Paris Still Life

by Rosalind Brackenbury

  “Why Paris?”

  “Well, there was the apartment. It seemed to be waiting for me. But you know, Marg, there’s nothing of Mum’s there, nothing at all. It felt as if she had never even been there.”

  “Well, she didn’t go there after she found out about that lady friend of his. And I think he had the whole thing redone, redecorated.”

  “You knew about her?”

  “Mum told me. She told me not to tell anyone. It was once when he was away, and she thought he must be with her, the other woman, and I found her crying in the kitchen. I must have been fifteen. She said it was very important that none of the rest of you knew, because the family was the most important thing. So, of course, I said I wouldn’t tell, and I didn’t.”

  “God. Marg, do you think they were mostly happy together? She and Dad?”

  “You know, I think they were, on the whole. It’s something I know I couldn’t have done—accepted that whole situation. But they weren’t like people today. They were kind of heroic, their generation. They tried to change society, and they tried to change themselves. Heroic and a bit mad. If they thought they ought to accept something, they got on and did it. Or tried to, anyway, with a few tears now and then. I think it was because they were brought up after the war, and there was a sense of having to put up with things. Then there was this kind of revolutionary stuff in the sixties. They really thought then that people were capable of change.”

  She leaned against the counter, her back to the sink, the plates all stacked in the dishwasher, the window behind her fogged with steam.

  “And we don’t?”

  “Well, Gab, I don’t know about you, but no amount of revolutionary fervor would enable me to put up with Jude having another woman for years and years.”

  “I see what you mean.” I had avoided talking to my sister for years because I thought she hadn’t changed, would never accept me as an adult. Now we were talking as women, as equals.

  “She could have gone back to work. She could have done anything. She chose to stay in East Anglia and do this kind of earth-mother thing, and of course it was great for us—we had everything we ever needed. But what about her? And just when she was getting a bit of life for herself, she got killed by a stupid bloody lorry. It wasn’t fair.” Marg closed the dishwasher and turned it on. I thought, how fairness counts with her, still; I remembered the boy at dinner: “America isn’t fair.” Nothing was fair, and surely you had to realize it once you were no longer a child.

  “Gaby, I hated him, from that day on, the day she told me. And I’d been so jealous of you, because you were his favorite, and I couldn’t tell you the truth about him because you were only young, and she had made me swear not to. But Dad was a shit.”

  I stared at her. “Really?”

  “Really. He took advantage of her. He used her money, her energy, her good nature, her love for him, and he just took what he needed.”

  “I thought he loved her. I remember. When we were children, anyway. Marg, he did love her.”

  “Yes, but what if love isn’t enough? I mean, what is that sort of love, really? You have to be able to think about someone, respect them, give up things for them, think about their well-being. And all he did was flit about Europe with this French floozy, and dabble in dealing pictures. I’m not even sure he wasn’t a bit of a crook. You know, when he died, in that puddle, facedown in a puddle, what a way to go, I thought, Good riddance. I didn’t want to have him on my hands. I didn’t want to look after him in his old age, and I didn’t want to put up with any more of his shit.”

  “Marg, I had no idea.” Was this what I had come all this way to hear?

  “Well, I know you didn’t, but here we are in our forties. How long are we going to go on pretending? Hugh thinks the way I do; he told me. He got what Dad was up to, with all those endless trips away, mysterious phone calls, and so on. Phil, I don’t know. Phil keeps things to himself.”

  “Well, hey, thanks for telling me. I’m amazed.”

  She had her arms folded across her chest now, her stance so like our mother’s, and a frown drew down her startling eyebrows over her equally startling blue eyes. She was beginning to look lined, and there were those white hairs, but she was a looker, my sister, and her fierceness showed it to me again.

  “No point in beating about the bush. We were all enveloped in his kind of ghastly myth. The great Peter Greenwood. Well, I was over it by the time I was a teenager, I can tell you. But you never saw it, did you, Gaby?”

  “I loved him,” I said. Immediately tears began sliding down my nose and into the corners of my mouth, and I drew my sleeve across my face to wipe them away.

  “Yeah, I know.” She said it gently, and there was a silence between us, in which raindrops slid down the kitchen windowpane, and tears slid down my cheeks, and she stood with her arms folded and then unfolded them, came across to me in two steps, and gave me the first long hug we had exchanged for very many years.

