Autumn Leaves

by Tessa Lunney

  “Ah, it is tragic. She was so young! Henri had commissioned her to sit for him on her next visit, he has a canvas of her that is only half complete…”

  “May I see it?” I asked. Amelie looked to her husband. Matisse and his stare had not moved.

  “Henri, mon cher,” said Amelie, “the canvas?” She walked over to him and took the brush and palette from his hands, placing them on the table. It was only then that he seemed to come back to life.

  “It’s her,” he said. “It’s just like her, that look, that…”

  “I know, mon amour, I know…” She stroked his face and fetched his pipe. “Do you remember now, Henri? Miss Stein’s, the letter…”

  “Yes, yes…”

  “Mademoiselle Button—may I call you Kiki?—I’ll fetch the canvas. Ah, Mathilde, coffee, just what we need. Please sit, help yourselves, I’ll only be a moment.”

  We moved to a coffee table covered with scrap paper and cigarette butts. Mathilde poured coffee for all of us, leaving Matisse’s cup on the table in front of him and the plate of biscuits in front of Tom. Tom shoved two in his mouth in quick succession but I could hardly even swallow my coffee. I felt Matisse’s gaze on me like a searchlight. Eventually Amelie came back with a canvas.

  “See?” she said. “So beautiful.”

  The painting was of a woman’s face in a hat. The face was turned toward us, over the shoulder, the hat taking up most of the canvas with its enormous brim. The colors were not naturalistic, blue and green and lemon yellow, but the face was somehow more luminous because of this, the eyes imploring, or defying, or in some exultant emotion that demanded our attention. I nodded; I could see these were my mother’s features but this was not a mother I had ever known.

  “Throw it away.” Matisse’s voice cracked.

  “Yes, I suppose we’ll have to…”

  “I’ll keep it,” I said. “I don’t even have a recent photo of her. I’ll pay for it.”

  “Pay for this?” Amelie frowned. “Absolutely not. It’s yours, of course. Henri?”

  He nodded, took a tiny brush from his wife’s hand, and signed the painting.

  “You are a Button?” Matisse said. “Not a Russell?”

  “My father’s name was Button…” I looked between him and Amelie. “Are you saying you know the name of my mother’s lover?”

  They shared a glance. Amelie nodded.

  “I think you should know,” she said. “Henri, sit down.”

  He plonked himself on a chair. “I’m not entirely sure, but…”

  “Henri was so in love with her.” Amelie smiled at her husband. “We all were, really. I would have been jealous, but by the time I met Henri, Cordelia was already married and living in Australia.”

  “I met her with Russell,” he said.

  “Who is Roussel?” I asked.

  “Who is Russell? Who is Russell?” Matisse put up his hands in exasperation.

  “The Australian, Russell—I think he says his name ‘Rah-sel.’ ”

  “Russell?” Tom asked. “Never heard of him.”

  “I’ve only heard of him in relation to my mother,” I said, “but… he’s a painter?”

  “A brilliant painter,” said Matisse, “in the Impressionist style. He made such a difference to my work. The way he used color, he made it sing, the waves shimmered, the sky danced, each blade of grass moved on its own over his canvas…”

  “He met Russell on Belle Île.”

  “At the cottage that he shared with his wife. He was a true artist. He rarely exhibited—which is, I suppose, why he isn’t widely known—he worked only for the work itself. I met Cordelia through him. I was jealous of Russell. Firstly, for his work. Secondly, it was clear that Cordelia adored him, and I wanted her to look at me the way she looked at him. She… she was filled with joy. She made you feel that only you mattered in the whole world, she gave you everything. But then she’d disappear, leaving you bereft. I don’t know how Russell withstood it.”

  “He didn’t, really,” said Amelie.

  “No, well, who would? But he didn’t leave Marianna.”

  “How could he? All those children.”

  “Hmmm… perhaps so. I would have though.”

  “I’m lucky you didn’t get the chance.” Amelie’s smile was both understanding and wicked.

