Grahame, Lucia

by The Painted Lady

  The more that I tried to consider his situation from this practical point of view, however, the sadder I felt. He would make a proper marriage to some thin-lipped, coldblooded English girl with a puritanical streak even broader than the one I had glimpsed in him. She would embody everything that I most detested in the English upper classes. Her blue eyes would bulge with confused incomprehension should her husband ever attempt to infuse her with the enchantment he’d once felt under the gaze of a marble faun. But what did these things matter? She would bring him the kind of pedigree that could never be mine, and equally important, she could give him children. Who was I? A creature of murky lineage who had not even been able to carry my beloved’s child to term.

  For a while I lashed myself with these painful thoughts as if I imagined that by intensifying my loneliness I could surmount it faster, but it was the note I shortly thereafter received from Sir Anthony that lifted my spirits. He intended to make another, very brief visit to Paris in October and hoped that I might be able to spare him an afternoon.

  We spent a good part of it idling over a bunch of autumn grapes outside a cafe in the Boulevard des Italiens, while the October sunlight fell upon us. I felt oddly happy and oddly shy.

  “And how did you find England?” I asked.

  “As lovely as ever,” was his reply, “and as imperfect.”

  “Imperfect?” I repeated. “In what way?”

  I have always regarded insular England as very imperfect when compared to cosmopolitan, democratic Paris, but I was curious to know in precisely what way Sir Anthony Camwell found his native land wanting.

  His lips curved into a hint of a smile.

  “It hasn’t quite the charm for me that Paris has,” he said, flashing me a sidewise look that I found difficult to interpret. “Of course,” he added after a pause, “you must feel this even more strongly, for you are English by birth and yet have chosen to make your home here.”

  “Oh yes,” I told him cheerfully. “On the great railway line of life I regard Paris as one stop short of heaven.”

  Sir Anthony’s smile broadened.

  “And where on the line do you put England?” he inquired.

  I wrinkled my nose as I considered this for a minute or two.

  “I don’t know,” I replied at last. “It is so very smoky, you know, I fear it must be rather close to hell.”

  Sir Anthony burst into laughter, but when he spoke again he sounded more piqued than amused.

  “So that is your opinion of England,” he said. “Don’t you think you are being unjust? There is a good deal more to England than smoke.”

  I popped a grape between my lips and considered this with an air of skepticism.

  “I have no warmth in my heart for England,” I said at last.

  “But you were born there, were you not?” he asked.

  I had the feeling he was trying to draw me out.

  “Yes,” I said in a tone that was meant to slam the door on that subject.

  “I hope that one day you will find a reason to think better of your country—and mine,” he said.

  “This is my country now,” was my only reply.

  He was watching me thoughtfully but did not press me to explain my antipathy for England.

  “Have you ever thought of making your home here?” I asked in the hope of injecting a lighter tone back into the conversation.

  “Me? Oh, I’ve toyed with the thought, but it’s really out of the question.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I have… responsibilities,” was his rather vague response.

  It occurred to me then that Sir Anthony had never, in his conversations with me, made any reference to his blue-blooded family or to his great wealth.

  Well, there was no use pretending they didn’t exist and that they would not shape the course of his life and every choice he would ever make.

  “Oh, I suppose you mean the vast Camwell estates,” I retorted lightly. “Don’t you pay someone to manage them for you? What’s the point of being rich if you still insist upon wearing the harness of dreary responsibilities?”

  To my surprise, the usually even-tempered Sir Anthony did not seem amused by my offhand remark.

  “I see,” he said. “Perhaps you’re right, Madame Brooks. What’s the point of life at all if it’s not to throw off all responsibility and do whatever you feel like doing at any given moment?” He paused for a minute and then added in a tone that managed to be both mild and scathing, “That’s quite an ideal, isn’t it?”

  I thought it sounded very appealing, indeed, but, even so, his cool words hit me like a little slap. I shot him a quick, rather startled glance.

