Liberty Silk (28 page)

And then one day, as she was mooching past an art gallery on the rue Saint-Honoré, she saw a painting in the window, a portrait of a woman in a simple peasant skirt and blouse, recumbent in the shade of a fig tree. It bore all the hallmarks of a Lantier.

She remembered the words written on the back of the card that had accompanied his farewell flowers:
If ever you should want a break from La La Land, I know the perfect place . . .

What better place to go, to recover from ill health, she thought, than the French Riviera?

That night Lisa dreamed again about little Cat, the tousle-headed sprite dancing on the windswept hill. She called to her, but Cat did not hear. She just carried on dancing.

Lisa phoned the number that Gervaise had written on the back of the card, and was glad to hear the warmth in his voice as he told her she would be welcome to visit. Sadly, he would be unable to receive her himself as he had business elsewhere, but he would have his housekeeper meet her at Antibes. He would join her in the villa the following day.

She cabled Phil to tell him she was extending her stay in Europe, then took the Blue Train south. It would have been cheaper and quicker to fly, but after the wartime journey to Ireland that she had made in Howard Hughes’s seaplane, Lisa’s fear of flying bordered on the pathological.

In Paris she had bought a dozen postcards to send to Cat, intending to occupy herself throughout the journey by detailing what she saw through the window of the train. But, despite the sunshine, much of the countryside she passed was so dismal that she resorted to inventing the kind of imaginary landscape a small child might dream about, with unicorns grazing in fields and brilliantly coloured birds flying in a sky full of rainbows and bobbly white clouds. ‘I know you can’t read this by yourself, yet,’ she wrote, ‘but Mammy will help you, and I hope that she will give you an extra special big cuddly bear hug and lots and lots of kisses from your loving Auntie Lisa.’

The train stopped at the station in Cannes as she wrote these words, and she watched as a small girl, clearly under the stewardship of a nanny, ran laughing to throw her arms around a woman descending onto the platform. ‘
Maman, Maman!
’ Lisa heard. ‘
Tu n’étais jamais si belle!
’ And as the woman scooped the child up to cover her with kisses, Lisa felt a pang of yearning so intense she had to look away.

BACK IN PARIS
some weeks after their trip south, Jessie continued to model for Gervaise, even as her shape changed. During their time in Antibes he had filled a sketchbook with drawings of the surrounding landscape, and these sketches informed the pastoral backgrounds against which the
Perdita
series was set.

A wash of French Ultramarine and Prussian Blue conjured a seascape; Hooker’s Green and Indian Yellow delineated foliage; and skin tones were picked out in Raw Sienna – with minuscule brush strokes here and there of Crimson Lake. Touches of Chinese White created soft highlights on Perdita’s face, breasts and rounded belly – lending her skin the lustre of peach-bloom – and Cerulean Blue traced the patterns on the soft fabrics with which he draped her.

The portrait she loved best was the one that showed her as she had first appeared to Gervaise, in her Liberty silk gown, her hair cascading over her shoulders. There was a hint of melancholy in her eyes, but her lips were curved in a smile. She knew, too, that this was the painting that meant most to him: the girl in the dress splashed with wild flowers, unadorned, bare of foot, as she had been when they had first met.

As her pregnancy advanced, the poses Jessie adopted became more languorous and lazy, as befitted her status as a woman heavy with child. The pastoral backgrounds were abandoned, and Jessie now reclined on chaise-longues and day beds draped with yards of seamless white linen. No more laborious treading of grapes for her – and no more making love. Gervaise seemed to view her with increasingly objective eyes, and she remembered his words to her the first time they’d slept together:
I shall require you to be sexually available to me at all times – until your pregnancy becomes too obvious to ignore
. . . Jessie guessed he had assignments with other women, but as long as she was the only one he was painting, her status as his
maîtresse en titre
was guaranteed. She continued to work hard; and she continued, as had been his stipulation, to keep him entertained, informed and amused. She read extensively – books and magazines and journals – she picked up titbits of delicious gossip at social gatherings, she made sure she was a delight at all times to the eye, sweetly scented, sanguine of temperament and cheerful of countenance. Above all, she made sure that Gervaise was never bored with her.

