The Rainbow Bridge (25 page)

He hesitated at the door of the kitchen; he would have to pass through, and Marie was there. He glanced in. The girl was totally absorbed, trying to feed chopped-up worms to a wounded bird she had rescued from outside the banqueting hall. Jacquot slipped through silently and went out to his cottage. He slid the picture under his bed, and with a murmur of apology, hurried back to his hot coals. When the fire was lit he returned to the kitchen and lingered there for a while. Marie was cross, and looking a little green. She didn’t like handling worms and the ungrateful bird wouldn’t eat. When Jacquot pointed out that goldfinches didn’t eat worms, she wasn’t sure whether to be embarrassed or relieved. She cheered up at once though when Jacquot said that it might sing for her, so she sent him out to find some spilled grain from the stables.

Jacquot immersed himself in the task of repairing Louise’s canvas. He went about it with extraordinary thoroughness. His first job, which proved the most difficult, was to pull the two sides of the tear together. After several failures he found that if he wetted threads of new linen, which he teased from dressmaking remnants that he had begged from Marie, he could stick these to the back of the canvas. As the linen shrank it pulled the sides of the tear together. Sticking the threads down was a problem until he learned from a local carpenter how to make glue by boiling animal hooves. He did this in the kitchen until Marie’s mother complained about the smell. He told no one about the picture, working on it at night, pulling in the latch cord and working by the
light of two candles to avoid shadows. Little by little the tear closed, until it was hardly visible on the surface.

Jacquot talked while he worked, rather as a groom will talk to a horse in a soothing patter. He avoided turning the portrait over, other than to review the progress of his repair. Something strange and wonderful, but also a bit frightening, had happened between him and the girl in the picture, and he was trying to shut his mind to that time. But he still felt the need to talk to her, so he reported that Marie’s mother was now the official caretaker, and explained that the Commune was running the farm, but that not much work was being done. The chateau people presumed that the Count had taken the picture of the girl in the green dress with him when he left. Jacquot would, of course, return it when it was mended, but it was not ready yet. He made a crude box for the picture, which he could slide under his bed. This not only concealed it but also protected it from any possible further damage.

Knowing that her portrait was safe gave Louise the same feeling of security that she had felt when it was enclosed in the travelling box the boys had made for her in Holland. Ever since the picture had been damaged, she had become very conscious of how vulnerable it was. Though she liked M. Morteau’s idea of her being an ambassador, she was also a guardian, with a duty to preserve Pieter and the Master’s place in history. She would not willingly put the portrait at risk again.

The peace and quiet of Jacquot’s hut was welcome after the turmoil of the Count’s departure. And Louise did not feel alone; she hadn’t been forgotten. Colette, Gaston and Pierre consciously and unconsciously thought of her, though Louise often had to use her imagination to interpret what she was seeing through their eyes.

Colette had been waiting for this moment. She and Jean Brouchard were like two pranksters as they looked out of the high windows of M. Morteau’s office, waiting to see if their victim, M. Morteau, would take their bait. Up to now he had been steadfast in his refusal to have anything to do with the ‘charlatans’, as he called them, who had been given portions of the vineyard by the Count in order to win favour with the revolutionaries. It had not surprised him that they had been unable to make anything better than vin ordinaire, or even, in one case, vinegar, from those grapes. The man who was now approaching him was one of these ‘charlatans’, and he carried an offer, carefully worked out by Colette and M. Brouchard so as to be to the advantage of all. The proposal was that he would hand over the management of his acres to M. Morteau. In return, he would get an agreed number of bottles of superior vintage made from grapes from the whole vineyard. It had been Colette’s suggestion that these bottles should have special labels, carrying not just the prestigious name ‘Côtes du Bois’, but the name of the new proprietor as well. The question now was whether Papa Morteau would accept the deal.

The two conspirators watched the introductory shaking of hands. They noticed M. Morteau stiffen as the man identified himself. Would he walk away? The miller was crushing poor Colette’s arm in his anxiety. Now the two were talking tentatively … now in earnest. M. Morteau was shrugging doubtfully but they were still talking, walking up and down.

‘Go on, Papa …’ Colette urged, ‘Look, he’s interested.’ The two men were pointing towards the now neglected plot. There it was! A nod from M. Morteau, his gestures
were getting wider, more expansive. Now he had seized the visitor’s elbow.

‘They’re off!’ shouted M. Brouchard. Sure enough, there they went, Papa’s arms moving like the sails of a windmill. Jean Brouchard seized Colette about the waist, waltzed her down the length of the office and the building shook.

Louise had been seeing the whole incident through Colette’s eyes, when suddenly the room seemed to be turning round and round. It took her a moment to realise that they were dancing. Now she laughed with them in their triumph. What Colette was trying to do was clever and foresighted. Surely the other owners would also realise the advantages of having their wine made for them. When Gaston came home he would find that not only was the Count’s personal vineyard his, but that his father had the management of the whole vineyard again.

