The Kiss

by Joan Lingard

  When he came down in the lift he found the three girls waiting for him in the foyer. Clarinda, who spoke passable French, was talking to the receptionist. She turned triumphantly to Cormac.

  ‘I’ve found out what Cherche-Midi means! Seek the South! Madame says there’s an astronomer’s sign on the wall of number nineteen. That’s how the street gets its name.’

  She had to see it, of course – she was good at getting her way, he had come to realise, through sheer determination – and so they progressed down the rue du Cherche-Midi and stopped outside number nineteen. There was the sign. Clarinda stood gazing at it and Cormac was able to hazard a guess at what was playing in her mind. Gwen is standing here. She is looking at the sign and thinking of the warmth of the Midi. She is on her way home to her little room at number eighty-seven where she will await the arrival of Rodin. She will hear his heavy step on the stair, his broad knuckles on the door, and her heart will flutter …

  ‘Let’s push on,’ said Cormac, ‘or we’ll never get there.’

  He managed to manoeuvre himself between Sue and Cathy, which meant that Clarinda had to walk on the outside, by the kerb. Whenever they had to break ranks to allow other people to pass he saw to it that they reformed as before. Their journey out to Meudon was not going to be straightforward, like the ride to Clignancourt. They were on their way to the Métro at Sèvres-Babylone. Clarinda was disappointed.

  ‘Are we not going to take the train from Montparnasse?’ she asked. ‘That was how Rodin usually went home. And Gwen would see him to the station. Don’t you want to go the way Rodin went?’

  ‘Not particularly,’ said Cormac. ‘And this is just as quick. Probably quicker. It’s a longer walk to Montparnasse.’

  Clarinda should not object to a shorter walk. Her feet must be in a mess after yesterday’s boulevard hike though she was not complaining. She never did, whereas the rest of them were always moaning about something, about having sore feet, being tired, hungry, thirsty, too hot, or too cold. They would stop every twenty minutes if allowed to take on cargo. Packets of crisps, cans of coke, chocolate bars, anything that could be put in the mouth. It was a wonder some of them didn’t carry dummies with them. And then of course there were those who disappeared for a few minutes every so often and came back reeking of cigarette smoke. ‘You must think I was born yesterday,’ he told them.

  Today, Clarinda was wearing trainers and they all carried anoraks since rain was forecast. At Sèvres-Babylone they took the Métro line 12 to the terminus of Mairie d’Issy. He contrived to sit beside Cathy, which left Clarinda to sit with Sue behind them. If he wasn’t careful they would be saying he was after Cathy! He could hear Clarinda telling Sue about Gwen John waiting for Rodin in the evening when he’d finished work at the studio.

  ‘She was a kind of stalker, then?’ said Cathy.

  ‘I wouldn’t call her that.’

  ‘Yes, but to hang about waiting for him to throw her a few crumbs. Give us a break! Wouldn’t catch me doing that for any guy—’

  ‘She had been his mistress, don’t forget.’

  ‘Big deal. Then he dumped her, didn’t he? Got what he wanted from her and said bye-bye, baby.’

  ‘It was that ghastly American woman who was married to a French duke that messed it all up for her. She vamped him to bits and poor Gwen was left standing.’

  ‘More fool her.’

  ‘But she adored him.’

  Cormac asked Cathy what she was going to do when she left school and set up a conversation for the two of them. She thought she might like to work for one of the building societies, which didn’t seem to offer much scope for discussion though he struggled to engage in one. Do you find the idea of mortgages interesting? He could hardly ask her that though perhaps he should, for she might. He was always interested in other people’s interests. ‘What draws you to that especially?’ he asked.

  ‘My dad works for the Woolwich,’ she said.

  ‘Gets me what you see in her,’ Sue was saying to Clarinda. ‘She sounds like a real drip.’

  ‘I don’t say I necessarily admire the way she carried on with Rodin. She did go over the top at times—’

  ‘I’ll say. Some of those letters, about her body yearning for his touch and wanting to put her lips against his neck, stuff like that. Could you imagine writing those things to a guy, especially one that doesn’t want you?’

  Clarinda murmured something, but whether she was agreeing or disagreeing it would have been difficult to say.

  Sue went on, ‘And then there was that bit about her setting light to her hair down there. I mean to say! And wanting to cut herself! She must have been bananas.’

