Beams of sunlight are already showing through the chinks in the shutters when she wakes. She turns her head on the pillow; the form beside her is quiet and still, unaware of the strokes of light falling across his chest and just missing his face, as though painted with some celestial brush. She rises slowly not to wake him, and goes quietly in bare feet to the window. She dares not open the shutters more than a crack – the light would be too dazzling for even the soundest sleeper – but the small opening is enough for her to see out; to catch the blue-green shimmer of the sea below, the glaring brightness of the sand in the morning sun. She smiles, even as she stands squinting while her eyes adjust from the gloom of the darkened bedroom. She can recall clearly the time first beheld it: the great Mediterranean, so bright and beautiful it seemed a slice of heaven. She remembers her first glimpse of the house too, with its white-washed walls at the very edge of the sea, as though it had risen from those aquamarine waters fully formed, like Venus from the waves. The house has not lost any of the charm of that first view, perhaps because it is as different from Ferndean as any house could be. There is a stillness here, a warmth and a calm unlike anything she knows in England. At this villa, with its sun and its water and its bright strip of shore it is easy to believe one stands at the end of the earth, in a place where worldly cares cannot reach, where sorrows cannot intrude. It lies but an hour's carriage ride from the busy port of Marseille, but he had spoken the truth when he'd first described it to her: a place to preserve innocence, a place where one could live sheltered and apart from the world.
Their life here is indeed innocent. They live quietly, intimately, like two youths who have never known trouble or pain. They forgo formalities. She wears light, linen dresses in the fashion of a young French maiden, entirely inappropriate for an English wife. During the day he dispenses with jacket and sometimes waistcoat too. His cravats are made of French country silks, pale blues and beiges. They sometimes breakfast before dressing, sitting on the terrace in their night attire with the full Mediterranean sun shining down on their uncovered heads. They stroll barefoot on the sand, allowing the sea spray and the breeze to dampen hems, cuffs, disarray their hair.
They do not go often into town – perhaps once a week at most, to dine or attend the opera or theater – but on these occasions they observe etiquette strictly. They wear their best clothes, settle their young son with his nurse before departing in the four-horse carriage. They have a favorite restaurant where the host knows them and sets aside a private table. They are always treated with special deference, for the host believes his lost hand, his blind left eye are the marks of a heroic military career. He is too amused by this respectful yet naïve version of his past to disillusion the man.
In the darkness of their box at the opera, he puts his hand in hers. He takes as much pleasure from the touch of her fingers around his as from the music. The dark is too profound for his eye to make out the expressions on her face, but he can feel her pulse throbbing when the notes climax, feel the squeeze of her tightened grasp when the arias overwhelm her. They sit side by side in the box – as they do everywhere else, even if overriding convention. At the table, rather than sit facing each other from opposite ends as custom would have them do, their places are set together, close enough for their hands to meet under the table, fingertips brushing in a hidden caress. After a night in town they ride slowly back in the carriage, each leaning against the other, her head on his shoulder, his arm around her.
She remembers – can it really have been five years ago now? – the strange independence his regained sight afforded them both. She remembers the first few times he parted from her – only for minutes, to fetch something from their chamber, or to step outside – and she experienced the peculiar sense that something had been severed from her. It was not painful, this truncation, but these moments of solitude – of having nothing but herself and the awareness of herself – after two years of being constantly by his side, of administering to his every need, was odd. How silly she feels now, remembering how she had feared in those days of their intimacy fading, or their need for each other – for completion – becoming less acute. Never has she been more certain than of this: nothing can truly divide them. Nothing can make her any less a part of him, or he of her. The chord he once spoke of – that bond from his heart to hers – will endure long after they have both returned to dust.
I sit on the terrace as I write this, looking out to where crystal blue sky meets blue-green sea. In the shallow waves, just off the shore, Edward is teaching Adam to swim. The boy has seen only four summers, yet he already possesses his father's strength and eagerness – he will learn quickly.
I wonder sometimes at this paradise that has been given to me so early in life.
Sitting here in the pleasant shade with such pristine views before my eyes and my ears filled with the sounds of the sea, I often lose sense of place and time. It seems to me at times that I must be back in the window-seat at Gateshead, ten years old, imagining myself in some remote foreign country, in some dramatic sweeping landscape, unreachable to my aunt and cousins. I used to sit in that seat for hours, trying to forget my unhappy situation in such daydreams, that I might find respite from cold, lack of love, humiliation and despair that were in those days my companions. Long years have passed since, yet I can recall my sorrow, my desperation of then with more than memory. When prodded by memory, my heart can still feel its old ache, for that ache left an imprint which no amount of time can quite erase. In this state of mind I find myself believing that my present life is but a dream; something I have conjured up to deliver myself from torment. I linger on these fancies – not out of any morbid bent, but perhaps that I might never take my present fortune for granted – until the happy cry of my child, or my husband's voice calling me, stirs and draws me back.
