The Memory of Scent, page 11
I feel George’s hand on my shoulder and it stills me. I remember the torturous decision I made to leave Delphine. It was as foreign and unwelcome as if I was being asked to plunge my hand into boiling water. Every inch of my being recoiled from it, but I knew I had to leave as it wouldn’t have been fair on her. She had been so good to me. She started me working with the patron at the café. She told me I was always welcome back to her if I ever got into difficulties again, but hoped she would never have to see me. My mother came to Paris shortly after that, totally oblivious, and with her own distress as carefully packed as the small suitcases she carried.
It is beginning to rain and heavy drops start to batter the little bunch of flowers. George unbuttons his coat and throws it over my head for I feel strangely rooted and unable to move.
‘Come on. Let’s get out of the rain. Maria, squeeze in here as well.’
We all try to run out through the gate together under George’s coat and suddenly life seems funny again, as we fall, dripping wet into the nearest doorway for shelter. George reaches across and clasps my hand.
‘Listen, I understand. I’ll keep making enquiries. I’ve covered a few of the court sessions. We’ll see what we can follow up. I promise you, we’ll find Babette.’
* * *
Why do I come back here and torture myself? My hair is now a cloying web encasing my face as the rain stabs me relentlessly. Damp mud has seeped through several layers of my clothing and yet here I kneel, clearing away some leaves from Isobel’s grave. I remember leaving with Maria and George and it has happened again … I find my way back here, as if in a trance.
‘Fleur.’ The voice is like a caress. I look up and it is Agnes, the elegant Madame Vignon. She parts the soggy tresses away from my face with her gloved hands. ‘I thought you might be here. Come with me, and we’ll get you some nice warm soup.’
There is a small hoof mark left in the gravel and I must fill it in. ‘I can’t. Look you see, the goat is back.’
Agnes picks up a stone and throws it off into the darkness, towards nothing in particular. ‘There. It’s gone now.’
And I believe her. I stand and allow her to lead me away. I try not to glance over my shoulder to where my daughter lays. I focus solely on the warm comforting feeling of Agnes’s glove against my chapped palm, as she leads me through the crowds to her apartment. I only begin to blink into awareness when I find myself sitting in a large leather chair by the fire, wrapped in a warm shawl with a bowl of soup on my lap.
‘I’m not sure why it happened again, Agnes.’
‘You must be under some sort of stress.’
Stress: what a baffling thing that is. It alights on you and inhabits you and ultimately debilitates you. Sometimes you are not even aware of its presence until you realise you cannot account for a period of time. I seem to have lost some nights. I stroke my soft stomach.
‘Am I trying to destroy myself just so that I can forget there was once a heartbeat here, inside of me, Agnes?’
‘Grief dislodges people. You know that. I know that. Our minds become fragile with the burden of having to carry around too many difficulties. That’s all. People make much too much of a fuss about it all.’
I watch Agnes as she fastens one of the tiny mother-of-pearl buttons on the cuff of her white blouse. It makes me smile as it reminds me of a gown she used to wear. We both used to wear.
‘So declares the, Fleeing Woman in White.’
‘Yes, well, that was a ridiculous amount of fuss too.’
I did not, for one second, consider what I experienced to be a mental breakdown, even as I was being led with anger rising in my throat, through the gates of the asylum. I had been through the trauma of losing my baby. As far as I was concerned, my reactions were that of a normal person reacting to an abnormal occurrence. If only people had stopped and talked to me about it. I would never have harmed any of those babies that I lifted from the perambulators. I just wanted to clutch them tight into me, to nuzzle them and smell them. That was all. If the smell of a baby was a colour, it would be pink.
I did find it peaceful there though, caught up in the swell of routine beyond the high stone walls. I was astonished to find out, very quickly, that the subject of Fleeing Woman in White was a fellow inmate. I had heard the painting being spoken of in tones of admiration, with many rumours circulating about who the ethereal figure in the painting could be. I also had the pleasure of seeing the painting at a retrospective portrait exhibition. It had been around for twenty years or so, dating from the time of Agnes Vignon’s first committal to that very institution, as I was to find out through dogged probing.