  “So, this Russell…”

  “Jean Russell… sorry, I should say it in the English way, ‘John.’ ”

  “He was her lover?”

  “Oh yes.” Amelie nodded.

  “Were they though?” asked Matisse.

  “Henri, she’s dead, God rest her soul. You can’t be jealous now.”

  “I’m not! No, I mean, they were close, absolutely, but were they lovers in the biblical sense? In the way the modern Mademoiselle Button means it?”

  “Oh… I should think so. She was such a free spirit!”

  “She became less free each time I saw her. It made her thoughtful and somehow more beautiful.”

  “Henri, you are such a sentimental fool sometimes…”

  “Just a romantic… who likes to be exact. But you should really ask Russell himself.”

  “He’s alive?”

  “Oh yes! He lives in America now.”

  “No, Australia,” said Amelie. “He went back to Sydney. Last year, I think? Yes, last year.”

  My mouth was dry. The coffee wasn’t helping.

  “Button’s—ah, Miss Button’s mother lived in Sydney,” said Tom.

  “Perhaps your mother met him there.” Amelie shrugged. “Perhaps she died of a broken heart, after loving him for so long.”

  “That is a distinct possibility.” It hurt to talk.

  I could hear the traffic noises outside, cart wheels and car motors. The room smelt of paint and turpentine and linseed oil. The Matisses gazed at me intently; I felt they were looking for my mother.

  “Is this what you wanted to tell me?” I asked.

  “Yes,” said Matisse. “I bumped into that crazy Romanian—”

  “Tzara?”

  “No, Brancusi. He said you were asking after Cordelia, that somebody should really tell you about Russell. He didn’t want to say, he felt it was my secret to tell… I suppose because we were close, me and Russell and Cordelia.” He fiddled with his glasses for a long time, until Amelie reached across and held his hand.

  “We will miss her,” said Amelie. “She was…”

  “She was light,” said Matisse, and in his long pause I understood: For him, light was life’s most vital quality. To be light was to be the essence of everything. He shook his head and looked away. “You’re very lucky to have had her as a mother.”

  55

  “stumbling”

  Tom and I sat at a terrasse table of the Rotonde, coats wrapped around us, Kir Royals in front of us, ankles locked together.

  “How can she have been so different here to how she was at home?” I asked. “Matisse said I was lucky to have had her as a mother, but she was so… censorious.”

  “Maybe she wasn’t censorious. Maybe you just assumed that she was.”

  “But Father would rant and yell at some minor infraction and she would say nothing! At most she would say, ‘As you wish, Reginald,’ when he asked for backup.”

  “So, she didn’t argue against your father’s censorship… but did she actually say, ‘Do this, not that,’ and so on?”

  The dusk was falling briskly, the night clear, the lights of the city punctuating the sky. The fur of my peacock coat smelt of hot chocolate and my fingers smelt of a hundred cigarettes. Looking at Tom in his black overcoat, stained on the lapel, I couldn’t call up a single memory of my mother admonishing me, just ones of her watching, impassive, as my father’s face went red with yelling.

  “She didn’t do anything much, really. No help… but I suppose no hindrance either.”

  “Then that’s the real question, isn’t it? Why she wrote in her diaries how much she loved you, but toward you she was cold an
d remote.”

  “She was going to visit me here… oh yes, I told you already, I’m repeating myself. I wish…” I couldn’t finish. Tom took the cigarette from my fingers to kiss my palm.

  “It would have been a brave new world, Button. But at least now you know.”

  “Russell lives in Sydney… she didn’t mention meeting him in her diaries.”

  “But you think she might have.”

  “She had an odd way of writing in those books, as though… almost as though she feared they might be read. I mean, if it’s a private diary, why would you hide the name of your lover? And she’s very lyrical, she writes a lot about street scenes and the sky and the sensations of her body in light… but after a while, I could see patterns. She used the same type of descriptions over and over…”

  “Like a code.”

  “Like an idiosyncratic cipher for what was really going on. It was one of the reasons reading her diaries was so addictive. While I read them, I felt that I was part of her personal landscape.”