  What a Roman standard he espoused!

  I wondered what he would think of me were he to discover that I was someone who had weakly collapsed under grief for nearly two years rather than honoring my sacred responsibilities to my husband.

  “I beg your pardon,” I managed after a few more seconds. “I spoke too carelessly.”

  But at the same time, he was saying, “Forgive me, Madame Brooks. I spoke too harshly.”

  “Not at all,” I said. “You were quite right to say what you did.”

  “No. Actually, I was being thoroughly disingenuous. You see…” He hesitated with something like embarrassment and then plunged on rather awkwardly. “I like being rich. I love being able to do pretty much as I please. I’m afraid I deny myself very little, if you want to know the truth. It’s not something of which I’m proud. And the fact is that I love my home in England. I can’t imagine choosing to live elsewhere for any length of time. I only wish…”

  “You only wish what?” I prodded him.

  He lifted his head and gave me one of his slow, charming smiles.

  “I only wish there were a little more of Paris in it,” he said enigmatically.

  I resisted the fleeting temptation to take this cryptic remark as a personal compliment.

  “Perhaps you ought to hire a French chef,” I proposed.

  He broke into that soft laughter again.

  “But I already have one,” he confessed. “You see, I do indulge every whim! But something is still wanting. And a French chef is not quite what I have in mind, at this point.”

  At that point, as luck would have it, I caught the eye of Monsieur Julien, who was strolling silkily down the boulevard. As he was known to both of us, we invited him to join us and our conversation quickly assumed a more urbane and inconsequential tone.

  It seemed that Sir Anthony had once again dropped one of those seemingly innocent but hauntingly provocative remarks that kept me awake at night when I ought to have been deep in slumber.

  So a French chef was not what he had in mind to enliven his English home.

  It was difficult to avoid the conclusion that what Sir Anthony wanted was a woman.

  So he had come to France to find a wife.

  No doubt, then, he had spent the vast bulk of his Parisian hours, above and beyond the few he devoted to me, in the salons of the Faubourg St.-Germain, politely conversing with young, convent-educated virgins whose blood was as rarified as his own.

  I must be a very dog in the manger, I thought, for I did not like the vision my thoughts had conjured up any better than I had liked my earlier vision of him wed to that prim-mouthed, pop-eyed hypothetical English miss.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I did not see Sir Anthony again before his return to his beloved England, where he remained for more than two months.

  On All Saints’ Day I visited Frederick’s grave in the Bagneaux with a wreath of immortelles. He would have laughed at such a trite act of devotion.

  December came. I celebrated Christmas Eve and most of the following day with Marguerite and Théo. They were so lively that it was impossible to feel much loneliness when in their company. Théo, perhaps out of deference to the season, did not indulge his famously contentious nature as much as usual. Marguerite, who relished every aspect of holiday-making, was in her element
. And I had had a card from Sir Anthony, who was spending the holidays in Devon at the home of Lord Marsden’s sister-in-law and her large family. He told me that he would be back in Paris in January.

  I had never spoken of Sir Anthony to Marguerite or Théo. I wanted to keep him separate from the rest of my life, somewhere where he could not bump up against people who had known and loved Frederick. And I did not wish to invite speculation about the nature of his interest in me, especially on the part of Marguerite, who had the soul of a matchmaker and could be wickedly suggestive when the mood took her. I had seen her victims writhe under her pointed tongue.

  Yes, I knew her. She would insist that Sir Anthony’s interest was not as innocent as I knew it to be. She would declare that with a mere coup d’oeil I could subjugate any man I chose. She would never give me a moment’s peace regarding the outcome of this friendship that could lead nowhere. Besides, it was Frederick I missed, Frederick into whose life I had fitted like a hand to a glove.

  Still, I counted the days until Sir Anthony would be in Paris again.

