Liberty Silk (36 page)

They walked as far as the sea wall, and then the count adjusted his monocle and cleared his throat.

‘You promised me once that you would do anything for me if I helped you,’ he said. ‘I don’t think either of us can deny that you have achieved spectacular success, and that if it had not been for me, you would be dead now, of absinthe and of syphilis acquired from the “gentlemen” procured for you in that abominable hotel. And your child, too, would be dead of malnutrition, or worse. I, alas, lost my little girl, for whom I cared so dearly, and I am lonely without her.’

From further along the cliff top, Jessie heard Zelda’s lilting, throaty laugh, and the low murmur of a man’s voice.

The count continued, unperturbed. ‘I am so lonely that I should like to relieve your daughter’s foster parents of their charge, and adopt her as my own.’

Jessie stared at him wordlessly, and then she laughed out loud. ‘Are you completely insane?’

An answering laugh came on the wind, to her right. ‘Perdita – Perdie! Are you there? Come! Come swimming with me!’

‘I am as perfectly sane, Madame, as you are clearly deluded. Sadly, as a kept woman, one might describe you as an unfit person for the duty of care you have relegated to the Reverdys. And, you see, I yearn so much for a little girl to call my own. I have had my solicitor draw up a contract—’

‘You are mad. You
are
mad!’

‘No, my dear. You are simply not listening to what I have to say. We made a bargain. I kept my side of it, now I must insist that it is time for you to do the same.’

‘I made no bargain with you.’

‘I
created
you. I washed your dirty little
feet
for you! Now, you owe me.’

‘I owe you nothing -’

‘
You owe me everything
.’ The count’s eyes were slits, his voice a rapier sheathed in velvet. ‘If you will not do as my solicitor instructs, I will unmask you, “Perdita”.’

‘Perdie! Come! Come along!’ came Zelda’s exhortation again. ‘It’s a perfectly heavenly evening!’

‘I don’t care!’ Jessie told him. ‘I don’t care if you unmask me. I’m fed up with this stupid charade. Act 5, scene 5, bring down the curtain! Do as you like.’ Abruptly, she turned away from the count and started to move in the direction of Zelda’s siren call.

But the count followed her, matching her step for step. ‘If you don’t grant me this request, you will no longer retain your prestigious position of muse to Monsieur Lantier,’ he continued, conversationally. ‘Do you know, I suspect he may be becoming more than a little bored with you. I hear that he has made no paintings of you lately. And when Lantier has no paintings to sell –
hélas!
– I make no money. But no matter, no matter! I have a beauty waiting in the wings, one who has an even more intriguing back-story than yours.’

‘Leave me alone, Count.’

‘What were you ever but a spoilt, silly girl masquerading as a bohemian? A girl who couldn’t even keep a husband when all over Europe there are women who are desperate to be married?’

‘Oh, you are evil!’

‘There’s always an understudy in the game of charades, Madame. Your time centre stage is over. And if you refuse to sign the papers my solicitor has drawn up, I will have no alternative than to write to your parents in Grosvenor Square, and tell them that their daughter is a whore and that their grandchild should be removed from her care.’

Jessie stopped, and turned fierce eyes on Demetrios.

‘How did you—’

‘I am clever, and I have connections. I procured for you what you wanted. And now I want the favour returned.’

The wind had got up. The waves below, which had whispered seductively earlier in the summer, were haranguing her now into taking flight. And then came the sweetly cajoling voice of Zelda through the night air.

‘Perdita, honey! Come.’

‘Perdita!’ echoed Demetrios, with a laugh. ‘Your renown as a whore has spread far and wide. I recall the night of the
vernissage
in the Galérie Pierre when bystanders on the rue La Boétie stood agog as you waltzed in on your paramour’s arm, with your pregnant belly on display. So flagrant! The women in the crowd whispered to each other behind their hands – and the men! The faces of the men were those of dogs who smell a bitch on heat.’

Jessie took two steps closer to the count. Then she slapped him, hard across the face, dislodging his monocle and leaving a livid patch on his sallow cheek. The expression in his eyes might have frightened her, or it might have made her laugh, but she did neither. Instead she kicked off her shoes, clambered up on to the sea wall and sprinted its length.

Zelda was sitting at the far end, bare legs dangling over the cliff face, a bottle of champagne beside her. There were two glasses, but one was empty. Whoever Zelda’s companion had been, he had made himself scarce.

‘Yes! You’re here at last,’ said Zelda, triumphantly. ‘
Santé!
’ She sloshed Moët into the empty glass until it foamed over the rim, then handed it to Jessie.

