‘It’s good to see you, Tibbie,’ he said, wondering why she’d come. ‘It’s about Marie,’ she told him.
‘What’s wrong with her?’ he asked.
‘I’ve not had a letter for months and that’s not like her. I wake up at night worrying about her. I wondered if she’d written to you…’ Tibbie was twisting her fingers together nervously as she talked.
He leaned back in his chair. ‘No, she hasn’t. It looks as if she’s cut us both out of her life.’
Tibbie shook her head. ‘She wouldn’t do that. I wondered if you’d make some enquiries. You’re her brother…’
‘What sort of enquiries?’
‘With those friends of hers in Edinburgh. You could write to them and ask if they’ve heard from their daughter. She went to Paris with Marie. They were only meant to be there for three months and that’s more than a year ago.’
David frowned and pressed his fingers down onto the wooden top of his desk. ‘Of course she should never have gone to Paris in the first place. Maybe she realises that herself. Perhaps she’s run out of money and can’t come home,’ he said grimly.
Tibbie was prepared to grasp at straws. ‘If that’s all it is, I could send her money. Will you write to the Roxburghs and find out please, David?’
He nodded. ‘All right but I think you’re worrying unnecessarily. She s gone off and we’ll have to accept it. She’ll be moving around with swanky people who are better than us. That’s what she liked.’
‘You’re not being fair to her,’ said Tibbie, rising to go. He was annoying her. He saw her reaction and changed his attitude. ‘I’ll write today,’ he told her placatingly.
A few days later he arrived at Tibbie’s cottage and said solemnly, I’m afraid it looks as if you’ve been right to worry about my sister. I had a letter from her friend Miss Roxburgh today and it was quite upsetting. Apparently Miss Roxburgh came home a year ago and left Marie in Paris. She’d stopped attending her classes by that time and was going around with a very rackety crowd of people, artists who sold drawings off railings in the street, that sort of thing. Miss Roxburgh would have nothing to do with them.’
Tibbie was horrified. ‘In that case she shouldn’t have left Marie with these people. She should have written to you or to me.’
David raised his eyebrows. ‘I don’t think we can blame her. You know how stubborn Marie can be. Miss Roxburgh wanted her to return home too but she wouldn’t. She quit their lodgings and went to live in some room that was full of cats. The Roxburghs didn’t know Marie wasn’t in touch with us.’
Amy’s letter had scrupulously avoided mentioning Marie’s anguish over Murray and the tone of her missive was tolerant and long suffering, as if Marie had given her a good deal of trouble that she was loyally glossing over.
‘Cats?’ asked Tibbie in a bemused voice.
David consulted his letter. ‘Eighteen cats apparently.’
Tibbie leaned back in her chair with a gasp. ‘We’ve got to find her, David. Something’s very wrong.’
‘I’ll write her a letter,’ he said solemnly. ‘You have her last address in Paris, haven’t you? You write too. Surely she’ll answer one of us. This nonsense has got to stop. Eighteen cats indeed!’
That night, when Tibbie was trying to compose a light and non-accusatory letter to Marie, Emma Jane and Tim appeared at the cottage to tell her that Bethya Godolphin had died in Bella Vista, very suddenly of a heart attack. Both of them were weeping and Tim said with a groan, ‘We’ve sent for Sydney. He wasn’t with her when it happened. I know he’ll be devastated…’
‘And those poor children left without their mother,’ sobbed Emma Jane. ‘It’s so terrible.’
* * *
Two weeks after Bethya died, Pierre made one of his periodic visits to Madame Guillaume’s and collected Marie’s mail, two letters which Isabelle handed over with good wishes for Miss Benjamin. Rain was pouring down and all the cheerful cafés were battened down against the cold; the trees in the Jardins de Luxembourg were leafless; no vendors stood on street corners and Paris seemed to be hiding from itself.
Back at Mancini’s he found Marie huddled in bed. Her face was as white as a winding-sheet and the bones stood out prominently under strangely shiny skin; her blue eyes seemed enormous and perpetually anxious.
