Painted Ladies

by Lynn Bushell

  ‘This must be quite a shock,’ she says. ‘I know you’ve been together for a long time.’

  ‘Yes, we have.’

  ‘Although of course he isn’t married to you,’ she says, in a sideways swipe.

  ‘Nor you, either,’ I say, brutally.

  ‘No, but he’s asked me.’

  Is she lying? I keep my voice flat. ‘You’d be a fool to pin your hopes on that,’ I say. ‘Pierre is married to his work. He’s fond of animals and he prefers his women when they are as much like animals as possible. The objects in his living room are next in line. I’ve seen him passionate about the butter dish, for instance. He’s head over heels in love with that old radiator. Oh yes, you would probably be in there somewhere, as a blob of yellow maybe or a stripe of purple – not much more than that. Are you sure it’s enough for you?’

  ‘It’s more than anybody else has offered me.’

  I wonder why. She has the sort of looks most men in Paris would go crazy over.

  ‘Will you let him go?’ This is the question she’s come here to ask.

  ‘It isn’t up to me.’

  ‘You want him to be happy, don’t you?’

  ‘You think you can make him happy? You’re a child.’ This upstart of a girl is starting to annoy me. ‘You have no idea what you’d be taking on.’

  ‘I’d learn. I’d learn from him. We’d both learn. Fifty isn’t old.’

  ‘Too old to start again, you’ll find.’

  She goes to speak and stops. She knows I’m right. ‘You’re not a bit as I imagined,’ she says, stubbornly.

  I stick my chin out. ‘What did you imagine?’

  ‘Once when we had been comparing animals to people, Pierre said you were like a mole inside the body of a wren.’

  ‘What sort of animal were you, then?’

  She’s begun to wish she hadn’t started on this tack. ‘A whippet.’

  ‘What about Pierre? He must have been an ostrich.’

  I imagine all their post-coital conversations, giggling like children as they tore apart the world we had inhabited for quarter of a century.

  ‘I thought you’d be a bit more . . .’

  ‘Like a mole?’ Now she’s embarrassed. Meeting me must be a challenge, if a mole was what she was expecting. Think of Jane Eyre meeting Mrs Rochester. I never read the book, but Pierre read bits of it to me in bed.

  ‘I’d hoped we could be friends.’

  ‘A whippet and a mole? That isn’t very likely. Did Pierre suggest you came?’

  ‘No. I just happened to be passing.’ Now she’s blushing. She’s aware of what she’s just said. This is not the sort of place you happen to be passing. ‘Would you rather not to have met me?’

  If she’d asked me in advance, I would have said no. I’d have been afraid by the comparison between us – her eyes, my eyes, her skin, my skin, her age, my age. All I have on my side is the fact that I have been here longer. She is like an orchid in a cabbage patch. Her eyes are hungrily devouring the objects in the room – the vase of flowers on the windowsill, the rug, the cat curled up on the settee, the pipe next to the fruit bowl and the spent match on the plate. She wants to understand the world he lives in when he’s not with her, so she can recreate it somewhere else.

  ‘Don’t look!’ I want to scream. ‘How can you cast your eyes around our home? As if you haven’t plundered it enough already!’

  ‘Pierre, I’m sorry! Don’t be angry.’

  ‘You went to the house in Saint-Germain! But why?’

  ‘I wanted to see where you lived when you were not with me. I thought if I could picture you there, I would feel less lonely.’

  ‘But you knew that I’d gone back to speak to Marthe. Couldn’t you have waited?’

  ‘I did wait. I waited eight days! I thought I would go mad waiting.’ Should she tell him that she did go mad, that after eight days she could not endure another minute on her own?

  ‘It was more difficult than I’d imagined. I had no choice but to put it off. There was a crisis in the family.’

  ‘Marthe told me. You’d gone to a funeral. I’m sorry.’

  ‘What did Marthe say to you?’

  ‘It was as if she had been waiting for me.’

  Pierre puts one hand to his forehead, drawing in the skin towards the centre with his thumb and forefinger.

