Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle (64 page)

This should be the end of the story, but some months after Adèle’s death, George Sand comes to see me.

“Have you heard?” she says, her face flushed from the rush through the Paris streets to my house. Like all of us, she is not as slim as she used to be.

“Heard what?”

“Mademoiselle Hugo is back.”

“Little Adèle?”

“She followed a soldier to Barbados and was brought back to Paris by a black woman. A former slave, nonetheless.” George collapses into a chair in my drawing room. “They say Mademoiselle Hugo has gone mad. Her father has had her committed to an asylum.”

M
Y BELOVED SISTER,

I still wear black for you. Every day since you died, I have dressed in mourning clothes. Every day for over twenty years now.

I no longer sleep. I don’t think I have slept for years. I walk the streets at night when I am on land. Here, on the ship, I pace the decks, the spray in my face. The salt water stings my skin and the decks are slippery. Sometimes I am thrown against the railings by the heave of the ship. The nights have no stars.

I see you ahead of me on the slope of lawn at dusk on Notre-Dame-des-Champs. You turn and your face has the gold of the sun’s glow behind it. You turn and smile, because you are waiting for me to catch you up. I struggle over the grass, my small legs pumping hard. I am always so grateful when you wait for me, and always so afraid that you will not wait long enough, that you will turn away before I reach you.

Madame Baa found me shivering on the foredeck. Is that where I was? I thought I was with you.

Madame Baa is kind to me, Sister. As kind as Maman. You would like her. She took me in when everyone else shunned me, thinking me mad because I walked the streets of the hot place dressed in the heavy clothes of the cold place. But I had no money. Papa had stopped sending me an allowance. If I had no money, how could I have afforded to buy new clothes?

Madame Baa says, “Quiet, child.” Sometimes when I am writing, it seems that I am also speaking the words out loud, and this is confusing to her. She thinks I will feel better if I am quiet.

Maman is dead. Do you know this? Her heart gave out. Have you seen her? I know she was buried in the cemetery at Villequier with you. Can you reach out through the cold earth and touch her?

I agreed to go on this ship, to go with Madame Baa back to France, because I longed to see Maman. But she died just before we boarded, and I could not escape the passage. Now it will be Papa who meets me at the docks. I am afraid to see Papa. I fear he will be very angry with me. He had endless patience with you. With me, he has no patience at all.

You were so good at everything, Sister. I tried to do one thing with all my heart, and I failed terribly at it.

I tried to love Albert, but he would not let me. He did not want my love. He has married someone else now, an Englishwoman. Albert is back in England with his new English wife. He probably never thinks of me.

Madame Baa says, “Come here, child.” She says, “Don’t cry.” Am I crying?

I must do as she says.

Halifax was cold. Bridgetown, Barbados, was hot. Albert was posted there without warning, and I followed him within the very week that he sailed.

I was not prepared for the heat, just as I had not been prepared for the Halifax winter. Bridgetown was scorching. I could feel the heat of the streets through the soles of my shoes. The bonnets I wore had to be peeled from my scalp at night.

I did not deceive myself that Albert would be pleased to see me, and I was not wrong. But my need to see him was so great that it no longer mattered what he felt about it all. I did not care that he loathed me, that he begged me to leave him alone. I just could not. I did not do it to cause him any pain, but only because I had no other choice. I was drawn to him. My destiny was his destiny.

There were orders at the garrison to keep me out. I found lodgings nearby, but I had to leave those quite soon because I could not pay the rent. I had taken little from Halifax, just one trunk of clothes and papers. I was allowed to keep the trunk in a shed at the landlady’s house in Bridgetown, and I returned to it daily to collect and deposit papers, and to occasionally change my clothes.

I was starving, and Madame Baa took me to her small house with the metal roof and fed me a stew that tasted much better than it looked.

Madame Baa is a slave. She was stolen from her homeland, a place called Trinidad, and forced to work on the sugar plantations in Barbados. She was freed only last year, and even though I ask her continually to tell me about her time as a slave, she will only say that talking about it makes her think about it, and she’d rather not do that anymore. “I am a free woman now,” she says. “And I am going to Paris.”

