The Girl Behind The Fan (Hidden Women) (8 page)

He drew Arlette and Elaine too, but he always made certain to show them in their very best light. He drew Elaine from the side without the birthmark. He drew Arlette in such a way that you couldn’t see that beneath her beautiful golden hair, she actually had rather large ears. He drew me too. I had been told too often about the sin of vanity to find myself beautiful, but to see myself through Remi’s eyes was simply wonderful. He made me look like a princess, even if he pictured me washing the pots. I treasured those drawings and kept them under my pillow, as though the warmth of his hand was still upon them and it might somehow escape from the paper to caress my eager face.

Remi was fast improving as an artist. He explained to me that his father had cut him off when he decided to become a painter and so, having run through his small savings, he simply had to make a living from his craft. To please his landlady, he was painting a mural in her sitting room.

‘She said she wanted it to be like Versailles. Well, I can’t give her the extra space but I can give her peacocks prancing along her skirting boards.’

The landlady was thrilled with Remi’s efforts and waived three whole months’ rent.

At lunchtimes, Remi drew the patrons of our local bistro – Le Petit Ami. The restaurateur was delighted to offer his clientele such an unusual added extra: a caricature with your
menu prix fixe
? He gave Remi a daily free meal in exchange. And sometimes, if the clientele were especially pleased with their portraits, they tipped Remi a little more on the side.

‘The patrons of Le Petit Ami are pretty wealthy,’ Remi told me one afternoon, when he was drawing me in the kitchen. ‘I am hoping that soon enough one of them will ask me to make a proper portrait in oils. I shall buy you a bonnet with the proceeds. Until then, I will keep making my sketches. Practice makes perfect. Sit still. You always fidget when I’m trying to preserve your beauty for all time.’

Now that really made me fidget. My beauty! I blushed to the roots of my hair.

‘Oh, come on, Augustine. Don’t be so coy! Everyone must tell you you’re beautiful. There can’t be a gentleman comes in here who doesn’t wish he could be visiting you and not Arlette.’

I was shocked by his boldness and I protested that he was wrong. He put down his pencil and held my gaze.

‘You don’t think I keep coming here to see your mistress, do you?’

‘Maybe not. But you come to keep company with your friends. You come for Charles. You come for a free meal in the evenings. You come for the wine.’

‘Don’t insult me or your own intelligence. You know I come here for something far more precious than the company of those buffoons who call themselves my friends or a plateful of Elaine’s stringy horsemeat daube. I come here only for you.’

He got up from his easel and came towards me. He took up both my hands and fell to his knees in front of me.

‘You are my goddess, Augustine. From the moment I first saw you, I could think of no one else. Say you feel the same way.’

‘I did,’ I stammered. ‘I do.’

‘Then let’s stop dancing around each other. Let’s show our feelings. Let’s be in love – starting right now!’

He got to his feet again and pulled me up so I was on a level with him. He stared deep into my eyes for a delicious, stomach-flipping moment, then pressed his mouth hard against mine, taking me completely by surprise.

I had never been kissed before. I had imagined what it would be like, of course, and Elaine had demonstrated the technique on the back of my hand. In reality, that practice was worth nothing. I was suddenly rigid with fear.

‘Let your mouth relax,’ said Remi.

‘I don’t know how to.’

‘What do you mean? You really have never done this before?’

‘Never,’ I confirmed.

‘Then I will have to teach you. Be calm. It will happen naturally.’

How could I be calm? My heart was beating so hard I was sure he must be able to hear it. My ears were filled with the sound of rushing blood. When he finally released me, I had to sit straight down before I fell down on the spot.

‘Augustine Levert,’ Remi breathed. ‘You are the most exquisite creature on God’s earth. If I didn’t have to be at the café in fifteen minutes I would stay here and kiss you all day.’

But he did have to be at the café. He was supposed to be drawing the owner’s daughter as a gift for her fiancé. He gave me one more hard kiss and then he was gone, leaving me breathless and utterly, utterly transformed.

That afternoon, I had some time to myself so I met Remi at the café and we went for a walk along the river. He held my hand and we stopped every couple of minutes to practise kissing. I was so happy and so proud to be seen with him. A man had chosen me at last!

‘He says that he loves me,’ I told Elaine that night.

‘Well well,’ said Elaine. ‘It must be true. I heard that before he saw you, he was well on his way to marrying a girl from his home town. That’s the real reason his father has cut him off. It was less a marriage than a business merger.’

‘What else did you hear?’

‘That his family is very wealthy, so it’s no small thing that he’s fallen out of his father’s favour. If he went back to Guerville, he would live a life of luxury. Instead, he’s staying here to be with you, scraping a living from making sketches. He must really be besotted.’

‘It’s so romantic,’ I said. ‘I love him so madly. I don’t care if he never has a penny.’

‘Not now, you don’t,’ said Elaine. ‘Give it time.’

Elaine was wrong. I was sure of that. How much a man was worth in crude monetary terms would never matter to me. In my parents, I had seen an example of true love at its finest. I don’t believe my father could have loved my mother any more if she had been dressed always in the latest fashions and I don’t believe she could have loved him harder and more enduringly if he had showered her with diamonds instead of the shells he sometimes brought back from the beach. Or the little painting that was my treasure. My father had put his heart into that painting.

I suppose it was not insignificant that Remi was an artist and in him I saw my father’s dreams realised. I always held artists in the highest esteem.

‘They’re shiftless and unreliable,’ was Elaine’s view.

I did not listen to her. I had found my love.

