Friday's Girl

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘What are you doing now, Fräulein?’

  ‘I am packing up my paints and brushes, Herr Brandt, and I am leaving you and your students to the ancient world.’

  Herr Brandt struggled not to look relieved, but then, remembering that Celandine’s mother, the docile Mrs Benyon, was always so prompt at paying the fees, he quickly suppressed his feelings.

  ‘I hardly think – I hardly think that is necessary, surely, Fräulein Benyon?’

  Celandine stopped in the middle of her task and stared up briefly at the art teacher, an indignant look on her face. ‘That is why we will never see eye to eye, Herr Brandt,’ she retorted. ‘You are always hardly thinking, while I wish to study under someone who will wholly think.’

  Back at their comfortable lodgings, Mrs Benyon stared first at her daughter and then at the hackney cab driver who was carefully placing Celandine’s canvases and other paraphernalia in the hall of their rented apartment.

  ‘You are leaving Herr Brandt, did you say, dearest? You are leaving Herr Brandt’s studio, before the end of the present term?’

  ‘I certainly am, Mother.’

  ‘But why, dearest?’ Mrs Benyon’s heart was sinking even as she asked, because finally she always knew why. ‘You seemed to be so happy there, so much happier than when you were in Amsterdam. And, well, we are all so happy here in Munich. At least I thought so, dearest, really I did.’

  Mrs Benyon could not prevent herself from wringing her hands together as she watched the inexorable chaos that was now invading the hallway. Unmoved by her mother’s obvious distress, Celandine sighed with unusual vigour and followed the driver back down the stairs and outside to the courtyard. There she paid him handsomely before turning to go back up to the apartment.

  ‘Is there nowhere we can find you where you can be happy with your art teachers? Why have you left the good Herr Brandt?’

  ‘Why have I left Herr Brandt, Mother? I have left his atelier because I have to tell you that one more day in that smug all-male establishment and I would have committed suicide or – worse – murder.’

  Mrs Benyon wiped a lace handkerchief across her forehead, and then promptly waved it in front of her face. She only imperfectly understood her daughter’s quest for perfection, and she certainly did not understand her outraged impatience with Herr Brandt, who seemed such a nice young man, always so polite and assiduous in his attentions to the ladies when he came to one of Mrs Benyon’s Thursday afternoon At Homes.

  By now they had both made their way to the main salon, and Mrs Benyon was able to sit down rather suddenly.

  ‘I have to tell you, Celandine, whatever you may think of poor Herr Brandt, I myself am most reluctant to leave Munich, dearest. I have made so many, many delightful friends and acquaintances.’

  ‘You must stay then, Mother dearest. You stay here with Marie, while I leave in search of some new place to live and work. I cannot stand a moment longer of Herr Brandt and his ancient world.’

  ‘But where are you going to go then, dearest? Where can we find you something more satisfying for your talents?’

  Celandine hesitated. ‘I was thinking about it as the cabbie brought me back here. It seems to me that I must go to France, Mother. I am going to go to France, where I should have gone in the first place, France, the mother country of my father, your beloved husband. I don’t understand why I did not think of it before, really I don’t.’

  Mrs Benyon seemed to take this as well as any American mother could be expected to take such an announcement. She had fallen in love with Celandine’s father, a widower with a small daughter, while he was visiting her own parents in Boston, having been commissioned to paint a family portrait of the Benyons and their dogs.

  Jacques Delors Benyon had been a tall handsome man with the sad air of someone who had been robbed of his happiness at too young an age. Helen was the youngest daughter of a well-to-do family, and her parents had been less than happy at her determination to marry her French painter. Finally, however, they gave their consent, not to mention a handsome dowry from which Helen was able to draw a substantial income to this day.

  ‘To France for the reason of? What I mean to say is, why go to France especially? I have lived in France, as you know, dearest, and it can be singularly difficult for an American girl, really it can. Everything so different.’

  ‘It seems if I want to progress I must go to France in search of that fast-disappearing – as far as the art world is concerned – soon to become mythical, place, the modern world, Mother.’

