Liberty Silk (30 page)

A sudden cry from beyond the French windows startled Lisa: an agitation of wings told her that some bird had been disturbed – a heron, perhaps, or a curlew.

Putting Zelda’s book back on the library shelf, she stood for a moment, undecided. She glanced again at the sheet of paper in her hand.

You are welcome to a small soirée in the farmhouse above, just off the main road
. . .

Why not? Tucking the note into the pocket of her slacks, Lisa left the library, pulling the double doors closed behind her.

JESSIE’S BABY GIRL
was beautiful! She weighed 8lb 13oz, and had arrived – a little Aries on the cusp of Taurus – after a mercifully short labour.

Since it was a stipulation of French law that her child’s Christian name be that of a saint, Jessie left the designated space on the birth certificate blank, as had thousands of women in the wake of the war. She no longer believed in saints – not even in Jude, the redeemer of desperate cases. Noting her hesitation when it came to filling in the surname, the registrar told her that in the absence of a patronym the child would be deemed
bâtarde
, so Jessie entered Scotch’s name. She did not want her child to go through life stamped with the stigma of illegitimacy.

Jessie felt such pride that the blood flowing through this scrumptious morsel of humanity coursed in her own veins, and that the milk that came rushing to her breasts when she heard her baby’s demand to be fed – a lilting, musical sound – was helping her to become plumper and peachier and prettier each day.

She had an astonishing head of hair – clearly Jessie’s legacy – but there was something of Scotch in her expression, and Jessie thought she had inherited his observant, artist’s eyes. Every time she gazed into them, Jessie wanted to drown in their slate blue depths. But the child’s eyes – beautiful as they were – had a knowing look, somehow, and Jessie felt awful pangs of guilt every time she put the baby to her breast, sick in the knowledge that soon her daughter would be fed by the wet nurse in Provence who had been engaged along with her foster mother. Jessie had placed a newspaper advertisement some months previously, and had stipulated that, as well as references, a photograph of the house in which her little girl was to grow up would be required. The picture of the farmhouse that the successful applicant had sent her reminded Jessie of one she’d seen in a picture book as a child, a house she’d fantasized about living in herself. It comforted her to know that her daughter would be reared in a dream home within a kilometre of the Villa Perdita.

However, before she and Gervaise could make the trip south, there was something imperative to be done: there was to be one last sitting.

It had been Gervaise’s dream to call the final painting of the
Perdita Enceinte
series ‘Mother and Child’, depicting Jessie with her baby at her breast. Once Jessie was robust enough and she and the newborn had settled into a routine, he began to make preliminary sketches. Jessie hoped the painting would take for ever to complete. She wished that she could ward off the inevitable by erasing the brush strokes, just as clever Penelope had unravelled her tapestry on the isle of Ithaca, before her long-lost husband returned to her. But one day she heard the words that she’d been dreading.

‘It’s finished.’ Gervaise took a step back from the canvas, then nodded in approval. ‘It’s finished,’ he said again.

‘Congratulations!’ Jessie stapled on a bright smile. She gently removed her baby from her breast and set her on the day bed before wrapping herself in her gown. Blinking in surprise, the baby waved angry fists in the air and squawked in protest. ‘Hush, hush, greedikins,’ Jessie told her, scooping her up and inviting her to latch onto her nipple again.

She moved across the studio, joined Gervaise at his easel, and regarded the painting. It showed her as Perdita, reclining naked. She was holding her daughter to her breast, and gazing at her with an expression of such tenderness that Jessie felt a jolt go through her. How could she, who had been set adrift among strangers herself, contemplate handing her child over to someone she didn’t know?
How could she?

At her breast, the rhythmic suckling continued, and Jessie thought for the first time of the impending day when she would feed the infant for the very last time, when she would deliver her into the arms of another woman, when she would turn her back and walk away from her. Would she cry? Would she utter that oddly melodic, plaintive wail? Or would she howl in distress? Emitting a little moan of anguish, Jessie doubled over suddenly.

‘What is it?’ Gervaise crouched down beside her; she could feel his hands on her shoulders. ‘What is it, Jessie? Are you in pain? Do you need a doctor?’

‘Gervaise!’ she blurted, shaking her head violently and gulping for air. ‘I’m sorry! I can’t do it! I can’t give my baby away! How did I ever imagine I could?’

