The Memory of Scent (22 page)

The three rooms they all occupy are more pleasant than the Rue Poteau apartment and the general atmosphere is very lively as the building is home to several artists. However, Maria looks exhausted.

‘Would you believe my mother is now absolutely intent on trying to find me a husband? The pressure is unbearable.’

‘I think she just worries about you.’

‘You mean she worries about herself.’

‘Has she any candidates in mind?’

‘Don’t laugh, but she’s convinced Henri could be the one.’

‘Hmmm, you and Lautrec, I’m not so sure about that. Can you imagine how short your children would be?’

She flicks a cloth at me in mock annoyance.

‘He is being so odd with me these days. I think he’s a little jealous that so much of my time is being taken up.’

‘Never mind him. What about your drawing? You must be building up a nice collection by now.’

‘It’s funny. I now have a lot more space to draw and a lot less time.’

Maria lifts Maurice from my arms as he is beginning to get restless.

‘I have to get back to modelling as soon as possible to bring some money in. I’ve been doing a little. I look at the new art schools springing up and those wealthy young ladies with all the leisure time in the world to indulge in painting, and I can’t tell you how maddening it is. It just isn’t fair.’

She rocks Maurice and stirs a pot with a large wooden spoon at the same time.

‘Come May when the Salon opens again, we must go and take a look at Puvis de Chavanne’s painting,
The Sacred Wood
. That large one I modelled for. Took forever, but at least he is helping me with my rent.’

I quickly glance at Maurice. Maria had spent a lot of time with Puvis at his studio in Neuilly and fell pregnant not long after. But Puvis must be at least thirty, maybe forty years older than her. Then again, Maria had also been spending a lot of time in the company of a handsome, swarthy man, whose particular talent was a mesmerising, traditional candle dance that he performed at the Chat Noir. I was dragged along and could not understand Maria’s newly discovered
fascination with candle dancing, until I too watched him. But suddenly, he was gone, off travelling around other parts of Europe and little else was spoken of him. If my friend remains unconcerned about Maurice’s parentage, then it is pointless me wasting my time in speculation.

Maria is now walking around the room speaking in a very animated way while swinging Maurice as he lies on his tummy across her arms.

‘Have you come across Seurat yet? Or Redon? They are doing incredible things with colour and form. It is thrilling.’

‘Maria, look, Maurice has fallen asleep again.’

‘Oh, thank God.’ She tucks him into his cradle. ‘Now
Maman
will probably come crashing in with her brandy breath and wake him up.’

Maria stokes the fire and closes the stove door. She then reaches for a bottle of wine and two glasses.

‘It’s all so exhausting. I’d love to just escape.’

‘Wine and Hashish, Baudelaire apparently swore by it. Was that to escape or to become an exalted version of yourself? I can’t remember.’

‘Wine will do, unless you happen to have an opium pipe on you.’

I pat myself down and shrug.

‘It will be fine. I’ll tour the cafés and the dance-halls as soon as I get a bit more strength, then I’m back to my drawing. I’ll produce some masterpieces. I’ll become the darling of the
Salon
and live in a magnificent and obscenely large apartment somewhere in the seventeenth arrondissement with an enormous studio just on the other side of the hall.’

‘What you need is to sleep. Do that while Maurice is asleep, otherwise you will look like the walking dead, and that is not a good look for a girl on the prowl for a husband.’

‘It’s my mother who is on the prowl for a husband, not me.’

A large folder rests near my elbow. I flick it open. There are only a couple of drawings in it: a self-portrait in pastel and a charcoal drawing of her mother in profile.

‘Maria, where are all the drawings you showed me before?’

My friend is suddenly transfixed by the light of the stove.

‘Maria?’ She continues to stare, then shudders a little.

‘It was some time in early January, Maurice was only a few days old and the snow … it seemed as if it would never stop. The baby was turning purple because he was so cold and there’s only so much warmth both of us can get from one shawl. The thing is, I had burned everything that could be burned. Almost everything.’

She gives her battered folder a little nudge. ‘Except some of this. I tossed them, one by one, into the fire.’

