Mesmerised (21 page)

‘Yes. Yes I am.’

‘
Then tell me about your morning?’

‘I went to the Louvre to sketch.’

‘And I wrote a melody. For you.’

‘For me?’

‘Yes, but it’s not finished yet. What about the Louvre?’

‘I was with Claude, Henri and Victorine bu
t no one stayed long. Claude was summoned by his father. Victorine was upset and I walked her home. Henri came to look for me. It was all a bit chaotic, really.’

‘Oh, what was wrong with Victorine?’

‘Edouard just told her he is getting married to Suzanne.’

‘How awful.
For her, I mean. So, what’s she doing now?’

‘I don’t know. She said she’s going to buy a bottle of cognac and write a song.’

‘I think we should go there.’

‘What
? Now? To her home?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why? She made it perfectly clear that she wants to be alone.’

‘I just want to see how she is.’

‘You hardly know her.’

‘She’s a friend of yours and a fellow musician.’

‘This is our time together. Are you sure?’Blanche tugs strongly on my arm and clutches the cloth of my jacket as she propels me forwards. We head in the direction of the rue de Rivoli where Blanche accosts a woman with a wheelbarrow.

‘Madame, I’d like to buy some vegetables.’

‘You should have come to the market, I’m on my way home.’

‘I will take the rest of your onions, peas and mint.’

The woman drops the handles of the wheelbarrow with a thump. Hands on hips, she huffs, bending her back into the beginnings of an arch and revealing a white apron beneath her coat tails, stained by greenery, mud and tomato juice.

‘Only if you take the potatoes and the onion flowers as well,’ she says.

Blanche lets go of my arm and elbows my chest.

‘Yes,’ I say, as a matter of course. The truth is I was miles away in the land of
Sâlpètriere and meditating on what I will say when I’m confronted with the abduction of Bella Laffaire by Ipsen and Charcot. My absence costs me a franc for vegetables and another twenty sous for the bunch of alliums. I do not question the robbery. I trust Blanche to have evaluated, whether under these circumstances, we are paying the right price or too much.

As we walk across the bridge and the wind sweeps my hair from my face like a
deja-vu of earlier in the day, Blanche berates me, ‘She charged us a fortune. Why didn’t you say anything?’

‘I don’t know. Why didn’t you?’

I acknowledge to myself that this is our first domestic argument.

‘Why are you smiling?’

‘Because I love you,’ I say.

We are silent until
we reach rue Maitre Albert. The door to Victorine’s building isn’t open. She might have gone out. I don’t even know if she is still there. There doesn’t seem to be a bell-pull. I look around for a pebble on the cobbled street. Blanche stands looking up with her hands on her hips. I find a stone on top of a muddied leaflet on the floor of an advertisement for a café concert at the Guerbois. The stone is too heavy. I fish in my pocket for a coin to throw at Victorine’s window. It misses. I pick it up and throw again. I do this several times like a circus clown till I feel a hand on my shoulder and turn around.

‘She’s not here or she doesn’t want us to come in,’ Blanche says, and at that moment Victorine appears at the window. She wears only a chemise. She calls down,

‘What is it Paul, what do you want?’

‘I told Bl
anche that you were feeling low. She wanted to come by and see if you’re all right. She’s brought you some flowers and some vegetables to make soup.’

‘Wait,’ she says, ‘I’ll come down.’

The door opens slowly as if someone is having trouble pushing it. I grab it to help and eventually a child squeezes out and runs past me.

‘You may as well come up,’
Victorine calls from the top of the stairs. The common parts of the building are circular and dark. They feel damp and smell of napthaline. I take the wrapped plants from Blanche’s arms. She picks up her skirts and begins to climb the spiral staircase. I follow behind. When we are half way up she loses her footing. I catch her in my arms. The paper crackles and the flowers snap. When we arrive on the second floor, Victorine stands in her doorway, she has a long silk shirt thing over her chemise, the two sides of which she holds together in her fist.

‘Hello, Blanche,’ she says, leaning forwards to kiss the two of us on both cheeks. As she moves towards me, there is a whiff of alcohol on her breath and the scent of pipe-tobacco clings to her hair
. ‘It’s very wonderful of you to think of me in this way, but I’m all right.’ As she speaks she looks over her shoulder into the apartment. ‘I have company,’ she whispers, turning back.

I hand Victorine the squashed vegetables and the dead blooms. Potatoes fall on the floor like a broken string of pearls. Blanche bends to pick them up.

‘Victorine, darling, are you coming back to bed,’ a female voice calls out.

Blanche looks to me.

‘We’re so sorry to have disturbed you,’ I say.

‘It’s nothing,’ she says. ‘Thank
s for these. You can disturb me anytime.’

I bow my head.

She turns away and shuts the door.

