The Painted Face

by Jean Stubbs

  ‘Folks might not speak the same language, puss,’ Lintott ruminated, philosophical in his cups, ‘or be the same sort, or live in the same way. But get down to rock bottom and you touch human nature. And human nature’s always the same, good, bad and indifferent. Yes. Bless my boots!’ He began to unlace them and paused, staring dreamily into the shadows. ‘I think I’ve had a drop too much of something,’ and he wagged his left boot at the winking cat. ‘Well, you don’t get more than one goose-chase offered at my age, and lucky to get that. It ain’t that I don’t want to go home, for I do. Yes. Only, looking back, it’s been an eye-opener. If I’d been younger, puss, like my lad John, I might have seen a bit more of the world than I have done. It’s a big place. A big place.’

  He found the milk and poured out a libation for his companion, without spilling very much. He laughed and shook his head.

  ‘And I said he talked wild! I’ve got a wilder tale to tell him, and I’m sorry for it and glad of it both at once. Sorry for the hurt, and glad I found out. John Joseph Lintott, the Nose! Oh yes, puss. We all have our weakness, our vanity you might say. And I like to see clear through a mystery as is black as pitch to other folk. Talking of black — I’d best brew myself some black coffee. This here room keeps giving a lurch.’

  He tutted over Carradine and Claire, padding round in his stockinged feet.

  ‘L’amoor is all very well, but what happens when you get old? She’s ladylike enough, mind you, in a French sort of way. Not like that madam of a sister! He fair jumped down my throat when I said what I did, but I meant it for his own good — and I was right. Might as well have saved my breath to cool my porridge for all the notice he took of me. When you come to think, I’ve done nothing for him. He’s done a lot for me. I’ll have a few memories to mull over of an evening by the fire. A few tales to tell.’

  He set the oil lamp and coffee on the model’s dais, unlocked his Gladstone bag with some fumbling, dusted a space with tremendous care and fastidiousness, and spread out his papers in orderly fashion. He filled his pipe and lit it, turning over a page here, reading a personal note there.

  Mr Roach — kidnapper? He had forgotten to tick that one off.

  Out of habit he picked up the list of passengers to make doubly sure of the late Lucien Fauvel. There he was, in company with the dead. M. Lucien Fauvel (37), Mlle Odette Carradine (6). Poor little wench! That was l’amoor for you! She’d have probably been alive and well now if they’d kept their heads and minded their morals. A married couple: M. Joseph Maxime (52), Madame Irene Maxime (46). In their prime, in a manner of speaking. Soeur Bernadette (31). That’d be the nun. Guy Fulbert (25). A young man, dear, dear! A maiden lady, Mlle Valerie Damien (60). Seven people who might as well have stepped into their open graves, as into that carriage.

  He sorted and stacked the notes, enclosed them in their buff cardboard folder, tied string round the lot. A crayon had rolled up against the platform at some time and been forgotten. He wiped a thread of dust from its blunt point, tried it on a scrap of paper. Then he printed, tongue between teeth, large and black and very neat, from side to side of the folder, THE CASE OF ODETTE CARRADINE. It was finished.

  The first night’s sleep at the end of a long task was sweeter than any other he knew. Lintott let it come to him through the night sounds of Montmartre.

  The railway carriage was almost full. Eight seats, seven passengers. Lintott scanned them closely. He knew their destinations better than they. Their tickets need never be rendered up. M. and Mme Maxime, well-fed, well-upholstered, had wasted time and money stocking their capacious picnic-basket. Guy Fulbert was turning over ambitious plans for a future that would not materialise. Soeur Bernadette, telling her beads, was within sight of the heaven she had surely earned. The withered Mlle Damien approached divine love, having been denied any other. Lucien Fauvel faced divine judgement. Odette Carradine, in life or death, drew her mother always after her.

  Lintott slammed the carriage door, blew his whistle, swung down his green flag. First stop, eternity.

  Seven French coffins in a forest of rotting wreaths and marble chapels. A flying wooden hearse seared by flame. Nuns chanting, sweet and steadfast, their faces wiped clean of worldly experience. No mourning there for Sister Bernadette, wise virgin, bride of Christ. An epithalamion, a rejoicing for her soul, at the Orphelinat Barnabas.

