by Kathy Shuker
‘Well, that’s for you to decide, surely.’
Lindsey said nothing and finished her coffee.
‘I thought you were dating Luc actually.’ As soon as she’d said it Terri regretted the remark.
‘Luc? No.’ Lindsey fixed Terri with an enquiring gaze. ‘Are you sure you haven’t met him before? Only the way you looked at each other... And you went to Nice together the other day, didn’t you?’
‘That was work.’ Terri hesitated, then offered a half-truth. ‘But it turned out we did meet years ago - at the preview of an exhibition.’
‘Is that right? I guess that is somewhere you’d meet people.’
Lindsey clearly didn’t believe her and Terri changed the subject, returning to the issue uppermost in her mind.
‘You told me Madeleine died young. So what happened to her exactly?’
‘Oh God, Madeleine, Madeleine. Everyone’s obsessed with Madeleine. Why do you want to know?’
‘Because if I knew it might make it easier to deal with Celia.’ Terri did an impression of Celia, staring fixedly into Lindsey’s eyes. ‘Your eyes, they’re exactly like Madeleine’s,’ she mimicked in a ghoulish voice. She sat back again and raised her eyebrows. ‘She’s scary, frankly.’
Lindsey assumed her more familiar mulish expression.
‘Well...Madeleine died in childbirth, apparently. Had some poor little kid who didn’t live long because there was something wrong with him.’
‘Oh no, how awful. Poor Peter.’ Terri felt a pang of guilt for some of the things she’d thought about him. ‘Do you know anything else about her?’
‘Yeah, of course: she liked paintings. Especially that Italian painter - what was his name: the one with a name like an angel...?’
‘Raphael?’
‘Yeah. Him. Maybe. Maybe not. But that’s all I know and I don’t want to talk about her,’ Lindsey added fiercely. ‘And I don’t think you should either.’ She got to her feet. ‘You’ve finished, haven’t you? Shall we go?’
Chapter 7
Peter started going for physiotherapy on a Thursday afternoon but omitted to tell Terri and it was Luc who informed her.
‘Quite a coup for you,’ he remarked dryly. ‘What did you do to his hand that day? Whatever it was he must have liked it. Perhaps you’d like to hold my hand sometime...’
Terri refused to rise to the bait. But Luc was often missing from the studio too, either for a couple of hours or half a day.
‘Collecting materials,’ he’d responded one afternoon when her curiosity got the better of her. ‘Peter is very particular. He has to have canvas from one place and paints or pigments from another; brushes from somewhere else. I could order it all but he likes me to check it for myself, make sure the quality’s right.’
And so it was that, on the second Thursday of May, Terri found herself alone in the studio for the entire afternoon. Peter was at the clinic and Luc had gone to Avignon to collect a selection of pigments, a journey of at least an hour each way. With a mug of tea to hand, she took the opportunity to pick up where she’d left off the previous week, looking through the disordered stacks of paintings. Every few days she now managed to persuade Peter to glance through the pictures she thought might enhance the exhibition. ‘Definites’ – of which there had only been three so far - were put in the holding racks near the door and ‘possibles’ stayed in her increasingly crowded office, pending a final decision. Most of the work she had found up to now had been from the middle or later years of his career and she was still searching for examples of his early work. Peter had been unforthcoming on the issue. ‘How the hell would I know?’ he’d bellowed.
After an hour of bending over, sorting through dusty canvases, she pulled out a striking image of a nude: a large, unframed painting of a young woman standing at an open window, her arms raised to lean on the sill, her back to the artist. The face was largely in profile, contre-jour and lacking in detail. The model’s chin length apricot-blonde hair, in big looping curls, gleamed in places where it caught the light. Terri turned it over. 1981 had been scrawled on the back. She put it to one side to show Peter.