Gervaise had told her months ago that he would get an entire series from her changing shape, and he was as good as his word. The week before her baby was due, his
vernissage
was held in the Galérie Pierre on the rue La Boétie.

Jessie dressed for the occasion in a gown that Coco had designed specially for her. It was not unlike the gauzy
chitons
favoured by the dancer Isadora Duncan – and indeed the redoubtable Miss Duncan attended the exhibition opening, along with some members of her troupe, the Isadorables, and
le tout Paris
.

On the street outside the gallery, onlookers had gathered to gawk. Jessie was reminded of a motion picture premiere she’d attended some weeks earlier, when the
vedettes
had sailed like shimmering swans into the movie theatre along a carpet, nodding graciously and sending lipsticked smiles at the fans who had congregated in the hope of bagging an autograph. The mob on the pavement this evening reminded Jessie of the destitute souls who had thronged the rue du Coq d’Or: the beggars, the prostitutes, the disabled war veterans on crutches or with eye-patches. Some called to her, all stared, some held out their hands for alms. Jessie would have obliged, but she had no purse.

‘Leave it to me,’ said Gervaise, ‘I’ll have a word with the commissionaire – see to it they get something.’

When Gervaise and Jessie made their entrance, little shrieks and squawks echoed round the gallery, along with a storm of applause. Gervaise was instantly surrounded by a sea of women.

‘Gervaise! I
love
them!’

‘They’re fresh, they’re delicate . . .’

‘They’re utterly charming!’

Gervaise inclined his head to right and left, acknowledging compliments as he moved through the room with Jessie by his side. She accepted a glass of champagne from a flunkey, and smiled enigmatically at each painted face that greeted her. ‘Why,’ she thought, ‘there’s probably more paint on all these faces than there is on one of Gervaise’s canvases!’ She smiled and sipped, sipped and smiled, and adopted an expression of profound gravity when the gallery owner launched into his speech.

‘
Mesdames, messieurs
– may I welcome you here this evening to an exhibition of unabashedly sensual paintings. Unlike the exponents of modernism, Monsieur Lantier has the greatest respect for the beauty of the human form, and remains true to Hellenic principles in an age of aesthetic chaos. Monsieur Lantier is a consummate draughtsman in this way, and his best work loses nothing by comparison with earlier masters of the subject . . .’

‘He clearly likes you,’ said Jessie in an aside to Gervaise. ‘But I’m awfully hot, and I need to sit down. Will you excuse me,
chéri
, for a few minutes?’

Skirting the crowd that was gazing with rapt and reverent attention at the gallery owner, Jessie made her way out to the foyer of the building, where hard-backed, mahogany chairs were ranged around the walls. Uncomfortable seating or not, Jessie badly needed to take the weight off her feet. She felt like a ripe fruit in danger of bursting. She had just perched herself heavily on the edge of one of the chairs, when the door to the gallery opened and someone slid through. It was Count Demetrios.

‘Mademoiselle Perdita! How are you?’

‘Count Demetrios!’ Jessie held out her hand, which the count gallantly scooped up so as to drop the requisite kiss on the back of her fingers.

‘I saw you slip out. You must need fresh air, yes? Not surprising in your condition.’ His eyes slid to her belly. ‘Your baby’s arrival must be imminent.’

‘Yes. It’s due next week.’ Jessie could barely keep the dejection out of her voice.

The count looked surprised. ‘But why do you sound so despondent? You should be full of rejoicing, should you not?’

‘Oh – I
am
happy – truly I am, Count. It’s just that – well – I won’t have the baby to myself for very long.’

‘And why is that?’

‘We – we shall be giving the baby into foster care,’ she told him. ‘We feel that Paris is an inappropriate place to rear a child, so he or she will be looked after by a couple who live on a farm in Provence. Gervaise has a villa there,’ she added hastily, ‘so of course we shall see the child every time we go south. And we plan to spend a lot of time there – even in the summer months – once the villa has been refurbished.’

‘The summer months? But no fashionable person spends time in the South in the summer months!’ The count seemed more surprised by this notion than by the news that Jessie had engaged foster parents for her baby.

Jessie shrugged. ‘We plan to.’

‘So.’ His eyes slid towards her belly again. ‘The baby will be a little Provençal,
hein
? How charming! What did your English poet, Keats say?
Dance and provençal song, and sunburnt mirth
. . .’

