Grahame, Lucia Read online

  A drunken misstep had cost him his life.

  Of course I knew it was my fault. For a period of nearly two years, I’d sunk into a private sorrow from which I had been unable to rouse myself until the summer before Frederick’s death. Meanwhile, our marriage had come apart at the seams.

  I’d failed my child and I’d failed my husband as well. Now both were lost to me.

  But fate, which had stolen everything that really mattered, was generous at least in one respect: Although Frederick’s incessant borrowing had cost us nearly all our friends long before he met his sorry end, the three who’d most stoutly refused to be exploited remained true and were now my greatest consolation and support. They were the actress, Marguerite Sorrel, my closest woman friend; her artist husband, Théo Valory, who’d been Frederick’s ally through thick and thin; and Lord Neville Marsden.

  At the time of Frederick’s death, of course, I did not consider Lord Marsden an intimate friend. He had been Frederick’s patron—his first. But even after he’d stopped commissioning paintings, even after we’d had to move from the charming house off the Rue du Mont-Cenis into our last home together, a miserable fifth-floor garret on the Boulevard de Clichy, Lord Marsden, amazingly, still called upon us and would sometimes wander sadly through the north-lit room that held Frederick’s easel. At first it pained me that he no longer exclaimed with pleasure over what he found there; I thought he was being unkind. But false enthusiasm would have been worse.

  Once or twice I overheard his mild attempts to make Frederick face up to his decline and the reasons for it, but as usual Frederick laughed and refused to admit to any failings or limitations—he was as good as ever; if he drank, it was only for inspiration. It seemed he had moved forward too quickly for his patron, whose exquisite tastes were perhaps a little too arrière-garde to permit him to readily appreciate the direction Frederick’s art had taken; one day, however— or so went Frederick’s litany—the world would trace the unbroken trajectory of Frederick’s genius and marvel at the ignorance of those who had stared so uncomprehendingly at the highest evidence of it.

  I ought to have defended Lord Marsden’s position, of course, for I knew he was right; I knew, as any reasonably sensitive and observant person must have known, that the great artist who still lurked within Frederick had not been untrammeled by his excesses, it had been dulled and drugged by them. But I never reproached him—not once during those first two bleak years after my tiny daughter had broken loose from her fragile mooring three months before her time and had died, before my eyes. All too conscious of my own failures, I lacked the confidence with which I might once have tenderly urged Frederick to try to change his ways—until, of course, it was too late.

  By the time I finally summoned up the will to shake off that incapacitating grief, Frederick’s slow but fatal dissolution was well under way. For months thereafter I had labored to break its grip on him; I’d gone on my knees and pleaded with him to struggle against it; I’d showered him with the tender little attentions that I had so selfishly withheld during my own long and lonely travail. I’d begged his forgiveness for having surrendered so weakly to the blow that had struck us both and for having failed to fill his life with the smiles he craved. He’d said there was nothing to forgive now that I would try to be happy again.

  If only he had understood that it wasn’t a matter of trying. I had always tried to be happy for him. It was just that for that one terrible period in my life I had not been able to manage it. Sometimes I even entertained the subversive thought that if only Frederick hadn’t so refused to acknowledge the reality of our loss and the legitimacy of my grief, if only he hadn’t been so determined to treat the painful matter as something of which it was best not to speak, something to forget as quickly as possible or to pretend had never happened, if only he hadn’t been so repelled by my long face and the unshed tears that hovered behind it, I might have recovered my spirits more quickly.

  But he hadn’t and I hadn’t, and all we could do in the end was to try to reverse the disastrous course our lives had taken. And then—just when I dared to believe that we’d come to the turning point, just as my smiles came more easily and he began to take more comfort from them than from a bottle, just when his canvasses had begun to burn again with that hot brilliance, just when he had seemed on the verge of reaching out to me again in the night, as he had not done for so long, and just when my blood had at last begun to sing softly again at the thought of what might happen if he did—it had all been snatched away.

