Grahame, Lucia

by The Painted Lady

  I gazed for a long, long time at its stark towers, part fairy tale, part nightmare. And then, oblivious to the glow falling from the lanterns above me, oblivious to the people and carriages still passing over the bridge, I buried my face in my arms.

  “I think you had better tell me what is troubling you,” said my husband firmly after some time had passed.

  I turned toward him.

  “You!” I said. “You and your threats! I had hoped Poncet’s daughter might have some bit of information for me that I could use to escape this miserable marriage, but it’s no use —oh God!”

  I looked down, down into the slow-moving water and thought of Frederick, who had been so warm and bright, and whose bones lay forever still in the cool, damp earth of a pauper’s grave, on which this same soft rain must now be falling. I thought, too, of my tiny, nameless daughter’s fate, and dropped my face back into the nest of my arms, all but sobbing aloud with an impossible grief that yet seemed strangely disconnected from those old, familiar sorrows….

  “Threats?” said my husband. “What threats?”

  I lifted my head.

  “Oh, you wretch, you devil!” I cried, to discharge some of that excess of emotion. “How can you act so innocent? What threats, indeed? Why, to have a painting made from that ghastly photograph, of course. And then to sell those other paintings back to that monster, who would drink my very blood, if he could!”

  My husband sank down upon the hard, rain-slick seat beside me. He shook his head slowly.

  “The photograph!” he exclaimed, staring at me with an expression of utter astonishment. “Lord love you, Fleur, are you a complete goose? Surely you know there was no plate in the camera, and even if there had been, there wasn’t enough light in the room to capture the faintest image! I was playing with you that night—I thought you knew that! I even imagined you were enjoying it. That is, until you turned so nasty the following morning.”

  Now it was my turn to go slackjawed.

  “No photograph!” I whispered.

  “No photograph,” he articulated, one syllable at a time. I tried to clear my spinning head.

  “But you took me at my word,” he went on in a low, choked voice. “My God, even if you are a complete ignoramus about cameras, I thought you knew me at least somewhat. Did you really imagine that I was capable of anything so vile?” He shook his head once more in that baffled way. “Well, I suppose you did,” he said at last. “But believe me, Fleur, I still have far too much”—he paused and then concluded rather stiffly—“regard for myself to do anything quite so ignoble as what you have credited me with.”

  “Well, you made the threats!” I said. “I didn’t invent them.”

  “I said those things because it was the only thing I could think of to do that might stop me from smacking you. Can you possibly understand that?”

  “Oh,” I said. I still felt giddy, as if some horrible weight had been lifted, but it was not a pleasant sort of vertigo— my relief was tinged with bitterness that I had spent so many nights with fear coiled in my heart like a serpent, sometimes raising its head, sometimes baring its fangs, and only occasionally slumbering.

  My husband, who had drawn himself up to explain himself to me, was now leaning forward with his forehead in his hand. Raindrops clung to his hair. Finally he raised his head and turned toward me. He wore a look of genuine remorse.

  “Truly,” he said, “I never meant to cause you so much distress.”

  “I think you did,” I whispered.

  A yet more shaken expression came over his face as he considered this, but he looked straight at me.

  “Well,” he said, still in that very low voice. “Perhaps I did. In any case, it was inexcusable. I most desperately regret it.”

  He paused. I said nothing.

  “I don’t know how to express how sorry I am,” he concluded. “I never dreamed that I might have caused you any real suffering. Can you forgive me?”

  “Forgive you!” I exclaimed. I thought of all I had endured, I remembered that painful interview with Neville Marsden, my frantic clutch at the lifeline of Marguerite’s friendship, and, most particularly, the appalling revelations of the past few hours. My throat closed up entirely.

  That was my answer.

  After a very long time, my husband said coolly, “There is one other thing for which I owe you the deepest apology. About this evening…”

  My heart seemed to lift, but it sank back to its usual depths as he continued, “I would never have been so unmannerly as to intrude myself into a private conversation, were it not for my fear that you had somehow fallen back into Poncet’s power. I could not imagine why you were making such secretive arrangements. Then I recalled your last visit to Paris, and it occurred to me that perhaps he had somehow managed to gain yet another hold over you. I knew very well that, if that were the case, you would never confide your troubles to me, so I thought it would be best to uncover any intrigue that might already be underway.”

  “And once you realized that that was not the case,” I replied, “you might have allowed me to speak with Madame Mansard privately.”

  He laughed.

  “Oh? You think I ought to have slunk away, leaving the two of you to gossip about me, as if I were ashamed?”

  “Aren’t you ashamed?”

  “No,” he said. “Not in the least. Why would I be ashamed?”

  “But you think I should be ashamed of my misdeeds.”

  “Oh yes. Absolutely.”

  I understood his own violent longings then. I yearned to push him from the bridge so forcefully that his proud neck would snap as his head struck the river bottom.

  Instead, I said, “You lied to me.”

  He stared at me in apparent confusion.

  Finally, he said, “Aside from those empty threats, I have never lied to you, Fleur.”

  I gasped with incredulous laughter.

  “You told me you were faithful to me.”

