Liberty Silk (31 page)

‘Lisa! Welcome!’ She turned to see Hélène by her side. ‘I’m so glad you came – the twins are dying to see you again.’

‘The twins?’

Before Hélène had a chance to reply, a young woman with a gardenia in her hair leaned forward to kiss Lisa’s cheek.

‘Surprise! Don’t you remember me? I’m Nicole.’

‘My sister-in-law,’ said Hélène. ‘She is Nicole Poiret now. And here is Danielle, her twin, and her delicious daughter Sophie.’

Danielle was dandling a baby on her hip. The child was dressed in a broderie anglaise christening robe with a matching bonnet, and was sucking on a plump fist.

‘What a beautiful baby!’ said Lisa.

‘I remember you, when you were the same age!’ Nicole told Lisa.

‘And now you’re a big movie star in Hollywood!’ said Danielle.

‘We were so excited when
The Lady with the Little Dog
came out in France,’ said Nicole. ‘Your photographs were everywhere!’

‘You look
so
like your mother. There’s a portrait of her, in the villa – have you seen it? The resemblance is remarkable.’

Lisa felt as though she were watching a tennis match, switching her gaze from one identical face to the other.

‘Stop bombarding her!’ scolded Hélène. ‘Poor Lisa may not even remember who you are.’

‘I remember,’ Lisa said, slowly. ‘I remember now. This is where I lived, once.’ The smell in the barn transported her back to when she was a toddler, chasing geese nearly as tall as she was, sneezing from the dust in the hay bales, playing ‘catch the rat’ with a black-and-white kitten and watching a dark-haired boy bait fishing-lines. ‘Nicole, Danielle . . . You were my family! That explains why everything – the villa, the garden – feels so familiar! Oh! Why didn’t Gervaise tell me when he painted my portrait?’

‘He didn’t think you’d want somebody from the past turning up out of the blue in Hollywood.’

‘Especially since you’d gone to the trouble of changing your name. I’m not surprised you changed it. Lisa La Touche is much more glamorous than Baba MacLeod.’

Baba MacLeod. Nobody had called her that for years. In Hollywood, Sabu and David Niven were the only people who even knew her real name. ‘How did he make the connection?’

‘A genealogist in the British Library did some research.’

‘If only he’d said!’ lamented Lisa. ‘I would have come here sooner!’

Nicole touched her arm. ‘He didn’t want to intrude. He’s very private, Gervaise, and he didn’t consider himself family.’

‘She’s more family to him than his real daughter,’ protested Danielle. ‘Her name’s Ghislaine,’ she added on seeing Lisa’s mounting confusion. ‘She’s his daughter by his first wife. He’s never painted her. But he was dead set on painting you.’

Lisa remembered the portrait Lantier had made of her in the buttercup yellow frock, reclining on the palliasse, barefoot and bare of head, and how she had said to him:
It’s me as I really am. How did you know?
He knew because Gervaise
was
family, just as these beautiful women, Nicole and Danielle, were family – of a sort. Family from a bygone era.

‘If we’d had more time together in LA,’ she said slowly, ‘I guess I might have made the connection myself. But his brother took ill, and—’

‘Gervaise doesn’t have a brother,’ said Hélène.

‘But he got a telegram when he was in LA telling him to come back to France, that his brother was dying . . .’

‘Pah. That was just Maquis code, to warn him that the Boche were sniffing around.’

The band had segued from a leisurely waltz into something upbeat. More couples were filing onto the dance floor, and the women were having to raise their voices to make themselves heard. Lisa recognized the slow-quick-quick, slow-quick-quick tempo of the foxtrot.

‘You’re probably itching to take to the floor,’ Hélène remarked, ‘but there is somebody you must meet first.’

‘Nana,’ said Danielle.

‘Since she heard that you were coming she has been longing to see you again.’

‘She’s across in the house.’

‘And Papa Reverdy? Is he there too?’

‘Papa passed away back in 1926.’

‘I’m sorry.’

A boy who had been hovering, ogling Lisa surreptitiously took a couple of steps forward. He had produced an autograph book, and Lisa knew that once she started signing, there would be no respite until everyone present had nabbed a trophy.

‘Come,’ said Nicole. ‘Let’s get out of here before they all start demanding to be introduced to you.’

‘But I’d be glad to meet them!’

‘Try telling me that after you’ve spent an hour stuck in a corner with Madame Boulanger and her cronies.’

