‘Just supposing you could be both beautiful and talented? Supposing you married someone who allowed you to be both, and loved you into the bargain, would not that be paradise?’
‘Didn’t anyone tell you, paradise was lost by Eve tempting Adam, leaving us only with real life?’
‘When I’ve finished here,’ Sheridan continued, ignoring her, ‘I am not going back to Paris, except to pack up, and pay my rent. No, I propose to go to England, to Cornwall, to Newbourne, where I was last summer.’
‘Why Cornwall?’
‘The light in Cornwall is just like here; it is perfect for painting in the open air. Why don’t you come with me, Celandine? We could share a studio, be part of something new and special, a new realism that is starting to happen in European art. I want to take everything I have learned in Europe back to England, perhaps eventually set up a school at Newbourne. Myself and some like souls, we all want to get away from the studio, away from painting men and women in the heroic or Biblical mould. We want to paint real people, working people, depict faces that are worn and torn, not painted and varnished and glowing with unreality.’
The expression in Celandine’s eyes changed. ‘I know just how you feel—’
‘No, you don’t,’ Sheridan interrupted with sudden passion. ‘I know you don’t know how I feel, because if you did you would not, could not, go off on walks talking the hind legs off that wretch Alfred Talisman every morning!’
‘Oh, we’re not back to that, please say we’re not back to that.’ Celandine sighed and looked away and then back at Sheridan. ‘Alfred is very intelligent. I like talking to him,’ she said slowly. ‘I am only trying to draw him out. He is so shy and sensitive.’
‘So am I! I too am shy and sensitive, but I have overcome it,’ Sheridan protested. ‘Do you realise what you put me through when you walk off with him, deep in some conversation about that all-embracing subject – nothing?’
‘We only talk about the principles of art, about painting, Sheridan. Nothing that could not be overheard by your maiden aunt, I promise you.’
‘Talking is often considered, quite rightly, to be more intimate than lovemaking,’ Sheridan stated sulkily.
Celandine banged the table lightly with a small fist. ‘I won’t have anyone telling me whom I may or may not talk to,’ she protested. ‘I am a free spirit.’ She pointed towards the windows of the café. ‘I have to be as free as the birds on the shore out there, or I will die.’
‘I insist once again, Celandine, talking is more intimate than lovemaking. For the past few days you have done nothing but take yourself off down the coast walking and talking with Alfred. It is maddening me, and you know it. You know how I feel about you; you know how passionate I am about you. I don’t want you going off for walks with Alfred Talisman.’
Celandine shrugged her shoulders. ‘That is my affair, surely?’
Sheridan, perhaps seeing that he was getting nowhere at all, leaned forward and kissed her on the lips, in full view of the waiter, who was at that moment approaching their table with a tray of coffee.
‘Ah, vive l’amour,’ the waiter murmured approvingly as he placed the coffee pot in front of them. ‘It so often follows after a good lunch, n’est-ce pas?’
Celandine was so shocked by Sheridan’s behaviour, most particularly since it was so public, that she was overwhelmed by a violent wish to slap his face, and slap it hard. The only thing that actually saved Sheridan from public humiliation, that prevented Celandine from administering a stinging reply to his audacity, was not the fact that Celandine had never been kissed on the lips before, nor the fact that the waiter had seen the kiss, but the effect that it had on her.
In those few seconds, even as she pulled away from him, Celandine knew that she had been admitted to a magic circle outside which nothing really mattered.
It was surprisingly easy to return to the old inn and creep up the stairs to her room. As Sheridan and Celandine inched open her door, from all over the small hotel could be sensed the feeling that siestas were the order of the day. Of course, what surprised Celandine more, was how easy it was to make love. How quickly clothes came off and laces were undone, and how her long, dark hair seemed to take on a life of its own, unwinding itself with unnatural ease from combs that had been carefully placed only hours before.
And if she had often wondered what the attractions of love could be, now her mind and body wondered no more, for they were greater than she could ever have imagined.
In the light that filtered from behind the deep red curtains their bodies seemed to take on a dark fascination of their own; so much so that by the time Sheridan was leaving her to rest and sleep under the thin French quilt, stealing out of her bedroom to his own, it was with a smile of such radiant happiness that, had it been night, he would have had no need of a torch to light his way.
From the bed Celandine watched the door shutting behind his slim, handsome figure, and was startled to find that she felt as if she already owned it.
Chapter Five
They were painting on the beach, and it was their first really perfect day, a day so beautiful that for once everyone was silent. Not even Sheridan had spoken for some hours so intent was he, like everyone else, on capturing the scene before them: the sea, the sunlight on the water, the blue sky. Celandine had just started to wonder what she had done to deserve such happiness, in love and surrounded by artists, watching the sunshine on the water, the children in their floppy hats and pretty dresses paddling on the edge of the still cold water, the frilling of the waves reaching towards the beach, when she heard a sound she had come to dread. It was unmistakable, rising insistently, imperiously, above the sound of the sea, the quiet happy calls of children looking for shrimps in the rock pools behind them, the murmur of grown-ups gossiping to each other in their deck chairs – Agnes’s voice.
