by Lynn Bushell
Édouard guides us into the first bar we come to, pushing Pierre down into a pew. I sit down opposite him. Édouard brings three shots of Calvados. ‘Thank God that’s over,’ he says.
‘I don’t think so,’ I say.
‘In the end it doesn’t matter who’s responsible. They merely need to know she did it.’
‘He said it was my fault,’ Pierre mumbles.
Édouard looks at me and grunts. ‘I’m glad I’ve not been brought to book for all the misery I’ve caused along the way,’ he says. ‘You were unlucky. In a sense, you were too principled. You wanted to do right by everybody. Better, probably, to be entirely selfish, like me.’
‘What do we do now?’ I say.
‘Wait. It’ll all blow over. People will find something else to talk about.’
‘I don’t think we can stay in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. The findings will be in the newspapers tomorrow. There were journalists in court.’
‘Perhaps you ought to spend a few months out of town.’
‘We’ve only just come back.’
‘Still, if you stay, the hacks will root you out. You’re welcome to come back with me until you’ve made your mind up.’
‘Thank you, Édouard, but we must find somewhere we can settle. Pierre needs to work.’
‘Keep him inside then.’
We’ve been talking as if Pierre wasn’t sitting next to us and he has taken no part in the conversation. ‘Drink your Calva,’ Édouard orders him and Pierre lifts it to his lips. He chokes. ‘Good stuff, eh? That’s the spirit. Drink it down.’
We sit in silence, each of us preoccupied, but all of us in one way or another thinking of the girl whose body will already have begun to decompose, whose beauty will be turning into dust.
I’m not sure how I’ll get through Monday when Madame Hébert is due, but she pre-empts me with a letter telling me that she will not be working for us any longer. I’d assumed that Madame Hébert’s thirst for gossip would have overridden any qualms she might have about coming to a house as saturated with debauchery as ours, but it seems even Madame Hébert has her limits. All of France now knows officially that I was not Pierre’s wife, that he had a mistress he supported independently in an apartment and that she committed suicide because he wouldn’t marry her. It isn’t an uncommon story in the circles that we move in. Even so-called upright men have mistresses, but it’s unusual for them to cause so much upheaval.
Pierre spends all day upstairs in the studio, but there is no suggestion that he’s doing anything. I find him staring at the wall once as he would have done if there had been a canvas pinned to it. ‘What are you doing?’ I ask.
‘Thinking,’ he says. But he doesn’t tell me what about. I don’t think it’s a still life somehow.
Manguin writes that there’s a house for sale up in the hills, a few kilometres from his. He thinks the owner might agree to lease it. He describes the house. There are enough rooms to convert one for a studio, a garden and, because it’s something I can’t do without, a bathroom. I am not expecting Pierre to take an interest in the house, but he seems desperate to get away from Saint-Germain-en-Laye.
‘And this house is for sale?’
‘Yes, but he thinks that we could lease it.’
‘We could buy it, Marthe.’
Once, the thought of even owning one home was a distant dream, but we could do it now. If Pierre could afford to keep a mistress in a flat in Clichy, I think bitterly, he could afford a second home elsewhere.
‘Why would we want to stay here?’ he says. ‘There is nothing here for either of us any more.’
Pierre insists that he wants nothing from the flat in Clichy but, as usual, it’s not that simple. We’ve invited Renée’s family to take whatever they would like of hers, but there’s been no response. It will be up to us to clear it out, which means it will be up to me. I go there with a notebook and a bag of luggage labels. I feel heavy as I climb the stairs up to the top floor. Renée’s spirit will be up there, lingering. I stopped off on the way here to say prayers for her and light a candle. It’s a long time since I spoke to God. He didn’t seem to be there in the war and if you can’t depend on someone in a crisis, why would you be bothered with them once it’s over? When Pierre left, I was lonelier than I had ever been before, but on the whole, I’d rather have the company of Juno and the cats. They may not be as powerful as the Almighty, but they’re more companionable. Still, there’s nothing I can do for Renée now, except to pray for her.
