Monet's Angels

by Jennifer Pulling

  ‘Thanks for the ride, Robert.’ He gazed back at her, wanting her to be gone. Then he folded his arms over the wheel and rested his head. The sun burnt the back of his neck but he scarcely noticed.

  Now he remembered that time with Scott. There he was standing in the doorway of the forge, watching his friend at work. He saw the pulse of white heat as Scott plucked the horseshoe from the fire. He heard the dull metallic ring as his friend pounded the shoe then carried it over to the waiting horse. The air was filled with an acrid smell, as the shoe was pressed against the horse’s hoof and sizzled and smoked. He remembered his amazement that the horse never flinched.

  ‘Hey, Bobbie,’ Scott grinned at him. no-one else ever called him Bobbie, not even his mother. ‘Escaped the office, have you?’

  Robert saw the flame of Scott’s hair as he bent over the anvil once more.

  ‘It’s Saturday, kid, I don’t work on Saturdays, unlike you.’

  Scott’s arms were pale and freckled. ‘Maybe but the difference is I enjoy what I do.’

  His eyes were grey blue. They spent all their free time together wandering the countryside with Rusty, lying in the grass with a ham sandwich and bottle of lemonade. Talking always talking, setting the world to rights, as he could never do at home.

  Robert heard himself try to be casual but it was difficult when he had to raise his voice above the sound of the hammer. ‘Hey, I know you don’t countenance my family much but it’s my birthday next week and my mother is arranging a picnic.’

  Scott was busy banging nails into the shoe and did not reply. Robert saw the fine muscled body, stripped to the waist, it gleamed with sweat. He wanted to plead though knew he shouldn’t for it would sound childish. ‘Please Scott, please come to the picnic. It won’t be the same without you.’

  – THIRTY-ONE –

  JUDITH

  J

  udith walked towards the hotel, surprised to find there were tears in her eyes. What a miserable ending to a day that had promised so well. She recalled his expression of a moment ago, the hardness of his gaze, his lips set in a thin line. He had glanced at her as though she were a stranger; no recognition of the pleasant hours they had spent together over these past weeks. All he wanted, it seemed, was to get rid of her, especially now, she thought, that I know his little secret. He’s frightened I’ll let it all out.

  By the time she stepped into the cool entrance, paused at the reception desk to collect some notepaper and her key, she had recovered. She knew what she was going to do. In her room, she sat on the bed and began to write a letter.

  Dearest Mother and Father,

  It has been some time since I wrote to you, although I have been so happy to receive all your lovely letters.

  Here she grimaced, picturing those shreds of paper that had filled the wastepaper basket.

  I’m so glad you are both well and busy by the sound of things. Here in Giverny, I have passed some wonderful weeks in the company of painters, and my dream came true when I visited Monet and saw his beautiful house and garden. He is such a nice, kindly man and I believe we have become good friends. Can you imagine it, your daughter sitting with him in his studio, listening to stories of his life? I can scarcely believe it myself.

  Judith paused and gazed around the room, seeing it once again with the freshness of her first sight, now seeming so long ago. She had grown to love this room with its simple rustic oak furniture, the red and blue tufted mat. With a stab of nostalgia, she remembered thinking, here I am in my very own room in Giverny and Monet only a few yards away. Everything had seemed set fair then: the prospect of a friendship with Robert, the anticipated visit to Le Pressoir, escape from all the expectations of her in New York. No, she was not going to contemplate failure. But how was she going to persuade them?

  I have heard from Charlie, of course, and am happy to know that he is not moping around but going about town a bit. In fact, he seems to be getting along very well without me.

  Again she paused, reread the last sentence and scored it out. Now she must come out with it:

  The thing is, I want to ask you a big favour. Would you be darlings and allow me to stay on a little longer? I know you will say that there is the wedding to consider but surely it could be delayed for a month or two. It would certainly give you more time, Mother, to prepare for it all. In your last letter, I thought you sounded rather anxious. I really hope you will agree to this and I promise that when I do return I shall do everything to fulfil your wishes for me.