  But I was no longer the same woman I’d been when I lost my daughter, and once the first tide of despair and disbelief had subsided enough to permit me to think clearly, I vowed that I would never again succumb to the paralysis of despair.

  I had come to this wisdom too late to save Frederick. But I could still save myself.

  No one was more generous, in the days immediately following Frederick’s death, than my warmhearted friend, Marguerite Sorrel.

  Childless herself, and with a superficially brittle and worldly air, she had never comprehended the depth of the wound that the loss of my daughter had inflicted, nor had she been able to do anything to ease it.

  But Frederick’s death was another matter; not only had she adored him as a friend, she was also far too much in love with her own mercurial husband not to feel my new grief profoundly.

  She understood my need to surround myself with memories, to fall asleep at night on the bed linens which still carried Frederick’s scent. Toward the end of his life, we’d slept on opposite sides of the bed, carefully observing, although never overtly acknowledging, the invisible boundaries of our respective territories. Now—too late—I crossed the lines.

  Of course Marguerite, with her busybody nature, insisted upon attacking the dusty disorder which always likes to steal in upon the heels of a domestic tragedy, but she was sensitive enough to avoid the room which had served as Frederick’s studio. Here I could still take some comfort from the paint rags and crumpled pages ripped from Frederick’s sketchbook that littered the floor. I smoothed the wrinkled sheets out one by one.

  I did not linger too long over the memories, however. After two weeks I washed the bed linens, threw out the rags, swept the floor, and, not without one searing flash of pain, wiped away the charcoal smudge that Frederick’s thumb had left upon a windowsill.

  Then I was ready to face the future.

  I knew, of course, that I would never love again. No man would ever know me as Frederick had… no man who did could have gone on loving me with Frederick’s accepting, uncritical, unflagging, and wholehearted devotion.

  It never ceased to amaze me that Frederick, knowing of my origins, had actually made me his wife—and after I’d given myself to him! But Frederick had loved me back in England when I was seventeen—even when I’d blurted out the humiliating truth about my grandmother, he’d loved me —and he had never stopped loving me, nor I him. When things were at their worst, when any other couple would have been at each other’s throats, savaging each other’s souls with bitter accusations, it was not so with Frederick and me. Instead, as I’d retreated gracefully into the quiet, undemanding depression that had been like death in life and Frederick had consoled himself with alcohol, it really seemed that these stratagems were what allowed us to keep love, if not its splendid early passion, alive.

  A fortnight after Frederick’s death—it was the same day I finally began to clean up the little studio—Lord Marsden left a card inquiring after me with Marguerite, who had been acting as my doorkeeper. But by then I saw no reason to hide myself from anyone.

  So I quickly sent my thanks for his kind inquiries to his temporary address in Paris, the Hotel Bristol.

  Lord Marsden would always have a special place in my heart. He had done so much to help establish Frederick’s reputation only a few years earlier. It was the elusive dealer Julien, of course, who had actually engineered Frederick’s dizzying rise to fame and fortune. He had insisted on showing Frederick�
��s Othello series to Lord Marsden, and not only had the enthusiastic viscount purchased all six of the Othello paintings, he’d also commissioned one of a favorite scene from The Winter’s Tale. It was of the moment when the supposed statue of Hermione reveals herself to be a real woman of flesh and blood. I posed for it.

  When the viscount arrived to deliver his condolences in person, I was genuinely delighted to see him.

  “It is customary,” said Lord Marsden, “for friends—and I hope you will consider me a friend—to ask whether there is anything one can do to lessen the hardship of such a bereavement. In my case, these are not idle words. If there is anything, anything at all I can do that may ease your difficulties at this sad time, you have only to say the word.”

  I swallowed my pride, for I knew that I could not afford to let the opportunity pass. My situation did not allow it.

