The Memory of Scent (23 page)

Babette and me. Two paint splodges, one painter’s bristled brush. We bleed each others hues and splatter on his canvas. Visceral daubings. When I close my eyes, we are swirling pigments of blues and yellows, then he slashes through us with his palette knife and renders us green. Each night I dream of green; at first meadow fresh where daisies bob, then battered and storm-sliced, then moulding and putrid. And in that green decay, I have lost Babette. I have lost me. We are neither of us.

The rim of the wood indents me, and prods me daily to reluctant wakefulness, at least partially so. Slowly, as each grain of dirt and grime cloaks my skin, I become encased and it’s almost comforting. You cannot scrape at me; I am numb I tell you. I am not even sure my blood is still flowing. I cut myself, deeply, just to reassure myself that I could still feel, but as I stared blankly at the deep crimson forking down towards my fingers, it proved nothing.

And people move around me, and I am this detached nothingness. Is it my blackness? I shouldn’t look them in the eye. I am a dark pit that the kindest of them might tumble into, and be consumed.

She is not suffering – that fat woman with the brown stumps of teeth. She sits in that doorway as she earnestly de-fleas a cat that she had locked between her legs. It is a hateful cat. It spits and snarls. She should fling it against the wall so we could both watch it slide down into a crumpled, gut-spilled heap.

Shuffle. Shuffle. Slush shuffle. More cloth to bind my boots. Hunched. ‘Straight back.’ If she could see me now, she would be cross. ‘Stand up straight.’ But she can’t. And I can’t see her. ‘Straight back’, she shouted once when I was younger and flailing, and I straightened it immediately, and what she meant was, ‘No dawdling’. A snatch. I am filled with snatches of recall. Tobacco whirls, tapping cane. Her sewing in the garden. Then rough hands, hands that were trusted but then betrayed. Snatches, like a slightly cracked window into a stuffy room.

Almost extinguished, edge-singed and then new-born scream, and life was something vital again. It pulsed before me and was briefly sweet.

Clawing. Clawing. Maggot earth.

Would anyone notice if I faded? I want to. I am beyond consolation. Day to night, night to day again. It will be a release.

‘Fleur. Fleur.’

Stop shaking me. Leave me be.

‘Fleur.’

I look up. A shimmering spectre dotted by sun-spots leaks through my splayed fingers. He leans down, another figure standing solidly behind him.

‘Fleur, it’s me. It’s George.’

It’s George. George. I think I smile. I feel hands under my arm-pits and I am on my feet. Gaston vigorously rubs my
shoulders and arms. I turn to the fence of the hospital yard.

‘I’m waiting for my mother.’

‘Fleur, listen to me. Gaston’s uncle is an influential doctor. He will take care of your mother.’ He indicates to his coat pocket. ‘I can get her released. I have papers. I’ll go speak to them.’

Something stirs me to wakefulness. I watch as George goes into the building. I am in no state to be seen in official company. I imagine him speaking sternly to the grumpy, sweating man with a large bunch of keys who will be sitting in a squalid cluttered office. He will probably ask George to follow him down long corridors through wailing and hollow-eyed stares. The guard will scan the dozens and dozens of ragged gowns and grimy bonnets until his eyes fall on the slight figure of my mother who is probably standing all alone, perhaps rocking herself. I have watched as they do this on their morning exercises. I have begun to do it myself. I am afraid to breathe. Gaston stands further back. As both of us staring at the door, George returns with a smile.

‘It is done. She needs to be looked over first and some paperwork must be completed but we can come back for her.’

I hear soft, stuttering sobs that melt into a seamless weep. I realise it is me. I feel relief. I feel.

* * *

Dr Philippe’s office has shelves and shelves of books. There are marble busts on plinths and the red walls are hung with several large paintings. His huge oak desk dominates the centre of the room and there are plump leather chairs with brass studs and a patterned chaise-longue with a matching large pillow, smaller pillow and bolster stacked against the head of it. I sit waiting while
Maman
dresses behind the screen. Dr Philippe
pours water from a jug into a bowl, then taps his hands dry on a white linen towel. Long, bony but delicate fingers.

‘That, Mademoiselle, is for the study of phrenology.’

