The Crimson Bed (25 page)

    'Mary is
our
baby, remember?' he said, even more gloomy at the thought that his family would not be there on his return. But there was no gainsaying Ellie once her mind was made up and he knew it well.

    'I know that, my dear Fred,' she said with a little more tenderness when she saw his downcast face, 'and I know you will miss us both. When you return from France, why not come over and visit us at Oreton Hall? I hope that Papa may also come and join us there for a week or so. Why don't you come over together?'

As it turned out Fred returned earlier and rather unexpectedly from Paris where, in the company of Mr Oldham and the pursuit of new art, he had been introduced to many new sights, sounds, tastes and ideas. This was no mean feat as Fred was not a traveller at heart, loving all that was safe, familiar and British. Neither was he a person prone to changing track once his mind had been settled on anything he liked and admired.

    The two men dined in some elegant places, visited various famous galleries and museums and strolled in the moonlight beside the Seine. Fred actually found himself enjoying the bustle and cheerful atmosphere of the city, sitting out on pavements drinking wine and watching the colourful scene around them. It all felt quite carefree, relaxed, and bright with colour unlike the greyness and drabness and smoke-darkened buildings of London. Being with Oldham made him feel mature and even a little rakish, a regular man of the world, nodding and tipping his hat to the ladies who smiled at him from beneath the brims of their bonnets. He would never have done this at home.

    
Ellie would have loved it here
, he thought regretfully but he understood that she was still worried about little Mary's health and didn't wish to leave her child with strangers. All the same, he missed her.

    Fred had been introduced to some interesting new Left Bank painters but he was not sure that he cared for their style very much. He could not believe in the crudeness of their efforts, some artists refusing even to use a palette but simply applying raw colour directly to their canvas and moving it about with the brush to create various effects. To Fred this was not painting at all, just playing around like a child. What kind of art was this, he asked himself indignantly, what attention or spiritual feeling or meaning could possibly be involved? How Hunt and Rossetti would laugh at them!

    'I don't believe they will come to anything, those fellows. I wish people wouldn't keep trying to change things. I still think our artists are the best in the world and the French, apart from the great painters like Ingres and Delacroix, have nothing to compare. I shall stick to selling British art and that's that.'

    'You mustn't be so insular, dear fellow. You've seen nothing yet,' said Oldham with a strange little smile. 'I have another artist or two for you to visit. I rather think you may enjoy what
they
have on offer.'

    Fred was caught by something in Oldham's voice, a slight insinuation of some kind.

    A couple of days before they returned, Oldham took him over to Montmartre. The previous night they had visited the Folies Bergère and Fred had been shocked but also rather stirred by the lewdness of the women and their dancing. It was true that as a bachelor he had often accompanied Gabriel Rossetti and other friends to risqué venues such as the Coal Hole or the Cave of Harmony to spend their evenings. He had been entertained by
poses
plastiques
in cigar divans where he and the other fellows would sit and look at women who wore flesh coloured body stockings and stood behind glass screens in various unmoving poses. But in the Folies Bergère, the women moved and how they moved, how they flaunted their limbs and wiggled their posteriors at one!

    Therefore, though he did enjoy the sights and sounds at the Folies Bergère, he also felt that British sense of disquiet and unease at actually having it thrust in his face, so to speak. He made an effort to appear urbane, disinterested and detached the way Gabriel always did in such places, just sitting smiling, watching and tapping gently on the table with his fingers in time to the music. Sometimes Fred scribbled little drawings of the scene before him with a pencil upon a small pad of paper that he always carried about with him. He tried to show he was a man of the world and felt he was succeeding admirably.

    Oldham watched his young companion with some amusement as if he sensed that Fred might rather like to pay more attention to the swirling skirts of the women, the uncovered limbs and flashing cleavage but was putting up a silly pretence of extreme gentility and disdain.

    The next day, Fred went with him to Montmartre. They came to a thick pair of wooden doors set in a dark, forbidding wall down a small, narrow alleyway. Oldham knocked and the concierge came and let them in. They entered a small courtyard and Fred looked about him with some disgust at the heaps of litter and covered his nose with his hand at the stench of urine. He never liked what he deemed to be scruffy surroundings and wondered why Oldham was bringing him to this terrible place.

