The Restoration Artist

by Lewis Desoto

  “She was drunk, Monsieur Millar. It happened outside a restaurant, Bofinger. We had just left dinner.”

  I shook my head, disbelieving.

  “It was witnessed by the manager of the restaurant, and two of the waiters who were seeing us off.” My face must have showed my skepticism. “Next time you are in Paris you can go and ask them,” Daubigny said. “Bofinger is on rue de la Bastille. I am known there. My wife and I dine there often.”

  “I know where it is. I live nearby.”

  “In fact,” he said, “why don’t you ask Lorca again?”

  If what he said was true, why would she invent such a lie?

  “I don’t know how well you know Lorca, Monsieur Millar—not well I suspect, since she has only been here a short time—but you might have noticed she likes a drink.”

  I remained silent, noncommittal.

  “Alcohol gives her solace. And sometimes she overestimates her need for consolation.” He stepped past me. “There never was a jazz musician by the way. Or an affair.” At the door, he turned and said, “You won’t be the first young man to become infatuated with Lorca, Monsieur Millar. She is one of those ‘dramatic’ women. But I wonder if you will be able to cope with her demons.” He buttoned his jacket and made a half bow. “Au revoir. Good luck with your picture.”

  I was left with the sound of the wind and the hissing of the oil lamp. I felt out of my depth, like an actor alone on the stage not knowing what his role is, what his lines are. Was Lorca playing some sort of complicated game with her husband, and I was the unwitting pawn?

  Pushing back the sleeve of my raincoat, I looked at my watch. Almost eleven. I hurried from the chapel.

  CHAPTER 26

  THE LIGHTHOUSE STOOD ON THE NORTHWESTERN tip of La Mouche. I had only been past it once, on my initial exploration of the island. To reach it, I retraced my steps along the route des Matelots in the direction of LeBec, then turned off along the path marked LE CIRCUIT DU PHARE. As the track rose I could see to my left the fields and buildings of Manoir de Soulles. All the cattle were huddled in a corner of one field, sheltering under the spreading boughs of the oaks. The light was fading, although it was only mid-morning, and the landscape was almost monochrome, trees and fields and buildings painted in tones of muted green grey. Green umber, I thought, automatically selecting in my mind the key pigment I would use if I were to paint the scene.

  The path veered away to the shore, bringing the ocean into view. Beyond the long empty beach, the water was a dark green, almost black, the sky now a solid wall of cloud. Terns and gulls wheeled above the sand, their cries plaintive.

  The lighthouse came into view, its rotating yellow lantern a feeble gleam against the immensity of the black sky. The building was a cylinder of stone blocks with the light contained in a green-painted lantern house at the top. A gallery enclosed by iron railings, painted red, circled the base. I walked right around the tower and tried the door. Locked. Since there was no keeper’s cottage, I assumed the light was automated. A glance at my watch showed that it was ten minutes past eleven. Would she come?

  I paced back and forth in front of the lighthouse, anger rising when I thought of what Daubigny had told me. I was a fool to let myself be toyed with this way. I imagined myself shouting at her, demanding that she explain herself. I imagined myself slapping her. Then I was ashamed of the notion. Jealousy was making my thoughts bitter.

  Finding a spot that was sheltered from the wind, I sat down with my back against the stone of the tower. Gusts of wet air wafted in from the ocean, the dark sea heaved and broke, booming on the shore. I looked at my watch again.

  Far along the shore I glimpsed a figure. I got up quickly and hurried down the slippery steps. A sudden, low flash of lightning creased the sky, bleaching everything in a magnesium flair of impossibly white light. Then the sky broke and the deluge came, bending the dune grass and pockmarking the sand. I ran towards her.

  I was close enough now to see her face and I felt my heart turn over in my chest. The rain battered down as I reached her, and I grabbed her hand, pulling her towards a derelict boat upended near the dunes. Her black hair framed her face in wet tendrils like seaweed and her sodden dress was plastered against her body. She didn’t even have a raincoat, just a light cotton windbreaker against the stinging needles of rain. On hands and knees we scurried under the hull and crawled onto a heap of old fishing nets half buried in the sand.

