He travelled the country by road and rail, adding properties to his portfolio. Like a convert to Buddhism, he had become a Francophile, a believer. He read the French poets, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Pierre Baudelaire. Just rolling out those names and hearing their prose on his tongue made Kamarovsky feel in touch with something hidden and abstracted deep in the core of his being. He listened to the radio, watched movies in half-empty cinemas and read aloud in hotel rooms in an incessant battle to wear down the burr of his Muscovite accent.
In 1995, he found himself in Beaune, in the Côte d'Or. He stayed at the Hotel de la Poste, an old coach house, and strolled the mediaeval streets of the walled town. He sat in the main square with a glass of burgundy. He liked the way the French enjoyed their wine, drinking for pleasure, not regret. Un verre de vin pour le bonheur. From beneath the shade of an umbrella, he watched the promenade, men with good shoes and brisk walks; women with bare arms and straw hats, the fine gaps in the weave letting in flashes of light like silver fish that swam over their faces. Those women at whom he smiled responded with a faint lift of the shoulders and smiled back. It was another custom he appreciated, that French women accepted a man's admiration of their beauty, as a man may admire a painting in a gallery, for what it was, not for what it might imply.
After lunch, he followed the ring road around Beaune and took the scenic route to Nuits Saint-Georges, 'the world's most illustrious wine village,' he'd read in the guide. Flies tapped against the windscreen and birds lifted indolently from the road as the vehicle approached. The country lanes curved between vineyards and fields of ripening crops, a landscape unchanged for centuries, and he felt when he saw the sign for Saint-Nicolas Grand-Moulin that vague sense of accomplishment that comes at the end of a long journey.
Saint-Nicolas Grand-Moulin was a large country house with a defunct oil mill that began life in the Middle Ages and had been extended in a palette of styles ever since. The windows were shaded by red shutters, dark as rubies against the necklace of large-leafed ivy coating the walls. The building, on three floors with a cellar, stood in a wide stretch of parkland in the still of a summer's day, the earthy, subtle tang of rural France, like a woman's scent, overwhelming his senses.
He stepped from the car as the owner of the house made her way towards him across the courtyard.
'Bonjour.'
'Bonjour.'
'Monsieur Kamarovsky,' she said without smiling, and offered her small white hand. 'Sibylle Durfort. Bienvenue dans ma maison.'
She studied him as if she were looking into a mirror to check her own reflection, or through binoculars at an empty landscape. The study was brief, just a second, but mildly intimidating, like the fleeting gaze of a senior figure in the politburo.
'You would like to see everything?'
'Yes, yes I would,' he replied.
'Do come.'
They entered Saint-Nicolas Grand-Moulin, it was surprisingly cool after the rising heat of the stone courtyard, his gaze drawn constantly to Madame Durfort's erect slender figure as he followed her through rooms with marble fireplaces, frescoed ceilings and carved Provincial furniture, the walls adorned with paintings in gilt frames. A piano and cello stood in the shadows of the music room, the objet d'art precisely placed as to appear arbitrary. He paused before leaving the library.
'Is that a Cézanne?'
'It was once,' she replied. 'Now it's just a copy. Like everything.'
'Not your house.'
'No, my house is my house.'
He followed her up creaking staircases and along corridors lit by sunlight that ran in strips through the half-opened shutters. He liked the way she moved, so light it was as if her feet barely touched the floor, the way the light filled her hair, it was pale, like honey, and lifted from her neck with stray strands falling from a tortoiseshell clip. In a sleeveless, ivory-coloured shift and rope-soled espadrilles that tied about her slender ankles, Sibylle Durfort was ethereal, a fleur-de-lis, delicate, elusive. She was ten years older than him, he thought, and he was reminded suddenly of that day on the windy beach in Biarritz when his soul migrated from Russia and fixed itself in France.
They entered a large room on the top floor.
'My studio,' she told him, and shrugged as if to dismiss the implication.
He studied the unfinished painting on the easel. It was a pastel landscape with a lemon sky, pink fields and blue trees vanishing into mist, the result alluring and mischievous, even transcendental. More paintings were hung and stacked against the walls, scores of them.
