Annette Vallon: A Novel of the French Revolution (62 page)

“I never ‘adjusted’ like that.”

“Didn’t you? What did you do, again and again?”

“I faced death—” I said. I felt a cool wind from off the Channel and shivered. William noticed it. I hadn’t expected it to be like this. I had expected him now to talk about Mary, but not about death, about us both adjusting to “the memory of what has been
.
” I saw that ship out there, blocking the Channel. It had no business to do that. We were in the middle of a peace. Then I saw the thin moon above it.

William took my hand and held it on his knee. He put his arm around me. We looked together out to the Channel. “Is that a British ship out there?” I said.

“Yes, they’re not taking any chances.”

I felt we were approaching something that we had to reach the end of now. I waited.

He lifted my hand to his cheek and rested it there. “Many poems,” he said, “about deserted women and orphaned children. And a ballad in which an old man looks back thirty years to when his daughter died.

To the churchyard come, stopped short

Beside my daughter’s grave

Nine summers had she scarcely seen.

“You understand her age? You understand?” He was almost crying now. “The old man turns from her grave. People thought I was merely writing of the common people, resuscitating the ballad form. Coleridge thought the Lucy poems were about what I would feel if my sister died, but I was
writing of my life
. What else can a poet do? I had to do it, or else I couldn’t ‘turn from the grave.’”

“But we weren’t dead. I was riding La Rouge at night, hiding people in our old lodge. Caroline was milking the goat.” But I knew what he was saying. “I never so much as kissed the cheek of another man,” I said.

“How does one go on?” He laid my hand back on his knee. We talked of the death of love and held hands like young lovers.

“One finds other things to feel passionate about,” I said.

“Exactly. I had my poetry.” He took his arm off my shoulder. He gazed at me with his old piercing eyes. “And then I turned thirty-two,” he said, returning to his earlier point. “I, and everyone else, thought the war would continue forever. Bonaparte’s power was absolute over Europe. I did not believe the preparations for the treaty would lead anywhere; none others had. Dorothy thought, no, I thought too, her best friend, my companion also; we all get along well together; I could not stay a bachelor forever.” He looked back out to the Channel. “My family asked me again, what was I waiting for, and I proposed to Mary.” He ended abruptly.

“So this is what this is all leading up to? You’re engaged to Mary? Why didn’t you just come out and say it?”

“I had to explain—”

I felt a smooth devastation, as in a clearing I had stood in once when I was a girl, in the forest where there had been tall chestnut trees, where you could see the light coming through their leaves in the summer. Now they were gone. I had realized that, standing in the clearing, remembering the light-filled leaves. They are not coming back. Grass will have to grow here now, I had thought.

And it became ankle-high grass, sweet to walk through.

A breeze picked up on the sea and blew my hair in front of my face. Maybe the breeze had been there before, as William was talking, but I hadn’t noticed it. The British ship had moved on. I had feared
this
was coming. And now, when it came, somehow, it wasn’t as bad as I had feared. The one thing that I wanted most not to happen had happened, and now, for some reason, I felt strangely lighter. I myself would never marry. I knew that. But that didn’t matter either, right now. The worst was over. He had told me. I pushed the hair back from my face.

The breeze blew some clouds over, and the two twinkling lights in England vanished. There was just the sound of the sea, and the stars far above us. I leaned my head back and looked at them. Some constellation spread brilliantly down the southern dome of the sky, across the European continent. What was the war and two lovers and their problems against
it
? I laughed. I suddenly laughed, and it shocked me as much as it did William. He was sitting there like a ghost beside me.

“William,” I said. “We ’re already married. Have you forgotten your vows by the river?”

“Of course not—”

“They can be real, and they can also be our secret. I think you’re right—we have both ‘turned from the grave’ in the past nine years, but something’s also still alive, yes? In the depths of your heart?”

“Yes.”

“Then kiss me. Let’s not talk about anything anymore. Kiss me as if you were going to England and never coming back.”

