Friday's Girl

by Charlotte Bingham

  ‘He has to have the doors open, to create a draught to blow the silk scarf back towards the backdrop.’

  ‘Oh, he does, does he? Well, we’ll see about that, ma’am. Dear oh me, artists think we are all of us made of stone, they do really. When I was sitting to him, I remember, he did not like that fire being lit, but in the end he was pleased, because he said it gave me rosy cheeks. Then, of course, the paint was hardly dry when he sold the wretched thing – to Mr Rosebery, I think it was. Lives up near Stowe, and a right gamey, mutton-whiskered old gent he is, so what he would want with a picture of yours truly sitting with a basket of apples and a dead rabbit at my feet, heaven only knows. But he paid Mr Todd good money for it, I fancy, because he was off to Paris the next minute, thank the Lord, leaving me to go back to what I do best, what he pays me for – the running of his blessed house.’

  She looked down at Edith and tucked the quilt tighter round her, a worried frown on her face.

  ‘Seeing as your teeth are still chattering, I’m going to light your dressing-room fire for you, my dear, really I am. There’s one thing about stone houses that no one tells you and that is they may be warm in winter when the fires are lit, but they’re that freezy-cold in summer when they’re not.’

  ‘I’ll help you—’ Edith struggled to sit up.

  ‘You’ll do nothing of the sort. You’ll lie right where you are until such time as your teeth stop chattering.’

  ‘I used to be in service, you know,’ Edith confided suddenly, as the older woman took spills from the spill box on the chimneypiece preparatory to lighting the fire with them.

  ‘Oh, you did, did you? Well, you’re not in service any more, madam, you’re young Mrs Napier Todd now, and as such you’ll oblige me by leaving the fires to us, while you get on with being a wife to Mr Todd and the mistress of Helmscote. We agreed that the first evening of your arrival.’

  Edith closed her eyes. For no reason she could think of she could feel tears welling, possibly because Mrs George was being kind to her. She had always found that if people were kind to you when you were having a bit of a difficult time of it, it made you feel sorry for yourself. She remembered how Cook had taken her under her wing when her mother had died so suddenly, and how hard it had been not to give way to her sorrow.

  Soon the fire was warming the room, and the shaming, weakening moment had passed, leaving Edith, eyes open once more, staring up at the reflections of light on the ceiling, still too cold and tired to do anything except wonder, as she did every evening now, if after a day posing for Napier she would ever, ever feel her limbs again?

  ‘I know how you feel, that is all I meant to say,’ she explained.

  ‘Of course you do, but you would anyway. You’re not the sort to not know how someone feels, we all know that,’ Mrs George agreed, coming back to Edith’s bedside and staring down at her. ‘Now you just lie down and enjoy some rest and warmth. I’m going to come back in a short while with some warmed towels, because no one should be as cold as you are on a warm summer evening, Mrs Todd.’ Mrs George tiptoed to the dressing-room door, opened it, and repeated quietly but vehemently to herself before closing it, ‘No one!’

  It transpired that Betty was going to be in-disposed with a ‘cold’ for fully nine months, but since it seemed that she had been engaged to a Mr Tyler for over ten years, her marriage, although taking place very rapidly after the announcement of her indisposition, did not, it seemed, come as much of a surprise to anyone at Helmscote.

  ‘Just as well that Betty has been made an honest woman of at last,’ Mrs George announced, some few days later, her small brown eyes somewhat narrowed. ‘Any more of that John Tyler’s dithering and I dare say her father would have taken a shotgun to him, and all the village knows it.’ She sighed and looked down at Edith, who was at last beginning to enjoy her statutory pre-dinner rest, so necessary to her thawing out after a day in the studio. ‘I don’t know, I don’t know, really, Mrs Todd. Maids! Well, you must know, seeing as you’ve been in service yourself, or so you say, bless you. They are either indisposed, about to be indisposed, or running off to some city where the poor creatures have some ridiculous idea they will be better paid. Still, at least Betty is a married woman now, and won’t be a nuisance no more.’

