Liberty Silk (35 page)

‘Sure,’ said Lisa with a smile. ‘I’ll have some coffee, and watch the world go by.’

She lit a cigarette, and did just that. Across the road, a girl was watering geraniums that burgeoned in bright splotches of colour from a window box. On the village square a group of elderly men were playing
boules
. Somewhere, someone was practising the clarinet. This was a world away from LA, where people cut and thrust and moved and shook and never, ever stood still. This was life lived leisurely, the way it should be.

Beside her, two women were sitting over tea and cakes. One of them was leafing through
Paris Match
.

‘Did you hear that Rita Hayworth is getting married to Aly Khan here next week?’ she said to her friend.

‘Here, in Vallauris?’

‘Yes. They wanted to have the ceremony in the Château de l’Horizon, but of course they can’t because of the law. They’ll have to get married in the town hall, just like everybody else. That’ll bring her down a peg or two!’

Lisa lowered the brim of her sun hat as she listened to the women gossip about Rita Hayworth’s love life. What they didn’t know was that sweet, shy Rita was being forced into a marriage she didn’t want in order to escape from a life where crackpots threatened to kidnap her child and throw caustic soda in her face.

She sat for a while, deep in thought. She thought of poor Rita, menaced by grotesque threats. She thought of Judy Garland, whose wretched addiction to barbiturates and amphetamines had been connived at by the studios. She thought of Veronica Lake, an alcoholic has-been at the age of twenty-seven, of Vivien Leigh, whose fairy-tale marriage to Laurence Olivier was on the rocks, of Ingrid Bergman, whose illicit romance meant it was unlikely she could ever return to Hollywood.

But why would she
want
to go back? What was there for her, for any of them? They were none of them stars; they were all of them slaves.

‘You look very thoughtful.’ Raoul dropped into the chair next to her. ‘And very beautiful.’

‘Thank you.’

He kissed her cheek, and as he did, a gust of wind snatched her hat and sent it spinning along the terrace.

The women at the next table turned, and one of them exclaimed: ‘My goodness! It’s Rita Hayworth!’

‘No, no!’ hissed the other. ‘It’s Lisa La Touche!’

‘You’re mistaken,’ Raoul corrected them politely as he retrieved the hat and helped Lisa to her feet. ‘This lady is Baba MacLeod.’

‘Who?’ chimed the women, looking blank.

Lisa gave him a grateful smile. And as they stepped on to the pavement hand-in-hand, she realized with a lifting of her heart how uncommonly sweet it felt to be anonymous.

The next day, when Gervaise invited Lisa to his studio to sit for preliminary sketches, he led her first to an anteroom, where he showed her the portrait he had made of the woman he had called Perdita. It was, he told her, the only portrait that had been neither sold nor looted by the Boche: it was just the third time in her life that Lisa had laid eyes on an image of her mother.

In the black-and-white photograph she had found in the old hatbox, Jessie’s hair had been arranged in a loose chignon; in the portrait it was unconfined, the abundant mass tumbling over her shoulders. She stood with her back to the viewer, glancing over her shoulder, lips parted in a half-smile. Her gown was of floral silk, splashed with primary colours. Lisa could tell at once it was from Liberty of London.

It felt strange to don the dress her mother had once worn, to feel the slither of the silk against her skin, the swirl of it as she moved. As she pulled it over her head, she caught the faint vestiges of Chypre.

In Gervaise’s studio at the top of the house his easel had been set up, his paints mixed, his brushes aligned with military precision. A low table was set for lunch between a pair of easy chairs.

‘Let’s not go to work straight away,’ he said, pouring her a glass of chilled Sancerre. ‘I’m sure there is much you would like me to tell you, of your mother, and how we met.’

‘I’d be very grateful,’ Lisa said, settling down on an ottoman and tucking her legs beneath her. ‘I should love to know more of her story. For me, it ends – with her last letter home from Finistère, when my father left her.’

So, as they ate, Gervaise told Lisa about how he and Jessie – or ‘Perdita’ – had set about making themselves notorious, the way so many bright young things had done in the years following the First World War. He told her of the gaiety and glamour of that short and radiant time they had spent together in Paris and here in Salamander Cove. He told her about the friends they had accumulated: Pablo and Olga and Coco and Boy and Scott and Zelda.

‘The Fitzgeralds!’ she said. ‘I met him once: he wrote the screenplay of the first movie I ever made. It was set here, in the South of France.’