  ‘But I did think, dear, that this time, here in Munich—’

  ‘They do not understand a woman painter here in Munich either, Mother, any more than they did in Amsterdam. In fact, if we searched all of Europe, I truly do not think that, even now, there are many ateliers that accept that women can and will paint. Yet . . .’ Celandine stopped, making a small determined fist of her right hand. ‘Yet I will not be put off. I am determined to find some place where they do accept that women can paint, and what is more will paint what they, women, want to paint, which is somehow a reflection of their own sensitivities, their own understanding of life, their differences from the all too masterful male sex. I am not interested in painting huge canvases that take seven or eight years to complete, with titles that take seven or eight minutes to repeat. And that, Mother, I am dearly afraid, is that.’

  The expression on Mrs Benyon’s face was close to tragic. First it had been Holland, and now Munich, but everywhere seemed to be the same, nowhere near what Celandine needed to progress in the way she so wished. The thought of giving up yet another comfortable apartment was not a welcome one.

  ‘Well, whatever you think, dear, whatever you think. But where shall we go in France? I suppose we could go to Avignon and rent somewhere near your half-sister Agnes, dearest? I suppose we could do that. But, as I have often reminded you, Avignon is very hot in summer, and quite cold in winter. Even your father – whose birthplace as you know it was – only went there for the last months of spring and early summer.’

  ‘No, I don’t want to go to Avignon, Mother. I think we must go to Paris.’

  ‘Paris? But your father, rest his soul, never approved of Paris, dearest, you know that. He thought of it as being degenerate, and decadent. He thought Avignon far more beautiful, more artistic in every way.’

  ‘I read that Paris is changing, that it is fast becoming the centre of something very lively, a new art movement. I feel sure that Father would approve.’

  ‘And I feel sure he would not. When in France your father rarely wished to move more than a few miles from Avignon, and only then so that he could hurry back to re-appreciate its splendours before returning to America in the fall.’

  ‘That may be so, Mother, but although I hope I will always respect Father’s memory, I really would like to go to Paris, and what is more, with your permission, of course, I think we should go to Paris.’

  ‘Oh dear, are we quite sure we should?’

  Mrs Benyon managed to look distressed and startled at the same time. Distressed at the idea that they would, yet again, be packing up their trunks and moving on, and startled that Celandine was using such a firm tone with her.

  ‘Quite, quite sure, Mother. I have to try to find another art teacher, and even if I should not, at least there is the Drawing Room at the Louvre where, when I am not studying, I can go to copy.’

  ‘But I thought that was why we were leaving Munich, because you dislike copying so much?’

  ‘We are leaving Munich because copying is all that I am doing here. I must try to find another art teacher, someone who will not treat me with such very overt condescension. There surely must be such a person in Paris? The French, since the Revolution, are in the forefront of advanced ideas in everything, are they not?’

  Celandine smiled at her bewildered mother to alleviate the determination behind her words. Her mother stared back, heart sinking at the idea of the packing, the rearrangements, the adjustments, and br
eaking the news to Marie, who was, Mrs Benyon was quite certain, currently carrying on an increasingly interesting affair with a boy who worked in the building opposite.

  ‘Very well, dearest, if you insist. It does seem most awfully troublesome, but if you insist we must go to Paris, to Paris we will go.’

  Mrs Benyon sighed and turned towards her bedroom, her mind already preoccupied. ‘Paris,’ she murmured as she made her way decorously towards the heavily curtained room with its dark club-footed furniture and its large ornate pieces of china set about in vast cabinets. ‘Paris,’ she said again as if trying out a new name for someone just born. ‘Paris.’

  She stopped repeating the name of the French capital when she felt first a dart and then a small shudder of excitement. Paris, after all, whatever Celandine said, was the city of both gaiety and sin. It was the place where kings and princes headed when they wanted to indulge in every, or any, kind of vice. The place where the chefs of the Italian-born Catherine de Medici had taught the French to cook, a fact, her husband had used to joke, that the Parisians now preferred to forget.

  On the way to her bedroom Mrs Benyon came upon her maid sewing by a window overlooking the street which also conveniently overlooked the building opposite.

