The Blue Bath (10 page)

She remembered the smell of the paint and the slight damp of the studio in the mornings. The feel of the cool wooden floorboards under her bare feet. Being woken by the sunlight coming through the thin glass panes in the windows.

She remembered Daniel stretching the blank canvases, mixing the colors and then washing them off his brushes. Their traces on the edges of the drain—mingling briefly to become something other than what they had been separately and then fading, faded, into the worn porcelain basin. She remembered the clumps of paint, like dried leaves, on the rough wooden palette and all the colors that she had not known were in her—black, green, burnt and raw umber, ocher, white, and then more green or blue for shading.

She remembered the strange silence of the studio. The paintings seemed out of place in this loud, crowded, windowless room. A man pushed by her roughly, mumbling a perfunctory apology through thick lips as he passed by, reminding Kat of where she was in the center of the room, her feet anchoring her to the floor as the crowd moved around her.

She kept her head down, pulling nervously on the end of her long plait, taking small breaths. The air in the room felt too warm, heated to a viscous syrup by the movement of the crowd. Looking around, she realized that most of the people had their backs to the paintings, talking among themselves, while her face looked on from different vantage points on the walls. The current of people swelled against her, urging her back the way she had come. She had obviously come the wrong way, viewing the exhibit backward.

There was something else in the air at the gallery. A different kind of excitement. Brash, eager, slightly tarnished, she recognized it in the excited laughter and conversation of the crowd. Money. The paintings had passed beyond what they had been in the studio on the rue Garancière, beyond even what the early critics had recognized in them, and were being regarded with a new kind of lust. They had become commodities. Looking more closely at the crowd, she was surprised to see so many familiar faces. These were the men and women who bought and sold things in London. Companies, property, buildings, art. He was in her world now.

A thought gripped her. Just how close was the resemblance between her and the girl in the paintings? How easy would it be to link her face to the face in the portraits?

Hearing a heavy sigh, she turned to find a tall brunette woman standing beside her. Kat recognized her as one-third of the trio she had overheard in the other room. The woman smiled at Kat and scanned the crowd distractedly as it moved past them. Turning her gaze back to the painting in front of her, she sighed again. Kat froze. Was it too late? Had she been recognized?

“Does great art inspire you or just depress you? I mean, there is no way I could ever create anything like this. Frankly, it would be embarrassing for me to even try. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the aspirational aspect of it, but I think that if we’re honest, part of it’s also about teaching us our limitations. After all, if everyone could create something like that, would we value it the way we do?”

“Maybe not,” Kat managed, but doubted that she had been heard over the noise. The woman’s gaze remained on the painting in front of them. She frowned, addressing her words directly to it.

“Although, I don’t suppose the alternative is any better. Even if you have the talent, by turning what you love into something that pays the rent, you destroy it in a thousand daily cuts. Familiarity, complacency, compromise … Although, at least you have your arms around it as you do it. At least it dies by your own hand. I don’t know—maybe there’s some solace in that.”

The brunette cocked her head at Kat, smiling widely. “I just think having something like that in my drawing room would suck the life right out of me.”

Kat felt a tidal swell in the crowd. The woman nodded toward the far side of the gallery. “Here comes the talent now.”

Kat turned in the direction she indicated. And there he was. A head above the crowd, looking too big and too volatile for the spare, white room. The same craggy face—more lived-in and more weathered than she remembered. Hair slicked back from his forehead. Clean-shaven. More solid. Older. She had anticipated these possibilities. What surprised her was not all that had changed, but all that had not changed. Somehow she hadn’t expected him to still be Daniel.

Staying very still as the crowd moved around her, she studied him in the brief glimpses through the changing kaleidoscope of bobbing heads, watching as, outnumbered, he met his admirers, greeting and kissing and shaking hands.

In that one moment, watching him across the room, she saw the arc of his potential condensed, realized. She saw him as he had been and she saw him as he appeared now through the eyes of the crowd. The artist. As if in that moment he became all that he could have been so many years ago. It was like witnessing a birth.

