Liberty Silk (47 page)

‘My true-love hath my heart, & I have his,

By just exchange one for the other given:

I hold his dear, & mine he cannot miss;

There never was a better bargain driven.

My true-love hath my heart, & I have his.’

It was the sketchbook given to Scotch by her grandmother all those years ago, the one described in the letter she had written in May 1919.

Cat leafed slowly through the pages covered with drawings and marginalia and commentary: she had in her hands a unique record of her grandparents’ magical honeymoon, she was seeing for the first time the deft penmanship of her grandfather’s left-handed sketches.

The sound of a conch shell blown by a fisherman on the reef made her look up. A woman clad in a floral-patterned pareu was making her way along the path that led to the house, a basket on her arm. She had the graceful carriage of a Polynesian dancer; her lustrous hair was so dark as to appear purple, with one lambent stripe sweeping back from her bronze forehead. She wore a necklace of shells and a white tiare flower behind her right ear, which, Lisa had learned from Patrick Lawless’s book, was to indicate that she belonged to one man alone. She stopped short as she caught sight of the automobile parked outside the house.

Cat moved to the door, and called a greeting. The woman gave her a wary look.

‘
Parlez-vous anglais?
’ Cat asked.

‘Yes.’

‘I’m Cat,’ she volunteered, stepping down from the veranda. ‘I wrote to say I was coming.’

‘My name is Tèha.’ The woman’s voice was musical. ‘I am the housekeeper of Sandyman. You say you wrote to him?’

‘Yes. I’m his granddaughter.’

‘The letter came, but he could not read it. His eyesight is waning. He is sick.’

‘Sick? How?’

‘Coral poisoning. I dressed the wound as best I could, and treated it with lime juice. I nursed him here for several days, but the wound festered and he had to go to the hospital in Papeete.’

‘Is he there still?’

‘Yes.’

‘How is he?’

‘Sometimes good, sometimes bad. But last night I heard the flute of the tupaupau in the dark.’

‘What’s that?’

‘The vivo – the ghost flute. And the banana leaves were shivering even though there was no breeze. I am fearful that death is near. If you want to see your grandfather, you must come quickly.’ Tèha looked at the sketchbook, which Cat still held in her hands. ‘I came by motor coach to fetch some items he requested. That is one of them.’

‘We can drive you back to Papeete,’ Cat said.

‘Thank you. It will be quicker that way.’

Inside the house, Tèha moved around with swift, restrained grace, selecting various items: three or four books; a tiny oil on bark that could have been a Gauguin; a wood engraving. This depicted a voluptuous Tèha – naked but for a grass skirt – dancing in a trance-like state, eyes closed in rapture, arms sinuously entwined over her head. As well as the sketchbook, Tèha consigned to the basket a photograph she fetched from the bedroom.

‘May I see?’ asked Cat.

Tèha handed it to her. It was a copy of the studio portrait that had been enclosed among Jessie’s letters.

‘Your grandmama,’ Tèha said.

Cat nodded.

‘You are alike,’ the other woman remarked as Cat returned the portrait to her. ‘You have her eyes.’

Scotch – or ‘ce
méchant
Sandyman!’ as the nurses affectionately called him – was in a morphine haze. He had periods of lucidity but, the staff advised her, they were coming less frequently. Cat passed through corridor after corridor and past row upon row of hospital beds, and as she walked, she found herself thinking:
Why am I here? Why have I travelled halfway across the world to visit a man who neither knows nor cares that I exist? A man who abandoned my grandmother and my mother with such callousness?
And even as she thought these wretched thoughts, she knew the answer.
Because he is my grandfather and his blood flows through my veins.

A
lei
of frangipani hung above the door of the ward where Sandyman lay. Allowing Tèha to precede her, Cat watched as the older woman took his hand, and murmured into his ear. She caressed his face, and straightened the coverlet on his bed. This woman was more than a housekeeper to Scotch, Cat thought. The tenderness of her demeanour told her that Tèha had been her grandfather’s mistress; the white tiare flower bore testament to that. Then Tèha stood aside, and gestured to Cat to take her place on the rickety chair by the bed.

Cat looked down at her grandfather. His face was cadaverous, but handsome still. She saw at once that his eyes, though bluish and cloudy with age, had the percipience of a painter.

‘Jessie,’ he said. Then he smiled. ‘I’m sorry, Mademoiselle. I mistook you for a moment for someone I knew many years ago.’ His voice was low: it had that burr that Jessie had described as
Scotch, but not too Scotch
. . . ‘Tèha tells me you have travelled all the way from Europe to visit me.’

