Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle (60 page)

“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 down 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.

The road that leads past our house to the clifftop is steep and I always have to walk slowly, stopping to catch my breath before I get very far along it. I always pause in the same place, outside a house with a lawn bursting with colourful flowers. The flowerbeds twist across the grass, packed with the most exquisite blossoms. The blooms are more beautiful than anything we have growing in our sunken garden at the back of the house, and I envy their brightness.

Guernsey is barely ten miles long and only half as wide. Victor regularly walks the length of it. He is such a fit man, my husband! He has such vigour!

One side of the island, our side, is protected. The other side is wild and rough, open to the full wrath of the western sea. I don’t often walk over to that side, preferring to troll along the path that runs above our house and the sheltered port town that sits below that. But today the weather is clear and sunny, the wind remarkably low, and I feel a borrowed restlessness from Victor. I leave the well-worn path at the top of the cliff and set out across the middle of the island along a sheep track.

On Jersey there was French society, but here on Guernsey the inhabitants are mostly English. We keep to ourselves, and the English in turn do not bother much with us either. Occasionally we have visitors from France, or some of Victor’s Jersey friends will make the short voyage to our island. Victor enjoys guests, and he has what he calls an “emergency” bedroom up in his glass tower, in case visitors arrive unexpectedly or late at night. He has nicknamed this bedroom the Raft of the Medusa, and it is quite frequently put to use.

I have no friends myself. The visitors who come to see Victor are never that concerned with me. I am lucky to have my family around me. Once my sister made the trip from Paris, but seeing her just made me lonely for home, and in the end, I wished she hadn’t come.

The sheep track is deserted. I meet no one on my trek across the girth of Guernsey. I thought that I had come up to the high ground to pick wildflowers, but I seem to walk right by their weave and flash in the tall grass without hesitation. I seem to want to keep moving, to be able to get to the other side and back again before dinner. I will need to be in attendance when Victor climbs down from his tower. He likes to have his family gathered around him after a day spent alone.

The wind is higher when I get to the far side of the island. I stand on the edge of the cliff and the wind tears the breath out of my body. I sit down beside a rock, and the force of the blast abates. The ground beneath me is soft with grass and thrift. I put a hand out and touch the rock, warm from the sun.

I don’t know why I do it, but I lie down, there on the grass, with my body next to the boulder. The sky is endless above me, all blue like the sea, a few birds swimming through it, far out of reach. Perhaps it is because there is nothing above me that thoughts are released in me that have never struggled to the surface before. I do not think such thoughts in Hauteville House. I cannot. If I did, they would be caught by Victor in his glass tower at the top of the house. He would net them as soon as they left my mind. They could not simply rise, undisturbed, into the open air.

I live in service to others, and because of this, I do not often know what I think or feel. I say this not as a regret but as a comfort.

It is Charles I think of. Not that day, that first day, when he came to visit us in rue de Vaugirard. No, what I remember is a much more dangerous time than that.

I run from the rented château at Bièvres with the children’s cries fading softly behind me. I run down the long cinder driveway, over the small bridge, to the edge of the wood, where I know Charles waits for me. He hides there all day, preparing for the moment I can get away. And I don’t care that Victor is probably watching me go from his room at the top of the house. I don’t care that my children need me. I care only about reaching my lover.

And when I do find him—when he steps out from behind a tree or bush to meet me—we stagger together like drunks. Sometimes I don’t stop running at all, just keep on going, smash right into him and knock him to the ground. Charles is so slight that it doesn’t take much to wind him, and I like to hear the breath rushing out of him as I follow him to earth.

I cannot get enough of his embraces, of his kisses, of the way he pushes his face into mine as though he wants to become me.

Victor loves me. I know this to be true. But Victor loves me for himself, and Charles loves me for myself, and the difference between those two is so astonishing that I don’t know how to reconcile them.

Charles holds my hand up to the sunlight. We are lying on our backs at the base of a huge tree. He holds my hand overhead so that my fingers echo the pattern of the branches above us.

“You are as strong as that tree,” he says. “I would like to be a little bird nesting in your branches.”

