The Restoration Artist

by Lewis Desoto

  When I left Vancouver, heading to New York to try my hand at being an artist there, I’d gone to say goodbye to Brother Adams and he had given me a little going-away present, a book. It was obviously old. The title was embossed in faded gold letters on the worn leather cover. The Ideal View. The pages were yellowed and the illustrations were in black and white, pictures of landscape paintings. By then I knew some of the names: Corot of course, Poussin, Claude Lorain, John Constable, Cézanne and Pissarro. Facing each picture was a line or two of text. I read the words opposite a painting by Corot. “The most perfect landscape painter the world ever saw. All is lovely, all amiable, all is amenity and repose; the calm sunshine of the heart.”

  “Now that is something to make a picture of, eh?” Brother Adams had said. “‘The calm sunshine of the heart.’”

  Would he have been disappointed with the way I’d turned out? Of course I’d suffered, maybe more than most people, and he would have understood. But now I had given up art and everything he’d hoped I would become. Would he have understood that?

  My thoughts turned to the chapel, to the painting there, and to Père Caron. Something about him reminded me of Brother Adams. He had that same masculine warmth and steadiness that I had longed for so much when I was a boy.

  Was I going to disappoint him too?

  CHAPTER 13

  THE NEXT MORNING, THE FIRST IN MY NEW HOME, when I pulled back the shutters the sea was ragged and choppy with whitecaps, but the rain that had blown across the island all night had stopped. In the little harbour the few boats were swaying back and forth against their moorings, the cleats and buckles on the masts clanking and clattering in the wind.

  With Piero’s paintbox under my arm, I took the inland path to the chapel, the route des Matelots, which was sheltered from the wind. But where it branched from the chemin des Sirènes I veered off to the right, because it would lead me past La Maison du Paradis. As I was crossing the open heath-land, where all the rabbits had wisely decided to stay underground, a strange unfamiliar sound came to my ears, not some primitive music this time but a sort of snarling barking noise from behind the dunes. Remembering that white dog I’d seen in the area a few days ago, I scrambled up the dunes. The wind whipped sand into my face and gusted around my head.

  I heard the barking again and just below and to my left I saw a melee of flying sand and twisting bodies. There were three dogs fighting.

  Then I saw that it wasn’t three dogs but two. The white Labrador I’d seen the other day, and a dark squat mastiff with a thick neck and wide shoulders. The third shape was a child. The boy! They were attacking him. No, he seemed to be trying to separate them. The mastiff appeared to be the aggressor and to have the upper hand, its jaws clamped behind the Labrador’s neck. The boy was pulling at the white dog’s collar.

  I charged into the brawl and aimed a hard kick at the mastiff’s flank. The dog released its hold and tumbled sideways and then was up immediately, circling me. A low rumbling snarl came from deep within its chest, audible over the gusts of wind. I was frightened but I stood my ground, putting myself between the dog and the boy. The mastiff leapt at me, going for my throat. I threw up a blocking forearm and with my other hand punched the animal’s head as hard as I could. Teeth ripped at my sleeve as the mastiff’s mouth fastened on my arm and I punched it hard again between the eyes. It fell and rolled on its back. I kicked at its hindquarters. Regaining its feet, the dog snapped its teeth at my leg, missed, then loped off with its tail between its legs, turning to cast a final glare at me before disappearing over the dunes.

  When I looked around, the boy and the other dog were nowhere in sight. There was only the wind whipping across the waves and the sand grains gusting up against my legs. I heard a shout above the moaning of the wind. Just on the crest of the dunes where the dog had slunk away, a figure appeared—the woman from the chapel.

  She came skidding down the dune, waving her arms. “What happened?”

  “Was that your dog?” I shouted. “It could have killed that boy!”

  She slid to an abrupt stop, holding her hair away from her face as the wind flattened her black curls across her cheeks. “What boy? I heard barking and shouts, some kind of awful commotion.”

