by Liz Nugent
One day, MacDermod’s wife was caught in the act of badgering her husband, complaining that he hadn’t built the fire hot enough for her to bake bread. This time, her neighbours were merciless. They dragged her down to the harbour wall and hacked her hair off again, but this time they forced her to eat it until she choked. To death.
Daddy used to tell me this story while I was curled on his lap, but he’d be staring at Mammy while he told it. Daddy said if a man couldn’t keep his woman in order, his neighbours would have to do it for him.
26
In an effort to create some distance between Christian and me, I got a job in a high-end gift shop, La Belle Époque, on the Quai des États-Unis. I made some friends: Élise, a Swiss girl, who had engaged me in conversation at the dentist’s one time; and Marielle, who worked with me in the gift shop. I still brushed my hair forward on the right-hand side, still ashamed of the imperfection.
At home the fights were constant. I no longer even remembered why they started, though money was always a problem. I dutifully handed over my maintenance payment every month, resenting every centime. It did not even cover my half of the rent. Though Christian could be cruel and violent, he was not particularly mean. If he had had a good week, he would give me money to spend, but it had now been a long time since he had had a good week. I could not have survived on my own. If I hadn’t needed Christian financially, I would have left him. I had written to Peter’s lawyer in London, requesting a change of account, so that I could regain control of my own money. The reply asked for my reasons for the change. The maintenance of this account cost her client a considerable amount in fees, and she saw no reason to change the status quo. The letter included a breakdown of medical expenses incurred by our son. Harry was right about the years he had spent in hospital, but I couldn’t think about that. I was stuck.
One day I was rearranging the window display in La Belle Époque when I noticed a man watching me, staring at me intently. It had been quite a while since I’d had that kind of attention. After a minute or two, he entered the shop and joined a middle-aged woman looking at the glassware, but he kept turning his head towards me.
‘Look, Marjorie, that girl, how do we know her?’ He was upper-crust British. He assumed I was French and would not understand him. I turned sideways, pulled my hair forward.
‘I’ve never seen her before in my life. What are you on about?’
‘I know her.’
I approached him, smiling. ‘May I help you?’ My accent matched his.
‘Ah! I have it! We have met before, I think? You were the pretty liar.’
I had no idea what he was talking about.
‘In Cornwall?’ he said. ‘Jory Lattimer’s place.’
I remembered him then, the tall man poking at the innards of a seagull on the edge of a cliff.
‘Freddie Baird.’ He put out his hand. ‘I don’t think we were properly introduced that weekend.’
‘Cordelia Russell.’
‘Cordelia, eh? And do you love your father the most?’
‘What?’ I was rooted to the spot by the randomness and accuracy of his question.
‘Lear. King Lear? Not an English scholar, then?’
I was completely thrown. I had never read or seen King Lear, despite Peter’s efforts to educate me. Before I could gather my thoughts, his wife joined us and Freddie introduced us.
‘Well, what a small world,’ she said, ‘and how do you know the Lattimers? So sad about Jory, wasn’t it?’
‘Oh, I didn’t know him at all. I was only at that party because friends of his invited me. What happened to him?’
Freddie smirked and Marjorie poked him in the ribs. ‘Don’t, Freddie, it’s no laughing matter. The man is dead.’
‘Remember that bloody great stag’s head over the arch in the hallway? It fell off the wall, clocked him on the head and killed him outright. Only fair, I think.’
He hooted with laughter. Marjorie tried to smother her amusement, and I laughed at the thought of that drunken oaf being taken down by a stag he’d probably shot himself.
‘What happened to your face?’ said Freddie, and I realized that my hair had swung back when I laughed. My hand flew up to the scarring.
‘Don’t,’ he said, ‘it makes you much more interesting.’
‘Freddie! Don’t be so rude. I’m so sorry, my dear. My husband has a morbid fascination with wounds and scars.’
‘But it’s perfect! I should like to paint you,’ he said. And of course, that used to be flattering to hear, but no longer.
‘Paint me? Like this?’
