The Improbability of Love

by Hannah Rothschild

  ‘I don’t see you being so happy,’ said Evie, quietly. ‘I hear you crying yourself to sleep. I see you looking at your pinched, desperate face in the mirror. I am witnessing this so called wonderful sober life and it doesn’t look so damn great to me.’

  Annie said nothing for a bit but kept on stirring.

  ‘You are right,’ she said finally. ‘I’m not happy and haven’t been for a long time. Most of the time I have to struggle to put one foot in front of the other, drag myself out of bed and into the shower. My day job is not what I hoped it would be. This flat is not in the place I would like to live. My friends are three hundred miles away and even if I saw them tonight, I am not sure we would have anything left to talk about. But at least every decision, however wrong or muddle-headed or pointless, is my decision and not driven by some senseless liquid demon.’

  Evie did not answer. Turning back to her saucepan, Annie dripped a trail of cream into the molten chestnut.

  Evie broke the silence. ‘You never told me what happened with the nice guide.’

  ‘Nothing happened,’ said Annie, crossly.

  ‘He never called?’

  ‘No.’ Annie set the soup before her mother and waited patiently for the verdict. Evie took a tentative sip and then two more.

  ‘This is delicious, darling,’ Evie said. ‘I have never tasted anything so fragrant, so unexpected, so delicate.’

  Annie clapped her hands together. ‘Do you really mean it?’

  ‘Too bloody right – you have a real talent, Annie. You are a truly wonderful chef.’

  Going around the small table, Annie gave her mother a kiss on the cheek.

  With a fragile truce in place, the two women sat, side by side, eating the soup.

  ‘Tell me about the painting. What have you found out?’ Evie asked.

  Annie wanted to tell her mother about the developments concerning the painting but something held her back. Ladling a second helping of soup gently into the chipped breakfast bowl, she knew Evie would transform Agatha’s cautious optimism into a major drama. Annie could imagine her mother storming into the National Gallery and demanding affidavits and paperwork in a misguided attempt to help her daughter.

  ‘I have not had time to think about the painting; things at work have been so busy.’

  ‘I tell you it’s good, I know it in my bones,’ Evie said, scraping out the last of the soup with her spoon.

  Suddenly, Evie jumped up and ran to the window. ‘Look, look at that,’ she said. Following her gaze, Annie saw the moon, so full and fat and white that it looked like a child’s drawing, suspended over London.

  ‘Do you remember?’ Evie asked, her eyes shining.

  ‘Of course,’ Annie laughed, thinking back to the times that mother and daughter had taken their clothes off, put Elvis on the tape recorder and danced under full moons in the backyards of their rented houses.

  ‘If only we had a garden,’ Annie said.

  ‘We do, an enormous one,’ said Evie and opening the window wide, she began to climb out.

  ‘Are you mad? We’re five floors up. You could die,’ Annie cried out.

  ‘Something much worse could happen: we could forget to live,’ said Evie.

  Annie watched her mother’s legs and then her feet disappear out of the window and then she heard a scrabbling sound above. Then her mother’s trousers flew past the open window.

  Minutes later, Annie had joined Evie on the roof. To her surprise it was flat and connected to the other houses; they could walk to the end of her street and back without touching a pavement. The moonlight bathed the townscape in a soft, silvery glow punctured by hundreds of dashes of lights from windows and street lamps. From here Annie could see the coordinates of her new world: from the corner shop to the tube station and across London to Winkleman Fine Art. She saw her cycle route along the edge of the park and in the distance, the London Eye, the Shard and the Gherkin, the landmarks she relied on to find her way about town. Seeing the city laid out sleepily beneath and around her made Annie less cowed by its vastness and, for the first time, she could imagine a life in the metropolis.

  The opening bars of ‘Hound Dog’, tinny through Evie’s mobile phone speaker, started up and Evie, now dressed only in her bra and pants, started to dance.

  ‘Aren’t you cold?’ Annie said.

  ‘Freezing my tits off,’ Evie said, her teeth chattering audibly.