  Lorca leaned against the shell of the boat, pulling her knees up to her chest, breathing hard. Neither of us spoke. Anger had been welling in me since I’d left the chapel and perhaps she saw it in my face. There was a kind of fear in her eyes. Her pupils were round and shining. My heart softened.

  “You’re soaking wet,” I said, slipping out of my raincoat and spreading it flat. “Sit here.” Reaching into my pocket I took out a handkerchief and wiped her face. There were goose-bumps along her bare legs.

  I pulled off my sweater. “Put this on.” My shirt had come loose and she scrambled to me, thrusting her icy hands under the cloth, up around my back. I awkwardly tried to fold the sweater over her.

  I held her trembling shoulders, felt her wet hair against my cheek. My hands searched her face and my fingers ran over her features like a blind man exploring. When I found her lips I bent my head and kissed her, tasting there the salt of the ocean. Her hands were under my shirt again, moving across my chest as if seeking out the warm beating life in me. Silent lightning flashed, illuminating the ribs of the boat, throwing shadows onto the bleached wood. Then we heard the thunder, and the rain drummed furiously on the boat’s hull, the old wood creaking and rocking in the wind. We were buffeted and thrown, our grasps urgent, her breath loud against my ear, her skin white in the blue flashes of lightning between sand and hull.

  The storm broke in us.

  I LISTENED to the dripping of water running down the sides of the boat. Lorca was still asleep, curled up in the crook of my arm. The musk of our bodies mingled with the smell of the sea.

  “The rain has stopped,” I murmured, waking her.

  Lorca sat up and reached for her dress, grimaced to find it still damp, and pulled it on. We scrambled out from under the boat. A slash of clear blue sky showed in the purple clouds. The ocean breathed in long gentle swells. On the shoreline a solitary long-legged curlew skittered across the damp sand. Lorca took out her cigarettes and lit one.

  I watched her smoke, and when she looked over at me, I said, “I spoke to your husband this morning. In the chapel.”

  “Ah.”

  “He saw the portrait I did of you.”

  “Mmm.”

  My earlier anger came back in a rush. “He told me that he never did hit you, that you got that black eye from walking into a lamp post. He said you were drunk.”

  She laughed.

  “Is it true?”

  “Yes. It was just like something out of a Charlie Chaplin movie.”

  “Why did you tell me that he beat you? That you were having an affair with a jazz musician?”

  Taking her time, she extinguished her cigarette by pushing it into the sand until it was buried. Then a shrug. “Maybe I wanted to scare you off,” she said.

  “Am I part of a little game the two of you are playing? King versus Queen, Pawn in the middle?”

  “No,” she said emphatically, twisting round to face me. “It’s not like that.”

  “Was there a jazz musician?”

  “No. I made that up.” She ran both hands through her hair. “It sounds stupid now.”

  “He said I wouldn’t be the first young man to become infatuated with you.”

  “I don’t have affairs, Leo.”

  “So what am I?”

  “You’re something else.” A small repentant smile on her face, a look of tenderness.

  “Your husband also asked me if I would be able to cope with your demons. What did he mean by that?” I took her hand and touched my fingers across the underside of her wrist, feeling the slight d
ifference in texture where the white scars ran. “This?”

  She pulled her hand away, grasped a handful of the fine white sand and, holding it tight in her fist, let the grains trickle out in a thin stream. Opening her hand, she blew the last grains from her palm.

  “I was his student. Students fall in love with their teachers. It’s a cliché, no? Distinguished and accomplished older man, impressionable young woman. Ambitious too. We hit it off musically. Eventually I was promoted, so to speak, and he gave me a place in the orchestra.” She glanced up at me sharply. “I was good enough. Better than that, even. Well, to make the story short, we married and lived happily ever after.”

  “Except?”

