Headline

by Imogen Robertson

  CHAPTER 13

  When Maud returned to the apartment the following day and was shaking her umbrella off in the passageway, she heard the voice of M. Morel greeting her. He was beside her at once, helping her off with her damp coat.

  ‘Mademoiselle Heighton! I am delighted to see you. Do come in. I hope you’ll forgive my rudeness but we are already at table. I only had a moment to dash back from the club.’

  Caught up in her coat and bag, Maud had no time to do more than assure him no apologies were needed before she was ushered through to the drawing room like a favoured guest rather than a girl who ate there every day. Sylvie was at the table looking far brighter than usual and dressed to go out.

  ‘Maud, darling! Are you famished? It’s boiled chicken for lunch again, I’m afraid, but they know we like it and their imagination seems to be running out. Christian has arranged his treat for us though.’

  Morel pushed in her chair behind her and while Sylvie piled stew on her plate and fussed with cutting more bread, he leaned over Maud, his eyes wide.

  ‘Now Miss Heighton, have you heard tell of the splendid, the refulgent Madame de Civray?’

  ‘Naturally.’ Everyone had. She was a French Countess though American by birth, and very rich. Rumour said she bought a great deal of art and said a great deal of stupid things about it which the painters all repeated to each other with great glee while they spent her money in the Montmartre cafés. Or so it was said at the Académie. Maud had never been near enough to a café in Montmartre to know what was said. Yvette was their only connection to the artists on the hill and all they knew of what was discussed there, they heard from her. She had told them her own story of the Countess too. She had been modelling for M. Degas one afternoon when the Countess arrived at his studio with her footman and her little yapping dogs.

  ‘Well, Master was not best pleased to see her, but even he cannot drive a woman like her out once she has her foot in the door. “Am I disturbing you, maestro?” she says. “Yes, you are, Madame,” he says, and looks as angry as all hell. “Well, honey, I’m only here to pick up a couple of little things for the smoking room,” she says, and I promise you she picks up the first two canvases she can put her hands on and passes them to the footman. Then she draws out a wedge of notes the size of my fist and pops them on the table. All this time, old Degas is too angry to speak. Then she backs out of the room with, I promise you, her finger on her lips! As soon as the door closed he threw his palette so hard against it, it cracked. Then she was heard the next day in Galérie Georges saying she couldn’t understand why people were so rude about him, because he was such a sweet old stick!’

  Morel dropped down into the seat next to Sylvie, his arm still slung around the back of her chair. ‘The Countess and I have friends in common. I begged a favour. You and Sylvie are invited to her home this afternoon – early, mind you – to see her paintings. She leaves for her husband’s country estate for Christmas today.’

  Maud didn’t know what to say. Morel lowered his voice. ‘You know, Miss Heighton, that Sylvie finds public places rather a strain on her nerves, but there you will be free to feast your eyes on pictures in privacy. Sylvie is more and more ready to brave the outside world, in this limited way. It isn’t even a formal visit. Come, haven’t I done well?’

  Sylvie put out her hand and covered Maud’s. ‘It is all good, isn’t it? I hate for you to be shut up here all the time. Christian tells me I have been selfish, and I agree.’

  Maud looked at her and said, ‘Not at all. You know I take such pleasure in your company.’

  ‘No, I can be strange and cross and I know it. But we are hoping this might make up for your patience, and to thank you for your help.’ She jumped to her feet. ‘See? I am already dressed. Now say you’ll come, Maud, do. Tell us how clever we have been, then eat quickly.’

  Maud looked at her with pleasure. ‘I’ll be delighted, but you must let me change.’

  ‘No need!’ Sylvie said. ‘She knows it is a poor friendless painter Christian wishes to see her collection. Spend the moments we have eating, Maud. Christian shall go and fetch a cab.’

  Maud looked back at her plate. Sylvie was as brutal as a child sometimes.