‘Scott wrote a lot about the time he spent here. He was inebriated most of the time, as so many people were in that post-war era. In the words of your famous Noël Coward, it was a time of cocktails and laughter.’

The melody of the song came back to her, which had played over and over on the Victrola one summer evening: ‘Poor Little Rich Girl’.

Gervaise poured more wine. ‘There were tears too, though,’ he said. ‘It was a very turbulent time.’

‘Nana told me.’

Gervaise’s raised eyebrow invited elaboration.

‘She told me about the night my mother disappeared. She said that nobody ever found out what became of her.’

Gervaise looked into his wine glass, then took a hit. ‘As Perdita, Jessie had a great sense of drama,’ he said. ‘She would have enjoyed the idea of a making an exit shrouded in mystery.’

‘Were there really no clues? No witnesses?’

‘No. We thought that perhaps Zelda could shed light on what happened, but she was stewed to the gills that night.’

‘Was Zelda very beautiful?’

‘In that Southern Belle way, yes she was beautiful. But beauty and madness combined make a lethal cocktail – no wonder Scott was insecure. He even challenged Pablo to a duel once, when he was drunk.’

Lisa hesitated. She felt there was a clue somewhere, that someone knew what had happened to Jessie, and that that person was Zelda Fitzgerald. ‘There’s a collection of Zelda’s stories, Gervaise, in the library, that seems to have been a present to you from her,’ she said. ‘Do you mind if I borrow it?’

‘Be my guest.’

‘Are you sure? It’s never been opened – the pages are still uncut.’

‘Absolutely. I’m never going to read it. I understand her novel was second rate. They say that Pablo is in it, thinly disguised.’

‘Did Pablo – Monsieur Picasso – ever paint my mother?’

‘No. I was too jealous to permit him. Artists can be very proprietorial about their muses.’

‘But she has – she did have – one of his paintings.’

‘She did?’

‘Yes – of a clown, all in blue, holding a baby. She gave it to Nana to safeguard.’

‘So that’s where it got to,’ said Gervaise, with a laugh. ‘I’d forgotten Jessie had spirited it away. How clever of her to have kept it hidden! You’re a lucky woman, Lisa. It must be worth a lot more than I paid for it.’

‘It’s not mine, of course,’ she protested. ‘It belongs to you.’

‘I’m a man of my word: a gentleman. I gave that painting to Jessie so that her daughter – so that
you
, my dear – would have a legacy.’

Lisa remembered something Nicole had said, about a daughter from a previous marriage.

‘But surely your own daughter . . . I’m sorry. I don’t know her name.’

‘Ghislaine.’

‘Ghislaine. Shouldn’t it be hers, by rights?’

‘Ghislaine is independently wealthy. She has never had to lift a finger or do a day’s work in her life. You, on the other hand, have had to struggle for every cent you’ve earned – as did your mother, once upon a time. You deserve that Picasso more than Ghislaine does. It’s yours, fair and square.’

‘But—’

‘No buts. Go ahead and sell it if you want. I can arrange an appointment with my agent in Paris. He’ll have the relevant documentation about provenance and all that jazz filed away somewhere.’

It was tempting, God knew it was! She hadn’t a clue when she’d earn again. But Lisa felt that it was not right, somehow. She could have accepted the painting as a gift from her mother, but from Gervaise . . .

‘I’m not sure I could afford to have it insured. I—’

‘Oh, stop prevaricating, woman!’ said Gervaise. ‘I’ll have it framed for you. We’ll hang it in the atrium. That way, every time you come and go, it’ll remind you that it’s yours to do as you want with, whenever you want it.’

‘But I’m not staying here for very much longer.’

‘That’s what everybody says, who visits this part of the world.’ Gervaise knocked back the remains of the wine in his glass and gave her a raffish smile. ‘Now. Are you ready to go to work?’

My tears fall that a tiny link that once held all the pure wonder of life should be so wholly broken.

Jessie left the journal on her writing desk next to the depleted dish of tomatoes, and moved out onto the balcony. In the stand of pine trees beyond the garden, a nightingale was singing. The sky had mellowed from a dazzling, intense blue to an indigo so soft and warm you felt you could wrap yourself in it. A bee was working overtime in the honeysuckle that overhung the balcony, its somnolent buzzing belying its industry. From the open window above she could hear Baba singing her French nursery rhyme to Dolly; in the drawing room, someone was playing the piano, their foot on the soft pedal. The heady smell of burning eucalyptus came to her on a southerly breeze: there had been wildfires that summer.

