Painted Ladies

by Lynn Bushell

  ‘Can I see what you were drawing last time you were here?’

  ‘The Laocoön? Yes, if you like.’ He guides her to the entrance of the Vatican Museums. They walk endlessly down corridors that open into larger spaces and then there, in front of her, is an enormous sculpture of three figures struggling to escape from serpents coiled around their bodies. She is shocked that there are life-sized statues of nude figures in the Vatican. They represent the suffering of humanity, Pierre says. She knows from the way he’s looking at it that it’s not the statue that’s preoccupying him.

  ‘You brought your sketchbook. Did you want to draw it?’

  ‘Oh no, that’s not what I had in mind.’

  What did he have in mind? she wonders. He is gazing at the statue with a fixed expression.

  ‘She’d be old now,’ Renée says.

  He turns his eyes on her. ‘Who?’

  ‘That girl.’

  Pierre looks at her a moment and she wonders whether he’s comparing them. He takes her arm. ‘Let’s go and see the Sistine ceiling,’ he says.

  Pierre has locked the workroom. What is in there that I’m not supposed to see? I check the row of keys on hooks next to the back door. That one’s missing. In the end, I find a chisel in the scullery and force the lock. There is a sharp crack as the spring goes.

  He has left a roll of canvas stacked against the far wall with the string still holding it together. Normally I wouldn’t dream of touching anything in there, but it’s like finding someone’s diary in a drawer. You have to look inside it, even though you know that what you find might hurt you.

  Pierre likes to paint the picture first, then cut it down. There have been times when I’ve been in it one day and the next there’s just a hand or half a head. There are four paintings altogether, on a single canvas. She’s in every one of them and here she isn’t simply posing. She is sitting at the table with me. Sometimes she’s there helping me to lay it. She stands in the doorway watching while I feed the cats. She stands beside the window gazing out onto the garden or steals quietly up the stairs when I’m not looking. We don’t speak. Pierre won’t lie to that extent.

  There is a book about Italian cities open on the workbench. I had never been abroad before I met Pierre. I turn the pages till I come to Rome. It’s big. It’s only when I see a photograph of the piazza with Saint Peter’s in the background and the crowds like swarms of ants in front of it, that Paris suddenly seems small. I can imagine Pierre and Renée walking arm in arm through the museums, Pierre explaining patiently, as he once did to me, why one work or another is regarded as a masterpiece.

  ‘You like it then?’ I asked once when we stood in front of a Uccello in the Louvre. How was I to know if I should like it, when I didn’t know if he did?

  ‘I respect it,’ he said. That seemed odd until I learnt that it’s impossible to love something you don’t respect. Respect without love, that was possible. But not the other way around.

  ‘I thought I might go out alone this morning,’ he says one day over breakfast. ‘I would like to do some drawing.’

  ‘Can’t I come?’

  ‘Of course, but won’t you find it boring? Wouldn’t you prefer to find a café where you can sit for an hour with a cake, or spend the morning in the gardens?’

  He suggests the Villa Ada. There are butterflies so huge they look like kites. ‘If you sit still, they come and settle on your arms,’ he tells her. They are not the only things, unfortunately. Men look back over their shoulders when they’ve passed her. One begins to talk to her. He sits down. Renée shifts up, but he moves up with her, till she’s wedged into a corner. He keeps pointing to the butterflies. ‘Farfalla’, he says, and then grins at her and nods. He wants her to repeat the word. She gets up. He calls after her.

  ‘Va-t-en!’

  He laughs. He doesn’t think she means it. They would never dream of pestering their own girls, but then you don’t often see them walking by themselves. No girl would do what she’s done – go off with a man who has a wife already, or as good as, try to make out that she’s married to him, let him book them into hotels as a couple and then leave their passports on the counter so that anyone who cares to look inside can see immediately what they’re up to. If she felt bad when she was in Paris, she feels worse here.

  She can’t shake this man off. ‘Non!’ she shouts. ‘Non, non, non!’ Even somebody like him must get the gist of that. He stops and stares at her. And then he throws his head back, waggling it from side to side. ‘Si!’ he says. ‘Si, si, si!’

