Painted Ladies

by Lynn Bushell

  I see him turn and whisper to the woman he is with. Pierre is talking to a client. Roussel’s pushing through the crowd towards me. He still cuts a figure in that lightweight linen suit of his and with a woman on his arm he looks more like his old self.

  ‘Marthe,’ he puts out his hand. ‘It’s been a long time.’

  ‘Yes, it has.’

  ‘Four, five years?’

  ‘All of that.’

  ‘How are the two of you? Do you like living in the south of France?’

  ‘We get by.’

  ‘Still the same old Marthe?’ He laughs, but it’s not the sort of laugh he’d once have given me. He turns towards the woman by his side. ‘You won’t remember this young lady,’ he says. When I look at her, the face is certainly familiar, though I couldn’t put a name to it. ‘My daughter Lisel,’ he says.

  I remember Roussel telling me that neither of his daughters was remotely interested in the arts. They and their mother had reverted to the family name after the marriage broke up. He had had no contact with his daughters. But it seems that Lisel is a painter in her own right now. ‘She was exhibiting while she was still a student at the Beaux-Arts,’ he says, proudly. ‘Lisel is a rising star.’

  I smile politely. Now I think about it, I can see she has a lot of Roussel in her, although not quite in the same proportions. She’s a handsome woman, but you couldn’t call her beautiful. He thinks she is, of course, and for a moment I feel quite benign towards him. He has got his daughter back and I know what that means.

  ‘What name do you paint under?’ I say, and she glances at her father.

  ‘Roussel,’ she says.

  We stand talking idly for a few more moments before she is whisked away by someone keen to introduce her to more influential people. Roussel gazes after her. He’s utterly besotted with his gifted daughter. He turns finally and sees me looking at him. ‘It meant such a lot, you know, her coming back to me.’

  ‘I’m sure it did.’

  ‘I didn’t realise how important it was, having children, till I lost them.’ It occurs to him that Pierre and I are not in a position whereby we are likely to have children coming back to us. ‘Did you and Pierre never think of having children?’

  ‘We had one. A daughter. Her name was Suzanne.’ He looks surprised. ‘She died.’

  He makes a sound like a collapsed balloon. ‘I’m sorry, I had no idea.’

  I look at him implacably. He’s groping for my hand and cups it in the two of his. Don’t make a meal of it, I think. I can imagine Suzanne saying, as we leave, ‘Whoever was that sentimental old ham?’ and I would have told her, ‘He was once accused of murdering his model. He was a philanderer. He had a wife he treated badly and two daughters who rejected him. He drank, he gambled, there were rumours that he slept with prostitutes.’

  ‘How is Pierre?’

  ‘He’s managing.’

  He hesitates. ‘That business at the inquest about Renée being pregnant,’ he says. ‘I said nothing at the time. I didn’t want to make things worse.’

  I know what Roussel is about to say.

  ‘There is a possibility the child might not have been Pierre’s.’

  I suddenly feel weary. Looking round, I search the crowd for Pierre. I’m finding these events increasingly a challenge.

  Roussel’s trying to be kind. ‘It must have made it harder for you,’ he says, ‘thinking that it was.’

  I need to get away from here. I can’t think with this racket going on all round me. ‘Thank you,’ I say, in an effort to be gracious.

  ‘Will you tell Pierre?’ He’s looking at me, keenly.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘It might be kinder if you didn’t mention it.’

  ‘To whom?’

  ‘Why, to Pierre, of course.’ He looks away. It strikes me that he wouldn’t want Lisel to know about it either.

  ‘I think you can count on me to do what’s best,’ I say.

  I don’t say anything to Pierre. It’s partly that it’s years since either of us mentioned Renée and I’d rather not exhume her memory and then have to bury it again. But also, I’m afraid that Pierre won’t forgive me if I take away the last of his illusions. I’d been haunted by the thought that she might have a greater claim on him than I had, that I might eradicate her from the paintings, but I’d never manage to eradicate her from our lives. Pierre might still think that she has a claim on him, but I know that she hasn’t. Once I have decided that she has no right to be here, I stop seeing her. Ghosts are like children. If they are ignored, they either clamour for attention or they fade away. There are occasions when I miss her company, but now at least I have Pierre completely to myself.