  With much love to you both,

  Judith

  Yes, that would do. She waved the sheet of paper about to dry the ink, folded it carefully and slipped it into the matching envelope. It would go out by this afternoon’s post.

  Judith went to sit on the wide window ledge and gazed out at the garden. Her eye followed the small flight of steps that led upward towards the more secluded areas. She thought back to that night when she and Michel had lain on the ground and he had held his penis in his hands, huge and dark and shining. At the thought, she felt the strange stirring inside her, a welling up of moisture as when he had used his fingers in that feathery tantalising touch. She didn’t know, of course, because they had never gone anything like so far, but she had a pretty good idea Charlie wasn’t capable of giving her the same kind of pleasure as this man. When she thought about it, he was more like an adoring brother.

  Judith moved back to stand by the window again. The last rays of the sun caught a tangle of white roses clambering over an arch, tingeing them with gold. They were supposed to meet again tomorrow but where would they go? Not the garden. It was obvious eyes were on them now and to be fair, she did not want to upset Madame Baudy whom she liked and admired. It would be madness to risk being thrown out of the hotel for something that had absolutely no future to it, whatever Michel seemed to think. Part of it was her own fault, she supposed, for leading him on.

  As she opened the chest of drawers to take out clean underwear, her glance fell on the packet of sanitary towels nestled there. Next week Aunt Flo would pay a visit. This thought led her to another and it struck her Michel had not used anything when he came inside her. He had got so worked up, she couldn’t have held him back if she’d tried. She remembered washing away the sticky stuff before she went to bed. Suppose he had made her pregnant? That would be an impossible situation to get in to, ruin all her plans. Maybe she’d got away with it this time but she couldn’t risk it again, risk being cast off without a dollar. Anyway, she was getting tired of his ogling, his possessiveness, all she’d wanted was a bit of fun. It was time to cut it short though she knew he’d make a scene. What an awful bore.

  Judith glanced at her travel clock. It was after seven and time to dress for dinner. Tonight she was going to make a special effort, let Robert see she was undaunted.

  Taking out the Fortuny frock, marvelling again at its shimmering colours, she thought of her reaction when he had suddenly spoken out over that delicious lunch. It had seemed to her more a confirmation of things sensed and felt rather than known. She smiled at herself for ever imagining he might fall in love with her. But although she wanted to believe she was free thinking, she found she did not approve. It was only ever spoken about in hushed whispers at home. ‘Serve him right if other people found out,’ she murmured aloud. His smugness about living in Giverny! No wonder he had left America and equally, no wonder he didn’t want to go back.

  She heard her mother’s voice talking about a friend’s failed contraception, using the withdrawal method.

  ‘Another one on the way,’ she had told Father, ‘and they can ill afford it. I don’t know what’s the matter with that husband of hers, selfish so and so.’

  ‘How many is that now?’ he had enquired. ‘Four?’

  ‘Four! This will be the sixth. She’s ruined her figure forever.’

  Judith remembered her mother smoothing her hands over her own very slender body, which her one daughter had left unchanged.
‘Thank heavens for the diaphragm.’

  ‘It’s certainly been a good friend to you,’ Father had remarked dryly.

  – THIRTY-TWO –

  CLAUDE

  H

  e wakes with a sense of approaching doom, of helplessness; he stares through the half-light trying to locate the reason, physical or mental. There is no bodily pain that might suggest sickness is about to strike, it is his mind that troubles him. Painting is a torture, thinking, thinking, always thinking, obsessed by the need to render what he experiences and praying he’ll have a few more good years left to him.

  He believed he had left them behind, those sensations of hopelessness and dismay that dogged him after Suzanne’s and Alice’s deaths, have dogged him at various periods of his life. Remember that time back in the sixties when he believed life was not worth living if he could not achieve what he had set out to do; how cold the dark waters of the Seine closing over his head? Remember when Camille died in his arms and he caught himself watching her tragic forehead, observing the sequence of changing colours that death was imposing on her rigid face. Blue, yellow, grey… in spite of himself he felt compelled to paint her, one last time. Never had he let his depression show in his art until that moment, always worked with joyous, sunlit colours. No, maybe for The Magpie, that frail bird perched on a gate like a staff of music in a world of white, grey and violet, maybe then it had come through, portraying his work’s rejection.

