The room was filling with cigarette smoke and murmured conversation. ‘La pauvre, la pauvre . . .’ echoed round the studio like a communal prayer.
Maud looked to see if any painting of Miss Champion’s remained on the walls. Perhaps once a month during his twice-weekly visits to his students, M. Lafond would nod at one of the women’s paintings and say, ‘Pop it up, dear.’ It was a great honour. Francesca had cried when Lafond had selected one of her pictures. He had not yet selected any work of Maud’s. She had submitted successfully to the official Paris Salon early this year – the head and shoulders oil portrait of a fellow student – but even if the Academicians approved of her worked, careful style and thought it worthy of exhibition in the Grand Palais, Lafond did not think she had produced anything fresh enough for his draughty attic classroom.
Maud had written to her brother and sister-in-law about having the painting in the exhibition. Even in the north-east of England they had heard of the Paris Salon, but the reaction had not been what she had hoped for. If James had sounded proud or impressed, she might have asked him for a loan and used the money to spend the summer in Fontainebleau and recover her health out of the heat and dust of the capital. All the other women she worked with seemed to have funds to do so. Instead he had asked if a sale were likely, reminding her that she still owed him ten pounds. Her little half-brother Albert though had sent her a cartoon of a great crowd of men in hats grouped round a painting and shouting Hurrah! There had been no sale. Her portrait hung high on the walls, and surrounded by so many similar works, it went unnoticed.
There was a canvas from Rose Champion. It showed the Place Pigalle in early-morning light. The human figures were sketchy and indistinct, blurred by movement. One of the new double-decker motor-buses, identifiable only by its colours and bulk, rattled along the Boulevard Clichy. By the fountain a few rough female figures lounged – the models, mostly Italian, some French, who gathered there every morning waiting for work from the artists of Montmartre and Pigalle. They were scattered like leaves under the bare, late-autumn trees. Rose had lavished her attention on the light; the way it warmed the great pale stone buildings of Paris into honey tones; the regular power and mass of the hotels and apartment blocks, the purple and green shadows, the glint on the pitch-black metalwork around the balconies. The American was right, Rose had not returned to the studio after the summer, but the picture remained. M. Lafond must have bought it for himself. Maud felt as if someone were pressing her heart between their palms. The girl was dead and she was still jealous.
‘She was ill,’ the American said to Francesca. ‘I called on her before I left for Brittany this summer. She said everything she had done was a failure and that there was . . .’ she rubbed her fingertips together ‘. . . no money. I’ve never seen a woman so proud and so poor. Most girls are one or the other, don’t you agree?’
‘I saw her a week ago,’ said an older woman, sitting near the model. Her shoulders were slumped forward. ‘She was outside Kahnweiler’s gallery. She seemed upset, but she wouldn’t talk to me.’
Maud wondered if Rose had seen something in the wild angular pictures sold by Kahnweiler which she herself was trying to achieve but could not – whether that would have been enough to make her hang herself. Or was it hunger? More likely. Hunger squeezed the hope out of you. Maud held her hand out in front of her. It shook. I hate being poor, she thought. I hate being hungry. But I will survive. Another year and I shall be able to paint as I like and people will buy my work and I shall eat what I want and be warm. If I can just manage another winter.
She looked up, possessed by that strange feeling that someone was eavesdropping on her thoughts. Yvette, the model for the life-class that week, was watching her, her dressing-gown drawn carelessly up over her shoulders as she sat on the dais, tapping her cigarette ash out on the floor. She was a favourite in the studio, cheerfully complying when asked for a difficult pose, still and controlled while they worked but lively and happy to talk to them about other studios and artists in her breaks. Yvette was a little older than some of the girls, and occasionally Maud wondered what she thought of them all as she looked out from the dais with those wide blue eyes, what she observed while they tried to mimic the play of light across her naked shoulders, her high cheekbones. Now the model nodded slightly to Maud, then looked away. Her face, the angle of it, suggested deep and private thought.
Mademoiselle Claudette returned and soon realised that the news she had to give was already known. The facts she had to offer were simply a repeat of what Francesca had already overheard.