    'I think you will feel it is worthwhile,' said Osborne when Fred voiced this question, 'Marillon is an interesting artist, known only to a select few.'

    They climbed the stairs to the top floor. Here they were let into a large studio room by an unkempt but quite attractive young woman who held a baby in her arms. Osborne spoke to her rapidly in French, a language with which Fred was not very proficient, and she laughed and called out to Marillon who came out of a small back room, looking rather tousled and unwashed. He was an oliveskinned individual, his eyes a deep, intense brown and very Gallic looking in Fred's eyes, probably from the Southern climes, something of the Spanish about him. His features were gaunt and bony, the beard and moustache shaved off but remaining as a dark stubble over his chin that gave him a vicious air. His whole demeanour was rough, coarse, and very unpleasing to Fred's fastidious eyes.

    'My apologies, gentlemen,' said the artist, smoothing back his long, unkempt hair, 'I have had a busy night.'

    'You have been painting all night?' asked Fred

    Marillon laughed a little and said, 'Ah, no, not last night. More exercise than painting, I would say.'

    Oldham also laughed at this and the two men exchanged knowing glances. Fred was puzzled by this comment but said no more. He felt out of place in this awful hole but thought to himself that a man should be able to take it all in his stride with ease. So he smiled in response and hoped he looked suave and urbane.

    'Well, Monsieur Oldham, how are you?' Marillon said with a hearty familiarity, gripping that gentleman's hand and patting his other arm at the same time. He turned to the girl and told her roughly to fetch them a bottle of wine and some glasses,' 'Get on with it, Lou-Lou... why are you standing there like an idiot! These gentlemen are thirsty!'

    He pulled up some chairs to a small rough table and Fred, yearning to dust the seat, sat down gingerly on the edge of one of them. Oldham seated himself comfortably and splayed out his legs, totally at ease. To Fred's surprise, the wine, when it was brought, was very good.

    Marillon uncovered some of his canvases for Fred to see and they were very pleasing though nothing startlingly original. Fred thought they might sell but could see no reason why Oldham, with his unerring taste, would be attracted by these paintings of little more than ordinary merit. However, he commented on them politely, not desiring to offend his host, who looked like a cutthroat to his eye.

    After a little chitchat, Oldham said, 'And now to business, my good friend. I would like you to show Monsieur Thorpe some of your more interesting work. V
ous comprenez
?'

    '
Mais, bien sur
,' said Marillon with another of his throaty little laughs. He set down his wine glass and went over to the back of his studio. Here behind a thick curtain stood a tall cabinet with thin drawers that slid out rather like those of a music cabinet and from these he brought out some large folders full of papers. Setting these down on the table, away from the wine for fear of spillage, he invited Fred to come over and look.

    There was drawing after drawing in vast detail and the nature of them made Fred blush with surprise and stare in a kind of fascinated horror. One of Marillon's models was obviously the young woman with the baby; at least Fred recognised something of her features and the colour of her fair hair. But there were also dark women, red headed women, plump women with breasts like cushions, thin women with pointed breasts – all being ridden by some man in various obscene acts. There were women who looked more like men coupling with other women and even scenes with men together, all depicting perverse postures that Fred didn't even know were possible between human beings. He felt slightly sick and set the pictures down.

    'Enough,' he said, 'I've seen enough.'

    Marillon, who had been regarding him with a slightly amused manner as he noted Fred's reactions, shrugged and carefully collected the pictures back together again.

    Oldham said, 'Form
idable, mon ami
... your collection improves every time I come. '

    'You intend to buy these?' said Fred in bewilderment.

    'My dear fellow, these will sell very well indeed – though it has to be said that photography is even beginning to take over this market now. But to my mind, and that of other connoisseurs in this art form, photography will never supersede the erotic imagination of the artist in devising new postures and contrivances. '

    'The human body is capable of a good deal,' said Marillon with a smile, 'but certainly an artist can make it more charming.'

