The Restoration Artist (20 page)

The room was filled with a soft warm glow, like the honeyed light of a harvest moon. She was sitting propped against the pillows with the edge of the sheet resting across her waist. Her hair was black against the white linen and her eyes were black against the paleness of her skin.

“Lorca,” I said, to hear my own voice and know that this was not a dream.

She had been waiting for me. I lay down on the bed and put my arms around her. This was what I wanted. Just this—the simple, essential fact of the two of us together. The wondrousness of it, me in her and she in me, and nothing else.

When I wept afterwards, her lips kissed the tears away.

I
HAD MADE THE DECISION.
I
WAS GOING TO ABANDON
the restoration. “Love and the Pilgrim” would remain in their landscape of shadows, the gap between them would never be breached; they would always be reaching for each other.

After manoeuvring the picture back into its place above the doorway, I removed my palette and paints and brushes and all the other equipment from the makeshift table and moved everything to the far side of the chapel. There was a broom in the vestry, and I used it to sweep up any charcoal dust and bits of paper, then filled a bucket with sea water and gave the floor a good wipe-down.

I turned my attention now to the large blank canvas on the opposite wall. Though I was forsaking those two figures in Asmodeus’s lost pastoral, whoever they were, that did not mean I was going to abandon the chapel, or my commitment and promise to Père Caron.

Reassembling the table, I set out my equipment in an orderly arrangement. The palette had been wiped clean, the brushes had
been washed. I had enough colours, having filled a suitcase with painting gear in the studio on rue du Figuier. I was ready.

The morning was bright and clear, the blue air fresh with a breeze from the west, small puffy white clouds like bleached scallop shells hanging in the sky, the smells of beach and ocean and lavender coming in through the open door.

I wanted a fresh start. The surface had been prepared with a priming of my own recipe, powdered calcium carbonate and titanium white pigment, mixed into an emulsion with oil, glue and some dammar varnish. I began by brushing a wash of raw umber, thinned to a liquid consistency with turpentine, over the whole canvas, covering the charcoal sketch of the two figures and the building. This was my usual procedure, since I never liked painting on a white surface. Tones were impossible to judge accurately against the brightness of white, and this way, any little patches that remained unpainted while I worked on the picture would not stand out as white holes. The umber would unify the whole surface.

Because I was using so much turpentine the chapel filled with a powerful odour that made my eyes water. I opened both windows and the front door to let in a cross-breeze. An unusual sound came to my ears, an engine burping and chugging in fits and starts, as if being coaxed along reluctantly. The sound was coming from inland. I laid down my brush and stepped over to the doors. A green tractor lumbered across the narrows, smoke belching from the exhaust, a low cart pulled behind. At the wheel, his laughter audible now, was Père Caron. Perched behind him, hands on his shoulders, Tobias stood balanced, shirtless and wearing his straw hat, his face crinkled in silent mirth. The bandage around his throat was bright against his browned skin.

The tractor shuddered up to the door of the chapel, where the priest shut off the coughing engine. Tobias jumped down and ran over, taking my hand in his, beaming up at me, tugging me towards the tractor. I waved away a cloud of oily diesel smoke.

“You’ve picked an unusual way to arrive, Père Caron.”

“It’s a humble chariot, I admit,” he said, dismounting and rubbing his knees. “And not the most comfortable either. Since the tide was out we thought it would be best to come along the sands instead of trying to navigate the paths. It did the job.” He patted the tractor. “We’ve brought you a few things.”

“Me?”

The priest walked round to the trailer. “For your work.”

In the little cart were two squat metal containers with the word Fioul printed on them.

“Gasoline,” Père Caron said. “I also have three flood lamps for you and a little generator which will run on the gasoline. Now you will be able to paint no matter what the light conditions. At night too. I’ve noticed you sometimes work late, and that little oil lamp you’ve got isn’t much good.”

Tobias was busy untying the rope holding the equipment and pulling down what looked like a battered but serviceable wicker rocking chair.

“This is very generous of you.”

“Thank Victor and Linda. The generator is theirs. The lamps are from Martin Levérrier at
l’épicerie
. The chair is something I found in my attic.”

“This is all marvellous.” I lent a hand to Tobias, who was struggling to unload one of the fuel canisters.

“I have also decided to give you as much peace and quiet
as you need. Services will now be held in the hotel. The chapel is yours.”