In the apartment it’s so quiet that I can hear my own breath. I unlatch the windows to let in the street sounds from below and then begin the grim task of examining the contents of each room in turn. I start with the least intimate – the kitchen. Out of habit I fill up the kettle from the sink and make myself a pot of tea.
I sit down at the table with my notebook and write ‘kitchen’ on the first page. After that, it’s easier. I lose myself in the routine of putting certain things aside and putting others in the pile for throwing out. I ought to be more ruthless, but I can’t bear waste. I keep the caddy, for example, partly for the tea and partly for the tin, which has a picture of a tree in blossom on the front. I’m keeping too much back, so I make a reserve pile to consider later. I could do with Madame Hébert being there. She was a demon when it came to clear-outs. Secretly, I think she took the things away and kept them for herself. It’s practically unknown for anybody born in Normandy to throw a match away unless they’ve used it twice.
I work my way round the apartment. All the time, I can feel Renée at my elbow, watching as I sift through towels and linen, docketing the tablecloths and crockery. She must have tidied up before she died. There is a sad finality about the rows of cups, the chairs pushed tidily into the table and the stopped clock on the mantelpiece that will have gone on ticking for the best part of a day after her heart had stopped.
There is a cache of photographs addressed to ‘M’ without an address, and a pile of magazines with ‘Gabi’ scrawled across the top one. I’m not sure if these are meant for someone or if ‘Gabi’ was the one who left them. Given all the other items that I need to sift through, I decide a heap of magazines and photographs are neither here nor there. I put them in the pile to be disposed of.
In an alcove off the bedroom there’s a pile of sketches, some of Renée sitting at the table, one of her reclining on the bed and one in which she’s washing at the sink. My impulse is to rip them into shreds. I keep on having to remind myself she’s dead. But here she is alive and always will be. If I keep the drawings, I’m immortalising her. If I destroy them, I’ll have killed her twice. I put them in a neat pile. Everything in here must be preserved. This is the only room that has a feeling of unfinished business in it. It’s the only space that still has life.
I don’t like going through the drawers, especially in the bedroom. Taking out the lingerie, I’m pricked with envy at the luxury of Renée’s underwear – silk stockings, corsets where the whalebone is replaced by tunnels of material through which the straps run delicately and emerge with ribbons on the ends of them. I could afford to buy such things myself now, but what would a woman in her fifties look like wearing something that cries out for youth?
I shall give these to Pierre’s niece. Poor thing, she hasn’t had a lot to cheer her since her mother died. There are five pairs of shoes lined up inside the bottom of the wardrobe and a pair of sandals with a broken heel. I recognise the shoes that Renée wore the afternoon she came to Saint-Germain-en-Laye. She’s left a jewel box on the bedside table. Inside, there are necklaces and bracelets, with her sisters’ names attached to two of them with bits of cotton. There’s a brooch here too, which she has labelled ‘Maman’. Nothing for her brother.
I have left the bathroom to the end. The police will have been through the whole apartment thoroughly. There’s just the dark stain on the floorboards underneath the bath where water gathered in a puddle before leaking through into the room below. I think she left the taps on so tha
t she would not be left up there indefinitely. Apparently, the tenant downstairs was a single man whose business took him out of Paris every week. He only came back at the weekends. Is that why she chose a Saturday to kill herself? She couldn’t do it on a Sunday. That would be unthinkable.
Each time I think of Renée dying in the bath, I feel as if it’s my grave somebody has trodden on. Because the idea is uncharitable, I’ve tried to stop wondering if she chose to drown herself because the bathroom was the one place that was mine. The fact is, Pierre can never look at me reclining in the bath now without thinking of it as her tomb.
It’s past four by the time I’ve finished itemising everything in the apartment. I shall never come back here again and so, before I leave, I go through every room and say goodbye to it and to whatever still remains of Renée. ‘I forgive you,’ I say, ‘for the way you hurt me, for the careless damage you did with your youth and beauty, for the guilt and grief you’ve left us with. And I hope you’ll forgive us.’ If you don’t, I think, we’re damned.
