Keeping the World Away (43 page)

He had almost put his fist through the canvas there and then, but was deterred by the thought that James would find out when it did not appear on the list of things to be sold. Instead, he wrapped it in the newspaper he was carrying and took it straight to the solicitors. The rest of the stuff he left in the flat. It was, he hoped, the last time he would ever see the troublesome painting.

*

Excitement was making her nervous. She’d hung the ‘painting’ the night before and all day she’d been imagining the denouement when she took her father to see it. Exactly how, she hadn’t decided – whether to lead him into the room, pretending he was to see something of hers, or whether to say nothing, just ask him to come with her. Should she blindfold him, or was that too melodramatic? This wasn’t meant to be a game – it was serious. She must calm down, be offhand, casual, or he would become annoyed and she’d get nothing out of him.

He was later than usual and came in frowning, furious with the Friday night traffic. But he was pleased to see her, and enjoyed being fussed over, though it aroused his suspicions.

‘What is this in aid of?’ he asked, accepting the glass of wine. One taste, and he knew how cheap it was, but he drank it.

‘The weekend,’ Gillian said, ‘and your darling daughter staying in, to have the pleasure of your company.’

‘Seems an extravagant sort of rejoicing for such an ordinary event,’ he said, drily.

‘Ordinary?’ protested Gillian. ‘I haven’t stayed in on a Friday night for months. It’s special.’

‘And to what do we owe this honour, then?’

‘I want to show you something.’

‘Oh, if it’s one of your art efforts it’ll be wasted on me, darling, you know I can’t tell a good painting from a bad one and I don’t understand any of yours, all squiggles and dots and splodges. God knows, I’ve tried.’

‘It isn’t my work. It’s something else. Come on.’

She got up and held out her hand. Reluctantly, he took it, groaning exaggeratedly as he raised himself up. She was such a pretty girl, especially tonight, wearing a dress instead of those trousers he hated. Her hair looked properly brushed and hung smooth and thick round her face instead of being caught up in one messy bunch on top of her head. Unless he was very much mistaken, she was wearing a little make-up, and looked groomed instead of wild. He couldn’t help smiling as he let himself be led from the room and there wasn’t an anxious thought in his head. Whatever she was going to show him, he was convinced it would be something silly and amusing.

He couldn’t see anything. ‘What?’ he said, staring round the small spare room. ‘What? I can’t see anything. What’s the joke?’

‘Look,’ Gillian said.

‘I
am
looking. It looks the same. It’s just an ordinary room. What am I supposed to see? Is it a new sofa? Why ever should you want me to look at a new sofa?’

‘Dad. On the wall?’

Even then it took a while. He looked, as instructed, at the walls of the room until his gaze fell on the only picture. A small picture. It wasn’t one of Gillian’s, that was for sure, but then she’d said she wasn’t showing him anything of hers. Whose, then? He peered, went closer. He felt a strange sensation of discomfort and yet this
picture
was innocuous, an empty corner of a room … He had seen it before, but couldn’t recall how or when. It made him irritable and the feeling of discomfort grew. ‘Well?’ he said. ‘What’s the point? I’m lost.’

‘Don’t you recognise it?’

‘No.’

‘Oh, Dad!’

‘Give me a clue.’

‘It was Grandmother’s, the only one she took with her from the family house.’

Instantly, he was alert. He glared at his daughter. ‘What are you up to?’

‘I want to know.’

‘Know what?’

‘About the painting and the quarrel with your brother and why the picture had an unhappy history, and …’

‘It can’t be the painting, it was sold.’

‘It’s a photograph of it. I went back to the house and …’

‘You did what?’

‘I wanted to see it.’

‘What a damned cheek.’

‘Mme Verlon didn’t think so. She was really helpful. She said she thought the painting had some sort of significance for your mother, something sad.’

‘I haven’t the faintest idea of what you’re talking about or what that Frenchwoman meant.’

‘But the sight of the painting upsets you.’

‘It certainly does not!’

