The Reinvention of Love (20 page)

“I could definitely be dead within the week,” I say. But Adèle doesn’t hear me, or chooses not to.

“They’re full of rocks,” I say.

“What are?”

“The Channel Islands.”

Adèle turns and regards me critically. She holds a wooden spoon in each hand. I don’t dare ask her why.

“They’re islands,” she says. “They have coasts. Coasts are full of rocks.” She speaks slowly, as though she’s talking to her imbecile cousin.

The Channel Islands are a mix of French and English. I feel a brief twinge of envy. Victor is already famous in France. Now he will become famous to the English as well.

“There is no stopping him,” I say.

Adèle puts down her spoons. “It is because you do not know,” she says.

“Know what?”

“How it is for Madame Hugo. You do not know anything, so you imagine everything.”

She is right. In some ways it would be easier if Adèle were dead. It would be finite. I would not be tormented by the endless possibilities of her existence.

I slam the atlas shut and drop myself down into a chair. If I am honest, it is not Adèle’s safety that really concerns me. It is not imagining her being blown off a rocky headland into an unforgiving sea that causes me sleepless nights. It is imagining her happiness – her happiness without me.

GUERNSEY, 1850s

ADELE

I WALK OUT ONTO THE TERRACE.
My children are still at breakfast there. They like to eat outdoors when the weather is fair. They like the bright morning light and the shuffle of sea against the rocks below.

“Maman!” calls Dédé, and when I go to her, she pulls me down beside her on the chaise. “What will we do today, Maman?”

If we were still in Paris, my children would be married by now. They would have lives of their own. But the exile has forced us to remain together as a family, and even though Charles, the eldest, is over thirty, and Adèle is a grown woman of twenty-seven, the isolation has turned them into children again and they look to me to lead them through each day.

I close my eyes against the sun, then open them and see the rag tied around the railing at the top of the house, the signal that Victor is up and working.

“Maman!” Dédé squeezes my hand.

“We could pick wildflowers on the cliff top,” I say. “Charlot, you might photograph us up there, and you could bring your books, Toto. We could have a picnic.”

Dédé drops my hand. “We did that yesterday,” she says.

“But we had fun,” I persist. “Did we not? And why not do something again if it was pleasurable the first time?”

There’s a short silence.

“Yesterday wasn’t the first time,” says François-Victor.

“I might photograph in the garden today,” says Charles. He
stretches his legs out, crossing his feet at the ankles. “Or I might have a nap.”

He has grown plump, my eldest son. More often he declines a walk than accepts one. He is not like his father. Every afternoon, after he has finished his twenty pages, Victor will stride out across the cliffs to the sea to sit on the boulder he calls his
armchair
and gaze out over the waves, waiting to be inspired.

But the exile has been so good for Charles! He has time to indulge his desires, time to explore his interests, and the naps serve as
his
inspirational pause between artistic pursuits.

“Toto?” I say, turning to François-Victor. “Will you walk out with me today?”

“Perhaps.” Toto does not like to disappoint, so he rarely commits to anything. I find this habit of his both touching and infuriating, so I refrain from commenting on it.

“Dédé?”

“No, Maman.” Adèle has lowered her head in a sulk. I put my arm around her shoulders.

“Dédé, why don’t you go and fetch your embroidery and I will help you with it. We could sit here in the sun. You could ask Sylvie to bring me coffee.”

“Sylvie left,” says Toto.

“For the day?”

“Forever.”

“So soon?” The maid was barely here two weeks, and it was so nice to have a French girl for a change.

“Now it’s Abigail,” says Charles. “She’s older.”

“Should last longer then,” says François-Victor, and they both laugh.

I ignore their comment.

“Dédé, go and fetch your embroidery.” I give her a little push. “Never mind about the coffee.”

“I’ll get your coffee, Maman.” Toto rises from his chair. I already know that he will not go for a walk on the cliff with
me today, that this offer to bring me coffee is his apology for that. I am more than grateful to accept an act of kindness from my children. I squeeze his hand as he steps over his brother’s outstretched legs.

“Thank you, my darling.”

“Oh,
d’accord, d’accord
.” Adèle gets up, reluctantly, and follows François-Victor into the house.

It is suddenly so quiet on the terrace. I can hear the creak of a gull’s wing as it flies overhead, and the rush and fall of the ocean below.

“Another day in paradise,” says Charles, bitterly.

“Yes,” I say to him. “Yes, I think it is.”

We went to Jersey first, not Guernsey. On Jersey they spoke French. It was as simple as that. Victor felt that the Channel Islands were pieces of France that had broken off and been cast into the sea, only to be plucked out and claimed by the English.

In Jersey we rented a house that Victor christened “Marine Terrace”. Like this house, it had a view of the sea, and like this house, it was haunted. The ghost of a young woman who had killed her child paced the halls, and sang in a sweet, melodious tone outside my bedroom door. She was known locally as the “White Lady” and Victor became so obsessed with her that he started to write love poetry to her.

