The Restoration Artist

by Lewis Desoto

  Then, in a desperate scramble, I was on solid ground, rolling onto all fours and crawling as far as possible from the edge before I collapsed face-down on the sweet grass of the meadow, my whole body convulsing with sobs of relief. Every muscle ached, the ribs on my right side throbbed, my hands were scraped raw, my fingernails were broken, and I had lost my shoes. But I was alive.

  The ground around me was scuffed and trodden with the hoofprints of goats and a scattering of dung pellets. There had been goats here, I hadn’t imagined that part at least. Then I saw it—the clear imprint of a small bare foot. Human. Just one. A child’s footprint. A boy had stood here. I placed my hand next to the print, measuring it, tracing my fingertip around the outline of the sole and the five toes.

  In front of me were the woods, thick oaks and the outlines of dark yew trees. But everything was so still, so strange. The light was brilliant, hurting my eyes. Glancing back at the cliff edge only a few feet away, I began to tremble with the realization of what had happened, of what I had almost done. I rolled over onto my back and looked up at the empty sky, and when I shut my eyes I could still see it, all white and brilliant. I heard a voice calling, faintly, or thought I did.

  I opened my eyes. A woman stood looking down at me. Her black hair fell around her shoulders and the golden sunlight behind her head radiated outwards in a halo of light. In her arms she held a bouquet of wildflowers and grasses.

  I felt at peace, calmed by this beautiful apparition that was like an angelic figure from a painting—like Aurora in that picture by Naudé in the Louvre, The Gates of Dawn. She shifted the bouquet and leaned closer, stretching out a hand to me. The faintest scent of perfume hung in the air—lily of the valley.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  Then I remembered. I sat up. A pain arced down my right side and I grimaced. The woman stepped back quickly.

  I struggled to my feet, brushing the dirt from my hands, wincing from the burning cuts and abrasions on my palms.

  “You’ve had an accident?” she said.

  “I was lost.” I looked around, making a vague gesture towards the woods. “I fell.”

  Now I noticed the espadrilles on her feet, the pale green capri pants and white shirt, the watch with a metal band on her wrist. Neither a dream nor an apparition from a painting, but a flesh-and-blood woman. She looked to be about ten years older than me, maybe forty. Her clothes were stylish and seemed expensive. She didn’t look like an islander.

  Then I saw the bruise on her cheek, a purple blotch, as if from a blow. I stared at it.

  She took a step away from me and brought a pair of sunglasses out of her pocket, slipping them over her eyes. “Where are you going?” she asked. “Can I help you?”

  “Did you … did you see a boy?” I said.

  “A boy? Where? No.”

  “I just wanted to talk to him.”

  She looked back along the path.

  “Are you from around here?” I asked. She shrugged. She seemed uneasy. I realized that I wasn’t making much sense, and might even be scaring her. “My name is Leo Millar. I’m staying at the hotel.”

  “I think you might need a doctor.”

  I glanced down at myself, at my scuffed clothes, a smear of dried blood on one bare foot, conscious of how much my whole body ached. “I’ll be fine. Are you sure you didn’t see a boy? He was here earlier.”

  She gave a noncommittal shake of her head. “You’re injured. Do you need help getting back to the hotel?”

  “I have to find him.” I scanned the unfamiliar landscape and limped back along the path, peering down at the ground for footprints.

  A minute later I halted and looked back. The woman was gone.

  CHAPTER 5

  WHAT HAD HAPPENED? WHO HAD I SEEN IN THE mist? Piero was dead, I knew that. But I had known that figure standing in the trees, and I had felt the recognition as something physical, with my body. Was I going mad? I shook my head and tried to clear my thoughts. The first thing to do was get back to the hotel and clean myself up. And a drink. God, I needed a drink. And shoes.

  I felt unsteady, confused, still reeling with disbelief over what I had almost done. Which way was the hotel? I should have asked that woman. I stopped and looked back. I couldn’t really recall what she looked like. Dark-haired. A bouquet of wildflowers. A bruise on one cheek. The faint scent of lily of the valley.