The room went quiet. Gillian, standing in the doorway, didn’t speak again. It struck her, observing her father, that she had only the glimmer of understanding about his reaction to the painting. Clearly, what upset him was the connection with his mother, but it was more than that, something deeper, some other memory perhaps. So she waited, unusually patient, until her father sighed and said, ‘Let’s go and sit down, Gillian.’ They went back to the sitting room and sat down. Her father looked exhausted. ‘I honestly
don’t
know,’ he said, ‘why you’ve made such a thing over that painting. You’ve built it up into something it isn’t, some mystery that never existed. Why on earth are you so bothered about it? It’s nothing to you, it’s nothing to me.’

‘It was something to your mother.’

‘My mother is dead. She’s been dead for twenty-odd years.’

‘And you still haven’t forgiven her.’

‘Don’t be absurd. You’re letting your imagination carry you away. You’re making things up.’

‘Tell me the truth then, tell me what really happened, put me right.’

‘Gillian, please, there’s nothing to tell. My mother was killed in an accident, she left almost everything to some strange Scottish charities, including that dreary little picture.’

‘And Uncle James?’

‘For heaven’s sake!’

‘Your only brother, and you don’t speak to him, and it was something to do with the painting.’

‘History. James was going to take it and he wasn’t entitled to it and I told him so. I wish I’d never seen the damned picture.’

‘It’s by Gwen John. Probably.’

‘I don’t care who it’s by, it’s meaningless to me.’

‘But it wasn’t to my grandmother.’

‘Who knows what the hell it meant to her.’

‘I think,’ Gillian said, slowly, aware that her father was still disturbed and angry, ‘I think my grandmother wanted to be the woman in that room.’

‘Woman? There’s no woman in it. The room’s empty.’

‘It only looks empty. It’s full, though: it has a presence, someone serene and contented and maybe in love.’

‘What rubbish!’

‘Not to me, not to my grandmother. If the painting could talk …’

‘Well, it can’t, which is a relief. It might come out with the sort of nonsense you’re talking. It’s just a picture of an empty room.’

‘It depends who looks, how they look.’

‘Let’s stop now, Gillian. You’re being fanciful, silly. I’ve no patience with you like this. You’re spoiling what promised to be a pleasant evening. What time is your mother back?’

‘Soon.’

‘Good. Now, can I read my newspaper?’

‘Yes, Dad. Read it.’

Quietly, Gillian slipped into the back room and took the photograph down.

*

Gillian’s A-level results were excellent: four As. Her father was delighted, his pride in her achievement almost embarrassing – ‘Dad, please,’ Gillian protested when he even told the plumber who had come to fix a new sink. Once the celebrations were over – an extravagant dinner in a restaurant – Cameron made one last try to persuade his daughter to go to university. But she was adamant. She wanted to take up her foundation course place in September 2006 and before then spend some time in Paris. The idea alarmed him – she was, he said, much too young and pretty to be let loose in Paris – but she pleaded with him, saying she’d work first at Starbuck’s, or somewhere, for six months, to earn the money to support herself and he wouldn’t have to contribute much. Money, Cameron said, was not the point. It was her safety he was concerned about. But her mother supported Gillian and eventually, with the greatest reluctance, he gave way, on condition that he himself should arrange where she would stay and vet the establishment where she wanted to study.

Paris, when Gillian finally arrived there, was not quite as she had imagined it, not as exotic as she had wanted it to be. Dismayed, she looked round the room she found herself in and thought she might be in any city in England. There was almost nothing about it that looked foreign, no piece of furniture which seemed intriguingly different and strange. Even the window had curtains which would have looked perfectly in place in her parents’ house and the carpet was surely an exact copy of the carpet in her bedroom there. There wasn’t the faintest whiff of garlic. Instead she could
swear
there was a smell of frying bacon drifting up the stairs.

But she reminded herself that a city was on the outside of rooms, not in them (though she wasn’t quite convinced of this), and that she was bound to be disappointed, arriving at this address late on a wet evening. She had heard French being spoken all around her at the station, and the walk from the Metro to this apartment block had been further evidence that she was in Paris, not London. But she had had her head down, battling against the wind and rain, and, encumbered with her bags and portfolio, had taken little in. When she rang the bell, the landlady opened the door and spoke to her in English, a welcoming little speech but not quite what she anticipated.