“Absolutely not. I can’t drive you out of your own church.”

He smiled. “With all these odours, you will probably drive out my parishioners anyway. But seriously, it is no bother to anyone, and a small gesture in return for the gift you are giving us.”

“All right. But you can throw me out at any time.” We began to carry the equipment into the chapel. I cast an eye in Tobias’s direction. “How does he seem to you today?”

The priest shrugged. “The same boy that he always was. No better, no worse.”

“He probably doesn’t need that bandage any more. The incision from the operation is healing nicely.”

“Yes, I looked at it,” he said. “But a few more days, just to keep it clean.”

In the past ten days, since our return from Paris, I had been to the clinic in Saint-Alban with Tobias three times, and once to Rennes on my own. Tobias was apparently suffering no ill effects from the surgery to his throat. On Tuesday the doctor had removed the three small stitches binding the incision in the boy’s neck, leaving a thin vertical line of puckered skin about an inch long. Otherwise, he was given a clean bill of health. He was no longer on a liquid diet, broths prepared by Linda in the hotel, and had switched to mashed potatoes and soft stews and rice pudding.

During the last visit to the clinic, out of earshot of Tobias, I had asked the doctor, “Is there any hope? Should I arrange for a speech therapist to see him?”

“Too soon,” the doctor replied. “Much too soon. Let the body heal itself first. If he is capable, the sounds will come naturally.
Only then can you consider trying to form those sounds into words.”

Nevertheless, I had been to Rennes to see a speech therapist. Her advice was to not force matters. Before the operation, Tobias had often made sounds, guttural utterances that were obviously an attempt to form words. He was familiar with language, the therapist said, and I should continue to talk to him. There would be no point in therapy until, and unless, he actually formed a sound with his vocal cords. She too advised me to wait.

After we returned to La Mouche from Paris, Père Caron had thought Tobias should stay in the presbytery while he was recuperating. In an aside he told me that since Étienne was fond of sampling his own Calvados, the boy might be better off under more watchful care. I realized I’d been hoping, somehow, that he could come and stay with me, but it didn’t seem the time to suggest it. He did, however, move a few things to my place, some books and his precious Laguiole knife.

While he was still his usual cheerful and mischievous self, there seemed to be a new fragility about him, as if his experience in Paris had shaken him in some way. For the first days he attached himself to me like a shadow. I was glad of the company. For too long I’d lived in silence. Now I talked constantly to the boy, even though the conversation was one-sided, wanting him to hear language, to be comfortable with the flow of words.

I had seen Lorca only once, at the Hôtel des Îles, where I had taken Tobias for an ice cream. She too seemed more fragile than before, and withdrawn. She mostly talked to Tobias, and when I had a moment alone with her she said, “I must be on my own now, Leo. I’m working. Hard. And I have to think about things. It’s all been a little overwhelming.” She squeezed my
hand and kissed me, warmly, but in the end I was somewhat relieved when she left us.

The new painting progressed. Although, it was still in a rudimentary stage because I changed my mind about the composition often, wiping out and repainting. The picture was a landscape made up of elements from the island. But no figures.

Yesterday, while out walking in the late afternoon in the misty air, I had come upon a cluster of dark yew trees silhouetted against the sky. The foliage was like black ink splashed against the mist and the whole mass of twisted curving branches seemed alive, bending in a wind, although the day was very still. It might have been made to order for me—a motif in dramatic isolation, imbued with mystery. I could feel it inside me, that smear of darkness against the ashy light, dense and contained and mysterious.

Plain lamp black pigment would not give the richness of that darkness. It was too flat, too opaque. I wanted a colour like the glow in a raven’s eye. I mixed Payne’s grey and viridian green and burnt umber into a rich luminous inky green, black as her eyes when they looked into mine. When I brushed it onto the canvas the effect was like a burst of music, like the first bars of a Beethoven symphony. I worked through the day; the trees took shape, the sky appeared, pale and silvery, the chapel began to form, Naples yellow the perfect colour for the stone walls.

I made the sky darker than the land, so that the light on the chapel walls seemed to come from an unknown source, an effect I’d seen often along the dunes before a storm. Dramatic and vaguely eerie. The whole landscape was tonally restricted, almost monochrome, but at the same time luminous and atmospheric. I was painting again, in my old style, with my
usual colours, dove greys, slate and stone, muted greens. My Corot tones.

