She gave a very small nod. ‘If you think, that is . . . if you would like me as a wife.’ She bent down and picked up a sheaf of papers from the low table in front of her. ‘Aunt Vera has been helping me with the sums and says she will teach me to keep an account book.’ She thrust the papers out towards him, her black eyes very wide as if she wanted him to examine them. He pushed them out of the way and took her in his arms, kissing her hard. For a moment she was still and frightened in his embrace, then she began to return the kiss with a heat that burned him. He had to pull himself away, breathing hard. She looked at him, her face flushed.
‘So you think, Paul, you might love me a little without all the flim-flam?’
He took her hand and thought for a second; his feelings almost choked him. ‘Tanya, your smile is one of the great sights of the world to me. The feeling I have when I see it, it’s like . . . like seeing a great clipper ship under full sail, or walking through the Alps on a clear day. It stops my heart. I love you very, very much.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Now let me do this properly. I am only ever going to do it once in my life.’ He lowered himself to the ground, supporting himself on the table with his palm until he was on one knee, crumpling some of the sheets of figures in the process, then he reached up for her hand again and with it between both of his own, he began: ‘Tatiana Sergeyevna Koltsova, would you do me the honour . . .’
CHAPTER 19
The Reader oil on canvas 56.1 × 33.1 cm
A subject that was a favourite of Edwardian genre painters, this image of a young woman reading by a window is given extra interest by the late-night setting, the treatment of the light falling across the figure, the burning end of her cigarette and the psychological realism of the model’s absorption in her book. What can be saccharine in some renderings here becomes an intimate portrait of a state of mind.
Extract from the catalogue notes to the exhibition ‘The Paris Winter: Anonymous Treasures from the de Civray Collection’, Southwark Picture Gallery, London, 2010
25 January 1910
Maud jerked awake. Yvette was sitting in the chair by the window as she had promised she would. The faint glow of the street-lamps softened the sharp angles of her face and made her look younger again, and gave her enough light to read by. She had borrowed some historical romance from the owner of the house and sat with it now on her knee, a cigarette burning in her other hand and an ashtray improvised from a soapdish sitting on the floor at her feet. The filigree ironwork outside cast vague curling shadows over the folds of her skirt. She heard Maud move but did not look up.
‘The rooms are still dark,’ she said and turned a page. ‘Go back to sleep.’
For a few minutes Maud thought she would, then a sudden explosion shook the room, a great throb of thunder. ‘God!’ Yvette said, getting to her feet and opening the window as Maud sat upright in the bed, her heart beating wildly. ‘They must have blown the Pont de l’Alma after all. Heaven help us.’
Maud slid out of the bed and went to stand next to her. Yvette pointed across the street. A light had come on in the Morels’ apartment and one of the shutters was being pulled back. Maud shifted back into the shadows, looking down and sideways as Sylvie appeared in the frame, leaning her small white hand on the ironwork and looking towards the river. The light spilled over her shoulders, the sapphire-blue of her silk dressing-gown, her blond hair loose and long over her shoulders. Other figures appeared on the street, all looking in the same direction. Only Maud was not looking north and west where the sound had come from; she focused instead on the lines of Sylvie’s face and her hand on the rail, remembering that head resting on her shoulder, that hand in hers.
Some hours later, Yvette brought coffee, bread and news from the woman on the ground floor. ‘The bridge is still there,’ she said, handing Maud a sliced and buttered roll. ‘It was some factory in Ivry blew up, but the fire didn’t spread. The water is still rising though. Anything from over the way?’ Maud shook her head. The shutters to the Morels’ drawing room were half-opened but there was no other sign of life. ‘Eat something, Maud.’ It was the sadness in Yvette’s voice that made her try the food, but even so she did not stop looking out of the window. ‘I want to get some message to Tanya if I can, to tell her we are well . . .’
