Painted Ladies Read online

  ‘Why do you wear black all the time?’

  He smooths the cloth on one leg with his hand. If she were looking at his hands in isolation they would conjure up a different sort of person altogether. He has dark hair on his forearms which she saw once when he rolled his sleeves up, but the hands are smooth except for a large vein running from his index finger to his wrist on both hands. ‘I feel comfortable in black,’ he says, at last. ‘Why don’t you eat your cake?’

  He doesn’t like it when the conversation turns to him. He’d rather that they didn’t talk at all, but it’s the only way for her to find out anything about him. When he asks her questions, she suspects that it’s because he feels he ought to rather than because he’s curious about her.

  ‘What would you be doing on a Wednesday afternoon if you weren’t here?’

  ‘I’d take the tram to Bobigny to see my mother, or I might go to the cinema with my friend Gabi.’

  ‘What films do you like?’

  ‘Romances. Films with Rudolf Valentino in the tent.’ He’s looking at her, vaguely. ‘You know, where he plays the sheikh.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘I saw Murders in the Rue Morgue recently.’

  ‘That one I do know. Have you read the book?’

  ‘Why would I read the book if I can see it in the cinema?’

  He nods. He casts about for something else to say. Her wrap has fallen open at the neck. She sees him glancing at her breast. At the beginning she had felt a vague sense of rejection when he made no effort to seduce her. She’d been told that she was beautiful, and beauty meant that men reacted to her in a certain way. She might not want them, but she wanted them to want her. When he showed no sign of wanting her, she wondered if he had detected something with that piercing gaze of his that left him ill at ease or maybe even that repelled him.

  ‘I hope coming here won’t have deprived your family of an opportunity to see you.’

  ‘I can always go on Sunday. What about you? Do you see your family?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Never?’

  ‘We lost touch when I abandoned law to study art. I do see one of them – my sister Andrée. We were very close as children. Andrée always took my side.’ He smiles. ‘She has a daughter – that’s my niece, of course. Her name is Renée, too.’

  ‘The same as me.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Nice.’ As Renée bites into her cake, cream oozes out of both sides of her mouth. A blob of cream has fallen onto her left breast. He watches as it slides towards her nipple. When it gets there, it will have to do a detour round the areola or divide up into separate tributaries. She pauses, her mouth full of cake. He sees her looking at him.

  ‘You’ve dropped cream onto your breast,’ he says. She wipes it off.

  When she is getting dressed one afternoon, she bends down with her back to him so that the gash between her legs is clearly visible. She glances back over her shoulder to see whether he’s affected and is gratified when she sees that he is. He looks away, but it’s too late.

  Pierre knows Madame Hébert’s been, the minute he walks back into the house. He’s told her she is not to pick things up. She can dust round them, but they must remain exactly where they are. He says there’s always something not quite in the right place after she has gone. She nudges things out of perversity.

  ‘I have a new girl coming to the studio,’ he says, as I am bringing in the cassoulet. He tucks the serviette into his shirt front. ‘She works on the perfume counter at that big store in the centre – Printemps.’

  I begin to spoon the cassoulet into the bowls. He helps himself to bread.

  ‘We went there once to buy a birthday present for you. You remember?’

  I nod. I remember everything. I’m thinking it’s a long way from the studio.

  ‘I went there looking for tobacco,’ he says. ‘Schiffs were out of it.’ He waits for me to ask about the girl.

  ‘And did you find some?’

  ‘Fortunately, yes.’

  I break the bread roll in the gravy, watching as the doughy lumps fluff up and take on colour from whatever’s nearest to them. Poucette jumps onto the table and I move the water jug. The cat sniffs the tureen, its delicate antennae picking up the signals.

  ‘Her name’s Renée.’ He’s about to spoon the cassoulet into his mouth. He pauses as if it’s an afterthought.

  ‘The same name as your niece.’ A pity, I think. It’ll make her harder to forget.