Other times, I imagine a parallel life – one that might have been, but is not. It is set in this same scene, the actors are the same, but how different, how terrible the theme! In this life, my husband is not my husband, but a man I can never rightfully call mine; his caresses, which I ought to cherish, make me tremble with guilt. These white walls, this sea, is a prison, a place for exiles, for us that have become God's castaways – we who have gone the way of him who was once the prince of light, to be buried in eternal darkness. My soul, my body is not my own. It is degraded, humiliated, a partner in wickedness. My child – my beautiful son – is cursed with the burden of illegitimacy, doomed by the reckless actions of his unfortunate mother to a life as an outcast, to be shunned by the respectable and the honest. I can see this life with such clarity, such vividness – it is almost as real as the Eden in which I now live. I look at my face in the glass – rosy, blissful, content – and see the shadow of the other behind it. I compare her pale cheeks with mine, my full eyes with her wounded ones, hard and dry because they have wept so that they can weep no more. I see her form, arrayed in bright silks and satins, cheapened with jewels and perfumes bought for her out of transitory ardor and fleeting passion and forced upon her until she has lost the strength to refuse them. I look over my own simple white frocks, their hand-netted lace collars and country buttons, so free of pretense, and my heart aches for the sorrow of the other – this poor girl who is so spoiled, so loved, but who cannot love herself. This girl who was lead by desire, beguiled by sweet words, and now flounders in a quagmire of self-loathing. Who lives a Godless life with a man who no longer respects her, mother to a bastard.
This girl's fate could have been mine! This girl, who would have lived lonely, with no kind cousins to write to – for I should never have known you, never felt the influence of your goodness – with no hope, despising herself until her withering soul finally ended her. Do you wonder, then, that I rejoice inwardly now, every time I sign my name – his name – that is now legally mine? That my heart swells every time I am called Madame, every time I speak the words "my husband?" We caress, and I know no shame. I embrace my child, and am burdened with no fears for his future, no guilt that I erred in bringing him into the world.
In the night, I sometimes wake and go quietly to the nursery. I gaze upon our son – against all expectation a beautiful child, with his father's dark hair and eyes but my pale complexion, my milder expression – and hum very softly the song Bessie used to sing me:
In the days when we went gipsying, a long time ago…
He is sleeping still. Under the spell of slumber his face is rendered softer, younger somehow, the etched lines of past trouble and sorrow temporarily smoothed away. She resists the urge to climb back into the bed beside him, to stroke this strange, youthful face, to kiss him into wakefulness and hear his voice, husky with sleep, whisper her name. Instead she slips from the chamber, descends the shallow stone steps to the first floor, pads down the hall with only the softest brush of bare feet on stone, past the kitchen where the French woman who serves as their housekeeper can already be heard humming to herself as she begins breakfast.
The terrace at the back of the house is flooded with sun. She steps into it from the shade of the house and instantly her skin warms, her blood pulses more strongly, her heart beats faster. A swelling, inexplicable joy buoys her up. Oh, to be alive! To wake in the morning beside him whom she loves – to wake, knowing she is loved by him. To stand at the edge of the sea and feel that the world holds no terrors for her, but hope, possibility, promise.
Her life, that had been so dark, so lonely and hopeless once, seems to her a blooming rose; with each hour, the petals unfurl and unfurl, pink deepening to crimson. She steps into the first foamy shallows, shivering slightly at the delicious coolness of the water. The waves lap at the end of her loose gown. She wades deeper. The water reaches her shins, her knees. She wades deeper. The water reaches her torso. Her gown clings to her body, revealing the curving swell of her belly; soon she will no longer be able to wear a corset. She dares go no deeper, but she stands there, facing out to the horizon where the blue-green of the water and the sapphire blue of the sky meld together and she cannot distinguish one from the other.
She does not hear him approach. Something – no sound, no flicker, but something: perhaps a whisper of a breeze on the back of her neck – makes her turn around. He is standing there, on the shore at the bottom of the terrace, squinting into the brilliant light. Beside him, Adam is blinking sleepily, holding his father's hand.
The glare is strong, and his sight is weak, but she knows he can see her – the white of her nightgown standing out like a waving banner against the blue of the sea, her loose hair a streak of dark hanging down her back. She watches as he smiles at the sight of her face, yet she is glad he cannot see the glistening trails on her cheeks, remnants of that strange elation.
His smile is brighter than the glints of sun on the water; brighter than the bleached white shore. He smiles as though they are meeting for the first time.
"Jane."
She goes to him.