The Reinvention of Love

thoughts.
    I think back to our apartment on rue de Vaugirard. It was small and confining. The fire always smoked and the cooking smells were cloying. There was constant noise from the joinery downstairs. But that is not what I dwell on. Instead, I remember how Victor and I shared a bed, how we were rarely out of eachother’s arms, how his presence across the room would lift my blood to attention.
    We might as well not be the same people at all.
    It has been years, no, decades, since we shared a bed, or had rooms near to each other. I have slept next door to little Adèle ever since she was born, and Victor has made sure there were at least several rooms, if not floors, between us. If he entered my bedchamber now, I would be as alarmed as if he were a stranger.
    That night on rue de Vaugirard, we were just sitting down to supper. I looked forward to our meals there. They were a welcome pause between our episodes of lovemaking, and they served to make me hungry to return to bed. I don’t remember the meal. It would have been something simple. We did not have money in those days. Victor was a struggling poet. Soup or stew perhaps. Maybe some bread and watered-down wine. Often we didn’t even have the money for that, and my sister, who lived nearby, would bring us round what was left of their dinner for us to eat. In spite of that, I don’t remember ever feeling pity for our circumstances.
    We were sitting down to dinner. The joinery had closed for the day and there was no more sawing and hammering, only the lingering smell of sawdust in the shared stairwell. We were sitting down to dinner and there was a knock at the downstairs door; a timid knock, such as a child might make.
    I must have fallen asleep. I wake to the sound of knocking. It comes from the room next to mine. Dédé is trying to contact her dead sister in the spirit world. Every night she taps on the wall by her bed until she gets the response she has been waiting for. She has been doing this since Léopoldine died, even before the seances in Marine Terrace. She taps, a frantic patter, like the sound the heart makes after exercise, the beats so fast they arealmost a flutter. She taps, and she waits, and in the silence before she knocks again, she is answered.
    I try to stop Dédé from contacting Albert Pinson, but I am not able to tell her not to reach out to Léopoldine in the afterlife. This is the space she makes at the end of every day to be with her sister, and what right do I have to forbid this?
    The house is quiet except for Adèle’s tapping. Victor must have gone upstairs. There will be no strange Latin phrase awaiting me when I rise. His restlessness has found no earthly form tonight.
    With morning there is purpose.
    “I am going up to the cliff top today,” I say to Dédé at breakfast. “I would like you to come with me, but I am going whether you come or not.”
    “I will go with you, Maman,” says Dédé, her sweet nature returned. “And I will pick a very beautiful bouquet for you to put on your nightstand.”
    But when I go to collect Adèle after lunch, she is writing a long letter to Albert Pinson and will not be persuaded away from it.
    “Could we not go later?” she asks, looking up at me from her work, her eyes wild and her fingers stained with ink. I can see a small stack of completed pages at her left elbow.
    “But this is the best of the day. Right now. This moment. The heat will be gone later.”
    “Tomorrow then, Maman. Tomorrow most definitely.” Adèle lowers her head, already lost to me.
    The road that leads past our house to the cliff top is steep and I always have to walk slowly, stopping to catch my breath before I get very far along it. I always pause in the same place, outside a house with a lawn bursting with colourful flowers.The flowerbeds twist across the grass, packed with the most exquisite blossoms. The blooms are more beautiful than anything we have growing in our sunken garden at the back of the house, and I envy their brightness.
    Guernsey is barely ten miles long and only half as wide. Victor regularly walks the length of it. He is such a fit man, my husband! He has such vigour!
    One side of the island, our side, is protected. The other side is wild and rough, open to the full wrath of the western sea. I don’t often walk over to that side, preferring to stroll along the path that runs above our house and the sheltered port town that sits below that. But today the weather is clear and sunny,