‘Oh, Freddie, leave the poor girl alone!’
Marjorie’s attention was taken by some ornate gilt-framed mirrors, and she wandered off to look at them.
‘Would you be so kind as to visit my villa?’ Freddie asked. ‘I will pay you and you may bring an escort if you fear my intentions. It is just your face I would like to paint.’ He gestured towards my right cheek and I knew he meant the damage. He seemed a little desperate, making this request. Afraid that I would refuse.
He was older than me, twice my age at least, and he looked at me as if I were a curiosity rather than a woman. Marjorie left, saying she would see him later for dinner. Freddie invited me to go for coffee with him. Marielle told me I could take half an hour.
I felt relaxed with him, and it was immediately clear that he had no romantic intentions. Over coffee, Freddie told me he had come down to the Riviera to paint. He was an industrial engineer and a frustrated artist, he said, and all of the best painters found the light here conducive to good work. He explained he had spent the morning painting a bruised nectarine, and had wondered how it would look if it were scorched.
‘Is it painful?’ he said, waving loosely towards my head.
‘Not at all. It’s been over seven years since the fire.’ I began to tell him about the nightclub fire. I told him that I lived with my boyfriend in Nice. He asked where I was from and I told him Hampstead and I think he believed me, but he did not press me. He told me Marjorie thought his painting was a frivolous exercise and that he was too old to take up such a hobby, but he was bored and restless and he had always wanted to paint. He had rented a place for a month, he said, but had not been inspired to paint much at all and would shortly return to London. He gave me his card with a scribbled address beside the printed London one in Regent’s Park, and he drew a small map on the back with a thin-nibbed Montblanc. He asked me to call the next afternoon or the one after. He was staying in Vence, a hilltop village an hour’s bus ride from Nice. I had been there with Christian once or twice in his car, and it seemed quaint and pretty and quiet. Christian had done business there with a local and we did not have time to look around.
Two days later, I feigned illness and Christian went to work, complaining that I’d better get sick pay.
I took the bus. I sat, as always, on the sea side of the vehicle and watched the coastline all the way until it disappeared as we headed up the mountain road. I found the house easily, using the meticulous miniature map on the back of the card. Crossing a narrow bridge over a steep ravine, I followed a signpost to Gattières and found a pale villa on my left. Freddie was leaning over the balcony upstairs, peering down.
‘I hoped you’d come. Let me see your face!’
I doffed my hat, revealing the imperfection that so fascinated him.
‘Perfect!’ he exclaimed. ‘Come up!’
I ascended some steps on the outside of the building to join him. He was excited and less needy than before, when I had been the one with the gift of my impairment to bestow. Now it was his, and he knew it.
‘You came alone,’ he said, surprise in his tone.
‘I decided to trust you.’
‘Brave, and yet foolish, but you are young enough to be my daughter and I have no intention of touching you, so you are perfectly safe. I should tell you that my wife flew back to London this morning.’
I knew I was safe. I looked around from the
roof terrace. ‘Where is the sea?’
‘Oh, beyond that hill. I know, I should have a place with a sea view, but I’m here for the light.’
‘I don’t like it when I can’t see the sea,’ I said aloud, and instantly regretted it. I knew this peculiarity about me was best left unsaid. It drove Christian insane. I had pulled our bed from the wall to the floor-length windows and refused to close the curtains at night because I needed to know the sea would be there when I opened my eyes. Christian would complain that he couldn’t sleep and often went to the sofa in the salon as soon as dawn broke, noisily cursing and kicking furniture on his way out of the bedroom.
‘And why is that?’ asked Freddie.
I could not explain it, even to myself, but went with the notion that used to charm Peter. ‘I think I might be a mermaid,’ I said with a coy smile.
Freddie frowned. ‘I see.’
He drew me that morning and took several photographs as I held the rotting nectarine beside my chin out on the terrace. He chatted about his life in London, his wife, his work – ‘I guess you could say I’m semi-retired,’ he said, ‘I only go into the office once a week or so’ – his travels all over the world, his wayward daughter ‘Audrey, she’s twenty-five, not that much younger than you.’ I didn’t see the point in telling him I was thirty-three.
