by Lewis Desoto
There are no figures in Millar’s landscapes, but rather than making them seem uninhabited, this absence avoids all storytelling. His mysterious terrains are “ideal landscapes.”
But there is a disquiet here too, a certain anguish and longing. For all their calm and tranquility, Millar’s pictures evoke melancholy as well. His ideal pastorals of order and harmony are also precarious, and because they exist only in art, we feel their absence in our own world as tragic.
Most noticeable in the exhibition is The Church at Pont de la Roque. Here, the view of an ancient ruined bridge and a church silhouetted on a hill in the morning light is elegiac, but it is also an image of hope, and, one might add, of a profoundly expressed love for the beauty of the world.
I smiled bitterly rereading these words. A review of my first exhibition at Serge’s gallery. Written by someone named Daniel du Courjan in ArtVue magazine, which coincidentally was where Claudine worked as an assistant editor. Perhaps that should have made me suspicious, but I was too pleased to give it a second thought when Claudine presented me with a copy. I am good at anagrams and crossword puzzles, so maybe that was why the name suddenly clicked in my mind some hours later, and out of the blue the letters rearranged themselves in my mind as an anagram of Claudine Jourdan. I confronted her and she confessed that the article was her work.
I was extremely angry. I didn’t need my wife puffing up my work under a false name, and if the word got out I would be the laughingstock of my contemporaries. I was humiliated. We argued. Claudine pleaded that she’d meant well, but I wouldn’t even speak to her. I tore the article out of the magazine and locked myself in the studio.
Later, only after reading the review over and over again, did I see that this was a wonderful description of my paintings. I couldn’t have articulated it so well myself no matter how much I had tried. I realized that Claudine understood me, deeply, which meant that she loved me, deeply. My anger evaporated instantly. I apologized, we forgave each other, and I took her that night to Bofinger for oysters and champagne. Was that the night we conceived Piero?
Folding the paper up again I slipped it back between the pages of the Balzac and placed it on the bookshelf. Perhaps one day I would read the story once more, and find the article again.
Across the hall I could see Piero’s bedroom, and the colourful wooden mobile hanging from the ceiling. I’d made it of balsa wood in the studio, painting the shapes in bright primary colours, then putting it up on the morning the three of us came home from the hospital a few days after Piero’s birth. The first time we were together here as a family. I remember him lying on his back, looking up at the mobile, his chubby little legs making pedalling motions in the air.
For the first days Piero mostly slept. When he opened his eyes they were a luminous dark blue, and their extraordinary beauty, their absolute purity, had made me weep. Life had been serene here, mother and child like gifts to me from heaven. Days and nights of contentment. Was there any better definition of happiness?
Those first months Claudine had been resplendent with an inner light, her skin glowing, a beatific smile on her lips as she sat with Piero at her breast. I’d never painted them like that, mother and child, because by then I was doing landscapes exclusively.
Before Piero, in the months after our marriage, I had done some nude studies of Claudine, but one day while I was drawing her, she had said to me, “Leo, I don’t want to pose any more.”
“Why not?” I asked, disappointed.
“It’s too unnerving,” she said. “The way you stare at me, almost taking me apart piece by piece and reassembling a version of me on your canvas. You look at me as if I am nothing more than a tree or a table. I don’t recognize you when you stare like that. You become someone else.”
“It’s just concentration,” I explained. “I have to look very carefully.”
“You want to capture me. Isn’t that what artists say, that they want to capture a likeness, capture a moment?”
“Well, yes, in a way.” What I wanted was to hold back time, to make permanent what was as transient as the light passing through the air. I wanted to keep us like this, together and happy, forever.
She explained. “When I am naked in front of you I want it to be a special experience between us, one that we share. I don’t want to become a picture. It is the living woman you get, Leo, not a representation. Maybe it is just vanity, but I want to age with the face I have. I want to look at your work, now and in the future, with joy, not with regret. Stick with your landscapes.”