‘Oh Marie,’ he groaned, ‘I’m going to fetch you something to eat. The café downstairs has cassoulet today. It smells very good.’
She grimaced. ‘The very idea makes me feel sick.’
He sat beside her and held her hand. ‘Then what would you like?’
‘Chocolate,’ she said. ‘Black chocolate and a bright red apple.’
‘I’ll get them,’ he said, jumping to his feet. ‘While I’m away read your letters. There are two of them today.’
When he came back he was horrified to find her lying face down on the bed sobbing bitterly. On the floor beside her were pieces of paper as if she’d torn the letters up.
‘What’s wrong. Is it bad news?’ he exlaimed.
She lifted her head. ‘Very bad, very bad. The woman who sent me to Paris has died. I can’t believe it. She thought I’d be a great artist and I’ve let her down badly.’
For a long time she had done no work. Canvases, some only half-finished and with the unvarnished paint cracking, were stacked against the walls. If a picture looked saleable, Pierre took it to the dealer who gave him cash for it. He knew that Marie’s paintings were subsequently changing hands for ten times as much as he was paid for them but there was nothing he could do about it. She desperately needed money and he was not in a position to bargain too hard on her behalf.
She looked up at him and said, ‘And my other letter was from my brother. He wants me to go home.’
Pierre looked down at the bits of paper and she explained, ‘That’s his letter. He’d like nothing better than to see me crawling home, poor and sick and pregnant… Oh yes, he’d look after me for the rest of my life but he’d never let me forget what I owed him.’
‘You don’t have to go back to him. You could marry me. I’ll be a father for your child. VVe could go and live in the country together and forget all that’s happened to you here. My copies are selling well now,’ said Pierre desperately.
She stared at him. ‘You’re offering to marry me?’
‘I love you. I’m doing fakes for an American. He takes them to New York and sells them as Caravaggios. By next year I’ll have saved enough to leave Paris, to go to the south, to Arles perhaps. It’s lovely there. The sun shines all the time. It would be good for your cough.’
‘Dear Pierre,’ she said softly, ‘I can’t burden you with another man’s child. And I can’t marry you because I don’t love you enough.’
The baby inside her was restless, heaving about and kicking. ‘In spite of that I’d be proud to take you and your baby,’ he said simply.
But she shook her head. She still cherished the hope that Tadi would come back to her.
Pierre knew what she was thinking. ‘He won’t come,’ he said and left, closing the door quietly behind him.
Tears flowing down her cheeks, she rocked herself to and fro for a long time but then she got up and went out for a bottle of absinthe. After she’d drunk half of it, she started to write to Tibbie.
The words in the letter were disjointed and scrawled across the page. Sentences began but never finished; huge tear blobs made the ink run. She would never have posted it if she hadn’t been very drunk indeed. Tibbie received the envelope from the postman with delight. ‘It’s from Marie. Oh thank God! She’s all right!’ she cried out to him but reading what was inside changed her feelings, for the letter was almost incomprehensible, like the ravings of a lunatic. Sentences petered out; phrases were repeated over and over again… ‘Poor Lady Godolphin, I owe her so much… I’m well and happy. Paris is beautiful. I’ll stay here for a bit… Poor Lady Godolphin, she was so kind to me… I’m staying here for a little longer. I have cried and cried about poor
Lady Godolphin. I can’t believe she’s dead…’
Then, at the foot of the page was written, ‘I miss you so much, Tibbie. I dream about you and the cottage at night. I hope we’ll meet again one day…’ Shocked, Tibbie read it over and over again. Then she took it to Falconwood to show to Emma Jane, who tried to conceal her misgivings for Tibbie’s sake but could not help saying, ‘If someone was speaking to me like that I’d think she was drunk.’
‘Drunk!’ Tibbie was shocked. ‘Marie never had a drop of liquor pass her lips in her life.’
‘Then maybe she was just shocked and homesick. Bethya’s death must have been a terrible blow to her,’ suggested Emma Jane. She succeeded in soothing Tibbie’s fears a little but not completely because she decided not to show David the letter. However, since he did not visit her, she was not put to the test.
