Illumination (37 page)

Elizabeth had maintained a determined pace through all of this, despite her claims of increasing frailty; she’d refused even to let Clem carry the small satchel she’d acquired for her notebook and papers. Now they’d arrived at the Jardin des Plantes, though, her priority was plain. She needed to sit down.

No one had set foot in the iron-and-glass refreshment pavilion for weeks. The potted plants were dead; the mosaic floor was scattered with smashed crockery; the kitchens, located at the back, had long since been broken open and looted. Elizabeth selected a table close to the doors. Clem took the chair opposite her.

‘When is it to happen?’ he asked.

‘Ten, I believe,’ she replied, ‘at the park’s western extremity.’

Composed as ever in a blue winter bonnet, she was giving the impression of one who might be suffering but would admit no weakness, not to anyone, not for an instant. The spines were up on the Pardy porcupine. She was continuing with her life. Clem was reminded of when his father had died, very suddenly, while he and Hannah had still been children. They’d known widows – the black dresses, the sobbing, the months of seclusion – and had expected that their mother might behave in a similar way. Open expressions of sorrow, however, were few and far between. There had been a round of commemorative dinners and public recitals, staged by his poet friends and a handful of literary societies, at which she’d dazzled all and sundry; and before the season was out she was romantically linked to a rising playwright. Mrs Pardy was not one to languish in desolation.

Elizabeth had come into Clem’s room the previous evening and specifically requested that he accompany her on this expedition to the Jardin des Plantes. He’d considered enquiring why she was prepared to accept him as her assistant once more, having denigrated him so roundly over their wolf steaks – and perhaps mentioning again how she’d abandoned him to the Mazas, or her lack of interest in his balloon crash and the injury he’d sustained, or the possibility that she, through her alliance with Allix and active promotion of these luckless sorties, might actually bear some measure of responsibility for Hannah’s death. Energy was required for this, though, a lot more than he possessed, and an appetite for further confrontation; so he’d merely agreed and started to get ready. There was never any real reconciliation to be had with Elizabeth, just a sort of weary recognition that you’d have to accept what she’d done and carry on. It was ridiculously optimistic to expect her to admit wrongdoing – or even realise that it had taken place.

Also, in truth, Clem had little else to occupy his hours. His room at the Grand was too cold for anything but burying oneself in bed; upon rising that morning he’d had to thaw his toothbrush over a candle. He’d actually made an attempt to start his book, his
Daring Airborne Escape
, but had quickly given up. The crash had rather attenuated the narrative, and complicated it with suggestions of sabotage; the whole episode now seemed a tragicomic mess, certainly not the stuff from which great adventure stories were made. He had an odd clouded feeling as well, that he couldn’t quite shake – as if his mind was a sheet of smoke-blackened glass through which only dulled outlines could be seen. He’d begun to fear that his knock to the head had permanently reduced him.

It was good to be out of the blasted Grand, though, and have the pervasive smells of blood, lint and chloroform washed away by the winter breeze. The hotel had been the setting for by far the most dismal Christmas of Clem’s life. Beef replacing horse in the municipal ration had been the sole official concession to merrymaking. This repast, tooth-looseningly tough and totally without flavour, had been eaten in coat and gloves to an unalleviated accompaniment of wails from the hospital in the lobby. What yuletide wishes had passed between the remaining guests had been delivered with bitter sarcasm. Elizabeth had chosen to deal with the occasion by not emerging from her room. Drinks with Besson in the Café de la Paix, Clem’s one slight hope for a spot of jollity, had been an utter failure. The
aérostier
had been hollow-eyed and silent, his vigorous spirit finally defeated by the disappearance of Sergeant Peabody. Clem had got the idea that seeing him reminded Besson of Hannah – so he’d decided to be merciful and stay away, for a while at least.

Outside the refreshment pavilion, a gang of obvious newspapermen were advancing into the gardens, loudly disputing the quickest route to the zoological department as they went. It occurred to Clem that he hadn’t heard the gravelly tones of the
Sentinel
’s Paris correspondent in well over a week. His mother, for all the notice she’d brought upon herself, had been a solitary figure of late.

‘Doesn’t Mr Inglis want to witness this event?’ he asked, taking out a cigarette. ‘I’d have expected him to be here.’

