Claude & Camille: A Novel of Monet (32 page)

Claude clasped his hands behind his head. His thick hair was graying and curly, the front a little receded.

He waited until he heard everyone going to bed, each tapping on the door and calling gently, “Goodnight, monsieur!” or “Goodnight, Papa!” He heard them climb the stairs.

For a time he was too tired to move, and then he too climbed the stairs in the dark. He stood listening to whispers from the rooms and to late acorns falling on the roof. The wind seemed to speak. He closed his own bedroom door behind him.

Camille was sitting in bed with her knees drawn up and her long hair in braids to her waist, a shawl around her shoulders. He pulled on his nightshirt and stretched out beside her on his back, looking up at her. “Is it soon?” she asked anxiously. “Is it soon he’s taking them away? Oh, I hope it’s not soon. I love having them here. It will be too quiet without them.”

“I don’t think they’ll be going too soon.”

“I thought Alice would be plain. She’s not beautiful, but she has a great deal of character. She endures everything without a murmur.”

After she fell asleep with her head on his shoulder, he stared into darkness, listening to the sounds of the people in this house. Debts were beginning to pile up here too. He had been building the tree house and helping the girls with their drawing, but now he had to get back to work. There were eight children and two women here and he had to provide for all of them. He would provide for them.

H
E HAD HOPED
to leave for Paris before anyone was awake, but when he went downstairs he found Alice up already and grinding coffee. He felt he blushed a little when alone with her, and he tried not to look at her directly, though he sensed her now as he had those days in her château. She knocked the coffee grounds carefully into the pot to avoid spilling any.

He said buoyantly, “I’m off to the city to see about selling my work. There’s a regular coach to the train now that I can catch.”

“Do you have time for coffee and bread first? Marthe will bake more bread today. May I walk with you, Claude? I need to buy needles in the village.”

“You may walk with me, of course,” he said with a slight frown. Nothing could cure her of addressing him with a slight formality, aware of her debt to him. He would have preferred to walk alone, but he could not refuse her.

He fetched his paintings, protected by canvas and tied together with a rope, and they walked side by side down the dirt path to the village, where the coach would stop before the church at seven. But the shop is likely not open yet to buy needles, he thought. She just wanted to walk with me.

They stood together before the twelfth-century church with its rising tower and surrounding graveyard, looking out for the coach. For a time they were silent and then he said, “I’m going to ferry across the Seine when it snows and paint the church again.”

“I remember what a beautiful picture you made of it in autumn! Is that one of the paintings you’re carrying to sell?”

“Among other things. I want to paint the same scene in different seasons. If you look at that tree, it is different than when passengers stood here yesterday. I see it more, not less. One day I thought I’d see it less, but the more I feel inside of me, the more it turns to color.” His voice dropped and he looked down at his new mittens, which Blanche had finished. “The subtleties of people elude me utterly, the subtleties of myself. I can’t explain it. I explain it when I paint. What good it does others I don’t know.”

A priest in a long dark cassock and cloak emerged from the church, nodding to both of them. Alice bent her head and turned back to Claude. She said hesitantly, “I wanted to have this chance to say how kind you are to keep us all. What I have lost is nothing; what my children have lost is everything. My husband means well. But he tries. He can’t face me.”

Claude shook his head. “I know that, Alice; I know how he feels. I said this once before. We are such fallible creatures, we men, and you women put your lives into our weak hands. But you are strong, strong. He’ll come for all of you soon, and I’ll miss you very much.”

“I’ll miss you and your wife; she is like a bright little candle. I’m happy to do what I can when I’m here. I love your children too. Will you all come to see us in Paris sometime? Be our dinner guests?”

He replied, “Yes, of course, and I’ll manage the lot of you lovely ones until then.”

“Of course we will have a terrible time leaving you! My Suzanne was learning embroidery from Camille yesterday; the girls love her. And our sons are inseparable! Do you know they were playing pirates by the river yesterday and fell in? They climbed back to the house soaking! And the clean laundry had not come back. I put them in blankets. Oh, the mischief they get into every day while you’re off painting!”

“It was the same with me and my friends when we were young, but still, I will speak to them sternly.”

Alice laughed. A wind came, stirring the bare trees, and she hugged her chest. She said very softly then, “Claude, I want you to know that I haven’t forgotten our time together. No one will ever know, but perhaps the memory of it will somehow come into your canvases? In all seasons as the years come, you will be here painting the church and village. I will be in Paris, and you’ll be here. You’ll have daughters of your own. As you paint you will, as you do, forget everything. And your dear feet will be so cold, so cold from standing at your easel, and your dear fingers so cold too.”

The coach came around the bend, the horse’s hooves stirring the dirt. She kissed his cheek and he looked after her as the coach bore him away and she walked back to the house in her long skirts and dark coat.

T
HAT WINTER, THE
neighbors said, was one of the worst they could remember. Snow and cold blanketed everything, but it could not keep him inside. He had to paint; he was utterly possessed by the beauty of this place. That February morning he had set up his easel in Lavacourt, where he had an excellent view across the Seine of his village of Vétheuil with the church tower rising against the sky. He painted the cold and the church, using cool blues, grays, and violets. When he saw the light was leaving this short day he reluctantly packed his things and ran swiftly down the wet wood dock to wave for the ferryman.

“Last trip tonight, likely,” the man said as Claude climbed on carefully. “River may freeze. Ice floes all down the river and still you’re out painting, monsieur.” Claude watched the oars cut the gray water, pushing aside the ice. It was only four o’clock, but darkness was falling early. Now, returning to Vétheuil, he slowly felt the passion of his work leaving him, replaced by thoughts of what he would find at home.