  “So, Russell is in those diaries as… a type of weather?”

  “Yes… but I’d need to read them again to make sure. Her way of writing only really makes sense to me now.” The last of my drink went down too easily.

  “I could have met him,” I said, “Russell.”

  “You still can.”

  “Not unless he comes here.” I looked directly into Tom’s dark blue eyes. “I’m never going back.”

  “Not even…”

  “I went back for a funeral once and it took me a year to leave. If I go back for another funeral, I might never make it back to Paris. That place is Hades for me, Tom. It’s no-man’s-land.”

  He kept my gaze. He didn’t even look up when the waiter brought us another round.

  “It seems I’ll just have to get a job on a London paper then.”

  “They’re not sending you home, are they?”

  “Not yet.”

  * * *

  “More correspondence, Button? Don’t you just go down to the café to get all your news?”

  “This is a telegram, fooligan.” I waved the yellow paper in his face. “That can only mean Fox and associates, or my father.”

  “Let’s hope it’s your father.”

  “Unlikely, as I haven’t spoken to him since I left him after mother’s funeral, when was that, November last year?”

  “But he knows where you live, doesn’t he? He’d have to, or you couldn’t have heard about your mother…”

  But I wasn’t really listening to Tom, not with the telegram in my hand.

  “What is it?” Tom looked over my shoulder. “What’s the sad face for?”

  I handed over the telegram.

  JOHN RUSSELL 22 PACIFIC ST WATSONS BAY ADDRESS IN BACK OF DIARY ENTRIES JUNE 12 TO 17 1921

  “What the hell does that mean? Who’s it from?”

  “Look at the address.”

  “Westminster?”

  “It’s from Fox. He has my mother’s final diary.”

  “How?”

  “How indeed. That date is a few months before she died.”

  “But… she died in Sydney.”

  “She did. So how did he get the diary? How on earth did he get her final diary?”

  “Alright, Button, it’s alright…”

  “No, it’s not! It’s far from alright!”

  “Have a cigarette…”

  “Fox sends me all this evidence of how he tried to get rid of you—then he sends me a note that says he knows all about me and my mother—where will it end, hmmm? When will he stop pulling my strings like a puppet?”

  “When you stop letting him.”

  “How can I? How can I leave you in danger if I have any chance to stop it? How can I… my mother… how I can say I don’t want to know? How…”

  I sobbed then. It couldn’t be helped. It had been such a fierce few weeks, after such a year. I hadn’t slept properly for days, my leg throbbed, my head throbbed, I was hungry and thirsty and couldn’t get a moment’s peace. We stood in the stairwell and Tom took me in his arms, kissing the top of my head as I wailed into his chest, full wrenching sobs that seemed to come from somewhere outside of me, the noise of my cries alien to my ears. I couldn’t work out how to inhale and almost choked. I hadn’t cried like that for years, which meant I had to cry for everything, for my mother, for all the broken men I had nursed, for all the boys I had known and would never see again, for all the dead. Eventually Tom had to half-carry, half-drag me up the stairs to my apartment, still sobbing, wash my face and take off my shoes and push me into bed. He lay down beside me, holding me and stroking my hair with his sore hands, singing lullabies in his deep, rough voice, until exhaustion overwhelmed me and I sank into oblivion.

  56

  “journey’s end”

  “Kiki, darling, how wonderful of you to see us off.” Bertie kissed me on both cheeks. We stood just at the main entrance to Gare du Nord, the stone arches behind us, traffic swarming in front of us. Rain spat in fits and starts.

  “In all that matching red, you’re like my own personal firecracker.”

  “You seem to have missed her overnight bag there, Bertie.” Tom pointed out my little suitcase.

  “You’re joining us?”

  “Don’t sound too disappointed,” I said, “I might think you mean it.”

  “I’m not disappointed! This is a treat.” Bertie linked one arm through mine and another through Tom’s. “I always hate leaving Paris, but if the best part of Paris comes with me, what more can I ask for?”

  “An explanation, maybe?”