  We had planned to visit the Musée de Cluny on the Friday following his return. But the spectacular winter afternoon— intensely cold, intensely bright—made me repent of my promise to spend it indoors, among tarnished-looking Flemish tapestries and medieval woodcarvings depicting the gruesome martyrdoms of ecstatic saints.

  I suggested an alteration in our plans to Sir Anthony.

  “I’ve been a prisoner to my pupils all week long,” I told him. “How I long for exercise and fresh air! Can I persuade you to forgo Cluny and settle for nothing more than a long walk?”

  What I had in mind was a climb to the still unfinished basilica of Sacre-Coeur, which is at the very top of the Butte Montmartre. I thought that would be grueling enough to settle my restless spirits.

  But although Sir Anthony proved cheerfully amenable to a change of plans in general, he seemed somewhat torn with respect to Sacre-Coeur.

  “Or perhaps… ,” he said, “if you wouldn’t find it too…

  And here he paused as if inwardly debating the propriety of the sentence that hovered on his lips.

  I waited, half annoyed, half flattered. Frederick would never have hesitated—he’d have burst out with his suggestion, no matter how bold. On the other hand, Frederick had never treated me with quite the same tact and delicacy that Sir Anthony invariably displayed.

  “Madame Brooks,” said Sir Anthony, at last, to my astonished delight, “have you, by any chance, a pair of ice skates?”

  I quickly unearthed the skates I had not worn for… how long? Four years? Then a pell-mell carriage ride to Sir Anthony’s hotel in the Rue de Castiglione to fetch a gleaming pair of skates that looked as if they had never been worn at all.

  And at last on to a frozen lake in the Bois de Boulogne. It was ringed with the glowing braziers of chestnut sellers. Over the ice flew dashing men in tight black breeches and gaiters and graceful women in accordion-pleated skirts.

  Sir Anthony led me onto the lake. Our feet left the lumpy, frozen shore, no longer earthbound, and we began to sail over the ice. It felt as smooth and hard as marble and as slick as butter beneath our blades.

  Sir Anthony skated with the same languid grace that I admired in everything else he did, and now, as he held me, his rhythms became mine as well. His long, slow strokes were more fluid and assured than mine would have been, had I skated alone. For a moment I resisted the impulse to let my feet follow the fearless sweep of his own. It seemed too thrilling—almost dangerous. Then I surrendered.

  We soared lazily over the lake like a pair of hawks hanging in the sky, barely moving their wings at all as they let the air currents carry them.

  The enchantment went on until I lost all sense of time. No giddy pyrotechnics, no calligraphic swirls and loops, only those strong yet indolent glides, each one lasting almost too long before the next one came to keep us aloft.

  Bundled as I was in heavy winter underwear, a heavy black dress, and a heavier black coat, I could barely feel my partner’s left hand on the small of my back. The suede-gloved fingers of his other hand, however, were firmly interlaced with mine. In spite of my black wool gloves, I was intensely aware of his gentle grip, and I gleaned all the private pleasure I could from knowing that we could sustain this innocent, delicious connection indefinitely.

  The distance between us was small, almost insignificant, and filled with our heat. I felt my cheeks glowing; was it from that warmth or from the frosty air?

  My eyes fell shut. I felt Sir Anthony’s arm bring me a tiny bit closer, and I knew that here on the gleaming lake we had at last lighted upon the purest expression and finest culmination of our unlikely friendship.

  Anything more would have alarmed me; anything less would have left my vague, restless hungers unslaked.

  But this was everything I could ever want.

  For one perfect afternoon I felt complete.

  Afterward, he whisked me off to a modest little restaurant near the Opera. At this early hour, the dining room was nearly deserted, so it was with a sense of luxurious privacy that we took our seats.

  Our conversation was desultory and marked with long silences. Once or twice when I caught his eyes, I saw that curious tenderness flickering there. I thought again of the impossibly deep and prolonged pleasure I had known in his arms. My skin blazed; I quickly dropped my attention to the canard à l’orange on my plate.

  A few minutes later, Sir Anthony cleared his throat softly.

