Autumn Leaves

by Tessa Lunney

  Alice looked up from a discussion over the teacups and came over.

  “Alice, dear, the last time Cordelia was here—do you remember? I told Miss Button here that Cordelia seemed burdened, but I only remember thinking about my car and how to fix it.”

  “Yes, that was an ongoing problem. We’d used the car in the war to transport wounded to the hospital and it was in rather a state. Is your cup empty? Come with me.” Gertrude turned back to Hemingway and started discussing a writer I’d never heard of. Gertrude and Alice’s dance was perfectly executed. This time, I didn’t mind going to the tea table.

  “I saw that Matisse left,” Alice said softly. “I’m not surprised. He had a tenderness for your mother.”

  “They were lovers?” I concentrated on holding my cup steady for more tea and brandy.

  “It would be hard to compete with Amelie. But there was a group of men who held your mother in very high esteem and Matisse was one of them. They are not part of our group. They are mostly older artists whom Gertrude finds too attached to the old ways. I don’t mind their art but they don’t listen to women, so their art quickly loses its luster. Only Matisse listens.”

  “My mother, when she was here last…”

  “Ah yes. Paris was so… well, it was still finding its feet after the Armistice. The hospitals were all full of war-wounded and flu victims. She came to nurse a friend, though she never mentioned to me who that was, and then stayed and continued to nurse people in a hospital before she left for England. She paid the rent for Modigliani and Jeanne for the whole time she was here, so I heard, and a good while afterwards as well. She was… lost, and in that respect, she fit into Paris perfectly, as she always had. So many of us felt lost.”

  She cut a slender slice of fruit cake and slipped it onto my saucer. Her look almost dared me to eat it.

  “Who were these other men, these artists who admired her? Gertrude mentioned Monet, Rodin…”

  “You should ask Matisse. He lives in the south, though, and I don’t know how long they’ll be in Paris.”

  I wanted to leave, to ask immediately, I had just put down my cup and saucer when Alice put her hand on my arm.

  “Don’t ask yet. Matisse is a sensitive soul, it will take him a while before he can answer any questions. Come, tell Hadley what you know about seamstresses in Montparnasse. She admires your style.” She handed me back my cup and saucer, the slice of cake still placed precariously on edge, ready at any moment to crumble and break.

  17

  “throw me a kiss”

  “You’re very quiet, Button.” Tom nudged me as we walked home in the cold evening.

  “They knew my mother.”

  “I heard.”

  “She flits about these streets in my imagination. I keep thinking I can see a woman in pre-war fashions, in last century’s corsets, just turning the corner. How could I not have known she had this other life?”

  “Perhaps because she was as good at keeping secrets as you are.”

  “Yet another similarity that I find out too late. Distract me, Tom-Tom. Help me think of something else, at least for a minute.”

  He looked at me with such longing, it was visible even in the darkness. Something metal clanged, a group of American tourists tumbled drunkenly out of a café singing snatches of music-hall hits. Tom took my arm and held me close as the cobbles clapped beneath our footfalls.

  “You missed all the political chat at Gertrude’s. Hem spoke a bit about Smyrna, but then said something odd. He said, ‘Those fascisti in Italy—I wouldn’t be surprised if we found them in Paris before long. They’re appealing to all the old soldiers who want to continue the old ways.’ ”

  “Old soldiers… like exiled princes.”

  “Especially those who fought. When I fought, I wanted the… civilization, for want of a better word, to be there when I returned. Concerts and restaurants and books and sport, I wanted it all to have thrived in my absence. I needed it to. How much more so for men who view the land not with simple belonging but with ownership?” He stared down the dark street as he spoke.

  “What is it, Tom?”

  “Nothing—”

  “Go on.”

