Judith. She thought of the letter again but said nothing.
‘I find it strange there has been no word from the girl.’
Blanche rose to fetch the plum brandy.
‘She’s young, Papa. You know what the young are like. Perhaps she is amusing herself elsewhere.’
He grunted. ‘She gave the impression that she enjoyed my company and I certainly enjoyed hers. Make some enquiries, Blanche. I would like to see her again.’
In the afternoon, Blanche checked the little cupboards for their store of eggs and decided to collect some more. She left the house and stopped briefly at the foot of the steps to gaze at the white frilled skirts of fuchsia blossoms, contrasting beautifully with their red sepals – like a host of little dancers. How simple the natural world, she thought, and how complicated the lives of human beings. This garden was content to grow, to bloom and then to die, to accept the changing seasons without regret for the past or fear of the future. The loud crowing of the rooster broke into her thoughts and she crossed to the hen run, discreet under a big fig tree.
As she opened the wire door and stepped inside, she entered a peaceful, feathered world. Hens strutted across the floor but many of the fat brown birds were sitting, quiet apart from a little chirping or clucking, others were eating or drinking. Clean and calm, they turned their inquisitive eyes to stare at her without fear. She was known to them as they were to her. They were her special task and she had come to understand them as thinking, feeling creatures who showed love and care for their young. They enjoyed dust bathing, nest building and seemed to form friendships. Each one of them had a name and now Genevieve came clucking towards her. As she sat on a stone slab, Eloise climbed into her lap. Blanche closed her eyes and sniffed the warm scent of the birds. She felt soothed and comforted, listening to the soft cluck cluck, the occasional cry of the rooster.
‘Oh madame, here you are.’ It was Lilli.
Blanche gave a start and immediately felt embarrassed to be discovered here, mistress of the house, with a chicken sitting in her lap.
‘What is it, Lilli?’ She spoke sharply and saw the girl flinch.
‘I wondered if I might have a word, madame.’
Blanche sighed and, lifting the chicken off her lap, came out through the door, shutting it carefully behind her.
‘Beg pardon, but I only wanted to tell you that Michel has apologised to me. He would like us to walk out together again.’
‘Isn’t that what you wanted?’
Lilli shook her head. ‘I am not sure, madame. He behaved very badly towards me. Do you think I should accept his apology?’
‘I cannot tell you what to do, Lilli,’ she replied. ‘You must listen to your heart and follow it.’
‘Yes madame, beg pardon for troubling you.’
‘I am sorry, I didn’t mean to sound harsh,’ said Blanche. ‘I just seem to have lost confidence in my ability to advise anyone about anything. I tried to encourage you but I didn’t know what kind of young man he was. I feel I am of no help to anyone.’
Lilli was immediately all sympathy. ‘But you have been to me, I’ll never forget all you’ve done, madame. I just wish you could be happy, too.’
That’s all any of us wants, Blanche thought, not money or success when it comes down to it, but to be happy.
As usual, she decided to go to the church with some flowers to lay on her mother’s grave. ‘You always seemed to know what to do,’ she told her. ‘When we were children, the time Marthe had that accident you sprang into action. You nursed Suzanne but you became so angry with the doctors because they hadn’t diagnosed her complaint. You never stood any nonsense.’
Blanche thought of the rumours that her mother had destroyed all letters and paintings of Camille. She could certainly be very jealous. Then there was her anger over the painting of Suzanne with a parasol, ‘using my daughter to conjure the ghost of Camille.’ In Blanche’s eyes the pose might be similar, but there lacked the presence of the dead wife.
Maman saw things in black and white. She would have said, ‘get rid of this American girl, she has caused you enough trouble, let her go.’ But as she undressed for bed, Blanche was still undecided as to what to do about the letter.
– FORTY –
ROBERT
‘
I can’t believe it. She is actually leaving this place.’ Harry set down his beer glass and leaned back in his chair with a sigh. ‘Maybe we can get back to how things used to be.’