  Sylvie was unusually animated on the way to the Countess’s house, and in spite of the crowds thronging the pavements, she made the cab stop twice in order to dart into one or other of the shops on Rue de Rivoli. Each time she made Maud wait in the cab and emerged with a number of parcels and boxes. ‘Presents,’ she mouthed as she returned. She stared out of the window at the passing streets with renewed excitement. ‘How happy everyone looks! Perhaps this time next year I shall be well again. We will be in America by then. They understand business there. And now I speak English very well. You will come with us to Midnight Mass tomorrow, will you not? Did you go last year?’

  Maud was becoming used to her whirring changes of subject. ‘I was unwell. But there was a little party in the boarding house where I was staying, and the landlady brought me up some of the food.’

  ‘How horrible it is to be unwell, particularly at Christmas when everyone else is so happy. This year you shall enjoy it more.’

  ‘I’m sure I shall, Sylvie.’ Maud had prepared her gifts. To her brothers and Ida she had sent French confectionery and picture books. For Yvette and Tanya she had made cards with portraits of them both. Morel was to have a tie from Charvet, and for Sylvie she had found a pretty fan in ivory, painted with peacock colours. They were all of them modest gifts, but she felt a certain pleasure in giving them.

  ‘Oh, we are here!’ Sylvie counted out coins from her purse for the cabman while Maud stepped out onto the pavement and looked up, amazed. The Countess’s house on Place Saint-Georges was astonishing, a can-can dancer among a row of stately matrons. Four storeys high, each window surrounded by stone Graces and Muses, garlands, flourishing black ironwork – all exuberance. It was a frivolous, pretty building that seemed to be laughing sideways at the flat, self-important front of the Thiers Library opposite.

  Sylvie appeared beside her. ‘I hope the lady is not too like her house,’ she said, ‘or I may find her exhausting.’

  The manservant took Sylvie’s card and within moments his mistress was approaching with quick steps, her hands stretched out in front of her and a pair of yapping dogs dancing around her heels.

  ‘Oh Miss Morel! Delighted! And this must be Miss Heighton, I think? I’m so pleased you could drop by and see me at such short notice.’

  Maud had always liked the American accent. It sounded friendly to her, its easy musical swing so unlike the clipped English of glass and china she had learned at her mother’s knee. The Countess was wearing a day gown of green silk rippling with pearls set into its lace bodice and sleeves. Maud waited for the familiar long contemptuous look her own clothes tended to draw in Paris, but none came. Instead the Countess shook hands very heartily and gave her an open smile. ‘Now, I want to hear your opinion on something straight away. Then I shall be very rude and leave you to wander about as you see fit. I have to get the evening train for the Loire and there’s not a thing packed. This way! You too, Miss Morel!’

  ‘Are you going to be away long, Madame?’ Sylvie asked as she trailed behind them, staring up at the high ceilings, the baroque mouldings and gilt and red velvet furnishings. It was like being in a private Versailles.

  ‘Only a week, thank God. We are paying our winter visit to my husband’s family. A whole château full of titles and unmarried aunts and not a chin between them.’

  Maud smiled and the Countess winked at her. She thrust open a pair of doors off the hall then turned to face them as they waited in the corridor, her arms still wide and holding the doors apart, a firm but glorious guardian of the space beyond. ‘Now, Miss Heighton, it seems to me in this day there are three sorts of painters. Those who paint what they want to see, those who paint what they feel they see, and those who paint what they think about what they see. Which are you?’

  Sylvie
spoke while Maud was still considering. ‘That is very clever, Madame. Did you read it somewhere?’

  ‘Seems unlikely!’ she said cheerfully. ‘Unless it was in a Sherlock Holmes novel.’

  ‘I hope I paint what it feels like to see,’ Maud said at last with some hesitation.

  ‘There! Just when Miss Morel has said I sounded clever, you have invented another category. I cannot allow it. I shall put you in category two, as that seems closest. It is my favourite. The first lot are too pretty, and the last lot think such ugly thoughts. Now what do you make of this?’

