The Reinvention of Love (23 page)

I suddenly feel exhausted.

“I have asked for nothing,” I say. “I have done my duty. When you wanted to move to Jersey, I followed 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.

We are the ghosts here now. Charles, busy developing his watery photographs in the dark cupboard under the stairs. François-Victor, frantically trying to find the right echo for each word of Shakespeare’s. We exist in this place as the spirits of who we used to be when we were truly alive.

Victor relented. It didn’t happen immediately. But over time, and with pressure from Charlot and Toto, he allowed me to take Dédé back to Paris each year for a month or two.

But it was too late. The melancholia inflicted by the exile was not easily shaken off. Dédé was withdrawn in Paris, preferring to hole up in our hotel room writing her endless letters to Albert Pinson than to venture out into Parisian society. She had lost the facility for mixing with people. She had lost the desire to be flirtatious and witty with strangers. She saw no point in it.

I could only do so much, and in the end it turns out that I could do nothing at all.

Pinson was posted to Halifax, Canada. In the spring following this posting I made my way to Paris, on the understanding that Dédé would be joining me within the week. She packed her trunk on Guernsey and dutifully left the island, not
for Paris, but for London, where, unbeknown to anyone, she took passage on a boat bound for Halifax.

This is where she is now. We had word from her that she arrived safely and that she was reunited with her sailor. She wrote home to ask for money, saying that she had married Pinson and they were happy, and that she would remain in Halifax with him, waiting for his posting to end. Although we were very upset with this arrangement, we dutifully took out an advertisement in the local Guernsey paper announcing the marriage. She writes to me occasionally, instructing me to be happy for her. She gets angry when I express any concern for her situation.

Victor is furious. She left the island without his permission. Married or not, he wants her to return. He rages around Hauteville House, beating his chest with outrage and self-pity.

I am glad Adèle is safe from her father’s fury. She is on the other side of the world. It took over a month for her to travel by ship to Halifax, and Victor, despite his vitriolic outbursts, is not willing to travel that same time and distance to bring her home. Instead, we all write letters, asking her to return. She writes letters back ignoring our requests, and relating the glories of her married life.

She is lost to us.

I now remain in Paris. I cannot bear to return to Guernsey, to Victor’s fury and his cloying self-pity. I write to Adèle, but I can do nothing for her. She has moved far away from my words and my embrace. She is following her own dark star and it has pulled her out of my sphere entirely. She always was half in this world and half outside it.

I would travel to Halifax to beg her to come back, but Victor won’t grant me the money for the passage.

“If she truly loved me, she would come home on her own,”
is all he will say when I ask him to let me go and fetch her.

Paris has changed very little in my absence. It would have been easier for me if nothing was as I remembered. But everywhere I go, I am reminded of little Adèle, of my former life with my young family, of Léopoldine. I cannot walk past our old apartment in the Place Royale without feeling faint at the sight of it, and I weep openly outside the little shop where I used to buy cakes for my children.

It is hard to remember that there was once an ease to my days, or that I ever enjoyed myself.

I stand in the little park opposite our old apartment. Other people walk through those rooms now. A woman in a red dress stops in front of one of the tall windows and looks down at me looking up at her. It is the strangest feeling, as though I am observing the ghost of myself. Or worse, I have become the ghost of myself, standing outside my own life.

I long for the past with a fierce hunger, and there seems nothing to feed it.

Well, perhaps there is one thing.

I will go and see Charles.

PARIS, 1860s

CHARLES

HOW DID I BECOME
an old man, a man in his early sixties? I stand in front of the looking glass in my bedroom as I dress for dinner, surveying myself. I am fat and bald. My forehead is twisted into a scowl and my lips are twisted into a sneer. My hands are fleshy, their nails yellow and brittle. My eyes have lost their sheen. I am not a man anyone could love. The admiration I sometimes get from younger writers is the best I can hope for. I can entice these writers to me by revealing the secrets of my contemporaries. I am not ashamed to dine out on the good name of other writers and I would show anyone’s letters to anyone else who asked. My mother once accused me of keeping secrets when I was a boy. But now, in my old age, I am the opposite. I will tell all. I am not to be trusted. My bland countenance doesn’t betray my wily heart. People confide in me because I appear to be harmless, and they are usually sorry.

I look around, at the long table loaded with books and papers, at the pair of mahogany bookcases against the wall, at the curtain-less iron bed, the worn armchair by the fireplace, the two bare windows that overlook the street.

I remember my rooms at the Hôtel de Rouen, how I had one for working and one for sleeping, and how pleasing that arrangement was. It strikes me, as I stand before the looking glass, that those separate rooms were symbolic of my life then, that there was a difference between my life and work, a separation. Now it is all blended together. My life is my work. I have no other.

I used to think that age ripened us; like fruit, we would become mellow as we grew older. We would relax into a version of ourselves that was the whole accumulated truth of our existence, that was the culmination of all our joys and sorrows and intellectual ideas.

But that is not what happens. We do not ripen like a peach. We grow hard in some places, soft in others. We are inflexible where we should yield, and we give way where we should hold fast.

And I wonder if it is added misery or consolation to know that when we depart this world we take with us the whole order of familiar things that have structured our days and given us comfort. What we have cared for in life and what has bound us most securely to it will no doubt accompany us, or go before us into death.

It no longer matters much what I do, so long as I have something to do – something to do in the mornings, and somewhere to go at night.

It is fortunate that I have something quite pleasant to do in the evenings these days. I belong to a dining club that meets once a fortnight at the Magny restaurant in rue Contreescarpe-Dauphine. We are all writers who gather there, some old, some young: Gavarni, Flaubert, Turgenev, Jules and Edmond Goncourt, Gautier, Renan, Taine, Charles Edmond, Eudore Soulié, and Frédéric Baudry. George Sand comes when she is in town.

What makes the dinners memorable and enjoyable is the rule we have for the club. The rule is a simple one: we are permitted to say anything at all during the dinners, but we have made a promise to one another that whatever we say will not leave the room.

What do writers talk about when they can speak freely on any subject?

Well, they don’t talk about writing.

This evening, Flaubert wants to talk about the different head-dresses that women wear to bed.

“I am partial to the cap,” he says, “but not the net.”

“The net is for a lower-class woman,” says one of the Goncourts. “The whores I visit wear nets.”

“I have known a lady to wear a net,” says Flaubert.

“Wouldn’t it be a matter of comfort?” I say.

“What do your women wear?” asks the other Goncourt.

“I must confess that I have never spent the whole night with a woman.”

There is shocked silence.

“On account of my work,” I add, which makes no real sense, but no one cares to challenge me on it.

We move on to the mechanics of love.

“I believe,” says Taine, “that women can only be satisfied in love when they are young.”

“I have found the opposite to be true,” says Flaubert.

“Isn’t it our duty, as men, to satisfy a woman, no matter what her age?” I say.

“This from a man who has never spent the night with a woman?” says the Goncourt with the moustache, and everyone laughs.

The Goncourt brothers, Jules and Edmond, wrote a book together, a novel called
Madame Gervaisais
which had the double misfortune to be released on the day in 1852 that Napoleon III staged his coup, and to be reviewed in the press by me.

It has not met with much success.