Confession

by Klein, S. G.

  I had gone to the refectory in order to find a quiet corner in which to read but on opening the door caught a glimpse of Monsieur at the far end of the room just as he was turning away from Madame.

  The room was dark, lit only by two small lamps so it was not easy to see Madame’s face but I could tell she was wiping her eyes.

  She had been crying.

  Quickly I closed the door behind me and returned to the schoolrooms where Vertue Basompierre entreated me to help her with an English translation.

  Ever since Monsieur Heger, Marianne and I had met Vertue & her guardians at the Carnival a sort of entente cordial had sprung up between us. Now, instead of teasing me about my unfashionable clothes or the way in which I dressed my hair, she defended me against all insults. It was a relief therefore to throw myself into helping Vertue with her homework although she was more inclined to leave me to do most of the labour for she was indolent of mind – that much would never change no matter if her life depended upon it.

  While I worked, Vertue chattered, leaning against me companionably. ‘What are you going to do during the long summer holidays, Mademoiselle? I myself am to go to Germany and afterwards to Paris and perhaps even London. I have relatives who live near Piccadilly – cousins of Mama’s – ’

  ‘And your young gentleman friend? Georges was it? What of him?’ Will he visit you?’

  Vertue shrugged. ‘Perhaps. Who knows. He has been rather tiresome of late – ’

  I laughed and Vertue smiled.

  ‘But you have not answered my question yet,’ she said. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Me?’ I said. ‘I shall stay here.’

  ‘By yourself?’

  ‘There will be others, I am sure. Marianne Wilke will be here and Madame Haussé I believe will stay on. And Monsieur and Madame Heger – ’

  ‘Oh no, I don’t think so – Monsieur and Madame are to go away for the holidays. They will not stay in the city during August – It is far too hot and besides it smells – ’

  ‘But Monsieur and Madame stayed here last year – ’

  ‘So they did! How very peculiar, perhaps it was because of the baby? That must have been it. But this year they are definitely going away. Madame told me as much herself only last week – ’

  ‘Last week,’ I heard my voice echoing. ‘She never said.’

  Vertue smiled. If she noticed my disappointment she kept it to herself.

  Seconds later the bell for supper rang and we filed alongside everyone else, into the refectory where Madame Heger sat at the top table.

  No trace of tears marked her face. They had vanished as completely as the ink stain on my dress. Indeed had I not witnessed them myself, I would never have believed they had happened.

  VIII

  I found the next set of books on the morning of what was to be our last lesson together before the school holidays.

  A whole month had passed since I had been able to speak at length with Monsieur. Occasionally we would pass each other in a corridor or I would catch him watching me as I walked in the gardens, but no contact was made. Instead I endured a month of perfunctory routines. Mealtimes, lesson-times, bedtimes. Nothing happened in between which was not scheduled. The sun rose at four every morning and did not set until well past ten every night, yet despite the extended hours of daylight, my mood grew daily more sombre. Mary Dixon bid farewell to Brussels and I found myself yearning to be in her company again. At night I paced my narrow part of the dormitory – unseen by others, restless, distracted. Sometimes I would sit by the window, a shawl wrapped around my shoulders trying to write down my thoughts, arrange them in some kind of order, but nothing came of it for I cared for nothing, feared nothing, enjoyed nothing until I found the books nestled inside my desk.

  They were small, unassuming volumes – a two-set edition of the works of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre together with a slim religious tract, which had it not been for the lingering smell of cigar smoke, I might have overlooked altogether.

  I picked the Saint-Pierre up eagerly, leafed through its pages before inscribing it with the words ‘The Gift of Monsieur Heger, Brussels, August 15th 1843’. For weeks now I had been hoping to find just such a gift. That none had appeared only added to the steep decline in my spirits and the beginnings of an unnatural bitterness for I had begun to blame Madame Heger for Monsieur’s avoiding me. She was Mediocrity personified, Dullness made flesh, small-minded to the extent that she was preventing her husband from teaching me. Sense told me this could not be the case yet when I came to sit down and write my next essay I used my frustration against her. I did not mean to, but that is what I did. I wrote my anger out – then gave the essay to Constance de Breuil to deliver to Monsieur’s study.