Her family are all dead. Sometimes Madame Baa says that I remind her of her daughter, but I cannot see how. I think she desires everyone to remind her of her daughter. I understand that. I know what it is to lose someone and want nothing more than to see her again, to have her turn around at the top of the garden and wait for you to catch her up.

Albert did not stay long in Barbados. He was waiting for a posting back in England, and when it came through, he sailed away, went home, and married that Englishwoman. I heard no more of him. Papa sent me the marriage announcement from the paper. This was cruel of him, I suppose, but Papa is angry with me for having lied. He says he would have understood if I had just told him the truth. But what is the truth, Sister?

Albert sailed for home. I was living in the shadows of Bridgetown. The white women who lived in the plantations moved to the other side of the street if they saw me approaching. They seemed afraid of me. I could see it in their eyes. Only Madame Baa felt any sympathy for my position. Only Madame Baa did not judge me.

I worry that she will be stared at in Paris. I worry that she will be just as much of a curiosity in Paris as I have been in Bridgetown.

Papa paid for our passage. Madame Baa wrote to him and offered to bring me home. “I have always wanted to see Europe,” she said.

If Maman is with you, Sister, will you tell her that Madame Baa has looked after me like a mother, and that I would have perished without her kindness? Will you kiss Maman for me and tell her that I wanted so much to see her again, just once more again?

Madame Baa wants me to stop writing this letter. She says it is upsetting me to think of you, to be writing like this to you. But she does not understand. If I do not think that you are still out there, somewhere, then you will cease to exist at all. And if that happens, you will disappear from my childhood. I will never have had a sister. There will be no one ahead of me on the slope of lawn at dusk.

It is not that I believe you are alive, but I believe you are somewhere. You are somewhere just out of reach. If I keep writing to you, if I keep calling out to you, then perhaps you will wait for me to catch you up. Perhaps you will hear me.

Papa was restless with the pain of your dying. Only the sea could console him. Only the sea’s embrace was strong enough for him to feel. He felt that the wrong daughter had died, and he was right. It should have been me, Sister. I didn’t matter as much.

I would like to be a child again. You would be alive, and Maman would be alive. We would still be living on Notre-Dame-des-Champs, with the pond in the garden and the roses against the windows. I remember our happiness there.

A sailor has just come by to ask if I want to go belowdecks. He was very polite. The sailors do not know what to make of us—two women travelling together, one black and one white—but they are nice to us. I don’t feel as afraid going back to France as I did coming across the ocean to Halifax by myself those few years ago. I don’t feel afraid, even with tonight’s rough passage, but I am a little afraid of seeing Papa again. He does not think that I have been on an adventure. He thinks that I have fooled myself, and that in fooling myself, I have also made a fool of him. Everything is about Papa, is it not, dear Sister? You know that he was not there to bury you, but that since then, he has made a big fuss of walking part of the way to your grave on the anniversary of your death and writing poems about the experience. He has written a great many poems to you. You have been his muse, and I must admit that it has made me angry. I don’t want you to be a muse. I just want you to be alive again.

A wave has just drenched the back of my dress, but I have held this book to my heart and saved the paper from spoiling.

There are only a few more nights to go and then we will be in France. What waits for me? Not you. The last time you saw me I was a child. You might not recognize me now.

Could you meet me, not Papa? Could you and Maman wait for me at the docks? Please. There is enough time to crawl out of the ground at Villequier and take a carriage to the coast.

I am almost twice as old as you now. Think of that. How strange it is that you, my older sister, are so much younger than I am.

The night is swirling around me—the waves, the voices of the sailors, the tap of the rigging. That noise sounds like the tap of the table leg on Jersey, from the table Papa told us was really you, communicating from beyond the grave. I didn’t really believe you were dead then. It seems truer now, but I pray that my voice still reaches you, Sister; that these words find you. I would be lost without this hope.

