Girl in the Afternoon (25 page)

Henri took another careful sip from his glass. Something in the story, in the dark room and stale air, unnerved him.

“I was going to go back for her.” Mr. Emsely whistled through his teeth. “I swear it. As soon as my father eased off, but it took months, and by that time, she was gone.” He held up his hand, turned it back and forth in the dim light as if checking his own existence. “My mother was so thoroughly convinced I was dead that when I arrived she thought my ghost had come to call. She thought it was very kind of me to take the time, and asked how I was getting on in heaven. She wanted to know if I was having a decent go of it up there with the angels.” He gave a long, guttural laugh and wiped his eyes. “Oh, my. She's what I was left with in the end. A demented old woman who outlived everyone but me.”

Henri set his drink on the desk and leaned forward with his hands pressed over the tops of his knees. “You went back and my mother was just gone? No letter? No one saw her leave?”

Mr. Emsley shook his head. “Nothing, my boy.”

The room went quiet. For a while the two men sat in the dark, and then, softly, Mr. Emsley said, “She didn't take her coat.”

“What?”

“Her coat. Left the house in the middle of winter without her coat. That's always gotten to me.” Mr. Emsley stood up and went to the shelf for some matches, fumbling and knocking a few to the floor. “I looked for her.” He lit the lamp, drawing the wick down, a warm, circle of light softening the room. “Workhouses, brothels, factories. Places I was sure she'd never go. I looked anyway. Searched the city over.” His words were slightly slurred. “I still do. Not every week like I used to, but periodically, just to be sure.”

Reaching down, he pulled open the bottom drawer of his desk and took out a bulky object. “Her coat. I never had the heart to get rid of it.”

Henri touched the soft, brown wool. It was the same coat she'd worn walking in the hills those mornings when he watched for her return.

Mr. Emsley sank into his chair, his watery eyes glinting behind the glare of the lamp. “Take the coat,” he said. “And be so good as to leave me, please. There's nothing more I can tell you.”

Henri scooted the coat back across the desk. “I'm much obliged, but it's yours.” From his breast pocket Henri pulled a worn piece of paper and held it out. Mr. Emsley hesitated.

“It's a sonnet,” Henri said. “My mother wrote it. I found it under my pillow the day she disappeared. I think you should read it.”

Mr. Emsley tugged at the chain around his neck, his spectacles jumping up and down. “Can't read a thing in this light, not even with these.” It wasn't true; he just knew he wouldn't be able to get through it without making a fool of himself.

Henri held the piece of paper under the lamp. He remembered Colette standing in his apartment the day she found it, taunting him. Colette had thought it was a love poem, and when Henri had reread it he realized his mother's words weren't fraught, but hopeful and eager, like a woman in love. Now he understood why.

Henri cleared his throat.

DEAR CHILD, DEAR BOY

Dear child, dear boy, one whom I call my own

Whose first affections thou showed to me

Before ever I, could show it to thee

Entwine all of thyself in the unknown

Then you will tremble not when truths awake

The tempted soul to find, not grief but strength

In wakened hearts that go to many lengths

To seek the love we tried so hard to break

From slumber deep I wake to take my flight

In haste I flee for new fledged hope is near

Grieve not when I have gone away, my dear

As colors wane and darkness takes the light

Look to find sweetness in the passing

For something tells me love is everlasting

“I never fully made sense of it until now,” Henri said quietly. “The second quatrain was most certainly written for you.”

When he looked up, Mr. Emsley was smiling, and there were tears in his eyes. “Thank you. Thank you for that, my boy,” he said.

And Henri could see that he meant it, and that those words made all the difference.

*   *   *

That
night, Henri slept deeply without any dreams and woke refreshed and confident, ready to head into the busy street to find his father's lawyers.

