Autumn Leaves

by Tessa Lunney

  “Next time we will have it on film.”

  “Be here soon, Bertie. I think I’ll need you.”

  28

  “crinoline days”

  My muscle memory, it seemed, was reliable. After a little more wandering from Gare du Nord, I recognized Ms. Harriet Harker’s apartment building. I had been coming here since the war, when she held an informal drop-in service for serving women. We could come and have a nap, a bath, a cocktail, and smoke with no one checking our uniforms or passes, with no one looking for chaperones or looking for a tryst. As most of the women she invited were part of the Ambulance Corps (unofficially sapphic, and they all looked good in trousers), freedom from male attention was particularly welcome. I was mostly there for the bath and the laundry service and good conversations with free-thinking women. Some of my fellow Voluntary Aid Detachment nurses behaved like schoolgirls on an especially bloody excursion. They survived shelling but were still afraid of their fragile “reputation.” Abandoned ambulance drivers were much more my thing.

  I stood at the front door and waited for the concierge to let me in. Last year, Harry had redecorated her whole apartment in purple, from pale lilac walls to aubergine bath towels. Would it still be purple or had Wendy managed to tone down Harry’s fin de siècle excesses? All I really wanted was to sink into one of Harry’s armchairs and let her lecture me on how thin I was, how my clothes needed mending, how I needed better work than the froth of gossip writing, and other ministrations of a friend who acted like a favorite aunt. I swayed slightly, so intense was my sudden desire to be cared for. I steadied myself as I smiled and chatted to the concierge, as I took my place in the clanking lift up to Harry’s apartment.

  “Kiki! Darling! Wait, let me tip the elevator boy.” She rushed out and placed a coin in the waiting palm of the lift operator. “You bohemians, I don’t think you’ll ever learn. Come in, come in! Excellent trousers, they really suit you. Wendy, look—Kiki’s in trousers!”

  “Very nice.” Wendy kissed me on both cheeks.

  “Very warm,” I said.

  “And good for walking, I can tell by your flush.”

  “I took the liberty of making pie.” Harry ushered me to the lounge. “Well, of asking Annette to make little pies, so you can eat a full meal but only feel like you’re eating snacks. Finger food, it’s my new craze. I could tell from last night that you needed a proper meal. Have you remembered to eat today? Pull over that ashtray, darling, but first put at least one bite of pie into that piehole of yours. Oh, grief, I was just the same when my mother died. I didn’t even like her, but when I heard of her death, I was all unmoored and in danger of sinking. Do you know what put me on an even keel again? I traveled to England and saw a cheese-wheel rolling competition, of all things. It was so much fun watching that enormous wheel of cheese roll down the hill, cheering for the men who chased after it, I found myself forgetting my grief for a while. It got better from there. I met Wendy on that trip too. Find yourself a Wendy!”

  I let Harry talk, leaning back into the armchair, looking out the large windows at the ever-darkening sky.

  “What was your mother’s name, Kiki?” Wendy asked. “Harry couldn’t tell me.”

  “Cordelia.”

  “Cordelia Button.”

  “Cordelia King Button, actually. She always included her maiden name.”

  “Cordelia King?” Harry looked shocked. “Your mother is—was—Cordelia King?”

  “The Cordelia King?” asked Wendy.

  “Is there more than one Cordelia King?” I asked. “Don’t tell me you knew her.”

  “We knew Cordelia King,” said Wendy. “Everyone did.”

  “Here, wait, let me…” Harry moved into another room, her purple dress flowing around her curves. “I have a photo—no, no—yes! Here it is. Here they are, I should say.”

  She returned, showing the photographs to Wendy who nodded, before she showed them to me, one hand on my shoulder.

  “Is that your mother, Kiki?”

  And there she was. In the first photograph, Harry sat at the terrasse tables of a Parisian café with a group of women. It was clearly some decades ago, as they all wore the fashions of the 1890s, with huge hair and long skirts, except they were smoking and there was not a chaperone in sight. I didn’t recognize anyone but young Harry and my young mother, in the same striped outfit that she wore in the photograph at Maxim’s. She was smiling with such joy, the position of her body was relaxed and somehow flirtatious and graceful.