We were under a spell on Jersey, I think, the long spell of Léopoldine’s early death. When we were in Paris we could hold on to the memory of her. It was there in everything we saw, everything we did. Every room I entered in our apartment in Place Royale was a room I had been in with her. We did not have to work at remembering her. She remained with us. But here, out on the windswept Channel Islands, we could suddenly feel her gone, and so we tried hard to keep her close.
Victor had the dress she was drowned in displayed in the dining room of Marine Terrace, and we held nightly seances there so that we might speak with her.

Did I believe that she returned to us, that she tapped out words with the help of the table leg? No, I did not. The seances functioned as prayer for me. They created a space in which I could be with the memory of my beloved daughter. And they made me believe in the strength of our family. When we held hands around the table, I felt the love we had for one another, and for our departed Léopoldine. I felt that we were solidly together again in those moments.

But strength in excess can easily swing to weakness. And when Victor wanted to have three seances a day and invite any stranger he found in town to come and join us – when he thought he had summoned, not only Léopoldine, but Jesus Christ, Shakespeare, Napoleon and Hannibal to our house – I had to put a stop to the ritual.

Now I can see that it was a mistake to have indulged it for so long.

At one of the seances my youngest daughter, Adèle, met a penniless sailor named Albert Pinson. They quickly struck up a courtship and now, even though he has been posted back to England, and cannot possibly afford to marry her, she remains obsessed and will not stop trying to communicate with him.

Toto brings me coffee. Charles goes inside to his darkroom. I wait on the terrace for Dédé, drink my coffee, wait some more, and then I go into the house to search for her. She is by the window in the parlour, holding something up to the light, turning it this way and that. When I see the flash, I realize that she is holding the glass from her hand mirror, carefully removed from the backing.

“He won’t see you in England,” I say. There is nothing
out of the window but the endless blue of the sea. “He can’t possibly see you from here.”

Adèle won’t look at me. She is intent on her signalling.

“Dédé.”

“You don’t know that he doesn’t, Maman. You don’t know what he feels.”

We were three long years on Jersey, three years of sitting around the pedestal table and watching it tap out the alphabet against the wooden floor. I had not realized how impressionable my youngest daughter was, how those seances had trained her to believe in the intangible.

I slip my arm about her waist. “Come, child. Bring your embroidery out to the terrace. I will help you with your stitches.”

Having first been expelled from France, Victor was then expelled from Jersey in the autumn of 1855 for organizing a protest against a visit the English queen paid to his enemy, Napoleon III. Because Victor was expelled, we were all expelled, and so we came here, to Guernsey.

I had thought that prolonged exile might dull Victor’s loathing of the Emperor, but it has sharpened it instead. When he wrote his scathing pamphlet,
Napoleon le Petit
, he thought up many ingenious ways of smuggling it into France so that it might be read. It was stuffed into raw chickens, into carriage clocks, into bales of hay, into trunks with false bottoms, into shoes with false heels, into hollowed-out walking sticks and cigars. It was towed in sealed boxes below the waterline of fishing boats and thrown at night onto empty beaches. There was even an attempt to launch the pamphlet in balloons from the back of our house in Jersey, when the wind was blowing towards France.

The second exile has just confirmed everything Victor was
convinced of when we first left Paris. He remains absolute in the righteousness of his convictions. I do not believe that we will ever see France again.

Adèle’s fingers are jumpy. They will not hold the stitches. I put my hand over hers to steady them.

“You are nervous today,” I say. “You need some exercise. Come with me for a walk along the cliff.”

Adèle puts the embroidery down beside her and leans into me. “Don’t leave me, Maman,” she whispers, and I put my arms around her and hold her close.

“I won’t leave you, Dédé,” I say. “You never have to worry about that.”

I am blessed to have my children with me. I am blessed to have their company long past my entitlement to it.

We have bought this house here on Guernsey – Hauteville House, halfway up the steep hill from the town. It is the first house we have ever owned. Victor means to stay. He has been redecorating it since we moved in. He has built on the top of the house a glass box where he works. He has constructed a fireplace in the shape of a giant letter H, and made a large candelabra entirely of old cotton reels. He is so clever, my husband! There are tapestries on the walls. The rooms are painted rich, deep colours. One of the rooms is entirely devoted to the display of decorative plates. The ceiling itself is formed of plates. Victor insists on doing all the work himself. I think that if he weren’t a famous author he would be a famous decorator. He has such a gift for it! But I will admit to not liking the Latin mottos he has burned into many of the ceiling beams. He does this with a red-hot poker, often late at night. I sometimes wake to the smell of burning wood and imagine that the house is on fire. But instead, in the morning, I will find a new, mysterious saying. Last week there was one added to the small downstairs lavatory. Victor had already decorated this lavatory with painted peacock feathers, and I do not understand why he felt the need to burn the words “ErrorTerror” into the room as well.