The concierge of the Morels’ apartment came out into the street pulling her shawl over her head. The snow was falling again and melting onto the soaked pavements as if the ground were drinking it up. Maud sat up in the chair and peered after her. She remained there, her pose one of fixed attention until the woman returned. There was a man with her in a long pearl-grey overcoat and a large leather bag at his side.
‘She has been for a doctor,’ Maud said and licked her lips. Yvette looked up from the novel she was reading again then set it down and brushed the crumbs of her breakfast from her dress.
‘I shall go and see if I can find out what’s happening,’ she said, and went to the door. Maud did not look round to see her leave.
The concierge was happy to talk. Her older sister had nearly been killed by typhoid and now with her best tenant ill it was all she could think about. ‘He came back shivering and soaked last night – fell in the waters, she said – and I don’t like the sound of him today. Groaning! There is groaning! And what if the floods come up this far? What are we supposed to do? Leave him to drown or carry him off with us, nasty diseases and all?’ Everything she said was in a fierce whisper and spoken out of the corner of her mouth, as if they were at the theatre and speaking at all was bad manners.
‘But the water won’t come this far. We’re safe, surely?’ Yvette said, huddling away from the sudden cold wind that ran up the street. She felt it like Maud’s impatience, pulling her back to the room to tell her about the fever, the groaning.
‘Don’t you bet on it, sweetheart! You don’t have to walk half so far to see the river today, I tell you. Go and have a look. My Georges has been down there already. He took one look and back he came, emptied out our bit of storage in the cellar and moved it all up to the attic. Now he’s a strong man, but a lazy one. There’s no way he would have carried my mother’s second-best mattress up to the roof if he didn’t think it had a good chance of a soaking. That I can tell you for free.’
Yvette ignored the wind tugging at her back and went to look for herself. The shock was sudden and absolute: water everywhere. It rippled along the quays and ate away at the islands; the naked trees, shivering with wet snow, hung at strange angles along the Quai de Conti. The streets were sinking. She turned back up Rue Bonaparte and saw the same fear on each face. The nervous excitement of the previous day had become something darker. Paris was being throttled slowly by her own river, and what had looked like another spectacle laid on by the city for the entertainment of her citizens was twisting into a slow act of violence.
Tanya was certain that Maud or Yvette would call for her early in the morning. The only possible reason why she had not heard from them already was that they had received her messages too late last night to respond – but nothing came. She stared at the clock until she thought it must be broken, and when Sasha came into her room with tea just after ten, she was shaking it vigorously. The old maid took it from her with a frown and set it back on the mantelpiece, then she pulled a telegram form from her apron and handed it to Tanya. She snatched it from her, then a second later crumpled it in her fist and threw it in the general direction of the fire.
‘All well? All well? That’s what they have to say to me?’
Sasha bent down to pick up the note, smoothed it out again then tucked it into her pocket. She thought all such things had value and should be preserved against emergency like short threads and off-cuts of wax paper. ‘They think I can have nothing important to tell them. That is it. They think all I’m doing is worrying about them and of course I am, but I do have something important to tell them.’ She turned and pointed an angry finger at Sasha who only stared at it with her eyebrows raised. ‘And I am engaged.’
&nbs
p; ‘I think you mentioned that a time or two last night as I put you to bed, pumpkin,’ Sasha said.
‘But they don’t know that! Yvette only knows I refused Perov . . .’
Sasha yawned and sat on the bed. ‘Maybe they can’t tell you where they are. Fact they sent this,’ she patted her stomach where the pocket of her apron sat, ‘means that they are thinking of you, so stop wailing. Now I mean to get you out and useful before you tear the house apart. The Red Cross are collecting, and what they are collecting needs sorting.’ Tanya started to protest but the look in Sasha’s eyes made her stop. ‘We shall send a heap of your messages around so they know where to find you and leave word here too. We might as well enjoy having footmen to spare before you make beggars of us, I suppose. Now put something on a sensible woman might wear and let’s hurry along, shall we?’ She got to her feet again with a grunt and pulled out one of Tanya’s more conservative walking dresses from the armoire.
‘Sasha, when I marry will you come with me?’