  “Then I will take you at yours,” I told him, and was relieved to see that he really did look pleased, rather than becoming stiff and uneasy, as I’d half feared. “But I must assure you that my circumstances are not nearly so desperate as you may have imagined.”

  This was true. At first I had supposed that the sudden cessation of visits from Frederick’s creditors was due to some nice reluctance on their part to harass me too soon upon the heels of his death. I ought to have known better —they had never exhibited much chivalry before. The truth was, as I had by now begun to discover, that they had all been paid off.

  Frederick, it seemed, had spent the last day of his life making good his debts.

  And how he had done it was a complete mystery.

  He’d still had money in his pockets when his body was found, and it felt like a small fortune to me, once I realized there were no other claimants to it. But I couldn’t stretch it out forever.

  “It seems,” I now observed to Lord Marsden, “that Paris is daily becoming more popular with our countrymen. But perhaps you have noticed the difficulties some of our visiting compatriots encounter when they try to make themselves understood on this side of the Channel?”

  “I have,” said Lord Marsden with a little smile.

  “Well, for most of the past year I have been offering French lessons to our English visitors, and I know that you have a great many connections….” Here I stammered a bit with embarrassment but forced myself to go on. “So if you should hear of anyone who wishes to achieve greater fluency, and would not mind paying a very modest fee for lessons, I hope you will think of me. I can’t ask you to testify to my abilities, of course, but if you would at least mention my name—”

  “I should be very glad to,” interjected Lord Marsden quickly. “And I think I can testify to your abilities—Julien swears that you speak like a native, and your late husband once confessed to me that he’d have had the very devil of a time, after you first came to Paris, had you not worked so patiently to help him master the finer points of the language.”

  I felt a belated but sincere little twinge of gratitude for my grandmother, who, even after she had washed up for the last time, figuratively speaking, on an English shore, pregnant, unmarried, and cast aside by her protector because the child she carried was not his, had clung to the language of her native land. She’d been fluent in both English and Italian, but she had always spoken only French to me. It was the language of love, she used to say.

  Of course, love had not meant quite the same thing to her as it did to me.

  Lord Marsden was as good as his word. Within a few weeks, I had acquired several new students and was gaining confidence that I would somehow be able to make my own way in the world. Of course, I’d have to exercise my hardworking grandmother’s lessons in frugality for the rest of my life. But instead of bemoaning my fate, I was glad to have had that stringent education, which she had prayed I would never have to use.

  By late April, the Concours Hippique horse show had for over a month been drawing English visitors, along with Tout Paris, to the Palais de l’Industrie, and the demand for lessons was growing. I suppose there was a sort of cachet in learning French from the widow of a well-known artist who was now on his way to becoming a legend, having died so tragically and with a certain morbid glamour so long before his time.

  By this time, although I still missed Frederick keenly, I was not indifferent to the benefits of my new independence. It was a condition I had never known before, having been so dominated by my grandmother and then having had to assume so many mundane responsibilities during my marriage to Frederick, whose artistic temperament had held him to a more elevated plane.

  Yes, I hungered for my incomparable husband more than I can say—but not so much for his body, to which I had been virtually unable to respond for two years, as for the sheer warmth and vitality of his presence.

  However, I found it easier to adjust to my new life than I had supposed; and the very notion of ever marrying again remained wholly inconceivable.

  Then, one June morning, more than four months after Frederick had been laid to rest in the Bagneaux, where the paupers sleep, Lord Marsden, who had continued to call upon me during his extended visit in Paris, asked whether he might introduce to me his cousin, Sir Anthony Camwell, who had just arrived in Paris for the Chantilly Derby. Lord Marsden would be returning to England soon, but his cousin, he said, intended to remain longer, for he was an art collector and had become fascinated with French and Belgian Symbolist painting. Lord Marsden was aware that, although Frederick had largely scorned the Symbolists for being too ethereal, I had not shared his opinions on that subject. It was true that the pale, rather attenuated saints of Puvis de Chavannes lacked the robust and vigorous splendor of Frederick’s best works, but I did not think any the less of them for it.