  Why doesn’t someone help her? She keeps walking till she reaches the hotel. He’s still there, needling her now that he senses he’s not getting anywhere. When she begins to climb the steps, he stops. He spits the last few words, then melts into the crowd.

  She’s shaking when she gets up to their room. She wants Pierre to put his arms around her, but he isn’t there. She waits an hour and a half.

  ‘You’re back already, darling,’ he says, taking off his jacket. ‘Did you have a nice time?’ He sits down beside her. When Pierre’s been working, he gives off a special scent. It’s full and rounded. When he isn’t working, or it isn’t going well, there is a non-scent, but it has a whiff of something sour. If she hadn’t spent so much time on that bloody perfume counter, she would be less sensitive. If he was less preoccupied, he might have noticed that the scent she’s giving off is not one you would pay good money for.

  She has two choices. She can cry so that he feels obliged to comfort her, or she can whinge because he’s left her on her own and she feels vulnerable. She can’t decide and so she does both. First of all she cries and then she snaps at him. Eventually, when she’s got it all out of her system, she lies quietly in his arms and goes to sleep. She wakes up half an hour later and he’s sitting in the window. Her first thought is that he’s drawing, and she feels a rush of anger. Then she sees he isn’t doing anything. He’s staring out over the square.

  He turns. ‘How are you?’ This time he does not say ‘darling.’

  ‘I’m all right.’

  ‘What happened when you went into the gardens? Do you want to tell me?’

  ‘An Italian started pestering me. I was frightened.’ She tries not to sound pathetic. Where she lived in rue des Peupliers she ran the risk of being pestered every time she put her foot outside the door. ‘He didn’t seem to understand the French for “Go away”.’

  Pierre nods. ‘It’s because you’re fair. Italian women all have dark hair. You’re a novelty.’

  ‘I think it’s more because he saw that I was on my own.’

  ‘A combination of the two, perhaps.’ He moves the chair back from the window and puts on his jacket. ‘It’s as well you woke up. Any minute now, the gong will go for dinner.’ She untangles herself from the counterpane. ‘I’m sorry you were frightened. We’ll go out together from now on.’

  It’s what she wanted him to say but it sounds grudging, as if he suspects she made the story up in order to achieve this. Normally they chatter over dinner about what they’ve seen that day. After they’d visited Saint Peter’s, Pierre told her about the argument between the Pope and Michelangelo over the Sistine ceiling. On it, you can see God disappearing off into the clouds after he’s finished the creation and he’s got no clothes on.

  ‘It’s the only painting of God’s bottom anywhere in Christendom,’ Pierre said.

  Then there’s Donatello’s David with this silly hat. Pierre said Donatello was a homosexual – that’s why his David was so lean and sinewy and wore a hat with flowers on it. Michelangelo was homosexual as well, but there’s no doubt his David is a man. There seem to be a lot of artists like that. Pierre says it’s because they needed to be sensitive as well as strong. ‘You manage,’ she said and he smiled, which made her wonder whether there was something she had missed.

  ‘Where did you go to draw?’ she asks him, finally.

  ‘The Church of Santa Croce. Later on, I did some drawings in the ruins. You
can see them later if you like.’

  She nods. She ought to have been more enthusiastic, but it’s as if he is justifying having left her on her own by showing her the work he’s done. ‘What do you want to do tomorrow, then?’

  ‘Why don’t you choose?’ he answers, carefully.

  ‘I don’t know what there is to choose from.’

  ‘We could hire a car and go into the countryside.’

  ‘Not look at art, you mean?’

  ‘The best things in museums tend to be the windows. And a day off wouldn’t go amiss, in any case.’

  ‘For me?’

  ‘For both of us.’

  It’s no use. I have tried but I can’t bear it any more. The whole house has become a mausoleum. I still fill the bath mechanically each morning and it gives me some relief, but once I’m in I feel I might as well just sink under the surface and allow my head to go the same way as my body. What would Pierre do then? Perhaps he’d simply sit down on the footstool in the bathroom and do what he’s done each morning since we came here – look at me.