  After we had drawn apart again and I had found a tissue in my jeans pocket and scrubbed my face, I said, “I met her, in Paris. Françoise, Dad’s lover. She isn’t a floozy, Marg. She’s nice.”

  Marg said, “Well, of course she is. Women are. I expect she had crap to put up with too. It’s Dad I was furious with.” She looked at me. Conversations in kitchens, between women, between meals and dishwashing, on the way to the next thing. Was this what our mother had left to us? Outside, the trees still dripped, but there was a brief patch of blue sky, and watery sun. “What’s she like?”

  “Good-looking, sixtyish, works for Le Monde. An art critic. She doesn’t cook. She lives in a high-up flat in Montmartre, and she had a broken leg. She told me she was quite happy with the situation. She hadn’t wanted more of him.”

  “Well, I can understand that. A little of our dad went a long way. Why do you say, she doesn’t cook?”

  “Well, she doesn’t.”

  “Unlike Mum, you mean.”

  “Well, Mum wasn’t an art critic either. Just to say, I suppose, they are, were, not a bit alike. But then, why should they be?”

  “But they both let him carry on his double life.”

  “Yes,” I said. “And if they all knew, really, was there anything wrong with that?”

  “Oh, the lies, the pretense, the disappearances, the way we never knew where he was, that was all. I know I was just young when she told me, and I was always her girl, where you were Dad’s. But there was something just so—so shitty—about the way it all went on under our noses, hypocritical, I suppose, hidden, secret, nothing ever being said.”

  “Well, sure, we all went in for the non-dit, as the French say. Not saying. That was part of the pact.”

  “That’s exactly what I mean,” Margot said. “And it’s what I can’t stand.”

  “You have changed.”

  “No, I haven’t. I’m just not part of their regime anymore, that’s all. They’re dead, and so I can say what I like. So can you.”

  Their regime. Yet did she know how exactly she reminded me of our mother, how her whole house, even her kitchen implements, did? Mum never had a dishwasher, that was all. Also, my sister worked full time now as a psychologist for the local authority, visiting disturbed children in schools. Maybe that accounted for her talk of the regime.

  “What about you and Matt? Since we hardly see each other. Do you mind me asking? I always liked him but found him pretty immature.”

  “Me too.” I smiled at her. “But then, so was I. I married him in a hurry. The way I ran off to the States. So, I honestly don’t know. But I’ll go back, yes, and then we’ll see. He’s a good guy, but I’m not sure that we should be married.”

  “You never wanted kids? I often wondered.”

  “No. No, I didn’t. I had a sort of allergy to families, to the whole idea. But lately, getting to know people in Paris, talking to all sorts of people, I don’t know. It’s probably too late, anyway.”

  “Gab, are you having an affair? You look so�
��sort of sleek.”

  “It’s just the haircut,” I said. “And not eating much. I squeezed myself into these French jeans; I bought a few new clothes.” There were some things that were going to continue being unsaid.

  “Well, I should go to work. Help yourself to anything, feel free. The boys will be back around three thirty and probably go straight out again. See you later.” On her way through the front door, she said, “Gaby, I’m so glad you came.”

  I was glad too. Fifteen minutes with my sister, and something had happened—we had really talked to each other. It was all so much easier than I’d feared. Maybe there was nothing to be afraid of, after all. I went into the sitting room and lay on the orange seventies couch, thinking about her and Dad. A person came into this world and was loved and hated, admired and criticized. On one hand, there was the love that came from people as different as Françoise, Simon Jakes, André Schaffer, and me; on the other, my sister and my brother’s disdain. He had been one person but had deliberately created what people called a double life. Was that simply because he wanted to live more than was allowed to him? Was he trying to increase his life exponentially, to make the most of it, or was it partly unconscious, just the way he was, from the beginning on? Had he been born wanting more than other people, in the way of experience? Had he known instinctively that he was going to die at sixty-five, not eighty-five, not ninety?

  Marg said he was a shit. Shit, shitty—a word she used a lot. Marg was a child psychologist. Why that, of all things? Marg had duplicated much of our mother’s life, and was her champion. Was that because Dad had bought me, not her, the Chinese horse? Was it because of the chance of going into the kitchen one afternoon, home early from school, and finding Mum in tears? Chance, or choice. Genes, or environment. The throw of a dice, or destiny. You couldn’t know. But this morning I had glimpsed the other side of it, a picture that I had thought was one-sided. Nothing was one-sided. Jude could yet fall in love with another woman and not tell the fierce and exacting Marg. Anything could evolve from this fleeting time, the present. As it had out of all the fleeting presents which were past. The question now was not what our parents had been to each other or even to us, but what we would do with it.