A few months later I was working at my easel when the door of the studio opened. Claudine stepped into the room wearing a white lace robe. She stopped a few feet away and let the robe slip from her shoulders and fall into a soft heap at her feet, revealing her naked body.
“Look at me,” she said.
The early light falling through the windows had a warm rosy tint, touching her breasts, the curve of her stomach and her bare feet with a dusting of gold. The robe at her feet was a creamy foaming wave. A faint blush like the bloom on a peach spread across her cheeks as I stared at her. I was astounded by her beauty. It was as if I were seeing her for the first time. A radiance emanated from her. I felt humbled, in the presence of a beauty no art could match. I was also confused. Had she changed her mind and was she going to pose for me? Or did she want me to make love to her?
She smiled—the first time I’d seen that odd inscrutable smile, filled with a secret inward knowledge that I could not apprehend. Then she said. “I’m pregnant, Leo.”
My eyes blurred now at the memory, the knowledge that her radiance was lost and gone forever. I crossed into our bedroom and flung myself down on the bed, burying my face in the pillows, inhaling deeply, trying to find again some lost essence. But only a slight musty odour came to my nostrils. Would I ever be able to sleep in this bed again? How many times had I made love with Claudine in this room? I pressed myself down on the bed, willing her memory back, wanting her.
But it was Lorca I saw, her long limbs and white skin in the rainy light of her room in La Maison du Paradis, her dark eyes fixed on mine, clouding as she cried out and the rain beat at the window.
I leapt off the bed and grabbed at the cover and sheets, stripping them from the mattress and bundling them up into a ball, which I threw into the corner. Collecting my keys from the kitchen counter I hurried from the apartment and strode down to the little Monoprix supermarket on rue Saint-Antoine. I asked one of the clerks for any empty cardboard cartons and he gave me a stack, which I carried back up rue Charlemagne to the apartment.
I started my packing in the bedroom, with Claudine’s clothes, not bothering to fold, to examine, to check the pockets, or even to allow myself the recollection of her in some dress or coat. Everything went rapidly into the boxes. Only once did I falter, when I came upon a wine-coloured paisley blouse by Mary Quant that I’d bought for Claudine, along with a set of red lucite earrings, at Bazaar on King’s Road when we had visited London to see the big Pop Art exhibition. Our only holiday abroad other than the last journey to Cyprus. With the cloth pressed to my face, I inhaled deeply, smelling her body, the memory of it. And then I thrust it away.
The entire contents of the closet went into the cardboard boxes—coats, dresses, blouses, underwear, shoes, shirts, pants, hats, gloves, scarves. What I could not throw away—the photograph albums, Claudine’s jewellery, some special mementos and souvenirs—I placed into two boxes that I shoved to the back of the bedroom closet. I taped the boxes shut and stacked them in the corridor outside the front door.
Next, I went to Piero’s room and began the same process; clothes, books and toys. One or two items had special memories and these I set aside—his favourite book called Boo, about the boy who was afraid of the dark; the small cast-iron model of a Citroën deux chevaux that Piero had won in a raffle; the sketchbooks; and the dusty wooden mobile of animal shapes painted in primary colours. When Piero’s room was cleared, I added those boxes to the s
tack in the hallway. At the end of my packing, all that remained was a lingering scent on my hands from handling Claudine’s clothing, faint traces of her. Only that, and the memories.
I telephoned the charity run by the nuns at the nearby church of Saint-Gervais and arranged for the boxes to be collected by them.
What would I do now? What would Claudine want me to do? I imagined her voice telling me to act, not to just turn my back and walk away. My departure from La Mouche had been sudden and without goodbyes. In a way, I’d fled from the island, just as I’d fled there in the first place. Would I be fleeing for the rest of my life? Perhaps it had been cowardly to leave like that, without even a word to Père Caron. I wished I had never agreed to restore the painting in the chapel, or offered to make a new one. He would be very disappointed. Yet, as I thought of the island it was with longing. For the first time in ages, I’d felt alive there. The restoration of “Love and the Pilgrim” had given me pleasure and a purpose.