It took her a minute to see the girl. She was beautiful. Delicate and small against him, she seemed more at home in this place than he was, although she was clearly here for him. He clutched her tightly, his arm wrapped around her waist, hand resting on her hip.

Her reflection was all too brief. Interrupted, as she clung to the wall on the far side of the room, when his eyes met hers. There was no double take. No lag between him seeing her and recognizing her. Apart from a brief flicker, his expression did not change. Excusing himself from his conversation and unwrapping himself from the girl, he began to make his way toward her through the crowd—eyes locked on her—pinning her to her spot like a moth. She could not read his expression, but she felt a familiar intensity in it.

But the gallery was too crowded with pilgrims, paying homage, seeking his attention in return for theirs. As he momentarily lost eye contact with her, she pulled away from his gaze and made for the door. Reaching it, she turned back, but he was gone, obscured by his admirers. Sliding between the bodies entering the gallery, she felt the rough pavement beneath her shoes and the cold wind on her face.

Kat made her way quickly down the street, her breath escaping back toward the gallery. When she was a safe distance away, she moved to the edge of the pavement and waited for the traffic to clear so she could cross the street. Hearing voices behind her, she turned. Was she being followed? Had someone in the gallery noticed the resemblance between her and the girl in the paintings? Holding her breath, she turned to find two men standing beside a black cab idling at the curb.

“And the schedule? He can complete it on time?” It was the older gentleman whom Jorie had pointed out at Daniel’s show. Kat tried to remember his name, but she had not glanced down at it after it had been dropped.

“Of course.” The answer came even before the question had been completed. The voice sounded immediately familiar and she recognized the short man in the green suit from the gallery. Martin. “I’ve been looking after Daniel for years. I know what he is going to do even before he does.”

The other man considered him gravely for a long moment, allowing him to squirm like a fat worm on a hook.

“Because, you know, we hear things. Addictions, perhaps…” He shook his head sadly. “There are, after all, visible scars.”

“We all have our addictions, Richard.” It was spoken in a low tone, with real menace in it. “Some are more productive than others. Without them, I doubt we would be having this conversation today.”

Crossing the street, Kat did not hear the reply, if there was one.

After a few blocks she slowed down and walked for a while through Mayfair, drinking in the cold air. Above the constellations of Christmas lights on Oxford Street, the sky was leaden and still. The streets were slick. It must have rained earlier. The reflected light off the pavement seemed somehow brighter than the streetlamps themselves. She was flooded with an overwhelming sense of nostalgia and regret for a delicate and vanished time. For the brief, fragile peace of simply being seen.

She recalled her astonishment standing in front of the first completed painting of herself in Paris. It was evening and the studio was wrapped in blue darkness. After a moment, she had turned to Daniel.

“Is that who you see when you look at me?”

He had looked around the room briefly, searching for something. Then, laying his hands on her shoulders, he had steered her to the window and indicated her reflection in the glass pane.

“That is not what you look like. At least not to others. We are not what we see in the mirror—our images are, in fact, reversed. We are not what we appear to be, even to ourselves.”

It was true. While immediately familiar, the face in the painting was not quite the same face she saw in the mirror or in photographs. Nor somehow did she believe that it was the face that others saw. Yet the feeling of recognition was overwhelming. The only way she could think to describe it was that girl he captured on canvas looked the way that she felt. And that sense of shared truth was more seductive than being admired or even being loved. And unlike love, which often engendered a broader affinity for others, its sharp edge severed all other connections, leaving only the two of them.

He had painted her whenever the urge struck him. She would suddenly hear the pages on the sketch pad being flipped over or the crisp sighs of the charcoal on paper. Sometimes she wouldn’t notice at all, discovering it only when she moved and heard his urgent whisper for her to stay where she was. Half prayer, half command. He often drew her while she was sleeping.