Sasha helped her lift the morning gown she was wearing over her head. ‘I’m not sure that’s how they manage things here, dear. Normally you’ll just have a girl in to clean and fetch for you by the hour.’
When Tanya’s face re-emerged from the white chiffon it was pale and slightly tearful. ‘If you wish to go back to Saint Petersburg, of course I shall understand.’
Sasha picked up the walking dress and bent down, fanning out the skirt so that Tanya could step into it. She felt the girl’s hand on her shoulder as she steadied herself. ‘Don’t fret, chicken. I’ll help you settle in – you’ve got some learning to do. Vera and I will teach you.’ She stood, pulling the dress up with her and held it so Tanya could slide her long slim arms through the tight sleeves. ‘Then I shall open a little restaurant, I think.’ Tanya’s eyes sprang open and Sasha sniffed. ‘There’re lots of Russians in Paris might like a taste of proper food from their homeland, and none of these Frenchies can cook a damn. All sauce, sauce, sauce till you don’t know what you’re eating.’
Tanya turned to let her fasten the dress, thinking the world was a more surprising place than she could have ever imagined.
He kept asking her if she had been to fetch them, though at times he wasn’t sure if he had said the words out loud or just dreamed them. She always said, ‘In a little while, Christian my love, in a little while. I cannot leave you just now.’ He was afraid he had mentioned the ghost of the woman and might have made her angry, but whenever he managed to open his eyes she was smiling at him kindly enough. She knew where they were, she’d take care of it. He sank into a sort of half-dream where he could see nothing, but the air was tainted with corruption and there was a constant sound of trickling water.
Maud watched by the window, eating whatever Yvette handed to her and watching the shutters of the house opposite. The day passed slow as ice. That night she slept a while and let Yvette watch, and for the first time her dreams were not of drowning. She seemed to be again on the terrace outside Sacré Coeur; the rain was falling but it felt warm as a blessing against her skin. She knew Yvette and Tanya were there watching with her as the floodwaters consumed Paris, and below them the lights went out one by one till the city of lights was dark and cold and victory blossomed in her.
CHAPTER 20
26 January 1910
Yvette brought her coffee again in the morning and declared her intention to go back to Valadon’s place and her own. ‘My clothes are stinking,’ she said. ‘If you insist on staying here until we have not got a franc between us, well and good, but I shall do so in clean clothes.’
Maud only nodded and Yvette began her weary slog across a shattering Paris. The Cours de Rome was becoming a lake fed by the Metro tunnels, and they said part of Place de l’Opéra was collapsing. Back at her room she found four messages from Tanya pinned to her bundle and then another crop at Valadon’s. She fished out a length of cord to tie up Maud’s clean clothes and cut it to length with her knife. A present from Maman the day she had finished her schooling with the nuns. She would rather have had a book as the nuns only handed out Bibles, and Yvette had already decided there was nothing much in those pages for her. She had used the knife to scare other children away from her things and twice used it to protect herself. Once from Louis. After the other men on the hill saw his scar they kept away when she told them to. It was the only gift she remembered being given and she had carved her name into the bone handle and gone out into the world with it. Not gone very far into the world though. She put it back into her pocket and headed to Saint-Sulpice where the latest appeals from Tanya had directed her.
Most of the refugees flooded out of their homes round Paris, Bercy and Javel had been directed here, and Saint-Sulpice had been transformed to receive them. There were cots and mattresses everywhere you looked, and people huddled into little groups round portable heaters. At the back of the church a procession of men and women collected bowls of soup from a trestle table. It was strangely quiet given the number of people there. Even the children were silent. The air smelled slightly rotten. A woman in a Red Cross uniform at the door looked relieved when she realised that Yvette was looking for someone rather than a place to sleep. ‘We are nearly full and the waters still rise,’ she said. ‘On the first night we had only five, now there are five hundred. Oh, it breaks my heart to see them praying. They can only be praying for other people, since they have already lost everything. Miss Koltsova is in the back with a few of the children while their mothers sleep. Take her out for a little while if you can. She was here half the night and from early this morning too.’