Elizabeth pulled her cloak tighter around the shoulders. ‘We have decided to spend less time together, Mr Inglis and I,’ she replied. ‘He’d been tiring me most dreadfully, Clement, with his despairing pronouncements. As his beloved Empire is gone, he is quite happy to will absolute destruction on France and her people.’ She sighed. ‘I don’t honestly know what I was thinking. It was the result of simple boredom, I suppose, like that wretched carrot-topped cocotte of yours.’

Clem lit up, looking away; the tobacco was stale, like that of every cigarette left in Paris. Laure Fleurot was a delicate subject. Four days earlier, while at a particularly low ebb, he’d resolved to find her. Her treatment of him, he’d decided, hadn’t actually been so very bad; he’d convinced himself that there might be some chance of reunion if he apologised profusely enough. All he’d wanted was to lie alongside her and feel her copper hair against his cheek.

Montmartre, however, had refused to give Mademoiselle Laure up – her or anyone else Clem knew. The atmosphere in those lanes, as Besson had warned, had been most unsettling. Quarantine notices for smallpox were everywhere, disease being the inevitable corollary of the extreme hunger that gripped the poorer arrondissements; truculent queues wound away from the shops designated as
cantines municipales
; every other door-knocker was wrapped in black crêpe. He’d gone down to that apartment on the boulevard de Clichy, of which he had so many potent, precious memories, to find it serving as a kennel to half a dozen slack-jawed Breton reserves. He’d retreated, deeply perplexed, unsure of what to do next.

‘Probably for the best,’ he said. ‘Mr Inglis, I mean.’

Clem’s own guess was that Han’s art had been involved in the rift between his mother and the journalist. The contents of Madame Lantier’s shed had been brought in its entirety to Elizabeth’s rooms at the Grand. Clem recalled Inglis’s powerful scorn for these paintings on that first night; it was easy to imagine this overcoming his lover’s docility or respect for Elizabeth’s loss and some disparaging comment leaking out. Such a slip would have earned him a prompt excommunication. Han’s works had been made sacred by her death. Elizabeth would talk about them with the faintest justification; she was talking about them right now, in fact.

‘She made several very accomplished
en plein
studies here, you know. They depict crowds, naturally, rather than beasts in their cages or anything like that. People, ordinary folk, experienced as we truly experience one another in these places. Chance encounters. A glimpse – a passing gesture. Momentary fragments of other lives. No story, Clement, no forced meaning or trite little tale, just what we observe as we move through the world.’

Clem nodded, studying the tip of his musty cigarette; any second now she’d get onto the portrait.

‘Obviously they are not as considered as the large portrait. There we have the
chef d’oeuvre
. To think that she would not have embarked upon it had Jean-Jacques and I not urged her to! He is
before you
, Clement – brought directly before you.’

I should bloody hope not, Clem thought; he mumbled something that could have been interpreted as concurrence. Elizabeth had made it plain that she didn’t believe he’d been anywhere near vocal enough in his praise of Han’s productions. He had to admit that he was rather reluctant to admire a portrait of the Leopard – the man who’d brought down the
Aphrodite
and set his sister, his
artist sister
, on the route that had led to her death on a battlefield. The thing stood over Elizabeth’s fireplace, in her sitting room. He’d glanced at it once, agreed it was excellent, and not looked its way since.

‘I am sure that when my book is published,’ Elizabeth continued, ‘interest in her work will
soar
. That such a talent was permitted to flourish without encouragement, unacknowledged, will be seen as a monumental sin – emblematic of all that was rotten about the Second Empire. Monsieur Manet and his set at the Café Guerbois will never forgive themselves.’

Elizabeth was growing agitated. She’d been facing across the pavilion; now she turned sharply towards Clem, the legs of her iron chair scraping on the floor.

‘It was true devotion, Clement. She felt the world so
keenly
. This was why she could give so much of herself to Jean-Jacques and the ultras. Theirs is the cause of the
people
– the wider world. She wasn’t interested in the theoretical assertions of Herr Marx or Monsieur Blanc or any of them. For her it was simply a question of
justice
, of the poor being allowed their rightful freedoms.’

Clem kept his eyes down. ‘Justice, yes,’ he said. ‘Freedom.’