  I say that, but the truth is that he hasn’t looked at me for years. What other woman looks the same at fifty as she did when she was eighteen? Twenty-four, that is. He got it right then. He’d immortalised me once. What more could any woman ask? And would I rather he’d kept up with me as I got older? Pierre was always honest in his portraits of himself. If he had painted someone else like that, it would have seemed unkind. He wasn’t merciless, except when it came down to looking at himself.

  Mind you, who’d want a picture of an old crone hanging on their walls? The bathroom pictures never sold well. There must be a hundred of them upstairs in the studio. I will say one thing for Pierre; he never cared much whether people bought the work or not. He did it for himself.

  I’m filling up the bath and thinking how nice it would be to feel the water all around me. All around me. I get in and sink up to my neck. It feels good. If I raise my knees and stretch them out again, it makes waves and the water sweeps across my breasts.

  How long would I be lying here before they found me? They were going for a month and it’s been less than three weeks. I imagine Pierre walking through the downstairs rooms and calling. He will look in all the other rooms first, knowing that if I am in the bath I shan’t be getting out of it again.

  What happens to the skin when it has been in water for a week? Will it have cured the rash? Perhaps my skin will finally be like it was when Pierre first painted it. Of course it might be night when he comes back. He’ll have to bring the lamp upstairs and stand there in the doorway, straining to see whether that dark shadow in the bath is me. Was me.

  There is a scratching at the door. Poucette jumps up onto the stool beside the bath. What will I do about the animals? I had forgotten them. I’ve not left any food out. What will happen when tomorrow they discover there is no milk in the saucer, that the herring I get every weekend from the market isn’t in the bowl, that there is no lap to curl up on in the evening? I ought to have given this more thought.

  The water’s getting cold. When you first get into the bath it’s as if arms are wrapping you in an embrace, but then you feel the temperature dropping by the second. It’s too late to put my head under the water. You would think that once you’d made your mind up, you could do it any time; an hour more or less is neither here nor there. But other things get in the way – the animals, the laundry, getting to the market, hunger. I stand up and wrap the towel around me. Poucette jumps down from the stool.

  Deciding not to kill myself – at least not yet – has given me an unexpected lift. I give the cats an extra helping of the herring and decide that I’ll prepare myself a proper meal this evening. I imagine Pierre sitting in the corner, watching me. I move as if I’m only there for him to draw. I turn the peppers slowly in the pan. I think about how this will look once it’s been drawn and wonder if I’ll ever be there in another painting. Poucette smells the herring on my fingers. I hold out my hand and feel the rough tongue graze my knuckles.

  Will I go mad, locked up in this house where every object interlocks with every other, where you can’t take anything away without the rest collapsing? Maybe other people live like this. How would I know? If I had really been eighteen when we began to live together, I suppose I would have thought of it as normal. If I hadn’t seen my father hurling crockery across the kitchen and my mother tearing off the tablecloth before the contents of whatever had been toppled seeped into the fabric, where the only routine was the constant threat of violence, how could I have borne the luxury of so much constancy?

  It’s cooler once they reach the outskirts of the city. They go up into the hills and drive on to Frascati. Pierre says that the wooded slopes here were created by volcanic action. Pine needles are spread over the ground like matting. She knows from the way he’s looking at the landscape that he’d like to get his sketchbook out, but he has left it in the hotel. Normally he takes it everywhere, so she knows it’s deliberate. He’s brought a picnic with a folding table, two chairs and a cold box with a bottle of Prosecco.

  Renée goes out of her way to tempt him with the food. She takes small bites of things and puts them in his mouth. She tells him he should take his hat off, so he doesn’t have that line of white between his hairline and his eyes that makes his face look like Venetian blinds. She’s chattering and if she goes on too long he’ll stop listening, so once lunch is over she spreads out the rug. Pierre takes his jacket off and folds it carefully. He puts his hat on top of it and then he stretches out beside her and she wraps her arms around him.