  “You should keep that animal leashed! It’s a damned menace.”

  “What are you talking about? I don’t have a dog.”

  “What?” My anger was in full flow, I was hardly listening to her.

  “I don’t own a dog. It wasn’t mine.”

  “It’s not your dog?”

  “Of course it wasn’t, I just told you.”

  “Did you see which way the boy went? “I didn’t see anyone.”

  I bent down with my hands resting on my knees, taking deep breaths. The inside of my mouth tasted metallic.

  “Are you all right?” she said.

  I shook my head, unable to speak, the anger draining out of me. I sat down on the sand.

  “What’s happened?” she asked again, her voice softening.

  “Two dogs were fighting. The boy was trying to separate them. I managed to get myself between them and one turned on me. A vicious thing.” I looked up and down the beach. “You didn’t see a boy?”

  “No, I just heard those awful sounds.” She knelt on the sand next to me. “Your sleeve is torn. If you’ve been bitten you should have your arm seen to. You can get tetanus from a dog bite.”

  I looked dazedly at the rip on my denim shirt, then pushed the sleeve up to expose my forearm. The skin was broken, showing a few drops of blood.

  “It’s nothing.”

  “My cottage is just on the other side of the dunes. I have a first aid kit there. You’d better come up.”

  “I’m fine,” I said. But I felt very tired. I just wanted to lie down and close my eyes.

  “Come on.” She held out her hand, as if to a child. “It’s not far.”

  We went over the dunes, bending against the stiff wind and walked up a rocky path. I had not seen the cottage from this angle before, although I’d passed the front side often enough. Like my own cottage, there was a walled garden, where hollyhocks on either side of a blue wooden door were swaying back and forth in the gusts. She led me through the garden into a large room.

  Along the wall was a tall Normandy armoire, its shelves displaying a collection of patterned plates. The other walls were covered with photographs and paintings. On the opposite side of the room an old couch was arranged in front of a fireplace where a couple of logs glowed.

  “Sit down,” she said.

  I sank onto the couch, overcome with fatigue, as if I had just run a great distance. From one of the drawers next to the sink she brought out a metal first aid box with a red cross on the lid. “Roll up your sleeve and let’s have a look.”

  There were a couple of small beads of blood along the gash on my forearm. I flexed my hand. “It doesn’t look too bad,” I told her.

  “We should put some disinfectant on it anyway.”

  It occurred to me that this was the second time she’d seen me injured. What must she think? “I’m not always like this,” I said. “In a mess of some kind.”

  She gave me the smallest of smiles.

  Holding my arm by the wrist she wiped the abrasion, then tipped a little alcohol onto the cloth from a small brown bottle and dabbed it on my forearm. I remembered being in a similar sort of occasion, with Père Caron that first day after my climb up the cliff. The same day I had first seen her too. I remembered the bruise on her cheek, which had faded now to a very faint discolouration.

  “You are shivering,” she said.

  When I held my hand out above the surface of the table, palm down, it was trembling. I clenched my fist. “That whole thing with the dog and the boy really shook me up.”

  She crossed to the counter under the window where a couple of wine bottles stood and poured some out into a glass. “Drink this,” she said, bringing the glass over.

  I swallowed, washing away the lingeri
ng metallic taste in my mouth.

  “Who is this boy?” she asked.

  “I thought you might know.”

  “Me?” She gave me a surprised look. “You keep mentioning him. Is he the same one you were searching for that day on the cliff?”

  “He reminds me of … someone.” I ran my hand across the paintbox, which I had placed on the couch next to me. My fingers traced the letters etched into the lid. “This was his. Piero.”

  “Where is he?”

  “I had a wife and a son. Claudine and Piero.”

  She stared at me. “Where are they now?”

  “They’re gone.”

  “Have they left you?” It was almost a whisper.

  I put my hands over my face and shook my head.

  Touching me lightly on the shoulder, she said, “What has happened? Tell me.”