‘What were you doing at that dreadful party in Cornwall?’ he asked.
‘Partying,’ I said simply.
‘Didn’t some ghastly girl make a fuss about you? What was that about?’
I claimed not to remember. When I lowered the shoulder of my wrap, he noticed the bruise there, inflicted by Christian.
‘How did that happen?’
‘A shoebox fell from the top of my wardrobe,’ I said.
It was a futile lie. If one looked closely enough, and he did, you could see the imprint of Christian’s fingers.
‘Perfect!’ he said, taking up his pencil again, and made no further enquiries. He was only interested in the injuries. He did not appear to care what caused them.
After an hour or two, I was stiff from not moving. Freddie invited me to come and take a look at his graphite drawings. I was shocked by what I saw. I wondered if this was how the world saw me. Like a half-rotten nectarine, one side smooth and glowing, the other sick with decay.
‘You don’t like it?’
I shook my head. ‘Sorry, it’s good, it’s just that I look so …’
‘I’ve made it worse than it is. This is what interests me, you see. The pretty models with their perfect teeth and their smooth complexions bore me to death. You hold so much in your face. The damage goes deep, does it not?’
I was startled by this sudden intimacy and shied away from personal details.
‘You are an amateur, aren’t you? I mean, you aren’t going to exhibit this anywhere?’
‘Good Lord, no! I would be laughed out of the academy with my scribblings.’
I looked at the picture again. Damage was the word he had used. So close to damned.
Afterwards, we drove to the next village and he bought lunch in La Colombe d’Or, a restaurant and hotel I had heard about but had never been able to afford. He drank a carafe of wine and I sipped a lemonade. He walked me to the bus and shook hands formally.
‘I thought you weren’t going to touch me,’ I said, looking up at him from under my eyelashes, my pretty side facing him.
‘Young lady, you are either trouble or you are in trouble. I can tell. Please stay safe and call me in London if you need anything. You have my card.’
‘I am neither!’ I protested. But he didn’t laugh or smile.
He gave me an envelope stuffed full of francs and I tried to refuse it, knowing he would insist. ‘For your time,’ he said.
‘When are you leaving?’
‘Tomorrow,’ he said, and the bus pulled up and I boarded and waved as he raised his hand in salute.
I wrote to him several weeks later. I didn’t ask for anything, just said it had been a pleasure to meet him and I wished him well with his painting. A courteous, non-flirtatious letter with my address at the gift shop in the top-left corner. I could have told Christian about my encounter with Freddie Baird, but I knew he would be suspicious, or would interfere in some way. Something about that morning with Freddie felt innocent. Neither of us had an agenda. Not then.
A week later, I received a card from England with a line written on it: ‘I should have taken you to the Matisse chapel. Go visit. Freddie.’ I had no idea what he meant. I was curious enough to ask Élise, who worked as a guide in the Matisse Museum in Nice. She rattled through the legend of Matisse, the chapel and the nun.
It seemed that when recuperating from an illness while living in Vence in 1941, Henri Matisse recruited a night nurse, Monique Bourgeois. He was in his seventies; she was twenty-one. When she left his employment, he asked her to return, to pose for him – he liked how she was a straight-talker and unafraid to offer her opinions of his work. She was amazed that he would want to paint her as she was no beauty, but she agreed.
In 1946, to his dismay, she entered the Dominican convent in Vence to become a nun. He visited her, and when he saw that the nuns were using a disused garage with a leaking roof for their chapel, he undertook to build a new chapel for them.
With the help of Monique – now Sister Jacques-Marie – he dedicated six years of his waning life to building a chapel for the Dominican sisters, designing everything from the building to the candlesticks to the priest’s vestments. So determined was he to finish the project that he painted from his wheelchair and from his bed.
