Liberty Silk (41 page)

‘And chemicals.’

‘I can nip into town for those. Just write me a list.’

Cat smiled as Orlando ambled over to her and put his head on her lap. ‘The thing is,’ she observed, popping a pretzel into his mouth, ‘Gervaise scares me a little.’

‘But you’ve only met him once!’

Gervaise had joined them for dinner the previous night, and had spent most of the evening looking quizzically at Cat. Lisa had had to take him aside and tell him to stop being so rude.

‘She’s the very spit of you,’ Gervaise had remarked.

‘So what’s to write home about?’ Lisa had retorted. ‘She’s my niece. Good looks run in the family.’

Nobody in Lisa’s circle in Salamander Cove, apart from Raoul, knew that she had had a daughter before becoming Madame Lantier. Nana Reverdy had suspected, Lisa knew, but had never been indiscreet enough to pry. Lisa was sorry that, unlike Nana’s daughters and her
belle-fille
, lovely Hélène, she alone had been unable to give Nana a grandchild.

Now she turned to Cat and said, ‘Don’t be scared of Gervaise, darling. He’s a big softie, really.’ She knew that Gervaise was no such thing, but she would have said anything to make Cat stay. ‘And the Villa Perdita is like a second home to us. Please don’t go back to London just yet. You’re not well enough. You may think you are, but you could relapse. We’ll find a space for you to work in the villa. I’m longing to see your photographs!’

‘I may not want to show them to anyone. They may not be good enough.’

‘Then you can take others! Look around at the loveliness, at the light! It’s what brings artists here.’

Orlando was gazing up at Cat, imploring her to give him another pretzel.

‘Do stay,’ said Raoul. ‘You’re the first cat the dogs haven’t tried to take a bite out of.’

Cat looked at Orlando, then at Raoul, and finally her eyes met Lisa’s.

Lisa suspected that the expression on her face was as abjectly beseeching as the Labrador’s. Between the three of them they must have swung it, because Cat smiled.

‘All right,’ she said with a laugh. ‘Let’s give it a go.’

CAT FISHED WITH
her tongs for the photograph that floated in the dish of developing fluid, and turned it over. This was what she loved the most about the process: from the moment the image began to shimmer into perspective, until the moment when the spectral outline finally took on recognizable human characteristics and – most importantly – a human expression. One more second . . . two . . . There. She rinsed the photograph, dipped it in fixer, rinsed it again, then pegged it up on the line to dry with the rest of the series.

Cyprus had affected Cat to her core. It had expanded her vision, sharpened her focus, and made her realize how narrow and narcissistic was the lifestyle she had embraced in London with its veneer of intellectual sophistication and liberalism. She had laughed at herself, along with the groovier-than-thou students at St Martin’s who had called her an Irish potato head, not understanding that to grow up surrounded by the wild beauty of Connemara was the rarest of privileges. She had dismissed her education at the hands of Benedictine nuns as archaic and irrelevant, unaware that they had cultivated in her the seeds of self-knowledge and the basics of what they called Christianity, and she called empathy. Cyprus had made her see that through the lens of her camera she could share other people’s emotional experiences and convey them to a world which was ignorant of suffering and unwilling to admit that evil flourished in dark places. She could transmit the essence of experience in black and white – both literally and metaphorically – through the medium of her photographs. She had a powerful message to communicate.

When they’d emerged from the tray, the photographs she had taken of the Turkish Cypriots had made her press her hands to her mouth in stupefaction. They had made her weep. In her mind’s eye she revisited Agios Sozomenos, saw the girl draw her scarf over her dead husband’s face, saw again the weathered features of the womenfolk stretched in agony, the grotesque pastiches of pietàs, the dark countenance of inhumanity unmasked. Her photographs were affecting, disturbing, arresting; they were different, and Cat almost loathed herself when she understood how very, very good they were.

Taking a last look at the row of grainy black-and-white ten-by-eights drying on the line above the sink, Cat slid out from behind the heavy blackout curtain that Gervaise had unearthed for her makeshift darkroom and closed the door behind her. She needed a drink.

There was one waiting. On the terrace, the master of the Villa Perdita was sitting in the gloaming, a dog at his feet, a
pichet
and two wine glasses in front of him.

