Liberty Silk (49 page)

Ghislaine followed Cat’s eyeline. ‘You can have
that
now,’ she said, pulling the gown off its hanger and bundling it into Cat’s arms. ‘I’m sure you’ll be quite the belle of the ball at your little provincial “hops”.’

‘Thanks, Ghislaine,’ said Cat. ‘Top of the morning, and
póg mo thóin
.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ said Ghislaine.

‘It’s Irish for “’Twas a pleasure doing business with you.”’

And with that, Cat turned on her heel and strode out through the door.

Behind her, she heard Nick’s low laugh.

They made for the beach below, and by the time they reached the bottom of the steps that led there, Nick was still laughing.

‘
Póg mo thóin!
’ he crowed, slinging an arm over Cat’s shoulders. ‘It means “kiss my ass” in Irish, doesn’t it?’

‘Yep,’ said Cat. ‘Ha! I trust Ghislaine doesn’t suffer from coulrophobia if she’s going to live with that Picasso on her wall.’

‘What’s “coulrophobia”?’

‘It’s the technical term for an irrational fear of clowns,’ Cat told him. ‘I’ve always suffered from it. My best friend used to sellotape pictures of them on the wall above my bed in the dorm in Kylemore, just to freak me out.’

‘What if it hadn’t been a clown? What if it had been one of Picasso’s blue ballerinas instead? Would there have been a problem then?’

‘I’d still have done the deal. Those two Lantier portraits mean more to me than any masterwork.’

‘It could have fetched you a cool million or so.’

Cat shrugged. ‘I’d prefer to make my own money, in my own way. Both my mother and my grandmother lived off men. I live on my wits.’

‘I’d say they had plenty of wits about them too, those old gals. It was a man’s world in those days. If they hadn’t had men to support them, they’d have had a tough time of it.’

Cat took in a deep breath of sea air. How she’d love to strip off and swim! But there was lunch waiting and a journey to be made and she didn’t want to delay the final stage of their quest.

‘Let’s have a paddle, to cool down,’ she suggested instead.

She kicked off her sandals and walked towards the sea, loving the feel of the sand between her toes.

‘I bet Madame Lantier will never paddle here,’ she said, as Nick joined her. ‘She’ll probably sell the villa Perdita.’

They walked through the water in silence for several moments, and then Nick said: ‘You know the way you wouldn’t call yourself a girly girl?’

‘I do.’

‘Then why insist on having all those dresses and stuff sent over to you? There’s hardly room for them in the house in Connemara, and you told me that whenever you moved flats in London all you took with you was a duvet and a backpack. You’re not the type to accumulate gear like that. What’ll you do when wanderlust sets in?’

‘That wardrobe belonged to my mother,
ergo
the clothes belong to me. I want to visualize her in them, and imagine how she felt when she wore them. I want to photograph them. I might even want to make a book of them. And when I’m done, I’ll invite Mam to take whatever she wants, and I’ll donate the rest to the V&A. I think Lisa would be pleased by that.’

As she strolled through the scalloped shallows, hand in hand with Nick, Cat felt as though she were walking in her mother’s footsteps; her grandmother’s too. She smiled as she pictured Lisa and Jessie before her doing the very same thing – perhaps even wearing the very same hat, gazing out towards the horizon to where sea met sky in an infinite, matchless blue haze.

‘Besides,’ she added with a laugh, ‘I couldn’t bear the idea of Ghislaine Lantier strutting her stuff in my mother’s vintage Balenciaga.’

Later, while Nick and Raoul pored over a map to work out details of their itinerary, Cat made her way to the graveyard again. There was one final thing to be done. Hunkering down by the side of Lisa’s grave, she unclasped a fine silver chain from around her neck. Then she scraped a hole in the earth with her fingers, and, sliding the little Egyptian charm from the chain, buried it as a gardener might plant a seed or the bulb of a flower.

‘Anubis will help you, Lisa. You mustn’t be afraid,’ she said. ‘Sleep tight.’

They travelled south in the Citroën to Italy, retracing the route travelled half a century ago by Jessie and Scotch. In Florence, they booked into the Pensione Balestri where the honeymooners had stayed, and where Scotch had drawn the view from their window in his sketchbook of the River Arno and the Ponte Vecchio.

