Headline

by Imogen Robertson

  ‘There is no need to come into my room, Maud. You may knock at the door and I shall join you here a little while later.’

  Maud retreated to her room. There was an envelope on the bed with her name on it. She picked it up and her fingers brushed the cotton of the bedspread on their way to the thick paper. Comfort. The envelope held two fifty-franc notes and a message from M. Morel asking her to make use of the money for any little items she might need to make herself at home with them. He added that this was, of course, in addition to her weekly stipend. Maud sat suddenly on the bed and stared at the pink and blue notes, the paper smothered with engravings of anchors and cherubs. No Empress has ever felt their wealth as wide and inexhaustible as Maud did in that moment. She lifted her head: there was a faint sweet smell in the air, heavy and pungent, reaching into the room. She tucked the money away in the lid of her box of painting materials and left the apartment.

  Funeral oil on canvas 64.8 × 76.3 cm

  The narrow range of colours gives the suggestion of physical and spiritual chill to this picture, and the framing forces the viewer to be part of the scene rather than the observer. The grave is at our feet; the figures jostling the frame are at our shoulder. In the distance and on the right, a break in the cloud allows a glimmer of sunlight and warmth of colour into the scene, though whether this is hope, or a false dawn, we cannot say. None of the figures surrounding us at the graveside have noticed it; it is a beam of light offered only to the artist and now the viewer.

  Extract from the catalogue notes to the exhibition ‘The Paris Winter: Anonymous Treasures from the de Civray Collection’, Southwark Picture Gallery, London, 2010

  CHAPTER 7

  The days quickly developed a pattern. Maud left the apartment every morning before M. Morel or his sister had woken; had her breakfast at a zinc by the entrance to Passage des Panoramas, and was ready to begin her day’s work with an unfamiliar lightness and ease. The studio had become a more welcoming place now. Tanya had made a pet of her, and having decided that their figures were practically identical, had given her two more of her old dresses: a working dress of soft grey, and another walking dress that meant she needn’t be ashamed of wandering the boulevards with Sylvie in the afternoons. The other women began to warm to her too. They teased her about her luck and when she laughed along and agreed with them, they liked her for it. The following week, when the dais was filled with another of their regular models, Maud realised she had no idea of the life Yvette lived when she was not in the studio with them. She asked Tanya about it as they drank tea.

  ‘Oh, Yvette is a child of Montmartre, you know,’ she said, waving her hand and almost knocking Francesca’s cup from her hands. ‘When she’s not here she’ll be with the other models at Place Pigalle. Old Degas has used her a fair amount in the past. And she normally has some boyfriend or other to keep her amused. I envy her freedom, don’t you?’ Maud shook her head. ‘Truly you don’t?’ Tanya seemed a little disconcerted. ‘Am I being stupid? I know it must be hard to be poor, but it is hard to be as harried and pursued as I am. My aunts are giving a dinner next week and that means I must go to Rue Taitbout again this afternoon for a dress fitting when I would rather be working.’ When Francesca almost choked on her tea, Tanya looked genuinely distressed. ‘Oh, do not laugh at me.’

  Maud offered her a pastry. ‘Tanya, I promise I do not envy you either.’

  The Russian appeared to be slightly mollified. ‘You are very kind, Maud. Would you like to come to the dinner? I could lend you the dress again?’

  ‘No, thank you. I do not think I can use the Morels’ flat as if it were some sort of hotel. Sylvie does not go out, so neither can I. In the spring when they have left Paris I shall come and visit you whenever you wish.’ At that moment, Maud realised that Mademoiselle Claudette was at their elbow waiting for an opportunity to speak.

  ‘Ladies, I wished to tell you that the funeral of Rose Champion will be held tomorrow morning. Her aunt has arrived in Paris to see it done. I shall attend. If any of you wish it, we may leave from here together.’

  ‘Monsieur Lafond . . . ?’ Francesca asked and Claudette shook her head. They understood. Their master’s income relied on his good reputation and his attendance at the burial might draw attention to the squalid nature of Miss Champion’s death. Tanya spoke for them.

  ‘We shall come.’

  M. Lafond might not wish to attend the funeral himself, but he did provide Claudette with the fare for a taxi to take them there. It was a cold but clear day and the women found themselves drawing in great lungfuls of clean air, enjoying the contrast to the centre of the city until they remembered their business and became quiet.