  I asked Marg my question that evening as she searched in the cupboard for bottles of various aperitifs and set glasses out on a tray. Jude had not yet come home from a run, and the boys, as she had said they would, went out again as soon as they came in from school, leaving clothes like shed skins thrown down in the corridors.

  “Marg, did you actually see Dad dead?”

  She looked at me, a bottle of vermouth in one hand. “What?”

  “Did you actually see him? After he’d died.”

  “Well, yes, I did, actually. I wish I hadn’t. It was one of those moments when somebody asks you something and you respond automatically. The undertaker asked me, and I said yes, and followed him into a disgusting sort of parlor place with a coffin open and Dad in it. But it wasn’t him, not really.”

  “What do you mean, it wasn’t him? Hey, give that to me, you’ll drop it.”

  “Just that he didn’t look anything like himself. I still felt that I hated him, but there was nobody there to hate. You know, a body really is an empty container at that point. Nothing like a live person. He was waxy white, the same color as his hair, and his face had sort of sagged, so he looked all nose, no mouth and chin. He was dressed in a dark suit. Frankly, it could have been anyone. I took one look and ran.”

  “You mean, it really could have been someone else?”

  She looked at me across the tray, which she put down on the coffee table in the sitting room. “Well, no, obviously it was him, only it wasn’t him anymore. It was not a person. It was vile, actually, and I will never, ever do that again if I’m asked to.”

  “Did he leave you anything?”

  “Only what we all got for the house and the few investments he had left. You mean, something personal?”

  “Yes. Something just for you.”

  “He left me a letter. I’ve still got it. It was a sort of apology. He knew that I knew, you see. He said he hoped I would understand sometime, and that he was sorry he had hurt me, as he knew he had. I don’t know what I was supposed to do with it. It would have been more to the point if he could just have said it, and I could have answered. But no, not our dad. He had to have the last word. Vermouth or sherry? Or, we do have some pretty good single malt.”

  “Oh, a drop of the hard stuff would go down a treat.”

  She fetched the Macallan from some far corner where it had been hidden from the boys.

  “Why did you want to know all that?”

  “Well, I’d sort of missed out, I wasn’t here, and I only got to Norfolk in time for the funeral, and by that time so much had already happened. To be honest, Marg, I wasn’t sure that he had really died.”

  “You mean, he might have pretended, like that fellow who was supposed to have been in a canoe accident and then showed up in Panama, living off the life insurance? I wouldn’t have put it past him. But no, he did die, Gaby, and it was a strange death, all alone out there on the marshes. It was his corpse in the coffin, even if it wasn’t exactly him.”

  “A dead ringer,” I said, and she laughed. We drank tots of the good whisky, chasing thoughts of death away: a surreptitious toast to our dead father, and to ourselves. I didn’t ask any more about the letter, and I didn’t tell her about the painting. This was enough for now.

  17.

  Simon was waiting for me at St. Pancras, at the new coffee bar just inside the entrance for Eurostar passengers. He was so obvious, so large: six foot two, I should think, with his long legs sticking out from under the little table, his clothes falling off him as they had in Paris, an open jacket, a misbuttoned shirt, a tie that was at half-mast, his laces dangling, and his messy gray-blond hair falling sideways over one eye. I greeted him with a couple of cheek kisses, and sat down. “Where is it?”

  “Gaby, you don’t trust me? Here.” He pulled the same canvas bag with straps and buckles out from under the table. It looked like something to take on a safari, perhaps to hold ammunition. “You’ll need to put a label on it, to take it on the train. Everything has to be labeled. And don’t let it out of your sight, don’t even go to the loo and leave it in the luggage rack, right?”

  “Simon Jakes, you must think I was born yesterday. Of course I won’t. Hey, thanks for coming, I hope it didn’t cut into your day.”

  “My day was ripe for being cut into. I always like coming here, anyway. Dear old John Betjeman, don’t you think he’d have been proud? He virtually saved it on his own, you know. In the seventies, they wanted to pull it down. And now look at the old girl, all poshed up and European.”