Père Caron dropped by a couple of days later.

“What do you think?” I asked, as he sat in the battered wicker rocker, a cigarette smouldering between his fingers.

He squinted at the picture, then scratched his chin. He cocked his head to the left, then to the right, half closed his eyes, opened them again. “You have captured something of the island. No doubt about that. Yes.” He puffed at his cigarette. “Yes, very interesting.”

I smiled. “When people say ‘very interesting’ they are being polite to the artist, usually when they don’t like his painting.”

The priest raised his shoulders and let them fall. “I don’t know. You have painted our island as a very lonely place.”

I said nothing.

“I’m only giving my personal opinion, and I really don’t know anything about painting. You must do as you like, you are the artist.” He opened his hands in a placatory gesture. “We are all grateful for your work.”

I didn’t resume until after he’d left. His words had planted a doubt in my mind. This was my kind of subject, my motif, I’d been doing it for years, creating the kind of landscapes that I yearned for, that I could inhabit. Did he mean that he’d like a figure in the painting? I never included figures. It was a signature of my style, I suppose.

Was there more to it? I wondered now.

Claudine had voiced something similar when we quarrelled once, at an exhibition of de Chirico’s paintings. He too had favoured solitude in his pictures, deserted arcades, long shadows, statues in empty plazas. I had been quite taken with them,
but Claudine described them as desolate and lonely. When I said that I preferred pictures without people, she responded, with an edge in her voice, that I seemed to prefer a life without people too. It had never occurred to me, until now, that she might be saying she was lonely.

Now my picture seemed dishonest, relying on old familiar forms and gestures, metaphors and themes. My usual bag of tricks, so to speak. I had resolved to make the truest painting I could. But was this it? And was it appropriate for the chapel? My painting was not as dark in tone as “Love and the Pilgrim,” but it was certainly darker in spirit.

I was rescued by Tobias. He appeared in the chapel, as silently as he always did. Often when I turned and saw him nearby I wondered how long he’d been there. This time he’d brought with him an old mirror in a simple wood frame and a bag of seashells, mostly cockles and the little spiral-shaped ones called turitelles. He wanted my help gluing the shells to the frame. It was a passion of his lately, to decorate objects with shells. I wondered how long it would be before he hit on the idea of decorating his paintbox.

While we were in Paris, I’d gone out and bought him a fine rosewood box with brass fittings, just like the one I used, the one with Piero’s name engraved on the lid. Now, as we sat in the sunshine on the leeward side of the chapel, an idea occurred to me. I went back inside to fetch my binoculars.

“We’re going to try something, Tobias,” I said as I unscrewed the smaller lens from one end of the binoculars and had him place the paintbox in the bright hot sunlight. Holding the lens, which concentrated the sunlight like a magnifying glass into a small bright spot, I waited until the wood began
to smoulder, giving off an acrid smell of burnt lacquer, which was soon replaced by the more pleasant smell of wood smoke. Tobias sneezed.

Gradually moving my hand and blowing away the puffs of smoke, I slowly formed the letter T. “We’re going to engrave your name on your box,” I explained, “just like the other little boy’s name on my paintbox. You want to do the rest?”

Tobias nodded.

“Let me mark out the letters for you.” With a piece of chalk I outlined the rest of his name.

At first shakily on the letter
O
, but with gathering confidence, Tobias began to burn his name onto the lid. The tip of his tongue showed pink between his white teeth as he concentrated. The way the light fell on Tobias’s profile caught my eye, like a golden line down the edge of his forehead, across the bridge of the nose, lost for a moment under the nostrils, then resumed over the curve where the two lips joined. A smaller patch of light touched his upper eyelid and was echoed on his chin. He glanced up at me as he worked, and smiled. And I wondered how I could ever have mistaken him for Piero. Tobias’s smile was beautiful, and very much his own.

I fetched my own paintbox and a small prepared panel. I began to paint directly, without bothering to make a pencil drawing. I used broad strokes, forgoing detail, just aiming for the effects of the light. Once a rudimentary but accurate head was in place on the panel, I took more time to mix the exact colours of the light that delineated the boy’s face—touches of cadmium yellow into the flesh tones on the eyelid, a little vermilion on the chin, more white in the mixture for the bridge of the nose.