  His shoulders slumped. “Smyrna. It wasn’t the worst thing I’ve seen but it is the latest. It’s still happening too… it feels so odd. I’m here drinking and laughing, no one here is at war, but over there, men are still bayonetting each other, children are still howling into the night, there are still women who roam from cot to cot selling themselves for nothing but the chance to live for a few more hours. The fires are smoldering and the cupboards are bare, while here, all is normal. At least in 1916, 1917, everywhere was at war. Even on leave, the streets were full of uniforms, there were air raid sirens all the time, food was rationed, and blackouts made a little sanctuary of every café and pub. My leave was only from the front, as no one could take leave from the war itself. With Smyrna, I can. With Russia, too, I just take the train and there’s no more war, no refugees, no famine, there is real coffee and butter on soft bread, there are clean sheets and running water and people getting excited about football and theatre and paintings. It only takes a few hours to travel from chaos to order. I can hardly fathom it. I keep turning a corner and expecting a corpse, I keep expecting a tap on the shoulder and behind me are the guns.”

  He stopped in the dark between streetlights, he pulled me into him, wrapping his arms around me. I made my body soft so that it fit perfectly with his.

  “You’re the only antidote, Button. You let me be here and now and not halfway between never-was and couldn’t-be.”

  We were steps from my building, I recognized my neighbors as they whistled and argued. Tom’s hug was somehow both too rough and too flimsy, a hug from far away.

  “Well, that was certainly a distraction from my bad mood.”

  He laughed but it was water splashing in the gutter, it was rueful.

  “I can think of better distractions,” he said. “All you have to do is ask.”

  Spilled light from the windows above made his eyes seem black, his expression intent. He would do anything for me, he would do nothing until I asked him. Did he sense my hesitation, that I was enjoying a life unbound too much to kiss him? Was he politely respecting my mourning? Did he need me to say yes first, to start the tumble into each other? I couldn’t tell, except that he was in earnest. I couldn’t help but reach up to stroke his face.

  “And I will ask, dearest Tom-Tom.” I didn’t invite him to ask the same of me; I could see, clearly, that our relationship didn’t work that way. We stood there for a long time, mostly in shadow with my hand on his cheek, only moving upstairs when the October wind made me shiver.

  * * *

  We slept badly. Tom was restless and I half woke with his tosses and turns. I drifted in a dream state through the dawn and into the morning, through the church bells that seemed to remind me that all I had believed in was upended and emptied out. The next day we roamed Paris aimlessly, ate absentmindedly, smoked constantly. I felt there was a cocoon around us, a protective space where others couldn’t enter, couldn’t hear us or see us properly. This space pushed back the sounds of now, the French along the river, the cars and carts and coffee cups. It was filled instead with the sounds of elsewhere, with whipbirds and fire crackles and the caress of the Pacific against sandstone, with howls and blasts and dead silence. This space protected us so we could speak and finally be heard.

  I spoke of my mother.

  “My mother… I am filled with guilt. Then rage. They mix together until I feel as though I have drunk absinthe from the gutter, I am retching and wretched. I have so many questions but they all simmer down to one: Why didn’t she let me know her? I think she was preparing to, there are little notes all through the more recent diaries, things like ‘When I see Katherine in Paris…’ or ‘I wonder if Katherine would enjoy Chelsea?’ or ‘Katherine should really meet X, she’ll find him amusing.’ X is the mystery man. I think if the war hadn�
��t delayed her, she would have joined me here and left Sydney forever. I would have seen who she really was, in her natural habitat. But it was the war—she couldn’t get here until I had left—then she died. Did she return in 1919 only to see me? There’s something missing, there are connections I can’t make. I keep getting glimpses of her, little slices of a total stranger with my mother’s name. I need to find that final diary. I need to find X, whoever he is. I think that’s the link between the mother I knew and this amazing Montmartre Cordelia.”

  “How will you do that?”

  “Gertrude suggested I speak to Matisse… perhaps he’ll know.”

  “Perhaps he’s the mystery man.”

  “He’s too young.” I flicked my cigarette butt into the bushes. “But I’ll find out somehow.”

  Tom spoke of war.

