by Lynn Bushell
She stops herself. This isn’t something Pierre would do. He can’t bear hurting people. Though he did hurt Marguerite, she thinks with satisfaction. He hurt Marguerite for her sake, so perhaps he would hurt Marthe, too. She should feel sorry for her, but she doesn’t. There’s no room for Marthe in their lives now.
It’s got dark while she’s been sitting there. She eases back the drawer and crosses to the window. In the street below, the lamps are lit. She hears a woman laughing. A cart rumbles down the street over the cobbles. At the bar across the road two men are sitting at an outside table, arguing. Pierre will be in Saint-Germain by now. Perhaps he’s sitting down to supper at this very moment, telling Marthe . . . what?
She shakes her head. Each time she thinks about it, she gets to the point where Pierre is ready to tell Marthe everything and then it’s as if her imagination shuts down. She looks round the studio for something she can occupy herself with.
Then she sees it, wedged into the gap between the rug and one leg of the chaise longue. It’s the button Pierre lost from his cuff on their first night together. Renée picks it up and turns it over in her hand. It’s white with two holes – one of those soft linen buttons that are difficult to fasten. Renée fingers it. It’s as if she is holding him there in the palm of one hand. She feels certain now that everything will be all right. The button links her to him. There is half an inch of thread still in the holes and Renée teases it between her thumb and index finger. She looks round for somewhere she can put the button where it will be safe, and tucks it underneath the bowl of apples on the windowsill.
Tomorrow, she decides, she’ll look for Caro in the café. It’s through Caro that Roussel will find out that Pierre is now officially her lover.
I lie in the bath, my head against the rim. My knees bob up above the water – rocky outcrops in a green sea uninhabited except by guillemots, a surface to cling onto in a high wind. My toes rise out of the sea like calloused reptiles and sink down into the depths again. I pat the water absently and send waves eddying towards them. I can lie like this for hours, patting at the water like a mother calming down a restless child. I am the lighthouse keeper and the ocean is my kingdom.
Downstairs I hear Pierre’s key in the lock. The front door opens and then closes. He calls, ‘Marthe?’ I don’t answer. He’ll be hanging up his coat and taking off the bowler hat. He only wears it going to and from the tram stop. He pretends he does it out of deference to me, so that the neighbours will mistake him for an office worker or a clerk. But after all this time they’ve probably decided he is neither.
He is coming up the stairs now. He knows that, if I am not downstairs, I will be in the bath. I used to have my baths each morning after he had left, but I have two or three a day now. He taps on the door and comes in without waiting for an answer. He looks down at me. He’s painted me so often like this that he would have been disturbed to find me sitting up or with my knees bent, scrubbing at my back or rubbing soap into my arms. I am the ‘done-to’ not the ‘do-er’.
There’s a jar of ointment on the rim next to the tap. He kneels down, rolling up his sleeves, and scoops a little of it out onto his fingers. I hold up my arm obligingly and he begins to rub the ointment on my skin in circles till his fingers run dry. When they catch against a shred of loose skin, I start and he hesitates. I keep my eyes closed. He is working his way up towards the elbow.
‘Do you think the rash is getting worse? Should we call Doctor Dolbecq in to have a look at you? Perhaps he can suggest a different ointment.’
‘This one’s good enough.’
He takes my arm and turns it gently. There are weals along the inside that have bled. He puts his lips against the hard skin. ‘I’m so sorry.’ What is he apologising for? Look at him, kneeling on the bathroom floor as if he’s genuflecting at the altar. This is where he worshipped me.
‘Poor little bird,’ he murmurs. ‘My poor little bird.’
That night we lie like two spoons, Pierre with his arms around me. When he touches me, I feel the hard skin on his knuckles and I’m grateful for the roughness of it. My skin must feel like this too. A quarter of a century of lying in the bath as it gets colder, of my hands plunged into boiling water in the sink or washtub.
Pierre sees through his fingers, so I know that when he touches me he sees the texture and the colour of my skin and tucks it in the secret places of his mind for later. When he paints me now, he’s drawing on what he remembers. I know this is not a new beginning. I can recognise an ending when it comes.