  Annie looked at her mother with tenderness. If Evie hadn’t become pregnant at sixteen, she might have finished school and had a career. Instead her talents were spoiled and wasted by an accident, a pregnancy with a boy who died two years later. Annie felt a sudden sense of responsibility towards the woman who had given up her life to look after her daughter, however cack-handedly. Now it was up to Annie to make that decision count, to make good for both of them. She felt a renewed sense of purpose, a surge of ambition; she was going to cook a dinner that people would talk about for many years to come and she was going to prove that an unknown picture was worth something.

  ‘Come on, Annie, take your dress off,’ Evie said.

  Annie slipped her dress off and, laughing, took her mother’s hand and together they danced in the moonlight.

  Chapter 15

  A sense of equilibrium and calm settled over my weft and warp as I sat in the eaves of the National Gallery, bathed in a gentle north light, lulled by the hushed voices of conservators, and stimulated by wonderful conversations with major works by Diego Velázquez, Albrecht Dürer and Giovanni da Rimini; oh, the sheer unadulterated pleasure of being back among friends, some of whom I had not seen for nearly two hundred years. My erstwhile friend the Velázquez was pretty jumpy when they removed part of his upper ground. Admittedly it was a later addition, but Diego worried they would take a leg or an ear off with it. Meanwhile, the poor old Rimini, painted in 1300 and left for over seven hundred years of total isolation in the private vestry of a minor Roman church, had been sold by cash-strapped monks and was now in a state of shock about how much the world has changed: he spent days murmuring, ‘In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti.’ Diego and I soon got bored of saying ‘Amen’ in reply. Imagine if they bring a rowdy Picasso or a depressed van Gogh up here – Rimini’s gold leaf will probably fall right off.

  The head of the gallery, Septimus Ward-Thomas, came to look at me yesterday. He didn’t dwell (he is only really interested in Spanish baroque) but assented to let Agatha work on me in her spare time.

  In idle moments I think of my mistress; one does get attached. Odd, really. Diego said it was Stockholm syndrome but as I have not been to Sweden for centuries, he is clearly off his woodwork. I wonder if Annie took up the young man’s suggestion about stopping at the British Museum’s drawings collection?

  Agatha, to give her her due, is not rushing into anything. Yesterday she took the tiniest pinprick of paint from the side of my canvas and took it along the corridor to the scientific department. Four scientists studied the results and no cleaning will begin until they have worked out exactly what kind of paint my master used. Antoine was not into preparation. In fact, and it pains me to criticise, he was inclined to sloppiness. In pursuit of rapidity of execution, he liked to paint in a hurry. Canvases require careful preparation and preparation was not my master’s strong point. He was trying to get all those ideas, those feelings down. Instead of waiting for the paint to dry, he’d rub the canvas all over with huile gras and paint over that. The damage was increased by a certain want of cleanliness in his practice, which has affected the ‘constancy’ of his colours and as a result, many faded. He seldom cleaned his palette and often went several days without setting it, so his paintings were filled with dust and dirt.

  It’s time to tell you about him, Antoine and the love of his life. My master was born in Valenciennes in 1684 to an alcoholic, abusive roofer. The humble circumstance of his birth underscores his genius. His father wanted his son to follow his own profession and seek a regular wage; Antoine knew that he had to
paint. In the middle of one night he ran away to Paris. It broke his mother’s heart and ruined his own health. The stupid boy chose winter to make the trek and after four days and four nights on foot, sleeping in ditches, eating only grass, he arrived in the capital with a debilitating pneumonia from which his lungs never fully recovered.

  France was at its most sullen; choked by war, famine and the decrepitude of an aged, dyspeptic, embittered old monarch and the underhand bigoted rule of a power-crazed mistress, Madame de Maintenon. An ennui had settled over Parisian life, a heavy stinking fug of solipsistic oppression. Even the ceremonious court was exhausted by its own pomp. There was no gaiety or life in the arts, no spontaneity or originality. The pseudo-heroism of historical painting lay like a pretentious, weighty blanket on the merriest of souls. In the early 1700s, during the great plague of Marseilles, cannibalism and famine were the norm in the great capital. This was the backdrop to my master’s life.

