Paris Still Life: A Novel

by Rosalind Brackenbury

  I reached to look at the photographs: Íngrid Betancourt, the French-Colombian journalist, who had been imprisoned for years by FARC in Colombia, first shackled to a wall, then embracing her daughter in the open air. The caption said that she had never given up. But how did you do that, when every day was simply hours of discomfort or pain, days, weeks, years of imprisonment, being insulted and even tortured, being systematically deprived of hope? I read over Yves’s shoulder. Yes, she had been tempted to despair. Some days, it seemed impossible that life would ever be any different. And yet, in a small corner of her spirit, she had kept hope alive. Her thin face, her long dark hair tied back, her dark eyes. Reaching to embrace her daughter in the sunlight, freed at last, who knew how, would she ever know exactly how it had been done, I wondered? Would she even know what deals had been done, threats made, promises offered?

  Yves said, “It gives you hope, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, but for what? For a world in which that never happens again to anyone? I don’t think so.” I thought of how I had lived for years only a couple of hundred miles from Guantánamo Bay, where men were held in such conditions you could not even bear to imagine them. Where they died, because life was unbearable when hope was gone. I looked at Íngrid Betancourt’s dark eyes on the page and thought, nothing matters but the freedom to come and go, to make choices. Nothing counts but freedom. And I have it and have always had it, and what would I have done in Íngrid Betancourt’s position? How would I have known how to survive? Not just physically, but as a person who could come back home and love people and smile and laugh in the sun?

  In the little park today, the children ran around, and the adults ate sandwiches and read newspapers; sun spread across the benches so that there was little shade, and the big bell of Saint-Médard struck twelve. I took Yves’s hand and held it on his knee.

  “You know, you were right, I do have to go home,” I said.

  “You mean, back to the apartment? I’ll come with you, but today I can’t stay long.”

  “No. Home, to America. I mean, at the end of the summer.”

  “Why? What happened? You suddenly decided?”

  “I have things to do.” Matt’s phone call had stirred some guilt in me that I hadn’t known was there. I had, after all, left him to deal with every aspect of our shared life. “I can’t just be here endlessly recovering. I have to go back, at least to sort it out.”

  “But you have a life here too.” He turned my hand over and then clasped my fingers with his, interlaced to keep me close. “You have this, with me. You said, you just needed some time, to think.”

  “Yes, and it’s wonderful. It’s been exactly what I needed. It always will be, these weeks, this summer. But I can’t just be a visitor in your life.”

  “A visitor who stays stops being a visitor. You can commit yourself to something. You can choose exactly what you want. People do. My mother, for instance, has never felt at home in France, but she chose to stay here, for me, because I would have a better chance. She even worked as a cleaning lady so that I could be here.”

  A little Vietnamese boy ran up then and threw himself onto Yves’s knee and then looked up, scared to see he had collapsed on the wrong knee, the wrong man. His father was sitting on the next bench, and he smiled to us at the boy’s mistake, and held out his arms to his son, who stared back at us, appalled, when he had reached safety. Yves smiled back and waved, making faces at the boy. What were we doing in this place full of other people’s children? Saturday in the park, the market full of people, crowds at the bread shop, couples beginning to settle into the cafés for lunch, two by two, lovers, friends, wives and husbands, mothers and daughters, all meeting each other at the cramped little tables, reading menus, choosing wine. I kept hold of Yves’s hand, and at last I said, “I didn’t mean it to be so sudden. I’m sorry. I’m not going anywhere in a hurry. Yves, let’s go and have lunch at the café, let’s be one of those couples sitting opposite each other, can we?”

  But he looked at his watch and said, “You know, today, I have things I have to do.”

  I knew then that, as I had turned a corner, away from him, he was doing the same. I couldn’t blame him, and neither could I ask him to change his mind. Here, again, was the hard edge of reality, and I had to welcome it.

  “You didn’t ask me about my exam results.” He stood before me in his black jeans and white T-shirt, pulled me to my feet.

  “When did you get them? Yves!”

  “Yesterday.”

  “Well?”