Celandine turned, unable to believe that it was actually her half-sister calling to her.
‘Agnes?’
The word came out as a quavering horrified question loaded with uncertainty, as if she was a blind person who could not recognise the figure of her sister standing at the top of the beach staring down to where Celandine and the others had been, until that moment, quietly concentrating.
‘Celandine – will you please come here?’
Agnes’s question, unlike Celandine’s, held no uncertainty.
Years of jumping to, years of being the much younger sister, years of seeing her mother hurrying towards Agnes in answer to her querulous demands, meant that Celandine, to the astonishment of the other painters, immediately put down her brush, rose from her stool, and walked quickly up the beach.
‘What are you doing here, Agnes?’
‘What are you doing here, Celandine? That is what I am here to ask.’ Agnes took Celandine by the arm as if she was some sort of naughty schoolgirl and pulled her towards her.
‘It has been reported by someone at the hotel that you have been behaving like a – slut! Dragging the family name through the mud.’ She nodded towards the group of artists. ‘And where is the lady friend whom you were so anxious to go away with, may I ask? Where is your regard for your poor widowed mother, for our father – who had he been alive would undoubtedly have had a heart attack should he have read the letter that your mother received? It is nowhere. You have, I repeat, dragged the family name through the mud. Your mother sent me to bring you home, at once.’
Celandine shook herself free. ‘I am not coming home, Agnes. I am not one of your children to be dragged off the beach when you decide. I am here, painting, in company with my fellow artists. I am not coming home, not for you, not for anyone. I don’t know why you came here. You could have saved yourself the journey.’
‘I came here on behalf of your poor mother, who wanted me to bring you back.’
‘I don’t and won’t come back until I am ready to do so, Agnes.’
Agnes crossed herself. ‘May God help you, Celandine. You are in grave sin.’
‘If I am, then that surely is between myself and God? Nothing to do with you, Agnes.’
‘I have come to save you from yourself, Celandine.’
Celandine stared at her sister. She knew that even if Sheridan and the others could not actually hear what was going on, they must know that whatever was being said could not be amicable.
‘You should not have come here, Agnes, really you should not. You must go back. Tell Mother I am perfectly fine, and I will be coming back when I said I would, not before.’
‘Mother insists.’
‘Mother cannot insist, Agnes, as well you know. Thanks to my father I am independent.’
‘Do you really think you are, or could be, independent?’ Agnes looked at her pityingly. ‘Do you think you could live on the tiny annuity Father left both of us: pin money, not enough even for a new hat? Or is it that you think your paintings will make you rich?’ She laughed.
It was the laugh that confirmed Celandine’s determination to do exactly as she wished, no matter what.
‘I shall come back when I have finished the course, and not before. Now goodbye.’
She turned and went away down the beach, back to her easel and her painting, back to her fellow artists.
Sheridan allowed only a few seconds to pass before he was at her side. ‘What happened? Tell me what happened. Who was that fury who suddenly appeared before us as from a nightmare from Hades?’
‘My half-sister Agnes.’ Celandine’s mouth set determinedly, but her eyes were full of despair. ‘Someone from the hotel wrote to my mother and said that I was – you know, that I had been seen with you. Someone must have seen us, Sheridan, one of the servants.’
Sheridan took her hands. ‘Never mind. We have done nothing of which we need to be ashamed. Love is not shaming, it is beautifying.’
Celandine nodded. Part of her wanted to believe him, but another part of her knew that her mother would not share his view.
‘How could you!’
Mrs Benyon never raised her voice. She was always the proud possessor of a low tone, barely speaking above what most people would call a murmur, unless to Marie, and even then she would never raise her voice, only ever over-enunciating her words, aspirating her Ts and Ss, in a supreme and worthwhile effort to make her wishes plain in a mixture of French and American, a form of expression which seemed to satisfy both maid and mistress.
Now, thank goodness, Marie was nowhere to be seen. Celandine was quite alone facing her mother, still in her travelling dress.
‘You lied to me, you lied to me, you lied to me.’
Celandine stared at her mother. She loved her with all her heart, and normally she would have hated to think she had really hurt her, perhaps for the first time in her life, but she had to be truthful. She could not spare her mother’s feelings, at least not at that moment, because she now knew she loved someone else even more than she loved her mother.
‘Yes, Mother, I did lie to you, but not in the way you think.’
‘In what way then, pray?’
Mrs Benyon’s hands were trembling and she put out one of them to the marble hall table to steady herself.
‘I did not lie to deceive you, I lied to put your mind at rest. I was going to the summer school with a friend, and I did think, as he told me, that there would be other females there. I felt the lack of female company, as a matter of fact,’ she went on, frowning slightly. ‘Men on their own are really quite – male; as a matter of fact, quite, quite male. But there were no other females there, which was a shame, as I say. However, I learned a lot, really I did. Painting in the open air is not as easy as everyone here in Paris would have you believe. You become such a victim of the weather—’
Mrs Benyon looked momentarily bewildered, before quickly returning to her theme.
‘You were seen by Monsieur Declos – behaving like a common street walker, in a restaurant of all places, kissing in a restaurant, and then he wrote to me here. One of the servants at the inn – they too saw you with a man, and not in a restaurant – upstairs!’