Straightening up, easing her head back to stretch her neck, her gaze fell on a cloth-covered mound on the roof of the offices at the end of the barn. The rooms had been built with partition walling and flat roofs, leaving a tall, open triangle of loft space above them where something had evidently been stored. She retrieved an old wooden ladder from the end of the studio where a high window kept jamming, leaned it against the office wall and climbed its creaking steps. Finding the roof stronger than she’d expected, she made her way cautiously to the back, lifted the huge piece of hessian, thick with dust, and saw stacks of canvases buried beneath it, propped any which way. She dragged the cloth away, coughing as a cloud of dust motes rose into the air, and picked up the nearest picture. It had 1964 written on the back. Finally she had found the early work.
‘Yes.’ She punched the air. ‘Why didn’t Peter tell me these were up here?’
She immediately returned to the studio for her notebook and labels. There were portraits and nudes, landscapes and intimate interiors, though several were damaged with mildew or beetle infestation. Peter should be shot, she thought, for letting his paintings get into this state. Slowly and methodically she began to work through them, though it was clearly going to take several days.
It was engrossing, grimy work but, by the time she was ready to give up for the day, she had lined up nine ‘possibles’ at the edge of the roof. About to abandon the rest for another time, a small framed picture caught her eye, nestling against the back wall where she had cleared a way through. It had been carefully wrapped in a separate piece of cloth - the only painting which had been given this special treatment.
‘So who are you?’ she murmured, easing forward again, lifting it up and slowly pulling the cover off.
It was a small head and shoulders of a young boy, his lively, intelligent features full of mischief, his expression perfectly caught as if he was on the point of saying something. The familiar prickle of excitement ran down Terri’s spine. This was something special, reminiscent of the painting of Madeleine, vibrant, intriguing. In fact... Terri frowned. The boy even looked like Madeleine. No, that was ridiculous. Celia had put that thought in her head, comparing everyone to the woman.
She looked at the reverse of the canvas where 1974 had been pencilled onto the top stretcher. She turned it back. How old would the child have been? Maybe seven or eight. His mouth was slightly lop-sided but there was definitely a resemblance to Peter’s first wife, she would swear it.
‘Now that is odd,’ she muttered.
Lindsey had said that Madeleine had a ‘poor little kid who didn’t live long because there was something wrong with him’. Terri had assumed this meant that he’d died in infancy. So was this a different son or had she misunderstood? If she knew when Madeleine had died it would help. Had Peter had another child? Or had Lindsey been misinformed? She propped up the picture to one side and took the selected paintings down the ladder. Returning to the loft she picked up the boy’s portrait again. It was excellent but, if this was indeed the child who had died, hardly appropriate for the exhibition and quite impossible to ask Peter. Even so, on an impulse she wrapped it up in its swaddling again and took it down to her office where she hid it among the clutter at the back of the room.
Straightening up, she started, catching sight of Luc standing silently in the doorway.
‘Is something the matter?’ he said.
‘Not at all. I wasn’t sure you’d be back this afternoon.’
He looked at her with a quizzical expression and she held his gaze, wondering if he’d seen what she’d been doing.
‘The ladder is propped up over Peter’s door,’ he remarked. ‘Is there a reason for that?’
‘I found some paintings stored up in the loft.’
‘Really?’ Luc automatically glanced upwards though he could see nothing from where he stood. ‘Anythi
ng of note?’
‘I’ve only just started looking. But I’ve found a couple of things.’ She gestured towards the pictures she had put near the door. ‘There are a lot up there. I’ll have to go through the rest another day.’
‘That looks good.’ He’d noticed the nude with the tumbling apricot curls. It was a large picture and she’d propped it up against a box. Luc moved closer, his critical gaze running systematically over the canvas.
‘Who is it?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know...yet.’
‘The use of light is powerful. It’s hard to make out her features. It looks more instinctive than Peter’s usual.’ He leaned in closer. ‘It’s quite a sensual painting. The pose, the use of paint...’ He nodded as if trying to memorise its techniques.
‘I have to admit: you’re good,’ said Terri mildly, perching on the side of her desk.
He straightened up, looked round at her and frowned. ‘What do you mean by that?’
‘I mean you’re really quite believable as the apprentice, desperate to learn from his master...almost anyway.’
Luc sighed, his mouth settling into a resigned expression. ‘You’re still convinced I’m writing a story, aren’t you, that I’m only pretending to be a studio assistant?’