Hoschedé had found work with a Paris newspaper, though he still lived only in a rented room, and delayed bringing his family until he could assure them an apartment. Now it seemed only a matter of time until he would do that, likely by early spring. Claude would miss them all; sometimes he felt it impossible they would not be there to greet him each night.

He walked up to his house, which rose white and dusky above him, a few lamps burning in windows. As he opened his garden gate, Alice hurried down the steps, wearing only a shawl over her dress. “Go back inside; it’s cold,” he scolded. “How is everyone? I painted until the last minute and almost couldn’t cross the river to come back!”

“The woodman was just here,” she said. “We waited too late to ask him to come. We’re only lighting the stove now. Camille’s sick and hasn’t been downstairs since the morning. Everyone’s been with her. I could bring her some broth once the stove is going.”

“What’s the matter with her?”

“I don’t know.”

Claude bit his lip. Camille had had no dark moods since her pregnancy with Michel. Could she be pregnant again? She hoped for a daughter, but he knew she still had not regained her old strength. And now they had no wood most of the day. In the name of all that was reasonable, why did they not? He thought, I left them all day without heat in this cold.

The girls were kneeling by the stove to light it, and he knelt between them to help. When the broth had been heated, Blanche poured some into a blue-patterned cup with little handles and set it on a plate with a bit of fresh bread. He carried it up the stairs and pushed open his bedroom door with his shoulder.

A lamp showed that the children had been here: the sketchbook and one of the boys’ books on pirates were on the table. Camille sat halfway up in bed with her coat over her shoulders and the warm sleeping baby beside her. She was looking out the window. “There’s such ice in the river,” she said, turning to him. “And you were away on the other side of the Seine all day! Jean was worried you’d be stranded there. Oh, Claude, I’m so cold! I can’t stop shivering.”

He put the broth down on the table.
“Ma chère
, if you come down to the kitchen you’ll be warm. I’ll make a fire here, but it’ll take time to warm the corners.”

“The stairs seem so long today.”

In the dim light she turned to touch the baby, her hand descending to pull up the covers. The hand moved so slowly. Suddenly his heart began to pound. He sat down next to her on the bed. “Are you really sick?” he asked. “Is it … do you think …”

“I don’t know. I don’t think I’m pregnant. I’m bloated here in my belly, but it feels different.”

“But Minou,” he said, taking her hand, “you’ve been so weary; you must be pregnant. Would you mind if our friend Georges de Bellio came to see you? He’s been threatening to visit me in this remote place, and this will give him an excuse. Come downstairs now! It’s lovely in the kitchen. I’ll show you my painting. I hurried home as fast as I could when it was done.”

T
HE SNOW WAS
even thicker on the ground when Georges de Bellio descended from the cart a few days later. The girls had swept the steps. Their father had brought them a guitar on his last visit, and they were inexpertly studying music from a book in the kitchen and quarreling over whose turn it was. On the floor by the stove Jean and the young Hoschedé boy were struggling over a game of chess, using small stones in place of a missing knight and queen. Blanche was sitting at the table drawing the stove, her mother by her side.

The middle-aged, balding physician stamped his feet and greeted everyone. “I saw Monsieur Hoschedé yesterday,” he exclaimed buoyantly, “and he tells me he’d be here with all of you if it were less arduous to go back and forth. What a ride from the train! I missed the daily coach and was bumped and shaken in that cart. I tell you frankly, Monet, if you hadn’t wanted me to look in on your wife, I would have deferred coming until spring. Another difficult pregnancy for Madame? I’m so sorry! I remember how she suffered last time.”

De Bellio kissed the children and said to Alice, “Your husband sends his love. I would much appreciate a coffee! But first let me see our lovely Camille.”

Claude watched him mount the stairs and sat down in the kitchen. The boys spoke softly over the chess game. He was about to give Blanche a few quick words about shadowing when he saw she sat with pencil raised, looking quietly at him. Alice had taken up her sewing. It was as if sound had withdrawn from the room.

“Will someone start coffee?” he said suddenly, clumsily.

The bedroom door had closed upstairs.

He rose and walked outside and into the garden. Snow had been swept from the swing, and boot marks showed that a few of the children had been out here today. He sat on the swing and looked up at his bedroom window, whose glass winked back a little with the dull sun. His feet were cold now and his chest, for he wasn’t wearing his coat. What was taking so long?

He heard the doctor’s voice in the kitchen and ran up the steps.

De Bellio said, “Come, my friend,” putting his arm around Claude and drawing him into the room where Claude kept his desk and his accounting books.

The doctor turned to him with a grave face. “It’s bad news,” he said. “It’s not pregnancy. Poor darling, she’s very sick. She has a uterine tumor, and it’s fairly large.”

Claude stared at him. “A cancer?” he repeated. “Camille has a cancer? But you must be mistaken. No, really.” He walked back and forth, gazing for a moment at one of his son’s school notebooks used for dictation. (Had Jean done his lessons? They ought to have a tutor here.) This was not possible.

He kicked the edge of the thin rug. “I thought it was … she’s moody sometimes and thinks she’s ill but then she recovers. You don’t think …” He threw his bent arm over his mouth for a moment, trying to look back on the last weeks, the last months.

De Bellio sat down heavily and half pulled Claude into another chair. “Brandy in the coffee, I think,” he said.

“Can it be operated upon? Yes, that’s what we’ll do. Get your coffee. I must go up to her.”

He ran through the kitchen, feeling them all looking after him. Had they somehow known? Not the specific thing, but had they feared something as they were here with her day after day and he was away somewhere lost in the ecstasy of his work? He climbed the stairs, holding on to the banister, and flung open the bedroom door.

Camille lay in bed, her head turned to the window. He hurried across to her and she looked at him, puzzled. “He told me,” she said, her eyes darkened in her lovely oval face.