  “They are dead.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

  I looked away, at the photographs on the walls. Strangers.

  “What happened?” she said.

  As I sat there on her couch, shivering, stretching my hands out to the fire, feeling that I would never be warm again, I found myself telling her about what had happened to Claudine and Piero.

  When I finished, we were silent for a few moments. “In the end, it was my fault,” I said finally.

  “You are not to blame,” she said. “It was an accident.”

  “No. If I hadn’t persisted in going up to the church, if I hadn’t been so selfish, none of it would have happened. All I could think about was the painting I wanted to make.”

  “None of us can foresee the future.”

  “I put them in danger, and they suffered for it.”

  “And now, this other boy, who is he? I don’t know the islanders much. I’ve only been here a short time myself.”

  “Just a local lad, I suppose. He resembles Piero a bit. That’s all. I’ve been making too much of it.”

  She frowned at me, as if aware that there was more to it than that. “That day I found you lying on the ground at the cliff edge, what happened? You were in pretty rough shape.”

  I looked away and reached for my wineglass, draining what was left. “I came here, to this island, because there was nowhere else to go. And I went to the cliff because I had literally reached the end. At the last moment I heard something behind me and I saw the boy in the mist.”

  “And …?”

  “I thought—I thought it was Piero. And then I fell. I landed on a ledge and eventually managed to climb up. That was when you found me.”

  She blew air out between her pursed lips and shook her head.

  “He saved me in a way,” I said. “The boy. And I thought it was Piero, that he’d come to stop me, to call me back.”

  She nodded. “Suffering can make us imagine things, it can make us behave in ways we cannot understand.” She sounded like she knew more than I’d told her.

  “I know he is not Piero. And I know I haven’t imagined him. He is as real as you and me. I’ve seen him, I’ve touched him. Just the other day, in fact, practically right outside your door.”

  “Here? What do you mean?

  “The whole thing was quite strange.” I told her about hearing the odd musical sounds in the woods. “It was the boy, standing there with his goats like some mythological faun, making this strange music on a clarinet.”

  “Ah, that explains it,” she said.

  “What?”

  She strode over to an instrument case sitting on the counter, snapped the catches open and brought out a clarinet. “Like this one?”

  “It looks exactly the same.”

  “The other day I came home and found my clarinet lying on the kitchen counter. I never leave it lying about when I’m not playing. This instrument is very precious to me, it has a special history, and I always put it back in its case. I couldn’t understand how it came to be on the counter. I’m never absent-minded about it. And you say he was actually playing it?”

  “Well, yes and no.” I tried to explain what I’d heard.

  “How odd. Did you try and talk to him, to find out who he is?”

  “I think I went about it in completely the wrong way and frightened him off.” I told her about trying to grab and hold onto the boy.

  “It’s likely he is afraid of you. He must have been terrified when he saw you fall. Too scared to even go for help. And he probably feels some responsibility for what happened on the cliff, even though he’s only a child. But I don’t understand why a boy that age is not in school. Why is he tending goats and running around shirtless? What about his parents?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Have you tried to find out?”

  “Not directly. I wanted to talk to him first. It would seem a bit odd for a stranger to be asking questions about some local boy, don’t you think?”

  She frowned slightly. “What do you really want from this boy, Leo?”

  I wasn’t sure myself, but I said, “Do you have children?”

  She shook her head.

  “Then you can’t really understand,” I told her. “I know about loss.”

  My eyes went again to that faint vestige of the bruise on her cheek. I sank back wearily on the couch. “You’re right, of course. But you have to understand that I can’t just let it end. I have to know who he is. He is a kind of phantom right now. Maybe just knowing that he is an ordinary boy like any other will help me.”

