The Reinvention of Love (21 page)

Hauteville House

But the phrase I mind the most is the one carved into the wall just outside the dining room.
Ede I Ora
. It is what you see on your way into the dining room, and I think it would be much more appropriately placed within the room itself, so that you might see it on your way out. Eat. Go. Pray. The way it is positioned now makes it seem as though you will enter our dining room and be poisoned, and I feel embarrassed on those evenings when we have guests.

Tonight, mercifully, there are no dinner guests. It is just the family sitting round the massive oak table.

“Did the work go well today?” I ask Victor. I ask him this every evening. Every morning I ask him if he slept well. These
two questions, and the corresponding answers, are sometimes all we have in the way of a day’s conversation. We know each other so well, there is no need to talk at length! If Victor is feeling uncommunicative, he will answer simply
yes
or
no
. If he is feeling generous, he will elaborate.

“Very well,” he says tonight. “In fact,” he puts down his soup spoon, “I feel magnificently inspired from my walk today, and I think I would like to work on the biography this evening.”

Victor’s work is constant and self-generating. He could happily remain at his desk day and night, but the rest of us have had to take up various projects to keep us occupied during the exile. Charles claims to be learning to be a photographer. François-Victor busies himself translating the complete works of Shakespeare into French. Adèle is working at her embroidery, and playing the piano and composing music for it. I am writing a biography of Victor. Well, I am writing the biography, but Victor is helping.

“Of course,” I say.

“Can you begin right after supper?”

“I can.”

“But, Maman,” says Adèle, “you promised that you would listen to my new piece of music tonight.”

“Can I not do both?”

“No,” says Victor, waving his soup spoon in the air. “I will not have my thoughts interrupted by that great wooden beast.” He furrows his brow, puts the spoon down again beside his soup plate and fishes in his breast pocket for a small notebook. He swivels in his chair so that his back is to his family, and writes down what he has just said. He is so clever, my husband! He says so many witty remarks, and all of them will end up on the pages of his novels.

Adèle has her head bowed. I pat her arm, but she jerks it away from me.

“No matter, Dédé,” says Charles from across the table. “You
can help me in my darkroom tonight. I think I have taken some good photographs of the garden this afternoon.”

The biography is massive, and we’re not even up to the production of
Hernani
yet.

Victor likes us to work on the dining-room table, after all the supper dishes have been cleared. He spreads out the pages of the biography and walks the perimeter of the table, surveying them. Sometimes he moves the pages into a different order. Sometimes he dictates a phrase or series of phrases, which I, seated at one end of the table, copy down. After we have finished working for the evening, Victor will gather up the pages and hide them behind the wood panelling in one of the secret cubbyholes that he had built when he renovated the house.

There is a restlessness to him tonight that makes me wonder if he really did go for his usual walk today. He moves quickly round the table, not settling on anything, his movements bending the light of the candle first one way, and then another.

“We will write a single day,” he finally says, stopping just behind me. I can feel the heat from his body at my back.

“The day of the
Hernani
battle?” I say, eager to move the narrative along. At this rate we will have to do six volumes just to get to this present moment.

“No,” he says, and he bends close so that his mouth is right next to my ear. “We will write about the first time we met Sainte-Beuve, that night he came to our apartment on rue de Vaugirard. You must remember that night, Adèle?”

“No,” I say. “I don’t. Not at all.”

“Come now.” His breath is in my hair. My hand tightens on the quill pen. “You must have a perfect recollection of the first time you caught a glimpse of our dear friend.”

“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 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 that 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 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 a flutter. 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 cliff top today,” I say to Dédé at breakfast. “I would like 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 cliff top 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 stroll 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 is 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.