Grahame, Lucia Read online

  I was too fascinated by the jumble of ribbons and roller skates, pedal-lathes and bandboxes—one of which was occupied by a skinny cat—to contribute much to the conversation that began to swirl about me almost as soon as Sir Anthony and I had taken our seats.

  Mademoiselle Rachel almost immediately proceeded to dredge up from the depths of Sir Anthony’s mind every image it still contained of any ballet he had seen in London since he had last called upon the family, and Sir Anthony obliged her gallantly, as if he had taken special pains to make note of the sort of technical details in which he knew she was likely to take a particular interest.

  He then encouraged Monsieur Salomon to reminisce about his youthful days as a circus tumbler, while Madame tried to feed me, scolded me for being too slender, and, in the end, would not allow me to depart without copies of recipes which she guaranteed would put meat upon my bones.

  I could not help but be amused by the terms of affection which punctuated nearly every sentence the Salomons addressed to one another. To her parents, Mademoiselle Rachel was “ma cocotte.” The others were inevitably “my dear husband or wife” or “my darling mama or papa.” Even the cat was “mon cher moumoutte.”

  This surfeit of endearments might have been almost stultifying had they not been flung about with a guileless warmth and sincerity that both touched and charmed me.

  But at last it was time to leave, and after we had made our selection of a little toy house for Lord Marsden’s great-niece, we departed. Outside, the winter sky was growing dark. Without saying much, we began to walk rather aimlessly through the cold streets until we found ourselves at the river. We were close to the spot where draymen and cavalry officers bathe their horses in the late summer afternoons, when the sunsets last forever. But the gentle days of summer were long past.

  We lingered by the floating apple market near the Hôtel de Ville; here boats from Normandy moor every autumn and remain through the winter until all their fruit has been carried off in great baskets.

  The sweet-tart scent of apples hung on the icy air, like a ghostly reminder of autumn’s abundance. Sir Anthony was to return to England on the following day, and tonight, after the last cold red glow had vanished from the western sky, I would fall asleep alone in that empty garret in the Boulevard de Clichy.

  I thought of the Salomons’ cluttered, overflowing kitchen, where sunlight must pour through the huge windows even at this time of year to coax such luxuriant greenery from Madame’s little red herb pots. Had my daughter lived, perhaps even now I might have been in a kitchen not so very different from theirs. Frederick, at the table with our daughter on his knee, would be cleaning his brushes, and I’d be across from them, slicing potatoes and carrots for our dinner….

  Never, never had I so dreaded going back to my… dwelling place—it hardly deserved to be called a home.

  I felt a surge of anger. How I wished Sir Anthony had not taken me to the Rue Vieille-du-Temple. Of course he had not done it to be cruel. He could not have guessed the effect it would have upon me. He had never known what it was to live in a garret with love and turpentine and a view of the rooftops.

  Nearly all the light had gone from the sky. For once, perhaps because he could not see my face, Sir Anthony’s customary sensitivity to my moods failed him.

  “Did you enjoy yourself this afternoon?” he was asking.

  “Oh, very much so,” I roused myself to answer politely. “The Salomons are delightful.”

  “An extraordinary family,” Sir Anthony was saying.

  Something in the way he said this irritated me, no doubt because my nerves already felt raw.

  “Extraordinary?” I said. “Very charming people, to be sure. But extraordinary? I don’t think so. Why there must be at least a thousand families in Paris just like them.”

  If only I were still part of one of them.

  “What do you mean—just like them?” he asked with a laugh.

  “Oh, close-knit, hardworking, talented. You know.”

  “And as warm toward one another?”

  “But of course!” I said impatiently, as if he were being obtuse. “Good heavens, what can be more natural than parents who love their children, and husbands and wives who love one another!”

  With his usual equanimity, Sir Anthony merely laughed that low laugh of his.

  “I suppose you’re right,” was all he said.