It was simpler than he'd imagined. His name had never been officially changed. Legally he was, and always had been, Henry Aubrey. After obtaining a certified copy of his birth entry from the General Register Office and signing his English name on a number of crisp, white documents, Abbington Hall was his. He was also bequeathed a large sum of money, some from royalties from his father's books, but mostly from an estate in Essex that had been sold off years before.

As Henri walked away from the lawyer's, navigating the curving streets, swept up in the current of foot traffic, he felt strangely giddy. He wasn't concerned with the money, or the estates. He wasn't thinking about Leonie or the children and what it would mean for them. All he could think of was how he could now help Aimée. He could take her from that dreadful house and bring her to Abbington Hall. He could support her. She could paint freely. She wouldn't be dependent on Lady Arrington anymore, or her papa.

But when Henri arrived at Sussex Place and pushed his way through the tall iron gates of Lady Arrington's, he found the house dark, the windows shuttered, and the curtains pulled closed. Three times he rang the bell, but no one came. He waited, pacing the street in front of the menacing black gates for over two hours. Eventually, he became so discouraged that he trudged back to the inn.

Every day, for the next two weeks, he went to the house on Sussex Place, but it remained shut up. He wondered if they'd gone away to the country, or the seaside. Lady Arrington did not strike him as someone who ventured off to fresher climates, but if they had gone away, he would have no way of finding them.

He drank, night after night, in the same dingy pub down the street from his inn. Single men huddled over tables, sometimes in twos, but never in great, lively groups like in the Parisian cafés. There was no banter, no uproar of laughter or outbreak of accusation, just a melancholy exhaustion, as if these men had no energy for the most menial of conversations.

One night, Henri sat in his room, thoroughly drunk and yet strangely lucid, all of his jumbled thoughts of the past few months condensed into a sharp picture.

He saw Aimée's pale, shadowy figure wandering the rooms of his monstrous, foreboding childhood home. He thought of her paintings, of all those babies, and he realized then that she'd be just as miserable at Abbington Hall with Marion Gray as she was with Lady Arrington. The truth was—she'd said so much herself—that Aimée didn't care where she lived. It wouldn't make any difference at all.

This was when Henri realized the truth of what he had to do, but it was too troublesome to dwell on, so he swept past it, brushing it off so quickly that he wouldn't think of it again for months. And when he did think of it again, it would feel as if he was coming upon it for the first time.

 

PARIS 1878

 

Chapter 29

Things were dismal in the Savaray household. That first year after Jeanne was born, Madame Savaray held on to the hope that Aimée would return the following spring as planned. But Aimée did not, and her letters, over the years, had grown short and indifferent. The last one had read:
Doing splendidly, dear Grand-mère. Painting away and keeping to myself. Regards to the family, Aimée.

Splendidly?
Madame Savaray didn't believe a word. And Lady Arrington's letters were just as vague and formal, with absolutely no real information to speak of. Something was terribly wrong, Madame Savaray could feel it, and if it weren't for her useless knees, she would have gotten on a boat and gone directly over the English Channel to find her
petite-fille
.

As it was, Madame Savaray could hardly walk anymore. She managed without too much trouble around the house, but a simple outing, a short walk in the park, would do her in and she'd have to keep to bed for hours.

When she took her yearly trip to Thoméry in May, her right knee swelled to three times its normal size. She'd gone every year since Jeanne's birth, on a Sunday morning when the family would be at church. There was a wooden bench in the square with a perfect view of the church steps where Madame Savaray could sit in her black dress and veiled hat. No one took any notice of an old woman enjoying a nice, spring morning. That was one benefit to being old. People rarely noticed you were there at all.

The first year, Jeanne had been a fat, happy one-year-old propped on Leonie's hip. The next year she was an adorable, toddling thing in a white dress with a shiny, lemon-colored ribbon around her waist. And this last year, well, Jeanne just couldn't get any prettier with those dark, bouncing curls and plump, rosy cheeks.