  He was wide awake, throwing aside the covers, shivering with more than the night cool as he hunted through Carradine’s dictionary. Orphee, orphelin, orphelinat — orphanage.

  ‘What’s got into me?’ he asked, bewildered. The match burned his fingers. He started. ‘Best get a bit of light on the matter,’ he mumbled, and found the oil lamp. He sat hunched in its glow, a quilt round his shoulders, filling his pipe. ‘Something Bertha said about those who should have died and were saved.’

  Of a child nobody wanted, whose reason had been impaired, taken to an orphanage. And the other child, burned to death with a bracelet on her right wrist?

  ‘There must be thousands of orphans, and hundreds of orphanages, in this country. It don’t have to be this one. I took it that the child lost its reason in the crash and was sent to an orphanage because nobody wanted it. It needn’t have done, of course. It could have been an orphan in the first place. A child nobody wanted. It could have been on its way to this orphanage, with the nun, in the carriage. Don’t talk so soft — it could have been a boy! But it could have been a girl, couldn’t it? Whose reason had been impaired. In the accident? The eighth passenger, thrown clear perhaps at first impact. Badly shocked, hit on the head, something of that sort. You’re running mad with speculation, John Joseph!’

  But the image nagged him. And he remembered the painting of Gabrielle and Odette. The girl in white with the bracelet on her left wrist. Did she always wear it on that hand?

  ‘Suppose,’ he hazarded, pointing his pipe stem at the sleeping cat, ‘suppose this nun was taking a normal little girl to the orphanage? Suppose she was the same age or size as Odette, in the same carriage? Two little girls, however different, jammed up for a long journey with six adults, get to talking. This here orphan admires the other’s bracelet, say. “Here,” says Odette, being a nice sort of child, “try it on for a minute!” You have to amuse children on a journey, don’t I know it! You let them have the window-seats, so they can look out and that. They’re near the door, perhaps one of them’s leaning against it. They do, you know! Particularly when you’ve told them not to! The brakes go on hard. One of them’s flung up against the door and the impact’s made it loose or thrown it open. Odette gets chucked clear, lands some yards from the crash, in a bonny mess. Knocked on the head so she can’t remember who she is, or anything else. Reason impaired. They pull what’s left of the bodies from the gutted carriage, and find a little girl about the same build with a bracelet on her right wrist. Odette’s found in the bushes and can’t tell them who she is. They cut off what’s remaining of her clothes — and they’d be in a right state if she’d gone down a slope, say, and landed in bushes or water or mud. They cut off her hair because of a bad scalp wound, and clap her in a hospital with all the other casualties. Only seven bodies in that carriage, and the nun’s dead. They identified the nun by her cross. Mrs Carradine recognises the bracelet and don’t look further or ask which hand it was on. The nuns go round the hospital, searching for this here orphan of theirs, and see a child as won’t look up to much after all she’s been through. And nobody else is claiming her, naturally. God be praised, they say, the child’s been saved. When she’s well enough to be moved they take her back with them. A pretty girl, but a bit soft in the head. Oh my Gawd!

  He paced the studio, smoking and pondering.

  ‘Too many ifs,’ he decided. He knocked out his pipe. He paused. ‘And if I don’t check it out I’ll have it on my conscience to the end of my days.’

  He conjured up Valentine, as he had seen her yesterday. Clean-cut features, black curly hair, small-boned and refined. He imagined her face lit
by wilfulness, by intelligence, by feminine power. He groaned. Then his jaw dropped.

  ‘If she didn’t come from that orphanage,’ he said, appalled, ‘then I shall have to track the place down and find out who it was. I’ll be here for ever, following up one blooming clue after another! And all because I got a hunch.’

  He could do nothing before morning. His plain watch figured four o’clock, the hour of physical ebbing. He crept back to bed.