Gervaise’s hand was on her chin, now, raising her face so that he could read her expression.

‘I can’t do it! I can’t do it!’ she cried, frantically. ‘Can’t you see that it’s impossible?’

‘Hush, hush, darling,’ said Gervaise, taking her in his arms and drawing her head against his shoulder.

‘I can’t – I—’

‘Try taking deep breaths, Jessie. You’re panicking.’

‘But how can I not panic? I’m abandoning my own daughter!’

‘Come, come. You’re doing no such thing. You’re doing what’s best for her, you know you are. It’s an act of selflessness she’ll thank you for one day.’

‘She won’t thank me! She’ll revile me.’

‘Nonsense. Nonsense, darling. I was sent away to boarding school when I was just four years of age, and I didn’t hold it against my parents. And think of the fun you’ll have together when we go south for holidays!’

Holidays? Squeezing her eyelids tight shut, feeling tears pool behind them, Jessie tried to conjure a picture of herself and her baby swaying in a hammock on the terrace of the Villa Perdita with that aching vista of blue sea below; she tried to imagine the pair of them paddling along the shoreline, gathering shells; she tried to visualize a game of hide-and-seek in the garden, grabbing a giggling girl and tickling her and saying ‘Got you!’. . . And then another hellish thought struck her, and she felt a sob rise in her throat.

‘What if she prefers her foster mother to me, Gervaise? She mightn’t love me – she mightn’t even like me.’

‘Of course she’ll love you, darling. Shh. Please stop crying.’ Gervaise held her closer, and began stroking her hair with an automatic hand.

‘But I won’t see her growing up!’ Jessie was sobbing in earnest now. ‘I won’t see her taking her first steps!’

‘There, there. There,
there
. Oh, calm down, Jessie, please calm down.’

‘She’ll call someone else
Maman
!’

‘For heaven’s sake! You’re not—’

‘I won’t get to celebrate birthdays with her! Or Christmas. I won’t be Santa Claus for her.’

‘You’re being utterly maudlin, now, darling.’ Gervaise rose to his feet.

There was a long, long pause, in which the only sound in the studio was the sound of Jessie’s sobs. And then the infant wriggled away from her mother’s breast, and started to whimper.

‘Oh! I’m upsetting her!’ At once Jessie started to fuss, her own woes rendered insignificant in the light of her daughter’s distress. ‘There, there, sweetheart, there, my little lamb! Shh, shh, Mama’s all better now. Come, come, finish your feed.’

Getting to her feet, Jessie guided the rosebud mouth back to her nipple, and wrapped her peignoir more closely around her. Then she shook back her dishevelled hair, wiped her face with her sleeve, and took a long, shuddery breath.

Gervaise was leaning against the paint-stained trestle table, watching her. Jessie turned imploring eyes on him. ‘What am I to do?’ she asked.

He looked back implacably, and then he said: ‘You must decide for yourself, Jessie. I’m not your keeper.’

Oh! Jessie felt as if she’d been slapped across the face. What had she done? What had she
done
?

She’d just committed professional suicide, that’s what she’d done. Because, in effect, Gervaise
was
her keeper.
I make the rules.
That’s what he had told her, the day she’d consented to become his
maîtresse en titre. I shall want you to keep me amused
. . .

There had been
nothing
amusing about her behaviour just now. In just a few short minutes she had undone half a year’s hard work. Over the course of the past months Jessie had made every effort to be entertaining, inspiring and witty, as per his requirements, and so far she’d never given him cause for complaint. Fear gripped her heart. She saw herself standing again on the rue Coq d’Or, this time with her baby in her arms, surrounded by the monstrous beings that peopled that quarter: the beggars whining for centimes; the drunks in the gutter; the dead-eyed prostitutes; Adèle with her gap-toothed grin.

Oh, God, oh God. She couldn’t risk upsetting this man, couldn’t risk being abandoned again.
Pull yourself together!

‘I’m sorry.’ Swallowing hard, she managed a smile. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. ‘That was schoolgirlish and mawkish. That was no way to behave.’

Gervaise smiled back, then moved towards her and dropped a kiss on her forehead. ‘That’s my girl. We’ll pretend it never happened, shall we? But there must be no more tears. I find them . . . unsettling.’

‘There won’t be any more.’

‘There’s no need for them. You mustn’t worry. Your daughter’s well provided for.’

