Louis could not speak. He could hear a clock ticking from the hallway.
Isobel drew breath and spoke slowly. “You insist on reliving my days as a chambermaid as if it were a great beginning. I have left all that behind, Monsieur Daguerre.”
Louis looked down at his plate. He had wasted his life on this woman.
“He doesn’t mean any harm,” Chloe said.
“I wasn’t aware that this was your concern,” Isobel said.
“Pigeon, it’s all right,” said Louis.
Isobel flashed her eyes from her daughter to Louis. “That is not the first time I have heard you call my daughter by that abhorrent name. While you are in my house, you will call her Chloe just like the rest of the civilized world. Pigeon—it makes her sound like something you feed with breadcrumbs.”
“That’s what people called me in Paris,” said Chloe.
“Well, I can only imagine what circumstances gave rise to such a name. I imagine that posing as a nude model leads to all kinds of intimacies.”
Chloe looked at Louis; he could see the whites of her eyes.
“I think there has been some misunderstanding,” said Louis. He had rarely called her Pigeon but something about the wine and the domestic setting had made him feel more familiar.
“What’s to misunderstand? I found a naked portrait of my daughter with your signature on it. There were tuberoses scattered in that ridiculous picture, as if you were engaged in some epic fantasy. The whole thing is disgusting. If you have been as intimate with my daughter as that portrait suggests, then you’re a worthless old wretch. I should be glad when you go back to Paris and leave us alone.” The threat of tears hung in the back of her words.
“I worked for Louis, Mother. He never even watched me pose. He was nothing but a gentleman, believe me. It was I who begged to do it. And he paid me well.”
“I’m sure he did. Fame can afford a man his trifles.”
“This is not warranted,” said Louis, but he could feel the indignation in his face. Had he indulged the lust and vanity of an old man?
Chloe drank a long sip of wine and turned to her mother. “I worked as a whore in Paris. Louis was trying to save me from it by paying me to pose. But I kept doing it. I don’t know why I kept doing it. The money was the least of it. Until I walked into this house, I never felt ashamed.”
Isobel found it impossible to react. A self-loathing rose in her stomach, but nothing made it to her face. She sat stone-faced, her head tilted. The girl at the banister; the girl who fell asleep at the dinner table—stolen. I have raised a harlot. She said, “I may take a walk.” Now she felt the wine and humiliation in her face, flush on flush.
“No, you should sit here so we can talk about this,” Chloe said. Her voice was brittle, broken off.
Mid-swing, Isobel saw her hand in the air and felt her shoulders tense. Chloe’s head snapped to the right, her face abstracted by motion. The harshness of the blow left a crimson handprint. Isobel felt her hands shake. Chloe touched her face very slowly. A single tear appeared on her cheek. Isobel remembered her husband on his deathbed; when he was gone, a single tear had appeared from one eye. It had been the only time she’d ever seen him cry—in death—and this economy of sentiment had made its way to her daughter. Chloe stood and rushed outside.
Louis sat for a moment. “I will return to Paris as soon as the roads are open,” he said, head down. He wished she had slapped him instead. He looked up and saw a deep bitterness in her face—the desire to be hated, to steep and wallow. She was a selfish, indulgent woman, always had been. Standing, he set his napkin on the table and went out into the night in search of Chloe.
Isobel sat there and felt the room slip away. The thought burned her insides, scoured her through. Of course it was her fault. In her widowed vengeance, in the bleakness of her regret at not having married for love, she’d ruined her daughter’s chances, sent her out into the world penniless. Her daughter had paid the price for her own safety.
Twenty-Three
The widow’s house stood in silence for two weeks. The fog rose off the marsh. It surrounded the house at dawn and dusk. Spring advanced. Bands of militant peasants drifted along the roadways, a ragged formation returning from Paris—boys with bandaged heads, old men with blankets draped around their shoulders. It grew warmer. Plow-men rode the fields in preparation to seed. But Isobel kept her house shuttered and the fire stoked. Condensation gathered in the herbarium. It was the perspiration of overtended milkweed, the breath of rampant lilac and chamomile. Chloe found the air stifling and slept by an open window each night. Louis, no longer an invalid, took to sleeping in the barn, huddled beside the stableboy.