And Tobias, his presence, just knowing he was there somewhere on the island, had stilled a yearning that I’d thought of as permanent. But I’d failed him. Especially now. And when I thought of Lorca, and my ambition to paint something new for the chapel, I felt that I’d failed there too. They were the living, not the dead, and was there anything more than my own grief and my own needs that I could offer either of them? Perhaps.
I needed advice. The only person I could call was Serge Bruneau. I dialled his number on the phone. We spoke for a few minutes and then I asked him if he knew of a doctor in Paris who could answer some questions I had.
When I’d hung up I walked through the apartment. The place resembled that of a bachelor—a man who lived alone and always had done so. In the bathroom I washed my hands, soaping off the dust and traces of the past. For a long while I examined my reflection in the mirror, my fingers twisting the wedding band on my finger.
Who is that man? I asked myself. Who did he used to be?
I turned on the taps again and reached for the soap, lathering it up around my ring finger until I could work the wedding ring off. I dried the ring on a towel and carried it in my palm to the bedroom where I retrieved Claudine’s jewellery case from the back of the closet. From my pocket I took the gold ring I’d placed on Claudine’s finger on the day we were married. I set it on the bed of velvet and placed my own matching ring next to it. Then I closed the box gently, put it back on the shelf and left the apartment, locking the door with a final twist of the key.
I looked at the scrap of paper on which I’d written the address Serge had given me. I had one more stop to make.
CHAPTER 24
“CAN YOU SMELL THAT?”
I lifted my chin and inhaled. “Flowers?”
Simon Grente nodded and smiled.
I inhaled again, trying to separate the scent from the diesel oil and fishy odour of the boat. “Honeysuckle?” I said.
“Right you are.” Taking one hand from the wheel, he pointed to a blur of green on the horizon ahead. “You can always smell the island before you see it. Sometimes from kilometres away.”
The smells became more intense as we drew closer, thick as perfume: the fresh loamy scent of earth, something floral, an elusive tang of wood smoke, even a hint of cow manure. And all the while the blue-green shape ahead grew, becoming land. La Mouche. Now the top of the lighthouse was visible, and the white walls of the Hôtel des Îles above the harbour.
Simon steered us towards Le Port, the harbour below the hotel, and the stone quay, where a long wooden motor launch was moored. I wondered if there were guests at the hotel.
Earlier, after I’d arrived in Saint-Alban on the mainland, I had gone down to the harbour, hoping to hire someone to ferry me over to La Mouche. As luck would have it I found Simon drinking a coffee in the little café next to the harbourmaster’s office. He was in town to collect the weekly mail. I didn’t volunteer any information about where I’d been and Simon asked no questions.
“Do you want to stop here,” he asked now, nodding towards Le Port, “or go on to LeBec?”
“Take me home, please.” Realizing what I’d just said, I smiled to myself.
He manoeuvred the boat past the opening to the harbour. Looking up at the hotel where the tricolour fluttered on its pole above the blue shutters of the upper floor, I picked out the room that had been mine. A few minutes later when the boat swung wide to the east, bringing the chapel of Notre-Dame de la Victoire into view like a white schooner anchored against the coast, I felt a warm sense of recognition, of welcome.
The boat glided into the shade of the steep rocky shore that was dotted with low shrubs of gorse, flowers of yellow and purple, dark pines. We rounded a bend in the shoreline and there was the simple stone quay, a few boats tied up at buoys, the scattering of cottages. LeBec. A gull sitting on a lobster pot took to the air squawking indignantly as the boat bumped against the quay. I walked up to La Minerve with my bag and parcels. Nothing had changed in the days I had been away. I made myself a cup of black coffee and sweetened it with two cubes of sugar, then carried it out to the little garden at the back.
On the journey down from Paris I had questioned myself many times about my reasons for coming back. And when La Mouche appeared on the horizon, I’d re-examined my motives again. I had tried to be clear-headed in my thoughts, and even if my feelings were complex, I hoped I was being honest with myself. But even so, I still had doubts.
