Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle (59 page)

At the moment, we are mercifully between prostitutes. It is late. My secretary has left for the day, and I wait, hopefully, for my supper to be delivered on a tray.

I wait and wait, and then I trudge down to the kitchen to see what drunken disaster has befallen Adèle.

She is leaning up against the pantry door. Her skirts are twisted and her cap is crooked on her head. There is nothing cooking on the stove, no smell of supper rising from any of the pots.

“Food?” I say hopefully.

Adèle fixes me with her gaze, then forgets to say anything.

The house feels airy and spacious without the prostitutes. Adèle’s neglect is so familiar as to be almost reassuring.

“Don’t worry,” I say. “I will fix myself some bread and cheese. I’m not that hungry tonight anyway.” I cut some bread, put several cheeses on a plate.

“Wine?” I ask.

Adèle produces an open bottle from behind her back.

“Sorry,” she says. This scenario has happened so often that apologies are entirely unnecessary, and I feel badly for her when she decides she has to offer one up.

I pour a glass of wine. I take down another glass and pour Adèle one.

“Come and sit with me,” I say, “while I have my supper.”

The kitchen is on the ground floor of the house. It’s always dark in here, even with the evening light fumbling through the street-level windows. I light a couple of candles, place them in the centre of the table. Then I get a plate for Adèle.

“Thank you.” She helps herself liberally to bread and cheese. We drink our wine.

“I saw another unfortunate,” she says, “down by the river. Off her head with drink. Raving mad.” It pleases Adèle to find women who are worse off than she is. She delights in it.

“Really?” My heart sinks.

“She has an infection.” Adèle thinks for a moment. “No, affliction. She has an affliction.”

“What sort of affliction?”

“The mental sort.”

I chew my bread. “I can’t be having an imbecile here,” I say. “It would be too much work.” I look at her. “For you,” I say. “Remember the woman who imagined she saw rats everywhere? You never had a moment’s peace.”

“This girl is mental only because of the drink.” Adèle holds out her glass and I dutifully fill it up. “And she’s very young, barely older than a child. It would only be for a week or so.”

This is what Adèle says about every prostitute who ends up staying here. More than likely, this new girl will remain well over a month.

I sigh. “All right. Tell her to come round and see me.”

“She’ll be here tomorrow morning, monsieur,” says Adèle brightly.

“What’s her name?”

“Claudine.”

It’s a pretty name. A name full of music and promise. But I have enough experience in these matters to know that Claudine will undoubtedly be thin and sickly, over-rouged, her teeth rotting in her head.

My friends don’t understand why I take these women in, why I keep Adèle in my employ. I can’t explain it to them properly.

Years ago I dreamed of living with Adèle Hugo. I dreamed that she would leave her husband and come away with me, that we would spend the rest of our days together. I remember the prayer I would offer up in the small church where we used to meet.
Please God, let me live with Adèle
.

I didn’t realize I had to be so specific. I didn’t realize my prayer should have been
Please, God, let me live with Adèle Hugo
.

Adèle has come to me. My prayer has been answered. How could I possibly throw her out? And the prostitutes need help. They need a place to stay. Adèle feels powerful at being able to help them. I feel powerful at being able to help her.

I was afraid that I would die alone and lonely, and now I can be assured that will not happen. My house is full of energy and chaos. We are in full sail on this stormy sea.

“Shall we have some almond cake tonight?” I ask Adèle, refilling her glass.

“It’s in the pantry,” she says, and we stare each other down to see who will get up from the table to fetch it.

The happiness that comes to you is never the happiness you imagine. I never would have dreamed that I would know a one-handed prostitute called the Penguin, or that the scent from the flowers Adèle has placed throughout the house would drift up the staircase with enough force to stop my hand above the page while I work.

“There you go,” I say, setting the plate of cake down before Adèle.

She switches the plates around. “No, monsieur,” she says shyly. “That’s not right. You should have the bigger piece.”

Victor is in exile. He is living with Adèle and his children on the Channel Islands, off the coast of Normandy. Apparently his mistress, Juliette Drouet, is also there. He has secured a house for her near to his family home.

Needless to say, Victor is a noisy supporter of the republic. After his election to the Académie française in 1840, he became increasingly involved in politics. He campaigned for the republicans. He spoke out against the death penalty. When Napoleon’s nephew Napoleon III seized control of the government and instantly destroyed all the reforms Victor had worked so hard to establish, he was very upset.