It’s cold here, on the deck of this ship, riding through the night sea. Maman said it was sunny when you went sailing at Villequier. She said that it was a sunny afternoon, and that the yacht capsized suddenly and you would not have known what was happening. There would have been no pain. You would not have had time to cry out. She said that your drowning would have been swift and merciful.

Is this really true?

Was it simply a quick confusion chased by a long silence?

Was the water cold? Did you struggle?

Were you afraid, my darling?

Were you afraid?

T
HIS STORY ENDS IN WINTER
, but I write it down in spring, and in this moment, while I write this page, the sky seals over with cloud. There is birdsong outside my window and a breeze from the north. The weather is changing. An hour ago it was sunny. The day held the promise of heat.

There is traffic on the street below. I can hear the cough of horses’ hoofs and the clatter of carts. Voices rise up to my window. Words spoken on the street reach my ears as musical notes, their meaning unravelling in the air between the ground and my bedroom.

Love doesn’t fail. We do.

I never loved anyone as much as I loved Adèle Hugo. And not just because I wasn’t willing, or because the opportunity didn’t present itself again—but because I was never again the same man I was when I was with Adèle. We met when I was thirty. I was young, full of idealism and dreams, full of energy and desire. As I have grown older, all these things have grown older too, more tepid. I have become less of myself, not more, and so by necessity, any love after Adèle would be a lesser love. When I was with Adèle, I was the best version of myself that I would ever be—although I had no way of knowing this then.

And no one was ever Adèle again for me. No one treasured every part of me, treated my body as a gift. No one surprised me at the gate. No one met me with a force of passion equal to my own.

I write this story down so I can enter it again. It is as simple as that. Writing does not recreate the moment so much as it stops it. And if the moment is stopped, one is able, finally, to get a clear look at it. One can walk around it and examine it from all sides. When a moment is in real time, it is always in flight. There is nothing to do but trail after it, or run to catch up.

Who we are is determined not just by the choices we make, by how we sew events together into narrative. What gives us the true measure of ourselves is how undone we can become by a single moment.

And what that moment is.

I sit in the small city church dressed as Charlotte, waiting for Adèle to arrive. I sit three pews from the back. She will enter through the doors at the rear of the church, and I want to be close to her arrival. I am always first at the church—eagerness coupled with an innate punctuality. Sitting at the back allows me to observe the front of the church—the altar and the choir loft, the stained-glass window above the altar. Sometimes it seems to me that the church is like a ship, and that the altar is the prow of this ship—with the parishioners’ faith the power that moves the vessel forward.

The wood inside the church is dark, and the light coming in through the yellows and blues of the stained glass burns amber, makes the space look honeyed and warm. This belies the fact that because it is built of stone, the church is always cold and damp; stone holds moisture, stone remembers cold. There is always a certain level of discomfort when one sits in a church. The pews are hard and narrow. The smell of the damp stone is sharp, a little rancid. It is natural to look for comfort when one is experiencing its opposite, and so the honeyed light seems almost miraculous. I raise my eyes to the light spilling from the altar, and it is easy to believe that it is God. I am grateful for that light. I want to bask in its rays. I want to worship its source.

An empty church is just as effective as a populated one. The building was designed for both the single pilgrim and the devout horde. When the hall is packed and the choir is in full flight, the surge of voices cannot help but lift the spirit. In those moments, it does seem possible for man to transcend his mortal faults, to exist on a more exalted plane.

When the church is empty and I am the sole human presence, there is time to contemplate the history of the building, to think about all the worshippers who came before me. When I am alone in the church, it is as if my living self is the beating heart in a cavernous stone body.

I do not know which state I prefer.

In this small church there is a side chapel for the Virgin Mary. Often there are candles burning in that chapel, and I sit in my pew at the back of the hall and watch their stutter. The church is draughty, and the candles lean their small flames first one way and then another. Fire is very agreeable. It does not mind bending to the will of air.

