by Jean Stubbs
‘Very peculiar, sir. I never realised. Nobody said anything to that effect, but it was all confusion and trouble. We had to be careful not to say anything to Madame, except about the running of the house.’
‘What would you have expected Mrs Carradine to do when she lost her daughter?’
‘Cling to an old friend as spoke her own language, sir.’
‘That’s what I thought. Well, Bertha offended her some way. I don’t know how. It’ll be my job to find out.’
‘Madame could fire up, sir, but she was never what I’d call cold-blooded. And that’s what it does seem, don’t it, to send Berthe back? You see, sir, Berthe had been nearly thirty years with Madame. There’d be nobody left as she knew in her village. If Mr Nicholas was to pension me off this minute, and send me back to Shropshire — where I was born and raised until I got wed — it’d be like a death sentence.’
Lintott had revealed as little as he wanted to, and gained as much as he expected.
‘Well, well, well, ma’am. There may have been a good reason as we know nothing about. She might even have asked Mrs Carradine if she could go back. Thank’ee kindly, just the same. I don’t mean to upset you, you know, ma’am.’ For the housekeeper was suffering from a vision of being returned to Shropshire in her old age. ‘You’re like my Bessie,’ said Lintott kindly, chiding her. ‘I’ve only to mention matches for her to think the blessed house is afire!’
CHAPTER EIGHT
‘My dear Natalie has not given this soirée without good reason,’ said Émile Roche, bowing to Nicholas, ‘and I am delighted to meet the object of it.’
His dictation was correct to the point of pedantry, his accent so pure that only the pedantry betrayed him. A short and dapper man of sixty, with a head of thick silver hair, a thin-bridged nose and heavy-lidded brown eyes, he surveyed Carradine. His air of ironic amusement was habitual.
‘I should warn you, my friend, that Madame Picard never, in fact, gives anything without demanding some return. And here it is, arrayed — as Count Montesquieu said of Bernhardt at La Duse’s premiere — like Iphigenia brought to sacrifice! My sweet Claire, I kiss your little hand.’
Natalie’s sister was in the sort of mood which Mrs Tilling would have denounced briskly as ‘a paddy’. Behind her, Natalie smiled enough for both of them.
‘My Claire speaks of nothing but M. Carradine since three days. His generousness, his disinterest, the small sister. You capture our hearts, m’sieu!’
Claire had apparently talked her admiration out, because she found nothing to say at the appropriate moment.
‘You are an artist of considerable repute, sir,’ said Émile Roche, though he had never personally heard of him. ‘Do you perhaps accept commissions? Madame Picard, I feel, would grace any canvas.’
‘Ah no, my dear! Claire, now, is a better matter.’
‘Oh, it is to be Claire, is it? I knew it was to be one of you. I beg your pardon, madame.’
But he had made the mistake on purpose, out of mischief.
‘Forgive me,’ Carradine replied, ‘but I don’t accept commissions. They place demands upon me which I find unacceptable. But if Miss Claire would consent to my portraying her as I see her, that is another affair entirely.’
‘But what delight!’ Natalie cried. ‘She accepts at once, do you not, my angel?’
The girl’s voice was unexpectedly rich, low-pitched and decisive, her frankness even less expected, and she spoke deliberately in her own language.
‘Let’s not pretend I have a choice, Natalie. Let’s at least be honest with each other.’
Natalie was piqued, Roche amused, Carradine surprised and a little sorry. She was trapped in this situation, or others like it, however defiant. Her absurdly virginal white dress, with its discreet sprinkling of pink rosebuds, became as bizarre as Valentine’s hat. It was a costume, not a part of her.
‘You mistake me, mam’selle,’ he said, good-natured. ‘I wish to paint you.’
She shrugged, disbelieving him.
‘Your maid will be an excellent chaperone,’ he suggested.
‘But that is not necessary,’ cried Natalie. ‘We do not insult our guest this way. Besides, I have need of Valentine myself. So that is settled. Please to make your rendezvous. Thursday will be excellent for us. And for you, M. Carradine? That is good. Come, Émile, Madame Villard wishes to speak with you.’