Isobel and Chloe passed each other, eyes down, passengers on the decks of some lost ocean liner. Isobel was adrift in self-loathing. Moving about the house, she dredged the image pool of Chloe’s childhood: the girl in her first dress, the birthday princess presiding over her gifts. Where was the moment of undoing? She saw Chloe at the threshold of womanhood—standing at the top of the stairs, lavender-frocked and shoeblacked, a basket of gathered flowers in one hand. She’d blushed when boys looked her way. At sixteen, she’d spoken of boys the way a skeptic speaks of God—such strangeness, such fuss in all their difference, their spindle-legged energy and defiance. Then Isobel saw a depiction of her daughter beneath a seaman, some ham-fisted merchant, a man grabbing at her neck and hair. The images came unbidden, appalling in their detail—a scuffed wallet on the nightstand, the bicep tattoo of a serpent.
Chloe felt pent-up. She imagined the respiratory fumes from the herbarium to be blue and vaporous, the plants exhaling her mother’s angry out-breaths. In their beds at night they were being poisoned by a cloud of remorse. She wanted to scream, to tear down the pinned curtains. She would return to Paris with Louis, pick up the thread of a new life. It was distraction she desperately wanted, but she couldn’t sustain a simple task; her attempts to read and chop wood ended abruptly with book throwing and cleaving the ax into a rotten stump. She spent hours on her back beside the marsh watching clouds, looking up through the proscenium of branch work. She looked out at a dusk-shot field of turnips and waited for the mercury moment, the sun kiss.
She went to the barn in search of Louis, but he was off with his camera and tripod. She saw the portrait and unwrapped it. Her body was foreign to her—her shoulders sloped, her thighs dimpled—but these imperfections seemed to blend with the Paris twilight, the chimney cowls aslant, the tar smoke pluming across the skyline. She saw her mother’s body in the picture, the foreboding of age. I will die childless, ruined. If only she could undo time, set things right, reclaim her body before it had become the empty flat where men lodged their desires. She remembered their names, the ones who gave them—George, Pascal, René, Manuel, Esteban, Charles, Phillip, Andrew, Bernard…British, Portuguese, Spanish, so many Frenchmen she could have formed an army. The international language of the unpeeled bed. She remembered their faces; the averted eyes or the cajoling stares, the ones who asked for permission to touch her; the ones who pressed bruises into her wrists. Some wanted to know her real name and where she was born; they wanted another strand, the veracity of her life. “Marie from Marseille” was what she’d told most of them. This alter ego had taken on proportions of the living over the years; Chloe knew where Marie went to school, how her parents died of typhoid when she was very young. Chloe felt a sisterly affection for this invented personage; she could see her building the pine house in the South she’d always wanted, long-haired daughters running in the yard, the simple and kind grocer husband who believed she’d worked as a nurse in Paris. At some point kindness is better than love. The truth was she had no idea why she did it. Punishing my mother, declaring love a hoax, the emptiness of losing Richard—none of these explain it. Because I could do it; because I had something they needed; because one man had a bandaged eye; because one called me the girl among the roses; because one made me frightened; because one bought me coffee—there are as ma
ny reasons as there were names.
Louis took to the country lanes. He walked briskly, tripod over his shoulder, flushing birds and rabbits from the downs. At first he was stultified by the thought of what to capture. His doomsday list now seemed false, an exercise in self-indulgence. He wanted to capture ordinary objects: an orange against wood grain; a cup of coffee gathering a dying afternoon in its brown bowl; a brindled cat asleep in the barn; a piece of chocolate on waxed paper; a smoking pipe on a yellowed edition of Le Gazette de France; the skeletal frame of beech trees against snow. He would search for the minuscule and the uncelebrated, the unlikely structures of elemental form—the helix inside honeycomb, the symmetry of a thyme leaf, the arciform of a daylily. Perhaps the whorl of the cosmic mind was contained in a nutshell.
He set up a workshop in the barn. He had a few dozen remaining copper plates, ten pounds of mercury in a flask, plenty of iodine and carded cotton. The spirit lamp had survived the maelstrom ride from Paris. One night he held the exposed plate of a hawk feather over the mercury bath. It was his first exposure to mercury in a month, and the metallic cloud stung on its way into his lungs. He felt its acrid breath on his windpipe, the gossamer veil it placed over his thoughts.