  “Well, I passed. Both written and oral.”

  “That’s wonderful. Congratulations. That’s brilliant.” I knew by now that the exams for a teaching qualification in the public sector were hard, and that many people failed them.

  “So now I’ll be able to get a job in the autumn, I hope. It may be anywhere in France. They just send you where they need you.”

  “So it may not be in Paris?”

  “I hope it’s in the new towns, in the outskirts. That’s where it would be toughest, probably, but also where I could do some good, maybe. At least I could try, like I said. I’ve had a lot of good opportunities that others don’t get, and I want to use them. But no, it could be anywhere. I may well not be around here for long.”

  “So, it isn’t just me who has other things to do.”

  “No. Just, you said it first.”

  An afternoon in a park in the cinquième arrondissement, with other people’s children around us, other people’s lives. The clock of Saint-Médard chiming, pigeons skidding down into the dust. One day, one afternoon, in a life that was not to be ours to share.

  “This”—he gestured in the space between our bodies—“this is forever. Even if we don’t see each other again. I am sorry about the other night. It was unfair, I know.”

  “How do you feel now?” I asked him cautiously.

  “Now—well, I can be a bit more adult about it.”

  I, too, since my lunch with Fabrice Corte, had been feeling more adult, as if I had won an important point. But Yves, in the park, in the July warmth, close to me, his smell, his touch, the sound of his voice. Matt, at the airport in Miami, telling me he loved me, telling me again on the phone, as if these words themselves were a magic spell. The belief we all had in love surviving absence, memory transcending time. The way we longed for it to be true, the old romantic pledge: that this—this, here, now—is forever.

  The bells, the shadow of leaves on the gravel as the sun came out, a child in a pink smock falling over, being scooped up, held and kissed, the man in the white singlet, African, holding his child, a pigeon landing, the Vietnamese father opening a pot of soup for his little boy, the bells, the newspaper images, Íngrid Betancourt, Yves’s invisible mother: What was it but the entire world around us that made us move on into the next moment, inexorably becoming who we needed to become?

  July 14 came and went, with the Firemen’s Ball in the Place Saint-Médard and fireworks arching over Paris, but Yves spent it with his mother, as she was still not well. I stayed in, reading and trying to write. I have never liked national holidays, and having avoided July 4 in the United States, I was not keen to take part in Bastille Day.

  Fabrice called me a couple of days after the holiday and left a message that he needed to talk to me. I ignored it. He sent me an e-mail. A text message. Then, feeling I was perhaps being too rude to someone who had, after all, paid for a memorable lunch, I wrote an e-mail back. Desolée, I had been ultra-busy, missed his messages, what could I do for him? I knew he wanted the painting back, and guessed that someone was putting pressure on him to deliver it and that there was probably money involved. The Dutch woman’s heirs, perhaps. Or someone else. The next e-mail said that I should deliver the painting to him at his office, near Opéra. What, walk about the streets, get on the bus with it in a bag under my arm? There was no way I was going to take it down off my wall now—or, at least, not yet. Getting on a bus with the painting in a shopping bag might yet be
the safest way of transporting it across Paris, but I wasn’t going to do it. Let Fabrice Corte pursue me a little longer, let him sweat. I felt angry with him, and didn’t know why—maybe because he assumed so easily that I would do what I was told?

  His next communication announced that he had to go to Corsica the following week, and that he must see me before he left. I wrote back that I would meet him if necessary, but that I could not give up the painting, which had been left to me by my father and which was none of his business, since Françoise and I had called him in as an expert and he had already given us his opinion. I asked him to send me his bill. Then I called Françoise and told her what I had done.

  “Ah, Gaby, I’m sorry now that I even thought of asking him. But he’s a fairly old friend and colleague, and I thought we could trust him.”

  “It seems that someone got in touch with him when he began investigating the painting. Apparently the Dutch woman died and her heirs want it back. At least, that was the story. What can I do?”

  “I know, you can stall for time. Send it to be cleaned. Get in touch with someone from Sotheby’s or Christie’s in England. You are English, after all. Get them to take it.”