They had lunch at the ‘swagger’ restaurant on the Piazza Repubblica where birthday tea and cakes had been taken (Cat and Nick had a couple of beers instead), they visited a Franciscan monastery high in the hills of Certosa and sampled the liquor, as their predecessors had. In the shop where Jessie had undoubtedly bought the book she’d given Scotch, the one she’d inscribed with a love poem, Cat bought Nick a leather-bound sketchbook to write in, copying into it a poem by Yeats.

They travelled to Siena, where they visited the palace that had been owned by the old countess Bandini, and where the newly-weds had met the mysterious Greek count and his pretty charge, and then on to San Gimignano, Venice, Padua, Verona, Chambéry, Paris; Nick all the time writing in his beautiful book, Cat with her Leica permanently loaded, making – as her grandparents had done – a record of their own love story.

TOWARDS THE END
of the summer, on a grey and windy day in September, Cat de Courcy and Nick Ryder arrived at the final destination on their itinerary: Pont-Aven – the
cité des peintres
in Finistère, north Brittany.

They pulled up outside the Hôtel Simonet, on the rue Gauguin. The
auberge
where her grandparents had spent the final night of their honeymoon was now derelict. Cat had been told, when she’d made her enquiries, to call on the daughter of the ex-proprietress, Mme Simonet, who lived opposite, and who still held a key. When Cat had mentioned she was on a sentimental journey, Madame had declared that she would be delighted to grant her access to the old hotel.

‘Do you fancy a swim, once we’re through here?’ Cat asked, turning to Nick and lighting up a Gitane.

‘At Raguenez?’

‘At Raguenez.’ She smiled at him.

‘Full circle.’

‘Full circle. Funny, isn’t it, to think that my grandmother was pregnant when she swam that day, just like me.’

‘What?’

‘Oh, it’s too hilarious! The look on your face!’

‘Hang on. What are you saying? Are you telling me you’re pregnant?’

Cat gave him the benefit of her most catlike smile.

‘
Are
you pregnant, Cat? Jesus – this is – wow!’

‘Calm down, Nick! Stop having kittens. Yes, I am pregnant.’

‘You!’ Nick crowed. ‘You’re the one who’s having kittens! My little Cat’s going to have a baby! Oh – I love it already! I love you two!’

‘Two? Just one kitten. I hope. One kitten’s portable. Two means we might have to start behaving like grown-ups with a house and a garden and everything, like the parents in
Janet and John
.’

Nick snatched the cigarette from her, chucked it onto the side of the road, then took her in his arms and kissed her again – a prolonged one, this time. When he broke the kiss, he laid his hands on her belly and said: ‘I will be the best daddy you could ever wish for. I will write stories for our baby. Adventure stories. I will climb mountains with our baby and dive the depths of the seas and cross deserts and sail through skies in a rainbow-coloured balloon and journey to the centre of the earth to slay dragons.’

‘Ah,’ said Cat. ‘But will you forsake all others, and love and honour me, the baby’s mother?’

‘I already love and honour you,’ he said, ‘and I forsook all others the day I saw you dancing through a war zone.’

‘
Bonjour
.’

‘Oh!
Bonjour
.’ Cat turned to see an elderly lady, birdlike and brown as a berry, approaching.

Swinging her legs out of the passenger seat, she went to introduce herself. ‘Madame Simonet?’

‘
Oui
.’

‘I’m pleased to meet you. I’m Cat de Courcy.’

‘You are most welcome. This is your husband?’

‘No, he’s my—’

‘I plan on being her husband some day, Madame,’ said Nick, with a smile, ‘if she’ll have me. In the meantime, I’m just her chauffeur.’

‘You’re dismissed, for now, Ryder,’ said Cat. ‘Pick me up in an hour.’

‘Sure thing, ma’am.’ Nick saluted the mother of his child, then put the Citroën in gear and took off down the street.

‘Are you artists?’ asked Madame Simonet, pulling a bunch of keys from her pocket, and selecting one.

‘I’m a photographer.’

‘Many famous artists stayed here in Pont-Aven, in this very hotel,’ said Madame. ‘They still come, for they say that the light reflected by the sea is incomparable. It was the favourite place of Gauguin, before he went to Polynesia. He called it “Little Tahiti”.’

Cat smiled, and followed Madame to the steps of the old hotel.