  Clumsy with pregnancy, Valentine rolled over in her cupboard of a room at the apartment in Étoile. She was reliving Carradine in her sleep, telling him that this was his child. She had shut out Claire, destroyer of dreams, usurper, like Natalie, like Émile Roche, like M. Paul, like the men whose names she had never known and would not have remembered. Even though Carradine had deserted her he could still help. Her portrait hung in a gallery that was all long corridors, lit by chandeliers. One room opened into another, and at the far end of the last she saw her father, white-haired and tall and handsome. A kind man of wealth and position. He stopped at the picture, he looked, he knew her. The small hands and fine features. The image of her beloved Maman who was his beloved also.

  I’ve waited ever so long for somebody to know who I really am.

  Lintott’s slate-coloured eyes opened again, pained for life’s derelicts: the harmless, the innocent, the uncomplaining, the from-birth-defeated.

  ‘If it is you, my dear,’ he addressed the wistful phantom, great with child, ‘he don’t need you anymore.’

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  She descended levels of sleep, passed doors open, doors closed. Dream shutters clicked and flashed fragments of days recorded and forgotten. People familiar and strange materialised from the shadows and whispered, but whether among themselves or to her she did not know, and it was not important. She opened the cupboards of her imagination, and folded clothes away. Fantasy, outmatched, uncurled from her hands and drifted. Past and present were one, and the future an inevitable conclusion. Freed from the prison of time and space she floated, rapt and all-comprehending. The cloud over her mind dissolved, dispersed.

  She could hardly see the pavement through the fog, and her nurse covered her nose and lips with a thick scarf, against the pollution known as ‘a London particular’. Yet she was excited by lamp-posts transformed into a dark blur and an aureole, by footsteps and cab wheels muffled and invisible, by the taste of metallic moisture drops on the soft wool. The mirror in the hall was cold and misty. All the energetic rubbing of muff and mitten could not reveal her image.

  The luminous globes of the Christmas tree in the parlour window reflected a distorted room in miniatures. A white world outside, a white world inside, and herself all in white. Her slippered feet found hold on a chair’s rung. She climbed and climbed, to melt into the looking-glass as Alice had done, and found an adult face staring into hers from the other side. She tumbled slowly down, mouth open, and changed into a doll on the carpet.

  The sun glittered on silks, gleamed on satins, glowed on velvets. Three vast trunks, their lids yawning to display interiors lined in striped cotton, stood in the middle of Maman’s bedroom. A black knob of hair bobbed over them, a black figure moved silently to and from the cavernous wardrobe. Within the cage of the boy’s arms she wriggled for freedom. His Norfolk jacket felt hot and prickly. He smelled of warm cloth, of ink, of boy. On Maman’s dressing-table the scent bottle of shimmering crystal held magic. Its silver top, unstoppered, released femininity. She gazed earnestly into the big mirror. The dark woman, stern and unsmiling, walking to and fro. Maman, hand on hip, turning to watch them. The boy’s arms encircling nothing.

  Summer in the long narrow strip of walled garden. Maman switched from French to English, drawing their visitors into conversation. A forest of rearing legs, a crush of crinolines, an Olympus of nodding heads which sometimes loomed down to speak to her. She understood both languages and did not find this curious. The little fish in the pond Papa had made for her flickered under the lily leaves. Her reflection was as pale and blank as an egg, no features. She flailed the water with both hands. It crashed into the air and splintered on the lawn.

  Winter. Muffin men with bells, an organ grinder with a shivering monkey in uniform, a child no older than herself holding out a bunch of drooping violets. Pictures in the flames behind the brass-railed fireguard. Her wax-faced doll was splendidly and fashionably dressed, its cloth body ending in china limbs. She sang a French lullaby, pushed her against the wire bars to see the people going to church — flecks of soot momentarily caught by fire. The features ran, molten, indistinguishable. Tears of separation, of protest, of abandonment. A cloth and china nothing, clad in scorched finery.

  Walls closed and receded. Mirrors clouded. Furniture was menace. Mother and daughter, imprisoned in paint, smiled head to head and did not notice her. She crept, unwanted ghost, from room to room of their lives: hearing scales fumbled by small fingers, watching stitches appear one by tedious one on a linen sampler, remembering a jumble of letters turn — by some mysterious alchemy — into words. She hung round doorways and envied this other self, revelling in a power made possible only by love. No answers there, only eternal questions. Footprints inexplicably ended in a white landscape.