  It’s the sharpness of the air that wakes her up. She’s shivering. Pierre is lying with his eyes half-closed.

  ‘What time is it?’

  He takes his pocket watch out. ‘Half past six.’

  ‘We’ll be too late for supper at the hotel,’ she says, desperately, and he laughs.

  ‘It doesn’t matter. If you’re hungry we’ll have dinner somewhere else.’

  ‘I think I’ve caught the sun. My skin feels hot, but underneath it’s cold.’

  Pierre wraps his jacket round her. By the time they reach the hotel, she feels feverish. That night she dreams she’s woken on the picnic and found Pierre with the paring knife they’ve used to peel the fruit protruding from that little hollow underneath his Adam’s apple. There’s a single spot of blood, but it’s on her. She tries to pull the knife out, but it’s stuck and when it finally comes loose it brings his beard and chin away with it. There’s just his mouth, then nothing.

  ‘Renée’. Pierre is shaking her. ‘Wake up. You’re dreaming. What on earth’s the matter?’ She begins to sob. He’s worried that the people in the rooms on either side of them might hear.

  ‘I dreamt that you were dead.’

  ‘Well, as you see, I’m not.’

  ‘And I dreamt it was me who’d killed you.’

  ‘Ah.’ He says ‘Ah’ as if now he understands. But what is there to understand? He presses one hand on her forehead. ‘Here.’ He pours a glass of water. ‘You must drink as much as possible. You’re feverish.’

  She spends the night alternately cocooned under an extra eiderdown and throwing off the blankets. By the morning, she’s exhausted. Pierre arranges to have breakfast brought up on a tray. ‘You’d better stay in bed this morning.’

  ‘What will you do?’ she asks, trying not to make it sound as though she thinks he’s engineered this for his own advantage.

  ‘I shall stay here with you.’

  Now she’s feeling guilty. ‘No, I’ll be all right,’ she says, reluctantly. ‘You go and draw.’

  ‘I’ll draw here. I can sit out on the balcony.’

  From where she’s lying, she can prop her head up on the bolster so he’s in her line of sight. Once he has settled down, he starts to hum under his breath. He’s soon oblivious to everything. She wonders whether Marthe feels this kind of loneliness. His head is turned away from her, but she can see the outline of his face. He bunches u
p his shoulders when he draws, as if his drawing needs protection. He protects her in the same way, but she knows she’ll never mean as much to him as this.

  The sun moves round until it’s in his eyes. The heat is building up inside the room. They ought to close the shutters now or by the middle of the afternoon there will be nowhere they can go to get away from it. In Paris you don’t see the sun from one month to the next. In Rome there is too much of everything – sun, food, religion, art, but shade is what you long for in the end.

  She’s better by the next day and Pierre suggests they spend the morning at the Villa Medici. The Medici were like a Mafia; they ran the city as if it belonged to them. If anybody crossed them, they would have them murdered – even children, if the wrong one was in line to take the throne. The one good thing they did, Pierre says, was to patronise the arts. They paid for everything in Rome between the 15th and the 16th centuries – banks, churches, palaces, the paintings inside and the sculptures outside.

  She would rather they had been a bit less generous. She follows Pierre through the rooms, which all look just the same. The sight of so much grandeur is exciting when you see it for the first time, but it palls. She hangs on Pierre’s arm. She wants everyone who passes them to know that they’re together. He detaches himself sometimes, so that he can go up to a painting and look closely at it. That’s the way he makes it look, but what he’s telling her is that he’d rather be here on his own. He isn’t showing her his sketches any more. He sometimes takes the sketchbook out and makes a few marks. ‘Records’, he says. Then he puts it back into his pocket and they go on walking. It would be more sensible for him to go off on his own; she knows that, but she’s frightened that if she begins to let him go, he won’t come back. She thinks of Caro. Caro’s shadowy existence has become a metaphor for all that could still happen in her own life. He is all she has now.

  ‘Please allow me, Signorina.’ It’s a man she’s noticed sitting with his wife and daughter in the hotel restaurant. She’s seen them looking round and whispering to one another when she takes her seat at table next to Pierre.