I have been staring at a white ceramic head, sectioned off into numbers and words. He motions me over to the velvet-draped plinth where it is resting like a guillotined trophy.

‘The head is divided up into twenty-seven different sections or brain organs. See this section, section four. That is a person’s instinct for self-defence and courage. Number nine: vanity, ambition, love of glory. Number twelve: the sense of places, of space proportions, of time. Number thirteen: the memory of people, the sense of people. Number eleven: the memory of facts, the memory of things. Look here at number five: even the propensity for committing murder. Everything is mapped out in the bumps of a person’s head.’

He steps close to me and takes both sides of my head in the palms of his hands. I stare up into his grey eyes as he concentrates, feeling the shape of my skull, tracing it with his thumbs and fingers. He slowly tilts it back. For a few seconds, it is almost as though he is going to kiss me. His hands spring away.

‘Ah, Madame Delphy, come sit down here.’ He pats the back of the chair and takes his seat behind his desk.

‘Madame, I’m going to give you a potassium tartrate of iron pills, and I recommend this oak bark. I shall also prescribe an ointment to be applied three times daily. Fleur will you be able to oversee all this?’

I nod obediently.

‘We’ll hold off on the opium until I can monitor you some more and in the meantime, plenty of fresh air, preferably sea air if you can manage it.’

‘Thank you so much doctor, I really …’

‘Now your turn, Mademoiselle. Mademoiselle, I need you to concentrate. I don’t like the sound of that rattle in your chest. You’ll need all your strength to take care of your mother. I want you to wrap up warm, take plenty of ginger and make up a warm poultice of garlic and onion which you need to apply to your throat. George tells me he has arranged for you both to stay in the country to recuperate and I think that’s a good idea. Come back to me in six weeks, unless there are any dramatic developments in the meantime.’

My mother rises slowly to her feet. She seems to have little notion of where she is, but still manages a small, gracious curtsey to the gentleman who is being so kind to her. Dr Philippe holds the door open for us as we leave.

* * *

The country is very still. When you are hemmed by buildings and funnelled down streets, sometimes you forget to just be still and breathe. When you are in a city, you live life in a clatter of trams and trains and talk. It is so easy to lose yourself in all the busyness. But here, as I pick my way through a light mottled forest and listen for the crack of twig underfoot, I feel as if I am in the centre of the world, both fortified and freed, a delicate branch at the top of the highest tree, decorated in cloud wisps.

These past few days have been restorative. The first nights here before my fever broke, were sweat drenched as strange and violent dreams hacked through me. But now, I am flooded with calm, as surely as if I had been flushed through with the purest of spring water. Anything rancid and fetid has somehow been dislodged from within me and even my
lungs have responded with glorious, chest-swelling exhilaration. I take a deep breath.

Walking with George has helped. Trying to frame Babette, the patchouli girl, within some sort of narrative has been difficult. I am doing my best to feign astonishment and delight for George. With my new clarity of thought, I am well aware, however, that my honest instinct is to wish grim things would befall her, leaving George and I in unimpeded bliss. But that was never meant to be. So I was not entirely disappointed when I heard that she had been feeling a little unwell and unable to join us.

‘After all my effort, George! I shouldn’t have just waited around and presumed a beautiful young woman like Babette, would have been blown into your path somehow.’

‘You could have knocked me over with a feather when everything dawned on me. You have no idea, Fleur.’

I am slightly derailed by his reference to a feather. It saddens me that he didn’t say it knowingly, that it didn’t resonate with him in the same way it did with me, that a feather was his introduction one afternoon at the Café Guerbois and already it served as no point of reference for him. He clearly has no memory of it.

‘Fleur, you could have died from exposure through sheer stubbornness if Gaston hadn’t stumbled across you.’

I shrug. I am feeling foolish. I would like to think I had taken a principled stance whereas what I know is that I had arrived at a complete point of abdication. It was a withdrawal. I was beyond reach. Beyond compassion. I cannot fathom it. That fragility has left me, as I walk, arm linked, his hunting tweeds damp and smelling of tobacco.

‘My family has cut me off, and I am now struggling a little.’

George has not yet volunteered the information about
Babette’s occupation, but I am certain that this is the source of his family’s ultimatum.