  “Russia… I’ve never seen anything like it.” The sun ruptured the clouds for an unruly moment before returning the sky to gray. “It was a front, the whole country a muddy trench. Endless grasses, horizons bare but for fleeing horses, smoke, the occasional explosion. Train tracks lined with wraiths, streets haunted by skeletons with roving eyes. This is the new world, the commissariat said, we all need to sacrifice to create a better earth. But just like in the trenches, it wasn’t the bureaucrats who sacrificed their lives, it wasn’t the bigwigs who suffered. They’d just left the ‘imperialist war’ and were inflicting that suffering all over again, a suffering so immense I could hardly think outside it. I thought, this can’t be worth it, however cruel the old regime was, at least it was stable, it can’t have been as bad as this. My interpreter agreed with me. The son of a police chief in Moscow, he’d studied in London and it was dangerous for him to be in Russia, but he wanted me to see what it was like, he wanted me to tell the world. Then people in the trains, in the stations, in the bars and cafés would speak to us. He wouldn’t translate at first, he told me they were talking nonsense, but he changed his mind. Such stories! The serfs had been practically enslaved, they had belonged to their princely masters who starved them or saved them on a whim. Working every day until they died, they had to beg for medicine, for education, for permission to marry. Anything, they said, was better than that. I met quite a few Jewish people traveling to Russia to help the Revolution. Their stories, of pogroms and murders, made even my interpreter cry. Slums in the Pale where hiding from the police was their first childhood memory. Rats for dinner when the pigeons ran out. Fear that every city murder would inspire a mob to set them on fire in so-called ‘revenge.’ ”

  The wind picked up the littered leaves and old newspapers and flung them at the backs of our legs, making us scurry into a café. The café reeked of old fat and cabbage, a smell that not even our coffees could overpower. The window next to us was opaque with condensation.

  “So, I couldn’t say that the princes are right and communism is dreadful, nor could I say the opposite,” Tom said. “All it seems is that, in an attempt to remedy a sickness, they have wounded themselves so badly they’ll be bleeding for a long time. I do believe one thing though: Hem is right. Europe is throbbing with revolutionary desire, and it’s a race to see whether communism or nationalism will win out.”

  “Nationalism… like the Fascists? Are they nationalist or internationalist?”

  “The Communists are internationalist… although Russia just happens to be ‘first among equals,’ if you can wrap your head around that paradox. These new Fascists… I can’t tell yet. They help each other across national affiliations, but the way they operate seems to be tied to their national armies, which makes it more nationalist. We’ll have to see how it plays out.”

  “My mission is clearly about these old soldiers who hate the new Europe.”

  “I’d say so. These clues aren’t as convoluted as last year.”

  “No,” I took a sip of my coffee, hot and bitter. “I’ve been thinking about that. Last year Fox knew who I had to find, where and when and all the details. He just wanted me to play his game and work it out. This year, I think he knows one or two things—the houseboy or boys, the prince or perhaps two princes—but not the rest. That’s why the mission is easier to decode. I actually have to do some proper spy work and find out the details.”

  “He trusts you, then.”

  “Probably he has no choice. He sends me to do the work men can’t. Which is another clue: what sort of princes are they, that they would let a woman close and not be suspicious, and not arouse the suspicions of their servants?”

  “Libertines. Ladies’ men.”

  “That’s my thought. Which means they can’t be just any old princes.”

  “The Prince of Wales.”

  “The Empire’s darling.”

  “Jesus wept.”

  The last rays of sun refracted through the window’s dirty moisture to speckle Tom’s face, the shadows under his eyes, his thin skin.

  “It could be fun, you never know.”

  “With you, Button, it’s always fun. The question is, how dangerous will the fun be?”

  “We’re working for Fox. Pack your pistol.”

  * * *

  We stood at the station platform at Gare du Nord. The whistle would blow any minute, the train was filling, and Tom still wouldn’t find his seat.

  “You want a good one, you’re going a long way, get in, for Pete’s sake.”

  “Button, Pete doesn’t give a fig about where I sit and neither do I.”

  “You’ll end up squished between Fat Freddy and Gabby Gladys and you won’t get a wink of sleep. Go on!”

  “Button.” He put down his case and took my hands between both of his. “I’ll stay here warming your icy fingers until the train begins to move. Stop nagging me.”