One thing I did know was that this was my life in the present tense, this island and the people on it. I did not want a parallel life, I wanted the here and now.
I had come back for Tobias. I had come back for Lorca. I had come back for Père Caron. At the very least, I owed them all an apology. But I had also come back for the painting in the chapel. Not “Love and the Pilgrim” but the new one I was now determined to make. I swallowed the rest of my coffee down and carried the cup to the sink. I wanted to go to the chapel immediately. The barrenness of the room on rue du Figuier had made me realize how much I now thought of the chapel as my studio. I wanted to see my sketches, I wanted to touch my brushes and smell the oil and turpentine. I wanted to see that big expanse of canvas with the outlines of a boy, a woman and a building. I ought to see the priest first, though, and explain my sudden departure, for I’d left everything in the chapel as is, without a word of farewell, and Père Caron must be wondering what had happened. I might very well find that all my equipment had been removed.
Although it was almost evening, I set out along the route des Matelots. But as the chapel came into view I saw the band of blue water surrounding it and realized I had forgotten the tide, which was now full, cutting off the chapel. Frustrated, I stood looking across the sheet of water. I even considered swimming across. It wasn’t deep and the evening was warm. If only I had a boat. Come to think of it, why hadn’t I arranged for one a long time ago? I had been at the whim of the tides often enough. Just a little skiff and a pair of oars would do. Tomorrow, first thing, I would ask around.
Rather than return to the cottage, I struck off along the route de la Croix towards the priest’s house, where I hoped to find Père Caron. If he wasn’t home, then there was always the Hôtel des Îles, where I might as well have a drink and dinner, since the pantry at home was quite bare.
To the west, above the treetops, the sky was turning cerulean blue and rose. The day’s warmth lingered, rising from the ground. Crickets thrummed in the tall barley. Where the path neared the junction with La Garenne, I caught the scent of wood smoke again, but this time carrying with it the aroma of grilling meat. Realizing how hungry I was, I turned my footsteps towards Manoir de Soulles. I hadn’t eaten anything for hours other than a stale sandwich in Saint-Alban. Ester Chauvin often cooked something for the bachelors on the island and I hoped there might be a couple of lamb chops available for me to take home. I grew hungrier by the minute as the aroma of grilled lamb grew stronger.
Just as the farm’s chimneys came into view a shift in the evening breeze br
ought the strains of music to my ears. Not just one instrument but what sounded like a number of musicians playing a lively jig. La Mouche was generally a silent place, with only the sounds of birds and livestock and the occasional boat disturbing the peace, so the music was something unusual.
Hearing a clarinet among the fiddles made me think of Lorca, and then something occurred to me. What if she had left the island too? All the optimism I’d felt on returning evaporated. A cloud of smoke and noise and aromas enveloped me the moment I rounded the corner of the big stone barn and entered the courtyard behind the farmhouse. Figures moved in the haze while others sat at the tables and at the far end under coloured lanterns a group of musicians were adding to the festive atmosphere. It all looked like one of those celebrations painted by Bruegel.
A number of tables had been set out on the cobblestones and off to the left a long iron grill laden with cuts of lamb was the source of the grilled meat aroma. A figure waved and called my name. I made out Père Caron at a nearby table on which tall green cider bottles stood. An elegant white-haired woman was seated next to him.
“Leo! Come and join us.”
I walked over and shook hands with him. He was wearing his usual dark blue linen jacket, but tonight he also had on a tie. His moustache had been trimmed, I noticed. The woman, who wore cluster pearl earrings and a Spanish shawl draped over her shoulders, was introduced as Jeanette DuPlessis. I remembered that the owner of La Maison du Paradis was a Madame DuPlessis. I wondered if that was her motor launch in the harbour. Judging by her elegant clothes it could very well be.
I recognized a number of other villagers at the nearby tables, including Linda and Victor from the hotel, but there was no sign of Lorca.
“So you are back,” Père Caron said.