Victor does not like to be opposed. I know this better than anybody. And the more famous he has become, the less he likes dissension, the less it agrees with him.

After Victor declared Napoleon III to be a traitor to France, the Hugos had to leave for Brussels. They then went to the Channel Islands, where they remain. Occasionally, Victor dispatches a political pamphlet on the ruination of France. Even though the pamphlets are banned here, they manage to be smuggled in. The political pamphlets, like all of Victor’s work, are very popular. The last one was called
Napoléon le Petit
.

Of course, it was a shrewd move on Victor’s part to go into exile, because now that he is absent from Paris, he just becomes more beloved, more valuable in the minds of the people. It is as though he cannot take a wrong step. Everything he does advances his career.

Victor’s exile, sadly, means Adèle’s exile. It is fitting, I suppose, as the end of our love affair has felt like an exile anyway. Any small hope I might have had about Adèle’s return to me has been dashed to pieces on the rocky shores of Guernsey.

I stay in. I go out. My habits, now the habits of years, are reassuring because they belong to me, but they offer less and less comfort. I have a restlessness that I can’t find a way to settle. Even my cook comments on it.

“You’ve got mice in your underclothes,” she says one day when she comes to deliver my morning chocolate. “Look at you, all scratchy and full of the nerves.”

I have been pacing back and forth in front of the window. Adèle places the cup of chocolate on my desk without spilling any. She seems remarkably sober this morning.

“I can’t bear to think of the Hugos on the Channel Islands,” I burst out.

I picture my Adèle walking the windswept coastal paths, being blown off into the foaming sea. I see her floating on the surf, her hair tangled with seaweed, fish nibbling at her fingers and toes.

“What are the Channel Islands?” asks Adèle. Like most Parisians, she has little interest in the rest of the world.

We pore over the atlas. When my secretary arrives, I send him to the library for additional information. After her initial interest in seeing where the Channel Islands are located on a map, Adèle tires of the research and returns to her kitchen. But I won’t let her be. I hurry down at noon with my stack of books, thunking them on the kitchen table and making her jump at the stove. I’m out of breath from the stairs, and it’s the first time that I realize I get winded from going downstairs as well as up.

“I could definitely be dead within the week,” I say.

But Adèle doesn’t hear me, or chooses not to.

“They’re full of rocks,” I say.

“What are?”

“The Channel Islands.”

Adèle turns and regards me critically. She holds a wooden spoon in each hand. I don’t dare ask her why.

“They’re islands,” she says. “They have coasts. Coasts are full of rocks.” She speaks slowly, as though she’s talking to her imbecile cousin.

The Channel Islands are a mix of French and English. I feel a brief twinge of envy. Victor is already famous in France. Now he will become famous to the English as well.

“There is no stopping him,” I say.

Adèle puts down her spoons. “It is because you do not know,” she says.

“Know what?”

“How it is for Madame Hugo. You do not know anything, so you imagine everything.”

She is right. In some ways it would be easier if Adèle were dead. It would be finite. I would not be tormented by the endless possibilities of her existence.

I slam the atlas shut and drop myself down into a chair. If I am honest, it is not Adèle’s safety that really concerns me. It is not imagining her being blown off a rocky headland into an unforgiving sea that causes me sleepless nights. It is imagining her happiness—her happiness without me.

I
WALK OUT
onto the terrace. My children are still at breakfast there. They like to eat outdoors when the weather is fair. They like the bright morning light and the shuffle of sea against the rocks below.

“Maman!” calls Dédé, and when I go to her, she pulls me down beside her on the chaise. “What will we do today, Maman?”

If we were still in Paris, my children would be married by now. They would have lives of their own. But the exile has forced us to remain together as a family, and even though Charles, the eldest, is over thirty and Adèle is a grown woman of twenty-seven, the isolation has turned them into children again, and they look to me to lead them through each day.

I close my eyes against the sun, then open them and see the rag tied around the railing at the top of the house, the signal that Victor is up and working.

“Maman!” Dédé squeezes my hand.

“We could pick wildflowers on the clifftop,” I say. “Charlot, you might photograph us up there, and you could bring your books, Toto. We could have a picnic.”

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.”

H
AVING 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 redecorating 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.”