Grahame, Lucia (2 page)

How insistently had she been warned that to marry the artist would
be to condemn herself to a life of stark poverty and terrible disillusionment!
Yet here she sat amidst gaiety and plenty, still wildly in love with her
dashing husband and at last, after five years of marriage, about to realize her
most cherished dream. In three months, she would be a mother.

Now, as she smiled at the sly way Théo Valory had just capped one
of her husband's jokes, her thoughts were already drifting away from the Coq
d'Or and back to the house off the Rue du Mont-Cenis, where the nursery walls
were painted with scenes from fairy tales, where piles of warm flannel blankets
and soft little wrappers, all of them hemmed and embroidered by her own hands,
waited to receive the baby she carried.

Now at last she understood completely her husband's extravagances,
which had once worried her—his compulsion to shower her with luxuries that far
exceeded her wants. She felt similarly driven; nothing could be too good for
this passionately longed-for child who would never be shabbily dressed, who
would never feel cold or want or rejection, who would be shielded by love from
the smallest discomfort, the tiniest disappointment, who must never, never know
pain.

The hours wore on, and fatigue began to steal through Fleur's
veins. But Frederick, who inevitably grew ever more lively and gregarious as
night progressed, did not wish to leave. It was close to midnight; the crowd
was swelling, friends and acquaintances were still stopping at their table, and
Frederick was basking in admiration and trading bon mots. It was his night, his
celebration; he looked so disappointed when Fleur at last whispered to him how
very tired she was becoming that she immediately wished she had cut her tongue
out instead.

"Only another half hour," he cajoled. "After all,
you've had nothing to drink—you can hold up for a bit longer, can't you?"

The half hour grew into an hour. In the end it was Marguerite who
saw how pale Fleur had grown and insisted that they leave the tavern
immediately.

"But why didn't you
say
something, darling?"
cried Frederick to his swaying, exhausted wife. Overcome with remorse, he sped
her home and helped her into bed.

Once she was lying down, he remarked that he thought he might as
well be off again—perhaps he could still catch up with Marguerite and Théo, who
had gone on to the Nouvelle-Athènes.

"I wish you'd stay," Fleur whispered.

"Now what would be the use of that?" he chided her
gently. "I'm wide awake and you're already half asleep! You need to
rest—I'd only torment you by talking all night!"

In the Nouvelle-Athènes, Philip Harborough, too deep in his cups
now to resent Anthony's inattentiveness, was re- counting a violent argument
which had erupted between two friends of his over the worthiness of Edouard
Manet's
Olympe
to hang in the Luxembourg Museum.

Anthony's eyes no longer wandered; but they had a distant,
abstracted look which might have betrayed to a more alert Philip how far his
thoughts had drifted.

He had left the Coq d'Or because the vision of Fleur Brooks,
glowing with love and joy, had awakened in him a desire that still seared him
with its intensity. He wanted her, and even now, after he had removed himself
from temptation, the hunger was as strong as ever.

And he had, only a few days earlier, made plans to visit Brooks's
studio with his cousin Neville later that very week.

To go... or not to go.

To become her husband's patron, to mount images of her upon his
walls, to gain the privilege of bowing to her in the street and of visiting her
home...

Or to walk away from that tantalizing beauty and cleanse the acrid
taste of covetousness from his palate?

It would have to be the latter. He knew himself too well to
suppose that he could easily tolerate the continual sting of thwarted desire.
He prided himself upon his sense of honor.

With a sigh of resignation, Anthony lifted his glass and began
halfheartedly to inspect the roomful of glittering women.

But soon the image of Fleur Brooks's incomparable warmth sliced
through his heart again like a tender knife, and after that the brilliant glare
of the Nouvelle-Athènes illuminated nothing but her absence.

A short while later, the sight of Frederick Brooks strolling alone
into the cafe shattered Anthony's regard for him completely. Despite the man's
undeniable gifts and his obvious charm, Brooks was a fool. Why the devil wasn't
he at home with his wife? There was no one else in Paris—or anywhere—to compare
with her.

In the bedroom of the lavishly appointed house off the Rue du
Mont-Cenis, Fleur was jolted from the threshold of sleep by a sudden, agonizing
pain.

Sometime around three o'clock, her husband ambled home. By then it
was over; she had lost the baby. In the two and a half years that followed, she
lost everything else as well, and the next time Anthony Camwell saw Fleur
Brooks, she was a penniless widow.

Frederick, my careless, brilliant, laughing husband, was dead.

He had squandered his talents, wasted his wealth, and exhausted
his store of goodwill. And finally, one February night, he never came home.

Sometime around dawn, a body, bobbing in the chilly waters of the
Seine, came to the attention of the gendarmes. A would-be wit among the party
which retrieved the corpse reported that it had been practically pickled in
absinthe.

A drunken misstep had cost him his life.

Of course I knew it was my fault. For a period of nearly two
years, I'd sunk into a private sorrow from which I had been unable to rouse
myself until the summer before Frederick's death. Meanwhile, our marriage had
come apart at the seams.

I'd failed my child and I'd failed my husband as well. Now both
were lost to me.