  Let us continue a few years to 1703. Antoine was still a young man, nineteen, working for the decorative painter Claude Gillot in Paris. The pay was a pittance, barely enough to cover a carafe of wine and a loaf of bread, but as long as he had a brush in hand, he was happy enough. To make ends meet my master sat in taverns and drew in return for alms. His was a life mired by undernourishment and poverty. Working for Gillot was useful training but the older man’s greatest contribution to my master’s education was excursions to performances by the banned theatrical group, the commedia dell’arte. These events took place in back-street taverns and the piquancy of performance was heightened by the prospect of a police raid. For most, the risk of arrest was worth taking: those wonderful actors were anarchic and lawless. Their leading man, Hippolyte was broad, handsome and brave. Their clown, Gilles, was the fount of all jokes. Few in the troop took anything seriously – they made fun of the ancient regime and its regulations. They laughed at love and life. Watching their performances, Antoine experienced a new lightness of spirit and a sense of optimism. In their exuberant, ebullient midst, he shook off, albeit briefly, his heavy heritage of Valenciennes, the years of war and poverty.

  He took to going every night. On the fourth visit, my master saw her, Charlotte Desmares, widely acknowledged as the most beautiful girl in Paris, who joined the Italians for occasional perfomances. Her stage name was Colette. Putting down his brush and grabbing some chalks from his pockets, Antoine began frantically sketching this maiden as she pliéed, twirled and danced around the stage. Charlotte saw him, but she was one of those women who was so used to being watched that the sight of another young man rapt in admiration was hardly out of the ordinary.

  Watteau drew till his fingers bled. Feigning an upset stomach, my master rushed back to his tiny atelier where, taking the one canvas he owned, he started to paint. That piece of cloth, stretched between four pieces of wood, that inauspicious piece of nothingness, became moi.

  I am the receptacle, the vessel into which all the agony and ecstasy of first love was poured. Urgency and magic, excitement, passion and terror flew from his heart to his brush. Watteau’s ardour was so strong that there was no time to prepare the paint properly on the palette. Instead he flicked and mixed colours one next to the other in a frenzy of dabs and wipes – look at the trees, admire the sunlight, the pointillism, blurred edges, the informality and you will see the birth of Impressionism, though it took the rest of the world some one hundred and fifty years to catch up.

  I am the representation of his impassioned, deranged, inflamed desire. I am l’amour fou. La gloire d’amour. I am the literal exemplification of utter mortal madness.

  Hidden under the layers of varnish and overpaint, you will see that Charlotte’s cap isn’t uniform red – it’s gold and yellow and crimson and magenta, silvering down to palest pink. Her dress is saffron – yellow grading from palest canary to golden buttercup, each delicate colour laid, splashed in minute harmony. Yellow, too, peeps though the opening in her décolletage and her skirt is hot with pale purple and soft browns. Her skin is creamy white like an opal taking reflections from light. There will never be a more beautiful painting of flesh, even among the Venetians.

  There have been other painters and muses. One thinks of Rembrandt and Hendrickje, Modigliani and Jeanne Hébuterne, Dalí and Gala, Bacon and George Dyer, but I propose that it was my master’s demented love for Charlotte that imbues my canvas with added unmatched fervour.

  The composition was one my master returned to his whole life: the stage of love. The background is transitory and artificial, a mythical, mystical landscape adorned by figures reclining, overlooked by a statue of the goddess of love. In the middle he placed Charlotte, as proud and as graceful as a swan. Raising her delicate arms, she looks directly, fiercely, provocatively at the viewer. At her feet, the simply dressed young man just stares. With only the lightest flick of a fine brush, Antoine captures his awe as he looks up at this vision of femininity. You can taste the hope and despair, the love and lust implicit in his gaze.

  If I tell you that the man’s face is composed of only seven strokes of a brush you’ll laugh and remonstrate that this can’t be so; but that is why my master is a genius and why his star is still in the firmament of great artists nearly three hundred years after his death. He understands the alchemy of red and pink and pearly white. More importantly, he understands mankind, and he can, like great artists, translate our innermost joy and fear into something tangible.

  Some say I’m only a sketch. It’s true that I was executed with haste and élan. This intensity released Antoine from the past, from the teachings of dreary academics, from childish doodling, and in his hurry to capture love he had found his métier and a new way of painting. I was the canvas that launched a career. I was the painting that started a movement, the rococo.