And he turned to me, held my chin lightly, tentatively, in his hand, then brought his face to mine. It was a feeling of coming home. Suddenly, there were no nine years, there was no Mary, or Dorothy, no war—in that familiar touch they were all erased. He kissed me again, and our arms went around each other. We were home, and I leaned back against the sand.

“No.”

“I’m your French wife.”

“I can’t kiss you, I can’t be with you,” he said. He put his arms at his side and sat up. “Duty forbids it.”

I sat up beside him. “I don’t believe you. What about the depths of one’s heart? What about duty to that? God knows that
it
knows.

If one doesn’t follow that, one feels ill. Why do you think you were getting all those headaches? It’s not as complicated as you make it.”

He dug the toe of his boot several times into the sand until the toe was covered up. Then he sprinkled sand over the top of the boot. He shook his head. “I’ll tell you something I’ve thought about a lot and never told you,” he said. “This simplicity is one of the things I love in you, that I marvel at. You come naturally to what I arrive at after long thought and suffering.”

“The suffering is only because you are not listening to your heart. It’s making you suffer because you are ignoring it. And then you call that suffering ‘philosophy.’ It’s quite amusing, really.”

“You’re making fun of me.” He put his hand on my cheek and stroked it, pushing my hair back now. I felt twenty-two again. Above us the summer stars were spreading out.

“Tell me that constellation, William. I never learned all their names.”

“Where?”

“That long line of stars, there.” I pointed to the south.

He leaned closer to me, to see where I was pointing. “The one that dips down there, and curls up, that goes all the way down the sky? That’s Scorpius. Do you see the triangle there at its top? That is its head. Then its long, brilliant body. The fishhook shape is its sting.” His pointing hand moved slowly in front of me and up the night sky. “To me, Scorpius means that it is summer. And summer, I’ve thought, ever since I was a boy, seems that it will never end. That the warm days will just go on and on.”

His hand rested now on my cheek. It just stayed there. He was staring at me. “It’s really the first time I’ve looked at you in nine years,” he said. “You have the most perfect skin.”

“I’m a thirty-three-year-old mother, but I am your French wife.”

He kissed me on the mouth then, and my mouth opened, and his hand held the back of my head. I felt it all gratefully vanish again, the need to talk, the need to figure it all out, to explain it. How could one possibly explain it all anyway?

“Oh, Annette,” he said. Above him I could see the glimmering tail of the Scorpius curling above the sand dune and all of France. I could hear the sea pounding and hissing and lying silent, and I could feel my beloved once again come home. It was our hour, which we had waited almost a decade for. It was the hour William had denied could be.

From a long way away, William said, “Now, I can sleep.”

“What do you mean?”

“I did not write you this, but every time I received a letter from you, I would lie awake, thinking about you and Caroline. Sometimes it would last for night after night, and would almost drive me mad. One night my sister knelt with me in prayer that I might sleep.”

“Poor William. I did not mean them to have such an adverse effect. They were just simple letters. What Caroline was doing. How my apricots were golden, my tomatoes red. Nothing to give you headaches about. I think it was seeing Mary, not my letters, that caused the sleeplessness, yes?”

“You are right.”

“I like to be right.”

But it did not matter now, of course, who was right or not. My head lay on his chest, his arm about me. I felt wonderfully lazy, lazy in a good way, as I had never felt in my life.

I think neither of us wanted to move. It got later; the waves came and went. William now lay with his head on my shoulder, my arm about him.

But I knew someone had to say something. Someone had to say that we had to walk back, that people were waiting for us, that if Caroline awoke in the middle of the night she would want me to be there.

I sat up and took his hand. “Come, my love,” I said.

I felt happy, leading him down the dune. We ran. I fell down once on my knees and laughed, and William lifted me up and we kept running.

It was a warm night, and we walked over the carpet of reflected stars in the wet sand. “Let us dance,” I said, and I took his hand.

“I have not danced in years.” And there, with nobody looking, we traced some of the old steps from long ago by a river, on another summer’s night.