‘Is there anyone here who knows anything of Miss Champion’s people in England?’
‘I believe she had an aunt in Sussex she lived with as a child,’ Maud said into the silence that followed. ‘But I have no idea of her address. Were there no letters?’
‘We shall discover something, I hope. Very well.’ The woman looked at her watch. ‘It is ten to the hour. Let us return to work at ten minutes past. Monsieur Lafond asks me to tell you that in light of this unhappy event he will reserve the pleasure of seeing you until tomorrow.’ There was a collective groan around the room. Mademoiselle Claudette ignored it, but frowned as she clicked the cover back onto her watch and turned to the tea-table.
‘Does he fear a plague of suicides if he tells us we are miserable oafs today?’ Francesca said, a little too loudly. The students began to stand, stretch, make their way to the pile of teacups and little plates of cakes.
‘My darlings, good day! How are you all on this dismal morning? Why is everyone looking so terribly grim?’ Tatiana Sergeyevna Koltsova made her entrance in a cloud of furs and fragrance. Maud smiled. It was a pleasure to look at her. For all that she was Russian, it seemed to Maud that Tanya was the real spirit of Paris, the place Maud had failed to become part of: bright, beautiful, modern, light. She would chat to Yvette or tease Lafond himself and they all seemed to think her charming. Not all the other women students liked her, no one with looks, talent and money will be short of enemies, but Tanya seemed blissfully ignorant of any animosity directed towards her.
Francesca straightened up from the tea-table where she had been leaning. ‘Be gentle with us today, my sweet. There’s been a death in the family.’
The Russian’s kid glove flew up to cover her pretty little mouth. At the same moment she let her furs drop from her shoulders and her square old maid bundled forward to gather them in her arms before they could pool onto the paint-stained floor. Maud watched as Francesca lowered her voice and explained. The Russian was blinking away tears. That was the thing about Tanya. She could be genuinely moved by the sufferings of others even as she threw off her cape for her maid to catch. She arrived late every day and one could still smell on her the comfort of silk sheets, chocolate on her breath. Then she would paint, utterly absorbed, for two hours until the clock struck and the women began to pack away. She would shake herself and look about her smiling, her canvas glowing and alive with pure colour.
Yvette tied her dressing-gown round her then clambered down from the model throne on the dais and passed the table, dropping the stub of her cigarette on the floor and grabbing up a spiced cake in the same moment. As she chewed she put her hand on the Russian’s elbow and led her away into a far corner of the room. The movement seemed to wake Maud. She stood and went over to the food and helped herself, trying not to move too urgently nor take too much. She ate as slowly as she could.
The Russian materialised at her side like a spirit while she was still licking her lips. ‘Miss Heighton?’ Maud was startled, but managed a ‘Good morning’. She had never had any conversation with Tanya, only watched her from a distance as if she were on the other side of a glass panel. ‘I know it is not the most pleasant day for walking, but will you take a little stroll with me after we pack away today? I have something particular to ask you.’
Maud said she would be pleased to do so. Tanya smiled at her, showing her sharp white teeth, then turned to find her place ami
dst the tight-packed forest of easels. Maud steered her own way back to her place on the other side of the room and stared at the canvas in front of her, wondering what the Russian could want with her. The model was once again taking her place on the raised platform. She glanced at Maud and winked. Maud smiled a little uncertainly and picked up her brush.
An atmosphere of quiet concentration began to fill the room once more – Rose Champion already, to some degree, forgotten. The food seemed to have woken Maud’s hunger rather than suppressed it. She closed her eyes for a moment, waiting for the sting of it to pass, then set to work.
CHAPTER 2
‘Vladimir! We are ready for you!’