The story was told that a beautiful woman in a white gown unwittingly became the subject of a renowned painting as she tried to escape. Some bleary-eyed painters were said to have been meandering home when they were astonished to come across a confused woman with fiery hair who stopped like a frightened deer caught in a lamp light, then leaped off through the field, a hint of her long white legs illuminated by the moon. She was, of course, caught, but she had left enough of an impression that her laudanum-fuelled hysteria would be forever framed and perused with casual interest by waves of strangers. I was one of the few people who knew the true identity of the Fleeing Woman in White.
‘Do you know when I first saw that painting of me, Fleur? It was at the Salon des Refuses around 1863, when I went to track down the portrait that had so dislodged my father. There she was, Red Hair, White Dress and as I continued scanning the walls, taking in the other works, there I was too, frozen in my fevered state of mind for time immemorial.’
‘You have to admit, it is a stunning painting though.’
‘Yes, but really, I’d much rather be sitting on a velvet divan in my favourite hat in some well-appointed room somewhere. I hate to shatter the myth; it does seem the stuff of melodrama, but I’m sure I was just going for a moon-lit walk, rather than actually trying to escape. I suppose it’s more than possible that someone did see me. Whether it was the artist himself, I don’t know, but I think the story became such a part of the painting that it almost grew to be more significant than it. I’d blame the fevered imagination of the artist myself. They are all such storytellers. There are probably fleeing women in England and Italy, everywhere. I’m sure I wasn’t the first mad person to want to absent themselves from an asylum for a harmless stroll.’
‘I never considered you mad, Agnes, either in Sainte-Anne’s or out of it.’
‘It was decided that I drank too much for my own good which meant I exhibited “abnormal impulses”. And, because I was fond of men, that meant I was also deemed to be devoid of moral sense.’
‘The word “degenerate” was used to describe me.’
‘All nonsense.’
‘I was grateful for my madness. It protected me.’
‘Yes, but you don’t want to go back there. This episode is like a carriage wheel that veered slightly out of its rut. Take the reins firmly Fleur. Don’t mind these past few days. They are lost so there is no point in fretting about them.’
‘This hasn’t been the only one of late. A night here and few days there.’
‘Fleur, grief can derail people completely. But to be so grief-stricken, well, it’s like having an insufficient love of life. You’re too young to live in such a state of anxiety. It has taken me a long time. I’m nearly forty now, but I became tired of feeling so displaced that I eventually decided my best defence was to love life.’
I sip at my soup again. Nobody could ever accuse Madame Vignon of not loving life.
‘My other piece of advice, from hard-earned experience, is to stay away from artists. Enjoy their company, by all means, and of course their talent, and don’t let it stop you working for them, but at the core of an artist is aloofness. This is what enables them to depict what is around them. They have to be aloof in order to create. I am endlessly fascinated by them and envious of their self-absorption but would warn any girl against emotionally investing in them.’
‘What about writers?’
‘Another story, my dear. I am not going to advise you on what to do about George. I am very, very fond of him, but would I broker a relationship between you two?’
‘No, I was just thinking in general.’
She flashes me a knowing smile. ‘Rest here tonight.’
Rest. What a beautiful word, a beautiful concept. But my mother needs me. I immediately pull the shawl from around my shoulders. My poor mother, how could I be so inattentive? I hope the ragoûts has held out and I do know that she has plenty of mending that will be keeping her busy.
‘Thank you so much, Agnes. I’ll try not to put you through all of this again.’ She takes the shawl from me.
‘If you do, you do. But I’d rather you didn’t, for your sake.’
* * *
I don’t think my absence was necessarily the cause, but there is a dullness about Maman, a tiredness and an air of defeat, which I am finding exhausting. I try to maintain a degree of levity because with her every sigh, she seems to be sucking energy from the very air we breathe. It feels as if there is a limited supply of oxygen between us and Maman is requiring most of it just to enable her to rise in the mornings. This then is leaving me gasping. I feel she is drawing too much from me, too much from what is ours that is shared.
