The Crimson Portrait

by Jody Shields

  The pavilion’s walls of stone and glass were indistinct, deepened to gray under an equally gray moon. One summer’s eve a violinist had played fox-trots and tangos in this windowed room, which had been crowded with dancers. Women had drifted outside seeking a cooler atmosphere, and their pale silk gowns carried light diffused from the candles like pollen into the dark field, where servants waited with glasses of champagne, their silver trays blossoming with moving reflections.

  Now the image of this scene seemed overly bright, fantastic, as if even her memory had been affected, muted by war.

  A strange odor found her; she knew it had wafted across the channel. It was the odor of fear and mourning, a harbinger of battle that had followed the men to their sanctuary at the estate. This was certain as gravity, cold as Mercury, and with another turn of the tide, spin of a planet, the enemy’s pointing finger on a map, grasses would suddenly flatten, revealing bare earth, leaving her unprotected and alone as the sky inflated, arched itself enormously overhead.

  Inside the pavilion, her footsteps revealed the cold echo of an unoccupied space, and her awareness sharpened to fit the opening of the windows, a route of escape. Too fearful to pace, she steadied herself against a wall, fumbled with a candle, and its feeble flame revealed broken glass, a floor patterned with pebbles, and the wiry disorder of birds’ nests in the eaves. The chill of the room enfolded her bare skin, a surface inviting inscription.

  Julian would be here soon. In her mind, she had stripped his face of features as wind strips leaves from a tree. Darkness would cover what she didn’t wish to see of him. On a battlefield, everything was aimed at one point. A target. Wasn’t a lover’s body a location to find in the dark?

  A noise outside.

  Fear snapped like a cloth in wind, twisting her attention around to a man emerging from the blackness behind the door. The illusion of his appearance was betrayed by wavering candlelight that caught the subtle reflection of his moist eye, revealing its live blue-and-white opacity in the mask that was Charles’s face.

  Her eyes stared cruelly, dangerous as a thrown weapon, a flaying knife. She couldn’t look away from this man. Not Charles. Not Julian.

  “So we begin.” His words were shapeless, rising and falling from behind the mask in a strange voice.

  He moved close enough to touch her, but her head turned away; she couldn’t look at him directly.

  He ignored her rejection—or was unable to see clearly—and gently opened her hand, pressed a small shell into her palm, smooth and unmarked as a bird’s egg, the line of its opening curved like two lips.

  “This is for you, Catherine. Hold it with the slit upright. I will touch the shell as if it were your body. Watch, think of yourself.”

  She looked up and for the instant of a glance, his mask revealed its stiffness, a primitive imitation of flesh, its surface textured with feathery brushstrokes, fine as a bird’s plumage.

  Their bodies touched, he cupped her hand, and his finger slowly circled the shell’s narrow opening. The rhythmic sound of his breath, a faint whoosh, was intensified by the mask, and it seemed he exhaled and inhaled through its entire surface, his flesh fused against it.

  Catherine resisted, tried to step back, but he wouldn’t release her; his finger stopped moving when she trembled. But there was nothing to fear, as his hand held only pleasure. He was unaware of her deceit, his unwitting imposture. She closed her eyes, to convince herself it was Charles who held her.

  Julian watched her face, patiently waited, then began to retrace a circle on the shell, his breath quickening, loud and intimate.

  She felt the shell’s thin membrane absorbing warmth from her skin and willed herself to slip into it, to dissolve this suspense. The room, his presence, the tense angle of her body vanished, and she became heavier, then lighter at his command, a chain of sensations ending as she blindly pushed him away, gasping Who are you?

  The candlelight intensified into a fiery streak that spread over the mask, glowing where her fingernails had scratched him in passion.

  AN ORDERLY ADJUSTED his spectacles and tossed an envelope addressed to Mrs. Coleman onto her worktable.

  “What’s this?” Anna studied the envelope. An official communication was seldom welcome in wartime.

  “Will you be reading it, Mrs. Coleman? Should I wait for a reply?”

  “Not now. No.” She instantly forgot the orderly and tidied the table, slowly covered a bowl of clay slip, cleaned her hands with a cloth, put the letter in her pocket, and left the studio.