  ‘Girls like her are notoriously unreliable, of course.’ He laughs and then I hear that little click inside his throat that comes whenever he’s said something he’s regretted. I don’t draw attention to it. I don’t want to spoil his dinner. Telling me he has a model is supposed to reassure me that he hasn’t anything to hide, but that is not the way it works. Now both of us are wondering what he has to hide.

  ‘How long have you and Marthe been together?’ She is looking at a postcard reproduction pinned above the sink, a sculpture of a young man with his arms above his head. Beneath it, on the same pin, is a picture of another youth but this one’s naked with his genitals on full view. Renée feels shy looking at it but since it’s been pinned where anyone can see it, she supposes it’s all right for her to look.

  ‘I’ve been with Marthe almost all my life.’

  ‘Do you still paint her?’

  ‘Yes, of course I do.’

  ‘That can’t be very interesting after all these years.’

  ‘It’s different every time.’ He takes a grimy teaspoon from the bench and uses it to stir his coffee. Renée makes a show of looking at the naked youth as if she’s adding to her fund of knowledge.

  ‘Are these statues made of stone in real life?’

  ‘Marble. One is Michelangelo’s Rebellious Slave. The other one’s The Dying Slave. They’re in the Louvre.’ He says ‘Michelangelo’ as if she should have heard of him.

  ‘He’s famous, is he?’

  ‘Michelangelo? He’s quite well known, yes.’

  ‘Are there any cards like this of your work?’

  ‘You could probably find one or two on sale in the tabac or in the bouquinistes. The still lifes, mainly.’

  ‘There’ll be none of me, then?’

  ‘As I say, it’s mainly the still lifes.’

  ‘Have you got any I can see?’

  He takes a pile of cards out of the drawer under the workbench. Renée recognises corners of the studio – the tin bath hanging on the wall, the vase of asters on the windowsill.

  ‘It feels odd, being here and looking at a picture of it.’

  ‘That’s because time normally moves on but when you paint it, it stands still.’

  She comes to one that isn’t of the studio. It’s of a sun-soaked parlour with a woman sitting at a table in the foreground and a riot of laburnum and lobelia behind her. ‘Is that Marthe?’

  Pierre nods. Renée notices the pudding-basin haircut and the way the woman seems to lose herself among the objects in the room. There is a white cat on the table, licking milk out of a saucer from the cup the woman’s drinking from.

  ‘She must be quite old now.’ It wasn’t what she’d meant to say. He’s giving her that look, as if he’s miles away.

  ‘A muse is different from a model. Age is not important.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’ ‘Muse’ is not a word she’s come across before.

  ‘An artist might have several models, but he only has one muse.’

  She feels obscurely that she’s being shown her place. She might not understand what he is saying but she knows that it’s important, that it’s possibly the most important thing she’ll ever know about him. She knows, too, that from now on her mission will be to become the muse in Pierre’s life. She understands as well that it is not a question simply of seducing him.

  ‘The Marthe’d Muse’ is what they used to call me. It was Pierre’s friend Édouard who came up with that. It was a play on words, Pierre said, although there wa
s nothing playful in the way it came about. Pierre had put three paintings of me lying in the bath into the Salon exhibition. He was starting to be quite well known for them by that time and we’d rented an apartment separate from the studio. There was an easel and a fold-up table with his paints on in the bathroom. It had been a vicious winter. I was used to cold, but that year was the first one of the century and there seemed to be nowhere you could go to get away from it.

  He liked to put the easel at an angle to the bath, so he was looking down at me. The dog would often crawl in underneath the bath and sit between the iron legs where she would be warm. I always made sure that the water started off hot, but once I’d been in there for an hour I could feel the pins and needles starting in my legs. The pain moves round your body looking for a place to settle and once it has set up camp it starts to claim the territory around it. You’re a city under siege. The only way to bear it is to take your mind off somewhere else, the way the saints did on the rack. The pain is still there, but it’s separate.