  She walked over to the table and picked up a pack of cigarettes. I watched her as she crossed the room. She was wearing a thick oatmeal-coloured sweater and a black skirt that came down to her calves, and a pair of old-fashioned lace-up boots. Her thick hair was disorderly from the wind and she raked it back on each side of her head with her fingers as she sat down. She lit the cigarette with a battered old brass Zippo that gave off a strong smell of lighter fluid, and I picked up the cigarette package.

  “Lucky Strike. I used to smoke Luckies for a while when I lived in New York.”

  “Are you American?”

  I shook my head. “Canadian.”

  She said, “I started smoking these at the end of the war when the American soldiers handed them out.”

  “Were you here in the war?”

  “Paris. Other places.” She looked away, gesturing at the cigarettes. “Have one.”

  “I never took to it,” I said. “But I like the smell.” I set the package on the cushion between us.

  “I really think you should put a bandage on that scrape,” she said.

  I didn’t object when she rummaged in the first aid tin and brought out a roll of adhesive bandage. She tossed her cigarette into the fireplace, then cut off a strip of bandage and removed the backing before pressing it over my wrist. Her face was close to mine as she bent over my arm and I was conscious of the warmth and scent of her body. A hint of lily of the valley perfume. I studied her profile, the smooth tanned skin of her cheek, the sweep of her thick eyelashes, the full mouth as she bit lightly on her lower lip with concentration.

  I looked at her hands. They were long-fingered, strong-looking. She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, but there was a band of much lighter skin on the third finger of her left hand and the kind of indentation that the long wearing of a ring leaves. On the underside of her left wrist were two pale lines on the skin, running parallel to the veins. I glanced at her other hand. The same thing there. Cuts, from long ago. I wondered about that. And the bruise. I’d been so consumed with my own story that I hadn’t given much thought to who she was and why she was here. There was something out of the ordinary about the situation.

  She looked up, meeting my scrutiny. I saw the sudden widening of her pupils as her eyes seemed to become darker and more intense in her face. That moment when we had looked at each other in the chapel came back to me—the almost physical sensation I had felt.

  “I don’t even know your name,” I said.

  “It’s Lorca,” she answered in a thick voice.

 
; “You’re not French?”

  “I am. Lorca Daubigny. I was named for the Spanish poet.”

  “I’m Leo Millar.”

  “I know. You said so that day on the cliff.” She let my wrist drop, still looking at me. Then she gave a little shake of her head and got to her feet. She stood leaning on the mantelpiece, busying herself lighting another cigarette.

  “And when you find this boy,” she said, “and realize that he is, as you put it, a local lad with a life of his own, what then? What will you do?”

  “I don’t know.” I hadn’t thought beyond just wanting to verify who he was. I changed the subject. “Have you seen the old painting in the chapel?”

  “No. I’ve only been to the chapel once. The day I saw you there.”

  Our eyes met again. Did I imagine that little flare of connection?

  “The painting is supposedly by Davide Asmodeus. Do you know his work?”

  “Didn’t he do that one in the Louvre? It hangs near Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa?”

  “Yes. But this one is in a terrible condition. Père Caron, the priest, has asked me if I could try and clean it.”

  “You are an artist?” She inclined her head at Piero’s paintbox.

  “Yes. But not a restorer. Anyway, you should come and look at the painting. That is, if you are interested in Asmodeus.”

  “Maybe.” There was something guarded and pensive in her expression now. Her voice had become impersonal.

  “It’s called ‘Love and the Pilgrim,’” I said.

  She raised her eyebrows and gave me that steady, assessing look. I suddenly felt uncomfortable, embarrassed at talking about my life with someone who was, after all, a stranger. And was I completely misinterpreting those glances between us? Was I being foolish, even a little desperate, while she was merely being polite? The logs in the fireplace were throwing off an intense heat, the room seemed smoky, and the taste of the wine was sour on my tongue.

  “I should be going.” I buttoned my sleeve, stood and picked up the paintbox. “Thank you for your help. And for listening.”

  She saw me to the door. “Take care of your arm. If I see the boy I’ll let you know,” she said.