  Softly she ascended, entering the frame of day, turning to the day’s images, the day’s knowledge.

  Beyond her lay a long road scattered with bureaus, with cabinets, with roll-topped and flat-topped desks, with escritoires, with any and every receptacle which might hold information. Two men approached, growing larger as they drew nearer, capes flapping. They were searching each drawer for documents. A trail of discarded papers behind them was carried away by the wind. She held out the envelope of herself, but it was irrevocably sealed.

  Carradine has painted the deep cream flesh, whose delicate shadows of olive and umber and modulated purple are cast by a richer ground. The broad square brushstrokes move across the portrait, nullifying outlines. She is reflected in glass and so becomes four women: two in the picture, two posing for it. None of them is herself. And though he captures her in a hundred moods, using all the cunning of his craft and the infinity of his palette, she still eludes him. More strange than his twilit interiors, more emotive than the harmonies and clashes of his colour, more precise than his impeccable draughtsmanship, her identity is secret.

  This lost child, this stranger, will be a responsibility he cannot shed. He cast a net into the sea, and she has been harvested. He opened a locked door that may not be closed on her again. He must reckon with her in mind and heart. And whatever he discovers her to be, and however difficult the truth, he must receive her. For he asked a question of the emptiness, seeking an answer to himself, and the void has posed him yet another riddle.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Morning brought further counsel, and a nostalgia Lintott could not place.

  His paucity of French, and the French lack of Wiltshire bacon, had curtailed his breakfast to fried eggs. These he consumed in the window-seat, looking out on Montmartre. He had mixed the suds vigorously in his shaving mug, drawn the razor skilfully round his whiskers, trimmed his grey moustache with a pair of nail-scissors, and turned his head from side to side to admire the effect. Spruced and fed, his mission lay heavily upon him. His usual sense of controlled power had deserted him, and in its place sat apprehension — and nostalgia.

  Now when did I last feel like this? he wondered, setting himself a conundrum.

  ‘God bless my soul!’ cried Lintott. ‘It must have been forty years since!’

  His young man’s fancy, meant for a richer catch than a struggling young policeman, swayed past in her open carriage beneath a silk parasol. Though she occupied his thoughts and dreams for the whole of one summer, she had never noticed him. He had wakened each day, looking forward to the few minutes when she would ride past. Sunshine made him whistle. Rain silenced him. Then his beat was changed, love lost its cruelty, he met Bessie. Until now, staring out at the white confection of Sacre Coeur o
n a June morning, he had forgotten that girl. Here, in the untidy beauty of an artist’s studio, in the transient aura of Paris, she lived again for him.

  ‘I’m catching a bit of the old l’amoor, like the rest of them!’ said Lintott humorously. ‘Back to business.’

  He washed up his breakfast things, made his bed, let out the cat. In broad clear print he copied Natalie Picard’s address, to show the cab-driver.

  Since he could not understand Valentine’s explanations he stood stolidly in the hallway until she pointed to a chair. Then he sat, hat in hand, with such an air of permanence that the maid shrugged and disappeared. He heard her agitated remarks, Natalie’s amused replies, and was at last rewarded by a full-voiced summons from a room to his left.

  ‘If you insist, m’sieu, I will see you.’

  Valentine appeared, motioned him to enter, closed the door softly behind her. Nonplussed he stared round Natalie’s boudoir. The parquet floor reflected his thick boots with brutal frankness. A full-length mirror reflected his plain face and figure. Chairs and footstools, upholstered in petit-point, formed barriers between himself and his quarry. Cream jugs, patterned in carmine, amber and apple-green, threatened his footing. At the far end of the room Natalie sat up in the centre of a vast draped fourposter, enjoying her breakfast.

  Lintott summoned his vocabulary.

  ‘Pardon, madame,’ he said, and wished himself well away.

  ‘Aha! M’sieu the Inspector! What shall they say of you in Scotch Yard, that you speak to a lady in her chamber?’ She registered his acute embarrassment, and with consummate tact overlooked it. ‘Please to sit down. No, no, not there,’ as he sidled towards a sofa near the door, ‘I do not wish to speak loud. Here if you please.’