  That day Pierre had started painting in the morning and it wasn’t till the light began to fade that he took out his pocket watch. I’d been there in the water seven hours. In the painting you can see the goosebumps on my legs. I think he was as shocked as I was when he realised how long it had been. He spoke to me and when he didn’t get an answer he knelt down beside the bath and plunged his hands into the water, trying to rub feeling back into my arms and legs. He lifted me out of the bath and carried me into the bedroom, piling blankets, coats and cushions, anything he could lay hands on, over me.

  ‘I don’t feel anything,’ I told him. ‘It’s all right,’ But then, as I began to thaw, that’s when the torture started. It was like a thousand tiny, biting insects running up and down my legs – a scorching, scarifying pain. I wanted to peel off my skin so that the insects trapped there could escape. I howled. The sound was so unearthly that I thought it must have come from somewhere else.

  Pierre was rocking, with his fists bunched up against his temples. ‘Tell me what to do.’ he begged.

  I must have fainted. When I came around, the insects underneath my skin had gone, but I was shivering – my teeth, my legs, my insides, everything was shuddering. The bed was groaning underneath me.

  Pierre took off his clothes. He climbed in next to me and rolled himself on top of me, his beard against my cheek, his breast against mine, his arms matching my arms and his legs on my legs. We lay like that till the morning. When I woke up, I was warm again, but Pierre was as cold as ice.

  She is afraid that in the end she’ll give herself away. Each time she leaves the flat she has to change the ring onto the middle finger of the other hand and then restore it to the left hand when she comes back in the evening. She is coming from the studio one afternoon when she hears voices arguing outside. She waits. The area is not as rough as Belleville, but it’s better not to get involved in anything.

  The argument goes on and Renée sees she has no choice but to walk past the pair. The man is leaning with his elbow on the wall next to the woman’s cheek and has his back to Renée. He is wearing a white linen suit. The girl is pale with short blonde hair, cut raggedly, and has her thin coat clutched around her. She assumes this is a client and a prostitute.

  ‘Don’t you come that with me, you little minx,’ the man says. ‘You get paid the same rate as the others and that’s all you’re getting.’

  As they pass each other, Renée glances at her and the girl returns the stare. She’s trying to look brazen, but she just looks frightened. Renée walks on. There’s a lot of violence in the class she comes from, but it doesn’t often happen in the street where everyone can see.

  She hears a slap and then a cry. She forces herself not to look back, but she feels a sharp rush of adrenalin. She waits until she’s reached the corner and then glances back just as the man looks up. He’s heard the sharp click of her heels against the cobbles. Even though he’s in the middle of an argument, the look he throws at Renée is appraising. It’s the look that men give women all the time in her world, and as Renée throws the glance back she is wondering why a man like that would need to pay for sex.

  She takes a shortcut through the market, stopping at the flower stall to buy a bunch of marigolds. On Wednesday afternoons she tries to make sure that she’s home ahead of Marguerite so that she doesn’t have to answer questions as to where she’s been, but when she lets herself in, Marguerite is home already.

  She puts down the flowers. Margo eyes them. ‘What are they for?’

  ‘I thought they would cheer the place up. And the man gave me an extra bunch. I thought you’d like them.’

  ‘Marigolds? I’ve always found them rather fussy – all those little frills. I can see why you’d like them.’

  ‘I don’t like them in particular. They were the nicest flowers on the stall, that’s all.’ She takes her coat off. Marguerite comes over to her. She bends forward as if to kiss Renée on the cheek, then takes her chin and turns it so she’s looking straight into her eyes. ‘I called in at the store this afternoon to pick you up. The supervisor said you weren’t due in.’

  The stillness in the space between them feels like concrete hardening around her. ‘Wednesday is my afternoon off.’

  ‘But you said you were doing extra shifts for your friend Gabi.’