  We walked through the doors like we were in a movie, people parting for us, the marble floor rolling out in front of us. But it felt like a false note of cheer, my head still ached with dehydration and my toes were cold from where the rain had seeped in. The vaulting arches of the station, so welcoming when I arrived from London, seemed like a giant cage.

  “You are the question and the answer, Kiki darling. Although I’m happy to hear an explanation, if there is one.”

  I didn’t know where to begin. I felt a strong impulse to buy cigarettes, newspapers, postcards, bags of lollies, croissants in napkins, to grab as much Paris as I could before I boarded.

  “What have I missed?” asked Bertie.

  Tom scoffed. “Button can fill you in on all the colors of Fox’s perfidy.”

  * * *

  The Blue Train clanked along, out of Paris and into the countryside I’d been looking at, in reality and in memory, since early 1915 when I was first sent to France. It seemed fitting that this would be the backdrop to my story, the trenches now full of birds’ nests and poppies, rusting tanks coupled with farm equipment, temporary markets next to the temporary graves. Bertie listened closely to the tale of Russell and the diary, read the telegram and for once didn’t interject with witty quips. The blue velvet seats of our private compartment made his skin look ghostly pale. I could only have looked the same.

  “So, you’re coming to London to collect the diary from Fox?” Bertie frowned.

  “I told her she shouldn’t,” said Tom. “She could just write to Russell, now that she has his address. She can just call Fox.”

  “And have him read out my mother’s diary over the telephone?”

  “No, insist he sends it to you, in Paris,” said Tom.

  “It doesn’t work like that.”

  “Why not?” asked Bertie.

  “Yes seriously, Button, why can’t it work like that?”

  The windows showed farmland, gray and brown and black in the autumn, crows flying overhead. I could almost hear the guns again.

  “The telegram… is a summons. He isn’t just telling me that he has what I want, what I desperately need. He’s telling me that I have to jump when he clicks, that if I want to hold onto this precious thing, I have to follow his instructions.”

  “How do you know this?” asked Bertie.

  “From the war.”

  “It’s no
t the war now,” said Tom.

  “This is what he would do when I worked under him as a nurse. Always giving with one hand and taking with the other. Then, his methods were cruder. If I wanted to eat, or sleep, once or twice even to live, then I had to carry out the mission. He…” Memories rose from the sodden fields outside the window, I had to voice them.

  “He kept me working on the wards until I passed out, overpowering Matron by saying he needed me specifically in this or that operation, which were always when I was not on shift. At first I begged to be released, but then I learnt to stop begging and push through until I could no longer. I think once or twice I even held my breath to bring on a faint, just so I could be sent to my tent. Then he changed tactic, seeing me in the mess tent line and sending me off on some immediate, urgent mission. I began hiding biscuits in my pockets and my coat, I kept a store of bread and cheese and fresh water by two different gates, so when I headed out by bicycle after dark, I could still get a bite to eat. The boys started calling me Gretel as I trailed biscuit crumbs through the wards.

  “But it was when he would leave me, after a completed mission, to make my own way back to the hospital, that were the most dangerous. One time… these fields remind me… after Passchendaele, after I had sent you home, Tom, he left me wounded in the snow.

  “We weren’t far from the front. An agent had messed up, he had been found out and beaten. He had crawled over no-man’s-land back to our line with some scraps of information. He was badly wounded but, in a little alcove in a flooded trench, I patched him up. Then a shell exploded nearby, it killed him and left me with cuts all over my legs and arms. I sent the signal—‘collect me’—but no one came. I had the intel and I couldn’t walk properly. I sent the signal again, waited another hour, and still no one. What could I do? If I stayed in the flooded trench I would freeze to death; I could feel the burn of frostbite already beginning. I knew I didn’t have long before I was in trouble.

  “So I walked, limping for hours back to the casualty clearing station. Fox let me reveal my sorry state to everyone before he drove me to a hotel in town. Then he made me rest for three days, with cream and eggs and butter and other impossible treats brought to my room. He even sent Maisie in to take care of me as I lay back on the soft pillows.