Hold Back the Night (5 page)

❧

All through her youth Domini painted a good deal. Her father allowed her to use his paints and a corner of his huge studio. Her efforts produced bright, joyous paintings, and Le Basque seemed to take delight in them, roaring with laughter, chucking her under the chin, rewarding her with huge bear hugs before he went back to his own easel. But he taught her nothing and voiced no comment and gave her no encouragement to continue. Nevertheless, she thought she could paint. On the brink of adulthood she had a childlike faith in her own invincibility, and she had not yet learned that it was difficult to be the famous child of a famous father. She was headstrong and proud at that age ... fearless because she had known no fear, impetuous because she had known a minimum of restriction, demanding because she had known no deprivation, overly confident because she was unaware of the extent of her own ignorance, tactless because she had never known reason to tell anything but the truth.

But because she had known much love, she was also joyful, warm, trusting, loyal, courageous, passionate, generous to a fault, and capable of loving very deeply ... too deeply ... herself.

The first of the clashes with her father came when she was seventeen and wanted to go to Paris to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Of course she was going to be a great artist! Didn't she have her father's genes?

'Great art is here in the heart!' he had shouted in return, slapping the barrel of his chest. Papa still had the build of a bull and a great peasant strength, for all that he was past seventy at that time. 'Naive little girl! What do you think you can learn in Paris?'

'You lived in Paris when you were younger than me! What did .you learn?'

'I learned what it is to starve! To steal! To lie! To hate! To love! To live!'

'And to paint!'

Yet, because it was the most he had ever told her about his early years, years even the art historians had not been able to reconstruct after the most arduous investigations, his objections silenced Domini for the time being. Later she wondered about his words ... they were not the words of a man who had been born and bred to think the whole world a miracle. Yet in his earliest youth no unhappy marriage had existed to sour his views. Had Papa not been happy before the Bitter Years, as Domini had always assumed?

But when she pressed him to tell her about his childhood, he merely chuckled and muttered, 'I am a child still!' just as he had always said in answer to her questions about such things.

Though momentarily routed in her quest to go to Paris, Domini had not conceded the battle. Berenice, who usually confined herself to listening sympathetically instead of interfering, became a strong ally in Domini's fight, pointing out to Le Basque that it was ill-advised to launch Domini into adulthood with as little experience of the outside world as she herself, with her strict convent education, had had.

'I would never have agreed to marry, if I had known anything of the real world!' she overheard Berenice arguing one day. 'You must let her become an adult, Pierre. Are you going to protect her forever?'

While Domini couldn't agree that her own upbringing had been as cloistered as Berenice's ... nuns didn't teach the kind of things she knew, and she didn't believe she had been protected from life's harsher facts in any way ... she was grateful for the help. And perhaps it was the extra pressure exerted by Berenice, in addition to Domini's own stormy persuasions, that finally changed Le Basque's mind. One year and several hundred confrontations later, her father capitulated suddenly and completely, taking her by surprise. Thrilled, she threw her arms about his neck.

'Perhaps the lessons will be harder than you think,' he muttered, hugging her.

'Oh, no, Papa! I can do it, I know! You'll be so proud of me!'

He sighed heavily and detached himself from her embrace and said, 'Oh, my little Didi. Can I bear to see you grow up?'

'I've already done that!' she cried, dancing away from him in an impromptu whirl of delight. Her father merely smiled sorrowfully.

He made arrangements for her to move into a pension on the Left Bank, a well-run establishment that housed a colony of art students and artists. It was owned by an acquaintance of Le Basque's Paris dealer, Monsieur D'Allard, who personally attested to its cleanliness and offered to keep an eye on Domini's progress. She was registered in classes, circumventing the usual admission requirements with an ease she failed to recognize, and was given a generous allowance that she accepted as her due. Berenice a Soule accompanied her to Paris to help in the selection of a suitable new wardrobe, choosing good but casual clothes that to this day, after more than four years had passed, still formed the nucleus of Domini's closet.

During her first few days in the pension she made a brief attempt to rid herself of the childhood sobriquet of Didi and gave it up as virtually impossible. The other boarders, fellow students most of them, knew who she was. They treated her in friendly fashion but with guarded awe, giving rise to a sensation that Domini found vaguely uncomfortable. In those days she bore a more striking resemblance to the famous portrait in the Louvre: her hair was still sun-kissed and feathered in a windblown pixie cut that emphasized her youth and her large dark-lashed amethyst eyes.

The pension was clean, comfortable, and cheerful, a friendly place where everybody seemed to know everybody's business but minded his or her own. The food was good and the widowed landlady pleasant, but for a tendency to complain about the electricity bill and replace bright light bulbs with lamps of lower wattage. Domini, never averse to new experiences, swiftly passed through a brief stage of homesickness. She reported to Monsieur D'Allard, when he dropped by the pension to enquire, that she was going to be very happy.

More than a week passed before she met Sander Williams, and by then she knew a few things about him, most but not all learned at the communal dinner table shared by the boarders. She knew he lived in the loft in a separate apartment that took up the entire top floor and had its own kitchen. Although he used the stairs shared by everyone, stairs that passed right by Domini's door, it happened they hadn't connected. She knew his bedsprings creaked badly; the floorboards were thin and his bedroom was directly above hers. She knew he was a sculptor and an American from New York. She knew he had been living in Paris for eight years, working not studying. She knew he had only recently acquired a reputable dealer on the fashionable Right Bank, and although the others spoke of that with some respect, as though it were a feat in itself, she wondered if he lacked talent. Eight years to find a good dealer ... surely he was second-rate at best!