  Renée feels her colour rise. She’s never been much good at lying, which is curious because she’s had a lot of practice. ‘She and Jules were going out to buy things for the wedding. In the end they didn’t go.’

  ‘So what did you do?’ She feels Margo’s fingers pressing on the flesh above her elbow. ‘Well?’

  ‘I took the tram to Bobigny, to see my mother. She’s not well. The shelling’s getting to her. She can’t sleep.’

  ‘You should have said. Why didn’t you?’

  ‘She told me not to fuss. She’s tired, that’s all. It’s hard for her to have to look after the girls at their age.’

  ‘Can’t your brother help her?’

  ‘Tonio won’t help her with the chores. He says it’s women’s work.’

  While Marguerite has little time for men, she draws the line at criticising Tonio. ‘You’ve had this oily smell about you lately.’

  ‘Oily?’

  ‘As if you’ve been going round a hardware store.’

  ‘The bus back from the suburbs often has the workers from the factory on it.’

  Marguerite grunts. Next time Renée leaves the studio, she puts a small dab of the perfume Pierre gave her on her neck and wrists. But she knows time is running out.

  ‘Who did that to you?’

  She has tried to cover up the bruises with a mix of chalk and resin, but he notices immediately when she takes off the kimono. He comes over to her, taking her arm by the wrist and turning it towards the light. He rubs his thumb against the bruise. The chalk comes off on it.

  ‘It was a game.’ She colours underneath the look he’s giving her. She’s told him she shares an apartment in the 18th and she sometimes mentions Marguerite, but Wednesday afternoons are an escape from all that and she wants to keep the two apart. The bruises on her arm say things about her that she’d rather not have said. The light is shining from above and there’s a sheen on them, like peaches when they start to rot.

  ‘You know that games like this become more violent as time goes on.’ He goes on staring at the bruises for a moment and then turns and goes back to the workbench. He picks up his brushes and begins to paint. For once she’s grateful that she doesn’t need to talk to him.

  ‘That ring you wear sometimes,’ he says, when neither of them has said anything for several minutes. ‘Who gave that to you?’

  ‘It was a birthday present from the girl I share with.’

  ‘It’s a friendship ring, then? If I’d known it was your birthday, I’d have taken you to lunch.’

  ‘It was the day before I met you, so you couldn’t have.’

  He makes a mark and stands back from the ease
l to examine the effect. ‘Does Marguerite know that you pose for me?’

  ‘I haven’t told her yet.’

  ‘You think she’d mind?’

  ‘She’d stop me coming to you.’

  ‘Why would she do that?’

  ‘She’s jealous’, Renée is about to say, but this is not a conversation that she wants to have with Pierre.

  ‘Those bruises on your arms. Are those the way she stops you doing things?’

  ‘Not always.’ He does not pursue it. Last week, Renée came in with a split lip. She’d expected him to comment then, but he had not said anything. However, when she saw one of his sketches lying on the workbench afterwards, she picked it up and saw he’d drawn the split lip. Renée felt she might as well have been a milk jug with a crack in it; if it was there, he painted it.

  He’s looking at the ring. ‘Blue. That’s your favourite colour.’ Renée sniffs. ‘You don’t seem very pleased with it. Would you prefer her to have bought you something else?’

  ‘I wish she hadn’t bought me anything.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘She always . . . wants something from me. She never gives me anything without me having to give something back.’

  ‘And is the “something” something you don’t want to give?’

  She looks away. She doesn’t want to tell him. She’s afraid that telling him might make it worse, that once the thing is out there in the open it will have a separate existence and that once it does, she will be stuck with it for ever. ‘I just wish she wasn’t so possessive.’

  ‘Ah.’ He weighs the brushes in his hand, then lays them on the bench and comes across to her. He twists the ring between his fingers and then slips it off. ‘It comes off easily enough.’ She looks at him. She feels the muscles in her stomach clench. He slides it back onto her finger.