Friday's Girl

by Charlotte Bingham

  Mrs Hanson gave a short laugh, and then, her duty done, she hurried to the door and down the corridor to where Napier Todd was standing surveying a still life of dead birds laid out for plucking, not to mention hares hanging from hooks.

  He nodded towards the painting before turning to Mrs Hanson. ‘Strange for such a talented painter, as this fellow undoubtedly is, strange that his only desire seems to be to spend as much time as possible depicting nature red in tooth and claw,’ he murmured. ‘Look at the poor hare, friend to everyone, enemy to no one, yet look at him here, would you? Poor creature strung up like a piece of rubbish on a string, a tribute to man’s appetite for ugliness and destruction.’

  Mrs Hanson, who rarely glanced at the paintings on the walls of the Stag and Crown except to run a finger down their frames to make sure that they were properly dusted, had no idea what their visitor was talking about, and so, in the absence of any maid to take care of the formalities, she merely nodded and beckoned Mr Todd to follow her to her husband’s business room. ‘Mr Napier Todd, dearest,’ she murmured discreetly from the doorway.

  Napier Todd entered Harold Hanson’s business room with a sense of destiny, a sense that a door, and not just the door of the landlord’s business room, was opening to him. Art and the Muse were about to place their hands in his, and because of this he was sure he would be able to lead the way to a new heaven on earth.

  ‘My card, sir.’

  Since the card was properly engraved, and proclaimed that Mr Napier Todd was the possessor of two goodish if not sparklingly smart addresses, Harold smiled at his visitor. It was not a vastly welcoming smile, but it was a cordial acknowledgement all the same.

  ‘Would you care to be seated, Mr Todd?’

  ‘I won’t, thank you, sir.’ Napier Todd, tall, bearded, slim and formally, if artistically, dressed, stood in front of Harold and pulled at the signet ring on his right hand, but he did not smile. ‘I am here, sir, to ask for the hand in marriage of your daughter, Edith.’

  Harold, who would really rather have preferred to have been able to sit down, found himself standing instead, and since he was shorter than his visitor he also found himself staring up into Napier’s bearded face in a fashion that he did not find wholly enjoyable. Most unfortunately for Napier Todd this meant that Harold was staring fixedly at that part of his visitor’s face of which he could not possibly approve, namely his dark, foreign-looking beard.

  ‘You are aware, sir, that my daughter Edith is all too young for marriage, and has no knowledge of the world, outside the Stag and Crown, that is? Her poor mother passed away some few years ago, and the present Mrs Hanson has struggled to bring her up as best she may, but since Edith was not a clever girl at her books she was forced to take her into service in this place, rather than have the discomfort of seeing her led astray, as so many of those of her sex, also alas possessed of a lowly intellect, so often are.’ He paused here before continuing in a changed tone. ‘However, the present Mrs Hanson having brought Edith up in such a manner, I can only say with some pride that my daughter has turned out a model of beauty and virtue, as you have no doubt noted, or you would not be here, sir.’

  Napier Todd said nothing. It was difficult for a man like himself to imagine setting a beloved daughter to work in such a place as that in which they were now standing. On the other hand, since he was a bachelor, and had always had servants, he was quite happy to accept Harold Hanson’s view of his daughter, and of his second wife’s virtuous struggle to turn her into someone respectable – and indeed anything else – just so long as he could whisk the girl off and marry her as soon as possible.

  Harold Hanson stared at the handsome stranger in front of him. He would not and could not explain, naturally, that nothing would give him greater pleasure than to get poor Edith off his hands before she grew any older. She might be another useful pair of hands at the inn to her stepmother, but to her father the employment of a nubile daughter as a maid was an embarrassment. Besides, although Aurelia always insisted that she was plain, that what with her red hair and bright green eyes she was almost a freak, to her father her colouring alone was a constant reminder of the days when he was young and foolish and loved Edith’s poor, beautiful auburn-haired mother devotedly. With her death had come a darkness that had never lifted.

