The Reinvention of Love

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 withme 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 nothingout 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