The Year It All Ended (25 page)

The old lady looked up and nodded at Tiney. Her dark eyes shone in her brown, lined face. She held out a fistful of the cut grass and said, ‘
Pour mes lapins
.’

Tiney understood she was simply gathering grass for her rabbits. Before Tiney could think of a reply, the old lady began to walk away but then turned and limped back. She took Tiney by the hand.

‘
Venez avec moi, ma fille
,’ she said.

Tiney allowed herself to be led down the lane to a cluster of
huts. The old lady introduced herself as Madame Sentier and settled Tiney on a bench outside the hut in the last of the sun’s rays. She chatted to Tiney in French as she opened a small pen and laid the cut grass before two large brown rabbits. Night fell yet still the driver hadn’t returned. Madame Sentier came outside and led Tiney into her hut to show her that she had made up an extra bed.

They ate supper together in silence – vegetable soup, stewed dried apples spread on chunks of bread, fresh egg, tea and goat’s milk. That night, Tiney slept as though she were a little girl again, as though the war had never happened, as though she was born to live in the country, to live quietly with the old French grandmother.

It took three days for Tiney, with Madame Sentier’s help, to arrange another car to take her back to Albert so she could return to Amiens and from there to Paris. She was glad of the quiet days with the old French woman. Madame Sentier’s pleasure in her company was obvious, even though Tiney’s schoolgirl French didn’t lend itself to long conversations. In the evenings, they sat together by the small fire and Madame Sentier told Tiney of her family, all lost in the war, of her home in a small village on the Belgian border that was razed to the ground and of her years of wandering in search of a safe place to rest. And of how she had found peace in the tiny hut that was built for the refugees fleeing the conflicts. On the morning of Tiney’s fourth day in Buire-Courcelles, she bade Madame Sentier goodbye.

‘
Bon courage,
’ said the old woman, as she held Tiney’s hands.

‘You have been so kind. One day, I hope to come back to see you again,’ said Tiney.
‘Merci beaucoup pour votre gentillesse. Je ne vous oublierai jamais, Madame Sentier
.’

Madame Sentier smiled through tears. ‘But it is not goodbye,’ she said in French. ‘It is farewell. You will never visit me again. I will die far from my home, for my village is no more. But you will go and make a new world, you and all the other young ones. You must do this, little one. Remake the world.’

Artist’s model

Ida’s studio was reached by climbing a twisting stone staircase in an old apartment building in the Latin Quarter. The stairwell smelt of damp but Ida’s room was bright with sunlight streaming through a dormer window that overlooked the boulevard below. There was very little furniture – a narrow single bed, a table, two chairs, her easel and a clutter of art materials arranged on a bookshelf. A small, gold-framed, oval portrait of Charlie hung beside the bed, and Ida’s sketches, watercolours and small canvases were tacked up to cover the fading wallpaper.

They sat in a patch of sunlight near the window. Ida had bought crisp bread rolls in anticipation of Tiney’s arrival, and set a jug of chocolate and another of black coffee on the table. Then she carried two small dishes, one with pale yellow butter, the other with
confiture
, from the makeshift kitchen wedged into a corner of the room.

‘You must stay with me as long as you like,’ said Ida. She put her hand on Tiney’s knee and smiled. ‘I never should have let you go to Buire-Courcelles without me. If I’d known you’d take so long before joining us, I would have dragged you to Paris kicking and screaming and made you wait until I could come
with you. If anything had happened to you, your parents would never have forgiven me. Why on earth did you stay on in Amiens for a week on your own?’

‘I needed to simply sit and write letters,’ said Tiney. ‘Each letter to my sisters took me a whole day to write and then it took another whole day to write to my parents. I wanted to finish all the letters and then send them together so no one could feel left out. And I had to write to my uncle and aunt as well.’

Tiney couldn’t tell Ida that she’d also written to Martin every day she was in Amiens. In her mind’s eye, that week would forever conjure a vision of the small corner cafe with red check tablecloths where she would sit each day, with her letter-writing folio, a bottle of ink and her fountain pen. She could see her hand moving across the paper, words pouring out of her, and a
cafe au lait
that she nursed all day until it was cold, as she wrote minute descriptions of the days in Buire-Courcelles and all it had meant to her. As if a letter a day wasn’t enough, she’d written to Martin twice on the day before she left Amiens for Paris.

‘You could have written your letters from here,’ said Ida. ‘By the way, Mummy and I collected all our mail from the Thomas Cook agency. There were some for you too.’ She jumped up and fetched a pile of envelopes from her bedside table. There were six for Tiney, one from each of her sisters, one each from Mama and Papa and one from Onkel Ludwig and Tante Bea. Tiney shuffled through them twice, unable to stop the twinge of disappointment that there wasn’t one from Martin.

‘Don’t open them now,’ said Ida. ‘I don’t want to lose you to homesickness. If Thea’s letters make
me
homesick I can’t imagine what it will do to you. We have to savour being here, Tiney. Every minute of it. Paris is beautiful at the moment.’

‘It was so lovely to arrive here, to be somewhere that isn’t spoiled by war,’ said Tiney. ‘It’s hard to imagine what it must be like to live with all that desolation day in and day out.’

‘You need time to recover. Lord knows, Mummy and I were shattered after Villers-Bretonneux. Mummy didn’t want to stay in Paris more than a week before going back to Sussex to be with Mrs Bloomfield. The only good thing about you taking so long to join us was that it helped my case of convincing Mummy that I simply had to stay on here.’