From her bench, Madame Savaray leaned forward and tilted her sunshade back so she could watch Jeanne skip up and down the church steps. The little girl kept stroking the blue satin streamer on her straw hat, causing the hat to tilt lopsided on her head. Jacques, wearing pink-and-white-striped trousers and a blue blouse, reached up and set the hat right before taking his sister's hand and leading her carefully down the stairs.

He was six years old now, and a serious, resolute-looking child. Madame Savaray could see Colette in him, the part that balanced the sensitive, diffident side of Henri. It was a determination in Jacques's walk, in his expression, and this strength pleased Madame Savaray. It was so much more acceptable in a man, for better or for worse. It would serve him well in life.

All of this she observed from her bench, watching as the family made their way down the church steps, lingering outside to speak with friends before waving good-bye and starting down the road toward home.

Long after they'd gone, Madame Savaray sat on, filled with a longing so painful it made her think she'd rather lie down in that church graveyard than return home.

When the sun was high in the sky, Madame Savaray set out on the long road to the station, scolding herself for wallowing in loneliness and trying to ignore the explosions of pain going off in her knee. She refused to hire a carriage. It was a small town, and she would be more conspicuous in an open carriage. She didn't want to draw attention to herself, and she certainly didn't want Leonie and Henri to think she was checking up on them. Though that was precisely what she was doing.

*   *   *

It
amazed Colette that Aimée had been gone for over three years, and that Jacques had been gone even longer.

For a time she thought things might go back to the way they were. She imagined that Henri would be unable to care for the child, and he would bring Jacques home. Once their son returned, Auguste would forgive her. He would call her back into his room. She would throw her soirées again, and Aimée would come home.

None of this happened. After a time, Colette understood she would never come back from the loss of Jacques. His absence had sprung the memories of her other lost children wide open. Now all four boys—the two who died in infancy, and precious little Léon and Jacques—blended together, and she no longer tried to sort out one from another. She remembered little hands and feet, the arc of a rounded head in her palm, a forehead soft as milkweed, a pitiful whimper, small gurgles, and piercing cries.

At times Colette tried to dig up her anger, thinking she might revive herself, but it was as if her rage had collapsed into a heap of self-deprecation intent on tormenting her. And Colette was vigilant about this torment, reminding herself of all she'd done to deserve it, thus preserving her hard edges and biting personality.

She gave up embroidery and took up the piano. She had always played, but not well. She hired a young, eager teacher whom she took to her room on their second lesson. That lasted a few months, and then she gave him up as easily as she'd given up embroidery. There had been no one else since. She hadn't even enjoyed it. It was just something to do.

She considered learning to draw, but she feared that would remind her too much of Aimée—whom Colette missed more than she'd admit—so she decided against it and kept at the piano. She didn't need a teacher anymore, as she was playing very well. At all hours of the day, the house was filled with her music. Sorrowful, delightful, maddening, intimate. The sounds of an emotional life she no longer lived. She'd be flushed when she finished, vibrant, exhilarated, with a feeling of excitement as if there were a roomful of people waiting to applaud her.

Sometimes she caught Auguste listening in the doorway with that look of inflamed desire that their arguments used to ignite. A few words might pass between them, formal, polite, nothing of the truth. Nothing of the torment Auguste was going through, the regret and misery, the loneliness. Nothing of Colette's collapse, of the anger she'd turned inward, and how it was eating at the very core of her being. A nod, a reluctant smile from one or the other, maybe a question about supper, or how the new maid was getting on, trivial things that made no difference.

Then they would part, and one of them might feel the urge to turn back, but neither would.

*   *   *

It
was in the spring of 1878—the spring Henri went to England and the Exposition Universelle came to Paris—that things changed.

Colette had no intention of going to the Exposition
.
Everywhere, grand, elaborate parties were being held. She'd heard Édouard Manet's was going to be especially magnificent, and this roused something in her, but she had not received an invitation. The Savarays were rarely invited anywhere anymore—after so many refusals people had given up—and Colette did not care to step out and be snubbed by the society that had once relished her company.