  ‘Only when she was desperate—’

  ‘Is the Woolwich a good place to work?’ asked Cormac but Cathy did not answer; she was too intent on listening to the conversation going on behind them. He wondered why Clarinda had been reading out bits of the diary to the girls when they would obviously not be sympathetic. She would have a hard job trying to convert them.

  ‘But I do admire her work,’ Clarinda was continuing. ‘And, as a person, she intrigues me. That she could be so absolute. There is something about going to the edge—’

  ‘Right, girls!’ said Cormac, springing up.

  They had reached the end of the line. They disembarked to find that the promised rain had arrived and was sheeting down. Cathy and Sue peered out into it, looking as if they would cut and run given the slightest encouragement.

  ‘Anoraks on, hoods up!’ said Cormac. They now had to catch a bus to Hôpital Percy. After a fifteen minute wait at the stance, during which time Cathy and Sue groused about wet feet, a bus came, and a short ride took them to their destination.

  The Villa des Brillants was situated on a hill behind the military hospital looking down over the valley. The house was not brilliant, he had warned them, so that they would not be disappointed.

  ‘It’s kind of ugly,’ said Cathy, as they approached it up a long drive. ‘With that sticky-up grey slate roof and those wee dormer windows poking out. And I don’t like red and white brick.’

  ‘It’s called the North Oxford style,’ said Clarinda, before Cormac could respond. She had read it in a book, of course, one of the ones he had lent her. He was beginning to wonder if she knew them off by heart. ‘It was the garden that Rodin liked so much. He loved sitting on a bench with his two dogs when it was getting dark, and watching the lights come on in Paris down below. Didn’t he, Cormac?’

  ‘I believe he did.’

  ‘That’s why he thought it worth the effort to walk to the station at Montparnasse every night and make the journey out here. It would be wonderful to work out here. Wouldn’t it, Cormac?’ Clarinda’s eyes had that shiny look again.

  ‘I guess it would,’ he said. When he had first come he had had the same thought, had imagined himself working in the pavilion where many of Rodin’s rough casts were on display.

  ‘Once, when Rodin was away,’ said Clarinda, ‘Gwen brought her cat and camped in the bushes and sketched the house. Rose Beuret, that’s the old peasant woman he lived with, came out into the garden and pottered about with the two dogs but she didn’t see Gwen. Lucky the dogs didn’t smell the cat! Gwen wasn’t jealous of Rose, though. She felt that Rose kept Rodin’s other women away.’ Clarinda laughed. ‘But can’t you just imagine it – Gwen crouching in the bushes there trying to keep her cat quiet!’

  ‘What was she doing bringing her cat with her?’ asked Sue.

  ‘She adored her cats. She liked to paint them. On the way home in the tram the cat shot out the door when it stopped at St Cloud and Gwen nearly went off her head. She leapt off the tram herself but there was no sign of Tiger – that was the cat’s name. She spent nine days living rough on a piece of waste ground near the river looking for him. But she did find him in the end.’

  ‘I think she was off her head anyway,’ said Cathy.

  ‘She was an artist,’ said Clarinda, going ahead.

  ‘A
re all artists potty?’ asked Cathy.

  ‘Most of them are fairly neurotic,’ said Cormac. ‘They possibly have to be in order to persevere.’ Though as he said this he wondered if Rodin could be called neurotic. He’d been obsessed by his work. But was that the same thing? He’d always had an image of the sculptor as a man securely earthed, with a strong centre and a deep religious but not fanatical faith.

  They paid their entrance money and went into the house. It was quite modest, having only three bedrooms upstairs, which they were not permitted to see, and on the ground floor, a dining room, a small salon and Rodin’s atelier, all of which were open for inspection.

  The interior, however, was light, with its long windows and attractive avocado-green and cream decor. The dining room was the part of the house they found most sympathique. They lingered there, imagining Rodin seated at the table, served by the elderly peasant woman. Even Cathy liked the room.

  ‘It must have been peaceful for him to come back to after the hurly-burly of Paris,’ said Cormac. ‘Here, he could relax. Rose appears to have been undemanding.’ He was thinking that perhaps all artists could do with a Rose but would not have dared say so. He would have been torn limb from limb by Cathy and Sue, metaphorically speaking, of course.