Ida leaned forward, her eyes bright. ‘You have no idea, Tiney, the number of Australian women painters I’ve met since I arrived. Evelyn Chapman is here – she was the first artist to paint Villers-Bretonneux in 1918. And Agnes Goodsir, a simply astonishing painter from Portland, is here – and so many American and British painters and writers. You can be a woman painter in Paris, make real art, and not be treated like a childish amateur. And Paris is so cheap, too. You could live here for a whole year on the smell of an oily rag.’

‘It sounds wonderful, Ida. I wish I could stay.’

‘You must stay, Tiney. We’ll have such fun.’

‘I’ve been thinking I might make a short trip, maybe to Berlin or Heidelberg. You know Mama’s family were German. I think it would mean a lot to Mama and to my Onkel and Tante. They did pay my fare.’

‘Germany! Are you mad? Didn’t you read about the Kapp Putsch?’

‘I couldn’t get English newspapers in Amiens,’ said Tiney. ‘And I was too busy writing letters to struggle with the French ones.’

‘A whole brigade of German soldiers took Berlin earlier in the month. The workers went out on strike and so the nasty little
uprising failed, but as the soldiers left the city they opened fire on the crowds. The putsch may have failed but there’s nothing to say there won’t be another. And there are terrible things happening in the Ruhr. They shot twelve Red Cross nurses! Germany simply isn’t safe. You mustn’t even dream of going, Tiney.’

Tiney stood up and went to the window and looked out over the rooftops of Paris. ‘I may never come to Europe again. I can’t fritter away my time and money here in Paris. And there are other things too . . . things I need to do.’

‘You have to take some time for yourself, Tiney. Visit the galleries, sit in a cafe and write more letters home. You could even come to the life drawing classes with me.’

‘Ida, I can’t draw. You know that’s your gift and Thea’s, not mine.’

‘You could come to our classes as a model. I’d love to draw you and to see how the other artists render you too.’

‘You mean take my clothes off? In front of strangers?’

Ida laughed. ‘You have a lovely face, Tiney. We need a portrait model at our life drawing class, as well as a life model. You could keep your clothes on. The artists all pitch in and pay the models. It wouldn’t be much but it would cover your costs of staying in Paris until you’ve thought about what you want to do next.’

‘You mean they’d pay me to sit for them?’ said Tiney, suddenly feeling brighter.

‘It’s harder work than it sounds. You have to be very still and you can’t let your expression flit about the way it’s doing right this minute.’

Ida took Tiney’s chin in her hand and turned her face towards the spring sunshine. ‘Your face has changed. Your cheekbones seem higher, your features more etched. I can’t wait to paint you.’

The worn floorboards of the atelier were flecked with paint and the space smelt of linseed oil and turpentine. Podiums were positioned at either end of the long room. A woman in a tattered kimono sat on the edge of the far podium, smoking a cigarette. She waved and blew a kiss as Ida entered the studio and Ida winked at her before leading Tiney over to the second podium. Tiney took off her coat and hat and sat meekly on a stool while Ida combed her hair.

‘That’s better,’ said Ida. ‘We must keep all that unruly gold fluff away from your face.’

‘Is there anything I should do?’ whispered Tiney.

‘Simply sit, without twitching that cheeky mouth of yours. We’ll work in twenty-minute sessions. And do try to keep your gaze steady.’

After ten minutes, Tiney developed an itch on her back and it took all her concentration to not flinch. She was aware of a man standing to her left, sketching her profile, just out of the line of her peripheral vision. When Ida finally called ‘Time!’ and Tiney was allowed to move again, she turned to look at the man. It was Martin Woolf. He was standing by the window, with light flooding in from behind him. When Tiney met his gaze, he smiled.

‘Hello again,’ he said.

Tiney climbed down from the podium and crossed over to look at the drawing that he had made of her. It was a simple charcoal sketch that looked nothing like her.

Martin laughed at her bemused expression. ‘I know. I’m not much of an artist,’ he confessed.

‘Then why are you here?’

‘The concierge at Ida’s said I’d probably find you here.’

‘That doesn’t really answer my question,’ said Tiney.

‘I had to see you and thank you for your letters, your beautiful, shining, wonderful letters.’

Tiney looked down at her feet. When she’d written the letters, it was like writing them to a part of herself, almost without believing that Martin would actually read them.

Ida came over to them and interrupted. ‘Tiney, we only take short breaks to begin with – could you please get back on the podium? We can have a cup of tea after the next round.’

Martin looked flustered. ‘Sorry for holding you up. I won’t stay,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I can do your portrait justice but I would like to ask if you’d join me for dinner this evening.’

‘Martin, darling, I’m not sure I approve,’ said Ida teasingly. ‘And how can you leave
me
out of your plans when I’m your favourite dance partner?’

‘You’d be welcome to come along,’ said Martin, deflated.

It was the prompt that Tiney needed. She looked Martin directly in the eyes and said, ‘I would love to have dinner with you. I’m sure Ida is only teasing and far too busy to join us, aren’t you, Ida?’

‘Touché, Tiney Flynn,’ said Ida. ‘Paris is having the right effect on you.’

Tiney scribbled Ida’s address onto a scrap of paper. ‘I’ll meet you in the courtyard of Ida’s apartment at seven thirty. There’s a seat outside the concierge’s. I’ll wait for you there.’

Ida laughed and took Tiney’s arm, dragging her towards the podium.

‘You certainly have changed, Tiney. If I didn’t know better,
I’d say you’re turning into quite the flapper.’

Later, as Tiney and Ida walked back to the apartment, Tiney asked, ‘Where did you dance with Martin?’