  ‘She wasn’t what I had expected. I thought she would be more homely, somehow. You know, like my mother.’

  ‘Like your mother!’

  Renée reaches for his hand. She needs Pierre to reassure her that what’s happened won’t make any difference to the two of them, but she knows it already has.

  ‘I wish you hadn’t done this,’ he says.

  I sit with my hands clasped in my lap. I haven’t even looked at him yet.

  ‘Dear one, tell me what’s the matter?’ He takes off his overcoat and kneels down next to me. He reaches for my hand, but I withdraw it, like a child refusing to be comforted.

  ‘You let that woman come into our home and then you ask me what the matter is!’

  ‘I didn’t know that she was coming.’ Pierre pulls up a chair. Perhaps he’s feeling at a disadvantage down there on his knees.

  ‘You haven’t been like this with any of the others,’ I say. Now’s the moment to point out that every time he strayed, I knew about it. He is looking at me now as if I haven’t just confronted him with something that he thought I didn’t know. Like all the other things we’ve never told each other, it’s as if it simply slipped our minds.

  ‘The others weren’t important,’ he says.

  What he’s saying is that this one is. I wish I hadn’t asked. ‘How did you meet her?’

  ‘She was on her way to work at Printemps. You remember?’

  ‘Like me. I was on my way to work, the first time you set eyes on me. You’re lucky you don’t get arrested, going up to women in the street like that.’ He gives a joyless laugh. ‘How long before you slept with her?’

  ‘Don’t torture yourself like this, Marthe.’

  ‘How long?’ I insist.

  ‘A long time; that’s all.’

  So it could have started years ago. Perhaps the last time I thought he had been unfaithful, it was her he was unfaithful with.

  ‘It’s just something that happened, Marthe. Neither of us wanted it.’

  He makes it sound so reasonable and in a way it is. What right have I got to deny him someone who has captivated his attention in the way that I did quarter of a century ago. But it is this that breaks my heart and makes me wilful – I have no choice.

  Yesterday, he pointed to three overlapping apples in a still life and said, ‘That’s us.’

  ‘There are three of them,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Pierre.

  This evening when he comes downstairs, I’m chopping onions in the kitchen. Usually I wait until he’s in the room before I start preparing dinner so that he can watch me doing it. I may be only standing at the stove but what I’m doing is important if he’s watching me. It’s like we’re doing it together. When I turn round this time, he’s still watching me but there’s a glazed look on his face and I know that it isn’t me he’s seeing. It’s her. Then I slam the knife down and he jumps.

  ‘Don’t bother sitting down to dinner with me if the only person you can think about is that whore!’ I shout. I can’t bear the noise my voice makes. I sound like a fishwife. I told Pierre my surname was ‘de Méligny’, but if I really were ‘de Méligny’, I wouldn’t be reacting like this.

  ‘Renée’s not a whore,’ Pierre says. And he gets up quietly and leaves the room.

  I’m wondering if I should bring the chopper down across my wrist. It’s hard to know what Pierre’s thinking at the best of times, but when I shouted at him something happened to his face. It was as if he had been looking at the same thing for a long time and had just seen something different in it. It was not so much discovery as disappointment. If he didn’t know before, he knows now wh
ich class I belong to.

  I should go up after him. I did get halfway up the stairs once. I was going to say, ‘All right, if it means so much to you, you’d better go to her.’ But not to know what they were doing, now that I know she exists, imagining the worst . . . I’d rather he was here, unhappy, cursing me.

  ‘I’m going to get out of Paris for a while.’

  ‘If you want me to leave, you only have to say so.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Marthe,’ he says. ‘This is your home. Where else would you go?’ He doesn’t say he doesn’t want me to; he only says I couldn’t. ‘Stupid Marthe,’ he might just as easily have said. ‘You surely don’t think after all this time that you can get by on your own?’ He’s right. I need the fruit bowl and the butter dish, the rugs and curtains just as much as he does. It’s as if the whole house and its contents have been grafted onto me.