At the same time, Arlette was embarking on a passionate tryst with Charles the poet. The general, who was Arlette’s most frequent and most favoured visitor, had been called away on military business. There was more trouble in Algeria. Arlette told him she would miss him terribly and would remain cloistered like a nun until his return. As it was, she spent a couple of mornings with Girodin (politicians somehow never needed to visit the wars they started) and the rest of her time – every moment they could snatch – with Charles.

I watched them through the peephole. With Charles, Arlette was unlike I had ever seen her. She was not imperious and demanding, as she was with the general. She was not meek and silent, as she was with Girodin. With Charles, Arlette was at her most natural. Their lovemaking was accompanied always by the sound of laughter. They rolled over and over on the mattress like a pair of happy kittens. Sometimes he was on top. Sometimes she rode him as though he were a horse on a fairground carousel. Once, they pulled all the covers off the bed and slept on the floor. They curled around each other. Their bodies fitted together so perfectly, Charles’ long brown limbs and Arlette’s alabaster-white curves.

That was what Remi and I would look like, I decided. Matched like two pieces of the same puzzle. Once we came together, we would never be able to part.

Chapter 10

I’d been working on my research for a week and a half when it struck me that I had to know more about Remi Sauvageon. He would doubtless be an important character in the film – Greg had explained to me that it didn’t matter if a movie was ostensibly about a woman, in Hollywood the male characters were invariably cast first – so I needed to get a better handle on the film’s natural hero. Unfortunately for me, unlike his lover, Remi Sauvageon was not a man of letters. The only correspondence of his that I could find was a letter to his canvas supplier, asking for an extension of credit. There were, however, paintings and sketches by the artist all over Europe and far beyond.

To begin with I read his biographies. They concentrated largely on his career as it took off when he became associated with the Impressionists. There were hundreds of thousands of words on the men Remi associated with in the 1870s, but Augustine was hardly mentioned except as the supposed subject of the painting in the Musée d’Orsay, commissioned by the Duc de Rocambeau a good decade before Remi was famous. In one book she was not even given a name, just referred to in a single sentence: ‘That year, Remi painted a notorious courtesan . . .’ It seemed a cruel dismissal of the love affair that had meant so much to Augustine. History’s footnote. Even the painting was dismissed as being relatively unimportant compared to his later works.

However, I now knew from Augustine’s diaries that the portrait was not the first time Remi had captured Augustine’s likeness, so I kept searching for more references in his archive. Then I found it.

A sketchbook of Remi’s, from 1839, had been sold at auction in 2011. By rights, that sketchbook should contain at least some pictures of Augustine. I was delighted to see that it existed. I was absolutely flabbergasted, though, when I followed the auction house’s paper trail to see where the sketchbook had ended up. The buyer: one Marco Donato of Venice.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Of all the people in the world who might have bought that sketchbook, why did it have to be him? I wanted to see those pictures, but how could I? How could I ask Marco to let me see them when our correspondence had ended in such an embarrassing impasse?

In the end, it was too great a coincidence to resist. Much as I tried not to be swayed by superstition, I couldn’t help but think I’d been sent a sign. This was the perfect excuse to get in touch with Marco and break the silence that had blossomed between us. After all, our correspondence hadn’t exactly ended badly. Rather, it had ended
strangely
when Marco failed to appear at the ball, sending his excuses by email. Unconvincing excuses at that.

However, it had been a while since that last email. Perhaps I could pretend that there was nothing strange about it and I was just a friend sending a ‘how are you’? I could only hope that he would be as pleased to hear from me as I was pleased at the prospect of being in touch with him again. I wrote:

Dear Marco,

I hope this finds you well and that business has been good and the troubles you were having in Hong Kong have long since been sorted out. I am sorry I have not written earlier. I’m sure you can imagine how busy I’ve been finishing my thesis on Luciana. I’ve attached a copy so you can see what all that time I spent in your library was really about. If you can bear to read such a dry academic text, that is.

It’s your library that brings me to write to you again. I’ve taken a job – a proper paying job this time – doing some speculative research for a Hollywood producer who is interested in making a biopic about Augustine du Vert, a nineteenth-century courtesan. I’ve been lucky enough to find copies of her diary in Paris, which is where I am staying for the meantime. But to have a real sense of her, it would be even more useful to have access to the pictures drawn by her lover Remi Sauvageon. I hope this is ringing a bell by now. Sauvageon worked on the fringes of the Impressionist movement, but when he first arrived in Paris, he ran with a crowd of young dilettantes who made a courtesan’s house their meeting place. At the time, Augustine was a maid there. She and Remi fell in love.

I tracked down one of his sketchbooks from that period to an auction at Bonham’s and discovered that you were the highest bidder.

Assuming you still have it, I hope you won’t mind me asking if I might return to the library one more time to see the book. I know you have re-instigated your ‘no visitors’ policy but wonder if that rule pertains to friends, as I hope we were and still might be.

I struggled with that last paragraph in particular. We had been something more than friends, I hoped. Friends didn’t generally share their sexual fantasies, after all. But friends was all we could possibly be now, after such an absence from each others’ life. I signed off and pressed send.

For the next few hours I was on tenterhooks, just waiting for a reply. Finally, it came. I could not open the email quickly enough. Just the sight of his name in my in-box set my heart racing.

Dear Sarah,

By all means. Next time you are in Venice, the library will be at your disposal.

Sincerely,

Marco

That was it. Just two lines. Marco’s email was as simple and cool as his very first email to me, all those months ago before he knew me. He didn’t ask how I was. He didn’t tell me what was going on with him. The email was bare bones. Utterly professional. The only way of telling that we knew each other at all was that he had addressed me as ‘Sarah’ and not ‘Miss Thomson.’

I started to write back at once.