The child-size stone Mary stands in the arc of flickering wax. Some Virgins are defiant, staring strongly ahead, daring one to approach. Some Virgins are humble, with bowed head and clasped hands. This one is caught between the two. She has her head lowered but her hands raised. She will not look you in the eye, but she is summoning you to come towards her embrace. I wonder at the mood of the sculptor. Her robes have deep folds, the stone gouged in channels, like rivulets running down the length of her body.

Mary holds a crucifix. There are red and pink roses painted on the blue background behind her. The blood of Christ, turning to flowers. If I move quickly, she sometimes seems like a real person, standing quietly in the shallow alcove of her chapel, her arms extended to welcome me. I sometimes think of her like that, as a human presence, as someone who is keeping me company while I wait for Adèle. Statues always seem to be waiting. They never seem to have arrived. There is perpetually the sense of expectation in something that is deathly still.

There is a stained-glass window above Mary. It is the picture of a life-size head of Christ. The colours are simple, an arrangement of brown, yellow, and red. Jesus stares straight out at me, and he looks a little disappointed, as though he was expecting more people. I always feel apologetic when I look up at him there in his window.

Jesus is positioned so that he gazes straight ahead. He can’t see Mary in her cave. And she looks down at her chipped stone feet. She can’t see him either. It would be better if they could look at each other, although I suppose their aloneness is about their relationship to God. If they were looking at each other they would be in a relationship with each other and God would be forgotten.

I often think that Adèle is the stained-glass Jesus, all powerful with the light behind her. I am more like Mary, with bowed head and beseeching arms. In fact, my Charlotte dress resembles Mary’s dress. My dress has heavy blue pleats, and it arranges itself stiffly around me on the pew, as though it too were made of stone.

We are waiting, all of us—Jesus, Mary, and I—for the moment when the heavy church door lurches on its hinges and opens to reveal Adèle.

As Charlotte, I am free from my own history. I can sit in the church and not think about my uneasy alliance with faith. I do not have a past. All I have is this moment of waiting for Adèle. It is so simple and so pure. It must be what true religion feels like.

The doors to the church are oak. The hinges are medieval, black iron straps and studs. They are the doors of a fortress and seem designed to keep people out, rather than to invite them in. When Adèle lifts the latch and swings the right-hand door open, it is the weight of centuries that she shifts.

The door opens. The light behind it is the real light of this day, not the eternal light of God that sifts through the stained-glass window at the front of the church. The real light always seems harsh, makes me blink my eyes and turn away.

Conversely, when Adèle first steps into the church, she is not used to the darkness and can’t see anything. She often stumbles on the threshold. It takes the full moment of the door swinging shut before she is able to distinguish objects inside the building.

When I ask her what she is thinking of in the moment when she enters the church, she always says, “Nothing. I’m just trying to find you.”

In our arrangement, I am the one who waits, and she is the one who seeks me out. It is partially a result of our circumstances, in that she is restricted by her marriage, so she is in control of the time we spend together—but it is more than that. Our natures are thus, I think. I am more comfortable waiting. She is more comfortable seeking. Our situation, although frustrating in terms of our being able to be together, is in perfect accordance with who we are.

Adèle’s heels are sharp on the stone floor, like the hoofbeats of a small horse. They knock and echo as she walks up the aisle, so that by the time she gets to my pew, the church rings with the sound of her steps.

I have watched her hurry up the aisle. She has seen me sitting in the pew. When she slides in beside me, we are looking only at each other.

She is always impatient. As she manoeuvres herself into the pew, she invariably bangs her knee on the upright at the end of the bench or her elbow on the back of the neighbouring pew. It is this I adore—her regard for her comfort and safety swept aside by her need to get to me as quickly as possible.

And what do I do as she tumbles along the bench? I sit perfectly still and wait for her to reach me. It is the most exquisite of pleasures.

Adèle’s hair is out of place, and sometimes there are leaves stuck through it. Her face is red from her frantic journey. She breathes like a man after sport. When she puts out her hands to grab me, they are damp with perspiration.

“Charlotte.”

I love how she says my name, as though it is the last word she will ever utter. I love how she takes my face in her hands and kisses me with such abandon.