  Miss Champion’s aunt and the priest were already waiting by the grave. There were no other mourners. The aunt introduced herself as Mrs Fuller and seemed distracted and exhausted as well as distressed by the death of her niece. Her hat, dark purple and heavy with black blooms, was rather crushed and her woollen skirt and jacket showed signs of travel. She peered at them short-sightedly and her hand, when Maud shook it, was damp and limp. The priest recited his lines mechanically, the grave-diggers began their work. As Maud made the proper remarks the damp grip tightened slightly.

  ‘You are English? And an artist?’ Mrs Fuller sounded hopeful.

  ‘I am.’

  ‘Oh, please tell me what is to be done with the paintings Rose left. There are only four of them. I have them in the taxicab, but I know my husband and my son will not like them. They are not cheerful. I prefer the paintings Rose did when she was little, though not many of them were cheerful either . . .’ Her words trailed away and she came to a halt in the middle of her memories. ‘She was always such a difficult child. I had always wanted a little girl, but she never liked me. Still, I cannot throw away her paintings. Oh, I hate to travel this time of year. Still a pretty day, but so many cars.’ She pulled a handkerchief from her bag and blew her nose.

  Maud was at a loss. Perhaps some dealer would take the paintings, though Rose’s poverty suggested that she had not managed to sell very much work. Even if she could find someone who would take them, the idea of dragging the canvases from one shop to another then arranging for the money to be sent to England seemed a thankless task, and in any case she was engaged to spend her time with Sylvie.

  ‘I shall buy them,’ Tanya said. Mrs Fuller looked up at her in surprise then let her eyes travel over Tanya’s fur-trimmed coat, her wide picture hat and the pearls in her ears.

  ‘But you haven’t even seen them,’ she said suspiciously, her rumpled face lined like damp linen being wrung out.

  ‘No matter. I know Miss Champion’s work and thought highly of it. I shall take all four and pay you fifty francs for each of them.’ Claudette rolled her eyes and even Francesca looked a little shocked. Mrs Fuller looked up at Maud, her tongue darting out of her mouth a little to moisten her lips.

  ‘Is that a proper figure, Miss Heighton? After all, I hear that some paintings my husband says are the most terrible scribbles are sold for thousands, and poor Rose will paint no more now. Does that not make them worth rather more?’

  Maud could see the attendants of the cemetery continuing to fill in Rose’s grave behind them. She tried to speak evenly. ‘Rose was a talented artist, Mrs Fuller, but entirely unknown here or in London. It is unlikely you would ever sell those canvases at all to anyone else, let alone for eight pounds each. Miss Koltsova’s offer is extremely generous.’

  ‘Is it now?’ Mrs Fuller narrowed her eyes and looked sidelong at Tanya again, and even though it must be clear to her that she was understood, she said, ‘Is the young lady Jewish?’

  ‘I am not,’ Tanya said. ‘Though I fail to see what the significance is of that.’

  Mrs Fuller smiled thinly. ‘I am sure you are very clever with money at any rate. Still, I suppose I must believe it is a fair price. Poor dear Rose, such a terrible loss to us all. Do you have the money with you? I have the cab waiting at the gates.’

&nbs
p; Sylvie agreed to go with Maud to the Jardin du Luxembourg that afternoon as the day continued fine. They took their sketchbooks with them and found a seat near the grand octagonal pond at the front of the palace, where the children pushed their rented sailboats across the rippling waters. Maud suggested that Sylvie try to draw one of the ornamental urns, thinking the curve of its body and the mass of its high pediment might give her hand some useful practice, particularly as the long afternoon shadows fell across it and turned it into strong patterns of light and shade. Maud watched the children for a while, smiling at the fierce concentration of the sailors, the pressure of the wind on the handkerchief sails, and she listened to the scud of running footsteps on the gravel paths, the shrieks of laughter. Opposite them, tiny in front of the walls of the pale palace, a girl no more than six years old was playing with her diabolo, running the cylinder along the string, throwing and catching it again while her mother sat nearby, occasionally looking up from her sewing to applaud her daughter’s efforts. Still, nothing caught her eye and Maud started to sketch what she had seen that morning, the clear day and the tiny band of mourners shivering around the grave. She began to tell Sylvie about the mean little funeral, and the greed of Miss Champion’s aunt.