I am not sure if I am more struck by her foolishness, or stunned by her selflessness. In that moment, she had condemned herself to a life of drudgery and struggle. As if those sketches would only taunt her, only remind her of unfulfilled ambition.

‘When I came to these final two, I stopped myself. It’s hard to explain. I signed one of them “Suzanne V” and in a way, with that new signature, I was dedicating myself to the life of an artist. I watched my work disappear into ash and made myself that promise.’

She smiles, almost apologetically, but I feel consumed in a wave of admiration for her. This beautiful, talented, committed young woman, only slightly younger than I am, she has made a declaration, quietly and without fuss. I get up from my chair. I must go and find my mother.

* * *

With blood pounding in my head, so vividly I can almost taste it, I doggedly traipse through the city until I am standing in front of the formidable sprawl of a building, the place that is nicknamed, ‘Pox-victims Bastille’. They refuse to allow me entry and I am firmly rebuffed by the guard at the door. Peering through the fence of the large exercise yard, I’m sure I must soon be able to see some of the patients who are brought out for fresh air in the morning. I am determined to be there from the moment their daily routine begins until their day draws to an end so that I might catch a glimpse of my mother. There is nothing for it but to tuck myself tightly into the corner of a doorway. I fasten every button on my jacket and pull my woollen shawl around me and try to sleep.

The forceful nudge of the large wooden door jolts me awake. The guard, on realising that I am the impediment to the execution of his normal morning routine, shouts at me and tries to haul me up from the ground, which he is perfectly within his rights to do. I do, however, find myself screaming furiously that I am not going to move until I see my mother. He clasps his large hand easily around my arm and pulls me up and away from the doorway. I try to soften my tone. He must deal with mad women every day and even in my anxiety, I realise that reason will be best served here. But it is too late. All that is in front of him, as far as he is concerned, is an annoyance and a hindrance. He brushes past hard against my shoulder as if brute force will shatter me into particles that the wind will carry off.

‘Please, I only need a few minutes.’

My pleading may be that of a hungry alley cat for all the humanity that he is displaying. A man steps around us briskly, but then stops and turns to look back.

‘Fleur?’

The guard shoves me a little towards the man.

‘You know her! Then get her away from here.’

I raise my hand to shield my eyes from the sharp morning sun and try to determine who is speaking.

‘Fleur. It’s me, Gaston, George’s friend. Leave her. I’ve got her.’

On seeing him, I am suddenly aware of feeling embarrassed. He folds me into his side, covering me slightly with his coat and eases me across to the other side of the road.

‘Come, we’ll go into this café.’

He finds a small corner table by the window and sits me down while ordering two brandies. In the warmth of the café and the purposeful intent of people going about their everyday business, and the dishevelled reflection that I realise must be me, I shake my head – no my entire being – as if trying to jolt myself from a bad dream. The drinks are quickly delivered and I cup both hands around the bulbous glass.

‘I’m sorry, look at the state of my nails.’

I gulp down the brandy and Gaston clicks for another immediately.

‘Fleur, how did you get like this? You look in such a dreadful state.’

The brandy just adds to the layer of fog in my mind. Nothing feels vivid.

‘Gaston, I’ve made a terrible mistake. I thought I was helping my mother, she is very ill, and now I’ve condemned her to that hell over there.’

He glances over towards the imposing building.

‘I don’t know what to do. I need to get her out of there. She will die.’

‘Fleur, you will destroy your own health by hanging around there. You’re freezing and you look terrible. And
when did you last have a decent meal?’

This makes me smile. ‘I had some meringue, was it two, maybe three days ago?’

‘Let me get you some food.’

And soon, before me, there is coffee and breads and mackerel and cheese. A desperate combination of sustenance, some of which he clearly hopes I will pick at. And I do. And it feels good to have different tastes on my tongue and soon the layers of fog dissipate and there is a clearing.

‘Are you feeling a little better?’

I nod sheepishly. For the first time, Gaston sits back in his chair, in the relaxed attitude more befitting of a coffee and small meal between friends. As he reclines, I am aware of how fresh smelling he is, as if he has just bathed in a tub of warm milk infused with vanilla. Everything about me, by contrast, is crusted and caked. My hair hangs in lank twists. The smell of my body evaporates through my damp clothes, but Gaston is pretending not to notice.