  She entered the infirmary, not realizing she had sought Kazanjian until she found him.

  “A pleasure to see you, ma’am.” Kazanjian was formal and remote, as if to defend himself. A nurse handed him a document, and he responded with a quick nod of gratitude, ignoring Anna.

  She waited, her skirt brushing the shelves of supplies, resenting her undisguised need to see him and the pleading expression on her face that anger struggled to replace.

  After the nurse closed the door behind her, Kazanjian’s demeanor became gentler as he noticed that Anna’s clothing was stained with clay, for she had forgotten to remove her smock.

  “Something has disturbed you.”

  “I have received an official notice.”

  Kazanjian reached out and held her hands between his. “Come and sit with me, Anna. I will prepare a place for you.”

  The floor shifted strangely under her clumsy feet as he led her to the Juliet window with a view of the lake. Her body stiffly bent itself into position on the bench. They sat side by side like two pylons at opposite ends of a bridge, an ominous span of water between them. Anna sensed that if he were to touch her, she would shake with relief.

  He slipped the letter from her pocket. “May I open it?”

  She numbly agreed.

  The letter seemed solid as a tablet in his hand as he read it, then softly said the words her husband had died. Enemy fire. There were official regrets, and exact details were omitted. Volunteers had provided the white wooden cross that marked his presence in a foreign field.

  Sorrow was a cold, empty sharpness, then enormously full, and Anna embraced it with a bitter cry that threw her against Kazanjian’s shoulder.

  IN THE DAYS that followed the news of her husband’s death, Anna shut herself in the studio, refusing to see anyone. An orderly brought fresh water, food, a bromide in a brown bottle. Catherine left an offering of flowers in a bucket, and a bottle of wine was anonymously left on the doorstep.

  Anna turned Kazanjian away. He allowed her to do this. He left her candles and an enamel mug he’d taken from the mess at the base hospital, a memento of their time together. When he could steal away from the wards, he stood outside the studio, listening to Anna pacing, never disturbing her.

  One afternoon, Anna finally opened the door and admitted Kazanjian.

  She was wan, thinner, and there were circles under her eyes. Despite her time alone in the studio, everything had been neglected. Clay had cracked in containers; paint had dried on brushes and stiffened into irregular smears on the palettes. Dust had collected along the edges of the worktables.

  Anna watched without offering to help as Kazanjian silently began to tidy the room. Once she quietly urged him to return to his own work, obviously not expecting an answer. He resealed the jars and tubes of paint, scoured the worktables, rinsed bowls, brushes, and clay tools, emptied dark liquids into the waste vat. He poured turpentine on the palettes and scraped them down. A crimson shape bloomed on the rag in Kazanjian’s clenched hand as he carefully wiped paint off a palette. “You have never allowed me to help you. Even at the base hospital.”

  “That was a lifetime ago.”

  Imperturbable as the bottles on a shelf behind him, Kazanjian studied her, a solemn appraisal such as he gave patients, although the calculation of the future was veiled. “I have no defense against you.”

  “I cannot.”

  He hesitated as if to say something, picked up his notebook, an
d walked out.

  Good-bye, then.

  AT SUNRISE, MCCLEARY SAT on the edge of his bed, too fatigued to dress. It was extraordinary that he was still animated, could walk and talk, that the flesh hadn’t fallen from his body the way snow drops from a branch. His tidily folded clothing, his spectacles, the beaker of water, and the journal on the cast-off velvet chair were strangely unfamiliar, as if they had been left here weeks ago, not the previous evening. Artis. He remembered that the boy was safe and savored a fleeting sensation of accomplishment.

  He was deeply tired, his bones too stiff to accept ease. Kazanjian was correct. Bones were secret, unseen, unyielding. The body’s ivory treasure. Mast. Pole. Support. Skin was frail, a thin cover for nerves, muscles. A contact and a barrier, transformed by a needle, a splinter, another hand. A cruel word.

  A vision came of his own pale fingers in surgery, drawing stitches of catgut with a curved needle, and then the needle multiplied into a forest of green spears—no, it was fine grass growing over the dead. He imagined soldiers rising from the fields where they had fallen or been lovingly interred, and there would be no distinction between the men with whole bodies and the mutilated he had mended. All flesh equal. Bodies with radiant skin.