‘I think she’s so exotic,’ Blanche whispers and I release my suffocating breath.

It’s very late
– or early, depending upon which way you see it. I can’t sleep. It gives me a thrill to say it, so I whisper it to myself several times – Blanche is sleeping in my bed. It doesn’t change; every time she sleeps here I feel the same way.

I sit at my desk and
unfold my sketch paper, a little troubled that I have allowed myself to run out of good writing equipment. As I raise my pen to start a letter to Clemens I’m aware of an eerie silence coming from the well. It feels as if my body is draining itself of blood. I am chilled and start to shiver. Looking towards the bedroom I see only the bottom of the bed. From the doorway I can hear Blanche’s breathing as a concerto. My heart pumps wildly. I’m aware of something both sinister and ridiculous. She doesn’t even have a hint of a cough. I stay to listen whilst her music grows softer and mingles with mine.

Dear Clemens,

I hope you don’t mind me saying but I miss your letters so much these days. I used to have a friendship with Doctor George de Bellio, a Romanian homeopath living in Paris, who also loves modern art. He no longer speaks to me. It sounds awful to say this and I wish you were here so that I could explain. I don’t think I can, adequately, on paper.

So many things have been happening in my life. I have met a wonderful woman who has captured my heart. I’ve become very much a part of the drama that is ‘modern art’. I am also a dedicated homeopath. My cup
runneth over, as a friend reminded me just today.

Clemens, my mentor and friend, I have things to say that only you will understand. Please forgive me, I don’t wish to burden you with what is contained herein and I don’t want you to feel that you have to
do
anything. It will be enough just to believe that, even for one instant, someone else understands this very isolated, homeopathic, point of view.

You know that I am employed as an allopathic doctor at the hospital La
Sâlpètriere. I am treating a patient there who suffers from acute delusions of grandeur and who was admitted to the hospital. I have been granted the permission to treat her homeopathically. I made my initial prescription four months ago and now monitoring her progress I anticipate that she will very soon have the stability of mind that should allow her to survive as an independent person in the outside world. She is now quite well, with the ability to join in society, in the day-to-day running of things, I believe. With a diagnosis of mania the change in her mentality in so little time is quite remarkable. But to gloat on homeopathy’s success is not why I write.

The thing is
that since taking on this case, I have become increasingly concerned about my own state of mind. The Faculty have sent men round to the hospital to spy on me. I feel as if homeopathy is their blood sport, and I have been manipulated, like a bird reared for shooting. When I think this way, I do not feel safe. Is this merely a symptom of melancholia? I cannot be the non-judgemental observer here.

I have also had other experiences. I treated a boy in my private practice for mild choleric symptoms and the remedy seemed to work well where
allopathy failed. I had them queuing around the block!

Two boys came to get me from Père Suisse
’s art classes. By the time I got back the crowd had dispersed and I almost got arrested. A policeman accused me of trying to cause an uprising!

Wait, I haven’t finished. Bella
Laffaire, my patient at the hospital, the one who I was telling you about. I needed to speak to her family as part of the case-taking. I traced a possible relative to Montmartre and was threatened by her pimp at the Moulin de la Galette … .

As I write I realise that I cannot send this missive. I smudge the ink with my left hand, my pen-hand, right across the page until the writing is a blur and spend the rest of the night in my bedroom, standing by the window, watching Blanche’s white reflection in the darkened glass.

We
Men

November 4th

‘In painting
, as in the other arts, there’s not a single process, no matter how insignificant, which can be reasonably made into a formula. You come to nature with your theories, and she knocks them all flat.’

Pierre-
Auguste Renoir

I have begun my love affair with physical exertion. In the same way as overeating swells your guts and you have to move for relief, anxiety expands inside me, and so I run. The pursuit is hard on my clothes but Victorine has negotiated a good frequent rate for me with her mother, the laundress. I do not have such a good arrangement with the cobbler for my battered shoes and my feet are constantly sore but my nerves are calmed. I run every morning at dawn through the dark grey streets of Paris that are expectant with the promise of light, sometimes sliding on cobbles or pummelling modern pavements, down to the embankment. I seem to grow stronger, stamping my jealous demons underfoot.

I run next to the Seine with her cold, wrinkly skin. Past the bobbing barges filled with fruit and coal and covered with tarpaulin. I run with the sound of my ow
n heartbeat in my ears and quivering vision. I run towards sunrays like seedlings growing on the horizon. I run until my lungs threaten to burst and I must stop with my hands on my thighs panting like a dog. I run to the rising sun.

This morning has already burst open with sunlight and although my breath is accelerated and my body sweats profusely, I am much
calmer than I was before I started.

Home again, I lie next to Blanche.

‘Hello,’ she says, huskily, sleep filled, squinting like an artist perusing her work.

‘Hello,’ I reply.