  “I never did. In fact, I believe I indicated quite the opposite.”

  “I thought it was an idle boast. And you confirmed that when you told me you had not been unfaithful.”

  His eyes widened with undisguised bewilderment.

  “I never told you any such thing, I swear it. I don’t know what you can be thinking of.”

  “Have you forgotten so quickly? ‘Remember,’ you said, ‘it was not I who was unfaithful to you.’ But you were.”

  The puzzlement faded from my husband’s face.

  “Oh, that,” he said.

  “Yes, that. There you stood, chiding me for my bad faith, while avowing your own fidelity!”

  “You are mistaken,” said my husband. “You have distorted both my words and their meaning. Let me refresh your memory. What I said to you was, ‘It was not my faithlessness which brought you to this.’ I never said that I had been faithful. I merely said that my faithlessness was not the source of your troubles. How could it be? But you misunderstood me, of course, and took it as a slight against you.”

  “Wasn’t it?”

  He did not answer.

  I leaned into the parapet. Finally, I said slowly, “If it wasn’t to slight me, then what did you mean?”

  Instead of answering, he said with a laugh, “I value my life too much to answer that. You already look as if you would dearly love to cut my heart out. Why is that? Why have you never asked yourself where all your anger rightfully belongs?”

  “I suppose you think I ought to have gone to Poncet and stabbed him in his bath, like Charlotte Corday!”

  “Not at all. If I believed he lay at the root of your suffering, or that his death would end it, I would have done the deed myself. With pleasure.”

  Instead of being flattered by the heroic assertion that he would have braved the guillotine for me, I said, “I think you are the most corrupt hypocrite on the face of the earth.”

  He laughed again. “Perhaps. But at least I cannot claim to have corrupted my high-minded wife. I am not
the one who deserves the credit for that.”

  Then I began to understand him. He was wise to fear for his life.

  “I was completely faithful to Frederick,” I said. “As he was to me. I loved him. I could never love anyone else. Yes, I modeled for those paintings you despise, it’s true, but everything else about them is pure invention. He was an artist, thank God, not a prig and a whoremonger. He had an artist’s imagination. I loved it. He was everything I ever wanted.”

  “I have no doubt of that,” returned my husband placidly, to my surprise. “But your irreproachable behavior in your perfectly idyllic marriage to St. Frederick of Montmartre has very little bearing upon this one. I did not make you what you chose to become by marrying me, and my conscience certainly doesn’t trouble me on that score.”

  “Hal” I said, focusing with bitter satisfaction on his belittling reference to Frederick. “There it is! I knew it! You’ve always envied Frederick. He was everything you could never be.”

  “You’re quite mistaken,” said my husband. “I have never in my life wished that I might trade places with Frederick Brooks. Except once, perhaps,” he added after a pause.

  “He had everything,” I persisted unkindly, “that all your wealth, all your noble connections could never give you. He had talent. He created masterpieces. You could only buy them. He had vitality, zest. He lived life to the hilt. And I loved him. Everyone did.”

  “You are utterly mistaken,” repeated my husband calmly, after a long, alarming silence that almost made me regret my cruel words. “He was very talented, and fortunate in many ways. But I can tell you this: I would not change places with him for the world.”

  “That’s easy to say—now that he’s dead.”

  “And just why is he dead?” retorted my husband swiftly.

  That brought my tongue to a halt. I knew the answer too well. He was dead because of me. It would have been kinder had I put a gun to his head, rather than sapping his vitality, his talent, by wallowing in my useless, vain despair.

  “He is dead because he sold the woman he claimed to love and then drowned himself in absinthe to avoid having to think about what he had done,” stated my husband brutally. “How could I envy a man like that?”

  I floundered with shock.

  “He loved me,” I whispered.

  “No doubt,” said my husband dryly. “And it’s plain to see how great a love this man of genius had for you, isn’t it?”

  I gasped. I felt as if he had kicked me in the stomach. I wanted to rip his eyes out. But I couldn’t allow him to think such things of Frederick, so I pulled myself together and said in a cold and steady voice, “What do you know? You have no idea what it is to be poor. You don’t know what it is to have creditors banging at your door, to fear being seen in the streets, having to duck down alleyways to avoid running into someone to whom you owe money.”

  Oh, how sordid it sounded! No wonder my husband’s haughty and privileged patrician features gleamed with contempt!

  “You are right, of course,” he said disdainfully. “I have no idea what that might be like. But I know myself. And I know what I would have done, had I been your husband and had I believed that selling those paintings was the only way out of my difficulties.”

  “What would you have done?” I challenged. “Do tell me, what would you, one of the richest men in England, do if you woke up tomorrow to find you had nothing left—no money, no friends to whom you were not up to your ears in debt, nothing? Can you even imagine being so desperate! I think not.”

  He was silent.

  I shivered and waited.

  My husband seemed to be fighting with himself. After a very long time, he said quietly, almost gently, “it is clear to me that Brooks’s views on love and marriage were somewhat different from my own. His apparently satisfied your tastes, mine do not. It really makes no difference, now, what I might have done had I found myself in his shoes. If you knew me better, you would be able to answer the question yourself.”

