by Lucy Foley
When he disappeared I sat down on the bed and regarded myself in the mirror opposite. I looked as tired and travel-worn as I felt, but there was something else, too, some barely perceptible change that couldn’t be attributed to the colour I had managed to pick up. If it wasn’t my imagination I appeared more resolute, more certain of myself. I had begun to avoid looking in mirrors since Mum’s death, because the girl I saw reflected in them was not someone I recognized: a spectre, a not-quite person. Now, however, I saw someone with purpose. Was this what Stafford had seen in me, that which I had not known until he had distilled into the portrait?
I returned to the sitting room, where Oliver was waiting. It was odd – he looked awkward in the bare space – out of place – as though he were the guest. But then I recalled how I’d felt rattling around the house in Battersea, feeling like an imposter, a pale imitation of all that had been there before. Perhaps it wasn’t so different for him.
‘Right,’ I said, and my voice sounded loud in the silence. ‘I should go now.’
Oliver shifted on his feet. ‘I could walk you there, if you’d like? It would be quicker than you having to find your way.’
I hoped, for the sake of my pride, that he could not see the relief on my face.
When I showed him the address from the postcard, and he told me that it wasn’t far, my heart began to beat faster. I had been so swept up in the events of the night before that I had almost managed to put it out of my mind. Now my trepidation came flooding back. In that moment, I think I might have preferred if he’d told me that by some misunderstanding we’d ended up in the wrong city. Suddenly I didn’t feel ready.
If I had thought I was the only one aware – and only newly aware – of Oliver’s beauty, I discovered now that I was not. The sheer brazenness with which people looked at him surprised me. I noticed, even if he did not, the exquisite teenager who treated him to a sliding glance as she passed; the lingering gaze of the middle-aged woman arranging chairs outside a restaurant. Had I been so desensitized, before, that I had been unable to see something that was so obvious to everyone else?
When we eventually came to stand in front of it, I couldn’t quite believe that the house existed. The fact of it made it all real – made Alice real. Until this point she had been like a figure from myth, and I had decided, from the off, to expect failure. I think I would have been less surprised to find that the place had collapsed in a cloud of masonry and furniture into some yawning chasm in the ground. It seemed all too easy that I should be able to walk up to Alice’s house and simply knock on her door.
It was a beautiful building: soberly elegant, with a lofty grey stone frontage and a graceful symmetry of ironwork balconies through which ivy wended glossy dark stems.
‘It’s rare to own a whole house here,’ Oliver murmured. ‘She must be well off.’
This sat oddly with what I thought I knew. Alice was the runaway, the girl who had forsaken a life of plenty for her freedom. I had imagined her scraping by, living a poor, bohemian existence in a grimy backwater, but this was unmistakably the address I’d copied down.
Before I put my finger to the bell, I had what I can only describe as a funny turn. My head felt, suddenly, as though it were filled with helium, my vision swam and my heart beat a tattoo in my chest. As if sensing this, Oliver joined me on the step. ‘I could come in with you,’ he said, casually.
I looked at him, taken aback by his kindness.
‘Are you sure?’
‘If you’d like.’ He shrugged, offhandedly. ‘I don’t have anywhere to be today.’
‘OK,’ I said, ‘yes – thank you.’ Gradually, I felt my breathing return to normal, my heartbeat slow. I reached out and pressed the bronze button, once, hard.
The door was opened by a woman in her fifties with dark hair cropped close to her head and an austerely beautiful face. She was dressed simply – but not inexpensively – in a dark grey shift, with a necklace of gold filigree around her neck. She was one of those tiny, compact people – rather like my mother, in fact – who made me feel about eight foot tall. I was suddenly aware of my elderly jeans and crumpled T-shirt. She looked from one to the other of us with a bird-bright, assessing gaze.
‘Oui?’
I explained, in my rusty but serviceable French, that we were looking for Alice.
‘I don’t understand.’ She switched immediately and fluently into English, and I tried not to feel offended that she hadn’t thought me up to the task of carrying out the discussion in her language. ‘No one of that name lives here.’ I know now that this ignorance was feigned, but that my use of the name had alarmed her into the pretence.
