The Memory of Scent (5 page)

Agnes begins to laugh again, but it is a hollow sound. ‘It backfired though, because on one of their excursions, a painter of much greater renown than my father approached Josie to see if she would pose for him. She readily agreed and became less available to Papa. So of course, he begins to lose interest in his own work and instead became obsessed with how “‘his” Josie was being portrayed by his rival. She stopped sitting for my father entirely, as his jealousy turned him into an unrecognisable brute and she became afraid of him. Even though I was still a very small child and needed to be fed and cared for, it was said that my father would spend days creeping around outside the art studio on Rue Hautefeuille where Josie spent long hours posing. He would peer through the window and was almost driven demented when she started to pose nude. He would stomp around his studio, complaining to the few friends that he had left, that the paintings were becoming too erotic. He was fixated by how the light caught her breasts, how her white hand rested on her pubic hair, how small and delicate her bare feet looked as she lay there.’

‘Your poor mother. How did she live with that?’ At least my own mother was protected from the reality of my father’s Marseille trips. She still had her pride, even if it was an illusion.

‘Well, I can only vaguely remember the afternoon my mother smashed a vase of flowers on the floor.’

Agnes takes a deep drink from her glass as she drifts back into her childhood, summoning up the details. ‘I remember they were pretty flowers that my mother had picked especially. I remember the smell of cooking and her checking herself in the mirror and fixing her hair as she heard Papa’s heavy footfall
on the stairs. I remember her sad smile as she stood by the neatly set table. I was in a pretty new dress. I remember being confused as the smile faded when my father just took his boots off and went into the bedroom slamming the door after him without saying a word.
Maman
grabbed the vase, stormed into the bedroom and screamed as she shattered the vase into little pieces against the bedstead. She untied her apron and kept saying over and over, “I can’t go on. I can’t go on.”’

Agnes seems draped in sadness. ‘I tried to keep up with Mama through the narrow streets. I hadn’t learned how to button up my shoes yet, you see, so one of them fell off. “
Maman
, my shoe.” But my mother just kept walking. I began to cry. My foot was bleeding by the time Mama stopped at the river’s edge. “Such pretty sailing boats.” I remember that was the last thing she said.’

After a long moment Agnes inhales deeply. ‘Her body was retrieved further along the Seine about three days later.’ An aching stillness hangs in the air.

‘And your father?’ Maria stutters.

‘You know, in a strange way, he seemed less agitated after my mother’s death. It was as if he had unleashed his anger on her on an almost daily basis because he had somehow convinced himself that if only my mother weren’t around, Josie would return to him. And that just wasn’t true. Everything seemed to slowly become calmer. Josie had become the muse for another artist and, I learned later, his lover. I think he whisked her off to England or somewhere. I’m not sure if Papa ever really lost his longing for her, but he seemed to realise it was out of his hands.’

‘So what became of you?’ I feel heartbroken for this confused child being caught up in a storm of passion and I watch as Agnes begins to twirl one of her stray curls.

‘He actually tried to undertake some of the things that my mother used to do. He was so clumsy! I remember him picking me up and sitting me on the table as he tried to fix my favourite red ribbon in my hair. He would bring me to his studio to paint me with my doll dangling at my side. Probably it was one way of keeping an eye on me. I was bounced about for years among extended family members until I got older and was able to fend for myself.’

‘Are you still in contact?’ Maria seems in awe at how she could have turned all of this around.

‘I visited him occasionally in his studio over the years and then noticed he was doing less and less work and was becoming dishevelled and losing weight. I learned from one of his friends that he visited an exhibition at the
Salon
and unwittingly came across a painting called
Red Hair. White Dress
. He didn’t seem right after that. So I sought the painting out and with her pale skin and long cascading red hair, I knew that the figure in the painting could only have been my father’s tormentor. She didn’t mean to be and probably didn’t even realise that she was, but men are weak.’

Maria makes an ill-judged attempt to lighten the mood. ‘My grandmother used to always say, “If there were no bad women, there would be no bad men.”’