  This melancholy seems to have appeared from nowhere and for no obvious reason. He knows he is an esteemed painter, that ever since he realised nature was his muse he has achieved his ambition to create important work. Why only a week or so ago, he had felt such joie de vivre. Judith made him feel young again, she infected him with her carelessness, curbed this constant worry about his sight. This week he had started sketching for the Water Lilies series. What has happened? ‘Time to get up, Claude,’ he scolds himself yet lingers, for once loathe to begin the day.

  He sits in his studio, smoking. A painting gazes down at him from the walls: sunny afternoon, vivid flowers and cool patches of shade. Camille’s summer gown is caught by a breeze as she takes an after luncheon stroll, while his son plays with his blocks in the shadow cast by the table. This morning, he finds no pleasure in the memory of that long ago meal, those months of high summer in Argenteuil. He is seized by the old fear, irrational, as he knows it to be, that he will lose everything; his house and garden will vanish, his work written on water. He lights another cigarette, feeling himself drawn down into the black hole of despair. To have gone to all this trouble to get to this is just too stupid. Outside, there is brilliant sunshine but he doesn’t feel up to looking at it. Instead he smokes while his mind returns to twenty years ago. He sees himself in Rouen’s square, painting the cathedral. He moves from canvas to canvas, altering his view point but only slightly, fascinated by the play of light and atmosphere at different times of day and in shifting weather conditions. As always when painting in the open air, he is at the mercy of a fleeting cloud, a sudden ray of sunshine, or fog in the early morning. Each day is a fresh struggle with the obstinate coats of paint. At times he is exasperated and ready to give up the series. Those cathedral paintings haunted him and he had nightmares about them. They fell on top of him and seemed to be blue or pink or yellow. He has given himself a severe challenge, forsaken nature for the monochrome of ancient stone; there is no constantly changing water or moving foliage as a means of expressing the play of light. Yet somehow he induces harmonies of colour with the passing of time: pale and rosy at sunrise, purple at midday, glowing in the evening under the rays of the setting sun, scarcely visible in the mist. He transcends his task but glories in the struggle. He has come to detest the things in which he has success at the first attempt.

  He opens his sketch book and glances through the drawings he has made over the past week: the whippy stems of iris, their fleur de lys crowned heads, willows bending to the water, agapanthus. Page after page he has covered, often working from memory for he knows the water garden off by heart. He lays it down with a sigh. All very well making sketches but isn’t he crazy to think of embarking on such a grand project? How many years would it take? Would his sight endure that long? He lights another cigarette. If he could see Judith again, it might pull him out of these doldrums but since her last visit, Blanche has made excuses when he asks her when the young woman is coming again.

  First she told him Judith had gone away for a few days, then she said he sounded as if he were in for a cold, better wait to see how it developed. Finally, ‘Claude, why do you continue to waste your painting hours on a silly girl?’

  Blanche has certainly done a volte-face. She had been all for these visits, the one to suggest them to him in the first place. When he thinks about it, this alteration stems from that luncheon with Georges and the discussion about his eyes. Memories of that splendid pike tickle his taste buds.

  There had been one other visit. Blanche for some reason had gone out, apparently forgetting the appointment. It had been left to Annette to announce Judith’s arrival. He smiles, remembering the conspiratorial glance they had exchanged, the tacit agreement they could now spend more time together without interruption.

  ‘I’m taking a trip to Rouen,’ she had told him. ‘Robert, you remember, Mr Harrison, the one who gave the birthday picnic, is taking me in his splendid automobile.’

  ‘Whatever you do, be sure to visit the cathedral, it is a splendid example of Gothic architecture.’

  ‘It’s at the top of my list. Emma Bovary met her lover there. Remember, in the book?’