  Its title was The Death of Napoleon.

  Two days later I received a message that Monsieur would like to see me for a lesson later that afternoon.

  His study door was closed. I knocked softly then, a few seconds later, a little harder. It was extremely hot that day and prickles of sweat formed on my brow, down my arms, yet my hands remained cold.

  When the door opened he would not look at me but ushered me in with a sweep of his hand. Despite my nervousness I entered quickly, unable to disguise the relief I felt at once again being inside this room. Here more than any other place in the school, I felt more myself, I was no longer that half-woman pacing the classrooms as she drilled her students in the finer points of English. In this room that woman did not exist. She was dead, buried, cold in her grave.

  I sat down at my desk upon which Monsieur had laid out my essay.

  ‘ “The Death of Napoleon?” ’ he said frowning then folding his arms as he watched me.

  ‘That was the subject, yes – ’

  ‘Could you not have thought of a pleasanter topic? – ’

  ‘My mind was inclined otherwise, Monsieur,’ I replied glancing down at the slashings of ink and legions of notes he had scrawled across my work. ‘You did say I could choose the next subject –’

  ‘But his death?’

  We stared at each other. Despite there being a window open the room was hot. A late ray of sunshine fell across the floor drawing my eyes away from his to watch how the light danced across the floorboards. My eyes flicked back to his. He was still watching me. My stomach jolted.

  ‘Monsieur?’

  ‘I have been working very hard at the Athénée, I’m afraid. I have been asked to give the Speech-Day Address, it is a very great honour – ’

  ‘Which you shall no doubt acquit very well – ’

  ‘But I have missed our lessons,’ he said. ‘Have you missed our lessons?’

  ‘A little, not much, I cannot properly recall…’

  He smiled. ‘I have seen you in the garden. Three days ago you sat next to the wall over there with Marianne Wilke – you were drawing in your sketchbook while she sat and sewed and yesterday evening you were reading a book whilst walking under the apple trees – you stopped to look up at something in the branches – ’

  ‘You were spying on me?’

  ‘No, I was looking out of my window.’

  This time it was my turn to smile. ‘I was reading Coriolanus,’ I said.

  ‘ “You are no surer, no,/Than is the coal of fire upon the ice/Or hailstone in the sun” That is correct, is it not?’

  ‘You committed it to memory – ’

  ‘Your essay echoes him in places – there are touches of brilliance there and yet …it is curious too – ’

  ‘Curious?’ I said blushing for – of course – I knew full well what he meant. I looked out at the garden, tried to concentrate on the way in which the sun was falling through the fruit trees, pale lemon rhomboids of light– anything to quieten my mind, to collect my thoughts. Laughter drifted across the lawns.

  ‘Mediocrity?’ he said. ‘ “The distinctive quality of mediocrity is moderation, a quality precious but cold.”’

  I looked down at my hands, made as if I were studying them.
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  ‘Mademoiselle your essay is entitled the “Death of Napoleon” which for the time being I shall ignore. But you begin your essay not with Bonaparte but with this digression on Genius versus Mediocrity…’

  ‘Did I? I forget now - ’

  ‘Shall I remind you?’

  ‘Don’t!’ I entreated but my plea fell on deaf ears for Monsieur Heger had already swept up my essay and was striding towards the window where, with is back turned towards me, he began to read.

  “…Thus one cannot deny mediocrity the right to judge genius, yet it does not follow that her judgment is sound. The distinctive quality of mediocrity is temperance, a quality precious but cold; more often the result of a meek temperament. Mediocrity can see the faults of Genius – its imprudence, its temerity, its ambition – but she is too cold,’ he said emphasizing the word cold, ‘too restrictive, too egotistical to understand its struggles, its suffering, its pain; she is jealous too, and so its very virtues appear to her under a false and imperfect light…”

  ‘Perhaps I judged Mediocrity a little too harshly,’ I said knowing immediately that Monsieur Heger had guessed my meaning.