  CHAPTER SIX

  In March, with my usual disregard for polite behavior, I went into half mourning. The proper thing would have been to wait at least three months longer—preferably six—before shedding my black garments in favor of the old gray dresses I’d begun to favor when I’d stopped caring about making myself attractive to Frederick. Later he’d said they were fit for nothing but paint rags.

  No, the change from black to gray did not signify any improvement in my spirits. My loneliness had sharpened with a vengeance during the dark days of winter. That was why I wore gray.

  I knew that black was infinitely more becoming; I had even succumbed at last, during the past summer, to my grandmother’s ghostly advice on how to increase its allure. Now I felt ashamed of that impulse; now I wanted to look as drab as I felt.

  During Sir Anthony’s prolonged absence, he wrote often, mostly about a reception and show that he was organizing on behalf of Henri Caylat, a painter whose works Sir Anthony felt deserved wider attention than they had yet received. He had begun making the arrangements with Caylat during his visit in January. The event was to take place here in Paris at the end of April.

  I was surprised that Sir Anthony should have undertaken such a venture. Although I had heard of Caylat, I had never seen any of his works. He’d been brutalized by the critics years earlier and had scarcely been heard of since.

  But Sir Anthony seemed quite set up as he planned the event. When I worried that the critics and gallery owners would never come, Sir Anthony replied that no matter how much they despised Caylat, they would make it a point to be there. Sir Anthony had a reputation for providing superb food and drink whenever he entertained.

  When I pointed out that neither Pommery and Greno nor magnums of Bollinger had ever softened a critic’s heart, Sir Anthony parried with the statement that he had no hope of altering anyone’s opinion of Caylat’s painting; but once the critics had seen the studies from Caylat’s sketchbooks that he’d persuaded the artist to mount and display, never again would they be able to dismiss him with the charge that he could only daub because he’d never learned to draw.

  My hopes were not high for the success of the event, but it was difficult not to respond to Sir Anthony’s enthusiasm, dry and understated though it was.

  With the same vague determination to keep the various strands of my life rigidly separate that had prevented me from introducing Sir Anthony to Marguerite and Théo, I did not invite the Sorrel-Valory ménage to Caylat’s show. If Caylat was as dreadful as he was reputed to be, and if Théo was in one of his uncharitable moods, no sneers would be crueler than his.

  There were several reasons, I suppose, why I failed to recognize the singular position in which I found myself on the day of Caylat’s show. At first I thought Sir Anthony must have felt uncertain of his own judgment and hoped that the presence of Frederick Brooks’s young widow would add prestige to the event—for lately it seemed that Frederick had enhanced his reputation tremendously by dying.

  I’ll admit that this attitude of mine was rather cynical, but it lasted only until I entered the rooms Sir Anthony had hired for the occasion.

  I was so enraptured by the astonishing display that I could think of nothing else. I had heard Julien disparage Caylat once or twice; he’d even mocked Sir Anthony for being his patron. He thought Caylat was a savage and Sir Anthony a fool.

  But he was wrong.

  And I knew that I had been wrong, as well, in ever having accepted Sir Anthony’s presentation of himself as someone whose eye needed training.

  So captivated was I by the brilliance and bo
ldness around me that I scarcely considered much else. Certainly I did not think as much as I ought to have about the fact that Sir Anthony was as attentive to me as he was to the artist himself, that he seldom left my side for very long, that he introduced me with something like pride to everyone he knew.

  Lord Marsden was present. Although I was familiar enough with his tastes to feel certain that he could not fully share Sir Anthony’s enthusiasm for Caylat, I was very happy to see him once again. Soon, however, I had the uncomfortable sense that he was watching me rather too closely. Before long, I became convinced that he was studying me with the intensity he ought to have devoted to the paintings around him! I wondered uneasily if it was on account of my dress. Because this was a special occasion, I’d worn one of the black ones, with touches of white, but now I worried that I had followed my grandmother’s advice too assiduously and that the altered dress detailed my curves too boldly.