She knew he worked in stone, a circumstance that aroused her curiosity because so few contemporary sculptors did, preferring more malleable materials such as plaster, plastic, and even bronze, which although unyielding itself usually resulted from the casting of clay models. She knew his art was characterized by realism, another anachronism that caused her to wonder about his capabilities - even her father experimented with a variety of techniques, as Picasso had done. She decided he must lack imagination. She also knew he did his sculpture in a huge shed at the rear of the house because stone was too heavy to be transported up the stairs.

And she knew he had a mistress.

She had even seen the mistress on occasion, a sloe-eyed creature with long black hair, a vague smile, and a stunning figure. One glimpse and Domini understood the frequency of the creaking springs. The relationship was also passionate in other ways ... the mistress had a temper. Her name was Nicole, according to reports, and she served as

Sander's model too. It was an arrangement that seemed perfectly natural to Domini, whose unconventional childhood had not been filled with examples of wedded bliss.

It was curiosity one morning that impelled Domini to investigate the shed. By habit an early riser, she had been up with the sun. Throwing open the curtains to greet the new day, she had seen Nicole sauntering off down the street, yawning, with an empty string bag over one arm. It was a sure sign of a trip to the market, which had to be visited not long after dawn if one wanted the best produce.

A follower of impulse then, Domini hesitated only fractionally. Surely, after the sounds that had finally caused her to put a pillow over her head the previous night, the sculptor would be sleeping late? Anyway, what could he do without a model? She scrambled out of her thigh-length lawn nightdress and into a thin cotton smock that was scarcely longer, not one of her new dresses but a garment she wore while painting. She took no time to brush the morning tousle out of her hair or to apply eye make-up, something she had taken to using ... with glee ... since her arrival in Paris. Lipstick she never wore; she felt it didn't become her.

In the communal bathroom down the hall she splashed the sleep from her eyes and was out the back door within minutes. She paused long enough to assure herself that no fury of hammer and chisel sounds, such as she had heard on other occasions during the past week, emanated from the shed. And then, without knocking, she flung open the door.

'
Nom de Dieu
!' exploded a man's voice at once.

Domini came to a startled halt, staring at the source of the words. At first she saw only a huge block of uncut marble, an irregularly shaped piece still rough from the quarry. Above it, a block and tackle suspended from the ceiling was still swinging gently. There was also a space heater, not in use, standing close to a mattress-sized platform of the type a model might pose upon.

And then, on the floor behind the marble, she spotted bare feet attached to a pair of long supine legs covered in faded blue denim, knees braced because of the uncomfortable angle at which the man was lying. Gradually he came to a sitting position, bringing all of him into view. His top half was naked, already drenched in sweat although the sun had not been up long enough to heat the air, and it was quite cool in the shed.

He had the build of a man whose main work was physical: deep chest, the flat corded stomach, the well-developed biceps, the powerful shoulders and forearms. The ripple of tendons and sweat-sheened muscles, the sheer virile beauty of his torso, caused one part of Domini, the artistic part, to soar with admiration and open pleasure; at the same moment she was tongue-tied for the first time in her life.

His fingers were tightened murderously over the sculptor's chisel and hammer he still held in his hands. 'Do you have any idea what you nearly didT he demanded, glaring at her.

'I'm sorry,' said Domini, finding her voice. Why should she be disturbed at the sight of a half-naked man? In Florence she had seen statues that showed far more; some of them hadn't even had fig leaves. And Papa often worked stripped to the waist.

'I really am sorry.' She spoke French as a matter of course because that was what he had spoken. Standing in the doorway, hair haloed by the sunlight behind her, she smiled, expecting instant forgiveness because most of her life she had had it. 'I suppose I caught you at a crucial moment.'

He was far from appeased, reminding Domini that some passing comment at the meal table had suggested that he was a proud man, quick to anger and unafraid of speaking his mind. 'You're damn right you did! I was about to whack off a great chunk where there happens to be a fault. One fraction off and I'd have cut into the wrong part. This piece is a commission, and I'll be out bread and butter if I ruin it. Do you know how much this Carrara stuff costs?'

Domini bristled. People didn't glower at her like that! 'You don't need to get so angry! I'd have paid for it, if the worst had happened. It's not as though you've put any work into the thing.'

'Oh, haven't I,' he said grimly. 'I've been studying this piece of rock on and off for months. If you knew a damn thing about this kind of sculpture, you'd understand why. Marble isn't exactly plasticine! You don't rule it, it rules you.'

'Then you can't be very good at your work,' Domini retorted, although she knew perfectly well the remark was unjustified. Before lifting a chisel to his famous 'David' Michelangelo had spent a long time thinking about the raw material, a fine but strangely shaped piece of marble known as the Duccio block; its irregularities had challenged the artist's genius and governed the final design.

This ill-mannered sculptor might be right about the marble, but he probably deserved the criticism anyway. His angry assumption that she knew nothing about art had pricked her pride, and besides, didn't she already know he must be second-rate? Tact, in those days, was not one of Domini's strong points.

'If you were any good I'd have heard of you,' she said.

'Frankly,' he snapped, 'I'm not interested in your good opinion. Now will you get the hell out of there? And stay out?'

'Gladly,' she retorted with a haughty toss of her bright head. She resisted the human temptation to tell him exactly who she was and started to pull the wooden door closed. But then she saw the sculptures in a shadowed part of the shed and stopped stock-still. All were small, much smaller than the huge piece he was working on, but there was no denying their impact. 'Why, you're good,' she said, surprised. 'You're really quite good.'

He put down the tools of his trade and got to his feet slowly, unfolding to an imposing height. 'Are you always so condescending?' he said coldly.

Changeable in her mood, Domini was excited now, too excited to heed the warning note in his voice. 'But I never condescend, and I wouldn't lie. I like your work. May I come in and see it properly?' Impatient, she waited for no answer before taking several impetuous steps into the shed. 'I do know something about art, more than you'd guess. I've had a lot of-'