Roussel keeps an account at La Rotonde and Caro sometimes has her breakfast there while she is waiting for him. Renée thinks the brown shape by her legs is Sweetie; then she sees it’s Caro’s satchel scrunched up on the floor beside her.
‘Isn’t Sweetie with you?’
‘He escaped the evening of the victory celebrations. Ricki put up posters with his picture on, but no one’s seen him.’
‘Caro, I’m so sorry. You must miss him dreadfully.’
She shrugs. ‘He wasn’t really mine.’ She looks at Renée. ‘You’ve not been in here for ages, either.’
‘I went down with ’flu. I nearly died.’
‘Poor you.’ She dabs a handkerchief against her nose.
‘I’ve left the place in Belleville I was in. I shall be living in the studio from now on. We’ll see more of one another.’
Caro nods.
‘Why isn’t anybody here?’
‘The painters are all working.’
‘Why aren’t you with Roussel in the studio, then?’
‘I’m still waiting for him to arrive. He goes to church on Sundays.’
‘Church!’
‘He’s Catholic,’ says Caro.
Pierre is an agnostic. Renée had assumed that went for all the painters in their circle. ‘I’m a Catholic, too,’ she says.
‘Yeah?’ Caro looks at her with mild enquiry. ‘Don’t you go to church, then?’
Renée looks away. ‘Not lately.’
‘Nothing to confess, eh?’ Caro grins.
‘Too much,’ says Renée. ‘Where to start?’
She hasn’t been to church since she moved in with Marguerite. Before that, she had hardly sinned at all, it seemed to Renée. Afterwards, she was too busy sinning to have time to think about it. Churches in the centre had been closed down in the last months of the war after a shell went through the roof of Saint Gervais, an old church in the Marais, and killed eighty-eight. It was incomprehensible to Renée that God would allow a shell to fall on people who were at that very moment praying to be kept safe. Some of the department stores, including hers, allowed those worshippers with nowhere else to congregate to use their basements. Renée heard them singing sometimes as she left the store, but she had never felt inclined to join them and she didn’t now.
‘Are you and Pierre . . . ?’ Renée nods. ‘Where is he now?’
‘He’s gone back to his house in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. He’s got a wife there.’
‘Does she know about it?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Can’t you go home too? You’ve got a family, haven’t you?’
‘My flatmate will have told them that I’m living with a married man.’
‘Right.’ Caro nods.
‘I wondered if you’d like to walk down to the river later.’ Caro’s looking at her, blankly. Walking isn’t something she does very often. ‘Or you could come over to the studio.’
‘Sounds fun,’ says Caro, vaguely.
When Pierre comes in on Monday morning, Renée’s still asleep. With no one there to wake her up, she can sleep twelve or thirteen hours at a stretch. Her body is completely hidden underneath the blanket. When her face emerges, it is pale and bleary-eyed. She yawns and stretches out her arms.
He’s bought a brioche. For the first time since the war began, these are back on the shelves. She hauls herself into a sitting-up position, balancing the slice of brioche on her knees. She scoops the flakes of bread into
her mouth and mops the crumbs onto her fingers.
‘How is Marthe?’ She knows better than to ask directly what’s been happening in Saint-Germain. She’d been aware of a reserve in him when he arrived, as if he was embarrassed by the memory of their last encounter.
He is perched beside her on the chaise longue, brushing stray crumbs absently onto the floor. She scrunches up the paper bag and sinks back on the cushions. Pierre rests one arm on her knees. ‘She isn’t well. She knows that something’s going on. Her body senses it and that’s how it responds. I couldn’t make it worse for her.’ He’s telling her he’s not said anything to Marthe. Renée feels a rush of disappointment. She begins to plait the loose threads on the silk kimono she is wearing. For a moment neither of them speaks.
‘And how was your weekend?’ he says. ‘How did you occupy yourself?’