  Napier stared at Harold Hanson. What he could not and would not explain, naturally, was that he had been going through a lengthy and tedious period of artistic sterility, a period during which he had toiled for weeks on end to produce canvases of which he could be proud, only to realise that he was once more artistically becalmed. For some reason, Edith’s upraised face, the startling colour of her eyes and hair, had set him afire, and he knew at once, as the light fell on her features, that his painterly ship was once more about to set sail on the artistic ocean. The only trouble was that this slip of a girl who had freed him from his gaol was not just young and startlingly beautiful, but a member of a bourgeois family that would not give her up as easily as a poor working-class man who might willingly have sold her to him for the price of a clutch of paint brushes, just as an aristocrat would have sent her to him with a huge sigh of relief and a considerable dowry. Folk such as the Hansons were different. They were middle class and respectable, and so for Napier it was marriage or nothing.

  Even now, unsurprisingly, Harold Hanson was getting down to the thing that affected him most, namely money. He was dreading that the negotiations would fail, that he would once more be left with Edith on his hands, and that, not wanting to let her loose to bring trouble to their door, they would have to go on employing her at the inn. He approached the whole matter in the same manner as he would any other business.

  ‘She has no dowry, sir.’

  ‘That is no matter, sir. I have enough money of my own. A handsome income from a trust means that I live well enough, I do assure you.’

  ‘She will come to you as she is, sir.’

  ‘That is how I want her, sir.’

  ‘Very well, sir. You may have my daughter’s hand in marriage.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  ‘When do you want to marry her, sir?’

  ‘As soon as possible, sir.’

  ‘Have you asked her, sir?’

  The two men stared at each other, the idea gradually dawning on them that no one had yet thought to ask Edith.

  ‘No, I have not, sir.’

  ‘In that case, I suggest that you do, sir. As I have said, Edith has never been one for her books, but she must be allowed her say.’

  Napier stared at his future father-in-law. He could not explain that he did not wish for a wife who read books; he wanted a wife who would inspire him, whom he could mould. He had always avoided marriage, searching in vain for something which would be both inspirational and desirable, and that he was sure was what he had found three days earlier at the Stag and Crown. If he had to marry Edith Hanson, which she being so young he obviously did, then so be it. But married or not married, what he needed more than anything was not a wife, but a muse.

  Celandine looked around her. Their new Paris apartment was light and airy, and everything that she could possibly desire. Not only that, but it was in such a convenient position that she was able to walk both to the Louvre and to the private studio into which she had been accepted as a pupil. Her mother too could walk to the smartest shops and gaze in the beautiful if simply arranged windows, occasionally allowing herself the luxury of entering the boutique of her choice and buying herself a longed-for pair of gloves, a new evening arrangement for her hair – all feathers – or a pretty velvet waistband to add new interest to an old gown.

  Since their arrival in Paris Celandine had been filled with the sense that her life was just beginning. This was not just because she had, to her delight, been accepted by the studio of Pierre Laurent, but also because the vibrancy of the city, the beauty of its buildings, the brilliance of its architecture, had become part of her every waking moment.

  She would always
remember her first walk towards the left bank, crossing the Pont des Arts, walking down the rue de Seine towards the Ecole des Beaux Arts. The sun was just beginning to set, almost imperceptibly, so that the pale blue of the sky was turning to that particular faded pink that always seems to be so busily creating a fairytale atmosphere at the start of a spring or summer evening.

  Once the bridge had been crossed she passed under a dark archway spilling over with the darkly vast figures of tramps spread about the paving, their bearded faces emanating the unmistakable smell of wine.

  ‘Ah, mademoiselle, how these tramps smell ‘orrible!’

  The maid’s voice coming from behind her had been filled with disgust, but Celandine had ignored her. The left bank of Paris might be unfashionable as far as the rich and tonnish were concerned, but it was a Mecca for artists. Once the Seine was crossed there was a sense of being beckoned towards a bubbling cauldron of aspiration and learning, of artistic endeavour and intellectual thought. Each old winding street into which they turned seemed to promise to lead them to some new discovery, some fascination that could be explored at a later date.