‘Yes,’ said Robert. But can we? He asked himself. The effect of Judith’s presence in Giverny would take a long time to fade. Even if other people forgot her, he never would. She had encouraged him with her quest to affront her destiny at whatever cost, she had helped him understand that his own actions had been not to run away from life but to embrace it in his own fashion. She had envied and applauded him before she knew his reasons why, and he regretted he had spoken and perhaps disillusioned her. Judith was a romantic. Her problem had been that she could not see the repercussions of attempting to live a fictional life… until last night, he reminded himself. She had not meant to do harm. Robert stared down at the deserted tennis courts, trying to understand his emotions.
‘Well, I think this calls for a celebration,’ Harry was saying. ‘Let’s have another beer.’
‘Not for me, thanks.’ Robert lit a cigarette.
‘No? Well I’m having one.’
He rose from his chair. Robert, watching him as if he were a stranger, saw a tall, fine muscled man, tanned skin, hair bleached by the sun. A man with the assurance of youth, far more like Judith than he would wish to believe. Harry waved at the serving girl, indicating his empty glass. She was busy with customers at another table and paid him no attention.
‘Hey,’ he called. ‘Over here.’
‘One moment, m’sieur.’
Harry sat down again. ‘Damn the girl.’
Again Robert was reminded of Judith, how she too wore self-esteem with the same flair as she did her clothes. ‘The world doesn’t revolve round you, Harry,’ he said quietly.
Harry laughed. ‘Someone’s in a bad mood. What’s up?’
‘Believe it or not, I am quite upset over this question of Judith. When she told me she was leaving, she was so emotional and repentant for anything she thought she might have done wrong. To be honest, I felt sorry for her.’ He remembered those dark eyes filled with tears, the regret in her voice.
‘Oh my God!’ Harry struck the table with his fist. ‘What is the matter with you, Robert? I thought you agreed with me that the girl was a damn nuisance, that she didn’t belong here and now you say you feel sorry for her.’
‘Life is not all black and white, Harry. When you’re my age, you’ll discover how many in betweens there are.’
Harry acknowledged the second glass of beer with a curt nod. ‘Listen to the wise old man talking,’ he sneered. ‘You sound like you’re eighty not fifty.’ He reached over and took a cigarette from Robert’s pack, flicked the lighter, exhaled a stream of smoke. He picked up his glass and, turning his body away, nodded to a group of painters at another table.
Something about these actions infuriated Robert. ‘You know what you are?’ he demanded. ‘Completely self-centred. Nothing must disturb your life and if it does, you can’t, or rather won’t take it. Sometimes I wonder if there is any room in it for me.’
Without looking at him, Harry remarked that that was nonsense.
But Robert was adamant. ‘It’s not nonsense.’ He rose and walked away. He heard Harry call after him, but he did not turn back.
He went towards the river, a route that Judith took. He knew because she had told him, and of the bench where she’d said she went when she wanted to think. He walked until he found it, sat down and held his face to the sun, closing his eyes. Silence and stillness, when he looked again, he saw the mirror image of poplars in the green water. A pair of ducks skidded onto the surface and the reflection spli
ntered for a moment, then came together again.
His mind returned to yesterday evening, the dining room noisy with voices and laughter as the evening meal began. He saw the gleaming faces of artists, some of them far more talented than he, but known at Hotel Baudy as David, Gustave and Richard; jugs of wine and baskets of bread were set on the red checked tablecloths. He had just raised his glass when he caught sight of Judith in the doorway. As she came into the room, he thought he had never seen her look more beautiful. However much she had sheltered from the sun, it had warmed the extreme paleness of her skin so that it gleamed like old ivory; the lamplight burnished her hair, bringing out its auburn tints.