When Yvette approached, Tanya saw her through the crowd and put a blonde girl off her knee, kissing her dirty head as she did. Then she flung her arms around Yvette’s neck and held her for a moment. ‘Oh, you are here! Thank the Lord!’ Before Yvette could do anything more than grin at her, Tanya took her by the hand and led her into a quieter corner. ‘What I have to tell you seems less important after what I have seen here,’ she whispered. ‘Oh, it is dreadful. Have you been near the river today?’
Yvette nodded. ‘It is higher than the road near Concorde. Only the wall holds it back. And there are crowds everywhere . . . But what is your news, Tanya? Are you engaged to Paul?’
She blushed. ‘I am. He is here, talking with the refugees. His paper had already set up an appeal and the American Ambassador has already pledged such a sum.’ Yvette thought she looked rather proud of this, as if every generous American action reflected rather well on her now. ‘But Maud? What news?’
‘All my congratulations, sweetheart. There, now you are resolved to work for a living I shall stop calling you Princess.’
Tanya looked pleased. ‘Sasha says she will believe I can earn money when I learn to dress myself.’ Yvette snorted with laughter and Tanya’s eyes danced. ‘Yes, I know, but some of these very expensive dresses are terribly complicated. I’m sure it will be much easier with cheaper clothes.’ She tried to say it stoutly but Yvette was not convinced. ‘But Maud . . . ?’
Yvette told her what she could, murmuring low so that the passing men and women would not hear her, but each seemed so sunk in their own distress and shock she could have sung it. ‘Now she watches and waits, for what I do not know. Perhaps if she sees him sick, sees that he believes she is haunting him it will be enough, but she seems . . . not herself. She frightens me.’
Tanya nodded. ‘Sasha said she found something dark in the river and brought it back into the air with her.’
‘She found the strength to live, that’s something. But I must go back to her. Kiss your fiancé for me and tell him he is a lucky man, even if his wife-to-be can’t dress herself.’
Tanya put out her hand to stop her. ‘Yvette, it wasn’t just to tell you I was engaged. That girl, the maid the Countess threw out, came to see me.’ Yvette waited, frowning a little. ‘She wanted to thank me. She is going to take a stenographer’s course, but the thing is, she followed Morel. Yvette, I know where the diamonds ar
e.’
They found Maud still in her place at the window but looking more animated than she had been the previous day. She told them she had seen Morel himself at the window twice since Yvette had left, looking anxiously towards the river then shivering and looking up and down the street, searching the faces of the people coming and going on the pavements, their steps hurried or cautious as if afraid the road was going to give way beneath them. She greeted Tanya with warmth and congratulated her, though even as she did so her eyes flitted towards the window again. When Tanya began to tell them of Odette’s visit, however, she became more attentive.
‘Morel had taken her to Café Procope in Cour du Commerce once or twice,’ Tanya explained. ‘Poor thing, she was rather in love with him, I think, and she went back there a few times after he gave her up.’ Tanya looked tired; her work at Saint-Sulpice seemed to have drained her, but her eyes were bright. Yvette found it strange to see her in such a plain dress, but she seemed more substantial sitting there than in her usual silks and chiffon. ‘She was hoping to see him, and see him she did, going into Cour de Rohan. She followed him whenever she could. Apparently he spent hours a day there, and she said she saw him go into the cellars in the yard a couple of times. The second time she tried to speak to him and he was cruel.’ Yvette could imagine. ‘Then that very evening the Countess cast her off.’ Yvette remembered what Valadon had said about women being fools and wondered if she were right.
‘So you think he’s keeping the diamonds there?’ Maud said. ‘In the cellars below Cour de Rohan?’
‘What else could it be?’ Tanya said, looking up at them with her round dark eyes. ‘Close, but not too close. Secluded but somewhere a man like him might easily be dining in the cafés.’
‘And you think we should go and search for them?’ Maud said, looking back again over her shoulder.
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