  She gave a long sigh and shook her head. “I’ve always been under his spell in a way. Hard not to be with a man like that—talented, charismatic, cultured, famous in his field. I’ve become trapped in that orchestra. I’ve always wanted to compose. I do compose, but what I write is not for the Orchestre de Paris. Armand is of the old school—a musician should become technically perfect and stick to the known repertoire. He’s looked at my compositions, even advised me on them, but he’s never offered to play a single one. Nobody takes a woman composer seriously. Maybe I’m no good. I have no confidence in that regard.”

  “Why don’t you leave? The orchestra, I mean. Find other musicians to play your work.”

  “It would be a betrayal. Make no mistake, Leo, I owe Armand a great deal. Not only musically. It was a difficult time in my life when we met. The war, all that … He rescued me in a way.”

  “But that was a long time ago. And you don’t have any children together.”

  She let out a long sigh. “I didn’t want children. After the war I couldn’t imagine a world with children in it.”

  “And now?”

  “And now I am too old.”

  “Hardly.”

  “I’m forty-one, Leo.” She shrugged. “C’est la vie.”

  When she continued speaking she kept her face averted. “I had a crisis a while ago. A sort of breakdown. That drunken evening when I walked into the lamp post was the culmination. Armand challenged me to finally finish the composition I have been working on for many years. He said the orchestra would play it, if it was good enough.” She looked across at me and sighed again, blowing the air out between pursed lips. “So I came here. To get away. To think. To work. To be alone. I didn’t know I would meet you.”

  Reaching out for my hand she pulled it to her mouth and kissed my palm. “I don’t want to fall in love with you,” she said. “I can’t. It’s too complicated. I can’t even begin to explain how complicated everything is. And it’s not fair to you. But I want you. I want you all the time. Now. Again. I don’t understand it.” She pushed my hand down between her thighs, to the surprising heat there. “Feel!”

  “I love you,” I said. I took her in my arms again and pulled her down to the sand.

  She kept her eyes on me the whole time, and afterwards, her look was anguished. “I can’t heal you, Leo. I can’t. I’ll drown.”

  I didn’t know how to reply. I knew that what she said was true.

  “You’ll forgive me, won’t you?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I whispered, but in my heart I wanted to win her, to win her for at least a little while longer before losing her.

  She ran her hands through her hair, shaking it free of sand, then stood looking out to sea. Her face was soft and melancholy. The sight of her was too beautiful to bear. I bent down to lace up my boots.

  “I’ll go back alone, Leo. It’s better that way.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  CHAPTER 27

  I HAD ONLY BEEN WALKING FOR ABOUT TEN MINUTES, following a meandering track that wound its way up the rocky shore, and had just reached the main path at the top when I came upon someone sitting on a wide ledge that gave a view down across the beach towards the lighthouse. A woman wearing a green plastic raincoat, with a sturdy walking stick resting across her knees. Madame Jeanette DuPlessis.

  “Ah, Monsieur Millar. Bonjour.”

  She didn’t seem surprised to see me and I realized that I must have been visible from a long way off. I greeted her, and lingered a moment, feeling it would be rude to just carry on to my destination without exchanging a few pleasantries.

  “Wasn’t that a magnificent storm?” she said. “Luckily I found refuge in an old cattle byre. But you are quite dry too. Did you find a place to shelter?”

  “Yes. I managed to sit it out under an old wrecked boat.”

  “Then you must have seen Lorca.”

  “Uh, no. Is she around?”

  “I just talked to her. She came up the same way as you just did. And she also sheltered under a boat.”

  She was looking at me very directly and I felt my face flushing.

  “Both of you seem to have weathered out the storm quite well.”

  I glanced back, saw the lighthouse, the beach beyond, but the boat was out of sight, although anyone coming round the headland would be easily seen from up here. She knows, I thought. It is probably obvious on my face. As it must have been on Lorca’s.

  “Sit down a moment, Monsieur Millar. The rock here is quite dry already.”

  “Please call me Leo, madame.”

  “And you must call me Jeanette. The way you pronounce ‘madame’ makes me sound like a concierge.”

  “I thought I had an impeccable accent,” I answered with a smile.