  I walked on, flinching every now and then when my bare feet trod on a sharp stone. Farther down the path I could see a row of poplars and the roof of a house where a thin wisp of smoke drifted up from a chimney. I’d only been walking a few minutes when I saw someone coming towards me, a short man wearing a dark jacket and white shirt and a large floppy beret. He was in his late fifties, with a broad chest and a very thick moustache peppered with grey. In his hand he carried a stout walking stick, which he raised in greeting at the sight of me.

  “Bonjour. You must be Leo Millar.” He stopped abruptly, frowning. “But what has happened to you?”

  “Do you know me?” I asked, further confused.

  “I ate breakfast this morning at the hotel and Linda mentioned that a painter had come to stay. I assumed that would be you. I am the priest here on La Mouche. Père Caron. Or just plain André Caron, if you prefer.” He extended his hand and I shook it, flinching at the pressure. He looked down at the cuts and the dried blood on my fingers. “You’ve had an accident! Can I help you?”

  “There was fog. I couldn’t see. I … I fell. Off the cliff and onto a ledge.” I hid my hands in my pockets. “I managed to climb up.”

  “You were walking on the cliff in that fog? It’s very dangerous. Didn’t you see the warning sign?”

  I shook my head.

  “If you don’t mind me stating the obvious,” the priest said, “you don’t look at all well.”

  “I’m okay.”

  He pointed at my feet. “Where are your shoes?”

  “I guess I lost them, back there.”

  “Look, I think you’d better come with me to my house. It’s nearby. I can give you a pair of boots.”

  I looked back up the path, searching.

  “Is someone with you?” the priest asked.

  “No. There’s nobody. I just need to get back to the hotel. If you could point out the direction.”

  “This way then. Come.” He took me by the arm.

  In a few minutes we reached a house built on a rise overlooking the ocean, stone walls painted white, a slate roof. Mauve hollyhocks grew along the sunward walls and the blue wooden shutters were fastened open. A small enclosed orchard of apple trees stood behind the house.

  “Come in a minute,” the priest urged. “You can’t walk all the way to the hotel in bare feet. I’ll lend you a pair of boots.”

  We went round to the side and I followed him in through a low doorway. He tossed his beret onto a table in the hall under a crucifix and led the way into a snug kitchen, where he opened a cupboard and took down a bottle of liquor, pouring out two glasses.

  “Sit down. Drink this.”

  I swallowed and the silky liquid slid over my tongue and down my throat, spreading warmth through my chest. The apple flavour that filled my mouth transported me instantly back to those first lonely months in Paris, just after I’d arrived from Canada, when I’d had a room at the Hôtel Mistral on rue Cels, and my one acquaintance in the whole city had been a writer from Vancouver, David McCullough, three doors down the corridor from me. One evening after he’d sold a short story to Esquire magazine he took me to dinner at La Coupole, where, he said, he intended to make up for all the months of bean soup and mutton stew. We dined on oysters, and then magret de canard with a bottle of Saint-Julien that cost as much as the food combined, and after dessert we each smoked a cigar on the terrace with snifters of eighteen-year-old Calvados.

  Everything had seemed possible. Paris awaited us. David was going to be the next Hemingway and I was going to give Picasso a run for his money.

  Now I sho
ok my head ruefully and took another sip.

  Perhaps mistaking my expression, the priest said, “It’s locally made. From some of my own apples.”

  He drank his own measure down in a quick swallow and fetched a porcelain basin, which he filled with water and set on the table. “Soak your hands in this. I’ll get the disinfectant.” He returned with a brown glass bottle and a towel, which I used to wipe the dirt and dried blood from my hands.

  “This will sting a bit,” the priest said, uncorking the disinfectant, “but it will do you good. You’d better wash your feet as well.” Watching me dab at my hands with the disinfectant, he said, “Let me see if I can find you some shoes. Our size might be roughly the same.”

  A minute later, he reappeared with a pair of worn boots and some socks. “These will do, I think. They’re a bit old but still in good condition.”