Her father had fixed up the digs – that’s what he’d called them, ‘digs’ – through someone he knew at work who had a friend in Paris running a kind of
pension
. Gillian had imagined a flat, shared with two or three other art students – but this would do for the time being until she made friends. She reckoned she would be out of this room within a month. By then, she would know Paris, as well as other students, and would be laughing at the memory of having been forced to land here.

If only it were a garret, empty and romantic. She wouldn’t have minded if it were freezing cold (the room she was in even had central heating). There would have been a view of rooftops, and the faint scent of Gauloise cigarettes would have hung about it. Opening the window here was a struggle – there were all kinds of locks – and when she’d managed to force it half open there was not much to see except the block opposite, as new and ugly as the one she was in. She wanted to be in Montmartre, or perhaps on the Ile St Louis, instead of almost in the suburbs. There was no romance here, and she felt disappointed to think that she had swapped one safe berth for another. But she went to bed repeating to herself, ‘I am in Paris, I am in Paris.’

*

Madame Verlon, on the other hand, felt like a foreigner in her own city. Twenty-three years since she had lived in Paris, but she had visited often and those years did not explain the unnerving
sense
of dislocation she now experienced. She had expected to slip back easily into her former life but this was not happening. Maybe, she thought, she was simply suffering from exhaustion after the upheaval of the last month when the London house was vacated – it had been far more upsetting than she had anticipated even though she had done little of the packing up herself. Twenty-three happy years, vanishing before her eyes. Her husband did not know what she was so distressed about. It was she who for so long had wanted to return to Paris, was it not? Yet again and again he found her in tears, standing in the middle of one room or another, and was exasperated. His own excitement at returning to Paris, though initially he had not been keen, could not be concealed, and he was irritated that she was the one who had become such an Anglophile. Claudette said her distress had nothing to do with her liking for the English or for London. It was to do with leaving the house, her home. Houses had souls, she believed, and rooms had an awful power. Until she had re-created another home she would feel bereft.

After a great deal of searching, the apartment they finally bought was not on the Ile St Louis but in the Rue de Rivoli. It was almost exactly what she had envisaged, in spite of the location (Jacques’s preference) and she was pleased with it, but there was a lot yet to be done in the way of decoration and refurbishment – it would be a year, she estimated, before she had the place looking as she wanted and could feel she belonged. She had vowed to take her time but already the sight of the hideous tiles in the bathroom made her want to have them ripped out immediately, and she could not stand the vile green paint in the kitchen one day longer. In London, she had had at her fingertips the telephone numbers of all kinds of workmen and services she had used over the years, but in Paris she was having to start again. Having money did not seem to help. It seemed you had to know the right people, have the right contacts here.

Everything was uncomfortable and she did not seem to be able to sort it out. Packing cases were everywhere, all neatly and efficiently labelled, but she could not bring herself to begin the
unpacking
. Her daughter came to help, but they ended up going out together for lunch and nothing got done. Huguette seemed delighted to have her in Paris, and there was something relaxing about hearing her own language all around. But Huguette did not think her mother was relaxed.

‘What’s wrong, Maman?’ she asked. ‘You’re all tense. Aren’t you glad to be home?’

‘I don’t know. I feel a foreigner in my own city.’

Instead of fading, the feeling grew; the sense of being displaced made her irritable and moody. Had she felt this when she moved to England? She had no recollection of having done so. All she could remember was falling in love instantly with the Chelsea house, and being endlessly busy settling the children into their new schools and routines.

It was a relief that there was a small room in the apartment which she had been able to claim straightaway as her own. It had once been an annexe to the kitchen, perhaps even a walk-in pantry, but there was a window in one wall, quite large, and out of proportion to the dimensions of the room itself. She hung her favourite painting here, in solitary state. She did not even furnish the room – when she came to look at her painting, she would stand in front of it. The room was more like a tiny chapel than a boudoir.