  “That’s an idea. Do you have any addresses, by any chance?”

  “No, but I’ll try and find out.” She paused. “Actually, I do know one person at Sotheby’s, a friend of your father’s. Gaby, just one thing. Are you doing this because you miss your father, because you associate him with the painting? I feel I ought to warn you that you have no real right to it by law. Peter was only the dealer who had it at the time of his death.”

  “I’m doing it for the same reason that you had it. Because it was what he wanted. And I’m pretty sure that it’s the right thing to do.”

  “Even if it’s illegal?”

  “Well, they have to prove ownership. It was left in my father’s care. Fabrice tried to threaten me, but it didn’t work, I told him so.” Yes, I thought, trying to sound like Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca; but it did seem to have worked—for now.

  “Gaby, you sound like a different person, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  “Well, maybe I am.” I’d stood up for myself against a bullying man, in French, and so far, got away with it.

  She called back with the home number of the man who worked at Sotheby’s but who lived in the English countryside and whose job was to identify paintings hanging in obscure English houses and list them and their degrees of authenticity. “He was someone your father knew well. His name is Simon Jakes. I thought he might be a better bet than someone at their head office. He’ll probably have more time for us.”

  I called the number in England and heard a tentative English reply. Then, “You’re Peter’s daughter? How simply marvelous. Just let me get my diary, and we’ll make a date. Where are you in Paris, the same flat?”

  “You’ve been here? You know it?”

  “Yes, ages ago, used to go out on the town with your dad from time to time. Always glad to skip over to Paris. You free any time next week?”

  “Yes,” I said, amazed. He was going to get on the Eurostar, he said, and pop across. I was going to meet someone who had been to this flat, been out drinking with my father, for whom none of this seemed problematic.

  “Terribly sorry about your dad. I’m still shocked, and you must be too. What a shame. I’d have come to the funeral, if only I’d known about it. What was it, heart?”

  “Yes, his heart.” That extravagant organ that had made my father beloved by so many, most of whom I had never even met in his lifetime.

  “Great man, your dad. Well, can’t wait to meet you. Tuesday all right? At the flat, are you? No problem. Gare du Nord, RER, Port-Royal, then down the road. Know it like the back of my hand. Remind me, though, there must be a code by now, no more nice old beady-eyed concierges dressed in black. Bye for now. Au revoir.” He pronounced it ove-wire.

  I put clothes in to wash and tidied up, and then stood for a long moment in front of my painting. “You’re going to England,” I said. “Officially, to be cleaned.” The painting needed it, if the one in the Guggenheim had been anything to go by. Its surface was blackened and stained in places, and the bright silver of the nutcrackers looked tarnished. If some angry heirs were to show up and accuse me of theft, I would simply say that I’d had their interests at heart and had sent it to the best place I knew to be cleaned.

  I had had no more sightings of my father since I’d had the painting. I wondered if this were a coincidence. I had reached the stage of believing, almost, that it had been Fabrice I had seen three times on the streets of Paris. I was in a state of mind to discount ghosts and revenants as explanations of current phenomena; I felt I had my feet back on the ground. I hoped that Fabrice Corte, in Ajaccio, was about to have a good long summer vacation until at least the end of August, as French people were supposed to.

  As I waited that Tuesday afternoon for Simon Jakes to ring my doorbell, I felt composed, contained, almost Parisian. He was so English, it made me smile. Untidy clothes, blond hair falling sideways, a rosy face and blue eyes, a grin that showed slightly discolored teeth, and a big warm hand that clasped mine and held on to it. “Gaby Greenwood. How wonderful to meet you at last.” He was so unlike Fabrice Corte that I felt like hugging him.

  “Come in. Can I make you some coffee?”

  “You wouldn’t by any chance have a cup of tea? I’d kill for a cuppa, metaphorically speaking, of course.”

  “Of course. Earl Grey or Lapsang?”

  “You wouldn’t have any builders’ tea, would you?”

  “Twinings do?”