  ‘The women in Paris that mobbed him seemed to have been demanding enough.’ Cathy shook her head. ‘I still don’t understand how he managed to pull them all so easily. I mean, I know he was a genius but he was no looker. And he was old. Same age as my granda.’

  ‘One night,’ said Clarinda, in the voice of a storyteller, ‘Gwen followed him home.’

  ‘Not for the first time, I bet,’ interrupted Cathy.

  ‘She crept up the garden to that window there and looked in on him and Rose and watched them at their meal.’

  ‘She was lucky she wasn’t arrested,’ said Cathy.

  ‘You could go on that Mastermind, Clarinda,’ said Sue, ‘and answer questions on Gwen John.’

  Clarinda had not heard. She had gone to stand in the doorway of Rodin’s atelier with a rapt look on her face.

  The sun emerged as they came out of the house. They went next to the pavilion in the garden, which had been erected after Rodin’s death. On entering it, Clarinda gasped. The long building was filled with white plaster casts of his sculptures and terracotta models, the whole lit by golden sunshine.

  ‘I didn’t expect all this,’ she said happily. ‘To see so many together, and with this light!’ The room was quiet, and uncrowded, unlike the museum in Paris. There were only two other visitors apart from themselves and they were soon to depart.

  Cathy and Sue did a quick tour round and said they’d wait for them outside.

  Cormac and Clarinda moved slowly round the room, stopping for long spells in time in front of each exhibit. There were studies and casts for many of his major works which, as Cormac pointed out, gave an insight into the artist’s method of working.

  ‘He was so wonderful with clothes, wasn’t he?’ said Clarinda, when they came to the statue of one, Bastien-Lepage. ‘Look at the creases in those boots, they look like real leather, and the breeches! You want to touch them to see if they’re made of real material.’ She was breathless with admiration.

  ‘He was a genius,’ said Cormac.

  They came to a cast of The Kiss.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ whispered Clarinda, ‘even as a plaster cast.’

  He felt a tightening in his throat.

  ‘Cormac,’ she said, looking up into his face.

  ‘We must go,’ he said. ‘Sue and Cathy are waiting.’

  ‘Please! I’ve got to tell you. I’ve fallen in love with you.’

  ‘No, you have not, Clarinda.’ He spoke gently. ‘You’re just carried away by visions of Gwen John.’

  She shook her head. She appeared to be calmer than he felt. ‘You’re wrong. And it doesn’t matter what you say, it won’t change how I feel.’

  ‘Hey, you two!’ called Cathy from the doorway. ‘Will you be long? Sue and I thought we might go and see if we can find a café.’

  ‘No,’ said Cormac, ‘wait for us in the garden! We’re just coming!’

  By the time Clarinda accedes to his request to leave the shop and get out of his way Cormac realises he is going to be late for Davy. He stashes the bucket in the corner and flings down the mop. He’ll come in tomorrow morning, Saturday, when he doesn’t open the shop, and do the rest of the clearing up.

  As he is putting on his jacket in the back shop he hears the door open. Surely she’s not come back! He goes through to the front. The girl closing the door is not Clarinda, but his own daughter.

  ‘Oh, it’s you, Sophie.’

  ‘Who did you think it was?’

  ‘You’re out of school early.’

  She says she hasn’t been in today, she wasn’t feeling well in the morning. She looks well enough to him but he doesn’t want an argument so he doesn’t say so. He feels half the time that he is being blackmailed by his children.

  ‘You wouldn’t have any sandwiches left, would you?’

  ‘There’s a couple in the fridge but listen, Sophie, I’m in a hurry. I’m late for Davy.’

  ‘It won’t take a minute.’

  There are three cling-filmed wrapped sandwiches on focaccia bread, marked mozzarella, tomato and basil. She drops them into her bag. ‘Could I have a couple of bags of crisps?’ She throws in four and two cans of Fanta.

  ‘Sophie, be quick!’ says Cormac.

  ‘All right, all right, I’m coming.’

  ‘Who are you planning to feed? The five thousand?’

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ she says and skips out of the door in front of him.

  He arrives at the school to find Davy standing by the gate gazing up the street with the face of an abandoned child. The playground behind him is empty.

  ‘Sorry, Davy old son!’

  ‘I thought you weren’t coming. Everybody else is gone.’ The boy is close to tears. Cormac puts an arm round him but is shrugged off.