‘I went down to the café.’ She was going to pretend she’d spent the weekend in the studio, but she wants Pierre to know that there are other options open to her. He does not respond. ‘I thought it would be nice to talk to Caro. It’s a long time since I’ve seen her.’
Pierre lays a hand on Renée’s calf. Because she’s nearly naked and he isn’t, there is something in the gesture that’s uncomfortably proprietorial. He senses it as well and takes his hand away, then seems uncertain what to do with it.
‘Her dog went missing on the evening of the victory celebrations.’
‘Yes, I’d heard. Is she upset?’ He rests the hand beside her foot, but Renée notices the fingers are still quivering.
‘Not really. Not as much as I’d have been.’
He loops his fingers round her ankle.
‘Did you know that Roussel was a Catholic?’ She is watching him for a reaction. Roussel is the stick she beats Pierre with when she has no other weapon.
‘No, I didn’t.’ His hand moves down to her instep. ‘Caro’s not a Catholic, presumably.’
‘I don’t think Caro’s anything.’
He cups her toes into the palm of one hand. Renée wriggles them. ‘That tickles.’ Her toes feel like small birds fluttering inside his palm. He’s looking strangely at her. Suddenly he puts his face down to her feet and takes the big toe in his mouth. She feels the bristles of his beard against her foot. His tongue dips down into the crevices between her toes, exploring parts of her that nobody has accessed since her mother bathed her as a child. The tongue flicks back and forth as if it has an independent life. Each time it dips into the gulley, Renée feels the flesh between her thighs contract and melt. The churning in her stomach is so powerful she’s frightened she might come before he’s even got undressed. She wrenches at his collar. He is struggling to get his trousers off. He thrusts himself against her and she curls her legs around his back. She’s whimpering and calling out to him. Once he has spent himself inside her, they lie drifting in and out of sleep until the bells ring out for midday.
That night he stays with her in the studio and in the morning they start early and work through until the afternoon. The next day is the same. She brings in food and cooks it on the stove. She often has to clean paint off the knives when Pierre has used them to prise open tins or scoop whatever pigment is left over back into the tin it came from. He looks on, amused, as she puts one pan then another on the hotplate, alternating them until whatever they contain is heated through. He turns her face towards him as she stands there with a saucepan in each hand and kisses her. ‘My darling girl,’ he whispers.
Sometimes when they’ve finished eating and she’s cleared away, he reads to her. She isn’t used to reading by herself; it seems to take a lot of effort. Even when the story draws her in, she can’t help riffling through the pages to find out how many more there are to get through. But when Pierre reads, she sees the characters in front of her. He reads to her from Dickens and she gasps with horror at the passage in which Bill Sykes murders Nancy.
‘Did he really kill her?’ She has read of such things in past copies of the penny dreadfuls that she picks up in the market.
‘In the story, yes.’
‘She won’t come back to life, then, even at the end?’
He smiles. ‘It’s not a fairy story, Renée. People don’t come back to life.’
‘But stories aren’t true.’
‘No they aren’t. But they reflect life. That’s why they affect us in the way they do.’
‘You don’t think that could really happen?’ Renée knows it can. It happens several times a year in Belleville.
‘It’s not so much the event itself; it’s the emotions that lead up to it – love, passion, anger, jealousy. Those things exist in all of us and Dickens shows us what the consequences are when we don’t keep a rein on them.’
She’s sitting at his feet and gazing up at him, her arms wrapped round his legs. Her chin is resting on his knees. ‘I wish you hadn’t read that bit,’ she says, but next time when he settles down to read to her, that is the passage Renée asks for.
‘Are you sure? You seemed upset the last time.’
‘Yes, but now I know what happens, it’s all right.’ What Renée’s interested in is not so much the suffering of Nancy as the rage of Bill Sykes. That is what she wants to understand.
‘Is this the button off my shirt cuff?’ Pierre turns it over in his palm.
‘I found it underneath the chaise longue.’
‘Clever girl.’ He goes to put it in his pocket.
‘Are you taking it away?’ says Renée.
‘Marthe will have noticed there’s a button missing from the shirt.’
