The Reinvention of Love

by Helen Humphreys

  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 f
ar 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.

  It is not just because Guernsey is full of English people that we do not take part in society. It is because society wants no part of a man who goes into exile with his wife and his mistress. They shun us. We are not invited into their homes or to their social functions.

  I don’t blame Juliette Drouet. When we first landed in Jersey, she kept a respectful distance back from my family at the docks. She understands discretion. She never comes to the house. I never meet her on the street, or hear a word from her. I know Victor, and this means that I cannot hate Juliette. Often I actually feel great sympathy towards her. She is in exile as well, and she doesn’t have any children to comfort her. All she has is Victor, and having had this myself once, I know what it means. And I do believe that I had the younger, better version of the man. She must be a very patient woman to endure all his present-day demands.

  If Victor isn’t working on his biography of an evening, he walks up the street to see Juliette. Sometimes he will have his evening meal there. He doesn’t simply need to have his family around him at the end of a day—he needs to feel loved. And his family cannot give him enough of the love he needs so voraciously—the love he feels entitled to.

  The problem with our situation is not that Victor has a mistress, or even that she has come to join us in exile. The problem with our situation is that it is seemingly endless. Napoleon III is still the emperor of France. Victor remains in opposition to him. I don’t see how anything will ever change. We will remain here together on Guernsey, in our uneasy alliance, until we all die.

  Charles is lounging on the terrace when I return to the house. He has been sleeping all afternoon, my lazy, fat son. Idleness is destroying him, and a false industry is destroying François-Victor. It is ridiculous to think that he can translate the entire works of Shakespeare! My little Adèle, my poor daughter, is being consumed by spectres. She is giving her life away to ghosts.

  This has to end.

  “Maman,” says Charles, waving in greeting from his supine position, his feet raised up on cushions. “Where did you get to?”

  He should be married, my little Charlot, who is not little at all. He should be married and have a family of his own. It shouldn’t matter to him where his mother was for a few hours on a beautiful day.

  I say nothing for fear I will say something hurtful. I just brush past him and storm into the house.

  My other children must be in their rooms. Good thing, I think grimly, and head for the staircase. I pass the mirror in the front hall and catch a glimpse of myself in the glass. My hair is loose and frayed, like rope ends that have lost their splice. There is a smudge of dirt across my cheek. My eyes startle, the wild eyes of an animal.

  There you are, I think as I pass on by. There you are, Adèle, at last.

  I never go up to Victor’s study when he is working. If not actually forbidden, it has certainly been understood all these years I have lived with him that I am not to disturb him during working hours. His genius is delicate and could easily be ruined by interruption.

  I take the stairs two at a time and am battling for breath by the time I get to the top.

  This room on the third floor was already a generous space before Victor added the glass box. It already had sweeping views of the ocean and sky, but the glass box has the effect of making it seem open to the elements. It is as though Victor stands in the middle of the ether. At night, the stars seen through the glass roof must be dazzling, and oh so close.

  Victor writes standing up at a battered, high wooden desk. When I get to the top of the stairs, he has his back to me, and in the moments before he notices that I’m there and turns around to face me, I have a glimpse of what it is like to be Victor.

  The sun through the glass roof is brilliant. It illuminates every detail of the room. There is the low-ceilinged library, where my husband keeps his vast collection of books. There is the Raft of the Medusa emergency bedroom, where he beds, or attempts to bed, the succession of young maids who come to work in Hauteville House. There is the glass window cut into the floor in the shape of a porthole, and the mirror positioned above it so Victor can see down into the bowels of the house, can see us walking through the rooms and going about our daily business.

  It must be magnificent to be Victor. Even his very name is triumphant. And here he is, at the top of the house, at the top of the world. He has the machinery of the household below him and the infinite horizon in front of him. The ocean is so flat and blue that it seems as if he could hook a finger under an edge and pull the entire sheet of shimmering fabric towards him.

  Why would he not feel that he can do anything, take anything? He stands at his desk, a conductor in front of an orchestra, moving the music of the world to his whim. I understand Victor better in this moment seeing him at work than I have ever understood him during all the years we have lived together.

  I understand him better, but I still blame him.

  “Adèle.” He greets me with surprise. “Are you all right? Has something happened to one of the children?”

  “The children are fine,” I say.

  He puts down his pen. His fingers are as ink-stained as Dédé’s. I see the lines he has written on the page in front of him as a series of small rivers spidering delicately across the paper.

  “Well, no. They’re not fine.” I have recovered from the climb up the stairs, but my breath is still catching in my throat and I realize that I am nervous. I have never confronted my husband before. I’m not sure I can do it. But then I think of Charles, lazing like a fat seal on the terrace; and of François-Victor, eagerly searching out each French word for Shakespeare’s plays; and most of all of Adèle, disappearing day by day into the spirit world. “But the boys are men,” I say. “They have chance and choice, even on this island. It is because of Dédé that I have come to see you.”

  “But I am working.” Victor still looks completely surprised at my presence in his study. “Could this not have waited until tonight?”

  The light behind Victor outlines him, makes him look like a sculpture. I notice that he even has ink on his beard, this new white beard he has grown since we’ve been here on Guernsey. He thinks it suits a man in exile to have a beard.

  I suddenly feel exhausted.

  “I have asked for nothing,” I say. “I have done my duty. When you wanted to move to Jersey, I fo
llowed you. And when you felt that you had to come to Guernsey, I followed you here. You bought this house without asking me, but I said nothing. I say nothing about the way you decorate it, or about how you spend your time. But I am not the only one who has done her duty to you. Little Adèle has given away her youth to this exile, to your exile. She is languishing here, pining after a sailor she barely knows, wasting her days doing embroidery.”

  “But I have given her a small garden to cultivate,” says Victor. “I have asked her to help collate my pages.”

  “She’s a young woman. That is not enough to fully occupy her. She needs to be out in society. I want to take her back to Paris.”

  “Impossible.”

  He says it so quickly that I am taken aback. “Won’t you even consider what I have said?” I did not say it easily. I have never said such words to my husband, and he knows this.

  “There is nothing to consider. If she leaves this island, it will prove that she does not love me. She must prove her love by staying. I will not be abandoned by my family.”

  “Not permanently, Victor. Just for a month or two. I would take her to Paris just for a little while, and then we would return here and continue to do our duty to you.”

  But Victor has already turned back to his desk, to his work. He has finished with our conversation.

  “She is suffering! You don’t know how she has suffered, how she continues to suffer.” My voice is raised and shaking from emotion. I’m glad that Victor has turned away and is no longer looking at me.

  He picks up his pen. “If she really loves me,” he says coldly, “why would she want to leave?”

  I mentioned that Hauteville House was haunted. The former resident, a vicar, apparently ran from the house, left in fear for good because of the ghost. But we Hugos are used to apparitions, and we are not worried by the footsteps and the moaning. The ghost is a woman. We have all heard her low keening outside our bedroom doors at night. When we first moved into the house she was very present, but over time she has disappeared. What I think is that our misery has overtaken hers, and that she has effectively been cancelled out by our greater collective woe. I lie awake at nights and no longer hear her timid steps along the hall or her whispery voice on the other side of my door. Instead I hear Adèle tapping on the wall in the room next to mine, trying to rouse her dead sister; or I hear Victor as he rages through the house with a red-hot poker, looking for somewhere to burn his immortal words.