  She left Edith’s side to put another log on the fire and set items of her underwear to warm on a towel rail in front of the flames.

  ‘You’ll be wishing for me to hire you another maid, won’t you, madam?’

  ‘No, really, Mrs George, thank you, I don’t think that is necessary. I can manage quite well, really I can.’

  ‘No, you can not manage, Mrs Todd,’ came the robust reply from the fireplace. ‘By no means.’ Mrs George paused in her turning of the warming garments. ‘In all honesty, seeing that you can’t and shouldn’t manage without a personal maid, I would suggest that until we find someone suitable, I should double as housekeeper and personal maid to you, Mrs Todd, just for the time being.’ She smiled, perhaps to temper the commanding tone she was using.

  ‘Will I always need a maid, Mrs George?’ asked a sadly resigned young voice from the bed.

  ‘Every lady has a personal maid, Mrs Todd, you know that. But we can make do, as I say, until such time as we find a suitable replacement for Betty.’

  ‘I understand. Well, I dare say you’re right, Mrs George.’

  Edith closed her eyes. She was gradually coming to realise how little she knew of Napier’s feelings on any subject, let alone herself. Today for some reason he had seemed even more remote than usual. He had been totally distanced from her, as if she was a stranger brought into his life at certain points, only to be taken out again at others; just a dressed-up doll of a person, not a human being at all. She had a growing feeling of despair which she was finding impossible to conquer, a despair born out of the gradual realisation that try as she might to sit to him the way he wished, she was not proving to be inspirational. It just might be that she was not only not desirable as a wife, but also a failure as a model, and this being so she saw little hope in the future.

  Perhaps Mrs George sensed Edith’s despair because she was being more than usually solicitous, fussing about her as if she was ill, staring down at her lying on the bed as if the buxom housekeeper was a doctor and Edith her wan-faced patient.

  ‘I will get a warm flannel for your head. It seems to me you have the air of someone about to have a migraine.’

  ‘Why do you think that?’ asked Edith in a faint voice.

  ‘You have less colour than usual.’ Mrs George bustled out of the room, trying to keep her feelings of inner fury from showing.

  It seemed to her that had she not been the housekeeper at Helmscote she would have told the poor pale-faced young girl lying in that bed to pack in her marriage and run back to her mother, if she had one. But since it seemed she did not have a mother, and since Mrs George needed to keep her position at Helmscote as much as anyone else, she found herself daily fighting her worry for her poor young mistress. It was not just her pallor, the shivering fits to which she succumbed, it was her voice. If there was one thing of which Mrs George was sure it was that the voice reflected the state of someone’s heart, and this being so, young Mrs Todd was certainly sick at heart.

  Edith opened her eyes briefly as she heard the older woman leaving the dressing room, and the door shutting quietly behind her. The movement of her long-lashed lids as she closed them again was so slight that they might have been the wings of a butterfly.

  Day after day she had climbed into her floating silk costume to sit holding the wretched harp. Day after day she had sat, feet frozen, hands frozen, as the draught from the open doors turned the stone-built studio into an agony of cold, despite the summer weather. If she shifted her position on the gold-painted chair by so much as an inch, Napier would throw his paint-brush across the room, sigh, and stalk off to the back of the studio to light a cigar. As the air grew heavy with the scent of his smoke, there would be a long, frightening silence
, a silence that seemed to suggest to his model that he was struggling within himself not to throw something at either her or the painting. Eventually he would return, and Edith, having taken advantage of his momentary absence to move a little in her seat, would resume her rocklike position.

  As the days passed, agonisingly slowly, Edith came to realise just what her future might be going to be, and in facing the reality of her life the person she once was seemed to be dying, little by little.