‘What are you doing lying on top of the covers fully clothed?’ she asks.

‘I had a bad night.’

‘I do worry about you,’ she says, reaching across me to the bedside table where she reads the time on my watch.

‘
Merde
!’ she says and slides herself over me so she can get up.

I make a mountain of our pillows and
lean against it, cross my legs, and watch as she stands naked at the sink to wash.

‘
You
worry about
me,’
I say.

‘You don’t have to worry about me anymore. You’ve cured me,’ she says, although I know I haven’t. Firstly, if she
were truly healed it would not have been I but the remedy that cured her. Secondly, she would not have to keep taking Phosphorus every week, which I know she does. Her symptoms are merely palliated and although this outcome would have the druggists advertising success, I, as a homeopath, have encountered real cures, where the patient does not have to keep taking any more medicine and the symptoms don’t come back.

I say nothing.

She has twisted her lips to the side and is rubbing some cream into her cheek. She watches herself in the mirror, mesmerising me. I have a sudden urge to stand behind her, press my body into hers and hold her breasts, but I don’t. Such behaviour is reserved for leisure times only.

‘Should I be worried?’ she asks, bending over slightly to view my reflection in the glass.

‘No,’ I mouth, shaking my head.

Midway, she stops making circular motions with her fingers on her face and waits. I do come to stand behind her but hold her hips away from mine whilst I kiss the cheek that she has pointed to the ceiling.

‘You’re not going to tell me?’ she says, eventually.

‘Tell you what?’

She puts on her clothes whilst I relieve myself of mine then go through to my kitchen/dispensary. I fill a pan with water. Blanche comes in with her scent of patchouli.

‘Coffee?’
I ask.

‘Yes,’ she says, sitting down on the stool at the counter.

‘I don’t want to make you late,’ I say, head bowed, running my fingers through my hair.

‘I don’t care.’

‘I care. I don’t want you to lose your job.’

‘I won’t.’

‘You might.’

‘Paul, this is absurd, you have to tell me.’

‘I don’t know what you want me to say.’

‘Something, anything, whatever it is that’s bothering you. I thought Bella was doing really well.’

‘It’s all become more complicated. Of course I will tell you. Over dinner in a little place I discovered at the foot of Montmartre and I promise I will tell you everything. It’s getting late, go to work.’

Reluctantly, she stands and swaggers forward like a child who has been told to go to their room. She kisses me and turns away.

‘Bye,’ she says huskily, disappearing from sight, slamming the door.

I am alone, noticing the lack of sound from the well again, watching goose pimples rise on my arm.

Two hours later, I am still in my kitche
n dispensary. It is a Wednesday, my painting day. Yet, here I am naked, sitting on a stool, idle, wasting time. I intended to have a bath but, despite the low temperature in the room, I have not moved.

In contrast to my stillness, rue du
Faubourg Saint Denis is alive. Horse-drawn carts outside squeak from their rusty wheels, horse’s hooves pummel the road, peddlars call out their wares, and vagrants roar messages of doom to the world.

I watch as the light pours through my red medicine bottles and turns into scarlet arrows in mid-flight across the room. A harsh wind
thumps the window followed by a thud against the front door.

‘
Gachet!’ a voice calls. ‘Paul, open up!’

‘Camille, are you alone?’ I call back, suddenly alert and making my way towards him.

‘Of course I am, why do you …?’

I open the door.

‘Oh, are you modelling for someone?’ he whispers, looking over my shoulder into the room. ‘Ah, then there must be a woman in the bedroom,’ he says when he can see no one.

I hear the street door open and close. A cold draught intrudes and leaps up the stairs. I hug my bare body with my arms.

‘I’m freezing, please come in. Is everything all right? Julie? Lucien? Your mother?’ I say, pulling him inside.

‘Everyone’s fine,’ he says, walking over the threshold twirling his Russian hat in his hands. ‘
No one’s going to Père Suisse today. We’re all at Café Guerbois. What are you doing naked at this hour? No, don’t answer that, it will ruin my image of you as a piously good man,’ he chuckles.

‘That needed to be challenged.’

‘Well quite.’

There is silence

He continues, ‘Come on man, we need to go.’

He is right. Everyone has turned up to this intimate restaurant with its panelled walls where strangers often jostle elbows and make new friends. It’s certainly very early in the day, even for this place, to be crowded. All the tables have been pushed together in the centre of the room and every seat is filled.

The owner’s wife is young and precocious. She places a clay pitcher of water at either end of the table and a half a dozen tumblers around each one.

‘What’s it to be then?’ she asks this crowd of high-spirited men, these revellers, for whom she seductively smoothes her apron with her palms.

‘Is that an offer,
Clothilde?’ asks Edgar, looking around to appreciate the effects of his wit in the expressions of others.

