The Reinvention of Love

present, but over time she has disappeared. What I think is that our misery has overtaken hers and that she has effectively been cancelled out by our greater collective woe. I lie awake at nights and no longer hear her timid steps along the hall, or her whispery voice on the other side of my door. Instead I hear Adèle tapping on the wall in the room next to mine, trying to rouse her dead sister; or I hear Victor as he rages through the house with a red-hot poker, looking for somewhere to burn his immortal words.
    We are the ghosts here now. Charles, busy developing his watery photographs in the dark cupboard under the stairs. François-Victor, frantically trying to find the right echo for each word of Shakespeare’s. We exist in this place as the spirits of who we used to be when we were truly alive.
    Victor relented. It didn’t happen immediately. But over time, and with pressure from Charlot and Toto, he allowed me to take Dédé back to Paris each year for a month or two.
    But it was too late. The melancholia inflicted by the exile was not easily shaken off. Dédé was withdrawn in Paris, preferring to hole up in our hotel room writing her endless letters to Albert Pinson than to venture out into Parisian society. She had lost the facility for mixing with people. She had lost the desire to be flirtatious and witty with strangers. She saw no point in it.
    I could only do so much, and in the end it turns out that I could do nothing at all.
    Pinson was posted to Halifax, Canada. In the spring following this posting I made my way to Paris, on the understanding that Dédé would be joining me within the week. She packed her trunk on Guernsey and dutifully left the island, notfor Paris, but for London, where, unbeknown to anyone, she took passage on a boat bound for Halifax.
    This is where she is now. We had word from her that she arrived safely and that she was reunited with her sailor. She wrote home to ask for money, saying that she had married Pinson and they were happy, and that she would remain in Halifax with him, waiting for his posting to end. Although we were very upset with this arrangement, we dutifully took out an advertisement in the local Guernsey paper announcing the marriage. She writes to me occasionally, instructing me to be happy for her. She gets angry when I express any concern for her situation.
    Victor is furious. She left the island without his permission. Married or not, he wants her to return. He rages around Hauteville House, beating his chest with outrage and self-pity.
    I am glad Adèle is safe from her father’s fury. She is on the other side of the world. It took over a month for her to travel by ship to Halifax, and Victor, despite his vitriolic outbursts, is not willing to travel that same time and distance to bring her home. Instead, we all write letters, asking her to return. She writes letters back ignoring our requests, and relating the glories of her married life.
    She is lost to us.
    I now remain in Paris. I cannot bear to return to Guernsey, to Victor’s fury and his cloying self-pity. I write to Adèle, but I can do nothing for her. She has moved far away from my words and my embrace. She is following her own dark star and it has pulled her out of my sphere entirely. She always was half in this world and half outside it.
    I would travel to Halifax to beg her to come back, but Victor won’t grant me the money for the passage.
    “If she truly loved me, she would come home on her own,”is all he will say when I ask him to let me go and fetch her.
    Paris has changed very little in my absence. It would have been easier for me if nothing was as I remembered. But everywhere I go, I am reminded of little Adèle, of my former life with my young family, of Léopoldine. I cannot walk past our old apartment in the Place Royale without feeling faint at the sight of it, and I weep openly outside the little shop where I used to buy cakes for my children.
    It is hard to remember that there was once an ease to my days, or that I ever enjoyed myself.
    I stand in the little park opposite our old apartment. Other people walk through those rooms now. A woman in a red dress stops in front of one of the tall windows and looks down at me looking up at her. It is the strangest feeling, as though I am observing the ghost of myself. Or worse, I have become the ghost of myself, standing outside my own life.
    I long for the past with a fierce hunger, and there seems nothing to feed it.
    Well,