Cat nodded.

‘Why have you come so far to visit a dying man?’

‘Because you are my kin,’ Cat said.

‘I have no kin,’ said Scotch.

Cat’s throat constricted. How could she tell this man that the daughter he never knew was dead; that she, Cat, was his granddaughter? It was preposterous: she should never have come here. She should leave this old man to die in peace. She rose to leave, and as she did, her chair made a loud scraping noise against the linoleum floor, and Scotch winced.

A passing nurse gave Cat a look of mild admonition. ‘Shh! Don’t tire him, please,’ she said. ‘Five minutes, no more.’

‘I’m sorry – I’m going now.’

‘Wait,’ said Nick, laying a hand on Cat’s arm. ‘We’ve come all this way. You’ve got to do this for his sake, as well as for your own. Come on, Cat. Be brave.’

Cat looked at him helplessly. ‘How can I tell him? I don’t have the words. You’re the writer – can’t you help me?’

‘That’s some call.’

‘You know the right questions to ask. Please,’ said Cat. ‘I don’t feel brave any more.’

Nick gave her a look of capitulation, then sat awkwardly down by the bed. ‘How do you do, sir? My name is Nick Ryder.’

‘Are you a doctor?’

‘No. I’m a journalist. May I ask you some questions?’

‘Ask away,’ said Scotch. ‘They’ll help pass whatever time is left to me.’ It was impossible to tell if his grimace was one of pain, or if it was a wry smile.

‘I understand you were married once?’ said Nick.

‘I married a long time ago,’ said Scotch. ‘I married a beauty with Pre-Raphaelite hair.’

‘Was her name Jessie? Jessie Beaufoy?’

‘Yes.’

‘You married in 1919, after the Great War, didn’t you? And honeymooned in France and Italy.’ Nick’s tone was encouraging, coaxing. ‘You went to Rouen, Paris, Florence . . .’

‘Yes! Siena, Venice, Padua . . .’

‘Chambéry, Pont-Aven . . .’ prompted Nick.

‘I would have gone to the ends of the earth for her, I loved her so much. I loved her so much, I had to let her go.’

‘But you left her with a legacy. You left her with a beautiful daughter.’

Scotch shook his head. ‘I have no children. Jessie had a child, I know. I saw her.’

‘When did you see her?’ Cat found her voice.

‘In Paris. In the springtime of 1920. It was outside the Galerie Pierre on the rue La Boétie. By then she had found a protector. A rich fellow; an artist. She was at a
vernissage
of his paintings, big with his child. And then . . .’

The nurse passed again, and looked pointedly at her watch.

‘And then?’ urged Nick.

‘And then she went off to live in the South of France and I never saw her again.’ Scotch’s eyes closed. ‘She went to a place called the Villa Perdita. That’s the name she was known by, then. Perdita. Demetrios told me.’

‘You sent her a book, didn’t you?’ asked Nick.

‘I sent her a book, yes, I don’t know why. To remind her that I was in the world still, maybe. I had illustrated it. I thought . . . I thought perhaps she might have come to me.’

Cat remembered the inscription on the title page of the book – ‘Memories of Raguenez’ – in her grandfather’s copperplate hand, and underneath, the date of publication: 1932. Scotch had sent the book to Jessie six years too late.

‘Your time is up.’ It was the nurse, cordial, but emphatic.

‘The baby she was carrying wasn’t his, sir,’ said Nick.

Scotch’s eyes opened, then closed again.

‘She was your child, sir. Jessie’s child was yours.’ He reached for Cat’s hand and drew her forward. ‘This is your granddaughter.’

The nurse cleared her throat pointedly.

Turning to her, Nick sent her a smile that was at once charming and beseeching. ‘One more minute, please. Just one.’

She gave a brusque nod, then withdrew.

‘It’s up to you now, sweetheart,’ said Nick. He stood up to allow Cat to sit by her grandfather’s side. ‘Good luck,’ he added, in an undertone. ‘This may just be the bravest thing you’ve ever done.’

Cat blinked and fidgeted and cast around for something to say, then caught herself. She needed no preliminaries, no concerned enquiries about the state of Scotch’s health, no labyrinthine explanations as to why she was there. ‘My name is Caitlín,’ she said.

‘I don’t know you.’

Scotch’s voice was feeble. Cat had to lean in close to hear him.