‘Of course.’ She eased herself off the table, closed down her computer and began to collect her things together.
‘Have dinner with me,’ he said.
She looked round sharply. ‘What? You must be joking.’
‘Ciel, Thérèse chérie. Don’t be so stubborn. I’ve thought about you so often over the last five years. This is a chance for us to make up and be friends. A lot has changed in that time.’ He took a step closer to her and looked as if he was about to reach out for her hand but then forced his fingers down into his pockets instead. ‘Have you never thought of me?’ he asked diffidently.
‘Oh yes,’ she said, moving away from him round to the other side of the desk. ‘But not in a good way. And don’t call me chérie.’
‘Well at least let me explain how I came to be here.’
‘Does it matter?’
‘We’re going to be working together for the next...what...four, five months. Wouldn’t it be better to clear the air?’
‘Fine,’ she said crisply, zipping her laptop in to its bag. ‘So tell me.’
‘What, here?’ He spread incredulous hands, taking in the dingy, cluttered space.
‘Sure. There’s no-one else here.’ She piled her things at the end of the desk, ready to take back to her room, and sat down, looking up at him expectantly as if he was about to tell her a story.
Luc stared at her, his mouth a pinched, tight line of frustration. ‘OK, if I must.’ He closed the door and began to slowly pace up and down the floor between the two tables.
‘Alors...the first thing is; I always wanted to paint. As a kid I was always sketching and painting. Awful stuff but I loved it. But my father didn’t think it was a ‘serious’ career.’ He looked across at her. ‘You remember I told you about my father: old school diplomat, very authoritarian, the reason I lived in London as a kid?’
Terri nodded.
‘So...I studied art history instead, then drifted into art journalism because I didn’t know what else to do. And I enjoyed it – some of it. Can’t pretend I didn’t, but it wasn’t fulfilling. It wasn’t what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Then about a year ago, I’d just had my thirty-sixth birthday, and it occurred to me that if I didn’t do something about painting soon, it would be too late. I’d saved some money so...’ He paused in his walking and shrugged. ‘...I took the chance.’
‘So you had an early mid-life crisis?’ Terri suggested, amused.
‘You can put it like that if you want,’ he said coldly. ‘I gave up the day job and came down to Provence. It seemed the obvious place to try my hand at painting again. Then I heard that Peter Stedding taught a few days a month and I approached him to see if he’d take me on. I showed him some paintings and, amazingly, he agreed. Then, about three months later, his studio assistant left...after some big row. He offered me the job which came with the use of the cottage and it was too good an opportunity to turn down.’ He smiled, a little ruefully. ‘It was stormy at first but Peter gets easier when you you’ve worked with him for a while.’
‘It’s certainly a good story.’
Luc stopped pacing and turned to look directly at her. ‘Merde, Terri. Peter wouldn’t have taken me on if I couldn’t paint. And I’ve got a cottage full of paintings. You can come and see them if you don’t believe me.’
‘Thank you but no thanks. Whether you can paint or not isn’t really the point, is it? In any case it doesn’t matter what I think.’
Terri got to her feet and picked up her bags. She walked across to the door but Luc blocked her way. She raised her eyebrows expectantly. He didn’t move.
‘And why was it you came here again?’ he said softly, leaning down to speak into her ear. She could feel the warmth of his breath on her skin, see his long eyelashes which she remembered so well. ‘A career move? Didn’t you tell me you wanted to specialise, become an expert in your field, write monographs on Holbein and Rembrandt? Though I suppose a book on Peter and all his painted ghosts would have a certain popular appeal.’
He straightened up and put his hand to the door handle.
‘You never told me about your great desire to paint when we were dating,’ said Terri.
He turned back. ‘No, I didn’t. We never got beyond the first stage did we: guarded conversations, both scared of embarrassment or rejection. I wasn’t likely to tell an art curator that I had aspirations to paint until I was more certain of her. Especially when that woman is as reserved as you are.’ He paused. ‘Everyone has corners, Terri, places they’re scared of shining a light into. So how many things do you keep to yourself, hein?’