'They are wonderful,' he said. 'You have so many.'
'When I finish one, I start another.'
'Do you have shows?' he asked, and the way she looked back over her shoulder gave him once more that feeling of being clumsy; uncivilized.
'No. Nothing like that,' she answered.
He followed her out to the balcony. What he could see was rolling green fields divided by trees that turned hazy along the horizon, the view when it transferred to the unfinished canvas softened, impenetrable.
'It's so peaceful,' he said.
'Like the eye of the storm,' she continued. 'Wherever you go in France it is the same distance. We are in the middle of everything and the middle of nothing.'
'That would have advantages.'
'I suppose it would.'
Their eyes met for a moment, and he gave away a secret, something you should never do in a negotiation.
'I like the house, I like it very much,' he said.
'Yes, so do I.'
'Then why sell?'
She nodded her head and swept a stray strand of hair from her eyes. 'That is easy to answer, Monsieur Kamarovsky, I have run out of money. But then, of course, you must know that.'
He wasn't sure what to say and was saved by the sound of an approaching vehicle. They looked out from the balcony and he could see the roof of a white car through the hedgerows.
'Ah, the children,' she added.
He followed her back downstairs and they left the house as the car came to a halt. The nanny was driving, an English girl; even the French had grown aware that English was indispensable. A boy ran up and hid behind his mother, peeping out timidly with the same expression as the miniature white poodle that chased after him. Nicolas was six, pale and blonde, like his mother. The girl was ten, tall for her age, with her mother's knowing eyes. She strode towards him, nodded in that typically French way, and shook his hand.
'Bonjour, Monsieur.'
'Marie-France,' her mother said.
'Bonjour.'
Her eyes fixed on his and Kamarovsky experienced the same feeling of inadequacy that had pinpricked his shell the moment he had met her mother, that sense of being assessed and found wanting. The girl entered the house while Madame Durfort, with Nicolas and the dog for company, continued the tour, the outbuildings with relics of ancient farm tools, the old mill, the chapel, the stone altar pitted by the woodworm of time. They arrived finally back at his car and he could hear above the courtyard the sound of a cello being played capably if inexpertly in the music room.
A cello. Of course.
It all sounded so...so romantic, so otherworldly, so...so foreign. I felt...parochial, cosseted, inadequate, English.
We had stopped at a station.
'Do you have a photograph?' I said.
He reached for his iPhone. 'I thought you'd looked already?'
'I may have said I did, but I didn't.'
He glanced back at me, shook his head, then scrolled through the files. 'Just one.' He gave me the phone. 'You can delete it.'
I studied the image. Marie-France was precisely how I had imagined her to be. She was my age, but had about her a wisdom, a knowledge; experiences I could barely envisage. No smile lifted her lips and she had that look in her grey eyes of someone who was being photographed against her will. Her hair was the colour of ripening corn, one side tucked behind a small ear with a drop earring, a pixie chin, arched eyebrows, a look of vulnerabil
ity and strength, the face of a woman men want to protect and ravage.
I returned the phone.
'You haven't deleted it.'
'It's not mine to delete.'
He did so, so that I could see, as if it made a difference. Marie-France had been important in his life and she remained, a scar, a wound, distinct and layered, as clear as a crystal ball that collects the light and leaves stains of shade as it turns. The sun was going down and Tom's face, too, through the carriage window, was divided like a costume mask in light and shadow. I wondered if he had ever intended to tell me about Marie-France? Or whether Tamsin had advised him to? Or whether there was some collusion, that he had asked her to break the ice before he told me? It was the sort of thing I would do for Matt.
We had left Bramley after the men returned with the missing cat. It was exactly where Joe had assumed it would be. He dropped us at the station. We would be home as night was falling.
Doors slammed. The train gathered speed, constantly moving, up and down like an algorithm. I pass exams by studying my notes the day before. My memory is specific, short-term, the opposite of Clemency Hirsch. I listened as Tom continued and, next day, I wrote everything down as if Marie-France and the Russian were characters in the book Lizzie Elmwood had said I was going to write.