‘I’m Cat,’ she said. ‘My mother was called Lisa: she was as lovely as Jessie, lovely as a film star. She inherited Jessie’s beauty: people loved to make pictures of her. I’m Lisa’s daughter, your granddaughter. I didn’t inherit her beauty, but I inherited your talent. I’m an artist, like you.’

‘An artist? What do you paint?’

Cat didn’t want to tell Scotch that she was a photo journalist who covered atrocities. Instead she said, ‘I paint landscapes.’

‘I painted landscapes once.’

‘I know,’ said Cat. ‘I’ve seen them. They’re beautiful.’

‘I have a granddaughter,’ said Scotch, in wonderment. Opening his eyes, he gazed at her, a smile tilting his mouth. ‘How grand a thing, to have a granddaughter!’

Fireflies flit in the hedge, and suddenly the whole rose garden is lit up. The dancing lanterns of the gondoliers play all manner of tricks with the water, the cafés fill, music is everywhere – in the piazzas, canals, and the lagoons, drifting through the hours into sleep. Venezia.

Cat had headed outside for some air in the hospital garden while her grandfather slept, and was sitting with his sketchbook in her lap. His description of Venice, where he and Jessie had longed so to go, had been penned on the page opposite a pencil drawing of a bridge spanning a canal. It was tinted with the palest pastel, like a sketch by a ghost, and underneath was printed in minuscule letters, ‘View from our hotel window.’

This was where they had sat together, watching the dusk descend upon the place known as the Floating City, listening to music wafting up to them from the narrow streets, and the dip and plash of the gondoliers’ oars. This was where they had haggled with porters and feasted on apricots and peaches and cherries and oranges and figs and felt like Americans when they swanked to the railway station in a gondola. Remembered snatches came to Cat, from one of Jessie’s letters:

We’re here at last, after all the dreams of years . . . Venice is blazing with clear light and radiance at every corner . . . night is just dreamland . . . lights on the water and gondolas filled with men singing and decorated with Chinese lanterns . . . you feel at any minute the whole thing might be wafted away! Oh, it’s great to be alive in a place like this . . .

‘Mademoiselle?’ It was Tèha’s voice. ‘Come now.’

‘Is he dying?’

‘Yes. I have said my farewell.’

The flower in Tèha’s hair was wilting now. Cat followed her back into the building. The corridors were striped with sunlight. Somewhere in the hospital girls were laughing, and then one of them started to sing:

Te reva nei hai aue

Na te patu aue.

‘What does it mean?’ Cat asked Tèha.

‘She is singing of her lover, who is going away on a ship,’ Tèha told her. ‘But his image will always be in her heart.’

Scotch’s eyes were open, but they were dreamy, morphine-glazed. Sitting on the edge of the bed, Cat took his hand. He raised it to his lips.

‘Jessie,’ he said, focusing on the cabochon sapphire. ‘You’re wearing my ring.’

‘Yes,’ Cat replied.

‘Did you write to your parents, to tell them we were engaged?’

‘Yes. I did.’

‘We’ll be married as soon as we get back from this monstrous war. Won’t we?’

‘Yes.’

‘And then we’ll travel. Paris, Florence, Siena. Venice! Damn the expense! We have to get to Venice.’

‘We will. I’ll – I’ll ask Pawpey for money to cover the cost.’

‘I won’t take money from your father.’

‘Let’s not talk about that now. Where do you think we shall we end up?’

‘Finistère, of course! The end of the earth! We’ll picnic on the sands of Raguenez, and swim in the sea.’ A look of confusion crossed her grandfather’s face. ‘I’m not in Chambéry, am I? I’m not dying?’

‘No. No.’

‘It hurts to breathe.’

‘Shall I fetch a doctor?’

‘No, don’t. I can’t bear to let go of you. Let’s take a stroll through the woods beyond Rouen – d’you remember Canteleu? Where we walked the first time, and then again before Christmas, when I asked you to marry me.’

‘I remember,’ said Cat. She tried to conjure up what it must have been like, to walk through woodland in winter. ‘It’s cold, isn’t it?’ she ventured.

‘Yes. But the frost feels good – crunchy under the soles of our boots.’

‘Look! Our breath is mist.’

‘There was a little burst of cloud when our lips first met, here in this very wood, remember?’

‘Yes. I felt so happy. Look up!’

‘There’s snow on the branches.’

‘And there’s Venus, the evening star.’

‘Listen. A robin.’

‘He’s calling for his mate.’

‘Imagine, in the springtime. There’ll be nests with blue speckled eggs.’

‘Will we have a baby, Jessie?’