  Every day was always the same as the students of the summer school prepared to set off to the beach: arms and bodies waving and bending in search of the inevitably missing bundles of brushes, pencils or pads; endless strapping of easels and canvas bags. Indeed, the preparation of the male students took so long that by the second week of the summer school, Celandine, who was always ready and waiting first, her dark hair tucked up under her straw hat, her hat ribbons tied securely against the sea wind, had started to resign herself to the inevitability of the daily wait for the men to organise themselves. She knew it would be a waste of precious energy to grow impatient, so she fell instead into the habit of leaving out her sketching stool from her own paraphernalia, and determinedly setting to draw the scene before her, a scene which it had to be said was affording her increasing amusement. However, the very fact that they knew they were being sketched naturally slowed everyone up, but since she was the only girl present none of the men appeared to mind, willingly holding their positions for her until such time as the rudiments of her sketch were finished.

  ‘That is very good, Celandine,’ Alfred remarked shyly one day, as he stared approvingly over her shoulder at the drawing. ‘You have me off to a T. Even my father would recognise me, and I haven’t seen him in years; and as for Tom and Sheridan, they look quite as chaotic as they undoubtedly are. You have a light touch. Not something that can be learned, as you doubtless know. You either have it or you do not have it, as I always tell my young pupils.’

  Celandine turned and, catching the mildly astonished look in his eyes, she smiled. ‘It’s only a sketch – I should do it in water colour first really, but I couldn’t be bothered to unpack everything again.’

  ‘Art is too difficult for anything to be “only a sketch” – whether it’s a cobweb in the early morning, a red cloak on a far dark horizon, or all of us preparing to go to the beach. We can allow life in the form of other people and most particularly posterity to laugh at our poor efforts, but we ourselves must take care to take what we do seriously, no matter what.’

  Celandine stared up at the quiet intensity in Alfred’s face. ‘We must talk about this some more at lunch,’ she murmured.

  Before Alfred had time to reply Sheridan appeared from nowhere and stepped un-apologetically and quite purposefully between Alfred and Celandine.

  ‘Time to move off,’ he announced, as if everyone was not already doing just that. ‘You’re lunching with me at the café today,’ he told Celandine. ‘I marked your dance card yesterday, if you remember?’ He turned and frowned at Alfred’s retreating back, as Celandine shook her head.

  ‘You did nothing of the sort. You did not even mention luncheon, Sheridan Montague Robertson.’

  ‘Well, I have now,’ Sheridan stated, still frowning after his friend. ‘Besides, Alfred must have bored you into the ground over the past few days with all his ideas, surely?’

  Celandine moved away from Sheridan. Really, he was becoming possessive of her in a way that she did not really welcome. She wanted to be free to pick and choose her company.

  ‘Let’s hope that the wind has died down a bit today,’ she murmured to no one in particular.

  The wind had indeed died down enough to allow them all to work, at least for the first few hours, without having to keep retrieving either their hats or their easels from the sand dunes into which the summer school settled themselves with such hope every morning and afternoon.

  The principle of painting in the open air might have caught Paris by storm, but the reality of it was that canvases were constantly being flung on to their faces, and easels, and indeed sometimes painters, off their legs. Celandine had found that she was certainly learning some new and interesting words, in several languages, for her artistic companions, forgetting there was a lady present, seemed to swear constantly and easily, as easels swayed and sand blew into and on to everything.

  At midday, as grey clouds gathered and wind and rain whipped round the corner of some nearby rocks and flung themselves at his easel, causing it once more to topple over, Sheridan pushed his straw hat firmly down round his ears and started to pack up, cursing and swearing as he did so.

  ‘Painting in the open air is one thing, but painting in this is enough to make a bishop swear,’ he yelled above the sound of the increasing storm.

  His words were not lost on the rest, but seeing the white tops to the waves out at sea, the deserted beach, and the ship on the far horizon, they all pulled their hats down and their collars up and remained locked in position, staring from the soon to become raging sea back to their canvases in excited fascination.

  ‘Remember Turner lashed himself to a mast to paint,’ Tom yelled to Sheridan’s departing back.

  ‘I dare say, but if he had known that today the Café Florence’s plat de jour was scallops in a creamy sauce served on a buttery parsley purée of pommes de terre, accompanied by a crisp dry white wine, he would have unlashed himself within seconds and done the decent thing by them,’ Sheridan murmured, half to himself and half to Celandine, who had also, regretfully, decided to pack it in, and was following him across the dunes back to the edge of the village.