Negotiations for the house we’re purchasing are dealt with by the lawyer, Maître Bleicher, who we’ve also put in charge of selling on the leasehold of the flat. Of course, he knows the circumstances. Renée’s suicide and Pierre’s part in it have turned into a cause célèbre, not just here in Paris, but, if Manguin is to be believed, down in the south too. If Pierre behaves down there the way he has at Saint-Germain it could be weeks before the local population even catch a glimpse of him.
We haven’t talked about the pregnancy. Pierre was so distraught, I didn’t feel that I could mention it. He will expect me to be angry, but the fact that it’s his child as well as hers is probably the one thing in its favour. Oddly, it’s the first time I’ve been on the point of telling him about Suzanne. ‘She’s not your only child,’ I would have said. ‘You had two.’ But, since both of them are dead, he might have thought that didn’t count for much. I get on better, generally, with ghosts.
When Madame Hébert hears we’re going, she relents and asks me if I need help with the packing. This is something I’d prefer to do alone, but it’ll take me twice as long and I need her no-nonsense attitude towards the things we don’t require.
‘They’ll have butter shapers down south, I imagine,’ she observes when she sees me attempting to find room inside an overflowing tea chest for an item you can buy here in the market for a few sous.
‘Maybe you would like it, Madame Hébert,’ I say, and she shrugs. She’ll only take it if it looks as if she’s giving in under duress. In this way we pare down the contents of the house to fifteen packing cases. We can auction off the furniture, although Pierre is clinging to things he insists he needs – like fruit bowls, carpets, plates. ‘You wouldn’t leave the cats or Juno,’ he says. ‘They have dogs and cats down in the south, presumably.’
It’s not the same, but I don’t argue. I’m relieved that he’s not leaving everything to me.
‘And how’s the master?’ Madame Hébert asks. When she’s around, Pierre stays upstairs in the studio.
‘Much better, thank you.’ This is not the news she wants to hear. What right has he to go on living comfortably when that poor girl is lying in her grave? That’s how they’ll look at it in Saint-Germain-en-Laye. They’ve no truck with what happens in the mind. The idea that guilt is a cross on which you’ll hang for the remainder of your life, is foreign to them. Someone throws a stone at you; you throw one back. That’s their philosophy. They wouldn’t spend time agonising over it.
I watch as Madame Hébert picks things up and puts them down again. She touches something and it’s as if she has thrown a net across it. ‘You won’t want this,’ she says, picking up a sugar bowl. ‘It’s got a hairline crack in it.’ It would go nicely on her kitchen table; this is what she’s thinking.
‘Everything in this room has to go into the tea chests, Madame Hébert. Pierre needs them for his work.’
‘You’d think that after all this time he’d welcome something new to paint,’ she says. ‘You could get ten for three francs in the market.’
‘He’s decided he wants this one,’ I say, firmly. I’ve learnt one thing in the past months. Madame Hébert isn’t here to do me any favours and unless it suits me, I shan’t do her any either.
Yesterday I took a bunch of dahlias to put on Renée’s grave. It was a bright day and her little corner of the cemetery looked almost gay. It’s not exactly in the cemetery, of course. They wouldn’t have her there, the bastards. Still, it’s near enough. The wind has blown leaves from the line of elm trees bordering the graveyard, piling them against the raised earth. There’s a bunch of lilies on the grave that must have been there since the funeral. We didn’t go. The family asked us not to. I’m not sure we could have faced them, anyway, after the inquest.
When I touch the flowers, they’re like paper. I can’t bear dead flowers. I can hardly put them on the rubbish heap, but still their withered beauty is too much like Renée’s and they make me feel uncomfortable. I don’t like lilies at the best of times – they reek of bitterness. Of course, they might have been left by Roussel. It haunted me the way he’d looked, the morning of the inquest.
I explain to Renée that we shall be leaving Saint-Germain-en-Laye for good soon, so I won’t be coming back. Perhaps somebody else will come by and take time to sit with her. Her mother, maybe, or her sisters. It’s much easier to talk to her, now that she’s dead. You’d think it would increase the barrier between us, but it doesn’t. If I say the wrong thing now, she’ll take it in her stride. We’ve passed the point of having to be diplomatic, which is why when I get around to telling her the reason for my visit, I don’t mince my words.
