Friday's Girl Read online

  ‘Whoever told you that, Mrs Todd, was not telling the truth. No, that is never true. His models mean everything to a painter of any merit, believe you me. That is why some painters even make the mistake of marrying them.’

  Edith stared up at Alfred, only slowly appreciating what he was saying.

  ‘Now I think we should go for that walk, don’t you?’ he said, after a moment.

  ‘You can go for what you call “that walk”, Mr Talisman. I shall return to my lodgings and see if there isn’t something I can do to help Mrs Harvey, perhaps with a little light dusting.’

  ‘I do not think I have ever been turned down before for a little light dusting, really I don’t.’ Alfred could not help laughing.

  ‘A little light dusting is preferable to risking my reputation with you,’ Edith told him in the voice she had been accustomed to use to the inebriates at the Stag and Crown who tried to force themselves on her.

  ‘What a pity.’ Alfred started to move away from her towards the path to the track that led to so many of the coves and inlets around the harbour. ‘Shall I give your husband your best wishes? Or shall I send him your love? Tell me. I know he will be disappointed to hear that you did not want to come with me – he did after all send me to fetch you. He and Sherry have taken the most delicious picnic down to the cove, and by lunchtime they said they will be quite played out. Dead fish, fisher girls filleting fish, all fish out of the way, and only a picnic lunch on the sand, prepared by the redoubtable Mrs Molesworth to take their minds off the piscatorial theme. You know how Mrs Molesworth dearly loves a picnic. The moment the baskets come out she starts rolling the pastry and cutting the sandwiches and preparing the meats, not to mention the bottles of ginger and lemonade and . . .’ Alfred was over-elaborating quite intentionally so that Edith had time to turn and stare at him.

  ‘What are you saying?’

  ‘Only that Sherry and Napier sent me to fetch you for a picnic lunch in the cove down there. Why else do you think I came across you the way I did?’

  ‘But – but you said that – you said that they were sharing a life class.’

  ‘Which is what they were doing. The girls are, after all, alive; only the fish are dead.’

  Edith turned and stared after Celandine, longing to catch up with her and tell her that it would only be a short walk to find Sheridan and Napier, but Celandine was gone, and Alfred was already walking away from Edith so quickly that if she did not follow him at once she would lose him, and miss out on lunch, and Napier.

  The Channel crossing to France was thankfully much less rough than the journey to Cornwall, which meant that Celandine was able to eat a little, and think a great deal. The fact that the letter had been written by the doctor must mean that her mother’s condition was indeed serious, but unfortunately he did not state from what she was suffering. It was impossible to stop thinking about what might be ahead, to stop imagining Agnes possibly hovering about her poor mother’s deathbed, perhaps privately gleeful that Mrs Benyon was dying, so that Agnes would finally be able to reign supreme in the family hierarchy. To distract her thoughts from time to time she took out the little water colour that Sherry had done of her in the first few days of their marriage. It was full of tenderness, as only a man who loves a woman can paint her. But inevitably her thoughts would return to the treadmill of her family’s complicated relationships.

  Agnes had always coveted everything that had come to Mrs Benyon from her marriage, something about which Celandine and her mother had often laughed, fantasising that in the unlikely event of Mrs Benyon’s early demise, Agnes would tear down the doors and whisk everything back to Avignon. It was a fantasy in which they only occasionally indulged, for Mrs Benyon always enjoyed robust health, and was much younger than her husband when they married.

  After Cornwall with its fresh blue skies and winding streets, its white-painted houses and the eternal cries of the seagulls and the sound of the ever-present sea, Paris was bound to seem confined, even overcrowded. Celandine was prepared for this, just as she was prepared for feeling almost impatient as she stared out of the hackney-carriage window at the wide avenues filled with people going about their pampered lives with an air of sophistication which now seemed so artificial compared to the hard lives of the Cornish fishing folk. What she was not prepared for was the look of the apartment as, having placed her key in the lock and pushed open the front door, she took in the shock awaiting her.