‘You don’t understand, of course,’ Elizabeth pronounced with some contempt. ‘You were always opposite twins, were you not? You are like your father, a glib being at heart, inclined towards whimsy. Hannah was a resolute soul, a dedicated soul. We were so alike, she and I. It is why we could not be together, ultimately – why we squabbled so.’

Clem had heard this many times before. His own view was a little different. There were certain similarities between Han and their mother, but it was their father she really resembled: they’d both been artists to the marrow of their bones. Seeing something of the life she’d built here in Paris had made that abundantly clear. Where this left him and Elizabeth, as distinct from one another as ink and engine oil, he couldn’t begin to say. He accepted, however, that in times of bereavement the dead have their lives and characters remoulded to meet the needs of those still living; so he nodded again, doing his best not to listen to what his mother was saying.

Elizabeth rose from her chair. ‘Come now,’ she said abruptly, as if it had been Clem’s idea to sit in the first place. ‘It is almost time.’

They went outside. The drumming of shell-fire was louder and more insistent here on the Left Bank. The Prussians were finishing off the year with a sustained bombardment of the southern forts. It seemed that they were becoming tired of swatting back these risible sorties, and were preparing to get serious.

Before Elizabeth and Clem was a network of tarmacadamed paths, winding off around clumps of trampled shrubbery. The fingerposts had been removed for firewood, but Elizabeth appeared to know where she was going. Soon they began to see the cages, as fine as miniature exhibition halls. Roofs bulged into exquisite onion domes; slender bars were painted white with red and gold capitals. Some had perches or hutches, or small ponds for swimming, while others opened onto landscaped paddocks. Every one was empty.

‘I’ve heard that certain beasts have been spared,’ Elizabeth said as she led them on, deeper into the zoo, ‘notably the simians. The directors know their Darwin, I suppose, and judge it to be a shade too close to cannibalism.’

A male crowd, both military and civilian, was gathering up ahead around an outsized stable, twice as tall as normal, on the edge of a straw-strewn enclosure. Elizabeth was recognised as they approached and the men parted, making a passage to a place at the front. They were greeted by a terrible bellow, a screeching blast of distress from a very large animal: the cry of the elephant. Through the stable’s open doors Clem could see two huge forms, shifting in their separate stalls. Manacles and chains were being prepared on a paved section of the enclosure. An address was underway, a grizzled fellow in a broad-brimmed hat holding forth with his hands clasped behind his back. At first, Clem couldn’t catch much of what he was saying and assumed that he was a keeper – the elephants’ custodian, perhaps, paying the unlucky creatures a final tribute. He came to realise, however, that this was actually the man who was to shoot them, describing in some detail the special ammunition he’d selected for the task. Theatrically, this executioner produced a bullet for their inspection: a chrome cone the size of a two-shilling cigar.

The first elephant was led out, surrounded by keepers and park officials.

‘Castor,’ said Elizabeth, her notebook at the ready. ‘His brother Pollux is to follow – they are twins, you see. I hear the butcher Deboos on the boulevard Haussmann has bought them both for eighteen hundred pounds. He plans to have skinned trunk in his window by the end of the day.’

Clem swallowed, digging his chin into the curtain-scarf, suddenly appreciating what he was about to see. He’d never been to Regent’s Park Zoo and certainly never to Africa or anywhere like that. All he’d experienced of elephants were etchings and paintings, and a skeleton, once, in the Oxford museum. He’d never set eyes on a live specimen before; and now he was to watch one be put to death.

Castor was an unlikely-looking jumble of parts – legs awkwardly long, shoulders hunched, bundled together under a loose, colourless skin. He knew that danger was close, but he evidently trusted a couple of the people around him and allowed himself to be manacled without complaint. Clem was struck by the tiny, swivelling eye in the enormous skull; the hairs and pale spots on his crown; the shrunken, wrinkled ears. The elephant’s tusks were mere stubs, all but buried in the folds of his face. He was adolescent, Clem estimated, still a distance from full maturity. The famous trunk was feeling the air with gentle caution, searching for something that plainly was not there. It was positively ghoulish: a genteel crowd of natural scientists, reporters, sportsmen and soldiers congregating to end this gigantic lump of life. Clem ground his teeth, wondering what the devil he was doing. He really hadn’t thought this one through properly.