  The second photograph was very recent. Harry stood next to Wendy, looking just like they did today. There was my mother, looking as I remembered her, with her perfect posture more like a punishment than good form, as though someone had slapped her wrist for slouching. It was here in Paris again, again outside a café. There were no uniforms at the table; it must have been taken on her last trip.

  “You knew her for years.”

  “Decades,” said Harry, moving over to perch on the arm of Wendy’s couch opposite me. “On and off. She was one of the first women I met when I moved to Paris. That photo,” she indicated the older photograph, “was taken in the first month I arrived.”

  “When was the other one taken?”

  “When we last saw her,” said Wendy. “About, let me think, 1920? 1919? Something like that.”

  “What…” How could I ask everything I needed to? “What was she like?”

  “I’m sure you’d know better than us, Kiki!”

  “I never knew this woman.” I pointed to the picture of my young mother. “Tell me about her. Tell me why she left Europe and why she always returned.”

  “Ah,” said Harry. “That was a question we often asked ourselves, me and the girls, Natalie, Winnie, Romaine, all the rest. Why would such a vibrant soul, a muse who was working to become an artist herself, suddenly pack up and leave for the other side of the world? She was an adventurer of the heart and mind, she said, and her body was very happy on the Kings Road or rue Gabrielle. She never even said she wanted to be married—she was committed to free living and free loving. She was very advanced!”

  “It was one of the reasons she was so loved,” said Wendy.

  “Yes, she was… tolerant is too mealy-mouthed, but her morality was that you could live as you wished. She just loved being alive, being in Paris, going to galleries and dance halls and cafés and, oh, everything! When she left for Australia, we didn’t have a farewell party, we had a wake! She didn’t even properly say goodbye, which I liked to think was why she kept coming back…”

  “But we knew it wasn’t,” said Wendy.

  Harry sighed. “Of course we knew. We…” Harry pursed her lips and looked out at the glowering sky.

  “I’ve read her diaries.” I ground my cigarette into the ashtray with too much force. “All twenty-seven years of them. You don’t have to keep her secrets. I know just how unhappy she was. I know that there was a man, a special man, who she came back for. She got pregnant by him but lost the pregnancy after she’d already married my father. That this man couldn’t, or wouldn’t, marry her, directed the course of her life. Who is he?”

  Both women stared at me in a kind of stunned silence.

  “This can’t be a secret,” I said.

  “Well, it is, actually,” said Harry.

  “She always had plenty of admirers,” said Wendy, “but when she visited us… well, we always thought she was…” Wendy and Harry exchanged a look.

  “One of us,” said Harry. “A sapphic. Or maybe that she didn’t make the distinction, man or woman, she loved a person for who they were.”

  “I read nothing about any woman in her diaries. She only referred to ‘he’ or ‘him.’ ” We were looking at each other with the same question in our frowns: who was Cordelia, really? These two women across the coffee table seemed to be separated from me not by a few feet but by the chasm of a generation.

  “To be honest, we only assumed she was one of us,” said Harry. “We never actually saw any evi
dence of it.”

  “All the more remarkable then,” said Wendy.

  “And all the more secretive,” I said. “So, who were her admirers?”

  “Everyone!” Harry threw up her hands. “She was so vivacious, so sensual…” Harry’s voice choked up, and she had to stop and dab at her eyes with the handkerchief Wendy passed to her. The pale purple of the walls seemed gray and drab in the dim light from the windows.

  “She was beautiful,” said Wendy, still looking at Harry.

  “She truly was. I can’t believe… such a loss. Her admirers, alright, let’s see.” Harry took a breath and appeared to pull herself together. “When I first knew her, before she left for Australia, she was part of Rodin’s set.”

  “Gertrude Stein said the same thing.”