‘But …’ Then I remembered: ‘I think she might also be known as Célia.’
She looked at me curiously, and gave a shrug, as if implying it wasn’t her problem if I were unhinged. ‘All right. What is it that you want?’
I tried to remind myself that it was probably the fact that she was not speaking in her own tongue that made her sound so cold.
‘It’s rather difficult to explain.’
‘Well, she isn’t available at the moment.’ I saw that she had a firm grip on the door, as if she were preparing to fling it shut in our faces.
‘She lives here though?’ This woman had already told me much more than she might have imagined. Alice was alive.
A curt nod. ‘This is her house.’ She began to close the door. ‘I’m sorry, but I—’
‘I need to speak to her.’ I hadn’t meant to raise my voice, but it was almost a shout. She raised her eyebrows, but her hand on the door stilled and I lowered my voice. ‘I should introduce myself. My name is Kate.’ I put out my hand, and she stared at it for a moment before taking it, reluctantly.
‘Marguerite.’
‘Would you … I don’t mean to impose, but I know that … Célia will want to meet me. It’s about something very important.’ Then I added, as an afterthought, ‘as important to her as it is to me, I think.’
Marguerite shifted in the doorway, apparently wrong-footed. I tried to peer past her down the length of the dark hallway, as though Alice might be waiting somewhere within, ready to receive me if I passed this first trial.
‘Perhaps I could call on her later – or tomorrow?’
Marguerite looked puzzled, then turned and followed my gaze into the depths of the house. She shook her head and gave a funny sort of laugh. ‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘no, she isn’t here. Not in Paris.’
‘I’m sorry … I don’t follow. I understood this was her house.’ The thought came to me then: perhaps she was dead, after all, and this woman was playing a nasty little game, to test the validity of my story. ‘So where—’
‘New York.’
‘New York?’ I echoed, faintly.
‘She has a gallery there. One here, and one over there, in New York. This is still her house too, naturally. When she is away, I look after it.’ She inclined her head. ‘She spends more and more time there now.’
She smiled economically. ‘So, you see, you will have to come some other time.’ She waved a hand. ‘A month, perhaps. I think she will return in November, for the opening of the new exhibition.’
‘November? It can’t wait until November—’ I tried to calm myself. ‘It’s very important that I speak to her now.’
She looked unmoved. ‘What can it be, that you need to see her so urgently?’
‘I can’t explain properly here …’
Marguerite shrugged, as though she didn’t believe it would do any good, but couldn’t summon the energy to argue the point with me. ‘All right, you can come in.’ She beckoned briskly, bidding us follow her into the house.
The corridor that led from the front door was lined with artwork. I tried to take stock of the pieces, but Marguerite moved too quickly, and glanced round a couple of times as if to see what was taking us so long. As we reached the end of the hallway, Oliver touched my arm and drew me back. It was all I could do to avoid remarking how my skin thrilled
at the warmth of his touch.
‘Look.’
It was an abstract: fierce squares of black and white, among which wandered bent humanoid figures. In one corner was a red cross, daubed in a quick, careless gesture, so that the paint had run from the lines to bleed down towards the bottom of the canvas. It was intriguing, certainly, but I couldn’t understand why Oliver had drawn my attention to it.
‘It’s my grandfather’s. One of his pieces on the war.’
Now I stared. It was so different from anything I had seen of Stafford’s: so much more raw and violent.
‘And there’s another. One of his “Odalisques”.’
I turned to see. A hugely fat woman, splayed on a sofa wearing nothing but a bath towel wrapped around her head, one hand dangling indolently – the fingers beautifully done. There was, despite her unhealthy size, something oddly arresting about her. A beauty that had been drawn out in the portrayal, in the delicate bluish pallor of her lolling breasts, the proud white meringue of her stomach.
It was curious, to say the least, that these two works should be in Alice’s possession. Perhaps they had been presents. But then I saw that the Odalisque was dated 1962, and Stafford had told me that he had last seen Alice in the thirties. So, it seemed, Alice was a collector of his work. Did Stafford know? I felt sure that he would have mentioned it if he had.