  I’ve seen Pierre weep when the cat knocked something off the mantelpiece. At the beginning, I’d say, ‘Don’t fret. I can get another one. It didn’t cost much.’ Then I realised that what he was suffering was grief. And yet he’s talking about leaving me. Am I the only object in the house he can get by without?

  ‘I want to visit Rome. I’m going there with Renée,’ he says.

  No, I think. I can’t be hearing this. It doesn’t make sense, any of it. Pierre, who likes the things around him to be ordinary and familiar, faced with all that grand art, those vast buildings.

  ‘Are you going to be coming back?’ I have to ask this. How can I get through the days unless I know there is an end to them?

  ‘I won’t be coming back to this house,’ he says. ‘Renée . . .’ For a man who doesn’t trust words, this is hard for him to say. ‘We shall be getting married,’ he says, finally, and gives a little sigh as if to marry Renée is the saddest thing imaginable. And for me it is.

  ‘You’ll miss the animals,’ I say.

  His mouth curls. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I shall. And I shall miss you too.’

  ‘Then why go?’ is what I would like to shout out. But I don’t. In the silence, I can hear the clock tick. It’s the one that stopped at five o’clock in every picture. I feel angry that it goes on ticking now. ‘Life goes on,’ it says, cheerily. ‘Tick, tock.’

  I stand there dumbly and eventually he takes my arms and kisses me.

  ‘Is this your daughter’s first experience of Italy?’

  Pierre replies without the slightest hesitation. ‘It’s the first time she’s been out of France.’

  The woman looks at her with wide eyes. ‘What a marvellous adventure for you. Rome is wonderful!’

  ‘I’ve told her that,’ says Pierre. ‘She’s looking forward to it, aren’t you, darling?’

  He smiles down at her. She leans her head against his shoulder and pretends to doze. The woman whispers to him, ‘What a beautiful young girl; you must be very proud of her.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Pierre. ‘I am.’

  Her little boy is playing with a toy car, running it along the ledge beside the window. Next to him, his sister’s playing with a doll. She’s talking to it and she looks up coyly every now and then to see if Pierre is looking at her. The performance is for him. His smile is distant but it is enough. If she were ten years older she would be behaving in the same way, shyly giving him the ‘come on’.

  Renée feels a wave of jealousy. She’d thought the ring Pierre had bought her would transform her magically in other people’s eyes, but no one bothers looking at her hands; they have already come to a decision about who and what she is. She’s either this man’s daughter or she is his whore. The silver band is too discreet. She’d hoped for something more substantial, but presumably that’s why he chose it. If it was a wedding ring it would be gold, so even if she does succeed in bringing it to people’s notice it will only reinforce what they already know – that she is not what she pretends to be.

  The woman leaves the train at Lazio. ‘I hope you have a lovely trip,’ she says.

  Pierre helps them with their baggage, summoning a porter. When he comes back, he finds Renée staring from the window.

  ‘Anyone would think you did this all the time, the way you answered her.’

  ‘Believe me, it’s not something I would do from choice.’

  Does he mean being here at all, or posing as her father? ‘Are you going to pretend that’s what you are when we arrive at the hotel?’

  ‘I can’t. They’ll want to see our passports.’

  ‘Won’t you be embarrassed?’

  ‘I’ll try not to be. They charge enough. I’m paying them to turn a blind eye.’

  ‘What if they say no?’

  ‘Then we’ll go somewhere else.’ His nerves are on edge. When he signs the register in the hotel, the man behind the counter in reception glances at her. When the porter brings their bags up, Pierre tips him. Once the man has gone, he leans against the door a moment with his eyes closed.

  There’s a choice when they go down to breakfast of meat, cheese, papaya, cereal and croissants. Renée orders everything. Pierre makes do with coffee and a slice of brioche. ‘Aren’t you hungry?’

  ‘Not as hungry as you seem to be.’

  ‘It’s so delicious. Did you ever see so much food all at once?’