  “Yes, Rodin, not my thing really, but there you go. The big man didn’t attend the gatherings all that often, but the others did, who were they… actually, you know, I don’t think I ever really knew them. Men, painting and sculpting and feeling themselves so important, older than Picasso and those Modernists. They were working with color and light. Lovely work, but, oh, very old-fashioned ideas about women. I don’t know what she saw in them.”

  I couldn’t stop myself from picking at the purple velvet of the armchair, worrying at a little thread until it gave way, bit by bit.

  “And in London?”

  “I heard about her in London,” said Wendy. “It took me years to link the stories of ‘Lovely Deelie,’ with Cordelia King in Paris. But she was a favorite there too, a model, she was part of the Café Royal set. From what I understood, she would walk into the Royal for dinner, find an artist, and agree to pose for him the next day. After the sitting they’d join the Café Royal crew and the cycle would continue.”

  I’d been to the Café Royal; it was a hub of hubbub and bohemian gossip. A vision of my mother at the Royal in her striped dress, greeting models in booths and listening to bearded painters, walked across Harry’s floor-to-ceiling windows.

  “That means…” I searched Wendy’s face but she didn’t reflect my surprise. “There must be hundreds of paintings or drawings of her!”

  “I’d say so!” said Harry. “I always wanted to see her own drawings, but she’d never show anyone her sketchbook.”

  “I got the impression they weren’t really sketches, they were… something else, ideas perhaps, something domestic or abstract or in some other way provocative,” said Wendy, “which is why she wouldn’t show anyone her work.”

  “The domestic was provocative?” I asked.

  “Oh yes,” said Wendy. “Men sneered at women painting women unless they were heroines of antiquity or naked little girls. You couldn’t paint a woman making dinner or hanging washing without being dismissed. As for breastfeeding! Heaven forbid we have bodies that aren’t solely for male pleasure.”

  “But her lover…” My head was beginning to whirl with questions like Where was her sketchbook? and Who was her teacher? “Rodin’s set, you think?”

  “If her lover was a man, in Paris, that would be my best guess,” said Harry. “We would have heard if her lover had been one of Natalie’s girls.”

  “But her lover could have been in London,” said Wendy. “As she lived in London most of the time, that would seem more sensible.”

  “But less romantic, darling,” said Harry. “And she was romantic. And in Paris so often too.”

  “Who were Rodin’s set?” I asked. “Apart from Matisse—and maybe Russell?—people never say the same names.”

  “I’ve never heard of Russell. You’ll need to ask—oh, who is it—Derain?” Harry conferred with Wendy.

  “Wasn’t Brancusi one of his students too?”

  “Isn’t Brancusi too young?”

  “I can never really tell under their beards.” Wendy grimaced.

  “Brancusi is too young,” said Harry. “You need men at least as old as us. Try André Derain, that’s my best recommendation. I think they were friends.”

  “Do you know where he lives?” Was Derain a Fauvist? My thoughts flashed with bright colors, seeing Harry’s dress glow, the stark contrast of Wendy’s white shirt against the aubergine velvet couch. “Or where his studio is? Unless he frequents the quarter…”

  “Ask around the galleries, honey, they’ll tell you.” Harry sighed again, poured wine, picked up food and put it down again. “So, Cordelia King is never coming back to Paris. I’m more devastated than I like to admit. You know, when she was here last, it was just after the war, we all felt, well, a bit old, a bit creaky. A bit like everything we’d worked toward had been dug up with the trenches and discarded just as easily—votes for women, for example, or freedom to love. We saw her having an aperitif alone at a café, she waved us over, and suddenly we were on a night out.”

  “She was tired and sad then,” said Wendy.

  “So were we all! To be honest, I didn’t notice.”

  “You were very tired, Harry, after your ambulance duties extended into the flu pandemic.”

  “Ah yes.” Harry and Wendy exchanged a tender, private look. I looked away, out the window over the rooftops, steel and slate and rust and stone.

  “Which is why your mother was tired, Kiki,” said Wendy. “She’d been nursing someone through the flu, but she wouldn’t say who. She just said, ‘He survived, thank God, and he even remembered thank me.’ ”

  “She was witty?”