  “Lovely. Milk and two sugars, please.” He sank down on the sofa, and immediately his eyes came to rest on the painting on the wall opposite, and he stood up again, dragging his long limbs that seemed wrapped in folds of denim and corduroy out of the depths of my sofa. “Ah, so that’s our baby.”

  “Yes.” I stood over the kettle, found tea bags, a mug, milk, and sugar.

  “Very nice. Very nice indeed.” He stood close, stroking his upper lip, looking. “Ah. Thanks. Lovely. Nothing like a cuppa. Now, you said this came from your father?”

  “Well, he’d left it in a friend’s flat. In Montmartre. She was keeping it for me. I didn’t exactly inherit it. I more sort of inherited the responsibility for it. Dad was keeping it for someone, to sell. Now some Dutch people are after it, because the woman who owned it died. I guess she was the one who wanted to sell it in the first place, but they want it back, I suppose for probate or something, or to sell it, I don’t know. If they exist, that is.”

  “Hmm. Complicated. So you are temporarily taking care of it?”

  “I think my father meant me to have it. There was a twin, in the Guggenheim, in an exhibition we saw together. He loved it, I know.”

  Simon Jakes stirred sugar into his thick brown tea and said, “But there’s a difference between loving a painting and owning it. You know that, I suppose?”

  “Well, yes. But Françoise, my father’s friend, was keeping it for me. She said he intended me to have it too.”

  “Françoise Lussac?”

  “You know her? Oh, yes, of course, she suggested I get in touch with you.”

  “I’ve known her on and off for years.”

  “Simon, how well did you know my dad? You said you used to come here and go out drinking with him.”

  “I came here a couple of times. Yes, we went out together, Françoise too.”

  “So you knew about her and him.”

  “Well, yes, didn’t everybody?”

  “Not his family. Not me. Not my mother, probably.”

  “Ah. Yes, I suppose he was a man who kept things in compartments. Safer that way, I suppose. So, you came here and met Françoise, and the beans were spilled, eh? I thought you lived in America, by the way.”

  “I did. I mean, I do. I came to Paris to think some things out.” Then, I decided that, of all people, I would trust him. “Since I’ve been here, I’
ve seen my father three times in the street, and no, I’m not mad and I’m not on anything. What do you think of that?”

  He stared at me, his sandy eyebrows lifted, that lock of gray-blond hair falling nearly over one eye; from his height, above his shabby clothes, he gave me the serious look I needed. From the depths of some aristocratic conviction about treating everything and everybody with politeness, he gave me his calm attention. “Did you really? How extraordinary. Everyone said he was dead, but you know, I somehow doubted it at the time.”

  “You did?”

  “Well, it was all so hushed up and hurried, wasn’t it, and the funeral rushed through and nobody he knew invited. I was a bit upset, to tell you the truth, and I’m sure I wasn’t the only one.”

  “You mean, you think he could still be alive?”

  “Well, if you saw him in the street, he must be, mustn’t he? Unless you believe in ghosts.”

  “Or Fabrice Corte.”

  “Oh, him. Yes, of course. But surely you wouldn’t mistake him for your father?”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t know anymore. When I met him, I felt as if I couldn’t remember what my father really looked like.”

  “Oh, but Fabrice, he’s just school of.”

  “What?”

  “School of Peter Greenwood. Your father was the real thing. Gaby, he knew more about painting and painters than anyone I’ve ever met, and he was completely self-taught. You could trust his opinion utterly. He knew what he had, and he knew its worth, and he could smell a dud a mile away. Corte just goes off to other experts. He knows the techniques, but he hasn’t the feel for it.”

  “He suddenly wanted to take it away again, to give it back to the heirs of this Dutch woman, he said, Marth someone. Then he disappeared off to Corsica.”

  “So, he’s out of town. That’s a help. And who suggested you get in touch with me? Françoise?”

  “She thought you could take it to England, to get it cleaned.”

  “And so I could.” He waved a canvas bag at me, like a deep shopping bag with buckled fasteners. “If it wouldn’t annoy the French, who are also very good at cleaning paintings.”