Élise showed me photographs of him at work, a paintbrush strapped to a bamboo stick as he sat up in his bed, painting holy figures on the high walls beside him. When Monique told him that she believed he was inspired by God, he said, ‘Yes, but that god is me.’
That weekend, I made an appointment to see the chapel. I took the bus back to Vence. The Chapelle du Rosaire was situated a mere hundred yards from Freddie’s rented villa, now boarded up and empty. The blank exterior walls of the chapel could easily be missed by a passer-by who didn’t know what to look for, but once inside, the building startled me. Living on the Riviera, I was not unaware of the number of artists and painters who had lived and worked here, but I did not move in arty circles and had little education in the subject. I might recognize a Caravaggio or a Renoir if I saw one, but this chapel was unlike any I had seen before.
A hawk-eyed nun watched me closely as I wandered around, but was thankfully disinclined to conversation. On the island, and in Westport, churches had been cold, austere places furnished in dark wood and suffering but, in the afternoon sunlight, this was a blaze of warmth. Heat seeped through the stained-glass windows and cast the white walls in a hue of rose pink. The holy figures painted on the walls were so simple and childlike, and even the Stations of the Cross, usually portrayed as a trail of torture, looked more like an instruction manual to build a crucifix. The God or Jesus figure (I couldn’t tell which) was blank-faced, swathed in monk-like robes and carrying a Bible.
The tall drawing of Madonna and child stood out, as if the child, standing, grew from her hands and was about to take flight, surrounded by cartoonish floral shapes. It comforted me, the thought that a mother is supposed to launch her child. And yet you could see the bond between them and I shuddered, and then I put the thought out of my mind because my son would now be fourteen years old. I could not think of him. But I could not help thinking of my mother. She had wanted to take us home to America, to her mother. For the first time, I thought about the fact that she didn’t just leave the island without us. She could have gone home any time. My father would not have followed her. He did not love her. But then, he did not follow me either. Instead, he killed her and my brothers and himself. Was that really my fault? Did he love me? Did my mother? The feelings of confusion overwhelmed me, and I sat in one of the simple pews to gather my thoughts. I decided to put them all out of my mind. I had to live in
the present.
I wrote to Freddie that night when Christian was out on one of his nocturnal prowls. ‘I went back to Vence and found the chapel. How beautiful!’ I did not have the technical vocabulary to appraise it in any meaningful way. I was afraid that my simplistic reaction might give away something about me, and when he didn’t reply I began to think that I had disappointed him. I didn’t know King Lear. It was obvious I knew nothing of art. He had expected more.
27
That winter, business was bad. Despite all of his nefarious dealings, Christian never seemed to make much of a profit. It was tied up, he used to say, in a business investment that would make him rich. I had heard this before, and maybe he was investing returns in bigger and bigger deals. I had a feeling that it wouldn’t end well. I remembered what had happened to Peter and his investments. Christian’s rages became more dangerous as his gambling problem became more serious. At the end of January, the manager of the gift shop told me that my services would not be required again until May. Marielle had seniority and would be kept on. I did not want to tell Christian. We lived from week to week, and half of my income went towards the bills, though Christian still paid the lion’s share.
We rarely went out together any more. We no longer played cards together, though he played, with others, for money. It seems I had escaped a gambling husband only to end up with a gambling boyfriend. I couldn’t remember the last time he had paid me a compliment or bought me a gift, and yet in the beginning of our relationship he would have done anything for me. I asked around for other jobs but there was nothing, nothing legal. Élise said an assistant was required in a modern art gallery but that I would need to prove my knowledge of art and that the owner was difficult. She also hinted heavily that I mixed with the wrong people and that my associations would work against me. She meant Christian.
I convinced her I could pass muster in an interview, and she prepped me as much as she could. I dressed carefully in my best clothes and turned up to be interviewed by Monsieur Arnaud, a vicious old bastard who knew immediately that my degree in fine art from Bristol University was a fiction. I gabbled about Matisse, about the nun and the convent in Vence, but I did not convince. He quizzed me about the names of the known art collectors on the Côte d’Azur.