    'Indeed so. And I know you speak from experience on all counts,' said Oldham with a little chuckle.

    'But these pictures are illegal... they are... you will surely never sell them?' Fred stammered. His glance returned to the drawings. They fascinated and repelled him in equal measure.

    'Do you wish to look again?' asked Marillon, spreading them out once more.

    'No. No. I have no interest in buying these. If Mr Oldham wishes to then that is his business. I will have no part of it.'

    He picked up his hat and gloves and went to the door. In his agitation he left without even saying goodbye. Oldham and Marillon exchanged glances and Oldham sighed.

    'The English are and will always be hypocrites,
mon ami
,' he said. 'I felt sure he would be a likely buyer.'

    'He loved them really,' said the Frenchman. 'He'll be back to buy some one day. When he has got over his fit of conscience.'

    Fred paused uncertain at the bottom of the stairs. He wanted to go back. He wanted to see the pictures again. He shook the idea from him as one might shake off a noisome creature that clings to one with gripping talons that dig into the flesh. He turned round again, went out into the cool night air, and raised up his face to the cleansing, gentle rain that had begun to fall.

Chapter 22

Fred spent the night writhing about in deep discomfort. He found his mind filled with the lewd pictures he had seen and they troubled him. In his dreams, he saw Bessie again, dancing like the girls in the Folies, staring at him insolently, taking off her drawers and waving them at him, smiling and beckoning to him to join her. Then he disappeared after her into some dark, strange place where he felt lost and afraid and struggled to awake himself from the suffocation of it all.

    He now regretted having come to Paris with Oldham. He felt the meeting with Marillon had somehow degraded him, filling his hitherto clear mind with terrible thoughts. He could never have imagined such things in a hundred years! Now it was a contamination; pictures and emotions he would never ever be able to erase from his memory. He politely told Oldham next morning that he would return to England that day as there was little in Paris to interest him after all.

    Oldham drank his black coffee, lit a cigar and regarded Fred for a short while in silence.

    'Very well then, Mr Thorpe, you must suit yourself. But I feel that you are allowing your feelings, your personal tastes, to interfere with your judgement and business sense. I cannot say I unduly like any of these pictures myself. They intrigue me as much as the next man, but they are, I'll grant you, coarse. However, these pictures sell – and sell very well. I have many sources in England where I can distribute them. I am a little surprised. Somehow, I never thought of you as a prudish man but rather a man of the world.'

    'I am, I am,' said Fred hastily, 'I am no prude, sir, no not at all. But I love what is beautiful, you see. There is nothing beautiful in all that. A true artist could never create such pictures. A true lover of beauty would find it abhorrent. I leave it to such as yourself who are not perturbed by it.'

    'So be it,' said Oldham with a little disdainful smile. Privately he thought Thorpe a fool. He knew plenty of very respectable artists who delighted in drawing such things in secret. They might not descend to selling them but that did not mean that their thoughts were pure as driven snow. What an innocent the fellow was!

When Fred returned to his Hampstead house, there was no Ellie to welcome him, no Charlie to put his arms about his neck, nor little Mary gazing up at him from her crib with her soft, long-lashed blue eyes. It seemed so empty of life, so cold and lonely without them. Even the parlour maid was absent and the fire unlit. The cook, the only person still in the house at that time, came up from the kitchen in something of a fluster of surprise at his return and lit it for him. No one had expected him home so early, she said, as she managed to rustle him up a cold meal of some sort.

    He sat at the dining table and ate his solitary meal, regarding Ellie's empty place with a forlorn eye. He then retired to the drawing room and sat beside the fire clutching a glass of whisky, smoking cigars till the air was filled with smoke, and he began coughing. Then at bedtime, he took a lamp and pausing on the way to his own room, turned and went briefly into Ellie's room and stared at the crimson-covered bed. He picked up some of her newly washed clothing that one of the maids had left upon a chair waiting to be put into the chest of drawers. Burying his face in a nightdress and then a pair of her pantalettes, he smelt the delicate perfume of her that came through despite the washing and ironing. He missed her so much!