  The years pass, and Pierre’s reputation grows again. The Second World War sees off many of our close friends – Édouard fleeing from the Germans in the first year of the occupation, Maurice Denis whom Pierre had known since they were students, three years later, and Roussel, who by then was the only one left of the old crew, in the spring of 1944. The rumpus over Renée’s suicide and the humiliation of the inquest has been long forgotten. Nobody these days has heard of Renée Montchaty. It’s me that students of his work refer to now. They want to see the house that has inspired so many of his paintings and the woman who they say is always in there somewhere. They take photographs of Pierre and me together, flanked by pictures. Finally, I have the recognition I deserve.

  And then I make a big mistake. I die. One day my heart stops beating; it has had enough. Well, after all, I’m over seventy. We never talked about my age, but I expect Pierre had worked it out. The next year, he attends the Salon opening on his own. That year will be his last. The painting he’s exhibiting is called The Women in the Garden. It’s a picture that he left unfinished after Renée’s death. I thought he had destroyed it. If I’d known he hadn’t, I’d have put the torch to it myself.

  They say that if you want to influence the future you should be there, but in Renée’s case the fact that she has not been there seems to be working in her favour. Looking at the painting, I remind myself that it is called The Women, rather than The Woman in the Garden, so there must be two of us, but at first glance you wouldn’t know that I was there at all. It’s Renée who is bathed in light; she positively shimmers. She is sitting at a wrought-iron table, her chin resting on her hand as if she’s not aware of me. She isn’t quite there, as indeed she wasn’t.

  Going back to it, he guilds the background yellow, so the light seems to be coming from within. It’s beautiful. If I’d still been alive to see it, I would have been spitting bile. It isn’t only that he’s put me in the shadow and her in the light, that I’m dark and in profile whereas she’s full-face and smiling, that I’ve been imprisoned in a corner of the picture by what looks like a wheel with cast-iron spokes but is in fact a garden chair. She’s centre-stage. She is glowing. She’s ALIVE.

  She is the only thing the critics talk about, her and her tragic life. You’d think that dying was the worst thing that could happen to you. I have never thought that. After all, death comes to all of us; we’re none of us let off. What matters is the timing. If you ask me, she chose well. I should have been the one who perished in the bath that day.

  As if he still has one eye on a future in which he might have to answer to me, Pierre does one more painting. This time it’s of me. I’m lying in the bath at Villa Bosquet, my flesh green, the water lapping all around me. I look like a corpse, but after all that’s what I am and so, now, is Pierre.

  I dare say we could go on bickering into eternity, but it won’t change the course of history. I tried to wipe out Renée and I failed. The very fact that nobody knows anything about her, other than her name, will be enough to stimulate the curiosity of hacks and busybodies. In the future, they’ll write books about her. What they don’t know, they’ll make up. She’ll be his muse, his soulmate, his lost love.

  And what will I be? There is only one place where my sovereignty is undisputed. Renée would have tak
en that from me as well, but no, when future generations talk about ‘the woman in the bath’, it will be me that they’re referring to and maybe that’s enough.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  In writing Painted Ladies, I am indebted to the numerous biographies that have been written about Bonnard. I have used the facts, as far as they are known, as a basis for the story. Where there are gaps, events, characters and dialogue have been fictionalised.

  I would like to pay tribute to my husband, Jeremy, for his unwavering support during the writing of this book and the books that preceded it. To my children, who suffered the usual neglect of a parent whose attention was all too often elsewhere and who responded by bringing themselves up rather wonderfully, this one is for you.

  Thanks are due to Stuart Harling, a dear friend who offered invaluable criticism of the various MSS he’s been asked to look at over the years; to David Llewelyn, Titania Krimpas and Alison Lang for their editorial advice and to Carol Smith and Christine Cohen-Park, fellow writers, for their friendship and encouragement.

  I owe a special debt of gratitude to Tessa David at Peters Fraser and Dunlop for her enthusiasm and determination to find a publisher for the book and to Tim Binding, author and in-house editor at PFD for reading the MS and endorsing her decision to run with it.

  Finally, I would like to extend a huge thank you to Moira Forsyth and the staff at Sandstone Press, without whom this book might never have been published.

  Thank you all.