Confession (27 page)

I turned to look around me, to judge what others made of the couple, to see if they too had registered the sadness writ large across their King’s face – only then did my eyes alight on those of a certain gentleman who was seated on the opposite side of the auditorium next to his wife.

Madame Heger had not left the Pensionat since the birth of Julie Marie Victorine. Indeed only the day before she had come downstairs for the first time since her confinement to begin running the school again. I had met her in the corridor and congratulated her on the birth of her daughter as well as adding how blessed this child was to have such devoted parents. Madame acknowledged my compliments then moved swiftly on to ask about my classes, how they were progressing, were any of my students lagging behind in their work. I stared out across the concert hall. Madame looked resplendent that evening dressed as she was in blue silk with what looked like sapphires at her ears, her dark hair coiled on top of her head, black as tarred rope. Her cheeks glowed, her eyes darted about the room as she acknowledged all her several friends and acquaintances.

But it was not Madame with whom I was interested. Instead my eyes rested on Monsieur as his did on mine and for a number of moments, across the vast expanse of tiaras and feathers and finery, across the heads of the ever-increasing audience, we spoke to each other. What he said did not shock me; rather, I think it shocked him for he it was who broke the gaze first in order to look at Madame who was talking animatedly to Monsieur Chappelle seated on her
left.

Why was I not shocked? Because happy endings, happy unions – call them what you will – are so infrequent in life they are nothing if not fanciful. That was the truth of the matter, painful, torturous, ruinous though it was to admit.

Tears filled my eyes, the room grew flooded as all the glitter and sparkle of only seconds before turned blurry and uncertain. Colours pooled together, blues and aquamarines, corals and violets, all mixed and merged as edges softened, clarity faded.

‘What is it my dear?’ asked Mrs Jenkins leaning forward in her seat, her face nothing but a soft pink smudge of powder and rouge.

I shook my head, ‘I am absolutely fine,’ I whispered.

‘But you look so pale, are you too hot? All these people, perhaps – ’

‘Really, I am fine,’ I said again just as the lights dimmed and the music began.

When I returned to the pensionat later that night the building was silent, all the students long since having gone to bed. I brushed the snow from my cloak then crept through the house glad of its dark interior, its thick walls and narrow corridors, glad too of its dimly lit classrooms made all the dimmer after the glare of the concert hall. Here was where I belonged, here at my desk with nothing but the moonlight for company and silence in place of idle chit-chat and gossip.

*

‘I shall write to you. We shall write to each other. You shall tell me what occupies you, how your days are filled and I shall do the same – ’

‘No –’

‘But I must – ’ my voice was steady although my hands were shaking. That morning I had

given Madame Heger my notice for the second time in as many weeks and she had accepted it.

‘You are sure this time?’ she said gazing up at me. ‘I cannot have a repeat of what happened before, it unsettles everyone – ’

I assured Madame I would not change my mind.

‘You have made the right decision. Your father will be happy to have you home.’

And you, I thought, shall be happy to see me leave.

‘Corresponding is out of the question,’ Monsieur Heger’s voice was hollow. ‘Unless you want to exchange trivialities – ’

‘To be forgotten is not trivial – ’

‘Is that what you think of me? You have been my brightest student, you are my …I shall not forget you Mademoiselle – ’

‘Then allow me to write to you – ’

Monsieur Heger did not reply. Instead he stood at the window, his face turned away from me watching the snow as it continued to fall.

‘It is very beautiful, is it not?’ he said quietly.

I agreed.

‘How do you think the crystals are formed?’

‘Sometimes I think it is more beautiful that we don’t know – nature should be allowed her secrets – ’

Monsieur Heger turned around. He was frowning, his eyes distant, but calm. ‘One day someone shall discover it – ’ he said.

‘Perhaps – ’

‘If you write to me, I shall not always reply – ’

I took a step forward, but Monsieur Heger held up his hand.

‘You look so melancholy,’ I said.