Oliver had spotted another painting he recognized before Marguerite came out of the kitchen to check why we had been delayed. ‘Is there a problem?’
‘No,’ said Oliver, apparently not inclined to say anything else. Then he changed his mind and added: ‘Actually, I stopped to look at the art.’
Marguerite regarded us steadily, apparently trying to decide whether we were pulling her leg or planning to steal one of the pieces. ‘Oh yes?’
‘Yes. I noticed’ – Oliver gestured to them – ‘a couple of works here I recognize. They’re my grandfather’s.’
‘They are—’ She stopped, wrong-footed. ‘Your grandfather is Thomas Stafford?’
‘Yes.’
She looked from one to the other of us, incredulous. ‘But Célia is probably the largest collector of his work in the world.’
It was surreal, being in Alice’s house without actually having come close to meeting her. Perhaps it was my imagination, but to me the air in the building felt rarefied, charged with some essence of the absent woman. There was the faintest savour of something smoky and exotic in the air that it seemed to rise up in a cloud from the cushions when we sat upon them.
We were at the back of the house. The light filtered green into the room from the small garden beyond the windows, and the topmost shoots of a white rosebush scratched against the glass with a tiny sound. A Burmese cat padded past on silent paws and slinked up the staircase, uninterested in our presence.
Oliver and I sat on a low, emerald-coloured ottoman with claws for feet, and Marguerite sat in a chair opposite, slightly elevated above us. I cradled my bowl of coffee in my lap, trying not to spill it. It felt like the start of an interrogation.
‘So,’ I said, to break the silence, ‘how do you know Célia?’
Marguerite took her time answering. ‘I’ve known her for a long while,’ she said finally. ‘Nearly all my life.’
‘Ah.’ No relation, then. I waited for an elaboration on this, but none was forthcoming.
‘And how do you know her?’ It was spoken like a challenge.
‘Actually, I don’t know her, not exactly.’ She raised an eyebrow – perhaps wondering if she had made a mistake in admitting us. I hastened on: ‘But, I’m … well, I’m her granddaughter. My mother was her daughter: June Darling.’
I had expected Marguerite’s reaction to be one of incredulity, or worse, outrage. I read neither in her expression – if anything, it had softened.
‘So you are Kate.’ She studied me. ‘Yes, you look like the photos I have seen of your mother. And a little like Célia, I think.’
‘Thank you. But how—’
‘Célia has known about you for a long time,’ she said, answering before I could ask. ‘I want to say that I’m sorry for your loss. Your mother was a wonderful dancer. I saw her, once, in Swan Lake.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, thrown by this compassion from a woman who had seemed so cold only moments before.
‘When your mother died, Célia was nearly destroyed by grief. It was the great tragedy of her life, that she never knew her.’
‘But she left her.’ I failed to keep the censure from my voice.
Marguerite looked fierce. She leaned closer, until I worried she might be about to pour her coffee into my lap. ‘Let me tell you something. I don’t know exactly what happened – Célia has never told me – but she would not have left your mother unless she had no choice. That is not the sort of woman she is.’
She sat back, and regarded me with those bright black eyes. Perhaps she felt she hadn’t gone far enough towards convincing me, because she went on, in a rush: ‘I was so jealous of your mother. Of how much Célia wanted to make contact with her, how much she longed for her …’ She stopped quickly, as though she had surprised herself with the confession. There was a weighted silence, punctuated only by the faraway retort of a car horn.
Suddenly Oliver spoke. ‘Will you let Célia know that Kate will be coming to visit her? This week, if possible.’
‘Oliver—’ I turned to look at him, wondering what his game was, but he simply gazed back at me, impassively, as though it had all been planned in advance.
To my surprise, Marguerite was nodding her head. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, I think that would be best.’
Outside, in the street, Oliver seemed possessed of an unusual energy. ‘We need to get there before they shut,’ he said.
‘Where?’
