Helen Humphreys Three-Book Bundle (48 page)

Adèle giggles. “That sounded exactly like Victor,” she says.

I am in a bad humour by the time we get into a cab at the Pont Neuf.

But Adèle reaches across me, pulls down the window blinds so we’re hidden from the driver and the people on the streets. She squeezes my knee. I grab for her breasts. We fall clumsily into each other, our first kiss missing completely.

My churlishness vanishes. The rock of the cab is the sway of our bodies is the rhythm of my heart rocking in its carriage of bone. The invisible streets pass by. Adèle is undoing the buttons on my trousers. I have forgotten my words for the river. I am only here. And love opens me.

T
HERE IS AN ORCHARD
in the Jardin du Luxembourg where we like to walk. Sometimes we have the children with us, but I prefer it when we are alone, when we are not worried about whether an errant touch or a stolen kiss will be reported, innocently enough, to Victor.

There are hundreds of apple trees in the orchard, and we like to play a game with the names of the different varieties, grouping them into categories. Often we choose a category before we get to the orchard.

“Animals,” says Adèle today.

It is a beautiful late-spring afternoon. We are blessedly without the children today. We walk between the trees languidly, our hands brushing against each other, the heat from our two bodies the same temperature as the air that surrounds us. Adèle looks to the left and I look to the right, reading the names written on the tags at the base of the trees.

“Dog’s Snout,” I say triumphantly.

“Sheep’s Head,” she says.

It takes a while to find another animal name. I pull her off the path, kiss her deeply. She runs her hands down my back. Someone wanders past and we break apart.

“Mouse,” she says. “Cat’s head.”

“Mermaid,” I say.

“A mermaid isn’t an animal.”

“It’s half-animal.”

“Half—fictional animal.”

“Miller’s Thumb,” I say.

“That’s a man.”

“Man is an animal.”

Adèle strokes my arm. “You are hopeless,” she says.

We walk through the orchard. We move through other subjects.

“Love,” says Adèle.

This time I’m the one who wins.

“Perpetuelle,” I say. “Fail Me Never. Open Heart. Everlasting.”

She is left with First and Last, and the rather dubious Neversink.

“Never sink,” she says, dramatically clasping me around the waist. “Float, my sweet darling. Float! Float!”

We pause before the label on a slender tree.

“Why would you want to eat an apple with that name?” I ask.

The tree bears the tag
Great Unknown
.

“Maybe it’s a description of the taste,” says Adèle.

“Surely they could be more specific than that.” I imagine this apple-namer as a man of melancholy nature, someone who has lost faith in words and yet is still expected to attach them to meaning. But who would propose a name like this? Wouldn’t they just ask someone else to name the apple more appropriately?

“I wish we could eat one,” says Adèle. But the blossom has just faded, and the apples aren’t yet growing on the tree. We won’t be able to taste the Great Unknown until the autumn.

We walk in silence for a while, although I keep looking at the names on the trees. We have just over an hour before Adèle has to return home. This is not long enough to go to the small hotel where we sometimes manage an entire exquisite afternoon—if we are lucky. Our life together is broken into different locales, depending on how much time we have to spend. The geography of our love corresponds absolutely to the clock.

Increasingly, I feel despair when I think of our future. I don’t know how we are to resolve this problem of not having enough time together. Some days I entertain the idea of telling Victor. Would friendship be able to triumph over adultery? On the days when I am feeling happy and optimistic, this seems entirely possible. On the days when I despair, like today, I fear Victor would kill me if he knew of his wife’s affair with me. Certainly he would challenge me to a duel, and since he is more robust, a better sportsman, and likely to be filled with moral outrage and vitriol, he would probably kill me with his first shot.

“I wish that we had time to go to our hotel,” says Adèle. “Or that we could be naked here, under the trees.” She squeezes my hand, and I manage a smile. Each time I drift away from her, she manages to snag me back, and I am so grateful for that, so grateful for her. I mustn’t poison what we have by thinking of the future. I close my eyes briefly. I can smell the last of the blossom, a perfume so clean and sweet that it is hard to imagine anything more perfect.