  “Madame Brooks,” he began. The assurance with which he usually spoke was gone. He seemed as diffident as he’d been when he suggested skating on the lake. “I wonder if I might ask… do you ever have any time to yourself during the week—other than Friday afternoons, I mean?”

  “Oh yes,” I said. “I never have pupils on Sunday.”

  “Oh, but that’s perfect!” he exclaimed. Then his voice faltered again. “I mean, if it would be agreeable to you… I have a sort of call I must make before I return to England, and I wonder if I might ask you to accompany me.”

  He wanted to introduce me to his friends?

  I thought it was a terrible ideal

  We had just achieved perfection; what could possibly be gained by attempting to push the acquaintance beyond its obvious limits?

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I demurred. I speculated on how my shabby black dresses—they made me look like a milliner’s assistant—would appear when set against the brocaded satin upholstery of a drawing room in the Faubourg St. -Germain, and on how they would contrast with the silk gowns of the ladies there. “I’m sure that any friends of yours would find me shockingly bohemian,” I added.

  “Not this family,” he said. “They will like you just as much as I think you will like them. But I can’t pretend that it is merely a social call. Among other things, Monsieur Salomon makes dollhouses.”

  I started to laugh. What on earth could the staid Sir Anthony Camwell want with a dollhouse?

  “Aha!” said I, laying down my fork triumphantly. “So you have decided to buy a house in Paris!”

  “I have,” acknowledged Sir Anthony gravely. “And I hope I may depend upon you to help me select just the right one.”

  “I would be delighted,” I said. “But really—what is the occasion? Have you a little niece?”

  “Not I!” I thought I heard a slight edge in his voice. “I was an only child.” Then he continued more lightly. “No, this is for a great-niece of Neville’s. She has a birthday coming up, and Neville has no knack at all, you know, for picking out gifts for small children. His tastes are overly sophisticated.”

  “And you have the talent he lacks?”

  “I like to think so. What Neville has forgotten is that children can entertain themselves for hours with not much more than a couple of stones or an end of chalk.”

  I thought that a rather odd remark to come from this scion of wealth. Surely he had never been obliged to entertain himself with nothing but rocks and a piece
of chalk! What an absurd notion! His childhood birthdays must have been princely celebrations.

  Of course there was a slim possibility that he had been raised in the horrible tradition which makes all pleasure suspect. I knew of a vicarage where a pet cat had once been drowned in the well simply to teach the children not to become too attached to earthly things.

  But I doubted that Sir Anthony had known such harsh treatment. Someone had grounded him in the virtues of kindness and consideration, had honed off the edges of what could easily have been an overbearing arrogance. I could hardly condemn the stranger’s handiwork.

  On Sunday, therefore, we found ourselves in an ancient gray house in the Rue Vieille-du-Temple, where we mounted a stairway as steep and narrow as my own to find ourselves before a door which bore a plate proclaiming this to be the establishment of Abraham Salomon, “Fabrique de patins à roulettes et jouets.” A little factory of roller skates and toys.

  Monsieur Salomon, who must have been at least seventy years of age, welcomed Sir Anthony warmly and expressed his pleasure at making my acquaintance. Then, after leading us through a dining room in which virtually every surface seemed to be covered with miniature houses, he lifted a curtain and ushered us into a low garret whose function I was at first hard-pressed to identify.

  It contained a bed and a washstand, so perhaps it was a bedroom.

  No, there was an iron stove; it was a kitchen.

  But it was the only kitchen I had ever seen, other than the one I had once shared with Frederick, where the fragrance of paint and varnish competed triumphantly with that of onions and garlic.

  Here Monsieur Salomon introduced me to his wife, Anais, who sat at a worktable varnishing yet another dollhouse, and to his daughter, Rachel, a danseuse of perhaps thirty or so who, I soon discovered, produced ballets for the provincial theaters. Today, however, she sat beside her mother making artificial flowers.