  He remembered a passage: “I know that my Redeemer liveth, and in the last day I shall rise out of the earth. And I shall be clothed again with my skin, and in my flesh I shall see God.”

  Constant in the background, like a current of suffering, he perceived the faint hiss of air over a moving object, as a bomb neared its target, a life neared its end. He put his fingers to his temples, and the throbbing there was synchronized to this pulse beyond the range of his hearing. Singing, was there singing? As his thought radiated across the fixed net of his body, he sensed it loosen, the veins slipping marvelously free of silken muscles and the anchor of bones as he settled into the cradle of his suspended flesh, conscious of a deep internal vibration that was entirely expected and entirely surprising as it came.

  KAZANJIAN VOLUNTEERED AND was assigned to Base Hospital No. 15, then finally transferred to a casualty clearing station at the front, as he insisted on being close to the battlefield. The conditions were appalling. Month after month, countless numbers of men died around him. After supplies of morphia ran out, he ordered the nurses to inject the most seriously wounded men with sterile water as a placebo. Bombs fell in a field adjoining the hospital tent, and he was unfazed. Kazanjian made his work a trench and buried himself there.

  AN ORDERLY HAD BEEN bribed to siphon hoarded petrol into the Wolseley and drive Catherine and Julian into the city. The trip was her gift to Julian, as she anticipated the mask’s illusion would be more powerful in an unfamiliar setting.

  Julian deftly tucked the blanket around her in the back of the motorcar, and they exchanged few words during the drive, as the chassis rattled like a cage. The weather had turned chill, the landscape was permanently gray, and a slowly darkening strata of remote, wintry clouds accompanied them along the half-frozen dirt roads.

  It was dusk when they arrived, but there was light enough to see that the city had suffered changes. The lake in St. James’s Park had been drained, and the open acres were occupied by military tents. Protective metal net had been draped over the National Gallery, apparently flung down by a giant. Tanks and immense guns mounted on revolving stands stood in the square before the Museum Library. The war was closer here. The most venerable buildings seemed temporary, artificial, as if broken bricks and debris were the true bones of the city, once hidden but now revealed.

  As Catherine and Julian walked under the green awning leading into the Berkeley Hotel, the lamplight struck their faces. Catherine anticipated the doorman’s shocked reaction to Julian’s bandaged face. She felt her arm tense under Julian’s hand.

  The gold buttons on the elderly doorman’s uniform flashed, his white gloves blurred, and the bored expression on his face didn’t change. A bandaged man was not an uncommon sight. Julian swiftly dropped a guinea into his hand.

  The hotel clerk was impassive as they signed the registration book. Catherine had remembered to wear her wedding ring, but Julian requested separate suites. Astonished, Catherine accepted his decision without protest and turned to follow a robust young woman in a bellhop’s uniform.

  The girl easily placed Catherine’s hatbox and two heavy leather suitcases in the lift. “Cold for the month, isn’t it, ma’am?” she observed.

  Disoriented by Julian’s rejection, Catherine didn’t reprimand the girl for speaking out of place. “It seemed warmer in the country.”

  “They say it’s the bombs that change the weather. Romney Marsh has been invaded by magpies. And there’s a plague of antler moths in Westmorland.”

  Catherine didn’t reply.

  Catherine and Julian had dinner sent up to their separate rooms that night. Afterward, she couldn’t sleep and stood before the window, cold air radiating through the windowpanes onto her outstretched hands.

  A fur cloak draped over her thin gown, she knocked on the door of Julian’s room and waited in the enormously wide, chilly corridor. There was no response, his room was quiet, and she returned to her bed alone as if in a dream.

  THE NEXT MORNING, Catherine began shopping for Julian at Fribourg and Treyer, relieved that the worn carpeting and dim, smoky interior of the shop were unchanged. She commissioned measures of dry Havana and Latakia tobaccos to be mixed, aged, and hand-rolled into cigarettes. A pair of malacca-handled umbrellas was ordered at Briggs, and a monogrammed silver cigarette box at Asprey. An appointment was made for Julian to be fitted for shirts at Budd. Every shop was busy but understaffed, as only women could be hired as clerks.