  She took hold of Maud’s arm, walked her into the middle of the drawing room then pointed to a still-life that hung above the fireplace. It was difficult at first to see the painting properly in these surroundings, for it was small for this room – perhaps twenty inches in length and almost square. It showed a rough wooden table with two bowls on it, one containing cherries and the other peaches, on a ruched-up tablecloth. But the perspective was all wrong. The cherries were facing towards the viewer, the peaches turned upwards. Every angle was impossible and clumsy; the brushwork strange, hurried, with variegated hatchings; the colours, other than that of the fruit, oddly muddy; the light source hard to trace. Still it had a mass, a weight that was tangible.

  ‘Cézanne,’ Maud said.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ the Countess replied, standing by her side and staring with her. ‘But what do you think?’

  ‘It seems crude, but I would never stop looking at it if it were mine.’

  The Countess clapped her hands. ‘Exactly! That’s exactly what I felt! How can something be revolting and so beautiful at the same time?’ She stared at it. ‘I own a lot of beautiful things, Miss Heighton. I’m as rich as Croesus and I like to spend my money, but if this place was on fire and the people were safe, this funny little painting is what I’d come back for. Isn’t that odd? My husband had a huge portrait of his mother here until I bought this. It felt like an act of Yankee rebellion replacing it, but when you really look at it, all this other stuff . . .’ she waved her hand at her private palace ‘. . . just seems to melt away. I think the Count was a little angry with me for a while, but you know what? I now believe it is what he would save too.’

  ‘I’ll never paint like that,’ Maud said.

  ‘Would you want to, honey?’ the Countess asked. Maud thought, and then shook her head.

  ‘Me neither. The world only needs one Cézanne and we’ve had him. You have to find your own way. Now, I have to run around like a fool getting ready for the train. The servants all know you’re here, so you wander about just as you like. The Degas paintings are all in the smoking room. The Count and his male friends think they are connoisseurs, but when it comes down to it, they just like looking at the ballet dancers’ legs while they have their cigars. You know I had to chain them to the walls? The first painting of his I bought, he came and took back, saying he wanted to alter something – and I cannot get him to return it! Always, “tomorrow and tomorrow, Madame”!’ Maud began to think a little differently about Yvette’s story of her raid on the master’s studio. ‘There’s a Fantin-Latour in my dressing room too you shouldn’t miss if you want a more classical fruit basket. So do have a good poke around. We can have a proper visit when I come back from the Château of the Dead in a week or so. Nice to meet you, Miss Morel!’

  And she was gone.

  Maud was intensely happy during the two hours she spent in the Countess’s home. There was such a profusion of canvases, and each one offering some fresh revelation. Here were pictures that belonged neither to the violent crudities on display at the Steins’ house, nor the polite pastorals of the Salon. And she was alone with the pictures. No matter how early she arrived at the Louvre or how late she stayed, the rooms were always full. The same people she saw in Père Lachaise were there too with their Baedekers and Ward Lock guides, glaring studiously at the paintings, comparing them with the fuzzy reproductions in their guides and reading off, loudly, the appropriate paragraph, before striding onto the next. She tried to ignore it, tried to tell herself it was right that these people too had the chance to look at these great paintings, but they irritated her nevertheless. She wanted to snatch their guidebooks away and stamp on them. ‘Just look!’ she’d complain in her head. ‘That’s all you need to do. Just stop for a minute and look!’

  The private galleries kept all their best pictures locked away to titillate their customers with goods unsullied by the inferior eyes of the poor, and the Salons? Packed society occasions that befuddled the eyes. At Madame de Civray’s, Maud feasted in solitude. It was indeed an eclectic collection. Impressionists jostled up against Symbolist works, the soft edges of Renoir alongside. There were names she did not know: Rousseau, Utrillo, who painted blank walls and somehow made them live. Some Maud liked, some perplexed her, but each one demanded attention. If the Countess did choose them at random, then her luck was the devil’s. Maud wished Tanya was with her. She’d change her mind about the catty gossip surrounding Madame de Civray just as quickly as Maud had.

