The Reinvention of Love (9 page)

Victor is standing beside me. He’s not looking out into the garden, but rather is staring down at his hands resting on the window ledge. I look down as well. His hands are broad, ink-stained, the nails chipped and dirty. These hands write the words that keep us all alive. They are also the hands that wrote the play that is forcing us to move across the river.

Victor slides his right hand towards my left hand, tentatively, like a cat slinking up on a bird.

“It will be an adventure, my darling,” he says.

I turn from the window before he can touch me.

“I must call the children in for bed.”

I sit on the edge of Dédé’s bed after she is tucked in and ready for sleep. She is excited about the move, keeps wanting to ask me questions, to talk about it.

“Will there be flowers over there?” she asks. “Will there be cats?”

“It’s the other side of the river, not the other side of the world,” I say.

“Will there be apples?”

“Of course.”

“Will I have a bed?”

“You will have this bed. We will load it into a cart and it will travel across the river and be set down in your new room.”

Dédé laughs delightedly and clutches my hand. “Can I lie in it when it is on the cart?” she asks.

“Shall we pretend?” I say. “Move over.” I slide down beside her on the narrow bed and she rolls into my arms. “There would be stars above us. Bright stars. Close your eyes and tell me when you see them.”

Dédé squirms in my arms. “I see them! I see them!”

“And the cart would be bumpy over the cobblestones.” I gently rock her in my arms, back and forth, back and forth. “The night air might be chill, but you would be tucked up so warm in your bed.” I tighten my arms around her. “You would be so safe and warm.” I continue to rock my daughter, closing my eyes as well, imagining the sharp stars above us, and the dank smell of the river; the yellow lick of lamplight on the bridges.

Dédé’s breath opens into sleep, but I stay with her on the bed, keep her in my arms. She is so light and small, more like a bird than a child. My little one. My treasure.

I am a selfish woman to want more than my children. It should be enough to care for them, to love them like this. For every other woman it would be enough. Why isn’t it enough for me?

I open my jewellery box and shove its contents into a carpet bag. I put the letters from Charles in there as well, and some of the gifts my children have given me – drawings, a swan feather, dried flowers. I take the pencil portraits I have made of the children, and some of the first poems that Victor wrote to me, when we were newly in love.

I will send for my dresses. I will send for my cloaks. I will send for the carpets and tapestries that belonged to my family. I will send for the few sticks of furniture that are my own. I will send for my books and paintings.

Downstairs Victor packs for the family. I can hear him crashing things into the packing crates. Upstairs I take only what I can’t bear to be parted from tonight, for I have made up my mind that I will leave after Victor has gone to bed. I will carry Dédé from her slumber and we will walk the short distance to Charles’s house. She has fallen asleep on the story of moving, and she will wake to find that it is true, although it will not be the move she had imagined. Still, I will make sure that there are flowers and apples and cats for her in her new life.

I will send for her bed.

I don’t hear the door, but I do hear the voices. Victor’s booming voice, and then the fainter, more feminine voice of Charles. I stiffen, and my breath comes fast and shallow. I can’t hear what they’re saying, so I drop the carpet bag on my bed and creep from my bedroom into the hallway. I move slowly down the corridor, my feet finding the boards that don’t creak, until I am standing near the top of the stairs. From this spot I can hear everything perfectly.

At first I think that they are talking about the play, because this is what they often talk about, Victor is always enlisting Charles to give an opinion on his writing. But I realize quite quickly that they are not discussing literature. No, Charles is telling Victor that he and I are having an affair.

My legs buckle. I lean against the wall. I can’t believe he is doing this. Why is he doing this?

The voices float up to me, as though Charles and Victor are in a play and I am sitting in the balcony, having paid handsomely for a ticket to this theatre.

Charles is boasting. Victor is scornful. Charles offers proof. Victor is confused and bewildered. Charles is penitent. Victor is outraged. Charles tries to take back what he has said. Victor won’t let him.

It has all the heightened emotion of any good drama, all the elements of a drama that Victor might have written himself.

I remember the first time I met Charles. He came to visit Victor and me on rue de Vaugirard, when we lived above a joiner’s shop. Victor had invited him round, was ecstatic about his visit because Charles had given Victor’s poems a wonderful review in the
Globe
. Victor felt that he’d found a champion in the press, someone to review his work favourably and advance his reputation. He practically threw himself down the stairs when he heard the knock at the apartment door.

I don’t remember what we ate, or the time of year, or whether I was pregnant yet with my first child. I don’t remember where we sat, whether there was a fire, if there was rain at the window, what I was wearing, how much wine we drank. It is strange how the details can fall away and yet the feelings remain.