  Catherine carried her own packages. An armload of offerings. She turned a corner, and the entire street before her sparkled with broken glass, fine as frost in sunshine, and smoke lifted from a building, or what was left of it. Here was rubble to bruise a body, dust to blind. A familiar wave of panic swept over her, and she scanned the empty sky.

  Julian gently touched her shoulder, picked up the scattered packages, and guided her into the Berkeley Hotel. He had been following her.

  WITH UNSETTLING SOLEMNITY, the maître d’hôtel ushered Catherine through the Savoy, past the immense potted palms, Meyer van Praag’s dark-suited orchestra, the chef moving among gleaming copper pots in the windowed kitchen. The rigid smile she offered the maître d’, the clumsy flourish of her fan, too tightly gripped, revealed her nervousness.

  Julian was late, and she waited, the round diamond on her finger hardening under light from the lamp. She nervously studied the objects arranged on the table like markers on the face of a clock, the tines of the fork, the vertical knives and spoons. Everything seemed significant, signs portending their happiness, Julian’s arrival.

  Across the room, the maître d’ slowly approached Catherine’s table, his face bearing an expression of compressed tension as he bowed slightly and stepped aside for a tall man in an impeccable suit. Charles. His face momentarily faded, then reformed as if a wave had covered him, distorting her vision. Julian behind Charles’s mask.

  “I feel as if I am intruding.” Julian’s voice was slightly muffled behind the mask’s mouth slit.

  “Not at all.” The illusion that he was Charles held if he didn’t speak. Instead of the fractional happiness Catherine had anticipated, a stone pressure weighed on her heart.

  The black figure of a waiter materialized. “Madame, monsieur? Will it please you to order?” The crème de laitues, pilaf de volaille à la Turque were excellent.

  She wished to spare Julian the awkwardness of making his impaired speech understood and quickly whispered they would both order the chef’s recommendations.

  Julian positioned himself in shadow, offering her only a glimpse of his face. When his eye was turned away and he was silent, he was completely unreadable, a cipher, a man encased in the armor of Charles’s face. He moved closer; the candlelight from the table lamp caught his face, and like corro
sive salt, it destroyed the illusion of flesh. Catherine interpreted his distress, wordlessly communicated by the strained angle of his neck and shoulders.

  The pressure of the cold circle of jewels around her neck, the angle of her heeled shoes, the point of the starched napkin in her lap, unbalanced her. Surely he read her face, knew she had something to confess? The bluntness of skin that cannot lie. With difficulty, she stopped from clutching Julian’s jacket in panic.

  Julian reached across the table, and at the kind, familiar touch of his hand, Catherine’s eyes expanded into tears.

  She would beg him to remove the mask.

  “Monsieur?”

  As dishes were expertly placed on the table, Catherine’s smile was directed at the waiter in an effort to blind him to the appearance of the man next to her. The food was exquisite. The mask allowed Julian to sip liquids but not to eat. Catherine silently drank wine, as the pale soup in her bowl cooled, untasted.

  The sommelier solicitously interrupted, leaned discreetly over the table to enquire about their lack of appetite, and noticing the eerie immobility of Julian’s face, he stiffened, then recovered, motioning that the waiter should attend to their wineglasses.

  She was stung with pity, Julian intercepted her look, and in that instant sorrow flickered across his good eye. A splinter formed between them.

  Julian abruptly stood up, and the woman at the next table followed the direction of her husband’s astonished glance—unerring as a pencil line on a page—to stare at the strange man. The diners observing Catherine and Julian leave the room sensed something was wrong between them. A lover’s quarrel. It was always about the war.

  In the motorcar, Julian sat upright against the seat, refusing to touch her. She attempted to speak, but he lifted his hand to stop her words, insisting on silence as they drove to Cranbourne Street. Was he angry? Sorrowful? She interpreted his every action as an accusation against her. The mask was temporary. It could be removed and forgotten. A transgression followed by forgiveness. Like sin. There was a line, a crack between the painted mask and Julian’s flesh. She would seek him there.