‘You’re shaking,’ she observed.

‘I’m cold. That wind is chilly.’

‘It bodes no good. That sounds neat, doesn’t it? “Bodes”. Have some champagne at once.’

Jessie hesitated.

‘It eases the heart,’ cajoled Zelda.

She was right, of course – the champagne would help numb the sting of Demetrios’s words. Jessie downed it in one. It fizzed through her bloodstream, sending her head spinning, and Zelda promptly poured her another glass.

‘I’m in love,’ she told her. ‘I’m in love with that French aviation officer who’s taken a fancy to me. Isn’t he divine? His face is full of the sun.’

Jessie wasn’t surprised. The aviator was a beautiful young man, and Scott was too preoccupied with the novel he was working on to notice that his wife was infatuated.

‘Who are you in love with?’ Zelda asked. ‘Gervaise? Or someone else? It’s practically
de rigueur
to take a lover on the Riviera, after all, isn’t it?’

Jessie turned to her and smiled. ‘I don’t have room in my heart for a lover. It’s too full of love for Baba.’

Zelda gave her a thoughtful look. ‘Love is such a big word, isn’t it? You always feel you have to pronounce it with a capital letter.’

‘Yes. Like Life and Death.’

‘And Champagne. Too much is just enough, don’t you think? Let’s finish the bottle.’ Zelda upended it into her glass. ‘How funny that your daughter is the first person you conjure when you think of love. Weren’t you disappointed when she turned out to be a girl? I was, with Scottie. She had hiccups when she was born, poor thing.’ Zelda shuddered. ‘I’d hate to be pregnant again.’

‘I loved being pregnant.’

‘Yuck. I got so enormously fat I thought I was having twins, even though I ate nothing but those little cucumbers.’

‘Pickles?’

‘Yes. I ate them morning, noon and night. Didn’t you have a hankering for weird food when you were expecting?’

‘Yes,’ said Jessie. When she had existed on Bouillon Zip and stale bread in the Hôtel des Trois Moineaux, she had hankered after
pommes rissolés
and
petits pois
. Now she hankered after tomatoes. She remembered the craving that had assaulted her earlier, for sweet tomatoes from the garden. She remembered the feeling of light-headedness, familiar from her previous pregnancy – a symptom she had in those days attributed to hunger.

‘I was sorry Scottie wasn’t a boy,’ Zelda said again, maudlin now. ‘When I found out I had a girl, I wished that she might be beautiful and a fool – a beautiful little fool.’ Abruptly, she rose to her feet and stripped off her dress. Underneath she was wearing nothing but a thin, rose-coloured slip. ‘I’m perfectly shellacked now,’ she announced. ‘Let’s swim. It’ll cleanse us, make us feel better.’

Jessie stood up, swaying a little in her bare feet.

‘Careful,’ said Zelda. ‘You must’ve imbibed one too many cocktails at lunch.’

She had drunk no alcohol at lunch. She would have to get used to dizzy spells for the next few weeks, until she entered her second trimester. Then, if her new baby was as well behaved in her womb as Baba had been, she would feel perfectly healthy until the final month.

‘Let me help you out of your frock.’ Zelda undid hooks and eyes and allowed Jessie to slither out of silk. Beneath her dress, Jessie was stark naked. For some reason, she felt liberated, a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis, a snake shedding dead skin.

‘Oh, look at you!’ cried Zelda in delight. ‘How beautiful you are! Like a fairy-tale girl! No wonder Gervaise loves you so much!’

‘He does?’ asked Jessie, confused. Tiny champagne bubbles were effervescing in her skull.

‘Oh yes. You can tell by the way he looks at you, when your back’s turned. He’s completely besotted.’

‘You’re wrong, I think.’

‘I’m never wrong,’ Zelda told her, with hauteur. ‘I have an unerring instinct for these things.’

Did Gervaise love her, then? Had she been misinterpreting the signals he sent out? Had she, in her preoccupation with Scotch and her beautiful, beloved Baba, alienated him, underestimated his affection for her? But now – now she could present him with a baby of his own – a boy! She could feel in her bones that she was carrying a boy. Gervaise would love a son – how could he not love a miniature version of himself? – and once she produced a child, he might relax his rules regarding Baba and invite her to be part of their family. They could be together, all four of them – they could leave the city and set up here for good!