  One of the things that had always been such a comfort to her mother, and to Celandine, had been the hanging of her father’s paintings in each new apartment in which – due to Celandine’s perennial inability to find a sympathetic art professor – they would so often find themselves.

  An oil painting of a long avenue framed by tall poplars had always been hung first, and always in the hall of whichever apartment they were occupying. Now Celandine saw that instead of that much-loved painting, there was only a grey gap. She turned from the dark marks outlined on the pale grey paint, to find another empty space where a smaller oil, this time of her mother seated under a cherry tree in their garden in America, had once hung. She looked round further, only to find wall after wall empty of precious paintings. Well-loved friends had fled, and only the outlines of the frames were now witness to where they had once hung.

  She pushed open the door to the main salon, where her mother had always so enjoyed entertaining friends and acquaintances, and promptly stepped into a strangely dark, unlit space. The long windows that opened on to the courtyard below were tightly closed and the curtains drawn, despite its being only early afternoon. Celandine threw the curtains apart, opened the floor-length windows, and turned to look at the interior, only to discover that all the walls, as in the hall, were quite bare of paintings.

  Her father having had a great capacity for friendship had inevitably enjoyed intense and much treasured friendships with other painters, both in America and in France. A consequence of this was that many of them had exchanged work with him, each happily swapping his unsold paintings in a genial, bohemian manner, so that at the time of her husband’s death Mrs Benyon had been bequeathed a large number of modern paintings of what was becoming known as the Impressionist school. And now Albert Benyon’s treasured collection of valued friends’ works, much loved by his widow and daughter, had vanished.

  With absolute certainty Celandine knew then that her mother must be dead, for how else could Agnes – and Celandine knew immediately that it must be Agnes who had taken them, and with what glee she could only imagine – have removed all the paintings from the walls?

  She found herself, for no reason at all, moving from one wall to another, and much as a housewife might find herself staring at damp patches that had suddenly appeared in her decorations, Celandine stared at the marks where the beloved paintings had once hung. There had been ‘Tower Bridge’ and there ‘Picnic at Arles’, and there ‘Children of Avignon’ – and now there was nothing but dark, empty wall.

  A baby cried. Celandine turned, thinking that the sound must have come from the windows which she had opened in such desperation, eager to let in not just light, but air. She frowned and turned back to the bare walls, unable or unwilling to move. Again came the cry of a baby, and this time she realised that it was coming not from outside the tall windows that gave on to the courtyard area which the Parisian pigeons so enjoyed, but from along the corridor that led to the bedrooms.

  Without knowing why, Celandine found herself tiptoeing down the corridor towards the sound, only to bump into Marie who was at that moment coming out of her mother’s bedroom. Marie screamed, and suddenly there was a cacophony, what with the baby crying, Marie screaming, and Celandine trying to raise her voice above the other noises.

  Celandine caught the maid by the shoulders. ‘Where is my mother, Marie?’

  ‘Mademoiselle Benyon!’

  ‘No, Marie, not Mademoiselle Benyon—’

  ‘Mais oui, you are Mademoiselle Benyon!’

  ‘No, Mada
me Montague Robertson.’

  Marie obviously found this too much, because she merely shook her head in despair as if she knew that Celandine was determined on confusing her. ‘Mademoiselle, votre mère est morte! Elle est morte, la pauvre.’ She crossed herself reverently, closing her eyes as she did so.

  In seconds Celandine’s worst fears were realised, her fragile hopes, to which she had clung with such ferocity on the journey, shattered. She took a few steps backwards and turned away from the maid’s tragic expression in order to cover her eyes with her hands, as if by doing so she could avoid seeing the truth of her situation.

  ‘Elle est mort – last Thursday the English priest he has come, and she has had the sacraments, and now she is quite dead,’ Marie continued in a stream of hysterical French. Seeing Celandine’s understandable shock and distress, she tried to take her by the arm and lead her back to the salon, but Celandine resisted her.