I have taken to patting Babette’s velvet hat on my lap as if it was a loyal cat. I find it soothes me as I conjure up possible scenarios for where she is and what she could be doing that very minute. The faint hint of patchouli always inhabits me long after I have carefully placed the hat back on my small dressing table. The little bird brings with it just enough whimsy to stop me from feeling terribly sorry for myself, reminding me that life is not all grim. Why then would I agree to accompany Maria to a funeral this morning? I suppose in their own way, they can be spectacles and we expect that Manet’s will be well attended. Maria pushes me through the crowd so that we can sit on a wall, giving us a clear view of Manet’s coffin as it is carried to the cemetery. The crowd of men closes in around the coffin. People often become more boisterous relative to their proximity to a corpse. I think it is a supreme act of denial – as if their laughter and chatter will act as a protective shield and death will become distracted and not seek out another body, at least not yet.
‘There goes my initial inspiration. To dust.’
Maria thumps her chest in mock piety.
‘But my pledge is not to bury that inspiration like poor Manet is being buried now.’
‘I didn’t know you knew Manet that well.’
‘I always had a tender spot for him. That café of yours, the Guerbois, that’s where I first spied him. He used to often sit at a table by the front window, impeccably turned out when I was this runny-nosed scamp peering through the glass. He sat with the same group of men and little did I think then that I’d end up modelling for a few of them.’
‘Well I’m sure if they looked out the window and saw this grubby creature staring back, in their wildest dreams, they wouldn’t have imagined they’d end up painting you!’
‘Renoir was there and Degas, he was one of them too. See those two pallbearers at the rear, Monet and Zola? I remember them being there.’
How strange to bury people in spring; it just doesn’t seem right. Everything is bursting forth with new life and new brilliance. You would reasonably expect a morbid scene such as the lowering of a coffin to be dipped in hues of grey. But then Manet, who died such a miserable death, with his gangrenous amputated foot, would probably prefer this to be a colourful occasion. His friends here will probably sign his funeral book and then commit the scene to canvas. Nothing seems private to them. I am trying not to think about my mother. I am trying not to wonder what, if anything, I can do to help her. I am trying not to let my mind drift to the Petites Maisons where poor women are treated, mainly for syphilis.
‘Come on. I feel I’ve done my duty now.’
Maria jumps down from the wall, and I slide to the ground after her, managing to scrape myself in the process whereas she just has to contend with some dirt that can be easily wiped off her dress.
‘We’ll go look at that statue’s head in the park.’
The statue is the talk of Paris; a giant monstrosity of a thing that is to be a gift to the United States of America when it’s finished. ‘Statue de la Liberté.’ At the moment it is just a huge, decapitated head jutting several storeys high among the blooms of the park. We need to stand quite far back to take in the giant copper face and pointed crown. The lips alone look to be about three feet wide. Maria climbs up onto the platform which holds the huge head. She tries to reach up to the copper chin. She caresses the mottled surface. It seems like an act of pagan worship.
‘I could do with this woman’s strength. They buried Manet, but long live this goddess of liberty. She will become my new source of inspiration.’ Suddenly Maria has a dizzy spell and stumbles.
‘Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine. Just pregnant.’
‘What? When did you find out?’ I look around for somewhere to take a seat.
‘Don’t worry about it. In front of this grand lady, I am vowing not to allow this to oppress or enslave me.’
‘How far along are you? Who is the father?’
‘I don’t know what to tell you. It was one of those nights that started off in gaiety, and then as the night wore on … well, you know, how sometimes, with absinthe, you seem to lose the power of your legs? You know when your mind is fine, but you’re getting numb from the toes up and by the time your brain tells you you’ve drunk too much, well your body is already on the floor?’
‘What then?’
