m actually going to have to travel to Belgium. Why do I do these things? Why can’t I be stopped?

“I’ll leave word of where I am at the Poste restante in Bièvres,” I say, resigned to my ridiculous fate. I suppose I can convince the
Globe
editor to let me do my reviews from some cheap hotel in Brussels for a week or so.

“Has Victor finished his book about Notre-Dame, then?” I ask.

“What?”

“Well, he wouldn’t be prepared to travel away from his working routine if he was still writing that book.”

“Yes, he’s moved on to thinking about a new play.” Adèle looks away from me, but I have seen the shadow of something cross her face. Victor must have told her that they were to make a change of residence because he wanted to revive their marriage, not because he had just finished a book and was waiting to fill up with inspiration for the next one. Victor must have told Adèle this, and Adèle must have actually believed him.

M
Y HOTEL ROOM IN
Brussels is horrid. It is cramped and has bedbugs. The view from the window is down into an alley. I sit in the room all day, trying to pen my wretched reviews, and in the evenings I slouch along the streets looking for an inexpensive place to dine. The only thing that keeps me from utter desolation are the letters that Adèle writes to me from Bièvres. They are letters of reassurance, proclaiming her love for me, telling me what a bore Victor is being. But I only half-believe her. A small worm of doubt has wriggled its way into our love.

I lie on the hotel room bed, with its litter of books and papers, and read Adèle’s letters over and over, looking for a word out of place, a word that can be pried loose, letting down an avalanche of betrayal.

But I don’t find this, and after a few days of re-reading the letters, I relax and trust again that all is well between us.

And then I receive another letter, one not from Adèle but from Monsieur Hugo himself. I don’t like to think how he has found my address—discovering his wife’s letters to me, or forcing her to confess—and I slit open the envelope with great trepidation.

Victor writes to me in a mood of bonhomie that reads as false. I skip over the first few sentences, the friendly greeting and inquiry into my health and well-being. I skip down to the second paragraph. In my experience, what someone really wants to say is never in the beginning of a letter. It is in the second or third paragraph.

And there it is, in Victor’s second paragraph, where he boasts that Adèle is doing well, that he has never known her to be so happy, that it was such a good idea for them to get away together. He writes that Adèle seems positively radiant with happiness.

This is more than I can bear. I throw open my trunk and begin to toss in my clothes and books.

After a brief stop in Paris to rid myself of certain belongings and pick up other items, I take a coach south to Bièvres. It is easy to find accommodation in a local inn, and easy to find the château where Adèle and Victor are staying. Everyone knows the famous author.

The château is surrounded by a forest, and for the first day, I flit like a bird through the trees on the edge of this forest, hoping to catch a glimpse of Adèle leaving the grounds. But this proves futile, and the forest is just a little too distant from the château to get a good look without a spyglass, so I change my plan.

I change my clothes and go as Charlotte to the local church. I know my Adèle. It will only be a matter of time before she feels a need to pray or confess.

I go to the church and sit in a pew at the back, and I wait.

On the third day, the doors open and I watch as Adèle walks up the aisle of the church. Because she isn’t expecting me, she isn’t looking for me, and she walks right past me to sit in a pew several rows up. I wait until she has her head bowed in prayer, and then I slip out of where I am and move up to her pew. She raises her head when I enter the row and immediately knows who I am.

“Charlotte. My love.” Her face lights up. She is, as her husband said in his boastful letter, positively radiant with happiness. All my doubts evaporate. She has not returned her heart to Victor. She is still mine.

We meet in the church. We meet in the forest. I lurk among the trees like a madman. We kiss in the choir loft. I fondle her by a waterfall. She takes flowers home to press with the children. She runs back to the château with twigs in her hair and grass stains on her dress.

We are being foolish and we know it.

“It is only a matter of time,” says Adèle at the end of the first week, “before Victor finds us out.”

We are lying in the forest in the middle of a gorse bush where I have hollowed us out a lair. It is how I spent my morning while waiting for Adèle to leave the château. I fear I am going feral. We are living like rabbits.

“What can we do?” I am trying to untie her stays, but I keep getting poked by sticks. “These are desperate times.” The need to keep our love even more secret has intensified the passion. I run my hand up the inside of her thigh. She shivers in delight.

“I have never been happier,” I exclaim. “I want to live like this forever.”

“In the shrubbery?”

“No.” I bend to kiss her. “Like this. With you. Near you.”

Adèle struggles up onto her elbows. “Charles,” she says, “I don’t want to get caught. You have to go back to Paris.”

I feel as though I have been run through with a sabre, as though the ground beneath Adèle and me is already soaked with my blood.