‘Why don’t you let me sew it on for you?’
‘I wouldn’t want to put you to the trouble.’ He goes back to tapping down the paint lids with the little hammer he keeps underneath the workbench.
‘It’s no trouble,’ Renée says. She tries to keep her voice flat.
‘I think Marthe would prefer to sew it on,’ Pierre says, quietly.
Renée goes on pulling on her clothes. Who cares which of them sews the button on? she thinks. What else has Marthe got to do all day? She pulls her stockings up and fastens the suspenders.
Pierre looks sideways at her. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing.’
He puts down the hammer so that he can press the lids down with his thumb to make sure they are airtight. ‘If you want to sew the button on . . .’
‘I don’t. Of course I don’t. Who cares about a rotten button?’
‘Quite.’ He smiles. ‘It’s not the button; it’s the principle. I understand that.’
‘I wish I did.’
‘There are certain things that Marthe’s always done, you see, and if I take those things away from her . . .’
‘You don’t have to explain.’
‘And there are other things that you do.’
‘What?’ She looks at him. ‘What things do I do?’
‘When I’m with you, I feel more alive. You’ve opened up a world I had forgotten. Does it matter which of you sews buttons on my shirts or trims my beard?’
Her eyes pass to the beard. ‘Does Marthe trim your beard for you?’
‘Yes. And my toenails. Maybe that’s a job you’d like.’
‘No, thank you.’
‘Well, then.’ He lines up the paint tins ready for the next day.
Renée throws her wrap across the screen. ‘Does Marthe have a button box?’
‘Yes, I believe she does.’
‘My mother has one. We were always begging her to let us play with it. We liked to sort them into piles, pretending they were people – big, fat men and skinny women, grandmothers and babies. Tonio pretended they were soldiers.’
‘It’s true, buttons seem to have a personality.’
‘Yours don’t. They’re all the same size and they’re white or black. Those are the ones that Tonio sent out to battle. They were always getting killed. He said it didn’t matter; there were always more.’
‘Your brother would have made a first-rate general.�
��
It’s been three days now since she set foot outside the studio except to buy food from the market. Pierre is lying on the chaise longue with one arm draped round her neck. She’s sitting with her back against it. Pierre is humming something out of an Italian opera where the heroine is dying of consumption, although Pierre said Violetta died because she’d sinned. It made her think of Marguerite.
‘Can we go out tomorrow?’
He stops humming. ‘To the café, do you mean?’
‘I thought we might go to the Tuileries? I want to see the rose garden.’
He shakes his head. ‘The rose garden was shelled during the last bombardment. It’s a crater.’
‘But that’s what I want to see.’
‘You want to see a vast hole with a few sad roses clinging to the edge of it?’ He laughs, but it’s a nervous laugh. If they go out, they run the risk of meeting someone Pierre knows and that will inevitably lead to gossip. Anyone who didn’t know already that he had a mistress would know now.
‘I saw a photograph in L’Illustration. Someone had left a copy on the Metro. It’s become a sort of shrine, they say. The roses have already started rooting in the soil again.’
‘If you would like to go, we will.’ The sigh he gives is almost imperceptible but still she hears it.
‘We don’t have to. We can stay here.’
‘No, you’re right. You can’t spend all your time cooped up in here. We’ll start off at the Tuileries and afterwards I’ll take you to the Louvre.’
‘Really? That place where they have all those enormous pictures?’
‘Would you like that?’
She is flattered that he is prepared to take the risk for her. She spends more time than usual on her appearance, pinning up her hair and putting on a dress that Pierre has bought her. There’s a little parasol that goes with it, which she’s been longing to show off. The day is sunny and although Pierre is wearing his habitual black overcoat, she doesn’t even bother with a shawl. She revels in the glances thrown at her by passers-by. She wishes Gabi or one of the other girls from work would suddenly appear and see her like this, walking down the pathway with a gentleman. But it’s a Thursday afternoon. The girls are all at work. The only people out this afternoon are those who have no work or have no need to work. Pierre keeps his hand looped round her arm.