She was wearing the gauzy Fortuny gown, it sheathed her body and rippled with those shimmery shades that had reminded him once of an exotic moth. How long ago that seemed. And yet, as she approached the table and sat among them, time seemed to fold up and she was once again the young woman without a care in the world, delighted when he admired her clothes. She was charming and flirted a little. She sipped wine and asked him about his day. Painting, or had he just been playing tennis? She winked and he could not help comparing her humour with the severity of Harry.
When the chicken chasseur arrived and everyone was delving among the mushrooms and shallots, fishing for a choice piece of chicken, a discussion began, turning again to impressionism and its genesis.
Richard spoke of the developments in colour theory, the painters’ search for its exact analysis and light in nature. ‘An impressionist painter depicting an orange, for example, might break up the shadow with dashes of complementary blue.’
Photography came into it, added Gustave. ‘Remember, back in those days it was still naïve: all that cropping to improve the composition, those shapes and forms at the edge of the image? If you look at Four Dancers, you’ll see how Degas used precisely that technique.’
David broke in to suggest the influence of Japanese prints was probably the most important, particularly
where Monet was concerned. ‘Those compositions of the Ukiyo-e masters.’
‘Ukiyo-e, yes,’ Judith exclaimed. ‘Now I know what you are talking about: pictures of the floating world, moments in people’s lives, the change of the seasons.’
Moments in people’s lives, Robert thought, ah yes, and how fleeting.
Judith was gesticulating, aware she had the others’ attention. ‘When I visited Monet, he told me all about them. His favourites are… hmm, let me think, yes, Hokusi, Hiroshige and… and Utamaro.’
The girl has a photographic memory, Robert marvelled. He was taken by her rapt expression.
She drained her glass and leaned towards her audience.
‘Now listen to this; Monet told me a wonderful story. He once found a marvellous collection of those prints in a shop in Amsterdam. He was bargaining over some china, Delft, I think, when all of a sudden he spotted them, piled in a dish. The salesman didn’t seem to understand their value and let him have them with the china jar. There! What do you think of that?’
They were impressed, Robert could see that. His usually boisterous companions were quiet, digesting this.
Then David spoke: ‘That sure is a swell story, miss. And Monet told you himself?’
‘He certainly did.’
‘Darn me, don’t know how you do it. None of us has ever got that near to the miserable old so and so.’
‘Well, let’s face it,’ Gustave retorted. ‘You’re not twenty-five and pretty as a picture like our young lady here.’
There was a roar of laughter and someone refilled Judith’s glass. She rose to her feet, the wonderful dress shifting colour with every movement she made. She held her glass to the light so that the red glowed within, her eyes glittered. He had to hand it to her, Robert thought, the girl had a perfect dramatic sense.
‘A toast. A toast to Monet!’
‘To Monet.’
They drank and went back to their absorption with the satisfying chasseur.
David leaned across the table. ‘So tell us what else Monet told you?’
‘Where do I start?’ replied Judith.
She was off, describing the visits she had made, the stories he had told her of his early life and how he had finally achieved success. ‘I have sat with the great man in his studio, I have walked with him in his beautiful gardens, he has made sketches of me. Once he said he would like to paint me.’
The words rang with nostalgia, though Robert wondered who would notice except he who knew her so well.
As the dessert plates were taken away and the cheese brought in, Richard rose and carried his glass over to the piano and lifted the lid. Once again, Robert listened to Silvery Moon and watched Judith sing along with him. After a while, the pianist stopped playing and said something to her.
‘I can’t,’ Robert heard her protest, ‘I can’t, not in this dress.’
And as the tune changed to the Maple Leaf Rag, she returned to the table. Everyone was talking and, under cover of the noise, Judith turned to him.
‘Robert, there is something important I need to say to you. Can we go outside in the garden?’
It was as if all evening she had been wearing a mask; now it was stripped away and he was startled by the agonised expression on her face.
‘Are you cold?’ he asked as they stepped outside. It was cooler on this early September evening, the first hint that summer was coming to an end.
‘A little, I guess.’