Those words had come to her, too, once she and Gervaise had found the ideal couple to foster her baby. The Reverdys were of solid stock, comfortably off. They lived on a farm just up the hill from the Villa Perdita, where they kept goats and pigs and chickens. They had three young children, so Jessie’s baby would have playmates. And he – or she – would eat well. In the
boulangerie
in Antibes there were artichokes and asparagus and peas for sale, and potatoes and lettuce and spinach and oranges and figs and cherries and eggs – all the food Jessie had fantasized about during her miserable time in the Hôtel des Trois Moineaux, all piled up outside the shop like an elaborate still life by a Dutch Old Master. Provence was a cornucopia compared to dirty, rainy Paris. She had definitely done the right thing.

‘Where is your villa situated?’ the count asked her.

‘On the Cap d’Antibes.’

‘A most pleasant spot. My wife’s family used to take a house there every autumn.’

‘How is your wife? And your little girl?’

‘
Hélas
, my wife is suffering still from tuberculosis—’

‘Tuberculosis?’ Jessie looked puzzled. ‘I thought it was heart disease she suffered from.’

‘Ah. That too. How she is afflicted! And Carlotta has gone back to her, to Greece. As for me, I still travel for my sins, like Pilgrim.’

‘You must miss your family very much.’

‘Yes, yes. I miss my poor wife, and our little girl.’

‘And she must miss her naughty boy!’

The count gave her a swift sideways look, and then his mouth stretched in a smile. ‘Her naughty boy, yes. I had forgotten that she used to call me that. So.’ He tapped his cane against the parquet floor. ‘You and Monsieur Lantier are happy together, yes?’

‘Yes, we are. And I must thank you again, count, for effecting our introduction – even if it was a rather unorthodox one.’

He nodded. ‘Sometimes, Mademoiselle, bold strokes are called for. The subtle approach is vastly overrated, to my mind.’ He drew his fob watch from his breast pocket. ‘Alas – I must go. It was wonderful to see you again, Mademoiselle. Please convey my kindest regards to Monsieur Lantier, and congratulate him on his magnificent new paintings.’

‘I will.’

‘And I wish you every happiness in Antibes, in your new villa. Does it have a name?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s called the Villa Perdita.’

‘The Villa Perdita,’ mused the count, a small smile playing around his lips. ‘The Villa Perdita. Home, sweet home. Isn’t that a saying you English have?’

‘Yes.’

He nodded again, and flashed his teeth at her. And then he did something quite shocking. He leaned forward and laid a hand on the mound of her belly.

‘Safe journey, little one,’ he said. ‘I look forward to meeting you.’ And with a swirl of his opera cape, he was gone.

Jessie sat motionless for some moments, appalled by the liberty the count had just taken. Then, with an effort, she got to her feet. She was halfway across the foyer when she felt the first jabbing contraction. Her baby was on its way.

AT ANTIBES, LISA
disembarked into blazing sunshine, feeling absurdly overdressed in her tailored travelling costume and high heels.

Hearing a shrill whistle, she turned to see a young woman at the other end of the platform. She was tall and rangy, dressed in loose linen trousers and shirt, her hair held back with a paisley-patterned scarf. A porter had sprung to attention, and was heading in Lisa’s direction with a trolley.

‘
Vos bagages
, Madame?’ he asked, indicating the small pyramid of suitcases that had been unloaded from the baggage van.

‘Yes. Thank you, you may take them all – apart from this one.’ Lisa kept hold of her Vuitton beauty case. It had been a gift from Sabu, and she knew that it had cost him a small fortune.

The porter piled her luggage onto the trolley, and started pushing it in the direction of the woman who had commandeered him.

She made her way along the platform, feet aching in her tight shoes, past a newspaper vendor selling copies of French
Vogue
, the cover featuring the new gamine haircut.

‘Miss La Touche, welcome to Antibes,’ said the rangy woman, extending a hand. ‘My name is Hélène. I’m Gervaise’s housekeeper.’

When Gervaise had told her that she would be met by his housekeeper, Lisa had envisaged an apple-cheeked, roly-poly type, not this willowy, Katharine Hepburn lookalike.