Grahame, Lucia (8 page)

"And you have the talent he lacks?"

"I like to think so. What Neville has forgotten is that
children can entertain themselves for hours with not much more than a couple of
stones or an end of chalk."

I thought that a rather odd remark to come from this scion of
wealth. Surely
he
had never been obliged to entertain himself with
nothing but rocks and a piece of chalk! What an absurd notion! His childhood
birthdays must have been princely celebrations.

Of course there was a slim possibility that he had been raised in
the horrible tradition which makes
all
pleasure suspect. I knew of a
vicarage where a pet cat had once been drowned in the well simply to teach the
children not to become too attached to earthly things.

On Sunday, therefore, we found ourselves in an ancient gray house
in the Rue Vieille-du-Temple, where we mounted a stairway as steep and narrow
as my own to find ourselves before a door which bore a plate proclaiming this
to be the establishment of Abraham Salomon,
"Fabrique de patins
à
roulettes et jouets."
A little factory of roller skates and toys.

Monsieur Salomon, who must have been at least seventy years of
age, welcomed Sir Anthony warmly and expressed his pleasure at making my
acquaintance. Then, after leading us through a dining room in which virtually
every surface seemed to be covered with miniature houses, he lifted a curtain
and ushered us into a low garret whose function I was at first hard-pressed to
identify.

It contained a bed and a washstand, so perhaps it was a bedroom.

No, there was an iron stove; it was a kitchen.

But it was the only kitchen I had ever seen, other than the one I
had once shared with Frederick, where the fragrance of paint and varnish
competed triumphantly with that of onions and garlic.

Here Monsieur Salomon introduced me to his wife, Anais, who sat at
a worktable varnishing yet another doll-house, and to his daughter, Rachel, a
danseuse of perhaps thirty or so who, I soon discovered, produced ballets for
the provincial theaters. Today, however, she sat beside her mother making
artificial flowers.

I was too fascinated by the jumble of ribbons and roller skates,
pedal-lathes and bandboxes—one of which was occupied by a skinny cat—to
contribute much to the conversation that began to swirl about me almost as soon
as Sir Anthony and I had taken our seats.

Mademoiselle Rachel almost immediately proceeded to dredge up from
the depths of Sir Anthony's mind every image it still contained of any ballet
he had seen in London since he had last called upon the family, and Sir Anthony
obliged her gallantly, as if he had taken special pains to make note of the
sort of technical details in which he knew she was likely to take a particular
interest.

He then encouraged Monsieur Salomon to reminisce about his
youthful days as a circus tumbler, while Madame tried to feed me, scolded me
for being too slender, and, in the end, would not allow me to depart without
copies of recipes which she guaranteed would put meat upon my bones.

I could not help but be amused by the terms of affection which
punctuated nearly every sentence the Salomons addressed to one another. To her
parents, Mademoiselle Rachel was
"ma cocotte."
The others were
inevitably "my dear husband or wife" or "my darling mama or
papa." Even the cat was
"mon cher moumoutte."

This surfeit of endearments might have been almost stultifying had
they not been flung about with a guileless warmth and sincerity that both
touched and charmed me.

But at last it was time to leave, and after we had made our
selection of a little toy house for Lord Marsden's great-niece, we departed.
Outside, the winter sky was growing dark. Without saying much, we began to walk
rather aimlessly through the cold streets until we found ourselves at the
river. We were close to the spot where draymen and cavalry officers bathe their
horses in the late summer afternoons, when the sunsets last forever. But the
gentle days of summer were long past.

We lingered by the floating apple market near the Hôtel de Ville;
here boats from Normandy moor every autumn and remain through the winter until
all their fruit has been carried off in great baskets.

The sweet-tart scent of apples hung on the icy air, like a ghostly
reminder of autumn's abundance. Sir Anthony was to return to England on the
following day, and tonight, after the last cold red glow had vanished from the
western sky, I would fall asleep alone in that empty garret in the Boulevard de
Clichy.

I thought of the Salomons' cluttered, overflowing kitchen, where
sunlight must pour through the huge windows even at this time of year to coax
such luxuriant greenery from Madame's little red herb pots. Had my daughter
lived, perhaps even now I might have been in a kitchen not so very different
from theirs. Frederick, at the table with our daughter on his knee, would be
cleaning his brushes, and I'd be across from them, slicing potatoes and carrots
for our dinner....

Never, never had I so dreaded going back to my... dwelling
place—it hardly deserved to be called a home.

I felt a surge of anger. How I wished Sir Anthony had not taken me
to the Rue Vieille-du-Temple. Of course he had not done it to be cruel. He
could not have guessed the effect it would have upon me. He had never known
what it was to live in a garret with love and turpentine and a view of the
rooftops.

Nearly all the light had gone from the sky. For once, perhaps
because he could not see my face, Sir Anthony's customary sensitivity to my
moods failed him.

"Did you enjoy yourself this afternoon?" he was asking.

"Oh, very much so," I roused myself to answer politely.
"The Salomons are delightful."

"An extraordinary family," Sir Anthony was saying.

Something in the way he said this irritated me, no doubt because
my nerves already felt raw.

"Extraordinary?" I said. "Very charming people, to
be sure. But extraordinary? I don't think so. Why there must be at least a
thousand families in Paris just like them."

If only I were still part of one of them.

"What do you mean—just like them?" he asked with a
laugh.

"Oh, close-knit, hardworking, talented. You know."

"And as warm toward one another?"