‘Here, take my jacket.’ He draped it round her shoulders.
‘Always fussing, Robert,’ she sighed, but her tone was wistful.
‘Someone has to look after you,’ he replied. As he said the words, he felt a shock of recognition. It was as if, at some subliminal level, he had known what would happen all along and had tried to protect her from it, as once he had tried to protect his sister. Scenes came into his mind: that first impression at Vernon railroad station, of a flame burning too brightly, Judith’s earnest expression as she defended romanticism. ‘All the heroines in the books I read die young.’ The extraordinary intensity about her, the sense he’d had that she would stop at nothing to get what she wanted. And now, there was something she had to tell him, something that was obviously tearing her apart.
With this sense of déjà vu, he led the way up the flight of steps that led to the second level of the garden, where the garden’s scents were ghostly on the night air. As before, the lights still burned in the dining room and Richard played on and sang. They arrived at the seat under the rose bower.
‘So what is this all about?’ he asked.
She was silent, staring ahead of her, though what she saw in this gloom he couldn’t tell.
‘Judith?’
She turned her face to him and he made out her exquisite features. Was she most beautiful when she smiled or was serious, he wondered.
‘Tell me.’
She turned away. ‘I am going back to America. I can’t see what else I can do.’
‘I see.’
‘I didn’t do anything wrong,’ she went on. ‘I just wanted to live like the books I read. I wanted all this…’ she spread her hands, ‘colour and sights and life.’
‘You have done,’ he told her. ‘I don’t know many other young ladies who have been entertained by Claude Monet.’
She considered this. ‘Well I guess there is that.’
‘And you’ve had nearly four months in Giverny, more than you planned.’
‘Uh huh, but…’
‘You want to stay here, live the bohemian life. You told me, remember? If I could do it, so could you.’
‘Yes, but I know now I was wrong and you were right. I don’t fit.’
Faintly the sound of the piano came to them and Richard’s pleasant voice. He sang: ‘I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls.’ They paused to listen to the words.
‘Sounds like a sad tune,’ she said.
‘Yes it is, The Bohemian Girl, I once saw t
he opera, in Bologna I believe it was. Arline sings this song, she’s a gypsy who is discovered to be the daughter of a noble man but she always remembers the gypsy boy she loved.’ Robert realised the poignancy in this and broke off.
They listened while Richard finished the song, ‘…that you loved me. That you… you love me still the same.’
Judith sniffed. ‘But I didn’t, you see, I didn’t. He believed I loved him and all I did was hurt him.’
‘So that’s what it’s all about.’
‘Michel was a part of everything that didn’t come right, but what I am really sad about is that girl I was, the one who danced the Turkey Trot on Vernon station.’
‘You will again,’ Robert said. ‘You’ll be the belle of the ball at New York dances.’
She shrugged.
‘We can’t go back,’ he added. ‘This is it.’
‘Yes, I know.’ Her eyes shone in the dusky light. ‘I want to say how very sorry I am, Robert. You have been so kind and good to me and I have just been horrible. I pushed you to arrange that picnic so that I could meet Monet, I wheedled my way into his house. I tried to take his daughter’s place in his affections and I flirted with a gardener. What more is there?’
‘I should think that was quite enough,’ Robert smiled.
‘Don’t laugh at me, Robert. I have been so stupid and you tried to advise me and I took no notice,’ she reached for her handkerchief. ‘No notice at all.’
She sounded so forlorn, he wanted to tell her: stop, stop, it hurt him to hear her remorse.
‘Anyway, you were right. And my parents want me to go, so I am going. I have to face up to who I really am and, I guess, come down to earth.’
He was startled to find how much this affected him. It was as if she spoke of himself, of all the disillusionment life brought about.
‘I only meant to help,’ he said.
‘I know. I had so many dreams but I guess that’s all they were, stupid fantasies.’ She turned and put her arms round his neck as a child might do.
Monet's Angels Page 31