Agnes wipes the bread crumbs from the table into the palm of her hand. ‘I was not going to watch as this woman destroyed my family twice. So I never visited my father again. I was not my mother.’

* * *

Would my patchouli girl actually stand around this fountain at the Place Pigalle? Would beauty not automatically elevate you to being the navigator of your situation? I have found
myself visiting pawn shops over the past few days. What this hopes to achieve, I am not entirely sure, just that if she did fall into the clutches of the Spaniard, then perhaps she too would end up having to pawn her belongings. I dislike being elbowed out of the way by people jostling to cash in on the paltry specimens of their day-to-day lives: odd household utensils, chipped crockery, hats, jewellery, bedraggled clothing, even mattresses.

A fat
marchande de poisons
with blackened front teeth, shoves me aside holding her new umbrella. She would have little use for it, standing behind her stall, but surely she hasn’t acquired it in an effort to mimic the fashionable. Does she think that brandishing this umbrella will somehow confer on her the illusion of privilege, of belonging to the bourgeois? It will never work, but she seems smugly convinced of its significance. I look at a rail of coats and think how one piece of attire could be linked to the miserable death of a lost girl.

I have also spread the word of my search among the streetwalkers of Montmartre. I even gave young Joseph a few centimes to keep his eyes and ears open. Then I go to work.

* * *

I don’t realise I am being so absentminded until I hear the
patron
shout at me.

‘Fleur, you have been carrying around that bowl of soup for five minutes now. Will you serve it to the table by the window there, and if they refuse to pay for it, it’s coming out of your wages.’

I carry the soup to the table and place in down while apologising profusely. Walrus jerks his head a little in a beckoning gesture.

‘
Mademoiselle
, tell your cook not to be getting so agitated about what is effectively nothing more than flavoured broth. If his ambition is to serve simple food, he can do so without treating his customers as simpletons. What is wrong with the traditional Crécy soup? How complicated can it be to mix carrots, poultry stock and some rice? Even for this kitchen.’

I lower my voice. ‘You are just determined to get me into trouble.’

‘Nonsense. My mission is to educate the ignorant palate and it is an onerous task I have chosen.’

I swing toward the kitchen with a large silver tray balancing on my palm. The table of men to the left of the door have ordered another round of cognac and they seem to be smoking with more intensity than usual. They are talking about the Spaniard.

‘He was last seen in a bistro on Rue La Fayette.’

‘That’s right, I saw him there myself before heading off home. He was drinking for hours and could barely put one foot in front of the other.’

‘A cab driver finishing up for the night saw him lying on the ground, thought he was dead, and got him to his feet. He must have found his own way home.’

‘Which of us hasn’t tumbled on to the road after a particularly sociable night?’

‘Why then are the police so fascinated in talking to all of us? It is damned distracting. I have a huge canvas that I am about to roll up and throw in the Seine because I just can’t get it completed. It is nothing short of an assault on my creativity. I don’t need any more knocks on my door asking if I’ve noticed anything suspicious.’

‘They seem to be of the opinion all painters could be at risk.’

‘At risk of what? Crawling home in a drunken stupor and collapsing when we get there?’

‘Collapsing dead, that is the point. It looks as if it was not of his own making, even though many think he deserved it.’

‘You see that’s the kind of madness that is around, but what have any of us innocuous blackguards ever done to deserve this? Whose wrath could we sensitive creatures of God above have so engaged?’

The others laugh at his feigned despair and dramatic hand wringing. One of the men slaps him on the back.

‘Can any of you think of any person that you may have painted an ugly portrait of lately?’

‘Well own up, which among you made Madame L’homme and her three children look like a sow with her piglets? I was painting a rather fetching still life at the time, so it wasn’t me.’

‘Yes, I saw that one, and I mean to say I know her girth is, well, very generous, but for the sake of the woman’s vanity, and more importantly, her husband’s reputation, could she not have been slimmed down a little?’

‘Never, never. Not once in my entire life have I done an ugly portrait of anyone. I have, however, on more than one occasion, painted ugly people.’