‘It is to be pulled down soon,’ Madame told her. ‘They are going to build a new, smart hotel here, with a swimming pool. A swimming pool – imagine! Who would want to swim in a pool when we have the sea on our doorstep, and miles of beautiful golden beaches?’

She inserted a key in the lock with clumsy fingers and twisted, but nothing happened.

‘Let me try,’ said Cat, taking the key from Madame. It was of heavy wrought iron, and when Cat tried the mechanism, it was clear that it had not been oiled for some time. When she finally succeeded in turning the handle, the door wouldn’t budge.

‘The timber has swollen,’ observed Madame. ‘Use your shoulder.’

‘I don’t like to force it,’ said Cat. ‘It feels disrespectful, somehow.’

Madame shrugged. ‘The developers will have no qualms about forcing it.’

‘I suppose you’re right.’

Cat shoved, twice. The door gave way on to a dilapidated hallway that smelt of must and damp.

‘Do you mind if I explore?’ asked Cat.

‘Not at all. Be my guest. I shall wait for you here on the bench and take my ease. You take your time, Mademoiselle.’

Cat stepped across the threshold.

It took some time for her eyes to become accustomed to the dim interior. The hallway had a pleasing shape, with an odd crooked staircase that led to the upper floors. Cat wandered from room to abandoned room. There was something slightly unsettling about the atmosphere of the place – something expectant, as if the ghosts of her grandparents had been waiting all this time for her to turn up. In the dining room there were tables still, with bentwood chairs upturned upon them. In the sitting room an old upright mahogany piano stood, with yellowed ivory keys, the once rich patina mapped with scars and cobwebs. In one bedroom she found an old leather hatbox; in another, a shaving brush; in yet another, a tea dress of faded artificial silk hung limply on a peg in a wardrobe.

People had
lived
here once, in these rooms! They had eaten and slept and laughed and cried; they had danced and sung and painted pictures and told stories. They had argued and celebrated and got drunk. They had conceived babies, and given birth to babies, and they had got old and sick and died. Because that was the rowdy way of the world.

In a room on the top floor Cat paused to admire the vista beyond the window – and felt an electrifying frisson when she recognized it as a view that her grandfather had once sketched. This room – with its peeling paintwork and creaky floorboards and rusty fireplace surmounted by a mantelpiece of curlicued wood – the mirror of which was flyblown and cracked – this room was where her grandparents had lived! This was where a young, newly-wed Jessie would have washed, dressed and arranged her hair; inspected her face, regarded herself curiously in the glass: striking poses, maybe – smiling, frowning, wondering what her future might be, expecting it to be happy. Cat stood in front of the looking glass and pictured her grandmother there, gazing back at her through time and space, wishing her well.

She turned to where light flooded into the room above the window seat. Brushing dust from the sun-bleached wood, she sat down upon it, took her grandfather’s sketchbook from her camera bag, and started to leaf through its pages. There it was – the very same view – the last sketch in the book! There was the vista of terracotta rooftops, with pigeons perched on chimneypots and a cloudless sky above. It felt a little spooky to realize that this was exactly where Scotch had worked with his sketchbook on his lap, sitting just as she was sitting now.

Below her on the street a gaggle of women was gossiping. They fell silent as a much younger woman sauntered past them wearing a miniskirt and a halter-necked top, and sent poisonous looks in her direction before resuming their tittle-tattle.

Cat opened the casement. A gust of wind burst through. She pushed her hair back from her face, then she took her Leica out of its case, selected a lens, knelt up on the window seat and adjusted the focus. The camera made its familiar purring, clicking sounds – four, five, six times. As she readied herself for the seventh shot, something happened that told her it was The One. The clouds shifted momentarily, and the sky to the north – where the sea was, and the sands of Raguenez – was afire suddenly, strafed with sunburst. Purr, click!

Cat remained kneeling there with the sketchbook between her hands for several minutes until a sudden fierce blast of wind swept through the window, and sent the pages turning in a flurry.

My true-love hath my heart, & I have his,

By just exchange one for the other given:

I hold his dear, & mine he cannot miss.

There never was a better bargain driven

My true-love hath my heart, & I have his.

Cat put her camera back in its case, and as she passed the open bedroom doors on her way down the stairs, she bade each of the former tenants
adieu
. It felt comforting to say goodbye to ghosts.

Downstairs, by the front door step, Madame Simonet was waiting for her.

‘You have finished your quest?’ the old woman asked.