  “Oh, that’s really low,” I said. “To judge him so glibly— you, who have never tasted poverty! And you can’t even say what you’d have done differently!”

  “Call it whatever you like,” said my husband equably. “If ours were the kind of marriage I dreamed of when I proposed to you, and if you had loved me at all”—for an instant his voice seemed to resonate with passion—“you would know instantly what I would have done differently. As it is, it hardly matters. You seem to approve of the way he handled the situation.”

  “He had no choice.”

  “Oh?” said my husband, and went on as if the words were breaking out in spite of his efforts to hold them back. “This man of so much vision and imagination had no choice?”

  “Poverty gives people very few choices.”

  “I hope I have never condemned anyone for being poor nor for doing whatever they must to keep body and soul together,” said my husband with frosty pride. “How could I presume to do that? It would be the very height of arrogance.”

  “Then you must exonerate Frederick. I know you despise him for being a wastrel and for leaving me penniless. But his only crime was that he liked fine things, as you do, and that he bought absinthe instead of women when he wished to forget his disappointments, and—oh yes, his worst crime— he had no hellish collieries and starving tenants to support his tastes, and therefore had to sell his paintings.”

  “It never crossed my mind to think of him as a wastrel,” protested my husband, laughing. “Until I learned precisely what he had done to you. When did you learn of it, by the way? Poncet led me to believe it came as something of a surprise to you. I merely thought he was a brilliant artist who had succumbed to a tragic weakness. As for me, I am afraid I haven’t got any hellish collieries—my soft-hearted father divested himself of that sort of thing, much to my mother’s dismay—and if you see even so much as a starving dog on the lands over which I am fortunate enough to have stewardship, I hope you will tell me so.”

  I was still nearly choking on my fury. I could not have answered him to save my life.

  “If you’d like to know where the money comes from that protected your reputation and now keeps you clothed and housed and fed,” continued my husband calmly, “I am more than willing to review my investments with you. My father put his money where it wouldn’t prick his tender conscience too painfully, and I have tried to honor his wishes in that respect, but—wouldn’t you know—the returns have been embarrassingly great. However, if you find I have some particularly odious source of income that offends your sensibilities, I’ll shed myself of it posthaste. Since my ill-gotten gains will be supporting you for the rest of your life, I would hate to have you feel they were too tainted for you to fully enjoy whatever you may spend them on.”

  To be honest, it was some of the places where his money had gone—far more than whence it had come—that troubled me the most, but I was still in a retaliatory vein.

  “You surprise me,” I said. “I was beginning to think you took real pleasure in holding the whip.”

  “Oh, I do,” he agreed readily. “I like it better than anything. I don’t think you can imagine how much pleasure it gives me to make others bend to my will. But it is a disagreeable trait, I fear, and one that I have struggled rather hard to overcome.” He paused and threw me a sidewise glance; he now wore the cheerful countenance of a man whose conscience had never given him an uneasy night. “It’s a thankless task to try to alter one’s tastes, however; I suppose I ought to be grateful that your bad behavior has provided me with such a pleasant excuse to indulge them.”

  I knew this was a cut, but I did not rise to it; I was rather intrigued, in spite of myself, by the notion of my lofty husband wrestling with anything that he could deem a weakness. Even at his most superficially diffident, he generally conducted himself with an air of such underlying aplomb that I could never have suspected him of finding himself seriously wanting in any respect. And that, given his position in society, he would regar
d a lust for domination as a weakness to be resisted rather than as an appetite to be indiscriminately sated touched me in a curious way.

  “Perhaps it is not so much a deficiency of character as it is a double-edged sword,” I remarked pensively.

  “I don’t know why you would think so,” said my husband in a tone of perfect indifference. He paused, then added, “The wind is rising, and it is becoming uncomfortably cold here. Shall we turn back?”

  As we left the bridge and began to retrace our steps along the river, my husband appeared to be lost in his own thoughts. But suddenly he broke his silence. “You seem to feel that I have condemned you for what I believed took place in your previous marriage. Do you actually regard me as such a sanctimonious hypocrite?”

  I laughed. “Of course, I do! Especially after tonight. What else can I think?”

  “Your first marriage is really no business of mine. If I have impugned it, I had no right to do so. As for the paintings you went to such lengths to keep secret from me for so long, my opinion—which I know is worth very little to you —is that they are extraordinarily lovely and certainly no cause for shame.”

  His words, with their ring of sincerity, stripped me of yet another of my assumptions. My conviction of his hypocrisy and the sense of superiority it had once given me to believe that he had condemned not only me, but Frederick as well, had already begun to crumble under the fusillade of the evening’s revelations. My skin burned.

  But it was his next remark that completely demolished me.

  “If you had simply told me the truth,” he said, “I would have spared you everything.”

  “What?” I said with a short, disbelieving laugh. “Before we were married? Without judging me? Without demanding anything in return? You don’t—”

  He turned toward me on the dim, rain-soaked quai. The light from the lantern above our heads glistened on his hair and in the little puddles at our feet.