That vision faded and Louise relaxed. It would be nice if she could pass the good news on to Gaston, but she knew that the very best she could do was to turn her mind towards him and hope that he would feel her happiness. It was, therefore, possibly no coincidence that she soon found herself seeing steep crags sloping down towards a sea as brilliantly blue as the lapis lazuli that Pieter had been grinding on the day she had first gone to the Master’s studio. Gaston must be on the march again. As far ahead as she could see, an army of men was winding along a steep coast road, men clad in dusty blue and carrying muskets, their rations of bread pierced on their bayonets. Gaston must be following an upper path, ‘guarding the flank,’ as she had heard him say. The soldier in front turned, and she recognised Pierre, smiling and pointing. He looked sunburned and well.

‘Yes, Italy!’ she heard Gaston’s voice. So, that blue sea
must be the Mediterranean. Italy, she sighed enviously; a country set in lapis lazuli!

Jacquot’s gentle ministrations eased not only the hurt in her foot, but the hurt to her heart as well. She liked the scents of the hut, and the feeling of the forest outside. The weather warmed, the door stood open most of the time, and she could listen to the rasp of his saw and the clunk clunk of his axe as he worked.

But gradually Louise recognised that there was something wrong. She could feel spring all around them but somehow it wasn’t touching them. New shoots were sprouting everywhere, but the boy and she were not mending. Although the picture was almost whole again, Louise was not. It was as though the evil that had touched Jacquot had penetrated her soul as well. They were like a pair of sick vines, gradually dying back.

Her almost daily glimpses of life in the winery and of Gaston and Pierre in Italy only helped to feed her depression. She was more and more oppressed by her future. Was she always to be a captive of her sixteen years, never able to fulfil any relationship as time drew out the differences between herself and the people she learned to love? Would she always have to step aside for someone else? The rainbow that had bridged the gulf between herself and Pieter came back to torment her. Should she have abandoned reality and crossed the rainbow bridge to Pieter? But how could she leave Jacquot, who still needed her, and Gaston, Colette and the others who had recreated her in their minds? As she and Jacquot slipped deeper into a morass of depression the temptation to turn back in time grew stronger and stronger.

Jacquot’s reaction to his malaise was to become a recluse. The more spring spoke to him, the stronger became his desire to be alone. His feelings of being unclean were getting worse, not better. When he was working outside in the forest, the air, the wind, the rain and the rough wood scoured his mind and kept him clean. But when he came close to people he became conscious of his contamination. In the kitchen he would sit as far away from everyone as he could, convinced that they would notice the smell of corruption from him. The customary morning handshake had become a torture; his own fairy tale came back to haunt him, and he half expected to see green slime on any hand he had just shaken.

It was young Marie who precipitated matters. Jacquot had come running into the hut, with Marie hot on his heels. There had been some exchange between them, and Louise was delighted to see them happy together. Jacquot had retreated to the end of the room. Marie advanced, arms akimbo, challenging him. Jacquot was trapped.

‘Did I hear you shout: ‘Où est la Marie?’ La Marie? As if I were a kitchen maid?’ She was advancing step by step. Jacquot, half laughing, half nervous, was looking for a way past her. ‘Log boy… I’m coming to get you!’

Without warning, it happened. Jacquot crumpled down against the wall, cowering. ‘Get away,’ he hissed. But Marie was enjoying her game.

‘I’m coming for you …’

‘Get away.’ It was almost a scream.

Suddenly Jacquot was on his feet, his face inflamed and his arms outstretched. Marie, frightened, screamed and ran from the hut. Jacquot made to follow and then stumbled and stopped, leaning aghast against the door.

‘Come back, Marie’ he called … ‘Please, I didn’t mean it.’

Night came and he sat hunched on the edge of his bed, so far turned in on himself that Louise was afraid that she too might be drawn into his abyss. His voice seemed to have an echo when he spoke.

‘I nearly grabbed her,’ he said. ‘I love her, but I wanted suddenly to crush her.’ Then he whispered something that sent a shiver deep into Louise’s core. ‘Dear God,’ he said, ‘am I doomed to become like him?’

He dropped his head on to his knees and began to cry, a dry, heaving, tearless grief that Louise thought would break him apart. She talked to him then, as he had talked to her, about anything that came to mind, just so that he would know he wasn’t alone. When she ran out of things to say she even found herself singing him a silly little Dutch nursery rhyme: All the ducks are swimming on the water, fol de lol de li do … fol de lol de li do. It was then that he began crying properly.

The following day Jacquot was very downcast. When he came in, Louise didn’t like to ask if he had made it up with Marie. As he moved about she heard him singing to himself as he used to do. This time however she recognised the song: fol de lol de li do …

Then he asked: ‘Mademoiselle, how is it that you know how I feel?’

‘I don’t, Jacquot. We each have our own feelings, but I saw the Count’s lust too, you know, and although he did not hurt me, he desecrated my picture instead. You have been healing me by mending my picture, but it will never be the same.’