Maud thought Tanya would speak to her on the pavement where the covered arcade of Passage des Panoramas gave out onto the wide, tree-lined expanse of Boulevard Montmartre, but instead she put her arm through Maud’s and waved her free hand at a smart blue motor which was waiting, its engine idling, under the winter skeleton of a plane tree. It rolled smoothly towards them and stopped precisely by the ladies. Maud noticed as the chauffeur hopped out of the machine and went to open the automobile’s rear door for them that his livery matched the dark blue enamel of the car itself. Tanya’s maid clambered into the front with the painting gear while Tanya herself ushered Maud into the back seat and said something in Russian to the driver. Maud heard the words Parc Monceau and the driver bowed before closing the door on them and returning to his seat.
‘I hope you don’t mind, Maud – by the way, may I call you Maud? Good. I need a little greenery after being shut up inside all morning. We shall run you to wherever you want to go later on.’ The Russian pulled off her leather gloves and lay back with a sigh against the heavily upholstered seat. Maud made some polite reply and looked out of the window as the car pulled away into the stream of other motors, carriages and motor-buses. What did this princess want of her? Did she perhaps have a drawing pupil for her? Pupils were hard to come by in a city packed to its heaving gills with artists, but if she did, a few extra francs a month would make all the difference to Maud. She felt the curl of hope in her belly under the hunger.
Paris ate money. Paint and canvas ate money. Maud’s training ate money. Paris yanked each copper from her hand and gave her back nothing but aching bones and loneliness. It was as if she had never quite arrived, as if she had stepped out of the grand frontage of the Gare du Nord, and Paris – the real Paris – had somehow retreated round the corner leaving all these open palms behind it. She was on the wrong side of the glass, pressed up against it, but trapped by her manners, her sober serious nature, behind this invisible divide. She spent her evenings alone in cheap lodgings reading and sketching in poor light. Her illness last winter – she had been feeding herself too little, been too wary of lighting the fire when the damp crawled off the river – had swallowed francs by the fistful. She must not get ill again, but she had even less money now. Sometimes she felt her stock of bravery had been all used up in getting here at all.
Even with winter closing in, the boulevard was full of activity – the shop girls in short skirts running errands with round candy-striped hatboxes dangling from their wrists, the women with their fashionable pinched-in jackets being ushered into restaurants by bowing waiters.
‘Tell me,’ Tanya said, ‘did you know Miss Champion well? I thought, perhaps, you both being Englishwomen . . .’
Maud shook her head; her thoughts were loose and drifting and it took her a moment to recall where she was. She blinked and found herself looking into Tanya’s large black eyes. She thought of Rose, all sharp angles and anger. ‘Not well at all. I found her rather . . . rather cruel, as a matter of fact.’
Tanya drew a small metal compact from her purse and examined her complexion, brushing away a little loose powder with her fingertip. Most women in Paris went into the world masked with heavy white foundation and their mouths coloured a false glistening red. Tanya’s use of powder and paint was subtle by comparison, but brought up as she had been, Maud found it rather shocking and was embarrassed by her own unworldliness. She had thought herself rather wise in the ways of the world until she came to Paris. Every day that passed, she was in danger of thinking a little less of herself.
‘I’m glad you say that,’ Tanya said and snapped the compact shut again. ‘Lord knows I am sorry anyone gets so desperate they hurt themselves, but she was terribly mean. I once asked her to comment on a study I was doing – it was my own fault really, I didn’t want her opinion, it was simply I admired her and wanted her to praise me – and her advice was “stop painting”.’
Maud laughed suddenly and covered her mouth.
Tanya grinned. ‘I know! I said it was my own fault, but still – what a thing to say! She painted beautifully, I think, and in fairness she was not vain about it.’
‘Yes, if one dared to say anything to her she looked as if she despised one,’ Maud replied. ‘She didn’t think of any of us as artists at all. Perhaps she was right.’
‘Nonsense,’ Tanya said firmly and Maud blushed. ‘There are some women at Lafond’s who will do nothing more than paint nasty still lifes. There are others who are serious. You are serious, Maud. So am I. About my work at least.’ The compact went back into the little embroidered bag over her arm. ‘Now I shall be quiet for a minute and let you look out of the window.’