  I concluded, with acute embarrassment, that it would be wiser to stick with the gray ones from now on.

  Although I was enjoying myself, I had to leave Caylat’s show earlier than I would have liked. During the latter part of winter, I’d acquired a new pupil, an American girl who had come to Paris to study music. Due to her other commitments and my own, I now had to devote part of my Friday afternoons to her.

  Sir Anthony, of course, was obliged to stay. He wanted to hire a carriage for me, but the weather was so fine that I refused his offer.

  I had walked only a block or two homeward and was still dreaming of the visions I had left behind while paying little attention to the ones in front of me, when a well-dressed gentleman, pale-eyed and with graying yellow hair, approached me.

  “Madame Brooks,” he said.

  I was not in the habit of speaking to strange men in the street, but that day I was so preoccupied that when he spoke my name I assumed he must be an acquaintance. I stopped and roused myself belatedly from my private reverie to realize that I had never seen him before in my life.

  I averted my eyes and started to walk on.

  “Surely Madame Brooks would not snub an old friend of her late husband—although she now enjoys such elevated companionship,” said the stranger.

  To be accused of snobbery was more than I could bear.

  “I am afraid that I do not know you,” I said in the most neutral tone I could manage. “Why do you say my husband was your friend?”

  “Because he was kind enough to show me an aspect of his talents that his other admirers have not yet seen,” replied the stranger, and I knew from the way he said it that he did not, in fact, number himself among Frederick’s admirers.

  To hear Frederick referred to in slighting tones was unpleasant but, alas, not outside the realm of my experience. During the last years of his life, Frederick’s lax attitude toward his financial obligations had given a number of people good reason to speak unkindly of him. But those days were over; he had paid every one of his debts before he’d drowned.

  I started to move past the stranger.

  “But soon all Paris will be talking of it,” he said.

  There was something ominous in his tone. I knew it was a threat. I supposed it was an idle one. Nevertheless I could not let it pass.

  I turned on him.

  “I don’t know who you are,” I told him, almost in a whisper. “Nor do I wish to. But I will tell you this: If you ever lift so much as your little finger to smear the memory of my husband, I will find you, under whatever rock you have crawled out from today, and I will cut out your heart.”

  “I’ll be waiting for you,” said the stranger with a calm smile, and moved on.

  I was trembling. But really, there was nothing anyone could do now to harm my beloved Frederick. He had taken himself far beyond the reach of vengeance or malice.

  In May, toward the end of another brief visit to Paris, Sir Anthony suddenly announced that he wished to visit the forest which had provided so great an inspiration to the en plein air landscape painters of the sixties and seventies. Would I care to accompany him to Fontainebleau?

  I remember the start of our journey so well. He brought a picnic lunch of cold chicken, a salad, and pears, and since we were rather late setting out—the whole adventure having been undertaken on the spur of the moment—we ate it on the train.

  Our conversation was light and careless; we laughed at everything and nothing. I had never seen Sir Anthony in so expansive and mellow a vein. Perhaps he might have said the same of me.

  When we arrived at Fontainebleau, we quickly agreed that we must forgo the convenience of a hired carriage and explore the huge forest on foot. I’d always loved long walks, and in Sir Anthony that day I noticed a new, restless energy, which I supposed he wished to burn off. I imagined that it was due to the effects of springtime on the masculine psyche; perhaps he had fallen in love at last. Perhaps that explained why he had spent more time in England lately.

  But I was no longer inclined to speculate about the kind of woman to whom Sir Anthony Camwell would be likely to give his heart; I did not like the feelings those thoughts invariably engendered. Now I merely told myself that I hoped she would be worthy of him.

  It was so warm a day that I left my coat at the railway station, along with our picnic basket, and set out into the forest dressed in only an unseasonably light summer dress. It was almost threadbare in places, but really very modest, for I had patched and mended it carefully.