  ‘Oh dear, Marie, I have a little bit of bad news, I am afraid.’ Mrs Benyon hesitated before continuing. ‘I think you might be going to be a little put out at what I have to say, Marie. I am afraid we are going to have to leave this apartment – we are going to leave for Paris as soon as is perfectly possible, because my daughter, Mademoiselle Celandine, is still not happy with her art teacher.’

  Marie stared at her American mistress, and her eyes grew dark with sadness.

  ‘But, madame, we have hardly arrived in Munich, no? We have not yet unpacked the paintings for the petit salon, and now we have to go away again. Enfin!’

  ‘I know, I know, Marie.’ Mrs Benyon tried not to look flustered. ‘And I have to tell you that I too am most miserable at this news.’ She paused. ‘But what can we do, Marie? We must accompany Mademoiselle Celandine. She cannot be allowed to travel on her own to Paris. We must chaperone her while she pursues her studies. I have no alternative.’

  Marie said something very French under her breath, which owing to the maid’s obvious distress Mrs Benyon decided to ignore, even though she understood it really quite well.

  ‘Mademoiselle Benyon is very spoilt by Madame, madame,’ she said, this time out loud.

  Mrs Benyon nodded slowly and sadly. It was undeniably the case. ‘Very true, very true, but even so I will make the necessary arrangements, Marie.’

  Marie nodded, her expression tragic. For the first time in her life she was in love with a beautiful young man, and now she must leave him. God, having smiled down on her from heaven, was now frowning. It was hard, very hard.

  The name of the stranger who had come in search of breakfast at the Stag and Crown was Napier Todd. Edith’s stepmother repeated it to Edith’s father as if it was the name of some strangely foreign beer that she very much hoped he was not going to order for the inn.

  Harold Hanson looked up from his meticulously kept account books and eyed his second wife, the mother of his two sons now away at boarding school, with his usual reserve.

  ‘Who did you say it was, my dear?’

  Mrs Hanson stared at her husband from the door of his business room with her usual mixture of impatience and inner fury. Somehow Harold always seemed able to invest whatever he did with a peculiar importance, an importance that she knew for some reason she was not able to invest in the myriad tasks that she herself undertook on behalf of them both.

  ‘He says his name is Napier Todd,’ Mrs Hanson repeated.

  ‘Is he a regular, my dear?’

  ‘No, he is not a regular, Harold. If he was a regular I would not be standing repeating his name to you, would I? He has been here the past three mornings, but despite that he is most definitely not a regular – far from being so, now you come to mention it. He lives somewhere quite other.’

  Harold’s eyes flickered back to the all-important columns of figures, the pounds and ounces of foodstuffs ordered and paid for, the pints and fluid ounces of the drinks. Somehow his books of accounts, the meticulous record of his financial transactions, always proved more satisfactory to him than the day-to-day business that took place at the Stag and Crown. If he glanced at his books, he could not see wastage. If he turned the pages he could see profits and more profits, and the dizzying amount of consumption that, thankfully, occurred at the usual festive times. What he could not see was the boots boy lounging about the scullery, or the cook selling off precious lard at the back door, instead of keeping it for use in his own kitchen. He could not see the maids skimping on their dusting duties. His books were tidy, ordered, filled with solid information with which no one could tamper, over which no one could lounge or laze. Two pennies added to four pennies made six pennies, and no argument. All of which meant that he was now staring at his second wife, the present Mrs Hanson, with unconcealed reluctance.

  ‘Perhaps you should show him in here, my dear. If he is not a regular, it should not take very long. If he wishes to complain I shall listen to him as courteously as is my wont, I do assure you.’

  ‘He does not wish to complain, Harold, far from it. No, he has quite another intention.’

  ‘And what might that be?’ Harold’s eyes had returned to the page of his accounts book which was now being turned, presenting him with the gloriously heartwarming sight of a blank sheet already neatly ruled, waiting for his profit and loss accounts to be annotated across its virgin surface.

  ‘What might be what, Harold?’