  The red Victorian stone that had once looked like old meat was indeed beautiful, pink and clean behind the sheets of heavy glass. Columns rose up out of the floor to support new ceilings, elevators went up and down like mercury used to in thermometers, and everyone was hushed and small in the giant spaces that had been imagined first in an era of steam trains, reimagined for a century of fast new trains to take over from air travel, the ideal of a Europe that would have no borders.

  “Hmm, good job.” I was hardly paying attention, so pleased was I to lay hands again on that canvas bag. It was oddly exciting, meeting Simon like this and taking possession of my stolen goods. He was looking nervous, his gaze going to the announcement boards, the queues of the returning French tourists with their carrier bags from Harrods and Crabtree & Evelyn and their souvenirs from Camden Lock, as well as all the people who lived in France and worked in London, and vice versa.

  “What’s the matter, are you afraid of being caught?”

  “No, no, of course not, we aren’t doing anything wrong, just a little unusual, that’s all. I don’t want you to miss your train. You’re flying back to the States from Charles de Gaulle, right?”

  “Probably, yes. I do have a return ticket.”

  “Well
, if anyone asks you about this little darling, just say that it was a present to you from your father. Play the innocent. Don’t go into details.”

  “Oh, I rather thought I might say, Hey, I stole this from the Guggenheim.”

  “Gaby, don’t even joke about it. I’d better go, I’ve got an appointment. Sorry to dash. Hope to see you again soon. And good luck!”

  As I boarded the train and sat down, the bag on my knees, I thought that all I had done was remove the painting from Paris during the month of August, when nobody would have looked for it anyway. If anyone was going to get excited about it, it would be now, at the rentrée. The Dutch heirs might just have come steaming back from their holidays to hunt up the thief who had their painting. They might be in Paris, waiting for me. So too might Fabrice Corte. I was probably going right back into the center of an ants’ nest of intrigue. But I had seen Margot, and been with my family, and as I watched England disappear and waited for the twenty minutes to pass before I emerged again in France, I knew that it was what I’d needed to do. I was connected to those people, herself and Jude and my two gangly nephews, more than I really was to anybody else in the world. I’d sat in their house and felt at home. I remembered Marg’s sudden hug, and the way I had dropped tears onto her T-shirted shoulder. I wasn’t a lone person foraging in the world, the way I had often felt since I had left Matt. It made a difference.

  At the Gare du Nord, I went down underground to the RER station and got on the train, my overnight bag rolling on its tiny rollers and my canvas bag slung from my shoulder. Nobody stopped me, or asked me what I was carrying across Paris, and even as I walked back down Port-Royal, I felt at ease, at home here too, a person who had somehow gained weight and heft in the world.

  Back in the apartment, I kicked off my shoes, placed the canvas bag on the couch, opened it up, and got out the bubble-wrapped, parcel-taped package inside. It was surprisingly light. For a second I wondered if Simon had cheated me, and filled the parcel with plain cardboard, or a print, or even a note saying, Ha! Ha! But no. The painting was here, in its cleaned frame that shone dully but beautifully in the summer evening light from the windows. The canvas was as bright and vivid as it must have been when first painted. It was like a different thing. It was so beautiful, so absolutely present, so real. The walnuts were real walnuts that someone picked up yesterday. Their shells were still damp and thick, not easily cracked. The opened one showed a little of its snug white meat, juicy and new. The nutcrackers were silver, bright where the light caught them from a window on the left of the painting that had surely not even showed before. Whoever had cleaned it had done it with such care, love, and skill, he or she must have adored it. I was on my knees before it. I was its first and only owner, its worshipper. I understood why people paid fortunes for paintings, and if they couldn’t do that, stole them. I was on the side of thieves and capitalists, both. All that mattered was to be able to feast your eyes on such exactitude, such finesse, such love for the created world. It was nearly dark before I got off the floor, and placed the painting back on the nail that still waited for it, in the middle of the otherwise blank wall. I didn’t even want to leave the room in which it hung, but I made myself my usual omelette and a salad, poured a glass of wine, and sat down at the table opposite it. It was mine, it was my gift, my inheritance, from the man whose other daughter said he was such a shit; while Simon Jakes had said he was the real thing, Peter Greenwood, Fabrice Corte is only school of. Was I school of? I didn’t care. If my coming to Paris had been to lead me to this, it was enough.