This
was the pure wonder of life. This is how things should be, how they were meant to be. Wherever Scotch was, whoever he was with, she hoped that he had found it too, this wondrous peace. She hoped he was happy.

The barking of a dog made Jessie look down. Below, Gervaise was on the terrace, sharing a smoke with Scott. Their new pooch, a rowdy Weimaraner puppy, was chasing something between the flower beds – a rabbit, maybe. It was difficult to see. The low-slung sun cast rays of such intense gold upon the garden that all was a burnished blur.

There came the popping of a champagne cork from the further end of the terrace and Scott moved away in response. Gervaise took a long pull on his cigarette, then ground it into an ashtray. He looked sombre, introspective; she rarely saw him alone these days.

‘Gervaise!’ called Jessie.

Shading his eyes with his hand, he looked up. ‘
Bonsoir
. Is Baba in bed?’

‘Yes.’ As she reached for a strand of honeysuckle, the silk of her robe slithered over a shoulder. ‘Why not come up?’ she suggested, trailing the flower along the bare skin of her forearm.

Gervaise looked uncertain. This was clearly an invitation, and – since they had not made love for some weeks – a singular one.

‘Come,’ repeated Jessie.

‘I can’t now – I promised Scott I’d look over something he’s written. Anyway, it’s late. Why haven’t you changed yet?’

‘It’s such a perfectly blue evening I didn’t want to let it go. I thought I might wait until the evening star made her appearance; one so seldom sees her in the sky over Paris. But she’s in no hurry this evening.’

Gervaise turned and scanned the horizon. ‘There she is, divesting herself of a cloud.’

‘She’s left it rather late. She must have been detained somewhere. She was probably deciding what to wear.’

‘Venus detained,’ said Gervaise. ‘It sounds like the subject of a painting.’

They regarded each other with contemplative interest.

‘What does she wear in the end?’ asked Jessie.

‘Nothing,’ said Gervaise. ‘She is always her most beautiful with nothing on at all. See? She’s cast off that last little wisp.’

To the south, Venus was all aglimmer, a cobweb of cloud trailing in her wake.

They smiled at each other, and then Jessie blew him a kiss and went back through the French windows. The journal was where she had left it on her desk, the line of black ink all but obscuring the last entry.

Jessie took up her fountain pen and wrote in careful capitals at the bottom of the page THE END. Putting the cap back she eased her arms and shoulders into a stretch. Tomorrow, she would take the red-backed books to the bonfire that the gardener kept smouldering beyond the sea wall, and burn them. She would help herself instead to one of the small black notebooks that Gervaise used for jottings and start her journals anew.

Slipping off her kimono, she moved into her Aladdin’s cave of a closet. It had been designed for her by a master cabinet-maker, a friend of Gervaise’s: it was Palladian in its simplicity and baroque in its cunning, lined with drawers and cubbyholes and niches to accommodate the wardrobe she had accumulated since embarking upon her career as muse to Gervaise Lantier. Her closet was so beautiful that when she had first seen it, she had burst into tears.

As she selected which garment to wear this evening, she could not resist pausing now and again to test the texture of a beaded collar, or run her hand along a satin sleeve, or rub her face against a swathe of Shantung silk. She finally decided on a frock shimmery as moonshine, a scarf of silvery gauze and a pair of pearly shoes with Louis heels – a present from Coco that had been sent down with Mistinguett from Paris. They were dancing shoes, and though it was unlikely there would be dancing tonight, they were too pretty to resist.

She had just returned downstairs and was making for the drawing room to wind up the Victrola when a smooth voice made her freeze.

‘Your daughter is a true
mignonne
,’ said Count Demetrios, who had been sitting in the shadow of the cantilevered staircase.

Jessie gave a start, raising a hand to her chest to steady her heartbeat. ‘Count! What brings you here?’

‘I think perhaps that you and I should take a walk, Madame. We have important matters to discuss.’

She didn’t want to discuss anything with the count, but since he acted for Gervaise and was responsible for their financial well-being, she felt it would be impolitic to decline. Demetrios extended an arm to her, and led her into the garden. As she passed the table on the terrace, she noticed that the big blue umbrella was flapping in the breeze, and found herself thinking abstractedly that she must ask the gardener to take it down.