"But of course!" I said impatiently, as if he were being
obtuse. "Good heavens, what can be more natural than parents who love
their children, and husbands and wives who love one another!"

With his usual equanimity, Sir Anthony merely laughed that low
laugh of his.

"I suppose you're right," was all he said.

In March, with my usual disregard for polite behavior, I went into
half mourning. The proper thing would have been to wait at least three months
longer—preferably six—before shedding my black garments in favor of the old
gray dresses I'd begun to favor when I'd stopped caring about making myself
attractive to Frederick. Later he'd said they were fit for nothing but paint
rags.

No, the change from black to gray did not signify any improvement
in my spirits. My loneliness had sharpened with a vengeance during the dark
days of winter.
That
was why I wore gray.

I knew that black was infinitely more becoming; I had even
succumbed at last, during the past summer, to my grandmother's ghostly advice
on how to increase its allure. Now I felt ashamed of that impulse; now I
wanted
to look as drab as I felt.

During Sir Anthony's prolonged absence, he wrote often, mostly
about a reception and show that he was organizing on behalf of Henri Caylat, a
painter whose works Sir Anthony felt deserved wider attention than they had yet
received. He had begun making the arrangements with Caylat during his visit in
January. The event was to take place here in Paris at the end of April.

I was surprised that Sir Anthony should have undertaken such a
venture. Although I had heard of Caylat, I had never seen any of his works.
He'd been brutalized by the critics years earlier and had scarcely been heard
of since.

But Sir Anthony seemed quite set up as he planned the event. When
I worried that the critics and gallery owners would never come, Sir Anthony
replied that no matter how much they despised Caylat, they would make it a point
to be there. Sir Anthony had a reputation for providing superb food and drink
whenever he entertained.

When I pointed out that neither Pommery and Greno nor magnums of
Bollinger had ever softened a critic's heart, Sir Anthony parried with the
statement that he had no hope of altering anyone's opinion of Caylat's
painting; but once the critics had seen the studies from Caylat's sketchbooks
that he'd persuaded the artist to mount and display, never again would they be
able to dismiss him with the charge that he could only daub because he'd never
learned to draw.

My hopes were not high for the success of the event, but it was
difficult not to respond to Sir Anthony's enthusiasm, dry and understated
though it was.

With the same vague determination to keep the various strands of
my life rigidly separate that had prevented me from introducing Sir Anthony to
Marguerite and Théo, I did not invite the Sorrel-Valory ménage to Caylat's
show. If Caylat was as dreadful as he was reputed to be, and if Théo was in one
of his uncharitable moods, no sneers would be crueler than his.

There were several reasons, I suppose, why I failed to recognize
the singular position in which I found myself on the day of Caylat's show. At
first I thought Sir Anthony must have felt uncertain of his own judgment and
hoped that the presence of Frederick Brooks's young widow would add prestige to
the event—for lately it seemed that Frederick had enhanced his reputation
tremendously by dying.

I'll admit that this attitude of mine was rather cynical, but it
lasted only until I entered the rooms Sir Anthony had hired for the occasion.

I was so enraptured by the astonishing display that I could think
of nothing else. I had heard Julien disparage Caylat once or twice; he'd even
mocked Sir Anthony for being his patron. He thought Caylat was a savage and Sir
Anthony a fool.

But he was wrong.

And I knew that I had been wrong, as well, in ever having accepted
Sir Anthony's presentation of himself as someone whose eye needed training.

So captivated was I by the brilliance and boldness around me that
I scarcely considered much else. Certainly I did not think as much as I ought
to have about the fact that Sir Anthony was as attentive to me as he was to the
artist himself, that he seldom left my side for very long, that he introduced
me with something like pride to everyone he knew.

Lord Marsden was present. Although I was familiar enough with his
tastes to feel certain that he could not fully share Sir Anthony's enthusiasm
for Caylat, I was very happy to see him once again. Soon, however, I had the
uncomfortable sense that he was watching me rather too closely. Before long, I
became convinced that he was studying me with the intensity he ought to have
devoted to the paintings around him! I wondered uneasily if it was on account
of my dress. Because this was a special occasion, I'd worn one of the black
ones, with touches of white, but now I worried that I had followed my
grandmother's advice too assiduously and that the altered dress detailed my
curves too boldly.

I concluded, with acute embarrassment, that it would be wiser to
stick with the gray ones from now on.

Although I was enjoying myself, I had to leave Caylat's show
earlier than I would have liked. During the latter part of winter, I'd acquired
a new pupil, an American girl who had come to Paris to study music. Due to her
other commitments and my own, I now had to devote part of my Friday afternoons
to her.

Sir Anthony, of course, was obliged to stay. He wanted to hire a
carriage for me, but the weather was so fine that I refused his offer.

I had walked only a block or two homeward and was still dreaming
of the visions I had left behind while paying little attention to the ones in
front of me, when a well-dressed gentleman, pale-eyed and with graying yellow
hair, approached me.

"Madame Brooks," he said.

I was not in the habit of speaking to strange men in the street,
but that day I was so preoccupied that when he spoke my name I assumed he must
be an acquaintance. I stopped and roused myself belatedly from my private
reverie to realize that I had never seen him before in my life.

I averted my eyes and started to walk on.

"Surely Madame Brooks would not snub an old friend of her
late husband—although she now enjoys such elevated companionship," said
the stranger.

To be accused of snobbery was more than I could bear.

"I am afraid that I do not know you," I said in the most
neutral tone I could manage. "Why do you say my husband was your
friend?"