  ‘No, but I must know. What is that baby noise? Is there a baby staying here, Marie?’

  ‘No, madem— no, madame.’ At this Marie looked more agitated than ever. ‘No, madame.’ She hesitated, her hands twisting the corners of her apron. ‘No, madame, the baby is Madame’s baby.’ As Celandine stared: ‘Madame Benyon has had the baby, madame, that is why she is dead, enfin!’

  Celandine stared at the maid, uncomprehending, silent, imagining that the poor woman was in such a state of hysteria because her mind had been turned by the death of her mistress.

  ‘That is not possible,’ she said slowly, and she turned and walked back down the corridor to the salon, where there was more light, before turning back to Marie. ‘My mother,’ she began to say, ‘is far too old to have a baby.’

  No sooner had she said this than she realised that she had just announced something that was medically ridiculous. Her mother was – had been – only . . . she tried to calculate the exact age of her mother. She had been forty-three! There was no reason on God’s earth why she should not have been able to have a baby. The wife of the vicar of Newbourne had apparently just given birth at the ripe old age of forty-eight; and while the vicar had found it necessary to pass off the event as a miracle of the kind normally associated with the Blessed Virgin, nevertheless his wife had managed without any difficulty to give birth to a healthy baby boy.

  ‘My mother has had a baby? My mother has died giving birth to a baby? But she wasn’t married, Marie. My mother was not married!’

  ‘No, madame, she was not married, no, she was a widow.’

  For a moment Marie seemed to think that she ought to look shocked, which she did, but perhaps remembering her own sometimes colourful love life, she finally merely shrugged her shoulders.

  ‘No, Madame was not married. No, Madame fell in love with a younger man,’ she continued, speaking rapidly and in a low voice as if her late mistress might overhear her. ‘She fell in love, passionately, with a younger man. When we were in Munich. He came twice a week to teach her German, in which he was most proficient. That was why she was so sad to leave Munich for Paris, but before she left he . . .’

  For a brief second Celandine wondered why the word ‘passionately’, which was really so similar in English and French, sounded so much more passionate in French. And then she wondered, almost as passionately, why she had never taken any notice of her mother’s eagerness to learn languages at the hands of young tutors wherever they had lived in recent years. She had to face the fact that she had probably been too self-absorbed, too caught up in her own quest to find someone who believed that a woman’s artistic vision was as valid as that of a man. She had been too selfish.

  ‘Yes, Madame was passionately in love – but not so much as to want to . . . be pregnant!’ Marie continued.

  As she said it again Celandine almost winced. She hated to think of her mother doing anything passionately with a younger man, but it seemed she would have to, if for no better reason than that Marie wanted, just as passionately, to convey how their present situation had come about.

  ‘He was a painter like her late husband, but younger and more handsome, and one day she tell me he took advantage of her. She did not want it, she told me when she was dying, and she did not know she was pregnant, not ever, not until the end. She thought, perhaps because of his taking advantage of her, she put it away from her.’ The maid paused, waiting for the right words to come to her, and finally finding them. ‘She thought she was becoming – as older women become – fatter . . .’ she mimed an ever-expanding stomach, ‘but not fertile, yes? It could have been. But it wasn’t. Maybe she shut out the reality, perhaps? This happen to an aunt of my mother, but she was married.’ Marie straightened her stiff collar, allowing herself a moment of family pride. ‘She died, my aunt, poor creature; and now your mother too is dead, and we have this baby which is being fed by Madame Montellier opposite – you know the apartment near to the concierge?’

  Celandine nodded, too stunned to speak.

  ‘Madame Montellier, she has a new baby, her eighth. It make her very ’appy because she like the even numbers, huh? But she has too much milk. Madame Montellier is in there now, in your mother’s room. It was lucky that she was in the habit of sitting at her window for that was how I noticed her, or the poor baby and I, what should we have done? How would we have known which way to turn with its mother so dead?’