I had two feelings that night. The first was one of relief. If Victor had a friend that he could talk poetry to, then he would have no need to be constantly discussing it with me. I had initially been flattered that he valued my opinion so highly, but then I saw him have the same discussions with his friends, with my sister’s husband, with the fishmonger and the lamplighter. It was a discussion he was having with himself, except that it helped Victor to be able to have his inner conversations out loud. I, like all his other listeners, was required to hear his ideas, not to comment upon them. And if there was someone else willing to take my place in this, so much the better.

Later, Charles remarked on my silence during that first evening, how I had said not a word to him when he came for supper. It was not that I intended to be rude, or uninterested in his company, but rather that I was so grateful he was engaging Victor in conversation, that I feared anything I said would snap that thread. For the first time since we had married, I could have my own thoughts, and not have to be reacting to Victor’s. I could sit over my needlework and muddle through my feelings,
think about the events of the day, or of my life so far, anticipate the pleasures of the evening, when, after our guest had departed, my husband would take me to bed.

I had nothing
but
desire for Victor in those days.

The second feeling I remember having that night was curiosity. Who was this young man who wanted so badly to make a friend of my husband? I watched him out of the corner of my eye. He looked a little like a bird, with his hooked nose and high forehead – like a bird of prey. And, like a bird of prey, he was intent on his target. He wanted Victor to like him. He fawned and fussed, laughed a beat after my husband started laughing, repeated the same words back to Victor, a few minutes after Victor had said them. How agreeable he was being! How friendly!

What did he want?

I asked Charles this once, when we were lying in bed in our hotel room, limbs entwined. Be honest, I said, because I felt that around his own ambitions, he was not always truthful.

I believed him a genius
, he said.
I wanted him to help me become a better poet.

But this was not all. The feeling I had that first night was a feeling I sometimes had later on, once Charles and I were lovers. It was faint then, came to me like a whiff of stale perfume carried by the breeze.

What I felt that night was that Charles did not just want to please Victor, but rather that he wanted to
be
Victor.

Had I just exchanged one man for a lesser version of the same man? Was I merely a trophy to be flourished and fought over in this contest between Charles and Victor? Was everything really about literature after all?

This is partly why I prefer Charlotte. She would not confess our affair to Victor. She would keep it secret. She would keep it sacred.

The shouting has subsided. The voices are quieter. There is the clink of glasses. Now Charles and Victor are talking. They are drinking wine.

I walk back along the hallway towards my bedroom, not caring if they hear the creaking floor. I push open the door, sit down heavily on the edge of my bed. There is the carpet bag with its precious sentimental cargo – all that hopefulness I felt, mere moments ago.

Would life with Charles really be different from life with Victor?

I put my head in my hands and weep.

By the time I hear his heavy tread on the stairs, I have stopped crying. When he steps through my bedroom door, I am sitting up straight, composed, my hands folded demurely in my lap.

Victor has had all his emotion with Charles. They have fought and talked and drunk wine, like lovers in a spat. By the time he comes to me, he is spent. He stands there in the doorway, a shadow framed by shadow.

“You will end this,” he says. “I will not be shamed by your behaviour for one more instant.”

He doesn’t wait for my reply, or even for my acknowledgement that I know what he is talking about. It is not a discussion. He takes it for granted that I have been eavesdropping. He turns and walks back down the hallway, back down the stairs. In a few moments I can hear the noises of his resumed packing.

Once, when I was running towards Charles at the Luxembourg Gardens, he grabbed me, in full flight, before I collided with
him, and he asked me if I was running towards him, or simply fleeing Victor. Perhaps it was both.

When I was a girl, I had the ambitions of a boy. I could run and jump and ride a horse. I was good at drawing, and good at writing. When I fell in love with Victor, I attached my ambitions to his own, craved his successes, wished for him to be a great artist. My own desires fell away when we married, when I became pregnant, when I had my four sweet children.

I didn’t think they would ever come back.

But somehow my ambitions have returned as a single drive, as the force that compels me to love Charles and Charlotte and not Victor.

When I rush towards Charles along the gravel path of the Jardin du Luxembourg, just as I ran out into the meadow as a girl, chasing after my sister through the long grass, I am not in flight. I am hurtling headlong, with no way to stop the momentum I’ve gathered.

And what I want, what I long for, is not to escape so much as simply to arrive.

CHARLES

THE HUGOS HAVE MOVED.
I have not seen my beloved in weeks. Despite Victor’s orders that I end my affair with his wife, I have no intention of doing so. The brief notes that Adèle has managed to send me reassure me that she has no plan to end the affair either. But we have encountered great difficulty in seeing one another of late. Victor does not leave Adèle alone for a moment. I have had to write secret letters to her and leave them, under the name Madame Simon, at the Poste Restante. She has sent letters to me by foot messenger, often using the same dim-witted girl who used to board with the Hugos. And despite his avowal that our friendship would not be affected by my love for his wife, Victor always treats me awkwardly when we meet. Thankfully, this is not often, as he has been kept busy with his change of residence and his new book about Cathédrale Notre-Dame.