‘And you are not, I suppose? – ’

How much at that moment did I wish to say one hundred and one different things to my teacher?

That I would miss him; his voice, the manner in which he recited poetry, the smell of his cigars, the sound his footsteps made along the corridors of the school. That I had grown to value his opinions, to love and respect him. That everything I wrote from that day forward – be it a sentence, a paragraph, a novel – would always contain something of him within it. That – without him – I did not know what my life should be any more.

There was so much I wanted to say and yet I said nothing.

*

The date of my departure from the Pensionat was set for the first day of the New Year. I would spend the night at Ostend then sail for England the following morning. What happened in the lead up to this leave-taking was far less clear for the days that followed passed in a haze.

I remember writing several letters to Emily alerting her of my return. I recall I also received a few notes from my pupils telling me how sad they would be to see me go. The latter surprised me for I did not think my presence at the Pensionat had brought anyone other than myself – together with one notable exception – any degree of pleasure. Vertue Basompierre even went so far as to give me a small bouquet of white roses.

‘I shan’t miss you, but no doubt you shall miss me,’ she said tossing the flowers into my hands on the morning she left to join her mother, father and husband-to-be in Paris. ‘Whatever are you going to do when you get back to… wherever it is that you are going? I can never remember its name – ’

‘I shall think of something,’ I laughed.

‘Well don’t think of writing to me for I shan’t write back. There won’t be time – ’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’

‘No,’ she said then opening the lid of her trunk she withdrew a handkerchief and blew her nose. ‘I have something in my eye, please do not mistake this for crying. My face will look all blotchy now, does it? Please say that it doesn’t – ’

On Christmas day the Jenkins invited me to share in their festivities and dine with them at their home. Mary Dixon’s father, Abraham Dixon, who had returned to Brussels for a brief spell was there also and despite my melancholy it was generally-speaking a merry occasion.

On 29
^th
December I packed my trunks. Kneeling on the floor of the dormitory it suddenly struck me that I would not be returning to this room again. When Emily and I had left the Pensionat the previous year we were in such a hurry to reach Antwerp, I had had no time for reflection.

Now each thing I did was freighted with meaning.

‘This is the last time I shall do this. And this. And this. This is the last time I shall walk along such and such a street, eat in this Refectory, sit in this classroom, descend this staircase, talk with my teacher – ’

Monsieur Heger found me standing by the window in the classroom, just as I knew he would. When I heard the door opening I did not even turn around. He came and stood by my side and together we looked out at the snow which glistened as if possessed of an interior light.

‘You are ready to go back?’ he said.

‘My trunk is packed, my passage booked – ’

‘I didn’t mean – ’

‘I know what you meant – ’

A moment’s silence during which I could feel a pain growing inside me, the intensity of which made it almost impossible to breathe.

‘I want you to take this,’ Monsieur Heger handed me a foolscap piece of paper. It was a diploma – written in his own hand - testifying to my qualifications as a teacher and sealed with the official seal of the Athenée Royal.

‘I don’t know what to say – ’ my voice was hoarse.

‘I hope it will be of some help to you when you set up your own school. My wife tells me that you might be prepared to take on one of our daughters as a pupil there in the future?’ he added referring to a brief exchange I had had with Madame Heger earlier that morning when she had informed me that she would be accompanying me to Ostend.

I told her there was no need. The journey would be exhausting. She should not tire herself out on my account. Besides surely she would prefer to spend time with her children. But Madame insisted, saying that it was inappropriate for a woman to travel alone.

‘But you will be alone on the return journey,’ I protested.

‘But
I
am a married woman. There lies the difference.’

There indeed!

She would be my jailer, that is what she was saying to me and in no uncertain terms. She would be my jailer until she had escorted me safely on board the boat. Suddenly the keys she kept around her waist took on a sinister aspect.

Back in the schoolroom Monsieur Heger asked me to remember him to Emily.