An uproarious laugh from the other side of the room made Danielle look round. ‘Uh-oh. That imbecile, Maurice. My husband,’ she told Lisa, by way of explanation. ‘I’d better grab him before he has much more to drink.
Au revoir
, Baba. I mean, Lisa!’

Lisa watched as Danielle made her way through the dancers to where a group of men were lounging by a table. One of them glanced up at her approach and made eye contact over Danielle’s shoulder. Lisa was used to the way men looked at her: she generally dealt with it by adopting an aloof expression and staring them down. But this man did not look away: he held her gaze even as he slid a cigarette between his lips and lit it. Then he blew out a plume of smoke, narrowed his eyes, and smiled. Lisa looked away at once. There was something unnerving about the man’s demeanour. She was used to a degree of deference from the opposite sex.

‘How many grandchildren has Nana?’ she asked, quickly returning her attention to Nicole and Hélène.

‘Four,’ said Hélène. ‘She’s waiting for me to produce the fifth.’

That meant, conjectured Lisa, that Hélène must be a daughter-in-law, married to the brother – the boy who had used to take her fishing when she was a small child, and who had taught her to swim. Raoul. She wondered where he was: she had not wished to ask in case he had been a casualty of the war.

‘Come,’ said Nicole, ‘let’s go and find Nana.’

In the kitchen of the farmhouse across the yard the stockpot simmered on the big range as it had every day when Lisa had been a child there, and a tortoiseshell kiten a descendant of the calico cat that had been her constant companion, was snoozing on an armchair.

‘Nana!’ called Nicole. ‘Come and see who is here!’

There was the sound of a step on the stair and Madame Reverdy came into the room. She stopped when she saw Lisa, and her clasped hands flew to her face. ‘My little girl!’ she said. ‘My Baba.’

And as Nana took Lisa by the hand and sat her down at the big table, Nicole discreetly withdrew. And then the film star and her erstwhile foster mother started to talk.

THE FARMHOUSE WHERE
Jessie’s baby was to be reared was a rambling affair, built of weathered red brick with bits that were clearly afterthoughts, and lots of chimneys and curious dormer windows and a cerulean-blue-painted front door. The only real difference between Jessie’s dream farmhouse and this bucolic structure was that the picture-book one had roses growing around the door: in the Provençal version, there was bougainvillaea.

Gervaise left Jessie at the gate, and told her he’d come back for her in an hour. He’d done this, she knew, because he would not be able to cope if she broke down and started begging him to change his mind. But Jessie understood there could be no going back now. She had her future to think about, and that of her daughter.

Madame Reverdy, the farmer’s wife, emerged from the farmhouse, drying her hands on a faded, floral-patterned apron as Jessie approached.

‘Madame! How nice to see you again – and this time with the baby! Allow me to have a peek at her. Oh – but how pretty she is – how like her
maman
! What a head of hair for one so small! May I hold her?’

Jessie nodded, and handed her baby over. She didn’t know whether to feel jealous or glad when Madame Reverdy said: ‘Oh! I get a smile! Hello,
poupette
– what a pleasure it is to welcome you to our home! How would you like to meet your new brother and twin sisters? Raoul! Come here and help Madame with her bag.’

A boy of about six years old appeared, and took from Jessie the bag that she had packed with such care: the tiny baby clothes that she had shopped for so diligently in Paris; the little porcelain monkey that Gervaise had bought for her; her birth certificate; the cabochon sapphire ring that Scotch had given her – the only legacy the child would ever have from her birth father – and, most importantly, the blue Picasso pierrot, which Jessie had rolled up with careful fingers and inserted in a sturdy cardboard tube. She had included the Picasso because she was its custodian: Gervaise had entrusted the painting to her for safe keeping, after all. But Jessie had been clever: what if Gervaise dropped her for a more inspirational muse, the way Scotch had done? He might then change his mind, alter his will, and her daughter would never get the Picasso. It was safer to spirit it away here to the home of the child’s foster parents, where Gervaise would never think to look for it.

They made their way towards the front door, Raoul loping beside his mother and craning his neck so that he could get a good look at his new baby sister.

‘What’s she called?’ he asked.

‘She doesn’t have a name yet,’ said Jessie. ‘She’s just “baby”.’

Once inside the house, Madame Reverdy led the way to a sunny kitchen with a floor of warm terracotta tiles and a big range upon which an aromatic stockpot simmered. Beyond the open back door, Jessie could see chickens roaming. A ploughshare lay abandoned in front of a timberbuilt barn, which – to judge by the sounds coming from it – was home to a family of pigs. Troughs of bright geraniums bristled on every windowsill, a cock was crowing loudly from his perch on the half-door of an outbuilding, and a little cat was washing herself on the doorstep. She was the image of the kitty, Purdy, that had slept on Jessie’s pillow every night at home in London.