It was a long winter, uniformly grey and wet. Towards the end of her pregnancy, Marie drifted into a state of suspended animation which made her more tranquil. Her frail prettiness returned, she stopped drinking and even managed to eat some of the food brought by the faithful Pierre, who still looked after her in spite of her rejection of him.
Thérèse had been furious at Marie when she ran away from the abortionist but as time passed, she forgave her, especially when she saw how pathetically helpless and ill the girl was. She or one of the other women in the building looked in on the girl every day to see that she was all right. All Marie’s energy was concentrated on the baby who heaved around inside her. She spent hours sitting with her hands on her belly, feeling it swimming around like a vigorous little fish.
She could not stir herself to paint any more. The colours on her palette caked hard, the stacked canvases gathered dust. She was waiting, waiting, and hoping that Tadi would come.
She marked a chart of her pregnancy on the wall of her room and ticked off each day. Other ticks she made also represented the number of days since she had seen Tadi… two hundred and ten, two hundred and twenty…
Every morning she thought he would appear, every day she did not go out till it was dark in case she missed him. The nights were hideously long, made terrible by the yowls of cats and the hurrying feet of solitary pedestrians on the cobbled street beneath her window. If she was careful the money Pierre had got for her pictures would last till the baby came. She did not think any farther than that.
One dreadful, lonely night she remembered the relief she’d been granted by the opium that Madame Robert gave to her. Next day she slipped downstairs to the laundry and bought a bit from an old Chinese woman who worked there. After that she bought it often and spent her days in a daze. Pierre and the other women did not realise what gave her such serenity. They were only glad that she was not drinking so much.
She neither knew nor cared how her appearance had changed, for she never looked in a mirror. Her belly was sticking out as if she were carrying a ball under her dress but her arms and legs were stick-thin. Her beautiful hair was lank and her peaked face looked like that of a starving child.
The disease that Madame Robert had spotted in her had taken a firm hold during the winter and the cough was worse. She did not know that the pinkness which flooded her cheeks was not a healthy sign but a hectic flush. Nor did she particularly worry when she woke in the morning and found bloodstains on her pillow. When her cough got too bad, Pierre went to a pharmacy and bought her linctus but he knew that she would almost certainly forget to take it.
‘Please marry me, Marie,’ he asked again but she dreamily shook her head she said, ‘I can’t, Pierre. I’m waiting for Tadi, you see. When the baby’s born he’ll love me again.’
He rose angrily. ‘I heard last week that he’s gone to Berlin with some rich woman. He’s even left Thérèse. Can’t you accept that he’s a bad lot?’
But it did not matter to Marie.
On a bright spring morning, Thérèse paused at her door and heard her groaning.
As always the door was unlocked so she rushed in calling out, ‘Have you started?’
Marie had been sweating and writhing in bed all night and the tumbled covers were half over the floor.
‘Help me, please,’ she said through gritted teeth.
‘How long have you been like this?’
‘I don’t know. It was still dark when I woke up. I can’t move… it’s so painful…’
Thérèse threw up her hands in horror. ‘Have your waters broken?’ she asked.
‘The mattress is wet,’ admitted Marie through clenched teeth. The pains were agonising. She felt as if her body were being torn in half.
‘Then it’s coming. We’ll have to do something. I’ll get a midwife.’ Thérèse went rushing out and soon came back with a mild-faced little woman who was rolling up her sleeves as she walked into the room.
She took one look at the convulsing Marie and said, ‘Oh dear, this is bad. I can’t do anything with her. I think the baby’s upside down. We’ll need to take her to the nuns. They’ll know what to do.’
There was a convent hospital for mothers and babies a short distance away so Mancini carried Marie there in his arms. She weighed next to nothing.
Gentle nuns received her. Through the spasms of agony that racked her, she knew she was being cared for, given medicines, put into a high bed, covered with a pure white sheet, her brow stroked, a sponge passed over her face.