At her approach, he set aside the book he was reading, and took off his spectacles. ‘I thought you could do with an apertif,’ he said, sloshing red into a glass and handing it to her. ‘I always used to need one after a long day in the studio. Now that I don’t spend as much time there, I don’t bother with the excuse.’

‘Why don’t you spend as much time there?’ asked Cat, taking a seat opposite him.

‘I spend more time doing work
en plein air
. I find it liberating, and the landscape’s become as dear and eloquent to me as the faces of loved ones. Besides, my eyesight is beginning to go, and my muse abandoned me years ago.’

‘They say that the worse Monet’s eyesight became, the more his landscapes improved.’

‘His waterlilies got bluer, that’s for sure,’ he said, raising his glass. ‘
Santé
.’

‘
Santé
,’ she echoed, mirroring the gesture.

‘How did your session go?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know whether to say it went very well, or that it was bloody awful.’

‘May I be the judge of that?’

‘The prints won’t be dry until tomorrow.’

‘I can wait. You’re in a hurry, aren’t you?’

‘In what way?’

‘To get on with the things that matter.’ He took a hit of wine, then regarded her with interest. ‘What makes you think your photographs might be bloody awful?’

‘I don’t really. Distressing is a better word.’

‘You took them in Cyprus?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s all you need to say. Let me look at them when they’re ready and I’ll give you an honest assessment. If I think they’re any good, I’ll get in touch with a friend of mine – an editor on a picture desk. You don’t have any scruples about influence, do you?’

‘You mean nepotism?’

‘That’s a big word that means the same thing.’

‘I guess if I have any talent, it’ll be recognized at some stage.’

Gervaise shook his head. ‘It’s not axiomatic—’

‘That’s a big word!’

‘Shut up and listen. What age are you?’

‘Twenty-five.’

‘That’s a lie.’

There was no point in denying it. ‘Yeah. It is.’

‘See? You think you can dupe me with a little swagger. That’s akin to stepping into boots that are too big for you.’

Ouch! He’d succeeded in making her feel small and stupid, and even younger than she really was.

‘Most people your age are egocentric enough to believe that they can get by without help,’ he resumed. ‘It’s an attitude that’s scuppered countless promising careers, and it’s a bad one. To allow someone to help you is a sign of humility. Is that too big a word for you?’

‘No.’

‘Show me your work tomorrow. And if I tell you to work harder, work harder.’

From a stand of pine trees over by the path that led down to the Boat House came a sudden magical, complex trill. Cat’s jaw literally dropped.

‘A nightingale,’ remarked Gervaise, sounding blasé. ‘I can tell by your expression that you’ve never heard one before.’

‘I haven’t. I used to complain about the noise the cuckoo made outside the study room in the boarding school I went to, in Connemara.’

‘Tch tch. Noise pollution is the coming bane of our times. Is that where you learned to take photographs?’

‘Yes. There, and at St Martin’s in London.’

‘Exciting place, London.’

‘I used to think so. It seems vapid now, after Cyprus.’

‘War does that to you. I went through two.’

‘That must have been hard.’

Gervaise shrugged. ‘I partied through the first one and its aftermath. I sobered up sufficiently to take the next one a little more seriously.’

‘You fought in the last war?’

‘I worked for the Resistance.’

In the pinewood, the nightingale began its aria again. Cat listened, rapt, unaware that Gervaise was studying her expression. When she turned to him again, she was smiling.

He returned the smile. ‘Once I would have asked your permission to make a portrait of you.’

‘I have a better idea,’ she said. ‘I’ll make one of you.’

‘That makes a lot more sense.’

Spitting on her hand, Cat extended it to him to shake. His grip was muscular, his fingers firm. It was an honour, she thought, to clasp the hand of such a venerable artist in her own small paw.

The next day Gervaise looked at her work and pronounced it better than good.

‘These photographs can’t have been easy to take,’ he said.

Cat shook her head. She couldn’t speak when she looked at the pictures; her throat constricted and her face went scarlet with emotion.

‘They’re dignified,’ Gervaise said, holding a print at arm’s length. ‘There’s nothing remotely intrusive about them.’

‘We asked permission.’

‘But you didn’t stage-manage them.’

‘Oh, no. No. That would have been unspeakably unethical.’