Kamarovsky drove slowly through the heat haze that still afternoon in early summer and his dry heart burst to life like a flower in the desert. His mouth was parched, his eyes watery behind dark glasses. He had been struck by a lightning flash, a coup de foudre, an unexpected sense of urgency and passion so powerful a pain crossed his chest and he thought for a moment he was having a heart attack.
He pulled into the shade of a tree and stepped out of the car. He loosened his tie and took deep breaths like a runner at the end of a race. He was beside a vineyard, the grapes growing plump, each row of vines hemmed by a rose bush with pale pink blooms. He had seen roses marking the vines all over France and wondered what purpose they served beyond the beauty of being. A bird with blue-tipped wings landed on the branch of the tree and he couldn't recall what type of bird it was, the word mislaid in Russian as well as French. He was tired of living in hotel rooms, his sense of being on the outside of life looking in exaggerated more than assuaged by the one night affairs that marked his journey. Kamarovsky shaded his brow and gazed across the landscape. He doubted that there was a more beautiful place on earth.
He clapped his hands. The bird flew away, taking with it his self-doubt, his sudden anxiety. He straightened his tie and climbed into the car. He swept his hand through his dark hair and smiled as he studied himself in the rear view mirror. Intelligence is knowing what you want and making the right decisions to reach your goal. A smile touched his lips as he fired the engine. The driver on a tractor waited as he turned the car in the narrow road. He waved and the man touched his fingers to his beret and waved back. You never knew where you stood with the French. They were rarely open. They didn't weep like the Russians or welcome you noisily like the Italians and Spanish. They could be amiable, charming in subtle ways, and he took the friendly gesture from the farm hand as an omen.
Without mentioning his intention to acquire Saint-Nicolas Grand-Moulin, he invited Madame Durfort to join him for dinner. That night, they became lovers.
What Kamarovsky admired in Sibylle was her self-assurance, the serenity easily mistaken for arrogance, or perhaps it was arrogance; her remoteness, her poise, the pastel paintings she had never shown. She was from that class of old families all across Europe – I know them, I am them, the haves who have grown used to having less, conventional, prudish, innately xenophobic, clinging on with good accents in draughty houses they can't afford and who work for a living, media jobs, columnists, designers, artists.
The deeds to Grand-Moulin moved into Kamarovsky's name, but little else changed. Not on the surface. He continued to work tirelessly those coming years. He bought hotels and apartment blocks off plan and sold them when they were built. He still negotiated for the oligarchs, they are not men to whom one says no, but from the old mill in the middle of everything and the middle of nothing he avoided all things Russian and exercised his artistic gene writing poetry in French. He grew his investments as you grow Pinot noir black grapes with patience and love and, when the crash came, he was sheltered, as only the rich are, behind the walls of banks with initials not names in Switzerland, Dubai and the Cayman Islands.
Madame Fournier, in fact a mademoiselle, the plump housekeeper with peasant wisdom and pastry skills that validated her family name, organized life at Grand-Moulin. Nannies came and went. The children learned English. Sibylle painted. She was thin by nature and grew thinner, sharp-angled, a woman transforming from an object of desire to pity. The qualities Kamarovsky had admired in Sibylle, her aloofness, her superiority, traits she had passed on to her son, became the wall that went up brick by brick between them.
When he wasn't at school, Nicolas spent his time in his room with his collections, butterflies under glass, crusaders acting out battles with Saladin, obsolete coins and books of stamps that had belonged to his father, whom he worshipped like a fetish and had barely known. Kamarovsky was an intruder, an invader from the Kazakh steppes, and Nicolas, in an oedipal sense, believed he had stolen his mother.
Marie-France, by contrast, had an instant affinity with Kamarovsky. He was a man, and men do things. They make you feel in touch with something and you're not quite sure what it is. She laughed when he pronounced words wrongly or borrowed phrases from Baudelaire, and when she laughed, he laughed at himself. He built a tennis court and swimming pool behind the mill – 'how gauche!' whispered mother, but used it nonetheless. He bought a white Vespa. He taught Marie-France to drive, there were paths all over the estate, and when he was away, she raced the scooter through the country lanes without a licence. Kamarovsky appealed to her wayward side and she, in turn, gave him a feeling of belonging, something he had never felt in Moscow or between the sheets of Sibylle Durfort's four-poster bed.