Jessie sent him a questioning look.

‘The Picasso,’ he said with laconic significance.

‘You’ve done it, Gervaise? The Picasso is hers?’

‘It will be one day. It’s in the hands of my lawyer – he’s adding a codicil to my will.’

‘Thank you. Oh – thank you! You’re most generous, Gervaise.’ Bowing her head in grateful acknowledgement, Jessie looked down at her baby. ‘And I apologize again – for the unseemly behaviour. I solemnly promise that those will be the last tears you’ll ever see me shed.’

‘I rather hope they may be. Your vulnerability was oddly . . . endearing. It would never do for me to fall in love with you.’

Slowly, Jessie raised her eyes to his. Gervaise was wearing his most inscrutable expression. ‘Why would that be such a bad thing?’ she asked.

‘Because I know that you could never love me back.’

Turning to the still-wet canvas, Jessie thought fast. She would have to word her answer very carefully. She did not want to run the risk of him rescinding his promise of the Picasso.

‘Gervaise . . .’ she began

‘You don’t need to say anything,’ he said, moving towards the door. ‘I’m an artist, remember? You can’t keep secrets from artists. We’re mind-readers.’

He returned moments later with a furled canvas in his hands. ‘It’s just as well it needed re-stretching,’ he remarked. ‘It’s more portable this way. Here. Here’s the little girl’s legacy.’ He let go of a corner of the canvas so that the painting unfurled before her eyes. ‘It’s yours to safeguard for her,’ he said, holding the painting out. ‘Take it.’

Jessie was holding her daughter’s future between her hands.

‘Thank you, Gervaise,’ she said. ‘Thank you from the bottom of my heart.’ He had kept his side of the bargain: it was only fair that she should keep hers. ‘May I have a minute to myself?’ she asked.

She went into the bedroom and shut the door. Then she settled down on the bed and unwrapped the cashmere shawl that swaddled her baby. She gazed at her child in wonder: at the tiny, perfect nose, the rosebud mouth, the mother-of-pearl fingernails, the shell-like ears, the sable eyelashes, the infinitely blue eyes. She ran her hands over her rounded little belly, and squeezed her chubby legs, and stroked her velveteen head, and kissed the creases around her knees and elbows, and gently bit her toes. She learned the little girl by heart, so that she could worship her always in her heart. And then she held her daughter to her breast and breathed her in, the warm, sweet, baby smell of her mingling with the scent she had misted herself with that morning, and as she gazed at her she murmured the words of an old French nursery rhyme:
Y’a une pie dans l’poirier, j’entends la mère qui chante
. . .

And then a miraculous thing happened. Her daughter looked directly into her eyes and smiled.

Jessie sat there for many minutes, holding her baby, crooning to her and rocking her to and fro, crying and laughing. And then she rose from the bed, tucked her into the crib, and inspected her reflection in the looking glass. She pinched her cheeks to lend a rosy flush to her pallor, she smoothed her eyebrows with a little Vaseline, she arranged her hair, she practised a smile. Then she left the bedroom and went back to Gervaise’s studio.

He was standing in front of the canvas, wiping his hands with a cloth. The air was redolent with the smell of linseed oil and turpentine.

Elevating her chin an inch, Jessie steeled herself. ‘When do we go south?’ she asked.

‘Tomorrow,’ he said.

LISA WAS GLAD
the evening was cloudless, for without the lambent glow of the moon it would have been difficult to find her way. Once she reached the gates of the farmyard, the sound of fiddle music told her that the party was being held in an adjacent barn.

The weathered doors were festooned with strings of paper chains and balloons, and a hand-painted banner announced
Bienvenue à la petite Sophie!
Inside, half a dozen musicians stood on a dais by a stack of hay bales, playing something lively, and the floor was crowded with dancing couples. Around the walls long trestle tables were piled with food: wine was being liberally poured from flagons. A man passing with a tray offered her a tumblerful, but Lisa declined politely. She’d already consumed nearly half a bottle with her meal.

All of a sudden the band launched into an impromptu version of ‘When You Wish upon a Star’, and Lisa realized she’d been spotted. Teenage boys were gawping, elderly matrons were regarding her curiously, young women were sliding oblique glances in her direction, and everyone was exchanging surreptitious whispers.
Lisa! C’est Lisa La Touche
. . .