The names of the apples that I like best are the simple names. I find them more profound than the poetic ones, because I imagine the simple titles bear witness to the places or the circumstances where the apples were first found.

River. Sunrise. Field. Day. Sunset. Star. Hunger.

“If you could name an apple,” I ask Adèle, “what would you call it?”

I think she will pick a flowery name, something poetic that makes a tangle in the mouth. But she answers swiftly, as though she had thought of the question long before I asked it.

“I would call it after you,” she says.

“Charles?”

“No, not Charles,” she says. “Your other name. Charlotte.”

I
ARRIVE FIRST
and take a seat near the back of the church. It is afternoon. The building is empty except for me, and my slightest movement echoes loudly in the cavernous chamber. The pew is uncomfortable, and when I shift on the hard wooden bench, the rustle of my skirts can be heard throughout the vaulted room.

When our time is short and the day is a good one, Adèle and I meet in the orchard. When our time is short and the weather is inclement, we meet in the church. Today it is rainy and cool outside, and the unheated church feels damp. So much easier to believe in God when the sun is shining and the stained-glass window shuffles its colours over the grey stone and dark wood interior.

I like arriving first. I like the anticipation of waiting for Adèle, the sound of the heavy doors creaking open, her quick footsteps on the stone floor. I like watching her walk down the aisle towards me, her face flushed from hurrying. That first moment, when she looks for me and finds me, is a moment I never tire of witnessing. That moment of recognition is one of the most satisfying in life. The instant a lover seeks you out. The instant of understanding something, of working out the answer to a problem that has been puzzling you for some time. The moment when something suddenly becomes clear.

This church is not the closest one to Notre-Dame-des-Champs, where Adèle and I live. We cannot risk going to the church in our own neighbourhood. It is not that we fear meeting Victor—he is rarely inside a church—but more that we fear meeting someone who knows Victor and Adèle. And that church is the one in which Victor and Adèle were married. So we frequent this modest church, many streets away, where we are fairly certain we will not be discovered. But even then, we take precautions. We come in the middle of the afternoon, when the church will be empty. And I come dressed as a woman.

You might think this is the secret I was referring to earlier, but this is not it. Dressing as a woman to rendezvous with Adèle is simply strategy. Two women in a church are not given a second thought, a second glance. Two women can sit close together on the same pew, can walk down the street with their arms linked and arouse no suspicion. They will not be thought of as lovers. They will merely be two friends who are out enjoying the city together.

I borrow my mother’s clothes. As she lives, temporarily, with me, it is not difficult for me to take a dress or two from her wardrobe and return them before she has noticed their absence. I look remarkably like my mother, with my high forehead and my delicate features, and I make a convincing woman. Sometimes I wonder, if Victor did see us together, whether he would be able to tell that his wife’s new friend was, in fact, his old friend. It is tempting to put this to the test, but part of my being a convincing woman is that I act the role with confidence, and I fear that I would lose my nerve in the presence of Victor, that I would falter, and that he would discover my true identity.

I like being a woman. There is a freedom in it that I find a relief. No one is going to challenge me to a duel. If I say something out of turn, I will be ignored or forgiven for my outburst, not expected to pace twenty steps into the undergrowth with a loaded pistol. I like walking on the inside of the street, not out by the gutter, which runs with sewage. I like being helped up into a cab, having doors held open for me, having men doff their hats to me in the avenue. I like the whisper of my skirts, the feel of them in my hands when I gather them up in a knot to step over a muddy patch of ground. I look much better in a woman’s hat than I do in a man’s. My small hands were made for soft leather gloves that button up the forearm with tiny pearl buttons.

Often I prefer being Charlotte to Charles, and the surprising thing is that I think Adèle prefers this too. With Charles she has to feel the guilt of adultery, the shame that she is cuckolding her husband, breaching her marriage vows. With Charlotte, she can pretend that theirs is simply an innocent friendship. She is sometimes much more lighthearted with Charlotte.

There is the heavy toll of the church door swinging shut. I turn in my seat and see Adèle. She stands there for a moment at the back of the church, with the last bit of light from the day outside fleeing behind her. She is dressed in dark colours, as she frequently is when she meets me here, as though simply to enter the church is an act of mourning.