She smiled brilliantly as she turned away, but Claire said vehemently to Nicholas, ‘Don’t trouble to pay me compliments. They are useless, I assure you.’
He could have laughed out loud, and his inner enjoyment must have conveyed itself. Her eyebrows contracted, her lips thinned. She left them without another word.
Roche, admiring the girl’s long back and narrow waist, said, ‘Make sure of your goods before you purchase them, my friend. More than one man has thought her spirited and found her cold. Natalie is the only head among the three of them. I see her, in ten years’ time, giving yet another evening for Claire, putting out yet another of the unfortunate Valentine’s mistakes to foster-parents. And so it will go on, until she or I are too old to care. You find our little Claire interesting?’
She was mentally and physically apart from everyone. The back, so resolutely presented to Carradine, looked arrogant. But in the mirror on the wall her face seemed pale and lost. The coquetry of one silk rosebud, perched an inch above her right ear, mocked her reflection. In obedience to a nod from Natalie she moved away to speak to someone else, and the glass filled with other faces.
‘I find her very sad,’ Carradine replied, and addressed himself to the wine which was good but not excellent.
‘I am sure Madame Villard has no need of my compliments,’ said Roche, nodding towards a group of men, who concealed everything but an animated green ostrich feather. ‘Now there is a woman who has made a triumph of her ugliness. Her wit is quite superb. M. Carradine, Natalie keeps her best wine elsewhere. Let us seek a little privacy in the petit salon and take a bottle with us. There is nothing for you, here,’ observing him shrewdly.
‘We need have no pretence, as our charming Claire remarked. This is a flesh market, my friend, and you would prefer conversation, would you not? I, too. When one has dined and made love one becomes weary of the flesh.’
Sitting together in the small gold-and-white panelled room they relaxed over their first bottle. The second loosened their tongues, and the truth.
‘You met my son Paul the other day, I believe? Another of Natalie’s favourites. She is his mistress, of course. Were you about to say something polite and innocuous?’
Carradine laughed suddenly, throwing back his head.
‘I am a realist,’ Roche continued, smiling. ‘Why should I mind? No, my friend. The boy wishes to become a man. I am saved the expense of keeping a mistress for him as well as for myself. There is no harm in this little affair. He will leave her eventually, but she knows that. She is very sensible. Naturally, I say nothing either to him or to her. I do nothing. I appear to know nothing. But we understand each other very well, she and I.’
He had seen most things in his sixty years, looking at life ironically down his fine nose, brown eyes unsurprised. Life was an untidy business. He had turned it into art.
‘As for Claire. I have some knowledge of women, but I assure you she is a mystery to me. Sometimes I have wondered whether she inclined towards women rather than men. You understand me? But I think not. No. She may well be cold, of course, but so was Pompadour. Yet Pompadour was practical, and made pretence of passion. This one is impractical. But if you are interested in solving riddles, my friend...’
Carradine said, ‘Perhaps Mam’selle Claire is searching for love?’
The Minister dismissed this notion with a gesture. ‘What is love?’ he asked, and did not wait for an answer. ‘Natalie can scarcely keep up the image of the virgin sister for much longer. Virginity sours with keeping. Claire is young, but not so young, and time is on the side of no woman. One does not ask, but one does speculate
how old she might be. They have been in Paris for six years. She was then said to be seventeen — though Madame Picard now furiously denies this. Shall we broach another bottle?’
Carradine shook his head. The room was too warm, the disclosures too sincere, for comfort.
‘So Madame Picard is trying to find some honest farmer in the provinces, who will marry Valentine for the consideration you so kindly provided, my friend. The girl is a constant embarrassment.’
‘I can’t imagine a farmer being Valentine’s idea of a husband,’ said Carradine with some compassion.
‘Oh, she is resisting the suggestion with what little power she possesses, certainly. But it is her weakness that fights best for her. The balance here is a delicate one,’ and Roche tapped his forehead. ‘If one presses too hard it may shatter, and then...’ He spread his hands and pursed his lips. ‘So Madame Picard dare not go too far, and the situation remains the same. I am told,’ he went on, in a different tone, ‘that you are uncovering the secrets of the past, m’sieu.’