  I was painted to celebrate the wild cascades of love, the rollicking, bucking, breaking and transformative passion that inevitably gave way to miserable, constricting, overbearing disappointment.

  Four days later, when the paint was hardly dry, Antoine took me back to the theatre as a present for Charlotte. Imagine this young, gawky nineteen-year-old laying open his heart. The troop crowded around, pushing and shuffling, giggling and chattering like tiny chaffinches at a bird table. I had my first brush with death. Charlotte’s rival, Hortense, was so overcome with jealousy that she ran her long nails down my canvas. A fraction harder and she’d had damaged me for ever. Shocking really. Charlotte was rather delighted. The attentions of this young painter elevated her and her cachet was upped by his gift of love.

  ‘Give it to me,’ she demanded, holding out her pretty little hand. Watteau started to hand the picture over – then he hesitated. ‘No,’ he said, ‘It will be my present to you the day you agree to marry me. Until then, it will never leave my side.’ The company fell about in mirth. How could a young penniless painter compete with her lover, the Duc d’Orléans, nephew of Louis XIV? Their laughter was so intense, so heartfelt, that it brought Gillot running to see what the commotion was about. He looked from the actress to the painter and his eyes finally rested on me. The blood drained from his face; it took only a glance to realise that the younger man was by far the superior painter. Gillot, to give him his due, could not have been more gracious. ‘I can’t teach you anything more but I can point you in the right direction.’ He sent my master to work with Claude Audran, an interior decorator in charge of the Palais de Luxembourg, home to wondrous works by Rubens, Veronese, Titian and Tintoretto.

  The other actors begged Antoine to paint them and many would return with him to his atelier and sit for hour after hour while he immortalised them in chalk and pen and occasionally even in oil. But if you look at his great works you will always find glimpses of her – sometimes it’s her face, other times it’s her neck, arm, back, her foot. The essence of love for Charlotte haunts most of his paintings. Her sweet girlish visage peeps out everywhere and the spirit of his love for her, his unbridled romance, steals into all of his works.

  I
f I were to offer a soupçon of criticism against my master it would be in the field of courtship: love is as much an art as painting or living; it requires practice, finesse, determination, humility, energy and delicacy. Like many before and since, my master became enamoured with the sweet ecstasy of unrequited passion; he saw his ‘problem’ as not being loved, when really it was the inability to give love. He was so green behind the ears, so naïve, that he thought love arrived fully formed and complete. It never occurred to him, after that first rejection, to earn Charlotte’s respect or her heart. He flounced off to his studio. I’m sorry to say that some find the agony of rejection far sweeter than the ecstasy of consummation.

  To try and expunge the hussy’s memory, he painted over Charlotte’s face with that of another woman’s. Then he added the clown, a ghostly figure in the gloaming: a Pierrot, the embodiment of pathos and derision. It was a self-portrait he returned to over and over again for the rest of his short life.

  Then he changed my title. Once I was called The Glory of Love; after her rejection, I became The Improbability of Love.

  So what happened next? I’ll tell you the rest in good time.

  Chapter 16

  ‘Your mother has called seven times in the last hour,’ the receptionist, Marsha, told Annie. ‘Something about a break-in – I couldn’t really understand.’ She did not need to add that Evie had been drunk and slurring her words.

  Annie looked at the clock – it was 3 p.m. That morning, Rebecca asked her to prepare dinner for eight and Annie had rushed across town to her preferred fishmonger to choose a line-caught cod. Hanging up her coat and placing her bag in a drawer, she dialled home. Evie was hardly coherent: Annie tried to stitch the series of events together. Her mother had only gone to the shops for a short while (probably the pub for a long drink, Annie thought), but on returning to the flat it took her a few minutes to realise that the door had been forced (probably twenty to negotiate the stairs and another fifteen to find the set of keys, Annie translated). Evie thought she had gone mad (thought? Annie nearly laughed), but although the flat was very tidy, things weren’t quite the same (Were you were seeing double?). The toaster was in a different place; the bin was three feet away (How would you know?). Evie was frightened (Not as worried as I am that you still haven’t left). Evie wanted Annie to come home early (In my dreams).