‘I’ve heard you were the saucy one,’ she says, taking a crumpled piece of paper and a pencil from a hidden pocket in her dress and standing poised to write.
Edgar stares back at her with his soulful, droopy eyelids, a motherless child, a moody man-boy.

‘Better luck next time Degas,’ shouts Armand from the other end of the table, raising a tumbler in a toast, water slopping over the sides.

Edouard sits back and lights a cigar.

‘It’s
Cézanne that she’s looking up and down,’ says Claude.

‘Hey,
Clothilde, sit on his lap. You can be
his
model. As long as you like to be outlined in bitumen and have your privates turn up like purple rolling hills,’ shouts Edgar, perking up.

‘Let’s drink to that,’ Henri calls out.

Everyone stands and water is poured and handed around at each end of the table. Clothilde suddenly turns from fey to matronly as she taps an empty tumbler with a spoon several times. The room waits in a silent hush. I look to the pools of water on the table already bleaching the colour of the wood.

‘Right then,’ she says. ‘Are you going to order? Do you want food? Or just drinks?’

‘Bring wine Clothilde,’ says Edouard, who never rose to partake in a drink at Clothilde’s expense, but stayed in his chair puffing and re-lighting the brown crêpe-like tobacco that keeps going out. ‘Several pitchers of your impressive house red for the boys. If anyone wants beer, they can order it themselves. And bring menus. I, for one, want to eat.’

‘Hey,’ says
Clothilde, poking Edouard’s arm. ‘I wouldn’t mind modelling for you.’ Words that award her a collective ‘wooo!’ as she walks off into the kitchen, slamming the door behind her.

‘I’m not eating, Julie will have prepared a meal for me for when I get home,’ Camille tells
Edouard.

‘You’re being ridiculous, that’s hours away. You’re up in Paris for the day and besides, this is my wedding party. I’ve just got back from Holland. I’m a married man.’

‘Oh, you didn’t, you didn’t, you didn’t marry Victorine,’ Charles calls out, with his hands covering his face in mock despair.

‘No, don’t be ridiculous, I married Suzanne like I always said I would’

Everyone is quiet.

Eventually Camille talks softly, swallowing first as if his mouth is dry. ‘I remember when you first introduced me to her. It was obvious you were very much in love.’

‘Love … yes love … ,’ Edouard says, staring at the volcanic tip of his cigar. ‘Anyway, enough deviation away from the main event, where are those menus?’ he asks, standing and looking around. ‘I don’t know about any of you but I’m starved … . Ah! The beautiful Clothilde.’

She smiles as she places baskets of bread on the table and hands out the menus from under her arm.

‘Venison. Goose. Is this compliments of the groom’s maternal parent?’ asks Henri.

Claude throws a bread roll at him.
Henri picks one up.

Camille shouts, ‘Hey, hey, hey, we’re in a restaurant
. Henri, put that down.’

I gaze at
Edouard above my menu. An intriguing thought comes to mind. Could Suzanne have been courting Edouard at the same time as having a love affair with Auguste, his father? Edouard catches me staring and lifts his eyebrows. I quickly look down at the list of dishes.

‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost,’
Edouard says in a low voice, leaning across the table towards me.

‘
I’ve had a very stressful time at the hospital.’

‘But you’re a brilliant doctor, everyone knows it, I’ve seen those crowds outside your front door.’

‘Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that.’

‘Look, if there’s anything I can do to help
… ,’ he says, sitting back and calling to the rest of the group, ‘Is it venison and goose all round?’

Clothilde’s
husband and brother come through from the kitchen like rustic soldiers. They set wine and glasses down. Clothilde stands and watches with her hands on her hips.

‘We’ll have goose and venison all round,’
Edouard tells her.

She nods her head decis
ively. Everyone helps themselves to wine. There are an abundance of toasts. Our host holds an empty carafe above his head and calls out for more.

‘We need to stick together,
Edouard,’ Camille says, his eyes full of sorrow and wisdom. ‘We’re the old men here.’

‘You speak for yourself.’

‘The others look to us. We could bring the whole thing together.’

Edouard’s
eyes shine like those of a dog who has been kicked too many times and now doesn’t even like to be stroked. He turns violently towards Camille.

‘Look, I understand that you need an alternative. I might paint outside. I might present work that the stupid world does not seem to understand but my sole ambition is to have my
paintings exhibited at the Salon. I am not a rebel. I am not, what’s that word I hear bandied around everywhere these days? … a realist.’ And despite a very obvious attempt to keep his emotions under control, Edouard is shouting now. ‘I am not a realist!’

It is
11am and already my friends have all had quite a few glasses of wine. Auguste stands up, handsome in his black jacket, fawn trousers, and well-trimmed chestnut hair. He sways slightly from the wine.

‘United we stand, divided we fall,’ he says. ‘We can all help each other.’