  ‘You’d better save some space for lunch.’

  ‘We’re having lunch too? Aren’t there any shortages in Italy?’

  ‘There may be now.’ He smiles. ‘You ought to have some lire on you so that if you get lost you can take a cab or buy yourself an ice. And you should memorise the name of the hotel.’

  ‘To listen to you, anyone would think you were my father.’ Now that they’ve got over the misunderstanding on the train, she can start teasing him about it. After all, if anybody was to feel insulted it would be Pierre. In restaurants, he lets her choose things from the menu that she likes the sound of and then tells her what they are. She is his lover and his little girl. Now that her family is lost to her, Pierre is standing in for all of them.

  Occasionally, she thinks of Caro. She has not told anyone that she’s seen Caro. At the start she was preoccupied with what was happening in her own life. Later, Caro seemed irrelevant. No one had mentioned her for months. Somewhere inside her head she’s thinking that she might have shared the same fate. She is thankful to have left that life behind her. It’s strange how irrevocably ‘past’ all that seems now – the café, Caro, Roussel, even Margo. It’s as if a door has shut on it.

  There’s been no word from Pierre since they left. Perhaps that woman is already Madame Bonnard. Once he’s married her, she’ll be respectable and I shall be the harlot. Our roles will have been reversed. He’s marrying her, I suppose, to show me there’s no going back. If there’s a message, it’s for me, not her. I wander through the house imagining them in a carriage on the train, the country slipping by outside the window, Renée chattering, Pierre not saying anything, just looking, noticing the way the powder on her cheeks is pink with greenish shadows in the hollows, how the lilac of her eyes affects the colour of the scarf around her neck. She’ll ask him what he’s thinking and he’ll smile. He isn’t thinking anything, he’ll say, he’s looking. She needs nobody to tell her that she’s beautiful. She’ll know it every time she looks into a mirror. She could have had anyone. So why destroy me?

  There’s a moment when I wake up in the morning and I feel quite normal and then I remember what it is that’s lurking in the shadows. Even if there isn’t such a thing in pictures as an empty space, in life there is. The rash is getting worse. I lie for hours in the bath, but even in the water it’s as if there are ants crawling over me. Because the water dulls the pain, the tramlines I make with my nails across the skin are deeper. Sometimes I draw blood. I watch it seep into the water and make swirling, cloud-like patterns and I think, ‘Pierre would find that beautiful. He would be captivated by the swirls of red dissolving. He would turn my suffering into art.’

  The first week, all they do is eat and sleep and see the sig
hts. They follow lunch with a siesta. Sleep comes easily and when they wake up they make love and lie there with the windows open and the roar and bustle of the city down below. The curiosity that greeted them when they arrived has faded, or perhaps they’re simply getting used to people in the hotel staring at them. Sometimes, when she wakes up, she sees Pierre is sketching on the balcony. He comes in once he knows that she’s awake.

  She’s never been as happy as she is now, Renée tells herself. For once there isn’t anything she longs for, nothing that she wishes hadn’t happened, or had happened differently, except perhaps the night she had been lured by loneliness to Roussel’s studio. But like so many other things that she associates with that time, it’s been docketed and filed away. Her whole life up till now has been a preparation for this moment. Renée wishes she could stop it moving on. She tries to slow the seconds down by concentrating hard on each thing individually – a grey hair in Pierre’s beard, the small patch above his pocket where the weave has parted and been darned by Marthe with a thread that’s one shade lighter than the jacket, the small scar on Pierre’s knuckle that he got when he was dragged along a gravel pathway by the family dog when he was four years old. She tries to stash the images away inside her head, so that they’re there for later.

  When she puts her hand into the Bocca della Verità, she says she loves him and it doesn’t bite her hand off, so it must be true. It is their destiny to be together. They will make each other happy and then no one else will matter.

  They are in the square outside the Vatican. He hasn’t taken out his sketchbook, but she sees him pat his pocket to make sure it’s there. He turns to her. ‘What would you like to see, dear?’