‘Glad to be of help, at least to someone, because George is not paying any attention to me or to anything.’

George. A piece of bread seems to have become drier and harder to swallow at the sound of George’s name. My mind is now clear enough to feign a detached interest in Gaston’s difficulty with his friend. Maybe I can even be of help.

‘Is he being obstinate about something?’

‘Someone, more likely. I have warned him it will end badly, but he is blinded. He thinks it is love, but it is more obsession, or, you’re right, obstinacy.’

I indicate a ‘carry on’ signal with my raised fork, for in truth, I seem to have lost the ability to formulate actual words.

‘They both must know the ways of the world, and setting her up in a nice apartment in Paris, then ensuring he has lots
of business to conduct here … well, that should be how it’s done.’ Gaston cuts into something on his plate, I am unsure what. ‘I’ve said to him, you know, pointed it out, that his great-aunt Eugenie, the one who bequeathed the property to her direct descendants, enormous portrait hanging on the first landing and all that, well even though she’s long dead, her opinions still hold a lot of sway, and she was the one who practically invented the class system.’

I am digesting and shamefully relishing the dilemma as it unfolds.

‘So she is not suitable for George then, do you think?’

He leans forward, both hands now clasped.

‘Of course she is beautiful, well so he expounds elaborately and effusively. The more he drinks, the more divine this creature becomes, but the Barrés would not countenance their lineage being sullied by a … a courtesan.’

I gasp and lower my fork.

‘I have been trying to state the obvious to him, that the inheritance is through the mother’s line and his father does not have a healthy enough income to maintain the estate, that unless he wants to toss his mother out into some cobbler’s cottage, he is going to have to do what he has been raised to do. This interlude here in Paris … I said to him to consider himself merely a soldier on furlough and his regiment is now calling him back to duty.’

He swirls what remains of the cognac in his glass.

‘And Adèle is a beautiful, accomplished girl, so all is not lost.’

‘Adèle?’

‘George is being dismissive of her because she is his cousin, but it’s so far removed it hardly counts. He knows she was being groomed for him. It is a pickle of a situation. He can’t see past Babette, bless him.’

‘Babette? Her name is Babette?’

‘That’s right!’ He thumps the table. ‘Of course, I forget that you all had that intrigue and caper. The – what was it – the dead painter and evaporation of the model into thin air? Forgot that.’

‘She was in prison. She went home. We, George and I, we went to the prison and we were told that.’

‘Yes, that whole prison episode, apparently it was down to an over-zealous policeman who was trying to inflate his quotas for the incarceration of undesirables and vagrants and the unregistered. Several were released when it was discovered. But she did end up in a brothel, one of the better ones mind you. My own uncle is rather partial to it.’

‘He met her at a brothel?’

‘No, no. Some other story behind it. God knows. But he is that stubborn, it didn’t change anything when he found out. I am telling you, this is not going to end well.’

I can only stare out of the window. I am lost for any kind of rejoinder: humorous, shocked, observational. There is nothing. I have been struck as if dumb.

‘Fleur’, he follows my gaze. ‘Perhaps your mother needs to be over there. Maybe it’s for her own good.’

I stand up with such ferocity that my chair scrapes loudly back on the wooden floor.

‘I thank you for your generous drink, for your kindness, for the food, but I will also thank you to keep your opinions to yourself. I know my mother. I know what’s best for her, and over there …’ I emphasise by jabbing angrily at the window, ‘over there is not it.’

Gulping down the last drop of brandy, I march out the door glancing briefly back at Gaston. He looks utterly bewildered.

* * *

It is numbing how quickly you can lose your sense of dignity. I have a doorway corner that is becoming so familiar to me that I know how best to angle my head against the ridges of the wood. Last night, I actually wept because I did not take enough care with the cobweb that had been delicately embroidered above the hinges, and I tore it asunder with one careless sweep of my arm. I felt as if I had committed an act of murder. I felt as if a close friend had died. I felt as if I had betrayed something, some code of conduct that only the street dweller understands.