  ‘You know I’d always come, you should never doubt that. I got held up. A couple of late customers.’

  ‘Can I go to Mum’s tonight?’

  Cormac sighs. Oh yes, go ahead and punish me! Everybody else is keen to so why not you? His spirits, which were not that elevated to start with, fall even lower. This is one of those days when the gods are showering down every kind of rubbish they can find on top of his head.

  ‘Can I?’ Davy asks again.

  ‘I’ll ring her when she gets in from work.’

  Davy cheers up, which does not cheer his father who, until recent times, has thought himself a pretty good father who loves his children and enjoys them and makes time for them and is loved by his children in return. Now it seems that Davy can’t wait to get away from him.

  He rings Rachel’s number at six and gets the answering machine. He rings at seven and gets it again. And at eight. It is not worth trying after that. It is time for Davy to go to bed.

  ‘You’ll be seeing her tomorrow, anyway,’ says Cormac as he makes hot chocolate for his son and sets out a chocolate biscuit on a plate beside it. Bribery and corruption. After Davy has gone to bed and been read to for fully twenty-five minutes he washes the dishes and loads up the washing machine. Then, at ten, he presses the redial button on the phone once more.

  Sophie answers. She sounds short of breath.

  ‘Have you just come in?’

  ‘No.’ She is lying, he can hear it in her voice. He is not as foolish as Mrs Bain is to think his daughter always tells the truth. He thinks too much still about Mrs Bain, which is not good for his blood pressure. He sees her satin arm with its shimmering dragons lifting the receiver and hears her plum-filled voice saying, ‘Officer, I’d like to make a complaint.’

  ‘I’ve been in a while,’ his daughter is saying.

  ‘So what did you do with yourself this afternoon?’

  ‘Went to Tilda’s.’

  ‘Was she not at sch
ool either?’

  ‘After she came back.’

  ‘And before?’

  ‘I just wandered about.’

  As lonely as a cloud. Not lonely at all, he’d lay a bet on that.

  ‘I’m in the middle of my homework,’ she says.

  ‘I’d better not keep you then. Is your mother there?’

  ‘No, she’s not back yet.’

  ‘It’s not her badminton night, is it?’

  Sophie’s response is defensive. ‘I’ve no idea.’ Is she protecting her mother? She doesn’t have to of course: Rachel is free to do what she wants. What is she doing? And with whom?

  ‘See you tomorrow then.’

  He is determined, this weekend, to be firm with Sophie. Lay down the law.

  ‘You must come back tonight,’ he tells her. ‘I don’t want any of this staying at Tilda’s lark, and you’re to be in by eleven-thirty.’

  ‘Half eleven? None of my friends are home before two.’

  ‘Twelve then. And I want to know where you’re going and who you’re going with and if you’re not here by midnight I’ll come and fetch you. Comprendido?’

  ‘All right! You don’t have to shout.’

  She goes out mid-afternoon, but not before leaving an address. Cormac watches Saturday sport on the telly, then makes an omelette which he consumes with the best part of a bottle of red wine. He has a free evening ahead and doesn’t know what to do with it. The trouble is most of his male friends are married and have their Saturday nights spoken for. Everybody loves Saturday night! Not if you’re on your tod you don’t. You feel you should be doing something other than lounging around. He decides to give Ken Mason a ring on the off chance that he might free for a drink. Ken says there’s nothing he’d have liked better but they are committed elsewhere.

  ‘Remember April, that woman you were speaking to at our party? She’s giving a dinner. She’s found herself a new man, a lawyer, widower, plenty of money. She wants to show him off.’

  ‘Have a good time,’ says Cormac, putting down the receiver.

  He goes along to a pub in St Stephen’s Street for a while but nearly everyone looks under twenty-five, and he is wary of bumping into Clarinda again. Edinburgh is a small place if you want to avoid someone. Too small for him, with hundreds of his ex-pupils milling about, knowing too much about him. There are a couple in the pub but he doesn’t think they’ve noticed him. They’re not coming over to slap him on the back, at any rate, and say nice to see you. Nor are they glancing covertly in his direction and whispering behind their hands. Maybe he should go to Dublin, make a fresh start, and insist on taking Davy with him. But what kind of a life would it be for the boy waiting in the upstairs flat for his father to come up at midnight reeking of cigarette smoke and beer from the bar?