  “Ah non, you sound like one of those G.I. soldiers we met at the end of the war.”

  We sat silently for a minute. The passing of the storm had left the sky a rich cerulean blue and the sea was tranquil again. Flocks of black and white gulls were bobbing on the swells offshore.

  “It’s a view one could paint,” she said, indicating the tall lighthouse, the black rocks above the white beach.

  “A little too picturesque for me,” I replied.

  “I went and looked at the portrait you drew of Lorca. Armand told me about it.”

  I waited to hear what else she might say. I had a feeling she was leading the conversation somewhere.

  “It is not a pretty portrait,” Jeanette said. “And I don’t mean what that boy did to it. Lorca is not a pretty woman.”

  I looked at her with surprise.

  “She is beautiful, though, in a way that few women are beautiful. I suppose it takes an artist to see that. Her face is too real, too much personality for most men. She can be almost sphinx-like sometimes. Impassive. Inaccessible. But she also bares her emotions. Like a wound.” She paused. “Lorca and I are old friends, you know. I can read her face.”

  I toyed with the buttons on my raincoat, feeling out of my depth, not knowing if she was sympathetic or disapproving. She had a transparent rain scarf on her head and she took it off now. Her hair was very fine and white, held in place by two mother-of-pearl barrettes on either side of the central parting. She wore no makeup and her skin seemed very clean and silky to me. She smiled, her eyes kindly. If I’d known one of my grandmothers, I thought, she would be about this age.

  “Lorca and I came here often in the years after the war. The house belonged to an aunt of mine, but we named it La Maison du Paradis. After what we had experienced in Rosshalde, this was a real paradise. We came here to recover. To heal.”

  “Rosshalde?”

  Her eyes studied my face. “Of course you were too young then. But not by much. They took children too.”

  “Who did?”

  “Rosshalde was a camp. In Germany. A concentration camp. For women. Lorca and I met there.”

  “A death camp?” I asked.

  “Weren’t they all?”

  In my experience, the war was not much mentioned by the French. It was something they would rather put behind them. Even Claudine’s mother had spoken of it only in passing, despite the fact that the bridge at Pont de la Roque had been bombed and a Canadian flyer had lost his life in the raid. I sensed that scarcely anyone had been left untouched by the war
years. What had it been like for Lorca?

  “But weren’t you a civilian?” I asked. “And why a camp for women? Or were you in the Resistance?”

  A wry smile greeted my question. “Nothing so heroic. We were simply Jews. Lorca, myself. Millions of us.”

  “Ah.” I understood now. “What about her family?”

  “Non.” Jeanette shook her head. “But we survived. We are here.”

  I was still wondering why she was telling me this.

  “We met in the camp. Lorca was already a talented and aspiring musician, but really nothing more than a girl. We even had a little quintet at Rosshalde, with three other women, Betsie and Michelle and Brigitte. But afterwards, when we came back to Paris, Lorca was no longer able to play music. The years in the camp almost broke her. She had lost faith—in life as well as art. And who could blame her? I managed to coax her into enrolling with Armand Daubigny. He was the one who really brought her back. He showed her the value of music. And its purpose.”

  I was silent.

  “She fell in love with him. Love can take many forms, it’s not only the romance of novels and films. We can love out of lust, out of admiration, even envy. We can love out of gratitude. We can love simply because we meet someone who understands us.” She paused. “Let me tell you something more about Lorca. You’re an artist, you’ll understand what I mean. I have known her a long time now—as a musician, as a woman, as a friend. She is one of those few who can bring beauty into the world. She can make beauty for those who cannot. She has the gift. You know what I mean?”

  I nodded.

  “Call it what you will—talent or ability or whatever. Not genius. That is given to the very, very few. The Mozarts and the Beethovens. Still, what she has … I don’t have it. Daubigny doesn’t have it. Even though he has reached the pinnacle of his career. Sometimes I wonder if he knows what Lorca has. Nevertheless, she has not realized her talent yet.”

  “Does she agree with this assessment of her ability?” I asked, thinking of the music I had heard her playing.