‘Which must have struck you as a highly impractical procedure, M. Roche.’
Roche shrugged. ‘Impractical, yes. But also dangerous, my friend. Is life not perilous enough for you without challenging it to do its worst? I believe you are trying to discard a dream. But why? A dream should be cherished because it can never be realised. That is its beauty.’
Carradine judged them to be amicable enough for personal revelation.
‘May I ask what dream you possibly cherish, M. Roche?’
‘One that would be ruined if ever I met her again. She will be a stout and handsome grandmother by now. I was enraptured, as a young man, with this lovely creature whose parents discouraged my courtship. They found her a better match. Had she been my daughter I should no doubt have done the same.’
He spoke of his youth as he spoke of his son, with a wry and affectionate detachment.
‘But how I suffered,’ he observed quietly. ‘With that infinite capacity for suffering which only the young possess. Much later, I discovered that I had a choice in life — to suffer or to compromise.’ The peaked eyebrows, the heavy lids, the well-kept hand holding the stem of his wine-glass. ‘Keep your sister in your heart and memory, my friend, where she and you are safe.’
‘Your advice, m’sieu, is excellent. But like most good advice it is often given and seldom taken. My Nimrod, in the shape of an English detective, is already tracking down his ghostly quarry.’
‘A pity. The fates are notoriously mischievous.’ He smiled, connecting them with someone else. ‘What a fascinating woman Madame Picard is! A glorious set of contradictions. For instance, she poses as one who has no illusions, and yet enjoys the pretence of family grandeur. After six years, my friend, and much tenderness, I have never succeeded in discovering her origins. It is a matter of no consequence, as it would be in a wife, and frankly I do not care. But sometimes it amuses me to question her and receive yet another embellishment of the dream. When I catch her out in an inconsistency she either denies it — or repeats the inconsistency even more firmly than before!’ He spread his arms. ‘And I do not care, my friend. She could tell me anything about herself and I would not care. Ah! how infinitely amusing I find her!’
Both men turned guiltily as the door opened.
‘Madame Picard has sent us a most exquisite reproach,’ said Roche easily. ‘Is she terribly angry with us, Claire? You will pardon me, M. Carradine, I must make my excuses to her. I have been enchanted to make your acquaintance.’
He smiled and bowed to both of them as he sauntered out.
‘I wish,’ said Carradine spontaneously, ‘that Whistler hadn’t painted a girl in a white dress, reflected in a mirror. He has stolen you from me. Do you know the picture to which I refer?’
An evening’s resistance had wearied her. She stood, mute and pretty, against the door. She shook her head.
‘Won’t you sit down and talk, or listen, for a few minutes?’ he asked, knowing they would remain undisturbed, realising that Natalie and Roche had at length manoeuvred them together.
With his customary detachment he saw that the wine, conversation, and flattering confidences had been merely bait. Roche had appealed to his inmost weaknesses: masculine vanity, the desire to solve mysteries, the belief that he could face truths unacceptable to most people. And ruefully he admitted that Roche had been successful: that he, Nicholas Carradine, wanted to reach this remote and angry girl, to find her out in flesh and mind and spirit, knowing all her circumstances, and to say, ‘This was simple, with me.’ He regretted his vulnerability. He regretted that Roche had apparently used rather than befriended him. He would have liked to believe there was a genuine rapport between them. There might be, but he would never know.
Claire was making the effort to speak in English. Natalie must have cowed her temporarily.
‘I am fatigued, and shall not be very amusing for you, m’sieu.’
‘If you’re tired, mam’selle, then sit down. Oh, over there if you wish. I’m not in the habit of making love to unwilling young ladies.’ He added, with considerable irony, ‘Particularly so publicly, and especially because those round us want it to happen.’
He had unconsciously adopted her earlier attitude, and she looked startled.
‘You needn’t worry,’ he said, annoyed by everyone, including himself. ‘I am in no mood for compliments, mam’selle.’