When the image was fixed, he set it on a bed of straw. The picture showed a bone-white quill cut through crosshairs of brown. He went outside into the cold of night. The cottage was yellow-lit and seemed to float through the dark. He could see Isobel and Chloe eating in the kitchen. Isobel left his meals on the veranda with the stable hand’s. Pathetically, he looked for signs of hope in the soup and the fish—a sprig of rosemary set upright, a heart carved from a fillet of sole. He saw himself as an old man standing outside a widow’s house, afraid of having squandered his love, unmoored by the continued rotation of the earth.
The fresh exposure to mercury had made his head ache, and he returned to the barn to lie down. He climbed the ladder to the barn loft and felt the pressure in his head get worse; his pulse throbbed behind his eyes and in his teeth. Panting, he sunk down on his straw bed. The stableboy, sitting beneath a hanging kerosene lamp, was cleaning a rifle with an oil cloth. Louis stared at him. He was a blunt-faced lad, smelled of saddle soap and leather, spoke few words but was known to have a soprano voice and a penchant for singing to horses. His hands were rough and blistered, but his fingers were precise. He polished the barrel and then held a bullet between two fingers—Louis saw it in profile, something as perfect as a basilica dome—before kissing it and pressing the bullet gently into the chamber. Was the boy going out to join the revolution? As Louis watched, his peripheral vision dimmed; suddenly, it was like looking through a keyhole. Everything seemed to move away, blink, recede. An empty feeling rose from the pit of his stomach and settled behind his shoulder blades.
The boy looked up from the rifle. “Are you all right, sir?”
“If Degotti sees you with that rifle in the dormitory, he’ll make you sweep the floor for a year,” Louis replied. “Do you understand me? We are painters, not soldiers.”
Smiling, the boy looked back down at his rifle, set it aside, and blew out the kerosene lamp. In the darkness, Louis heard him say, “We’ll never win the revolution if the Parisians are always drunk!”
Isobel and Chloe brooded over a meal in the kitchen. Chloe sat idling her potatoes. Isobel looked at their twin reflections, ghostly and warped, in the kitchen window. She hated the insufferable silence but felt pinned by it. The past had ransacked her house.
Chloe watched her mother cut her potatoes with a surgical precision. When Chloe’s voice filled the house, she realized neither of them had spoken since breakfast.
“When the roads clear, I will return to Paris also,” Chloe said.
“I see,” said Isobel.
Some silence. A gust at the windowpane.
The thought returned to Isobel, the image of sixteen-year-old Chloe descending the stairs. She said, “When you were in Paris, did he really try to save you?”
“Yes, like I told you. He paid me to model so that I would quit working in the brothel. He would have done anything to make me stop.” Her mother’s face startled her—the tight, withheld mouth, the hostility in the eyes. This is the face I will someday inherit.
Isobel nodded almost imperceptibly and looked around the room. “And he never touched you?”
“Never.”
“Surely a man who wants to look at naked women cannot have honorable intentions.”
Chloe set down her silverware and moved her plate to the center of the table. “Mother, you’ve been asleep since 1800. The world is different now. Artists command the cafés and the brasseries in Paris. Painting a nude model is a form of philosophy, a religion, almost. They pay twice as much as a man who wants to sleep with a whore—so why would he bother if it weren’t legitimately about art?”
The logic of it caught in Isobel’s throat. How she wanted to bellow, to shatter the windows with a single held note.
“Do not use the word whore in this house,” she said. A moment later, she added, “Ever.” Her voice was sharp, even to her.
Chloe said, “You hate me. I can see it when you look at me.”
“Don’t be so dramatic.”
“And you hate yourself—that much seems certain. You are terrified of being loved.”
Isobel perched her fork halfway between plate and mouth.
Chloe said, “You’re the most indulgent woman I’ve ever known. What is this cross you bear? I knew women in Paris who sold their children to eat. How dare you. Your biggest burden is that a man has loved you his whole life.”