  She put up her faithful umbrella against the rain, and together they clung to it as they bent their heads against both the increasing wind and the rain, finally arriving thankfully at the café, which was already filling up.

  ‘I am no good at storms,’ Celandine confessed. ‘The idea of detailing all those white tops to the waves makes me seasick before I have even begun.’

  Sheridan gave his infectious laugh, perhaps delighted by her honesty, but perhaps even more delighted by the delicious smells coming towards them from the kitchens. The two of them quickly took their seats at a corner table, well away from the bump and bang of the service door.

  ‘Just how hungry can painting make you?’ Celandine asked dreamily after demolishing a plate of scallops and several glasses of white wine.

  ‘There is no greater hunger than the vulpine appetite of the artist arriving at table for his lunch or dinner.’ Sheridan smiled, and allowed his free hand to touch Celandine’s, which was resting on the table. She did not react, but nor did she move her hand, preferring instead to ignore the contact rather than hurt his feelings. ‘What were you talking to Alfred about this morning before we left?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Celandine pulled a small face.

  ‘Nothing, eh? Now that is a grand subject.’

  ‘Yes, it is, isn’t it—’

  ‘I don’t like you talking to Alfred Talisman about nothing. It is far too big a canvas, especially in the early morning.’

  ‘He’s been hurt, quite badly, by his father, I think. That is why he is so reticent.’

  ‘Well, so have I! I have been hurt by my father. He died when I was quite young. And you don’t confide in me as much as you confide in him. I must confess it is making me jealous.’

  ‘Well now, what is that supposed to mean?’

  ‘It is supposed to mean that it’s making me jealous.’ Sheridan took a long sip of his wine. ‘You must know that I suspect that Alfred is entertaining feelings for you, and I won’t have it, because I fell in love with you first,’ he continued in a low voice. ‘You know very well I have been in love with you ever since I drew you in the Louvre. I won’t let anyone else be in love with you, not the way I am.’

  Sheridan’s free hand was no longer placed beside that of Celandine, it was now covering it. Celandine looked away.

  ‘I don’t want anyone to be in love with me – I really don�
�t. I don’t like the thought of love, or being in love, or anything to do with it. I only like the thought of art—’

  ‘What about the art of love, then?’

  ‘Love in art would be all right,’ Celandine returned, ‘but anything more is so tangled. People in love are always moaning and losing their ideals in a welter of emotion that has nothing to do with real life. People in love do not notice life, only each other. No, I don’t think love is for me.’

  Sheridan sighed. ‘Well, isn’t that a bit of a pity, since I am in love with you, and have been ever since I sat drawing your lovely face in the Louvre museum that rainy afternoon – what now seems a hundred years ago.’

  Celandine smiled. They had both presented each other with their drawings. Sheridan’s offering was far better than hers, and he knew it. It was plainly sensual, startlingly so, despite the fact that Celandine was fully clothed and even wearing a hat. She decided to change the subject.

  ‘I shouldn’t even be here in Brittany, you know that. If my mother knew—’

  ‘If your mother knew I want to marry you she would be like all mothers, thrilled to the marrow at the idea of a wedding.’

  ‘But you don’t seem to understand. I don’t want to be married either.’

  ‘You have to marry, Celandine. Not to marry would be to waste your talents as a woman. You have to marry to be truly appreciated.’

  ‘I don’t mind wasting my womanly talents, whatever that might mean, I just don’t want to waste my artistic talent. Artistic talent lasts, beauty does not.’

  ‘Whoever told you that was not telling the truth. Beauty lasts for ever, because it comes from inside, whereas talent, my beautiful Celandine, is only as good as whatever you did yesterday, and that is the truth.’

  ‘I don’t want to be married. My half-sister is married and she is essentially very dull.’

  ‘She would have been dull unmarried, surely?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Seeing that he was gaining ground just a little, Sheridan took Celandine’s other hand in his, and shook both gently up and down as he went on, at his most persuasive.