  “Of course, darling!” said Harry. “Not in a cruel way, like those Cunard women, but softly, pointing out the ridiculous, playing with words.”

  “She was never like that at home.”

  They looked at each other again, a whole conversation in Wendy’s raised eyebrows, in Harry’s pursed lips.

  “We have long suspected that perhaps you were the only good thing to come out of her marriage, Kiki darling. Our guess is that she would have left the marriage if it hadn’t been for you.”

  “Not to make you feel guilty!” said Wendy. “She loved you, that’s what we mean.”

  “Of course! That’s exactly what we mean. You didn’t think… Someone asked her once, around a table twenty years ago or so, ‘What’s in Australia then? Don’t go home!’ but she just smiled her slow sensual smile and said, ‘My little girl.’ Someone made a comment about how her girl would be a little angel and the conversation moved on.”

  Was it Harry’s loving look that made me want to cry? Perhaps it was the way Wendy ran her hand through her short white hair and stared out the window, or the way Harry squeezed Wendy’s other hand with all the confidence of tested intimacy. Maybe it was my hangover, or my empty stomach, but I struggled to swallow even a sip of wine, and I couldn’t see the flame of my lighter through my rapid tearful blinking.

  “Actually, I do remember some of the people she sat for,” said Wendy, coming back to us from the view, “mainly because I asked her to sit for me and she was too busy! Matisse was the person she said no to me for, here in Paris.”

  “Apparently he’s very demanding,” said Harry, “which sounds like Cordelia, she could tame anyone.”

  “In London, well, the Café Royal set centered around Augustus John, so maybe him?” Wendy frowned. “Although he might be a bit young.”

  “Are you in London much, Kiki?” asked Harry.

  “Not if I can help it.”

  “I feel the same. Dirty, cramped city.”

  “But I might not be able to help it in the future.” I didn’t want to explore why with Harry. I had to have at least one part of my life unstained by Fox. “In any case, I have friends there who can help me.”

  I closed my eyes for a moment, seeing Bertie flirting his heart out in the Café Royal, seeing Tom striding down Fleet Street, collar up against the wintry rain. I opened them to find Harry sitting on the coffee table in front of me, her large silk-clad bottom surrounded by plates and glasses.

  “Kiki.” Harry leaned forward and took my hand from where it had been lying slack in my lap. “You can lean on us.
Truly.”

  I nodded. My head felt so heavy, it felt like I could hardly hold it against the armchair. Harry kissed my hand, exhaled heavily, then clapped her hands on her knees.

  “Anyway, Kiki, eat! You’re like a sparkling skeleton from the tomb of Tutankhamun. I absolutely can’t let you leave here with this plate empty.”

  “My heart is too full to eat.”

  “Rubbish. Try that one, it’s chicken and leek and delightfully creamy. Here, have some more wine. Annette! Some of the white from the trip south, please! There are stewed plums and cream for dessert and I won’t accept anything less than a plate licked clean.” She took my glass to top it up. “Now, tell me about all these princes you were with at Chanel’s little party! And did you meet the Germans? They said they were princes too, but unless they fought for France it seems a bit early to include them in a ballroom, don’t you think? I still can’t hear that accent without a shudder.”

  Harry shuddered theatrically, making the wine she was pouring splosh over the table. Wendy protested, Harry laughed, and I was able to relax enough to eat. The room was cozy, with its soft armchairs and roaring fire and some kind of extra modern heating somewhere too. Harry gave me all the gossip and news from the past year—where she and Wendy had been on holiday the last two summers, who came to her Sunday salon and who they left with. It was an effort for her to keep up her banter; Wendy held her hand and massaged her shoulders, Harry paused often when her chat is usually seamless. But I could not help her in her struggle. My own thoughts were too distracted by the clues about my mother’s lover.

  29

  “yes! we have no bananas”

  “Browne speaking.”

  “Bertie darling, the check arrived.”

  “Oh good! Now you can send us your copy on time, instead of dictating some beautiful nonsense over the telephone, that Mavis at reception then has to type up just in time to rush it to the printers.”