  Finally Celandine had turned towards home and away from their tentative explorations, but with such reluctance that it had seemed to her, as she walked back across the only bridge in Paris over which no horse or vehicle was ever allowed to pass, that she might actually be leaving a part of herself behind.

  The natural excitement she felt, a few days later, when she entered Pierre Laurent’s studio evaporated on meeting the man himself. To say that Monsieur Laurent was a disappointment was to say the least. Besides, as had been the case in Munich, there were no other female students in the studio. There was no one else, young or old, who had to cope with long dresses that looked either too dowdy in the street, or too glamorous to be worn in a working studio. Celandine found herself, once more, quite alone in an all-male world.

  Yet again she found herself reluctantly having to cope with the sudden shouts of laughter, the ceaseless gossip and chatter, and the equally ceaseless smoke that made her hair smell. Her mother always complained when she returned home that Celandine reeked as if she had just descended from a public tramcar, so faithfully did the stench of the studio accompany her back to their apartment.

  So it was that in those first few weeks in Paris, despite the presence of her mother and Marie, Celandine found to her consternation that she felt as isolated as she had ever done. She could not even admit as much when she returned to the apartment, for her mother had busily turned it into a haven of domestic prettiness, setting it about with cushions and flowers, ornaments and peacock feathers, with her own particular artistry, as well as mastering the difficulties of the kitchen, which had somehow become more onerous now that Marie had been forced to leave Munich.

  ‘Is that you, dear?’

  Mrs Benyon was stitching at her needlepoint frame, seated by the open window above the elegant courtyard over which all the apartments looked.

  ‘Yes, Mother.’

  ‘Did you have a good day, dear?’

  The exchange was always depressingly the same, and, hovering by the door, Celandine always knew exactly what would be said next.

  ‘Do not come too far into the room, dear, whatever you do. We do not want the perfume of the flowers to be affected by the odours of Monsieur Laurent’s studio, do we? Go straight to your bedroom and change. Marie will take your clothes and air them.’

  ‘Yes, Mother.’

  As she tottered towards her dressing room at the end of every day Celandine would only ever admit to herself just how played out she actually felt. It was not the constant struggle to get better at her drawing, to compete with the noise and chatter which seemed to be an accepted part of a working Parisian studio; it was the deep artistic depression she was experiencing, a depression that she knew stemmed from the growing realisation that she really was no better off in Paris than she had been in Munich. She was still a freak, a young woman struggling to become a professional artist, not content like so many of her contemporaries to sit at home executing polite water colours.

  Night after night Celandine found herself unable to compose herself for sleep, instead lying awake and staring at the ceiling, tussling with the idea that she really should give up any idea of trying to be a painter. And it was worse when she had to succumb to the weekly visit to his studio of Monsieur Laurent himself.

  How she dreaded the moment Laurent stood in front of her work, knowing only too well as she did that the fog under which she had been daily struggling was soon to be lifted, only to be replaced by a black cloud.

  Laurent was a fussy little man with a stiff moustache, both sides of which he kept carefully waxed. It was his custom when about to pronounce on his pupils’ work to stand back from the canvas with one hand raised, straight black eyebrows twitching, lips pursed, silent as the grave for a full minute. What seemed like hours, but was probably actually only seconds, would pass, while Celandine waited for him to say something, at the same time aware that it would probably take a miracle to prompt him to do anything more than murmur phrases which amounted to little more than bored condescension, in a purposefully hopeless voice.

  ‘Tiens, but whatever have we here, enfin, made-moiselle?’