And indeed he was already bored by the situation. She would become another pretty girl, and there had been so many. He lived, with the clarity bestowed by wine, through the whole affair from start to finish, and no longer desired it. He desired a woman who could be that passion, that completion, that at-last-contentment he achieved with paint and brush. He desired a woman who could make him her servant, who could show him his inadequacies, who could transcend him and yet love him. He desired a woman brighter, better, more powerful than himself. He desired Galatea, made flesh by his own hand.
This sorrowful, virginal coquette whose only interest lay in the defiance he might melt — if he were cunning enough — was no answer to his needs. She was there if he cared to amuse himself, and amusement had grown stale long since with repetition. How would he paint her? As he had painted girls in the past, faults hidden that they might not destroy his ideal? What were her faults, that he might explore them for a change?
‘Smile for me!’ he commanded.
Her eyes narrowed. She grimaced, and he saw that her teeth, though white and even, sloped slightly inwards. Absorbed, he walked all round her chair, and she sat tensely, staring at nothing — or at something terrible and inevitable that only she could see. Her corset was cleverly padded. He perceived the line of velvet that gave an extra inch to her bust. Her arms were faintly freckled, there was a mole beneath the hairline at the back of her neck. Her curls were natural enough and strong enough to prevent a perfectly smooth chignon. He visualised them as wires, rough and uncontrolled. Her body scent, beneath the docile flowery perfume, was green and sharp.
‘You wear the wrong perfume,’ he stated impersonally. ‘Your dress is wrong, too. But I should like to paint you. Regard it simply as a professional consideration. If not you, then another. I am never short of models.’
She drew a long breath, and said in her controlled dark voice, ‘I am not a cattle market, m’sieu!’ Then her control deserted her. She spat something at him in French. Not an obscenity, but the worst that she was able to put into words at that moment.
He stood indicted of bad manners and a fundamental unworthiness.
‘Leper!’ she said, standing up and facing him.
Social leper. Spoiler of good bargains in the marriage market. Cut by a brother and an uncle in the Garrick Club. That chap Carradine, something wrong there you know. They made their money in the wine trade. Not a gentleman.
‘Woman-hater!’
He had never thought of the girls involved, except to be genuinely sorry for them, except to assure them that he was not good enough and the
y would be happier with a better man. So they had been, all of them, eventually. Now he saw them as the discarded, and sensed what it must have meant to them personally. Two had been sent abroad to recover and returned for the next season. He had felt each imagined stroke of the pen, in his mind, as the Mamas crossed him off their list of eligibles. For he minded, though he always said he did not, what people thought of him. And he admitted, in this instance, that their distrust was justified. Had he hated those girls? He had never remotely considered it. Then he remembered the distinct flash of relief beneath the self-reproach, the beautiful apologies, the brilliant explanations. Perhaps, in an odd way, he had enjoyed hurting their feminine esteem. He had reached them, that way, as he never reached them in courtship.
Claire recollected the English term, and delivered it a couple of tones richer and more deliberate than usual.
‘Bastard!’
None of them, of course, had challenged him in this fashion. Not even Evie Harrison. They had grown paler, and somehow smaller. He pictured them in the only abandonment open to young ladies, the abandonment of shamed and bewildered tears in the privacy of a girlish bedroom. It took a failed French courtesan to swear at him. Boyhood phrases came unexpectedly to his lips.
‘Steady on!’ Carradine cautioned. ‘Hush up!’
He had halted her simply because she didn’t know the idiom. They looked at each other warily. She made a face. He smiled. Then they both laughed.
‘What is that hush-up?’ she asked, hands over mouth.
‘It means talk a little less forcibly, mam’selle. But I must ask your pardon for my own behaviour...’
‘No, no, no. Not the English gentleman, if you please. I mislike him. So stiff, so polite, so nothing.’
‘All right. I’m sorry. I really am very sorry. Won’t you let me paint you? You don’t have to be my mistress, you know,’ he added charmingly. ‘If I made love to every girl I painted I’d never do any painting.’
She assessed him slowly and shrewdly. ‘We shall make a contract, you and I, m’sieu. Let us be friends. That way we are all happy. They need not know. Let them think as they please themselves.’