  Sylvie sauntered around with her for a while, but was more interested in the Countess’s dressing table than her art. She began picking up the jars of ointment and reading the labels of each one slowly as if committing it to memory. Maud went on and found herself in an upstairs library face to face with a painting of Pissarro’s of a meadow in sunlight. A woman, the suggestion of a woman, stood under a group of trees, looking out of the frame. In the distance were the roofs of a small town. It was all so perfectly light and alive; the air moved, the woman would walk away at any moment. Maud closed her eyes and opened them again, trying to fix the image in her mind, trying to see the individual colours and brush-strokes. And all this in peace. No one dragging on her arm. No loud voice behind her, pronouncing. She could reach out and touch it . . .

  The door opened and she flinched. It was the Countess.

  ‘Sorry, honey. I won’t disturb you but I wanted you to have this.’ She handed over a flat black cardboard folder tied with ribbon. Maud took it. ‘Open it up.’

  She did. It held a slippery mass of photographs of the paintings she had been admiring. ‘Oh my goodness!’

  ‘I know, I’m just too kind – don’t even say it! Happy Christmas! It was just I thought, Hell, I’m giving that poor girl a couple of hours to take it all in, then throwing her out again. It seemed cruel. We had them done for the insurance in the summer, and I had them make up a few extra sets.’

  ‘Are you quite certain, Madame? I can return them.’

  ‘I’m always sure, honey. It’s one of my many virtues – and keep them, for crying out loud. You don’t treat me like an idiot and that makes you one of my special friends in Paris. Now, where is that floaty friend of yours?’

  Maud laughed. ‘I’m afraid she’s not as fascinated by these as I am.’

  ‘More fool her. Now I have to go for a fitting, it seems, so stay as long as you like and scoop her up on your way out. Wish me luck in the ghastly Château.’

  Maud held the portfolio to her chest. Her heart was lifting and rising; the pictures had made her giddy. ‘Good luck, and thank you – thank you so much!’

  The Countess sketched a wave as she left the room. ‘Pleasure, honey!’

  CHAPTER 14

  The various studios of the Académie Lafond gave themselves over to pleasure on the morning of Christmas Eve. Lafond himself went from studio to studio drinking a glass of punch at each and giving his blessing to his students. He always came early to the women’s ateliers, since a man as careful of his reputation as he was would not visit his young ladies after drinking the punch mixed by his male students. Even at ten in the morning, though, he was jovial and pleasant with them all, released from judging them as they too were released from being judged. He beamed at them all over his fantastic white moustache as he told them it was at this time of year he most enjoyed counting his blessings, to revel in his old age, crowned with friends and prosperity. All his students felt caught up in his
pleasure: it was as if Père Noël himself, having swapped his tunic for a tailored suit and high collar, had graced them with his presence.

  Maud rather shyly gave her cards to Tanya and Yvette, and was delighted when they both laughed heartily at them.

  ‘You see too much, Maud!’ Tanya said. Maud had drawn her in an evening gown and clutching a canvas under her arm, fleeing a Russian Bear who wore a top hat and monocle. ‘Oh, I shall keep it forever.’

  Yvette’s card showed her seated on the edge of the fountain at Place Pigalle with a queue of hopeful artists in front of her. ‘I wish it were so!’ Yvette groaned when she saw it. ‘Still, all the girls with rich friends will be off and holidaying for the next few days so I might have the fountain to myself.’

  Mademoiselle Claudette became a little sentimental and handed each of them a little printed card from the studio itself as they left. Classes would begin again on 3 January 1910.

  It was all very different from the previous year for Maud. She went to Midnight Mass with the Morels and for the first time since childhood felt moved to prayers of gratitude. After they returned to the apartment, brother and sister fussed over their gifts from her. Morel played cabaret songs on the piano, bashing them out with more enthusiasm than accuracy and making Sylvie and Maud dance around the drawing room behind him. Maud had Morel’s gift – a scarf from Worth – tied loosely around her neck and her gift from Sylvie – a brooch in the shape of a butterfly – pinned to her blouse. Sylvie played the coquette with her fan, and Morel wore his new tie over his old one. Maud went to bed at three leaving Morel playing slower songs and Sylvie curled up on the chaise longue watching him. Her bedside-table was a little forest of cards including ones from her brother’s family, wishing her luck and success. She felt, falling asleep, she had nothing left to ask for.