‘I am sure ultimately, my family’s innate decency will win through. They must know that the preservation of a rather grand set of walls, should not trump a person’s happiness.’

‘Are they fond of Babette?’

He grins and squeezes my arm. ‘How could they not be? She will triumph in the end, through all the obstacles. I can promise you that.’

‘George, Gaston spoke a little of this. There does seem to be a lot at stake here, and there must be a certain amount of sympathy for your family’s … concern.’

‘Babette is feeling enormous regret about it all. But she is convinced we will get through this. She does have a little inheritance, money put aside for herself and her sisters, and has offered to try to raise a loan against it, which I will not allow.’

I am sure that Babette has been shrewd and has accumulated assets. There must be jewellery, and furnishings and probably trunk loads of clothes that she would be unable to get through in a lifetime. George seems deflated, world weary. I would pawn my last possession for him.

‘And what about her family?’

‘Yes, some type of falling out. But she feels now, though it fills her with horror, that she should go and visit them. There is an older sister with a child that she especially dreads thinking of, but one day there should be a troop of little cousins running around, so bridges do need to be mended. Her family are getting impatient with letters and have been instructing her to come back. Her father, apparently, never got over the shock of having two daughters and no sons, so he seems indifferent by all accounts.’

Family ties, they can be so difficult.
Maman
, like me, has been enjoying walks in the fresh air, especially in the garden. Her health is improving, but her mind? Her minds hangs together as delicately as a cobweb. She is very confused. She keeps asking after my father. Then in the evening, she sits by the fire, calmly engaged in the act of sewing, her graceful fingers tugging at invisible threads and wrestling imaginary needles through fanciful pieces of cloth, a mesmerising and elegant motion.

The garden boy who lives in a cottage near the estate found her wandering in her bare feet late at night, looking, she said, for fallen apples to bake a pie for her husband. She had scooped up her apron by both corners and filled it with small rocks. He steered her gently back to the house and even carried her rocks for her, placing them carefully on the long wooden kitchen table.

These walks with George … is there no way we could just seal ourselves into the here and now? Could we be stitched into one huge tapestry then safely hung for all to admire? Is there any ruse by which I could keep him here for just a little longer? The place I have felt most safe in a very long time is right here, my arm linked on to his.

George has been cut off. I am sure that I can raise several thousand francs by disposing of a lot of my things. I know he is trying to appear unperturbed, but there is a lot at stake here. Vincent was true to his word and barely broke breath before rushing to the Barrés home on his ‘sociable’ visit, bringing with him all manner of ‘family news’. This is difficult. George’s mother, when I think about it, could not have been more lethally proficient had she simply pushed me over the nearest cliff.

‘More tea, sister?’

How is it possible to so despise your own flesh and blood? We were close growing up. She was much more adventurous than I, and always climbed that higher branch at the most severe risk to her petticoat. I was too self-aware. My distress at getting mud on my boots was beyond reason. An ill-fitting bonnet left me inconsolable. I think I may have been told I was pretty once too often, and it left me in a state of
severe anxiety as I felt constantly beholden to this birthright of mine. If I did not honour it, and tend to it, it would be snatched away, or dissolve and what would I be left with? Certainly not courage.

It did not impact on my father one way or the other, the fact that people smiled warmly at me and talked of me as though I wasn’t even there. It was always in pleasant terms. Large-busted women with folded arms would cackle approval as I passed by and then smile at my father. This didn’t seem to make him proud, for all we were to him were two daughters, when a son would have been much more bountiful. Had we been two sons? Well, heaven’s multitude of blessings would have enriched his life beyond his wildest dreams!

And mother? What a strange and ambivalent relationship a woman has to her daughters. As babies and toddlers, we reflect on her everything that is good and godly. She is a beautiful and revered Madonna and her status secured. As the daughters grow older and blossom, they become instead something against which she measures herself. It become all about loss. Loss of youth, loss of beauty and appeal. We must appear as leeches, sucking the very essence of her womanhood. She withers to our bloom. Sometimes I catch a look in her eye. Once when I twirled in delight in an especially gorgeous gown, purple I remember, there was something in her gaze, a kind of hardness. And maybe my father’s seeming disinterest in us, in me in particular, was out of some profound sense of kindness to my mother and to the times, long before, when she once twirled for him.