  ‘What might be his intention, my dear?’

  ‘To marry your daughter, Harold. To marry Edith, of all people. His eye has been caught by Edith, who as we both know is not what I would call a beauty. Quite a plain Jane, poor child, is your daughter Edith.’

  Harold’s eyes now swivelled from his favourite sight to one that was rather less appealing to the landlord of the Stag and Crown. He stared at his wife.

  ‘He wants to marry my daughter?’ he asked, a blank look coming over his face, as if he was finding it hard to remember whether or not he actually had a daughter. Having reassured himself of this fact, he frowned deeply, staring ahead of him in a great effort of concentration, as if conjuring up Edith’s image was more than difficult, it was almost impossible.

  ‘Yes, Harold, your daughter. Edith Hanson? Your daughter, remember? She is the only child of your first wife, who died when she was run over by the tram when walking in—’

  ‘I can remember my first wife’s sad demise, my dear, without any help from you.’ Harold removed his spectacles, slowly, and very deliberately folded them up and placed them in a case to the side of his ledgers. ‘But I fail to see who would wish to marry our Edith, most especially if he knows that the poor girl has no dowry.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ Mrs Hanson stated as if she were imparting surprising news. ‘He knows she has no dowry, but he is still more than keen.’

  ‘How do you know, my dear?’

  By now Harold too had started to look keen, something which Mrs Hanson had quickly noted.

  ‘For the simple reason that he told me so this morning. This is his third visit to the Stag and Crown, Harold. He knows that Edith has no dowry. He wishes to marry her, and take her to live with him in his house in the Cotswolds, it seems, where, as I understand it from him, he is apparently attempting a new style of country living, less autocratic, less patrician.’ Mrs Hanson paused, frowning, suddenly realising that the idea of a country house run on democratic lines did not sound at all nice to her. However, realising she could do nothing about democracy as practised in the Cotswolds, she continued, after a few seconds, ‘As I understand it, he will also provide her with the use of a small town house, albeit only rented and in Kensington. There are studios, it seems, within these houses, and many of his kind live there, pursuing their occupations in d
ifferent ways.’ She paused again. ‘He is a painter, you see, Harold. A painter of some means, and he thinks Edith a beauty, would you believe? Edith. Edith of all people! Edith a beauty.’

  Mrs Hanson was managing to make her step-daughter’s being a beauty sound about as likely as Harold’s becoming king of England.

  ‘My dear!’ Harold gave his wife one of his rare smiles, as he suddenly realised that he did not care if the man was a painter or a dustman. ‘What a thing! Someone wants to take Edith off our hands, what a thing! With both the boys away at those expensive boarding-out schools, it is God smiling on our affairs, no doubt of it.’

  All at once Harold could see the sense in his interviewing the gentleman in question and as soon as possible, before he changed his mind. He had long found being a father to a girl a most particular nuisance, but, seeing that he had no wish to provide for her future, had also long ago resigned himself to the idea that his only daughter would have to continue to work for him in a menial capacity in order that she would not prove a drain on the family resources. But now, wonder of wonders, manna from heaven, it seemed a man of some substance had been found who wanted to take the sixteen-year-old off his hands. In all honesty he could not wait to meet the fellow. After all, a maid could be replaced, but the thought of being able to get his daughter off his hands, and what was more married and away from the paternal home, out of sight and therefore out of mind, was more than a blessing, it was a miracle.

  He turned to his chair and plucked his coat from the back of it. His wife, knowing her place, immediately fussed around him, removing imaginary pieces of fluff from his sleeves, and dusting his shoulders quickly with her small, pudgy hands.

  ‘Remember who you are when interviewing this painter, dearest. You are Harold Hanson, a man of substance, no different from him.’

  ‘Do I need to be reminded of that, Aurelia?’

  ‘No, dearest, of course not. I only make mention of it because, although the gentleman in question is only a painter, he has the manners of a member of the aristocracy. However, he is certainly not titled, I do know that.’ She paused and smiled. ‘We both know that if he were a member of the aristocracy he would be trying to buy Edith, not marry her!’