Maria looks unconcerned, or making a very good attempt at feigning it.
‘That is the problem, I’m not exactly sure. Henri was with me at one point, but my last memory of him is sitting like a crumpled doll on a bench. I remember wild dancing. I remember hands. I woke up in the apartment of some insurance clerk. Fleur, I’ve no idea if he is the father or not. What was I doing with him of all people? He is so dull and grey, and he does that thing with his nose … he presses in one nostril and honks. I think it’s a mucus problem.’
I can’t help myself and begin to laugh. I hold Maria’s cheeks between my hands. ‘Whoever the father is, there is more than enough of you to knock him off his perch. Your blood will be coursing through every inch of that child you are carrying. It will be just the two of you, an army of two, ready to do battle.’
I am willing strength on her but I am fearful at the thought of Maria being side-lined into the unyielding state of motherhood. That would be such a waste. Still, there is very little wrong in the world that cannot be softened by the sweet smell of a baby’s skin. I immediately wished it would be a little girl, to let me imagine how my own daughter would have grown up.
‘I’ve decided I do want to keep it. My mother said she will look after it and that I should get back to modelling as soon as possible afterwards. It will be fine. I would prefer a spring baby to a winter baby but I’m afraid that kind of timing is out of my hands.’ She seems to have a sudden burst of energy.
‘Come on, you can help me because today is moving day. We’ve a new place near the bottom of the hill. Mind you, this is only going to take about two or three runs for all the things we have accumulated over the past few years, so trust me, I won’t be taking up too much of your time. My lifetime’s belongings don’t amount to much.’
We navigate our way back to Maria’s little home in Montmartre in idle gossip, the way we have done so many times over the years, our chatter sealing us in a bubble of oblivion. A knife-wielding lunatic could jump in front of us and then plunge his knife into the neck of a passing child, and we would barely notice. We place several small bundles into a handcart with both of us then steering it down the hill until we reach the narrow Rue Poteau and Maria’s new lodgings: a small apartment on what is a dark and dingy street. Maria and her mother have moved so often that she hardly comments on it at all anymore. She registers my disapproval.
‘It will do for the moment. It is cheaper, and we don’t have that much money coming in with even less for the foreseeable future.’
‘If there’s ever anything I can do to help you, Maria.’
‘I know, but you have your own mother to worry about. You are going to have to make some decisions there.’
My mother has been suffering frequently with violent headaches, but sometimes I prefer them to her quiet moments where she appears to be nothing but an emptied hulk, her eyes devoid of light. Each time I sponge her at night, I study her frail body for lesions or swellings, terrified in case there is any evidence of the pox as there is a muted obsession with it around here. It is not something that is openly discussed, just darkly hinted at. Prostitutes are fearful of it and men are fearful of prostitutes giving it to them. But then if men like Manet can get syphilis, can they not just as easily pass it on? Did father’s Marseilles trips harm Maman in any way?
One evening at the café, I listened as the men spoke gravely of a fellow artist who had just undergone treatment for syphilis. They described some sort of mercury stew where their friend had to sit in a small steam-room covered head to toe in mercury ointment while wrapped in blankets for twenty or thirty days at a time. Most of his teeth fell out and his jaw swelled painfully. The secretions from his nose and mouth had a disgusting smell, and he had fainted several times. They said he hadn’t been right since and certainly didn’t have the energy to do anything. To my shock, I heard them say that another friend had died of a heart attack during the treatment.
I have to be strong enough for both of us and I worry that I will find it too difficult. Agnes is the only one that knows, really. Agnes is a witness to something very different in me. She is like a beautiful mirror that I am drawn to yet don’t want to stare at for too long. Agnes reveals to me a truth that I would much rather keep tucked away. We both know that something at the core of me is fragile and unpredictable, something has been dislodged, and I can only blame my grief for that. This has been playing a lot on my mind lately. I try to over-ride it by focusing on living in the moment, but there are incidents, fleeting events, where I feel in a daze, as if displaced.