The sensation of being driven was very pleasant. Maud had been in her brother’s motor a few times before, but she couldn’t see why he liked it. The thing rattled your teeth and shook, and was forever making strange banging noises. This motor though was quite different; they seemed to float over the streets and the engine’s regular fricatives made Maud think of contented pets. For the past few weeks, walking through the city between her classes and her lodgings had been a bleak necessity rather than a pleasure. The cold was bitter and Maud could not afford a coat thick enough to keep it from getting into her bones, and you needed money to rest in the pavement cafés, heated with braziers and defended from the winds with neat barriers of clipped box-hedge. Now though, Maud was snug behind the window seals of the motor-car, her legs covered with a rug lined in fur, and Paris unrolled in front of them like a cinema film.
The car argued its way through the traffic under the fifty-two Corinthian pillars and wide steps of the new Eglise de la Madeleine, then swung up Boulevard Malesherbes past the dome of Saint-Augustin. All movement and variety. Street-hawkers and boulevardiers, women dragging carts of vegetables or herring. The charming busy face of Paris a thousand miles away from Maud’s draughty room in one of the back alleys around Place des Vosges, in a house just clinging to respectability, with its paper-thin sheets and the miserable collection of failed businessmen and poor widows who gathered around the landlady’s table in the evening and tried to pretend her thin soups and stews were enough to sustain them.
Tanya grew quiet and let Maud enjoy the view until they reached Parc Monceau and the motor-car came to a gentle halt near the colonnade. Tanya sprang out before the chauffeur had time to open the door for her. ‘Actual trees! Don’t you feel like a butterfly pinned up in a case in Paris sometimes?’
Maud followed her onto the path. ‘A little, I suppose. Though butterflies in cases are meant to be looked at, and no one looks at me.’
‘I wish I could go out and about without being watched sometimes,’ Tanya said casually, then turned to her maid and said something in Russian. You could try being poor, Maud thought. The conversation with the maid became a long and passionate debate that ended with Tanya stamping her foot and the maid crossing her arms over her bosom and frowning. The chauffeur had returned to the car and stared straight ahead the whole time, his face immobile.
‘My maid Sasha is convinced still water is unhealthy,’ Tanya said, taking Maud’s arm and flouncing with her towards the little lake. ‘She swears if I get typhoid she will not nurse me! You would think I had said I was going to swim the length of the Seine before lunch rather than take a little walk with you.’
Tanya’s indignation had made her eyes shine and she held her chin high. She reminded Maud suddenly of little Albert, six years old and always right, and always shocked at the gross stupidity and moral turpitude of his elders. ‘She had care of you when you were a child, perhaps?’
‘Yes, and I was a sickly infant. Now I must spend hours every day convincing her and my aunts that I am sickly no more. You are not too cold?’
‘Not at all, Miss Koltsova.’
‘Oh, I am Tanya. Call me that. I love to walk here. It is the most respectable park in Paris, so my old cats can’t complain, even if Sasha does.’
‘Old cats?’
‘My two aunts who live with me and make sure I am kept comme il faut. Vera Sergeyevna can tell you the order in which any company should come in to dinner within five minutes of entering a drawing room – she is an expert in all forms of protocol – and Lila Ivanovna, my late mother’s sister, is here to agree with everything she says. Papa would not let me come to Paris without them! Lord, the weeping I had to do to make him let me come at all. They are my guardian angels, apparently. Guardian gargoyles, they seem to me.’ She paused and Maud wondered if she was about to tell her what she wanted to hear: about rich pupils who wanted long lessons in warm houses. Instead she went on, ‘The best families in Paris send their nurses here with their little babies for their fresh air.’
Tanya walked on with a slight swaying step as if on the verge of breaking into a skip or a run; her long straight skirt swung and rippled round her. Maud began to think she had been wrong about the drawing lessons. Something like that could have been discussed while walking through Passage des Panoramas surely, and there was a nervous edge to Tanya’s chatter. Well, she would ask eventually. In the meantime Maud had never been to this park before, so she looked about her with pleasure and saw full, mature trees and pathways that wandered in curves; it made the Tuileries seem a desert.
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