  It was one of the dullest of my gray ones—not alluring at all. The costly gowns which had once filled my closets were gone now; I had sold them long before Frederick’s death to staunch the unending flow of bills. All my vanities seemed to have died with my daughter; today I did not even carry a parasol.

  Sir Anthony, too, was dressed in summer clothing, although his attire, despite its simplicity, was of a quality far more impressive than my own. Perhaps it was these outward manifestations of the vast social gulf between us, a gulf I took completely for granted, that made me so ill prepared for what happened that afternoon.

  We had been enjoying ourselves immensely, having ventured rather deep into the fairy-tale forest with its magnificent old trees and fantastic rock formations, when the weather changed.

  The first sign was only a cloud passing over the sun, but a little later the sky darkened alarmingly and large, slow raindrops began to splash upon the leaves above us and spill down from them onto our heads. Then the clouds burst open.

  “Oh, Madame Brooks, you’ll be soaked,” said Sir Anthony. He sounded chagrined, as if he blamed himself for having carelessly exposed me to some dreadful peril. He stripped off his jacket and quickly placed it over my head and shoulders.

  “And now you’ll be soaked!” I exclaimed and lifted the jacket in a vain effort to shield him from the rain as well, as if the garment could be miraculously transformed, like loaves and fishes, to meet the present need.

  In the next instant, as neither of us was willing to leave the other unprotected, we found ourselves standing with our arms around each other, his jacket only half covering us both.

  I heard a muffled sound, as if a sigh, torn from his throat, had been reined in before it could escape.

  I could feel the beating of his heart, and through my thin garment, I felt something else as well. Not being a maiden, I understood its meaning and knew that I ought to pull away. But a flame had leapt up the full length of my body and held me to him. My breasts were straining against the light fabric of my gown so urgently that I feared the seams would not hold them. I longed for his mouth; the hunger made me shiver.

  All of my rigid notions about what was possible, about what was permissible, about what I sought from him, about the potential of his heart and that of my own—all these came tumbling down like rocks in a landslide. I was too weak even to think of trying to reassemble them.

  In that moment he might have done anything he liked with me.

  Past and future, consequences and responsibilities, the rules of conduct, all had been blasted i
nto insignificance. I would have laid myself open to him fully so that he might find and take from me anything and everything he had ever desired in a woman. I would have withheld nothing. I would have given myself to him for an hour—or for a lifetime.

  Yet, to his credit, my companion, if he felt my heat, did not take advantage of it. In the suspended seconds before I found the strength at last to draw gently back, he did not move his lips to mine; he did not alter the position of his hands to encompass my willing flesh more intimately; he did not even tighten his embrace.

  I disengaged myself and turned away.

  “It’s useless to fight nature,” I said shakily, trying to conceal my own embarrassment and to save him from feeling any. “We might as well give in to it.”

  Of course I had said the wrong thing!

  “The rain, I mean!” I added with one quick glance back at him to make sure he had not misunderstood me.

  But a veil had fallen away from his gray eyes. For one blinding moment they were the windows to his heart: They told me that he loved me, that he had always loved me, and that he always would.

  It was too much. I felt as undone as the mythical Semele, who’d bound her lover Zeus to a promise to appear before her in all his Olympian splendor. She could not endure the blaze, and died.

  But I still lived and breathed and heard Sir Anthony say, “I suppose you’re right,” in the most ordinary of tones, and when I dared to look at him again, it was as if nothing at all had happened.

  After that, however, things were not quite so easy between us.

  The storm was brief, the sun returned, our light clothing did not take long to dry, but we were bedraggled in appearance and chastened in manner as we climbed aboard the train back to Paris. Whenever I tried to speak during the two-hour ride, my voice sounded strained and artificial. I was glad that Sir Anthony seemed disinclined to conversation.

  The next day he returned to England.

  CHAPTER SEVEN