  Marie started to cry once more, throwing her apron over her head as she did so and rocking backwards and forwards, moaning.

  ‘It is so much tragedy, madem— madame. I love your mother as my own whom I never knew. She was always so kind. And what if the baby dies too?’

  Celandine held Marie by both her shoulders, shaking her gently. ‘Stop it! Stop it!’ she begged. ‘Isn’t it bad enough that we are in the position we are in without you having hysterics?’

  Marie stopped crying instantly. ‘I have to inform you, madame,’ she said, with some dignity, after she had dried her eyes on the apron, ‘I have to inform you that I am owed two months’ wages.’

  ‘So you would be,’ Celandine stated, after a short moment. ‘You, and I dare say anyone else who happens to have come to the apartment in the last few weeks. Everyone will be owed at least two months’ wages, will they not? The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, they will all be sending in their accounts – suddenly and surprisingly unpaid by my mother who was always so meticulous in such matters. And not unnaturally, I dare say too that the bills will all be vastly larger than in previous months.’ Celandine gave a great shuddering resigned sigh. ‘Now lead me to my mother’s body, and to the baby.’

  ‘But it is not possible, madame. Madame, your mother’s body is gone. Mademoiselle Agnes, she sent Madame Benyon away. Before Mademoiselle Agnes took all the paintings from the walls and had them transported back to Avignon, the undertaker come. Your mother, may she rest in peace, is in the chapel waiting for the funeral tomorrow, but Mademoiselle Agnes she has already told me, she can’t come back for the funeral, because of the children. One of them has measles, and she fears she too might have caught it. The measles will last three weeks, so she will not be coming to Paris for the funeral.’

  ‘Of course. Only to be expected that Mademoiselle Agnes and her boys should all be too ill to come to the funeral. Only to be expected. How happy for them though that, despite all these worries, she was still able to take so many of my father’s paintings back to Avignon to be in her safe-keeping. Now let me see the baby, please.’

  Celandine walked to the bedroom where the baby had stopped crying, probably because the obliging Madame Montellier had just finished feeding it. The large moon-faced woman stood up as Celandine came into the room, smiling sadly and greeting her in the low tones considered appropriate when someone is in mourning.

  ‘He is a very beautiful boy,’ she announced to her visitor, nodding towards the baby, and perhaps to save Celandine the trouble of asking. ‘He will be very beautiful. Let us hope that he will live to be as handsome a young man as his mother would have wished, n’est-ce pas?
’

  The shock of the circumstances in which Celandine found herself was so great that she hardly knew what she was doing, or she might never have held out her hands and taken the small human being who was her half-brother into her arms; never have held him for so long staring down at his serenely sleeping face.

  Celandine would not have been human if she had not found herself remembering that when she had last seen her mother the latter had been full of righteous indignation. She had looked at Celandine as if she had committed murder, not succumbed to love. Now her mother was dead because she too had fallen in love and finally, perhaps, if Marie was right, been made to succumb to it.

  Celandine put her finger in the tiny hand, and feeling it grip her knew at once, with a sinking heart, that whatever happened in the future, her fate and that of the baby were now securely entwined.

  Edith sat staring out to sea, realising with delight what a brilliant subject it was, what a friend to the imaginative, what a source of fascination. Soon the Lugger would be putting in to the harbour and, as Sherry had just said, half the town would be down to help pull in the nets and greet their men from whom they had been parted for many months. Napier had already sketched Mary and her friends in their aprons and bonnets with some fish laid out on the beach, but that would be nothing, she was sure, compared to the sight they were about to see.

  ‘Of what are you dreaming?’

  Edith turned and smiled at Alfred. ‘I was not dreaming. I was thinking about the sea, and how it is possible to sit and watch it for hours on end – more than any landscape, I should have thought.’

  ‘It can be a cruel companion—’

  ‘Not today. Today the sea is in a brilliant mood, no white tops, the Luggers coming back to the harbour. The sea is ready to celebrate.’