‘They wouldn’t have worked if you’d tried. You can’t stage-manage calamity.’ He gave the photographs another once-over. ‘The most eloquent artist allows his subject to do the talking for them. Remember that, Cat. These are eloquent pictures. But there’s more to be said, and if you’re set on taking pictures like this, it’s never going to get easier.’

She managed a smile. ‘So I have to work harder?’ she asked.

‘You do. Complacency is a killer. Now, go get your camera.’

‘Does that mean you’re ready for your close-up, Monsieur Lantier?’

‘I’m ready.’

Cat slid the photographs into a manila folder. ‘Where will I shoot you?’ she asked.

‘You’re doing a portrait of the artist. Can you think of any famous ones you’d like to emulate?’

‘Vermeer.
The Painter in his Studio
.’

‘Top marks.’

‘You mean, you’re inviting me into your studio? But you never allow anyone in there!’

‘Who told you that?’

‘All the newspaper reports I’ve ever read have described you as “famously reclusive”.’

‘I am famously reclusive. I haven’t allowed anyone apart from your . . . aunt into my studio for nearly four decades. Just think – you can sell the picture to some rag for a small fortune.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of doing that!’ protested Cat.

‘Why not?’ returned an insouciant Gervaise. ‘I would.’

Cat made portraits of her new mentor and of Lisa and Raoul and Orlando. She was invited to lunch in the farm where Lisa had spent the first years of her childhood, and there she took photographs of the entire Reverdy family; babies and adults and – as they were called in Connemara – auld wans. She visited the
marché provençale
in Antibes and photographed the buyers and sellers, and the produce piled high on stalls. Further along the coast she photographed the trendy, the jaded, the beauties and the beasts in St-Tropez and the sad hopeful girls on the Croisette in Cannes.

She had just started experimenting with landscape when she got word from a picture editor in
National Geographic
magazine to say that they were interested in buying some of her photographs, and were thinking about commissioning more.

WHEN WORD CAME
that Cat was to have her photographs published – in
National Geographic
, no less! – Lisa felt a mixture of emotions. She felt buoyant with pride and giddy with excitement for her daughter, and yet she was heartsick at the prospect of her departure. Her heart grew sicker still when Cat told her where she was heading next.

‘The Congo!’ she said. ‘You can’t possibly
think
of going there! Haven’t you heard the news stories?’

But nothing Lisa said could dissuade her. She sat in the living room of the Boat House listening with her head in her hands while Cat discussed her itinerary over the telephone in the hall; she watched as Cat and Raoul pored over an atlas murmuring a litany of place names – Owando, Komono, Impfondo; her stomach lurched when she sneaked a look at the checklist Cat was compiling – Swiss Army knife, whistle, hand-crank radio – and she could do nothing to stop the tears coming when Cat asked her for a pair of sewing shears so that she could cut off all her hair.

‘It’ll be hot where I’m going – I don’t want that great unruly mess sitting on top of my head like a tea cosy, ramping up my body temperature and getting in my face,’ she said with breathtaking pragmatism as she hacked off a thick pigtail.

Lisa escaped to the Villa Perdita to seek solace from all the travel plans in the company of Gervaise, but he wasn’t there. She went instead to the library, to try to find refuge in a book. She and Raoul treated the place like their very own public lending library: if they’d had to pay overdue fines they would have owed Gervaise a fortune by now. She had spent many hours of her spare time over the years contentedly cataloguing volume upon volume for him, with a diligence born of the respect that David Niven had instilled in her for books.

Gervaise’s collection was a bibliophile’s utopia, part of the very fabric of the Villa Perdita. Lisa remembered the libraries in some of the Hollywood mansions she’d visited, where books had been bought by the yard; shelf upon shelf of tooled Morocco leather tomes dusted religiously every week by some hapless maid, but never opened, let alone read.

If Cat was hellbent on travelling to Africa, Lisa supposed that she ought to bone up a little on the continent. She helped herself to a copy of Joy Adamson’s uplifting
Born Free
, and Karen Blixen’s elegiac
Out of Africa
. Running her hand along the aligned titles on a row further down, she also selected a slim hardback. The cover was patterned with a design of copra half-shells, beautiful concentric circles of ochre, black and grey.
A Tahitian Journal by Patrick Lawless
, she read,
With Wood-Engravings by an Artist
. On the flyleaf was written – in a fine, copperplate hand – ‘Memories of Raguenez’.