She felt full of hope, suddenly, as she had earlier in the evening. The air on her naked skin felt like a benison: she was at one with the universe. She had so much to be thankful for! She had day upon wondrous day ahead of her reaching into the future, green days and blue days . . . Where had the words come from? A poem she had read on a beach somewhere, a lifetime ago, at the end of the earth. Something about birdsong and star-shine . . .

She turned to Zelda with a beatific smile. ‘I know a poem,’ she began.

‘So do I,’ said Zelda, strutting along the wall.

Out in the shimee sanatorium
, she sang

The jazz mad nuts reside.

Out in the shimee sanatorium

I left my blushing bride.

She went and shook herself insane,

So let her shiver back again!

Jessie laughed, not because the poem amused her, but because Zelda Fitzgerald performing a Charleston along a sea wall in the South of France looked so bizarrely, insanely beautiful.

‘The jazz-mad nuts! That’s us, all right,’ Zelda pronounced, slinging her glass over the cliff edge and looking down. ‘I’ll go first. The trick is to aim a little to the left. There are rocks on the right.’

All aflutter in her silk slip, Zelda raised her arms over her head and took a deep breath. ‘Breathe! Breathe in the burning eucalyptus!’ she cried. And then she executed a perfect swallow-dive over the cliff edge. Jessie heard her laughing all the way down to the water.

Jessie’s eyes searched the sky until they lit upon her lodestar, Venus, gleaming in the blue beyond. Arms aloft in exhilaration, she raised herself on tiptoe and adopted Zelda’s stance.

But as she prepared to launch herself into the air, she heard a voice come from the surrounding darkness, and it was saying: ‘Scotch didn’t love you, Madame MacLeod. You knew that: all along you knew in your heart that he married you for your family’s money. But what you didn’t know was that he ended by despising you. He was there that night on the rue La Boétie when your portraits were unveiled; he saw you parade as Perdita, he witnessed your shameless display.’

Disoriented, Jessie turned.

‘You imagine Lantier loves you?’ continued the voice, unruffled and inexorable. ‘You’re wrong. He has no love for you: you are nothing to him but a whore. As for the daughter you abandoned; if you died tomorrow, she would neither notice nor care.’

With a cry of distress, Jessie stumbled backward, losing her footing.

The monstrous words of Count Demetrios sounded in her head all the way down; before her mind’s eye flashed the faces of all those souls she had loved: Pawpey and Mummy, and Purdy, and Tuppenny, and Scotch and Baba. And Gervaise.

‘
WILL YOU JOIN
me for supper?’ asked Gervaise, when he and Lisa had finished for the day. A purple twilight had descended, the interval she had heard described by the French as ‘the blue hour’, less frequently as ‘the hour between dog and wolf’.

‘No, thank you. I have an engagement . . . elsewhere.’

‘I’m glad you have company. In that case, I’ll carry on working.’

‘You can work without your model being present?’

‘Sometimes it’s easier to capture something of a person’s essence without having them there, physically,’ he explained. ‘The expression goes dead after a few hours. The eyes glaze over and you can’t see the soul behind them any more.’

Lisa’s engagement was with Raoul. He had asked her to join him later that evening, for dinner at the house on the beach. It would be the third evening in a row that she had dined there since her arrival at Salamander Cove, and each night she had ended up in his plain white
bateau lit
and shared breakfast with him the next morning.

If Gervaise knew of her sleeping arrangements, he gave no indication.

After she left the studio, Lisa hung the Liberty silk gown back on its padded silk hanger and got into her day dress – a simple cotton halterneck she had bought in Vallauris. Then she went downstairs to the library and helped herself to the cloth-bound volume that had been inscribed to Gervaise, the one that contained the unpublished short stories of Zelda Fitzgerald. She cut the pages with an ivory-handled knife and leafed through the book with careful fingers.

The title of the third of Zelda’s stories arrested her. It was called ‘The Fairytale Girl’. Lisa curled up on the big cushions on the sofa that faced the French windows and devoured the tale of a beautiful young woman who had arrived from nowhere into the exuberant chaos of the jazz age, and who had departed without leaving a trace of her identity behind. Like Little Red Riding Hood, she had been lost in a forest and menaced by a Big Bad Wolf. Like Snow White, she had run away from danger and been rescued by a handsome prince. Like Cinderella, she had abandoned the most scintillating party of the century, leaving only a shoe behind. Like the Little Mermaid, she had consigned her body to the sea, where she had metamorphosed into foam upon the waves. The heart of the Fairytale Girl was, like that of most romantic heroines, full of love: but the love she safeguarded, the love she treasured above all things, was for her baby daughter.