The Reinvention of Love

life with him should have made them both profoundly happy. That would have been the only compensation for my loss.
    There is a knock at the bedroom door and Adèle the cook comes in to replace the wine with coffee. She is now on herbest behaviour, nods deferentially to Adèle on her way out of the room. She also seems miraculously sober, probably because she doesn’t want to miss a word. I’m sure she is listening outside the door. For once I wish that she were drinking, that she would stumble downstairs and pass out at the kitchen table as usual.
    “Victor is furious,” says Adèle. “He wants to have her committed to an insane asylum. He says that she has inherited the family trait of madness, that she is like his brother, Eugene.”
    “Well, it’s a good thing she doesn’t come home then,” I say. I had forgotten the story of the Hugos’ wedding, how Victor’s brother went insane, screaming out his love for Adèle as he was dragged from the church.
    “Your marriage didn’t start well,” I say.
    “Don’t,” says Adèle. “Please, Charles. Leave the past where it is. I can’t bear to go back there. I have made mistakes. We both know what those were. It won’t change anything to bring them up now.”
    I don’t know what mistakes Adèle has made. She’s never said. But it slowly dawns on me that she is referring to the fact that she ended the affair with me, that perhaps remaining with Victor was the mistake. But how was she to know he would go into exile? How was she to know the effect this would have on her youngest daughter?
    With Victor there was always something. He was a volatile character, his ego charging relentlessly ahead, trailing his friends and family in its wake, obsessively writing his books, always pumped up on his own virility.
    “Do you think Adèle inherited our passion?” I ask.
    “The strength of it?”
    “The futility of it.”
    Adèle lurches from her chair, her body older and slower, but still driven by the force of her emotions. She kneels on the floor in front of my chair, rests her head on my lap.
    “Charles,” she says, “our love was the greatest pleasure in my life.”
    It makes me so sad to hear her utter those words, to know that her life after me has been so joyless. I stroke her hair with my hand. It is no longer silken to the touch, but coarse, like the mane of a horse.
    “But, if you added up the hours we were together,” I say, “it might not even equal a single week.”
    “It doesn’t matter.”
    And I suddenly see that she is right. It doesn’t matter. We loved each other. It is the simplest of truths, and it is not tied to a chronology. Time would not have increased what we felt.
    I pat her shoulders awkwardly. Her bones are well padded with flesh. My hand is damp with perspiration and sticks to the fabric of her dress.
    “You have always been with me,” I say. “I have never left you.”
    I suddenly think of Charlotte, of the freedom I felt when I was being her, and of how she was created within my love affair with Adèle, and now is shipwrecked there.
    Adèle lifts her head from my lap, struggles to regain her composure. She pushes weakly off from me and drifts slowly back to her side of the room.
    “Adèle?”
    She secures the combs in her hair, smoothes the front of her dress with her hands.
    “I came here to ask for your help, Charles,” she says. “I came here to ask you to lend me the money to travel to Halifax and bring my daughter home.”
    “Of course. I will give you whatever you need. Whatever I have is yours.”
    “But I wasn’t quick enough,” says Adèle. “It seems that Dédé has already left Canada. Her landlady wrote to say that she has sailed from Halifax.”
    “And gone where?”
    “I don’t know.” Adèle looks out of the window again. “She is now well and truly lost to me. But you can still help me, Charles,” she says.
    “How?”
    “You can help me not to remember the past. The pain of what I have done is too great.”
    We look at each other. She is still beautiful. She is still my Adèle. I can see it in her face. It flashes up, then disappears again.
    I understand everything. She thought she was making the correct moral choice in staying with Victor. She thought she was protecting her children. But now she has one daughter who is dead, and another, her favourite, who is possibly mad and lost on the other side of the ocean. Her sons are well, but their lives too have been made wretched by exile.