  ‘Ah, dear Flaubert, man after my own heart… utter perfectionist. Although, I have to say, I would never have had his patience. I met him once. Do you know what he said to me? Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.’

  ‘Oh my golly, you met Flaubert?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘And he said that?’

  ‘He did.’

  ‘Regular and orderly, that sounds dull.’

  ‘It is not if your alter ego does something entirely different. His certainly did. He was lucky to escape prosecution, unlike poor Baudelaire.’

  ‘I will never be great as Flaubert was great. I just have my life and I want that to be, maybe not violent, but certainly original. Do you think it will?’

  She had leaned back in that familiar pose of hers, folded her arms and scowled.

  He chuckled. ‘Of course, ma petite, you are well on the way.’

  She smiled then. ‘Oh thank you. You’re so nice and kind.’

  ‘There are others who wouldn’t say that.’

  ‘Well, I think you are. Now come on what story are you going to tell me today?’

  ‘Let’s see. I know let’s go back, way back to when I was even younger than you. Let’s go back to when I was twenty.’

  ‘Before you met Camille?’ She sounded disappointed. ‘I love hearing about Camille.’

  ‘Several years before that but it was an important time in my life, I assure you.’

  * * *

  Autumn in Paris: the sky is a clear blue and the florists’ buckets stacked with flowers, as if it were still summer. He has visited the Louvre where he watched painters copying the old masters. Instead he goes to sit at a window and paints what he sees. Now he walks along the Tuileries, scuffling the fallen leaves with his feet, breathing in the crisp air. He admires the Emperor’s new garden with its beds of exotic plants and flowers, the statues, pauses by the orangerie where the citrus trees in their tubs have already been brought inside to over winter. He walks on, feeling he never wants to stop, cannot get enough of this city, which is now his home. This morning, he gazed down from his apartment window through the branches of the plane trees, telling himself he has arrived; he is a part of this centre of art and culture. He feels indomitable. As he nears the Place de la Concorde, a skinny boy in ragged clothes pleads for
money. Claude drops a franc into the dirty hand. What on earth made me do that, he asks himself, I’m struggling myself on Papa’s measly allowance. That franc would have bought me supper.

  In November on his twentieth birthday, he stays late in the Brasserie des Martyrs with Pissarro and some other painters, getting drunk. The next morning a letter arrives. The lot has been drawn and he has a bad card. He is being called up. The only advantage is that, if he responds immediately, he can choose his posting. It takes very little time to make up his mind: Algeria. Delacroix is his motive, the master of colour, its explosion on canvas in scenes of dramatic violence. He has consumed them, Death of Sardanapalus, Liberty Leading the People, not for the subjects for he is not drawn to history or mythology, but for this consummate manipulation of colour. If his hero had been inspired by North Africa, might he not be similarly so? This fires his request to be posted to Algeria. There he can study the intense southern light, exotic subject matter and heightened colour.

  In June of that year, 1861 he is drafted into the Zouave. If he is honest with himself, he has to admit he is also attracted by the uniform, the baggy trousers, the sashes and oriental headgear… all rather dashing. He learns to ride a horse, to handle a rifle and to march, all of which he finds tiresome. In the garrison, he amuses his companions by making caricatures of their seniors and of his friends. He knows his true raison d’être: he chose Algeria because of the sky. He finds it a splendid country with constant sunshine, hot seductive colours and this eternally blue sky accentuated by the greens of palms and exotic plants. Everywhere he looks he finds something new and, when he has time, he tries to render what he sees.

  ‘I made a succession of small drawings of little Algerian scenes… fauna and flora, landscapes, countryside views, veiled women and young girls… everyday life. You cannot imagine how my vision developed, although I suppose I didn’t quite realise it at the time, this impression of light and colour was the germ of my future work. And then I became ill. The first symptom I remember was feeling very tired, so tired I could hardly move. My head ached and my throat. I didn’t want to eat and my temperature rose alarmingly. Typhoid, I developed typhoid, Judith, just at the moment when I had had enough of being a soldier.’