  I had heard Sir Anthony Camwell’s name before. At the very height of Frederick’s success, the baronet, who’d apparently been remarkably struck by the beauty of some of the paintings that decked his cousin’s walls—particularly the one of Hermione—had arranged to visit Frederick’s studio with Lord Marsden. It might have been another great coup for Frederick, for Sir Anthony was said to be very rich. But the visit had not materialized: At the last minute Sir Anthony had sent his regrets and, with what could only be regarded as cavalier incivility, had not even proposed another date! Not even the courtly Lord Marsden had offered any explanation for the baronet’s precipitous withdrawal.

  I’d hardly cared; I’d just lost my child and was almost beside myself with regrets that seemed too deep for tears. But even Frederick had been crushed by Sir Anthony’s sudden loss of interest in his work, and although the severity of his disappointment was not at all the kind of thing that Frederick could have found the words to express, it must have shaken his self-confidence, for, in spite of his success, Frederick suffered from a growing anxiety that his work might suddenly become unfashionable. It was most unfortunate that Sir Anthony’s thoughtless little blow had fallen on Frederick at a time when I was too demolished myself to perform the complex job at which I had become so skilled, that of bolstering Frederick’s spirits whenever they flagged without actually acknowledging that they were flagging—a condition he would have indignantly denied.

  But now at last I would meet the arrogant and ill-mannered Sir Anthony Camwell, whom chance had linked so closely in my mind with my own greatest failure and with Frederick’s subsequent decline. Out of regard for Lord Marsden, however, I voiced no objection to the proposed introduction. Perhaps since Sir Anthony was planning to spend some time in Paris, Lord Marsden had a view toward helping me acquire yet another pupil. Or perhaps Sir Anthony had come to regret the earlier lost opportunity—now that Frederick’s death had permanently secured his reputation and had sent the value of his works soaring. Perhaps he wished to snatch up anything still in my possession. But I had nothing to sell.

  I had nothing left at all of Frederick’s mature works, except five gorgeous but blazingly indiscreet canvasses that had been rolled and bound almost as soon as the paint had dried and had been relegated, in our final home
, to the back of a deep closet behind a barricade of ordinary domestic clutter. Frederick had promised me long ago that no eyes but ours would ever see those brilliant, damning masterpieces.

  This time, Sir Anthony did not excuse himself from keeping the engagement. On the appointed day he arrived at my door in Lord Marsden’s tow.

  Although I had been predisposed to dislike him, on account of the subtle injury I felt he had done Frederick, he was Lord Marsden’s cousin, and I was determined to be cordial on that account.

  But, alas, he appeared to be everything I had feared he would be—-and worse.

  He was young—much younger than his cousin—and as tall as Frederick, although with not so massive a frame.

  No one, in fact, could have been more unlike Frederick. He was as handsome, it is true, but in an entirely different way.

  Frederick’s vitality had given an irresistible charm and magnetism to a face that might have otherwise been merely pleasant. Sir Anthony’s features had been chiseled with such flawless precision that he seemed to feel no need to exert his personality at all in order to enliven them.

  No, there was not one ounce of Frederick’s endearing spontaneity in Sir Anthony Camwell. More than anyone I had ever seen, he exuded a cool, quiet, almost lazy self-possession, the kind which proclaims itself to feel under no obligation to ingratiate or please.

  From his silk hat to his fine leather shoes, he was attired with studiously understated elegance. Indeed, all that prevented him from being the perfect gentleman’s fashion plate, in swallowtail coat, gray-striped trousers, dove gray waistcoat, and snowy ascot, was the fact that his hair, which was pale blond in color and rather long, hung loosely around his well-cut features, undisciplined by any pomade. That single suggestion of insouciance gave the perfection of his appearance some slight interest that, in my opinion, would have otherwise been entirely wanting.