  ‘But Maud, simply because you knew that her niece’s pictures were worth very little, it does not mean that she did. And consider, are you English not taught from the date of your birth that every foreigner you meet is trying to take away your money? She was doing that which she was taught to do, and you cannot reproach people for that.’ Sylvie swore softly under her breath. ‘I shall never manage this. It looks like a plant pot.’

  Maud leaned over and examined her work. ‘Do not press so hard, or try to make such long strokes.’ Sylvie tried again. ‘Yes, that is better. I think you are too kind to Mrs Fuller. She was standing in front of her niece’s grave and thinking of what profit it might bring her. How can that ever be proper?’

  ‘Proper? Bah! So might anyone if they were not very attached to the person who died. And I think it would be a very easy mistake to make. Who knows what makes one painter rich and another poor?’ She tapped her drawing with her pencil. ‘What if I hold this up high and say it is the new art. Very rare and valuable. Give me two hundred francs for it.’

  Maud looked at the rather misshapen drawing with its heavy lines. ‘No one would believe you.’

  Sylvie looked triumphant. ‘But that is nothing to do with my poor picture. It is only because I haven’t published a manifesto first. Everything that is worth money in the world is so because someone says very loudly, “This is beautiful and rare”. Every piece of art is rare because a person has only so many hours to live, so many bits of art they can make. Now all you have to do is convince them the art is beautiful . . . or clever at least. I shall write an article for the newspaper proclaiming myself a genius then we can sell this,’ she flicked the page with a smooth fingernail, ‘for a hundred francs. The rare work of a genius.’ She bent down and picked up a piece of gravel between her finger and thumb; it was a pale lilac. ‘Now if there existed in the world only a very little of this, and a million tons of diamonds, this is what queens would wear in their crowns and we would put diamonds down on the walkways. Beautiful and rare. Beautiful because it is rare, or beautiful because we have been trained to think it rare. Then we can make it into money.’

  Maud felt strangely sad at the idea. ‘You make it sound like a trick.’

  Sylvie shrugged. Whether it was because she was unhappy with her drawing or because she had not rested after lunch, her mood had become suddenly brittle.

  ‘Come. Perhaps it is just I know too little of art. You must educate me. This place is full of art shops, books on art. Let us go at once.’

  Maud began to put away her materials, sensing Sylvie’s impatience, then allowed herself to be dragged down Rue de Tournon. The bookshop Sylvie happened upon was in Rue Saint-Sulpice, but though the impulse and the plan were hers, as soon as the two women entered the shop, it was clear she wished to be gone. The bookseller, a young man with a ready smile, obviously wanted only to help, but Sylvie made her purchases distractedly. Maud found a translation of Ruskin, and though she thought him a little old-fashioned, she offered it as a useful place for Sylvie to begin her reading.

  ‘Very well, Maud. Whatever you wish,’ Sylvie said briskly. She picked up two or three more of the volumes the bookseller had put in front of her on his polished counter, then handed them to him without more than a glance. ‘And these.’ Maud thought of her lost, loved books and wondered where they had ended up.

  As he bound up the package, Sylvie tapped her foot and when she handed him her money, her fingers shook. Maud stayed silent and let herself be whisked out of the shop and back to Rue de Seine without comment. As soon as they were back in the apartment, Sylvie put the package into her hands. ‘Open them if you wish.’ She went into her room without another word.

  Maud took the books into the living room and untied the paper wrapping. Her education in the history of art had been all at second hand until she came to Paris. It had been a wonder to see in life the images she had learned to know in hazy reproduction, as if the sun had suddenly appeared to drive off the mist on the dale and reveal the landscape below it. She removed her hat and gloves and sat at the table, but did not open the books. She thought instead of the strange ugly pictures that Tanya had bought from Mrs Fuller and what Sylvie had said about art. They had returned to Passage des Panoramas before examining Rose’s pictures, and had done so in a sort of sorry silence. The palette of each was limited and muddy, purple lake and brown madder with sickly touches of citron to suggest sources of light weak and out of the frame. They were loosely painted, sketchy in places and oddly placed, flattened, the perspective lost and lurching. Where the eye expected to see most within the frame was a dingy absence of form; only at the edges of the whole did figures lurk, pressed down in the composition as if irrelevant, yet the only interest the artist offered. The gutters of Paris. A long table surrounded by gaunt and stooping figures, their grey fingers curled around wooden bowls. A woman leaning against one of the elegant lamp-posts, but crushed by the darkness around her. No street was as dark in the city of light as Rose had painted this one. When you looked long enough, that darkness seemed to seethe with half-realised faces, painted as a layer of darkness on a deeper dark.