  ‘A certain meekness is not such a bad gift to possess,’ he said ‘Meekness is not unpleasant – ’

  ‘Genius is often very clumsy – She speaks out of turn.’

  ‘She is fierce,’ he said. ‘Fierce, gifted, passionate – these are her gifts – ’

  ‘But sometimes she acts before she thinks. She is rash. That is her weakness – ’

  ‘Her position is difficult – ’

  ‘Not as difficult as yours,’ I said for by now I was completely at sea. Behind me lay a distant shoreline. Beyond me desolate landscapes, solitudes without horizon –

  ‘In two days the school closes for the summer. We are to go abroad – ’

  ‘And yet I am abroad already,’ I replied – a note of desperation catching at the back of my throat. On the floor the patch of sunlight still danced against the boards, jumped and quivered as if it were alive.

  Monsieur looked at it too then quietly closed the window and crossed the room just as I stood up to go.

  ‘You will find enough to occupy yourself with over the summer?’

  ‘You are concerned? – ’

  ‘Look at me – ’

  I looked. My eyes filled with tears. ‘You need not trouble yourself, Monsieur. I am looking forward to the holidays. There will be no interruptions, no students. I have plenty of reading material that someone kindly left in my desk. I shall visit with my friends the Revd & Mrs Jenkins. I believe Marianne Wilke is going to – ’ but here I was interrupted as Monsieur very gently placed one finger against my lips.

  I made no opposition. There was none to be made.

  The tears continued.

  He kissed me.

  IX

  ‘Tell me again,’ Marianne Wilke demanded.

  We were sitting in the main classroom, just the two of us because five days previous to this, Monsieur and Madame Heger together with their children had set off for Blankenberg. They had been there years before, so Madame Muhl informed me, to take the waters and recuperate and the holiday had been a great success. The students too had dispersed, a succession of carriages drawing up outside as one girl after another was collected in turn by her parents or guardians. Mademoiselle Blanche left to go to Paris, Mademoiselle Sophie to Rheims and Madame Muhl had headed for Switzerland to stay with her brother.

  ‘Again!’ Marianne demanded grinning and rocking backwards and forwards. ‘I want to hear it again!’

  For the third time that morning I read the first chapter of Paul et Virginie, one of the stories contained in the book Monsieur had left me.

  ‘Situated on the eastern side of the mountain which rises above Port Louis,’ I began, ‘in the Mauritius, upon a piece of land bearing the marks of former cultivation, are seen the ruins of two small cottages. These ruins are not far from the centre of a valley, formed by immense rocks, and which opens only towards the north. On the left rises the mountain called the Height of Discovery, whence the eye marks the distant sail when it first touches the verge of the horizon, and whence the signal is given when a vessel approached the island. – ’17

  The words soothed Marianne and to a lesser extent they soothed me also for by reading aloud the silence was filled.

  Not that I minded it terribly. On the first day after the exodus I had walked the corridors and entered the rooms in what I can only describe as mild elation. Not having to teach was a joy. Not having to make meaningless conversation. I sat in the garden until well past midnight, watching the moon as she rose in the sky, scattering the pathways with her benign, silvery light.

  ‘Again,’ demanded Marianne.

  ‘But you have heard it three times!’

  Her face fell and I let out a sigh. With her childlike behaviour she was both the best and worst of companions. Her angelic smile and the pleasure she took in the simplest tasks counterbalanced by a pitiful restriction in almost everything she said and did.

  Yet she was my only companion for the next several weeks.

  Soon I was avoiding her company as frequently as I was able.

  My escape when I decided I had had enough of Marianne’s company – took a strange form at first, for rather than leave the Pensionat, I decided to investigate the rooms on the second floor of the building, that is to say Monsieur & Madame’s private apartments which included both their own and their childrens’ bedrooms, a nursery and a small drawing room which the Hegers kept for themselves rather than using the more public one on the ground floor. It was this room in particular I wanted to visit although the whole of the second floor proved as intriguing as might a ghost one has heard of but never seen with ones own eyes.

  Only a few servants remained in the Pensionat over the summer therefore it was easy enough to slip downstairs one night after they had retired to bed.