“I wouldn’t mind being a tree at all,” I say. “It would be nice not to have to move.”

“But you would move all the time,” says Charles. He puts down my hand and rolls onto his side to look at me. “You would move with the wind.”

“No, I would respond to the wind. I would answer it.” I look up through the web of tree to the sky. “And only if I wanted to.”

The demands of Victor and the children are incessant. They call and I must go to them, over and over during the course of a single day. I can never stand still, be still. I can never have a thought that is my own. Their needs have gradually replaced mine.

Already I have been gone too long from the house. I can feel the anxiety of this fact crawling on my skin.

I lower my hand to Charles’s face, touch the skin of his forehead, pushing back to stroke his wispy hair.

“A bird would have a difficult time making a nest from your hair,” I say.

“Yes,” says Charles. “Soon I will be bald, and even uglier than I am now.”

Charles will often describe himself as ugly, and it pains me. I can only imagine that he heard this from his mother when he was a child, and that pains me too, that she could treat him with such loathing. I think of my own children, how confident they are that they are perfect because I tell them so a dozen times a day.

I run my fingers over the sharp planes of his face, over the end of his hooked nose, around the soft contours of his lips.

“You are the most beautiful creature,” I say.

I meet Charles in the forest. I meet Charlotte in the church. She is the only one there when I rush into the dark interior in the middle of an afternoon. She sits stiffly in the centre of a pew, eyes gazing straight ahead at the altar. Charles slouches and shuffles, but Charlotte has perfect posture. Her tiny shoulders are exquisite in that dress, and I launch myself into the pew from the aisle, hurtling towards the unsuspecting Charlotte with the velocity of a cannonball. She turns towards me, smiles, offers a delicate gloved hand—but I am well past such decorum. I have run down the staircase of the house, snagging the sash of my dress on the railing and just leaving it there, like the flag of a conquered country strewn on the bloody battlefield. I have heaved open the front door with such force that it banged back on its hinges, the sound reverberating through the entire building. If Victor was unaware I was escaping from the house, that crash would have alerted him most absolutely to the fact. I have tripped over the front step and fallen onto the grit of the driveway. There are still tiny indentations on the palms of my hands from where my body briefly married the shape of the gravel. I have flown down the road, my skirts fanning out beside me like wings, my feet barely touching the earth.

So when I hurl myself along the pew towards Charlotte, I am propelled by the full velocity of getting there. There is no stopping me.

“I won’t wait,” I say, one hand at her breast, the other already beginning to open her dress. “I will have you now.”

The wind blows up from the ocean, scouring the cliffs, searching me out. I should stand up. I should walk back along the sheep track, back to Hauteville House so that I am not late for supper. But I cannot move.

I knew in Bièvres that I had gone too far over the precipice. The lover’s embrace is never enough when it has become everything, and I lived only for those moments in the wood, those moments in the church. All the time I was with Victor and the children, I thought merely of escaping.

But I couldn’t leave. Even though I had once thought of leaving, I knew I had a duty to stay. I was a wife and mother. I had been a wife and mother before I met Sainte-Beuve, and that was where my true loyalty lay. That was where it should lie, although I no longer really cared for that Adèle. I wanted to step out of her, the way I stepped out of a gown at the end of an exhausting evening. But I couldn’t.

There was no choice. Even when I thought I had a choice, it was never simply a matter of choice.

The walk back is a blind stumble along the dirt track, my mind racing forward and backward. I don’t notice a single step I take, and yet I don’t once leave the ruts and I reach the top of our street without incident.

Because I’m walking downhill towards our house I don’t need to stop for breath, as is necessary on the walk up. But I do stop all the same. I stop in front of the house with the pretty flowers on the lawn. This is the house Victor bought for his mistress, Juliette Drouet. This is where she lives. These are her flowers, planted by Victor in the shape of his initials on her lawn. A big, bright VH for all the townspeople to see. And if I stand here, in front of her house, and look down towards ours, I can see the rag that Victor has tied around the railing in front of his upstairs room. It is a flag for her, for his mistress, to signal that he is up in the morning. He is up and thinking of her as he sets about his work, and he has lashed his underwear to the railing to let her know this.