  “I don’t nag!”

  “I’ll get on in my own good time.”

  “I don’t nag. You just don’t know what’s good for you.”

  “I know what I need.” His voice was low. It made my heart beat uncomfortably fast. The lamps on the platforms were already lit, golden light pooling on the stained concrete.

  “I need you back in Paris soon. You’re part of this mission now, Tom. Abandon all hope of an easy life.”

  “Yes, ma’am!”

  “Write to me, or telegram or call, from London. I’ll need to discuss my breakthroughs with you. I’ll need…” But I couldn’t put into words my jagged feelings of desire and desperation, the will-o’-the-wisp of loneliness, the wildness that made me drink more than my body could hold, pain that tore through my days, ideas forming and reforming like oil on water. Tom squeezed my hands and kissed them.

  “Yes, you will,” he addressed all I hadn’t said. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. I’m bound to be sent to some skirmish somewhere and I always, always come through Paris.”

  “It’s not goodbye.”

  “It’ll never be goodbye.”

  The whistle blew, the train heaved its wheels into the first rotation.

  “Last drinks, Button.” He kissed me fiercely on the cheek and vanished inside the crowded carriage as the train pulled out in a cough of steam.

  18

  “my buddy”

  For the first time in a long time my head ached when I woke. It could have been the bowls of Breton cider that one of the waiters at the Rotonde brought out, as a joke, but that had kept us going through the night, crisp and cold, they tasted like the weather. It could have been the entire packet of cigarettes that disappeared into my lungs. But I knew these were mere symptoms of the real disease: Tom was gone, Bertie was still in London, Theo was somewhere or other but I didn’t need any more men. I needed my women. I needed Maisie.

  I telegrammed Maisie Brown Chevallier but I couldn’t wait for a reply. I should have contacted her earlier, I was a fool to take so long to say hello, as I didn’t want to wait to meet her, I didn’t want to make a polite arrangement to call on her, I wanted her right now, I wanted to run immediately to her strong embrace. I barely noticed the streets of Paris as I clipped over
to the river, my teal heels rapping against the cobblestones. I hardly saw the seamstresses assess my peacock blue coat with its tatty fur collar, its sumptuous volume in need of a wash. I simply clutched the coat like a prayer and moved forward into the wind.

  Angelina’s Tea Room was luxurious gilt and cream, hushed and discreet, and absolutely the wrong place for me at the moment. I was in a dingy-cellar-bar mood, a riverside-pie-cart mood, a mess-tent and biscuits-at-midnight mood. But as I’d practically summoned Maisie to a pot of hot chocolate, I thought this place would be easy for her to find in a hurry. The high ceilings were decorated with Art Nouveau swirls and the walls were mostly mirror. The air smelt of chocolate and expensive perfume. If I hadn’t had a packet of patriotic Gauloises with me, I would have felt dirty smoking.

  I remembered the first time I saw Maisie, when I was training to be a nurse in London. Matron had decided to bully me, for my “bright face” Maisie decided, so I was punished on the slightest pretext. As an experienced nurse, Maisie showed me tricks with sheets and bedpans so I could be both precise and quick and thereby avoid the worst of Matron’s wrath. I remembered when we found each other again at the field hospital in Rouen. I’d been in surgery with Fox when she had arrived, I was exhausted and could barely stand in line at the mess tent. She lifted me up with a big hug and then cajoled and threatened the other nurses until we shared a tent. She then tucked me into bed, and when I woke, fed me chocolate rum cake that had been sent to her from England and made me tell her all the hospital gossip.

  At the end of the war, Fox and family had called me to London while Maisie stayed in Paris. I promised to write, of course, but I’m a hopeless correspondent. Her letters told tales that seemed to mirror my life: nursing flu patients, working harder in the peace than in the war, performing emergency tracheotomies that ended up useless. Being in uniform but now also in quarantine. Missing each other’s company. Why hadn’t I replied? I received her letters at the Sydney Hospital, where I knew no one except by their eyes and walk as we were all in masks and gloves, all the time. I didn’t leave that hospital until it was almost 1920.