‘The thing is, Renée,’ I say, ‘and I hope you won’t take this amiss. You weren’t the first girl Pierre had fallen for, though you were probably the one who mattered most to him. He’ll never think of me the way he thinks of you, but when it comes to which of us will be remembered for their contribution to his work, it’s going to be me.’ I let the words sink in. It’s better that she comes to terms with it. ‘You were the mistress, not the muse,’ I tell her. ‘That was always my role and I’m hanging on to it. I’m sorry if you hoped for more, but this is where it ends. There will be no more pictures of you and the ones that do exist will slowly disappear. You can’t fight wear and tear. We muses are a wily bunch. We have to be. There’s always someone waiting in the wings – more beautiful, more captivating to the eye and ready to take over at a moment’s notice. That’s not what it is about. A muse is like a tick that gets in underneath the skin. She is the thought the painter has before he knows he’s thought it. She can make the journey from his eyes onto the canvas without going through his brain at all. He hardly knows she’s there and yet without her he is nothing. She’s the air he breathes. If you had listened to me when I tried to tell you, you might be alive now, though perhaps it’s just as well you’re not.’
Although the name suggests the house is grander than it is, the ‘Villa Bosquet’ seems to suit it. Houses have a personality and this one is accommodating from the start. It nestles in among the olive groves and trees in blossom. Sun streams through the open shutters when we wake up in the morning and the scent of jasmine and mimosa flood the room. Pierre drinks a glass of water when he gets up and then walks down to the footbridge over the canal with Juno, through the olive groves and up the hillside before coming back for breakfast and a morning in the studio. Our nearest neighbours are a couple of kilometres away. They’re not the sort of people you make friends with – bankers, businessmen who’ve come here to retire and die more slowly and in greater luxury than they could do in Paris. We don’t seek their company. If Pierre meets up with any of the locals on a walk, he says hello, but otherwise he keeps his eyes fixed on the ground until they’ve passed each other.
Though we’re moving to an empty house, I know there’s no such thing. A house contains the ghosts not only of the people you bring with you, but the ones already there. All o
ne can hope is that the ghosts are friendly. Sometimes, when I’m in the kitchen kneading dough, or sitting at the sewing table, there’s a flash of yellow in the corner of my eye or the faint rustle of a dress as someone brushes past me and I know it’s Renée. I might wish that I could blot her out entirely, but I can’t. She lives with us as surely as if she had moved into the house with her belongings. Having lived with ghosts, I know their habits. She and Suzanne keep each other company. Suzanne would have been twenty-three, the same age . . . well, let’s not go there again. I chat to them the way I talk to Juno and the cats. If you don’t talk occasionally, you lose the habit.
There is only one place Renée’s not allowed to go, and that’s the studio. I take more interest in the paintings than I used to. Pierre knows what it’s about. The studio is on a mezzanine, so I can wander in and out at will. I’m on the lookout for a shape reflected in a mirror, the suggestion of a profile in the pattern of a rug, a shawl that isn’t mine, draped carelessly across a chair back. I become quite good at picking up the clues. Occasionally, we have words about it. Sometimes, if it’s something insignificant – a hand that doesn’t look like mine, or someone’s shoe tucked underneath a sofa – I might let it go. I always make it clear I’ve seen it, though. My days of putting up with things are over.
Once a year, we take the train to Paris for the opening of the Salon. One year we run into Roussel. Like us, he had gone to ground after the inquest. You could not help feeling sorry for the man. His paintings were occasionally reproduced, but nothing that looked new. Whenever anyone referred to him, it was invariably in connection with that model who had disappeared – Chiara, was it? People liked to think he had exhibited that painting out of guilt. They say there’s no such thing as bad publicity. The critics raved about it, other painters copied it. He copied it himself. But it turned out to be a one-off. Nothing he did afterwards lived up to it.