The table of men guffaw, a laughter that builds from their chests and is expelled like cannon fire. It is vaguely demented. I serve more cognac. We have a couple of Americans in this evening. Their clothes tell me that they are American. There is a breed of foreigner that come to live in Paris, gentlemen adventurers of a type. Some are society painters, some seem to be respected authors, and some come to trade. The English men speak in low tones of living comfortably on £1,500 a year which sounds to me like an awful lot of money. It must be pleasant to come here and live comfortably. It is probably
the most melancholy place to be in the world when you try to live here in poverty.

I watched a young girl sitting on a door step in the pouring rain, trying to shape a hole-size lump of wet newspaper into her soaked boot. I was almost sure that she was crying but it was difficult to distinguish the salty streaming from the wet scene of abject misery. I had a little money. I bent down to put a few coins at her feet. I’m not sure she even registered my offering, with her gloom puddling round the hem of her dress. Lost and destitute girls, like gargoyles in archways and corners, are just part of the overall architecture, their grossness only evident when you care to look closer.

And now I am bending to serve wealthy foreigners a morsel of Paris, a side order of bohemian living, a
digestif
of Gallic conviviality. The patron once put a sign up declaring, ‘English Spoken Here’ to draw in those passers-by, whose francs would otherwise end up on another’s counter. English is only spoken here by irate Englishmen and Americans who feel they are being fleeced and double-charged at every turn by crafty natives. And they are probably right.

The talk of the dead Spaniard continues unabated with theories tossed about like limp lettuce. An unpaid debt that someone lost patience over? A love quarrel? A drunken brawl over a game of cards? The only consensus is the fact that a model found him and then subsequently disappeared. Could it have been her? Did she do more than just find him? When I held open that door for the beautiful girl in the velvet hat, were there secrets in her sweet-tempered face?

We all have secrets and for some reason I always feel as if I have a duty to expose them. Not for the sake of prurience, but for the restorative act of lancing the sickness and purging the system, for secrets are corrosive and the effort
to keep them causes enormous strain on body and soul. You can identify the carrier of a secret in the heaviness of a brow, or the flaking of skin, or in unidentifiable rashes that creep over the body, or in the bitten fingernails of even the most tranquil of exteriors. Mine was exposed, of all places, at a séance. I had been to one before and had dismissed them as a charade. At my first séance, we sat around a table holding hands and I knew for a fact that the medium was tapping her foot on a small wooden board that she had slipped in under the table when no one was looking. She was asking the spirits to tap one for ‘yes’ and two for ‘no’. Complete trickery. She even managed to conjure up some smoke. She foretold a life for me of anguished love, which I no doubt could have foretold for myself without the price of an admission ticket.

So when I was invited to go along to another, I think through Henri, I believed that it would be nothing more than an amusing evening, but Madame Xavier was a different beast. Her appearance, clad as she was all in black with a black veil fastened to her hat, did not encourage polite conversation and when she appeared in the room, everyone instinctively cleared a path which she wordlessly cut through, taking her seat at the round dining table. Without being instructed to, everyone sat down and fanned out around the table. I found myself sitting to her right. Madame Xavier pulled the veil from her face and over the top of her hat, and then opened her right palm, indicating to me that I should clasp it. By nodding to the entire group she informed everyone that they were to hold the hands nearest to them.

Madame Xavier looked up toward the ceiling; her head tilted back, her eyelids fluttering. She slowly lowered her chin then closed her eyes. ‘Spirit guide, we are here to greet you.’

The assembled group stared at Madame Xavier’s face as
her clear voice rang out again, this time a little louder. ‘Who do we have here with us?’ Her shoulders seemed to take on a squarer appearance and her posture became less upright. ‘We are in artistic company.’ The voice that came out of the lady in the dark dress now sounded utterly different from her matronly tones. It was harsher and more authoritative. ‘Who are you?’ Her clear tone returned.

‘I am Captain Olivier. The ocean swallowed me up along with my crew and we passed into the spirit world, many moons ago.’ The circle around the table almost gasped as one on hearing the Captain’s voice, each person transfixed by Madame Xavier’s face as her brow took on a heavy sea-worn frown.