“You are very good; you don’t forget.”

“It all comes back to me,” he said.

We moved forward and backward with the tide, and twirled, and laughed at ourselves. William whistled a tune that he said was from a country dance. I hummed an aria from Rameau’s
Orpheus and Eurydice
. We kept dancing. We could never get tired. We danced with the cliffs of England in the distance as if wars and lost marriages and future marriages never existed. Green flames shot through the waves.

The tide washed softly up to our shoes, and when it receded, stars of Scorpius glimmered beneath us.

William bowed and gave me his hand.

William and I had decided to extend our stay for two more weeks. When would we three ever get to be together again? With William’s marriage and another war looming, we didn’t know. Dorothy read in her room, William said, great poets of the past—Milton’s
Paradise Lost
and Sir Philip Sydney’s
Arcadia
.

She had brought the books with her. She said the French seashore was too hot, and she preferred her room. William thought it strange that she had stopped writing in her journal since she had come to France.

“She always keeps up her journal,” he said, “even if it’s just to mention a walk to town to get flour to make gingerbread.” But she hadn’t written a word since coming to France.

She seemed civil to me, now. Perhaps she was not pleased with the extension of their stay, but she knew the wedding would occur in October as planned. There was no doubt about that. William would marry her best friend, and his childhood friend. If she had had doubts when she first met me, William had laid those to rest. I had renounced all previous claims. Perhaps he said something like that to her; I don’t know. One evening when Caroline, William, and I returned to the door of their lodging after dinner, she took my arm and led me aside, while Caroline said good night. “I’m sorry for what I said about French girls,” she said. “That’s just a silly English way of thinking about them. I wish you’d forget what I said about French girls.”

“I never took it seriously,” I said, and I hadn’t, really. I had forgotten her as soon as William and I were alone that night. Now she wanted to be friends. It was important, for Caroline, that we all be friends. I was no longer a threat; how could I be an enemy? Dorothy taught Caroline how to play chess, how to construct some basic sentences in English, and Caroline taught Dorothy how to organize a shell collection.

They corresponded for many years.

On the last evening of our stay together, Caroline swung her parents’ hands, one on either side of her, and we watched the sun slowly, slowly, approach the horizon, then suddenly, almost imperceptibly, slip over it. We thought it was all over and started to walk on, when Caroline shouted, “Two sunsets!” One was on the sand, washed by waves. The colors shone beneath her feet. Caroline took off her shoes and waved them over her head.

Golden rays shot up and flecked the clouds over France. The water turned lavender and pink. William and I finally sat down on his worn frock coat. Other people stopped their promenade on the boardwalk.

It seemed everyone on the seashore paused at once and quietly looked out. What was there to say? It would all be over in a minute, and we didn’t want to lose any of it. We wanted it never to be finished and knew in a few minutes the sea would subside to silver, the sky darken, and the first star appear.

Caroline chased seagulls now, then bent down, looking in the sand for shells.

“I have two new translations for you,” William said.

I thought it would be a long time before I heard him read a translation to me again. “Read them,” I said.

“The first is a line from an old poem, written directly about you and never published. It is a young man’s work—

Those auburn locks which now exceed

The breathing woodbine’s hues.”

“I thought you should have it, for it is the only poem without any fiction. There is more to it, of course,” he said, “but those lines are so sad, I’d like to forget them now. Though ‘vermeil lips’ you might like,” and he smiled. “My main translation is about one of our evening walks here, at Calais. It takes place in what you called the ‘holy time
.
’ But it’s also
our
short time, between wars, between lives. When it says, ‘Dear child,’ that is Caroline, and when it says ‘dear Girl,’ that is both Caroline and you.”

“No one will ever guess.”

“Others may not know; but you will know.”

As he read, he kept one hand over my hand, on my knee. I did not look at him, but at the dimming gold in the sky. It is my favorite of his poems.

It is a beauteous evening, calm and free;

The holy time is quiet as a Nun

Breathless with adoration; the broad sun

Is sinking down in its tranquility;