‘Your sister will be pleased to have you at home again,’ he said with a robustness that might have fooled others, but did not fool me – ‘you can go walking together up on those moors you are always talking about - ’

‘Do I? ’ I said anxiously. ‘Always talk about them?’

‘You are worth listening to – ’

‘Monsieur – ’

‘What?’

Up above us the moon slipped behind a cloud and the view outside the window, which before had looked so otherworldly, so queerly beautiful, now turned a dull, shadowy black.

The bells of Ste Gudule struck seven.

At this hour, in this house, eighteen months previously I had walked out of this room only to bump into Monsieur Heger in the corridor. Back then he had spoken to me just as he was now – plainly, disinterestedly and yet how much had changed over the intervening months, how much had happened to make this, our last conversation, so painful.

‘Promise me something - ’ I said.

‘If it is in my power – ’

‘Tell me what I want to hear.’

For a few brief seconds my teacher looked confused then holding my gaze so steadily it seemed as if Time stood still, he leant forward towards me.

*

Once, on a rainy evening when I first came to the Pensionat I had watched from behind a curtain as some of the younger girls used their fingertips to draw upon a misted windowpane in the main dormitory – they drew love hearts shot through with arrows and underneath they wrote names and dates encircled by flowers. The drawings had shimmered wetly in the hazy glow of the oil lamps until one by one the hearts and flowers began to dissolve.

On 2
^nd
January 1844 my ship left Ostend on the early morning tide. I stood on deck watching as the coastline diminished until finally all that was left was a thin silver line hovering on the horizon then afterwards nothing. What had gone before was now firmly in the past while all that remained of the present was a salt-scoured seascape, a wide vista of everlasting grey, a slow journey back to where I, Charlotte Brontë, had begun.

Closing my eyes I listened as the gulls keened and screamed overhead.

Partings are not sorrowful, that is what – over the years – I have come to believe. They are inevitable. People die, loved ones perish, friends depart. There is clearly an end to everything. But what happens in between the time a woman steps off a boat in one country then two years later steps back onto it again to sail home, that is less clear. That is a matter of shadows and starlight, of unseen exchanges, unobserved glances, unspoken words.

When Monsieur Heger said good-bye to me on that last day in December my conviction was I would see him again although deep down in my heart I knew this not to be true.

The moon slipped behind a cloud.

The bells of Ste Gudule struck seven.

Monsieur looked confused then, holding my gaze so steadily that it seemed as if Time stood still, he leant forward towards me and whispered his last words into my ear.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

When Charlotte Brontë wrote what was to be her last novel,
Villette
, she drew for inspiration on the time she had spent in Brussels at the Pensionat Heger. In turn I am indebted to Charlotte Brontë for
Villette
upon which parts of this novel are based. I have also quoted from Charlotte Brontë’s letters, alongside the essays she wrote for Monsieur Heger whilst in Brussels.

FOOTNOTES

1
. Quoted in
The Secret of Charlotte Bronte Followed by Some Remininscences of the Real Monsieur and Madame Heger
, Frederika Macdonald. London: TC and EC. Jack, 1914

2
. Quote taken from
Paradise Lost
, John Milton

3
. Apocrypha – Bible

4
. Psalms 16:11

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Barker, Juliet.,
The Brontës
, (Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1994)

Gordon, Lyndall.,
Charlotte Brontë: A Passionate Life
(Virago 2008)

Lonoff, Sue (Ed).,
The Belgian Essays
, (Yale University Press, 1996)

Ingham, Patricia.,
The Brontës – Authors in Context,
(Oxford University Press 2006)

Smith, Margaret (Ed).,
Selected Letters of Charlotte Brontë
(Oxford University Press 2007)

Smith, Margaret (Ed)., The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, Volume One 1829-1847 (Oxford University Press 2005)

Spark, Muriel.,
The Essence of the Brontës,
(Peter Owen 1993)

Gerin, Winifred,
Charlotte Bronte: A Life,
(Oxford Paperbacks 1969)