Isobel set her cutlery on her plate. “No, my biggest burden is that my daughter has ruined her life. And as for that lunatic of a man, I never asked for his love.”
“No, and frankly, you don’t deserve it,” Chloe said. “I would give anything to have a man love me like that again, just once.” She stood and left the table.
Isobel watched her daughter move through the lamplight of the hallway. She had a brief sensation of time slowing, of the silent intervals between Chloe’s footsteps. The bedroom door opened wildly, as if it might swing off its hinges. Then it closed with a stiff wooden shudder. In its aftermath, she sat, looking down at her empty plate, gripped by the enormity of the silence.
Later, they were both awakened by a loud crack from the rear of the house. They rose and hurried down the hallway, Isobel holding a candle in front of her. In the herbarium, the night lamps cast a paraffin pall on the miniature trees and the potted herbs. Behind a bamboo plant culled for stakes and stirrers, a windowpane had cracked—a splintered vein that ran the course of the whole panel.
Isobel ran her fingers carefully along the crack, tracing it down to the bottom of the frame. She saw that a bamboo shoot had grown into the glass, pressed into the liquefacient surface like a specimen in a microscope plate. “Even the plants want to escape this house,” she said.
They both stood there for a moment.
“I’m going to stay up for a while,” said Isobel. “I wasn’t sleeping anyway.”
“I’ll go back to bed,” Chloe said.
“Good night, then.”
Isobel picked up her pruning scissors and scanned the foliage for the errant tendril or leaf. She trimmed the stalk of a miniature myrrh tree, its resin coating the bark in amber tears. She used it as a cure for digestive complaints, but she recalled that the Egyptians had used it to embalm the dead. If only she could believe in something beyond the rectitude of plants—the goodness of men, the benevolence of God, the efficacy of science. There was time, her plants, the spool of the seasons. She pricked her finger on the sharp end of a myrrh branch. A speck of blood appeared under her fingernail. Thwarted, she wrapped a cloth around it and retired to bed.
She tossed and turned, the cut pulsing like a beacon. You are terrified of being loved. The thought gathered around her. As a child, she’d avoided the boys for whom she had real affection; Gerard had been a widower unable to love. The closest he ha
d come was unbridled kindness, a tenderness that flared sometimes on a birthday or anniversary, and she had been safe, satisfied with knowing all she had to give was wifely camaraderie, a kind of connubial friendship. She opened her mouth to yawn only to find herself in tears. Her hand went to her mouth to stifle the sob—the slapping hand, knuckled with age, with a wedding ring from a dead man she had never loved. She took off the ring and placed it on the night table. Somehow, its removal allowed her to weep freely.
Her sobs floated through the house, passing through the timber walls. Chloe woke to the sound. She had not heard her mother cry in many years. Even at her father’s funeral, her mother had been stern-lipped, already assuming the icy pose of the dutifully stricken widow. Chloe stood in her darkened room and, without lighting any lamps, went to her mother. She fumbled towards the iron bed frame and felt the contour of Isobel’s body. Her mother lay curled, pillows clutched to her stomach and face. Chloe said nothing. She sat down next to her and took hold of her hand. She could feel her mother’s pulse throb between her fingertips. Isobel, her voice cut with fatigue, said, “I can’t live like this anymore.” Chloe made no reply. She lay down beside her mother. They passed in and out of sleep, their hands intertwined.
In the morning Chloe got up and made a pot of coffee with chicory, the way her mother liked it. She brought two cups into the bedroom. Isobel sat up in bed and took an earthenware mug. They sat on the bed, drinking coffee, letting the morning take hold of them. Chloe opened the bedroom window a little. They looked out at the slow stain of morning. The smell of acacia and lime came into the room. The present began to reveal itself.
Twenty-Four
Dear Louis,
These last weeks have brought me an impossible sadness. I confess I felt a real betrayal and violation at seeing the naked portrait of my daughter. But it seems there is nothing to be gained from dwelling on the mistakes of the past. I acted horribly and never should have struck my daughter. I regret you witnessed such appalling behavior. So much has passed between us and I don’t think myself capable of offering anything but well-intentioned friendship. Chloe and I would be glad to receive a visit from you, if you are so inclined. Please come out of the barn and join us.
The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre Page 23