Celandine now remembered a familiar face looking up at her as she left the restaurant so hastily that day with Sheridan, but she had no time to take her mother up on the point because Mrs Benyon was busy undoing the strings of her precious drawing folder, looking as if she was quite sure that the contents would be found to be non-existent, as if she was sure that Celandine had escaped to Brittany merely to make love, not to draw. She thrust the folder towards her daughter.
‘Let me see what you learned, and if what you learned is worth deceiving your poor widowed mother for. Show me all this famous work that you accomplished. Show it to me, I say!’
Celandine opened the leather folder, but in such haste that most unfortunately a drawing of Sheridan fell to the floor. She watched in horrified fascination as her mother picked it up and stared at it. It was not a drawing that any daughter would want her mother to see, and it was certainly no surprise when she felt a stinging slap across her cheek and heard her mother’s now distanced voice.
‘You are no longer my daughter. You will leave this house at once. I never want to see you again.’
Sheridan was relaxing in front of the floor-length windows that gave on to the inner courtyard of his lodgings, listening to the Paris pigeons calling to each other, watching the occasional visitor crossing or recrossing the cobbled enclosure, when he heard a knock at the outer door. Putting down his glass with some reluctance he strolled across and opened it, expecting perhaps the early return of one of the other lodgers, or one of the other students from the summer school, already bored with their own company, coming to seek his. Instead he saw Celandine, still in her travelling dress.
‘Celandine?’
‘May I come in?’
‘Of course, come in at once.’ Sheridan seized her by the hands and pulled her into the hall, but Celandine turned back to the door.
‘I’d better bring my luggage in,’ she said in a resigned voice. ‘It is, after all, all I have.’
Between them they dragged her luggage into the hall, and then stood looking at each other as if neither had any idea what to do next.
‘Come in, come in. I have opened a bottle of wine.’
Sheridan was tactful enough not to ask any more questions until they had both sat down and he had poured her a large glass of comforting red wine.
‘Mother has thrown me out. It appears I am no longer her daughter.’ For a second it seemed to Celandine that Sheridan looked unsurprised.
‘She was angry?’
‘When people tell you that you are no longer their daughter it usually means that they are not very pleased.’
They both laughed suddenly, almost hysterically.
‘I keep wondering who might have seen us together. Surely not just a servant? Anyway, why should they mind? They would be more likely just to come and ask for money in return for not saying anything, surely?’
‘I believe someone we know from Avignon saw me being kissed by you.’ Celandine smiled. ‘I dare say I need go no further.’
‘But young people do kiss each other. A great deal, as it happens.’
As if reminded by the delicious memory Sheridan leaned across and kissed her once again, with sudden passion, and then stood up and walked up and down the room for a minute or two quite obviously deep in thought, which Celandine recognised was not really like him. Sheridan liked to react to events, not plan them.
‘This makes no difference,’ he finally announced. ‘It only means that we marry earlier rather than later, by special licence, or some such. We shall be married in Cornwall.’
‘Cornwall? Cornwall?’
Celandine hoped she did not sound as appalled as she felt. To leave Paris for Cornwall, which she certainly did not know and was not quite sure she wanted to know, appealed to her not at all. Bad enough to be thrown out of her mother’s house, to have the lasting image of Agnes appearing just after her mother had slapped her, smiling at her discomfort, taking Mrs Benyon�
�s hand and leading her away, sobbing. Bad enough to have been punished so heavily for falling in love with Sheridan, but to be told that now she was to be taken to an alien land, as far away from the sophistications of Paris as it was surely possible to be, was really more than a punishment, it was a life sentence.
‘Yes, darling, we’re going away to Cornwall. I have a small allowance from my father, enough for us both to live, albeit not extravagantly.’
Celandine stared at Sheridan. She loved him, she realised that, and with all her heart, but Cornwall sounded far more foreign to her than either Paris or Munich.
‘I understand that it rains all the time in Cornwall, Sheridan.’
‘It rains a great deal, I grant you, but to make up for that there is the light. The light is exactly similar to the light in Brittany. It is clear, translucent, brilliant. Spring comes to Cornwall long before the rest of England. It is on its way shortly after Christmas. You will delight in it. Nature sends the daffodils ahead as messengers. Oh, Cornwall is a miracle of beauty, believe me. The flowers in the hedgerows, the wild pounding seas, the pebble beaches and white sands, they will be our inspiration, my darling.’
Celandine sensed that this was not the moment to remind Sheridan that he had told her that it was the working people, the fishermen and their women, who were going to be his inspiration. Instead she smiled.
‘I expect it will all turn out for the best,’ she said, unable to keep the doubt from her voice.
‘Turn out for the best?’ Sheridan stood her up and swung her round and round. ‘Turn out for the best?’ he repeated. ‘My darling Celandine, it is going to do more than turn out for the best. It is going to be delightful. The moment you set foot in Cornwall you will sense that it is holding out its arms to you, waiting to embrace you, as I am now.’
He took her in his arms, but Celandine promptly stepped back out of them, putting out her hands to his shoulders, holding him off.
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