  Opening the drawing room door my candle flickered unevenly, throwing dark shadows across the walls of the room, shadows which loomed up as if having recently escaped from a grave. The shadows danced and bore down on me making the room a very strange place indeed however as my eyes grew accustomed to the light I saw how in almost every detail the room was almost an exact replica of the one downstairs.

  How very odd I thought, that there should be two identical rooms in the same house one for public and one for private use. I could only imagine what Mrs Jenkins would make of such profligacy. Only a few days before I had taken a short walk around the city with my friend and she had again made reference to the extravagance of the natives, calling in to question not only their dress sense but also the way in which they decorated their churches as if the buildings were some kind of confectionary.

  ‘I do wish they would stop dabbling about with cherries and icing sugar,’ she said as loudly as politeness would permit. ‘Churches are for worship not for feasting the eyes upon, it is most distracting– ’

  But in one area Monsieur & Madame Heger’s second drawing room did offer some degree of soberness for above the fireplace hung a full-length portrait of Madame bordered by a plain mahogany frame. Not that I noticed the picture immediately for I was far too preoccupied with looking at all the books that lay round about, studying their titles to see what I might learn, but on sitting down momentarily to take stock of my surroundings I felt I was being watched and lifting my eyes to the space above the mantelpiece, it came as quite a shock to find my Directrice staring down from above.

  The candle I was holding flickered, as did Madame’s eyes as if she had suddenly come to life. I should not be there, that is what she was saying. I should not be in that room and yet, although I still knew how to distinguish between what was right and what was wrong, I continued to linger there and on more than one occasion over that summer returned to it although as a means of escape I soon preferred taking myself into the city rather than sitting alone in the house.

  Brussels during the summer is not a lively environme
nt, most of its citizens having left for the spa towns of Germany or France or for the cooler breezes and gentler pleasures of coastal resorts such as Ostend.

  There followed a time when I would set out early each morning to investigate this ghost city on foot. The streets shimmered in the heat, wave upon wave of it pounded down from above, the sun was relentless, yet despite this I enjoyed my outings. I liked walking along the near-empty boulevards and wide, tree-lined avenues that wove to and fro.

  In the old part of the city – the Basse Ville – I took pleasure in studying the architecture and the brooding sense of times past. Crumbling facades adorned with ivy and any number of other creeping plants, were complemented by equally crumbling gardens whose shrubbery poked out from between rusting railings.

  I enjoyed sitting in the Municipal Gardens under the broad-leaved avenues of linden trees, occasionally hearing a band play for the amusement of the occasional passer-by. I liked to watch the fashionable ladies out riding on horseback, those who had not seen fit to leave Brussels, accompanied by their equally fashionable husbands – and the tradesmen as they plied their trades, the flower markets being a particularly enchanting place to visit. But soon these pleasures diminished. Soon I began walking for the sake of walking. I did it because I could not bear to return to the Pensionat to sit by myself in the empty classrooms filled only with shadows.

  Monsieur Heger had wondered if I should not be lonely during the holidays with no company to speak of and I had replied that far from feeling lonely I was going to relish my time with no interruptions.

  The reality could not have been further from the truth.

  Instead of tranquillity I discovered torment for while I sat alone, was not Madame Heger enjoying the company of her husband? While I paced the near-empty house, a prisoner of my own dark imaginings was not Madame Heger in the loving arms of her family? Most people are frightened of being haunted, of being visited by spectres during the night but I tell you – being the phantom is no pleasure either for it would have starved a wraith to live in such a manner as this. The only human contact I had was that of Marianne Wilke, the aforementioned handful of household servants and Mademoiselle Blanche who arrived back earlier than expected from Paris. The return of any one of the other teachers, Mademoiselle Sophie or Mademoiselle Haussé for example, and I would have been overjoyed to see them. We might have shared a few walks into the countryside or visited a museum together, but Mademoiselle Blanche and I barely exchanged a word. If she entered a room, I would immediately vacate it. If I chanced upon her in the garden, she would walk in the opposite direction. The only time we sat together was in the Refectoire where we took our meals but she sat at one end of the table and I at the other.