And slowly, she had begun to become more aware of herself. Of the pleasing shape her neck made as she bent forward over a book. Of the way the shadows fell beside her as she sat or reclined on the bed, and the varying effects of sunlight in her hair at different times of the day. She became conscious of the way different textures of clothing or blankets looked against her bare skin and she began to pay more attention when buying books at the markets, selecting the ones with the most interesting covers, soft, mottled linens and rich, distressed leathers.

Daniel would sometimes begin to sketch her in the early morning, drawing her outline swiftly, without taking his eyes off her. Often turned away, she could not see him, but she could feel his eyes just beyond her view, moving over her, holding her to her spot. And when he had enough, when she was free to go, she would feel him release her. Daniel hardly acknowledged her departure when she left. When she returned to the studio in the early evening she would find herself taking form on the canvas. It was as if time obeyed different rules in the little room under the eaves of the ancient building on the rue Garancière. He didn’t need her to be physically present to paint her. When he was painting her, she remained with him.

As she made her way past the shuttered shops, Kat thought about Daniel at the gallery in his immaculate dark gray suit, its carefully cut lines betraying it as bespoke, a perfect complement to the confident smiles and brief greetings, the earnest eye contact, the seemingly effortless charm. Playing the artist. And he was good at it.

She supposed it wasn’t really surprising. After all, she had gotten better at it, too. She could sit through the endless dinners and cocktail parties. She could make conversation with the nervous first wives and the defensive trophies. She could smile and nod and not have to excuse herself from the table too often to sneak out the back door to the dark garden and fill herself full of night air, enough to get her through the rest of the evening.

It might all have seemed real if she weren’t watching so closely and if she hadn’t known what had come before. She noticed the telltale way he shifted his weight and how stillness seemed to elude him. He was acting. Pretending. And although he was better at it now than he used to be, there remained a lingering suggestion of volatility about him. He seemed to be actively restraining himself.

She was embarrassed for leaving the gallery the way that she had. Seeing him in a crowd like that had been so unfamiliar. In all her memories of him, it was always just the two of them. As if there hadn’t been anyone else in Paris.

And the paintings. She remembered living with them while they were drying. How they had surrounded them. And she realized at once just how rare that intimacy was. How it was almost impossible to achieve, in a museum or even in the smallest of galleries. How even the most hallowed of spaces were haunted by the footsteps and whispered incantations of others.

She caught a cab on Park Lane. As it cut through Hyde Park, her mobile rang. Jonathan.

“Darling—where are you?” His voice was muffled.

“Hello. Just in Mayfair.”

“Right—the Cancer Foundation ball, it’s tonight?”

“No—not yet. Just a gallery opening. With Jorie.”

“Ah, Ms. Thibaud-Paxton-Bowles…” Jonathan always included all of Jorie’s surnames. “Any eligible bachelors there then?”

Kat winced. “Not for long.… How are you? How’s everything?”

“Moving forward. Omega starts diligence tomorrow.”

Her confusion lasted for just a beat. “Oh. Are we at the code-name stage?”

“We are. Especially on phones.”

“I hadn’t realized.”

“You haven’t said anything to Jorie, have you?” His voice rose suddenly in panic.

“Jonathan. Of course not.”

She knew better and he knew that she did. She knew how information moved in their circles, functioning as currency, as entertainment, as proof of status. Even more literally in this case, as any information about the impending sale was insider information. There could be no confidences.

“Sorry. It’s just that the press is all over this. I’m pretty sure that someone has been following me since I got here.”

“Really?” She could not help the incredulous tone in her voice and immediately regretted it.

“Yes. Really.”

She heard the thin thread of his voice pull taut across the miles and she spoke quickly. “Don’t be cross with me. I know this is serious. It just seems so absurd.”

“Do you remember that bastard, Warre, the one who wrote that hatchet piece in the
Mail
? Apparently, he has started calling our analysts and some major shareholders, inquiring as to their opinions on the impending sale of the company to a foreign firm.”