  Mademoiselle Claudette had touched the half-seen figure of the woman, feeling the thickness of the paint. ‘I do not understand,’ she said, and Maud realised she had tears in her eyes.

  The American girl looked over her shoulder and shuddered. ‘You’ve wasted your money.’

  Tanya looked up sharply. ‘I do not think I have. She was trying to do something . . .’

  Francesca had hooked her palette over her thumb again and taken her seat by the stove. ‘I can respect the attempt, but I have not learned to paint to make the world miserable. I paint the world to celebrate it.’ There was a murmur of agreement around the room.

  Tanya bit her lip and set the painting down. Maud was not sure if she did so with respect or fear. ‘What do you think, Maud? I think Rose might have been almost a genius. But some of this seems clumsy and Francesca is right – even if it is clever, it is still very ugly.’

  Maud said nothing, only sighing and continuing to prepare her palette for the remaining hour of the morning. Rose’s pictures crawled behind her eyes, insisting on overlaying themselves on her vision. What can paint catch? they said. What can it make visible that is hidden? Are these pictures more true than your pretty women posed on a model throne with their lips a little reddened?

  At Rue de Seine, Maud smelled the heavy sweet scent in the hallway and went straight to her room, taking Ruskin with her for company. For a moment it seemed that she had carried Rose Champion’s ghosts with her into the room. The deepening shadows seemed to be full of her whispering demons carrying darkness on their backs. Their breath smelled heavy and sweet. She turned on the electric light and opened the
window, sat by it and let the cold air stream in until the demons were gone and the room was hers again. The fierceness of the light rather overwhelmed her, and only when she had wrapped a thin scarf round the shade could she read in comfort. Ruskin had no doubts or demons, it seemed. His heavy baroque sentences made her think of the rose window in Notre Dame, their thick colours hanging off his phrases like coronation robes.

  Maud ate her supper alone in the drawing room that evening and was asleep in her room long before M. Morel returned home.

  CHAPTER 8

  As the days passed their walks grew longer, then when they came home Sylvie began to look into the art books and ask Maud about what she found. Maud sketched her for the first time a week after she arrived. Heavy rain had kept them indoors, but Sylvie had not retreated to her own room and oblivion. Rather she stretched out on the chaise longue under a Lavery landscape and turned the pages of one of her books. Maud began her sketch and quickly became lost in it, not thinking of anything but the line on the paper until Sylvie asked in a strange, whining voice, ‘Are you nearly finished, Maud?’

  Maud looked at her, changing her way of seeing from the model to the girl.

  ‘Almost. One moment more.’

  Sylvie was staring at the clock behind Maud’s shoulder. It might have been a little more than a moment, but the second that Maud put down her pencil, Sylvie scampered from the room leaving Maud wondering. She emerged for supper with her though, her manner vacant and gentle, her half-smile drifting over her lips – and though she ate very little, she did eat.

  Maud’s health improved. The rest from worry, the good food, the calm of life in Rue de Seine was making her a better artist. Her hand was steadier, her lines more confident; at the Académie her use of colour grew bolder and more her own. She could almost feel the shackles that Tanya had mentioned coming loose, their weight falling from her wrists, and when she walked through Paris between her classes and Rue de Seine she did so with her head up and watching. The shouts of the street-sellers accompanied her; the old woman with her cart of glistening blue and silver fish arranged in fans on a bed of green grass, the girl her own age with milk-white skin and cap, her cart piled with potatoes with thin gold skins and deep mounds of cabbage, all arranged and turned to face any passing customer with their folds of malachite green frothing round them like crumpled lace. Each seller sang their calls to the housewives of the quartier like birds, each with their own particular rhythm, rise and fall: ‘les haricots verts, les pommes de terre’, ‘J’ai les poissons pour quinze sous’. While the models were resting from their poses, Maud joined the women in conversation, no longer obsessed with the provisions laid out for them. She and Tanya looked through the old illustrated catalogues of exhibitions, comparing the lines of composition, the gauzy fantasies of the Symbolists or the strange bare spaces of André Sureda with his Turneresque pursuits of light through mist.