But fate, which had stolen everything that really mattered, was
generous at least in one respect: Although Frederick's incessant borrowing had
cost us nearly all our friends long before he met his sorry end, the three
who'd most stoutly refused to be exploited remained true and were now my
greatest consolation and support. They were the actress, Marguerite Sorrel, my
closest woman friend; her artist husband, Théo Valory, who'd been Frederick's
ally through thick and thin; and Lord Neville Marsden.

At the time of Frederick's death, of course, I did not consider
Lord Marsden an intimate friend. He had been Frederick's patron—his first. But
even after he'd stopped commissioning paintings, even after we'd had to move
from the charming house off the Rue du Mont-Cenis into our last home together,
a miserable fifth-floor garret on the Boulevard de Clichy, Lord Marsden,
amazingly, still called upon us and would sometimes wander sadly through the
north-lit room that held Frederick's easel. At first it pained me that he no
longer exclaimed with pleasure over what he found there; I thought he was being
unkind. But false enthusiasm would have been worse.

Once or twice I overheard his mild attempts to make Frederick face
up to his decline and the reasons for it, but as usual Frederick laughed and
refused to admit to any failings or limitations—he was as good as ever; if he
drank, it was only for inspiration. It seemed he had moved forward too quickly
for his patron, whose exquisite tastes were perhaps a little too
arri
è
re-garde
to permit him to readily appreciate the direction Frederick's art had taken;
one day, however— or so went Frederick's litany—the world would trace the
unbroken trajectory of Frederick's genius and marvel at the ignorance of those
who had stared so uncomprehendingly at the highest evidence of it.

I ought to have defended Lord Marsden's position, of course, for I
knew he was right; I knew, as any reasonably sensitive and observant person
must have known, that the great artist who still lurked within Frederick had
not been untrammeled by his excesses, it had been dulled and drugged by them.
But I never reproached him—not once during those first two bleak years after my
tiny daughter had broken loose from her fragile mooring three months before her
time and had died, before my eyes. All too conscious of my own failures, I
lacked the confidence with which I might once have tenderly urged Frederick to
try to change his ways—until, of course, it was too late.

By the time I finally summoned up the will to shake off that
incapacitating grief, Frederick's slow but fatal dissolution was well under
way. For months thereafter I had labored to break its grip on him; I'd gone on
my knees and pleaded with him to struggle against it; I'd showered him with the
tender little attentions that I had so selfishly withheld during my own long
and lonely travail. I'd begged his forgiveness for having surrendered so weakly
to the blow that had struck us both and for having failed to fill his life with
the smiles he craved. He'd said there was nothing to forgive now that I would
try to be happy again.

If only he had understood that it wasn't a matter of trying. I had
always
tried
to be happy for him. It was just that for that one terrible
period in my life I had not been able to manage it. Sometimes I even
entertained the subversive thought that if only Frederick hadn't so refused to
acknowledge the reality of our loss and the legitimacy of my grief, if only he
hadn't been so determined to treat the painful matter as something of which it
was best not to speak, something to forget as quickly as possible or to pretend
had never happened, if only he hadn't been so repelled by my long face and the
unshed tears that hovered behind it, I might have recovered my spirits more
quickly.

But he hadn't and I hadn't, and all we could do in the end was to
try to reverse the disastrous course our lives had taken. And then—just when I
dared to believe that we'd come to the turning point, just as my smiles came
more easily and he began to take more comfort from them than from a bottle,
just when his canvasses had begun to burn again with that hot brilliance, just
when he had seemed on the verge of reaching out to me again in the night, as he
had not done for so long, and just when my blood had at last begun to sing
softly again at the thought of what might happen if he did—it had all been
snatched away.

But I was no longer the same woman I'd been when I lost my
daughter, and once the first tide of despair and disbelief had subsided enough
to permit me to think clearly, I vowed that I would never again succumb to the
paralysis of despair.

No one was more generous, in the days immediately following
Frederick's death, than my warmhearted friend, Marguerite Sorrel.

Childless herself, and with a superficially brittle and worldly
air, she had never comprehended the depth of the wound that the loss of my
daughter had inflicted, nor had she been able to do anything to ease it.

But Frederick's death was another matter; not only had she adored
him as a friend, she was also far too much in love with her own mercurial
husband not to feel my new grief profoundly.

She understood my need to surround myself with memories, to fall
asleep at night on the bed linens which still carried Frederick's scent. Toward
the end of his life, we'd slept on opposite sides of the bed, carefully
observing, although never overtly acknowledging, the invisible boundaries of
our respective territories. Now—too late—I crossed the lines.

Of course Marguerite, with her busybody nature, insisted upon
attacking the dusty disorder which always likes to steal in upon the heels of a
domestic tragedy, but she was sensitive enough to avoid the room which had
served as Frederick's studio. Here I could still take some comfort from the
paint rags and crumpled pages ripped from Frederick's sketchbook that littered
the floor. I smoothed the wrinkled sheets out one by one.

I did not linger too long over the memories, however. After two
weeks I washed the bed linens, threw out the rags, swept the floor, and, not
without one searing flash of pain, wiped away the charcoal smudge that
Frederick's thumb had left upon a windowsill.