  The opening remark was always the same, and, probably because she was the only woman in the room, it seemed to Celandine that following his inevitable opening remark all chatter around the studio would stop, that just as Monsieur Laurent opened his rather too full lips to pronounce on what he thought to be the faults in Celandine’s work, a silence would fall. It was as if everyone in the great, dark-panelled atelier, with its upper balcony where visitors, potential buyers, but more often dealers, were invited to drink and smoke, had fallen silent. It was a silence that always brought Celandine nothing but embarrassment.

  After he had finished trying rather too obviously to find something to say about Celandine’s work, ending up, more often than not, damning with nothing but faint praise, Monsieur Laurent would finally shrug his shoulders more than a little hopelessly and give a small sigh, before moving on to the next student.

  As he moved smoothly on to another easel it seemed to Celandine that the other students would turn to each other and shrug their shoulders, the expressions on their faces indicating that really, whatever Monsieur Laurent thought of their work, just to glance at Miss Benyon’s canvas was to find themselves feeling sympathetic to their professor. The young American woman chose such trivial subjects – domestic interiors, her mother sewing a piece of lace, the maid cooking – well, really, what could someone like Monsieur Laurent say?

  Sometimes, at the end of one of the professor’s visits, when she had heard him discussing every other student’s work in depth, Celandine would stare at the palms of her hands, noting with vague interest the nail marks caused by trying to control her inner fury, before quickly pulling on her gloves. Then she would cram her hat on the back of her head and set off home, unable to communicate her inner despair to anyone, knowing only that she was beginning to share Monsieur Laurent’s opinion of Celandine Benyon’s talent. It was small, it was trivial, it was hardly worth the canvases upon which she daubed.

  ‘Not off to the Louvre museum again, dear?’

  ‘That’s right, Mother.’

  It was Saturday and rather than stay in and watch her mother doing needlepoint and pouring tea for friends, Celandine had packed up her drawing books and pencils and was slipping out of the apartment.

  ‘What I do not understand, Celandine dearest,’ her mother continued quietly, turning away quickly so as not to risk contradiction, ‘what I am finding very difficult to understand is why poor Herr Brandt should have been always so out of favour when we were in Munich, most particularly because he was continually asking you to copy so much from the ancient world, when now we are in Paris all you yourself seem to want to do is to go to the Louvre on your own and copy the old masters. I mean, surely this is the same salad as before, dearest, just a differen
t dressing?’

  Having had her say, Mrs Benyon was gone from the hall so quickly that Celandine had no time to explain that copying in the Drawing Room of the Louvre was very different from being made to copy day after day, with no chance of expressing your talent, as she had been in Munich. She closed the front door behind her, consoling herself with the thought that even should she have been able to explain her mother would not have been very interested, for what was really at stake was the fact that Mrs Benyon was irritated that Celandine was not staying for one of her mother’s much treasured At Homes.

  Not that the guests who came to the apartment were without interest. Nowadays, thanks to letters of introduction from friends in New York, her mother’s visitors could include such diverse characters as a Russian countess, a relative of the queen of Spain, and a lady from the Latin quarter who was rumoured in private life to dress as a man and smoke a pipe, but, perhaps in deference to her hostess, arrived in a perfectly acceptable afternoon dress, only slightly marred by her carrying a walking cane and sporting a pair of men’s black and white spats on her feet.

  Celandine walked determinedly off in the direction of the Louvre. She knew how much her companionship meant to her mother, but to have to stay to take tea and make polite conversation with her mother’s visitors was sometimes more than her daughter could bear. She sighed inwardly. She would never be the sort of daughter a mother like Helen Benyon wanted. She was too like her father, too fascinated by her art, too determined to make something of herself, something that was not to do with either fashion or marriage, and they both knew it.

  Celandine entered what she always thought of as the portals of the Louvre museum – for such a cathedral to art and the ancient world could not, surely, only boast doors – with her usual feeling of excitement and made her way rapidly to the Drawing Room, where she knew she would be able to settle herself contentedly for the afternoon. Once away from the increasingly dreaded confines of Monsieur Laurent’s studio she seemed to be able to find her centre once again, and draw much needed confidence from the feeling.