She caught hold of someone’s hand and squeezed it hard every time a convulsion racked her. She screamed and wished she could die so that she would be delivered from such torture.
After a prolonged and agonising labour, the child was eventually dragged out of her by forceps. She was so weak and ill that she did not know she’d had a daughter until the following morning, because she collapsed into merciful sleep and did not waken till twenty-four hours had passed.
When she opened her eyes she stared about in amazement. She was in bed, in a high-ceilinged room with windows down one side and a parquet floor that gleamed in the sunlight. A sweet-faced little nun bent over her and whispered, ‘Do you want to see your daughter?’
Marie nodded. ‘Yes, please.’ It seemed a miracle that the bulge that had been in her belly and impeded her movements for so long should now have become a child, another human being. For a moment panic seized her because she had no idea how she was going to look after it.
The baby was beautiful, with an elegantly shaped head covered in Tadi’s black curls. Its face was tranquil and it was sleeping peacefully because it was being suckled by a strong woman who had given birth on the same day as Marie and was producing enough milk for two.
The nun put the baby in Marie’s arms and asked, ‘What are you going to call her?’
Just as she had never speculated about her feelings when the child was born, she had not thought of a name either. She smiled feebly and said, ‘I don’t know. My mother was called Mariotta…’
‘That’s a pretty name,’ said the nun.
Marie shook her head. ‘But I can’t call her that because my mother had a very sad life. No, I can’t call her Mariotta.’
She felt as if that name carried some sort of curse with it. It would not be fair to pass it on to an innocent child.
‘Call her after yourself then. Marie is a lovely name. Call her after Our Lord’s mother,’ suggested the nun.
‘No, I don’t think so. I’ve not been very happy either. I’ll find another name for her. I know, I’ll call her after Kitty. Then she’ll be strong and brave.’
Though the child was feeding well, the nuns christened her that night. It was not the baby they were worried about, it was the mother. They wanted Marie to know that her daughter had been accepted into the care of the Church because they were afraid that she was going to die very soon.
When the doctor in charge of the hospital examined her, he shook his head and whispered to the nun by his side. ‘Her lungs are riddled with tubercular lesions.’ Then he patted Marie’s shoulders and said more loudly, ‘Lie down and sleep, my dear. You’re going to be
in the hospital for a little while longer.’
Chapter Twenty-one
Freddy was beginning to irk Kitty though at first she denied this, even to herself. She found that more and more she wanted to be alone, to wander off and please herself where she went or what she bought. The constant company of Freddy and his noisy entourage was beginning to annoy her and she resented the role he had forced her into, the role of Freddy Farrell’s concubine.
Peg and her family still turned up unannounced and uninvited at the Strand about once a week. They were prodigiously hungry and thirsty, maudlin in drink and unashamed in their flagrant flattery of Freddy.
She disliked Peg most of all because she was always conscious of the woman’s pig-like eyes following her around, assessing her clothes, guessing at how much she cost Freddy.
‘I hate the way she flatters you,’ she said to him after one interminable visit, but he only laughed.
‘Don’t mind old Peg. She’s kissed the Blarney Stone.’
‘What relation is she to you anyway? Why does she have to come here with her starving – and thirsty – family practically every week?’ demanded Kitty.
‘She’s my auntie,’ said Freddy lightly.
‘Exactly how?’ persisted Kitty, ‘Is she your mother’s sister or your father’s sister?’
Freddy frowned. ‘Neither really. She’s a sort of distant relation, a kind of cousin three times removed.’
‘Then I wish she’d remove herself out of here for good and stop leeching on you because that’s what she’s doing. You can’t owe her all that much surely!’
‘Kitty,’ he said irritably, ‘don’t make a fuss. Irish families are like that.’
He had always been a considerate lover and now he began to treat her even more ardently, from time to time even asking her to marry him.
The first time he did that she was genuinely surprised.
‘I don’t think that’s a good idea. I’m not the marrying kind,’ she told. He didn’t argue and it seemed to her that he’d made the offer as a sop to her and that he was relieved when she did not take him up on it.
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