Two identical little girls sporting pigtails came running across the yard. One carried a baby doll, the other a squirming puppy, and when one of them called out – ‘Maman! Maman! Has our new sister arrived?’ – Jessie knew that she could not have found a better home for her child.

She turned to Madame Reverdy and said: ‘You will take great care of my daughter. I know you will.’

‘But of course, Madame! Look at my bonny lad and lassies, how bursting with good health they are!’

‘She’s called Baby,’ Raoul told his sisters importantly, indicating the bundle.

‘Baby! You mean Baba. You can’t just call her “Baby”.’ The girl gave her brother a disparaging look. ‘Hello, little Baba! I’m Nicole! And this is Dannie—’ Dannie leaned in and made little cooing noises ‘—and this is Cacahuète.’ Nicole held out the puppy, and Baba reached out and wrapped her plump pink fingers around Cacahuète’s tail. ‘Look! They’re friends already!’

Jessie sat down at the kitchen table and fed her daughter for the last time while her new family bustled around her. She bathed her, and changed her napkin, and dressed her in the tiny gown that had been hand-smocked by one of Coco’s seamstresses. She accepted a bowl of vegetable soup and a heel of crusty bread and a cup of milk from Madame, and she watched the girls help their mother wind wool while Raoul trained the puppy to play ‘fetch’.

And then a car horn sounded. Jessie turned to the window to see, at the end of the avenue leading up to the farmhouse, Gervaise at the wheel of the Buick. It was time to go back to Paris.

IN THE FARMHOUSE
kichen, Nana and Lisa talked about the time Lisa had spent there as an infant: about Jessie and Gervaise and the glamorous jazz-age friends who had used to visit the Villa Perdita, and how carefree their lifestyle had been. Nana told Lisa how things had changed since: how Gervaise had become, in effect, a recluse; and how her own fortunes had suffered a setback since Monsieur Reverdy died, leaving her with another child to rear along with the three she had already. It had been tough, she told Lisa, but worth it – especially now that she had grandchildren to dote upon.

‘Can you tell me more about my mother?’ Lisa asked the old lady. ‘I know so little – just that she went missing here in France.’

Nana looked upset. ‘There were rumours of foul play, but I never believed those preposterous stories.’

‘What stories?’

‘Oh, there was talk – stupid, stupid talk – of murder and abduction and all sorts of craziness. She left a shoe, you see – just a single shoe. They said that was symbolic, that she came into his life without shoes, with nothing, and that’s how she left, with nothing but the clothes on her back. When the police questioned me, they asked if I thought that Monsieur Lantier might have had something to do with it – oh! It would have been wicked even to think such a thought.’

He loved her so much he nearly died of grief when she disappeared. He locked himself in the villa for months and barely ate – I used to bring him food. He hoped that maybe your father had come for her, but he knew she would never have left you. Never.’ Nana put her head in her hands and started to cry.

Worried, Lisa rose from the table and went to the door. Outside in the yard, Hélène was scolding a small boy.

‘Hélène!’ she called. ‘Can you help?’

‘What’s the matter?’ Cuffing the child on the ear, Hélène advanced over the cobblestones, teetering a little in her dancing shoes.

‘It’s Nana,’ Lisa told her. ‘I’ve said something to upset her.’

‘What about?’

‘My mother,’ said Lisa, in a low voice. ‘I asked about what happened to her.’

Together they went back into the kitchen. Nana had opened a loose-leafed album, and was turning the pages.

‘Here!’ she said, wiping her eyes on her apron and sliding the album across the table towards Lisa. ‘This is how it was reported, in the local paper.’

DISAPPEARANCE OF LANTIER MUSE

An event near Eden Roc has puzzled local gendarmerie. A woman known as ‘Perdita’, who was resident at the time in the nearby villa of the same name, has gone missing. She was last seen on Thursday evening. Perdita is about 170 cm in height, of slight build with long auburn hair. She is said to have been wearing a silver-coloured dress of the low-waisted ‘flapper’ style with a ‘handkerchief’ hem and is thought to be barefoot. One of her shoes was recovered in the garden of the villa. Perdita is the British model and companion of the artist Gervaise Lantier. She has in the past been known to have suffered amnesia. Please report any sightings to the gendarmerie in Antibes.