At fourteen, Marie-France was as tall as her mother, a child-woman. She reminded me of me at that age with small breasts that itched and tingled, long legs, hips and bottom smoothing, shaping, reforming. It is a cliché, but the cliché is always true. Girls are butterflies and at fourteen they feel the air below their wings and fly through the glass walls that imprison them. She would have been like me, giddy and confused, happy one moment, melancholic the next, me studying at Saint Sebastian, she at the music academy in Beaune, mythic twins separated at birth.
Kamarovsky drove an old black Citroën he had bought because Marie-France had fallen in love with the svelte lines that may have reminded her of herself, all is vanity; it was long, poetic, sleek as a spaceship. He would collect her from the academy and they would visit art galleries and bookshops in time lost country towns where they sat in the shadows of churches and forts and ordered tea and pastries that he ate hungrily and she never touched.
She took his arm as they strolled back to the car and heads turned as if the dark Russian and tall slender girl with her face hidden by a hat were figures from a fairy tale. Did they stop in the forest on summer days? Did she take her cello from the car and sit on a tree stump in a glade playing Bach's Prelude to the 1st Suite? Did they climb into the big back seat with the soft grey leather in the long sleek car, read poetry, discuss art and literature. Kamarovsky would surely have read Lolita. Was he Humbert Humbert? Or Svengali? Or Rasputin?
He called her mon petit poisson, my little fish, and that summer when she turned fifteen she sunbathed naked beside the pool and grew as dark as he. Sibylle didn't notice or didn't care. She thought of her daughter, if she thought about her at all, as Kamarovsky's Girl, a foreign flag hoisted over a lost French colony. Sibylle's solitary ardour was her painting. She painted dark cityscapes with angular shadows crossing blank walls and bleak empty plazas. She signed her canvases in red with the name Kamarovsky and, at his prompting, showed her work to favourable reviews all over France.
Nicolas withdrew as if into the shadows of those unknown cities. His passion was his crusader figures marching eternally into battle and at night when Kamarovsky was away, Marie-France listened for the sound of her brother's footsteps as he scurried along the corridor into the big bed in his mother's room.
Tom fell silent for a moment. We had stopped at another station. A girl got on and sat further down the carriage singing softly to the music playing on the headphones she wore like earmuffs. It had begun to snow. It would be dark soon, the days short, the summer far behind and far away.
After receiving warm reviews in local papers and magazines, Sibylle Durfort left the serene eye of the storm to do an interview with the infamous poison pen of the art critic for Le Figaro. The critique, illustrated with photographs of her work and Sibylle in her studio, was unusually generous and her cityscapes in silver frames began to fly, like migrating geese, from the gallery walls. Astutely priced at 10,000 euros, Sibylle's art hit that golden mean figure that touched the nerve endings of both the old rich and nouveau riches, who believed in 1999 that the paintings would go up in value and the champagne bubble would never burst.
In the autumn of that year, she had a show in Dijon featuring for the first time her pastel landscapes, Kamarovsky, her familiar imprimatur, now scrawled like streaks of blood in the bottom right corners of the canvases. Dealers were calling from New York, Frankfurt, Barcelona. Sibylle Durfort was acclaimed, sought after: at forty-six she had reached artists' heaven, the airy space between the twin-peaked mountaintops: recognition and financial independence.
Those winter months she worked night and day on a fresh theme, merging her landscapes and cityscapes in what became known as 'autoscapes' – the curving graphs of the autoroutes with their bridges and service stations, the drivers and passengers faceless automatons isolated in steel cases, snappy cars like small dogs beside 16-wheel behemoths, like Trojan horses, smears of red lights and white lights in night parallels skirting nameless towns and dividing forests and field, day and night, the rational and the insane.
Katie In Love: full length erotic romance novel Page 13