  While I tried on the boots, the priest poured two more glasses of Calvados. Then he reached into his pocket for a package of Caporal tobacco and sprinkled the flakes into a sheaf of paper, which he rolled into a cigarette. He lit it with a match from a box on the table.

  “So, you were out walking and had a fall?”

  “Yes. Stupid of me. In all that fog I didn’t really pay attention to where I was going. Luckily I landed on a kind of ledge and managed to climb up.”

  “I know the place. You’re extremely lucky that you didn’t tumble straight into the sea.” He tapped the ash from his cigarette into a large scallop shell that served as an ashtray. “So you’re a painter? I can’t recall any artists visiting our island before. They tend to prefer the more dramatic vistas in Brittany.”

  “I’m always on the lookout for new landscapes, and when I saw La Mouche on the map I thought it might be worth a visit.” I was amazed that I could lie so easily, and to a priest.

  Père Caron regarded the tip of his cigarette and blew on it while giving me a long, searching look. “Are you … in any sort of trouble?”

  “No,” I answered quickly. “I’m just a tourist.”

  The priest held up his hands in a placating gesture. “I didn’t mean to offend you. But you must admit that your appearance is, how should I say, a little unusual.”

  “I told you, I fell.”

  “You’re not French, are you.”

  “I’m Canadian. But I’ve lived in Paris for the last ten years. I came to study art and I stayed. It’s my home now.”

  “Canada. It’s a long way to come. Do you still have family there?”

  “There isn’t anyone. Not any more.”

  But there never had been. I’d grown up in the Guild Home for Boys in Vancouver. A home for those without homes. The closest to family I’d ever had was a dormitory of other boys: the lost, the forgotten, the unwanted and the abandoned. At the Guild, we didn’t ask questions about parents. We’d all learned that there were no answers.

  I stood up and put my hands in my pockets, then took them out and rubbed the ache in my left arm. I wanted to leave, but I also wanted to know more about the island. “Are there many people living here?”

  “Alas no,” he said. “Most were sent away during the war years when the Germans occupied the island. Not many returned. And now, with the decline in the fishing industry, few of us are left. Some fishermen and their families in LeBec, the village on the other side of the island. The hotel and the shop on this side. Ester Chauvin’s farm. One or two others. That’s about it.”

  I wanted to frame my next question carefully. “What about the children?”

  “Since the war there has been no school here. Twenty years now. At first those families with children used to board them in Saint-Alban because we didn’t have enough pupils to warrant a school. But that wasn’t really suitable in the long run. People ended up moving to the mainland. A few tourists come in the summer.” He shook his head sadly. “Perhaps soon only the birds and the goats will live here.”

  “I thought I saw a child in the fog earlier.”

  “What did the child look like? I know everybody on the island.”

  “It was a boy. About ten years old, with dark curly hair.”

  “Really?” He paused. “And why are you interested in this boy?”

  Was it my imagination or did he seem evasive? “Perhaps I was seeing things.” I looked away and stared out the window for a minute, then turned back to the priest. “Let me ask you a question, Père. In your capacity as a priest.”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you think the dead ever communicate with us?”

  He glanced sharply at me, then took a moment to roll another cigarette, studying me with curiosity as he lit it.

  “Is there another life after this one?” I pressed.

  “Well, I can tell you, as a priest, what the Church says. I can tell you what Science says. Or I can speculate as a man, ignorant as the rest.”

  There had been a time at the Guild when I’d made a sincere effort at praying, wanting to believe during those long dreary Sunday mornings, nauseated by the smell of incense and furniture polish, longing for breakfast, staring up at the carved wooden figure on the crucifix behind the altar in the chapel, wanting it to move, to blink, to do something. But whatever God listened to prayers had not stirred on my behalf. By the time I’d entered my teens I’d realized that you got through this life with your guile, your fists and whatever measure of talent you could scrape together.

  The priest was regarding me thoughtfully. “Why do you ask?”

