The Reinvention of Love

if I wanted to.”
    The demands of Victor and the children are incessant. They call and I must go to them, over and over during the course of a single day. I can never stand still, be still. I can never have a thought that is my own. Their needs have gradually replaced mine.
    Already I have been gone too long from the house. I can feel the anxiety of this fact crawling on my skin.
    I lower my hand to Charles’s face, touch the skin of his forehead, pushing back to stroke his wispy hair.
    “A bird would have a difficult time making a nest from your hair,” I say.
    “Yes,” says Charles. “Soon I will be bald, and even uglier than I am now.”
    Charles will often describe himself as ugly and it pains me. I can only imagine that he heard this from his mother when he was a child and that pains me too, that she could treat him with such loathing. I think of my own children, how confident they are that they are perfect because I tell them so a dozen times a day.
    I run my fingers over the sharp planes of his face, over the end of his hooked nose, around the soft contours of his lips.
    “You are the most beautiful creature,” I say.
    I meet Charles in the forest. I meet Charlotte in the church. She is the only one there when I rush into the dark interior in the middle of an afternoon. She sits stiffly in the centre of a pew, eyes gazing straight ahead at the altar. Charles slouches and shuffles, but Charlotte has perfect posture. Her tiny shoulders are exquisite in that dress and I launch myself into the pew from the aisle, hurtling towards the unsuspecting Charlotte with the velocity of a cannonball. She turns towards me, smiles, offers a delicate, gloved hand – but I am well past such decorum. I have run down the staircase of the house, snagging the sash of my dress on the railing and just leaving it there, like the flag of a conquered country strewn on the bloody battlefield. I have heaved open the front door with such force that it banged back on its hinges, the sound reverberating through the entire building. If Victor was unaware I was escaping from the house, that crash would have alerted him most absolutely to the fact. I have tripped over the front step and fallen onto the grit ofthe driveway. There are still tiny indentations on the palms of my hands from where my body briefly married the shape of the gravel. I have flown down the road, my skirts fanning out beside me like wings, my feet barely touching the earth.
    So when I hurl myself along the pew towards Charlotte, I am propelled by the full velocity of getting there. There is no stopping me.
    “I won’t wait,” I say, one hand at her breast, the other already beginning to open her dress. “I will have you now.”
    The wind blows up from the ocean, scouring the cliffs, searching me out. I should stand up. I should walk back along the sheep track, back to Hauteville House so that I am not late for supper. But I cannot move.
    I knew in Bièvres that I had gone too far over the precipice. The lover’s embrace is never enough when it has become everything, and I lived only for those moments in the woods, those moments in the church. All the time I was with Victor and the children I thought merely of escaping.
    But I couldn’t leave. Even though I had once thought of leaving, I knew I had a duty to stay. I was a wife and mother. I had been a wife and mother before I met Sainte-Beuve and that was where my true loyalty lay. That was where it should lie, although I no longer really cared for that Adèle. I wanted to step out of her, the way I stepped out of a gown at the end of an exhausting evening. But I couldn’t.
    There was no choice. Even when I thought I had a choice, it was never simply a matter of choice.
    The walk back is a blind stumble along the dirt track, my mind racing forwards and backwards. I don’t notice a single step I take, and yet I don’t once leave the ruts and I reach the top ofour street without incident.
    Because I’m walking downhill towards our house I don’t need to stop for breath as is necessary on the walk up. But I do stop all the same. I stop in front of the house with the pretty flowers on the lawn. This is the house Victor bought for his mistress, Juliette Drouet. This is where she lives. These are her flowers, planted by Victor in the shape of his initials on her lawn. A big, bright VH for all the townspeople to see. And if I stand here, in front of her house and look down towards ours, I can see the rag that