‘The travel agents.’ We walked back along the Rue de Seine, and on to the grimy thoroughfare of the Boulevard St Germain. As soon as we found one, Oliver strode in and asked at the desk for a ticket to New York – and a flight back to London Heathrow. A stone of melancholy dropped through me at the thought of home – the place that now seemed so bound up with loneliness and grief. He hadn’t suggested, I realized, that I might prefer to return to Paris.
Within minutes I was booked on the morning flight from Charles de Gaulle to JFK. I saw Oliver fish his wallet from his pocket, and suddenly realized what he meant to do. ‘No,’ I said, in alarm, as he took out his card. ‘I can’t let you.’
He turned to me. ‘I want to,’ he said, firmly. ‘I told you before that I wanted to help – and it seems I’ve found a way to do so.’
‘I know,’ I said, ‘but not like this – it’s too much.’ But as I looked at him I could see how adamant he was, for whatever reasons of his own, that he would do this thing. So, still wondering at it, I let him.
By the time we made it back to the apartment, dusk was falling, spilling its purplish shadow across the city. The streets were busy, the tables outside bars crowded with people. Oliver told me that only a few weeks ago many of the bars would have been shut, the city eerily quiet.
‘I imagine you hardly ever see it like that,’ I said, ‘having always gone down to Corsica in the summer.’
‘No, that’s true. I’d never really known it until recently.’
‘So you stayed here one summer?’
He made a kind of grimace, and I suddenly regretted asking him. ‘Yes – for four years, actually. Isobel didn’t like to travel a lot – well, not at all, to be honest. So we stayed here.’
‘Ah.’ I couldn’t think of anything else to say. I had felt the name – Isobel – like a sting.
At the apartment I had a shower, hurrying from the bathroom to my room so I could avoid an awkward meeting with Oliver in the hallway. I changed my clothes – feeling the need for an outfit altogether more elegant than the jeans and T-shirt – now distinctly off-white – that I’d worn to travel in. I picked through my clothes indecisively, wishing I had something truly beautiful to wear. It was th
e city, I told myself, doing this to me.
I turned my bag upside down, prepared to be disappointed by what was in there. To my amazement, beneath the faded shorts and T-shirts stained with sun cream was my black crêpe de Chine dress: the one I had worn on my twenty-first birthday. I had not seen it since then. It must simply have been hidden in plain sight in my wardrobe, and I had somehow managed to sweep it up with my other things. I had certainly been distracted when I had packed for Corsica. Even so, I felt a thrill go through me.
It was perfect: cut high at the neck, sleeveless, close-fitting. I had forgotten how I felt transformed wearing it, several degrees more elegant. As I studied myself in the mirror I realized why I had always loved it so much. Because it made me look a little like her – like Mum.
I heard Oliver’s footsteps then, approaching my door. ‘Would you prefer to go out for supper?’ he asked. ‘Or we could eat here?’
I thought. I was dog-tired, but I hadn’t been in Paris since I’d visited as a girl with Mum. Besides, a crowded restaurant would be infinitely preferable to an awkward supper à deux in this empty flat. I could not help but suspect that Oliver’s cupboards would have nothing in them. I did not want him to have to humiliate himself by admitting it, to have to reveal to me how he had been living before he came to Corsica.
The restaurant was crammed with diners and dimly lit, clamorous with music and chatter. We were shown to a table in one of the shadowy alcoves that lined one brick wall. Its removal from the central chaos lent it a peculiar intimacy. It was a space intended for lovers, I realized.
While Oliver was speaking to our waiter I studied him. The candlelight acted upon his features: drenched the hollows in shadow, illuminated the sharp crests of cheekbone and brow. What was revealed was an almost terrible, unearthly beauty. Then he turned to me and gave a cautious smile – and became himself again. Still, I thought, how could I have been indifferent to such a face?
We asked for a bottle of wine, and drank it as we studied the menu. On my empty stomach the alcohol went to work quickly, and I began to feel a pleasant haziness descend. With each glass the restaurant around me became incrementally less real, fading gradually to an assemblage of light and noise and colour; of sensation and impression. Finally a waiter freed himself from the melee and came to take our orders.