  “I saw … I thought I saw … Nothing.”

  He leaned forward. “What have you seen?”

  Shaking my head I turned away and got to my feet. “I’ve taken enough of your time. Thank you for your help, Père. And for the boots. I’ll return them as soon as I can.”

  “No matter. Anytime.” He was still frowning as he accompanied me out to the garden. “Will you be staying long?”

  I looked past him, up to the woods. “No, not long.”

  He placed a hand on my shoulder. “I might not have the right answers to your questions, but it helps to confide in someone when we are troubled. Come and talk to me again. Will you do that, Leo Millar?”

  “Yes, I will. Thank you.”

  He remained standing at the gate as I turned and made my way in the direction of the hotel.

  CHAPTER 6

  WHEN I GOT BACK TO MY ROOM AND I SAW MY FACE in the mirror—haggard, pale, desperate looking—I was shocked. I looked older than my thirty years. Like a man on the run, like someone being hunted.

  As I studied the cuts and scrapes on my palms, remembering, my hands began to tremble. Then suddenly my whole body was shivering and my heart started thudding against my ribs. A cold clammy sweat broke out on my skin. A terrible feeling of shame came over me. I staggered over to the bed and collapsed across the cover. How close I’d come. Even though I’d thought I wanted it, I hadn’t.

  But what did I want? I had no purpose. Except to find that boy. And why? Did I think it was some sort of miracle? My son come back to life? It was absurd to have such thoughts. The fact that I was even here was pure chance. This island, La Mouche, was just a speck on the map off the coast of France.

  I’d woken one morning in the apartment on rue du Figuier in Paris after drinking myself into a stupor the night before, the only way I could fall asleep, with a dry mouth, clammy sweaty sheets tangled around my body, overwhelmed by sudden terror. All that I stopped myself from thinking about during the day I dreamed of in the night. I did not remember my dreams, but I knew I had dreamed because I woke, trembling, my hands searching out the bottle of wine on the bedside table.

  When I walked through the apartment I was overcome by a sense of strangeness—all the furniture, all their belongings, everything that had physically defined our lives together, even the contents of the studio when I glanced in quickly seemed unfamiliar, as if they belonged to other people, people I had never known. I was a stranger here.

  In less than half an hour I’d showered and dressed and throw
n a few things into a bag. I left the apartment without a backward glance towards all those years of happiness, and the months of solitary grief and misery and hopelessness that had followed.

  Before driving onto the autoroute and quitting Paris for good—I had no destination except to leave the past behind—I headed up to the heights of Montmartre. All over the city, posters adorned the news kiosks, advertising Brigitte Bardot’s new film, À Coeur Joie. I parked on the side of the basilica and walked round to Place du Parvis du Sacré-Coeur. Claudine had liked to come up here, especially on Sunday mornings to have coffee in the Café Jongkind on Place du Tertre. Paris looked like a village from up here, she had once said. Along the skyline a haze was touching the rooftops and chimneys while south of Gare du Nord the buildings faded into ragged edges where they met the sky. Everything was shades of grey and muted whites.

  “What do you think of, when you look down on the city?” she had asked me.

  “The colours. How I would paint it,” I replied immediately. “And how impossible it is to really paint Paris without making it look like kitsch.” I’d thrown up my hands in a mock gesture of defeat. “And you, what do you think of?”

  “I think of all the apartments, all the bedrooms. I think of all the people who made love last night, all the people who are making love at this very moment in their warm beds. All the promises kept.”

  I’d kissed her then, in the damp hazy air, overcome by a flood of happiness, slipping my hands under her raincoat to feel the living warmth of her body and knowing myself blessed. If it had been possible I would have made love to her right then.

  But as I stood there remembering, with my hands on the stone balustrade, I felt only sorrow. I looked down at the place that had been the only real home I had ever known: the grey and black rooftops, the familiar landmarks of the Eiffel Tower, the dome of the Pantheon, Notre-Dame, and just barely discernible, the slender column in Place de la Bastille not far from my own neighbourhood.