He stared at her a moment then flung the door open and walked out. Terri watched him cross to his work station, dumped her bags on the floor, and quickly pushed the door to. She put two fingers from each hand up to massage her temples, trying to clear the tension. She hadn’t expected Luc to affect her in this way. He was so plausible. And there was a small but worrying part of her which wanted to believe him.
She tried to push him out of her mind, remembered the little portrait of the boy and returned to her desk to root through Peter’s notebooks. She found the one for 1974, slipped it into her bag and left the studio without looking in Luc’s direction.
*
Peter looked up the ladder to where Sami was stretching one long, scrawny leg up into the loft space.
‘Careful,’ he said in French.
He now doubted the wisdom of doing this. Sami might be thirteen years younger than he was but he was no longer the lanky, gangling youth whom Madeleine had befriended all those years ago and for whom she had insisted they should find a job. He too was grey and occasionally stiff; he stooped a little when he walked. Peter sometimes forgot how much time had passed. There were scuffling noises as Sami successfully negotiated his way onto the roof of the office and disappeared out of sight. Peter was relieved. It would have been difficult to have asked anyone else to do this with him and he had reluctantly accepted that he could not do it on his own. The fall had sapped his confidence and he had balked at trying to climb the ladder. Not that he would ever admit it to anyone.
‘Which ones do you want?’ came Sami’s flat disembodied voice from the loft space.
‘All of them,’ said Peter firmly. ‘Just pass them down to me two at a time.’
Peter saw nothing for a few minutes but could hear odd sounds and grunts, then Sami appeared at the top of the ladder, looking, from below, even longer and stringier than usual. He was dragging a large piece of hessian in his hands and he folded it over and over to make a pad and put it down by the edge of the roofing. He disappeared and returned a moment later with a painting in each hand, slowly knelt onto the pad and leaned down to place each picture in turn int
o Peter’s outstretched hands. Without giving them a second glance, Peter propped the paintings up against the shelving nearby, then returned to receive the next two. He had no idea how many were up there. He couldn’t even remember how long it was since he’d put them there. All he knew was that he wanted to look through them before Terri did and without her being anywhere around.
‘I’ve found your early work,’ she’d declared to him exultantly on the Friday. ‘They were up in the loft space. But some of them are in a terrible state; they need attention.’ She’d pointed a reproachful finger towards the loft. ‘You’ll lose a lot of your work if you store them that way. Anyway, I’ve brought a few down which look interesting. It’ll take me a while to go through the rest of them. Why didn’t you tell me they were there?’
He had dismissed her find as unimportant, remarked that there would be nothing of interest in the loft, but then insisted on retrieving the rest of the paintings himself when she refused to let the matter drop. ‘I will not have you clambering about up there,’ he’d said firmly, closing the subject. ‘You’ll probably fall and then sue me.’
So now it was Saturday morning and he and Sami had the studio to themselves. It took them more than an hour and a half to move all the stored paintings down to the studio floor. During a short break in the middle they sat on two wooden chairs in the studio, drinking coffee, saying nothing. We’re just two old men now, Peter thought, glancing across at Sami whose dark eyes, sunken in his withered, tanned face, seemed fixed on some distant, imagined horizon. Their pasts felt inextricably linked – they had spent the larger part of their adult lives together - and yet it occurred to him that he barely knew the man. Madeleine had been the one who always made a connection with people. He cast about for something to say. Then he remembered Sami having a day off to go and visit an ailing friend a couple of weeks before. He could ask after him, or perhaps it was a ‘her’.
In the end Peter asked nothing; he had never been good at the personal talk. He wondered if Sami missed not having a wife. Peter had formed the impression that Sami had had lady friends in the past but he’d never settled with anyone. Did he get lonely? If he did, he didn’t show it. Sami kept his own counsel; he was the most silent person Peter had ever met. More than once he had thought that it was probably one of the things he liked most about the man. But did Sami regret anything? Had he made mistakes? Peter was curious to know but could not imagine asking him. In any case it would be unlikely to make him feel better. If their respective transgressions were put in a balance, Peter had no doubt that his own would weigh by far the heavier.