It does not take her long to find me in the dim interior. She hurries up the aisle and slides into the pew where I am sitting, hurling herself towards me with a recklessness that I find so touching. All my words dissolve to feeling and it takes ages for them to struggle back into shape.

“Charlotte,” she says, “you look so lovely. I have missed you so much.”

We haven’t seen each other for five full days. The separation has seemed eternal.

“Charlotte,” she says, “I want you so badly. I could take you right here, right now.” She runs a hand across the front of my dress, and a small moan escapes my lips.

At first when we met in the church, we spent some of the time in prayer. Adèle is more religious than I am, and she believed that by increasing her devoutness, she would alleviate some of the guilt she felt at having an affair. By praying more, by praying harder, by having prayer be a large part of our relationship, she would be forgiven the sin of adultery. We would kneel together in the pew, heads bowed and hands clasped in front of us. I don’t know what silent words she offered up to God, but I know I prayed, with all my strength, that she would leave Victor and come away with me. I feared that our prayers were cancelling each other out. She was probably asking to fight temptation. I was begging to have her yield to it.

Now I lean my head on her shoulder. She still smells of the outdoors, hasn’t taken on the musty perfume of the church. I feel weak with longing.

In the orchard, if we are lucky, we are able to hold hands, to manage several kisses while walking through the groves of trees. In the hotel, we can be entirely ourselves, without clothes or pretence or observers. The church has more privacy than the orchard, but it is the house of the Lord and comes with his attendant laws. In the orchard, we can pretend that we are courting. In the hotel, we can pretend that we are married. In the church, we know that we are sinners.

That knowledge does not entirely encourage romance.

Do lovers always suffer an impediment to their love? Is that what keeps love sweet and strong—the circumstances that would force the lovers apart make them cleave together more keenly? Will we end up poisoning ourselves, like the lovers in Victor’s wretched play? What other choice will there be? We cannot be together, and yet we cannot be apart.

“We should pray,” Adèle says without conviction.

But we don’t pray. I lift my head from her shoulder and take her face in my hands, kiss her deeply and passionately. The church recedes, disappears. There is only the mix of our breath, the feel of Adèle’s skin, our kiss. Love is a kind of attentiveness, I think. And yet, love also renders the world outside the lovers invisible, without consequence.

Adèle breaks away first. “I want you so badly,” she says. “I’m not to be trusted.” She entwines her fingers in mine. “I will think up a lie for tomorrow. We must go to the hotel for the afternoon. Can you get away?”

I am meant to be at the newspaper tomorrow, but I will work up an excuse not to go. Perhaps I will be ill. I do feel ill.

“Yes,” I say. “Can you manage to escape for a whole afternoon?”

“I must.”

The thought of the pleasures of the hotel room makes me squirm on the hard wooden bench. Adèle tightens her grip on my hand.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“For what?”

“For causing you pain. For not marrying you instead of Victor.”

“But you didn’t know me when you married Victor.”

“I’m sorry anyway.”

This is what happens in the church. Prayer and wish are entwined, and it becomes impossible to pry them apart. There is a strong need to confess.

“You wouldn’t have had your children,” I say, “if you had married me.”

“I love you more than my children,” says Adèle. Her words resound through the empty church, and we are both shocked into silence by what she has just said.

It strikes me that Adèle has more courage than I do. I have been looking at our future through the filter of my character. I would do better to regard it through the filter of hers. If she can say a thing like that, then she is capable of more than I supposed. She is capable of more than I am. She will have the strength to find a way for us to go forward.

I
T HAS BECOME IMPOSSIBLE
to meet with Adèle. There has been an outbreak of cholera in the city and it is unwise to leave one’s house, as the streets are full of infection—these same streets whose raw sewage caused the outbreak. It is said that two thousand people died on one day alone last week. Hearses prowl the avenues, more numerous than horse and cab. All manner of wagons and carts have been pressed into service to carry the hapless dead to the overcrowded cemeteries. Grave-diggers are reportedly jumping on the corpses to squash them down and make room for the freshly dead. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that in the haste to halt the spread of the disease, people are being buried alive.