But here I go too fast again. This is the trouble with love. It has its own momentum, skips ahead like a fast heartbeat. It is hard to slow the words down enough to properly examine the moment.

When Adèle slides into the pew beside me, I forget about the rest of the church. Everything I was thinking about, everything I was looking at, is easily replaced by the joy of being next to my beloved. The world shrinks to her body, then to her face, then to her lips. I wouldn’t notice if the church was entirely full of people, or if the stained-glass Jesus was suddenly sitting on the other side of me.

When I was a boy, standing on the top of that hill to watch Napoleon review his troops, I had this same feeling. When I am pulled through the early morning by a line of words—when I move further and faster along them, so that I forget myself completely—I have this feeling again. The feeling, when Adèle takes my face in her hands and kisses me, is one of surrender. No, it is more than that. It is wanting, with every part of myself, to give myself away, to spend myself, to be, finally, empty.

When Adèle and I meet at the hotel, I invariably arrive first. I stand outside, preferring this to waiting in the lobby, where I will be regarded with suspicion by the proprietor.

Adèle is rarely on time. It is always harder to escape from her life than she imagines it will be. One or other of the children has hurt himself and needs her maternal attentions. The person who has been pressed into looking after the children has not shown up at the correct hour. There is a shortage of cabs and she has to walk. When she is walking, she trips over a piece of wood near the gutter and twists her ankle.

Whatever keeps Adèle from arriving means that I often spend a long while loitering outside the Hôtel Saint-Paul.

I walk up and down in front of the hotel. I stand against the wall, gazing fixedly at my shoes, much as the Virgin Mary does in her alcove in the church. If Adèle is taking an especially long time, I will cross the narrow street and wait there, where I have a good view of the front of the hotel but am not so obviously lurking.

Adèle arrives eventually and we clutch each other in the street, stagger up the steps and into the lobby of the hotel. We are always desperate to get to our room, and the whole business of signing the register with false names seems designed as a torture to test our resolve. It always takes an infuriatingly long time to do such a simple thing as sign our names in a book.

Of course, everyone in the hotel employ knows why we’re there. No one is fooled by our pretence as man and wife. For, honestly, what man and wife are so desperate to have each other in the middle of the afternoon?

None come to my mind.

These remembered afternoons in our room are a perfect balance of the satisfactions of the flesh and the spirit and the mind. Because they are so perfect, I feel inadequate describing them. There is nothing to hang on to, no sharp edges. Everything swims away from me. I cannot separate myself enough from this experience to capture it for someone else. I suppose this is what happiness is—a wholeness that cannot be pried apart. The more an experience can be fractured, perhaps, the more miserable the event.

It is a lie to say that I remember my mouth on Adèle’s skin, or how she tasted, or how her body closed around my hand when I was inside her. The feelings of those moments are gone forever. They were gone the instant after they happened.

So what am I remembering?

Perhaps I am not remembering; writing is not a memorial.

This is just what lives in me.

I walk through the streets of Paris. It is winter. A cold wind funnels down from the north. I have dressed inadequately. By the time I get to the asylum gate, I am freezing. I should have taken a cab. I’m too old for this.

I ring the bell, stamp my feet, ring the bell again.

The attendant comes out of his hut and stands on the other side of the heavy iron gate, not bothering to open it.

We regard each other for a moment.

“I’ve come to see one of your inmates,” I say.

“Which one?”

“Adèle Hugo.”

The guard eyes me suspiciously. “It’s not the usual visiting hours,” he says.

I reach into my pocket for some coins, pass them through the bars of the gate. “For your trouble,” I say.

The asylum is a tumble of voices. It reminds me of the Académie française. A nun leads me up a stone staircase. “Her father pays for her to have her own room,” she says. “Such a generous man.”

I say nothing. Little Adèle would never have been put into an asylum if her mother were still alive. This is Victor’s generosity. This is how Victor takes care of his children. He is still living in the Channel Islands, but he is as powerful as ever. I am not surprised that he has thought Adèle’s actions insane, that he has no sympathy for her obsession with Albert Pinson.