Masque (3 page)

His round, wrinkled face crumpled into a smile at that question.

‘Erik, you are young after all, in spite of your work. There is a paradox in every vein of art I've found, that makes it nearly impossible for a genius to grow in reputation, in their own lifetime, at least, without pretending to ordinary people that anyone could make the miracles they do.' His hand went out for my shoulder again. This time he forced it to remain there, though his fingers trembled. In my soul, I thanked him for the effort.

‘Politics, my boy. Some of the greatest enemies to the arts are in the arts themselves. They are the gatekeepers you must bow to in order to progress and make your great work in spite of them, and right before their faces.'

I could feel his fingers thrumming, his very tendons desiring flight. He forced our connection, continuing, ‘The greater the genius, the deeper the bow they expect. My boy, they will try to make you grovel.'

I patted his hand, thanking him, disgusting him, releasing him at once. Oh what, I thought, would they think of me in the harem? I rather expected that inside those smooth pink-marble walls it would be very like the nunnery; with perhaps fewer garments. The air was perfumed, but a room full of women must be as bad, in this heat, as a room full of cats. I must say that Persia gave me beautiful dreams.

‘I have grovelled enough and been hidden enough, for one lifetime. It is dishonest to bow before the middling. A mercy to them, perhaps, like my mask, but a lie even so. I won't do it.'

‘Well, my boy, no one is asking you to, yet.' His smile was strained and his hands kept wiping at the hem of his robe. He thought I didn't notice. ‘Come. Let's get down there and do what we are paid for. Make sure that horrid foreman is not stealing more cement.'

‘Ug, how I loathe him. I would happily kill him for cutting corners on that fountain. And those looks he gives me!' I grinned, nearly lipless, luckily invisible, ‘And they say that I have got an evil face.'

We took the winding stair down to the street. I approved of the gilt wood and lush carvings of stylised, almost feminine animals lining the banister. My fingers traced the outlines of lionesses, graceful, dashing gazelles.

RAOUL

1.

I'm not used to failure yet, or to the complexity of fulfilment and desire. I never knew that I could get something I thought I wanted, be satisfied with it for a while, and then discover that the chocolate was bitter beneath the bright foil. Perhaps my brother should have denied me more often; perhaps he should have allowed the nurse who played the role of my mother sometimes, to inhabit that state more fully, to allow both ‘Yes' and ‘No'.

It has only just occurred to me that all three of us grew up with one dead parent. We've all lived with ghosts. My father survived, just barely, until I was sixteen. I was a late arrival; the product of a third wife, a pretty young thing purchased from her parents to warm the bed of a man sixty years her senior. I was the unexpected pregnancy which killed her. She wasn't bought for breeding. Her narrow pelvis could not spread. It is difficult to know that your first act on earth slaughtered your mother.

Now we all are orphans.

Still, it was a happy childhood. I lived with my nurse on the Brittany coast while my brother lorded it over Paris, preserving our fortune by investing in shipping and pretending to philanthropy by spreading coppers to the arts. I knew, even then, that he had a mistress, a dancer. Well, he was forty years old and unmarried. He needed distraction.

I was well educated in the subjects I loved: art, music and seafaring. Maths and history fell by the wayside. I rarely made it all the way through novels. I have since learned that because authors put what they know in their books, and since only so many things can happen to us (humanity is limited), a novel could have told me the story I would live before it happened. I would have known the structure of the terror anyway, known how to act to save her. I might have discovered what she was. At least, if I'd still failed, I wouldn't have had to meet it as though I'd invented the emotions I suffered.

I have slogged my way through many stories since; I have the time after all. I keep seeing her, my perfect image of her, dressed in the robes of Persephone, lodged in the underworld, her lips bleeding pomegranate seeds which glisten in the gloaming dark.

I remember the first time I saw her. We were almost still children, exactly the same age: fourteen and a day. She was a wild, ragged thing, swathed in white silk that had been quite fine the week before when her patron, the Countess, purchased it in Paris. Heaven only knows how she soiled it so quickly. It would be very like Christine to drench herself in delicate silk and then go rolling down the sand dunes to play in the waves.

Her father, the genius, was standing beside the Countess (she shaded him with her pink lace parasol – I think she was a little in love with him) playing gypsy reels on his lovely honey-coloured violin. It sang nearly as sweetly as Christine did, dancing there, dark as Salomé, twirling her red brocade scarf like an airy harem veil.

The old man was tall, a little stooped, his hair slate grey. He played with his eyes closed, his spare body swaying, seduced by the music. The Countess was taller than he was. Slim. Blonde. About thirty-five years old. She stared hard at Christine, her blue eyes cold, glistening, her red lips parted. Moist.

I don't remember what the girl was singing, only that it was beautiful, as irresistible as a hook in the mouth of a carp. I don't remember what she said to me after her scarf flew, red as a blood-gout, into the cold sea and I struck out into it, soaked to the skin in the freezing water. I remember the shape of her warm mouth as she spoke, twisting the sea-water out of the silk. I remember that her voice was silver. It did not matter what she said. To me, it was an invitation. I had earned her.

2.

I experienced her intensely for one week, I got to know the Countess and her frail father (even then it was obvious that he was not long for the earth), they always made me welcome in their large, immaculate home. The downstairs was decorated in the English Georgian fashion, all neo-classical pillars, ceilings lined with plaster laurel leaves, open-beaked eagles, the walls painted light blue, green, stark white. I wouldn't say I knew Christine.

This is not to say that she was not kind to me, or friendly. She may have even genuinely liked me. Certainly she acted as though she did. She couldn't have been miserable all that time we spent together in the attic among the bare dressmakers' dummies, headless as ghouls, all those veiled mirrors and obsolete furniture, all those soft, shrouded lurkers, listening as her father told us stories in his strange northern accent.
Little Lottie and the Angel of Music
.

I can hear him speaking now. A sweet voice that could be made rough or childlike depending on his need and the thrust of the story. He sat on an old leather trunk, pony-skin I believe, with patches of piebald fur missing. His large, precise hands moved as he spoke, as though he were conducting the narrative. Occasionally he scratched his moustache to hide a kind, sly smile.

‘Little Lottie lived dreaming. The old fools in her village thought that she was a bad girl because she spent all her time singing, and some of the things that she sang were not very “proper”, though they were all true.'

He stroked his daughter's hair with one huge hand, catching his fingers in her chocolate curls. The other hand he rested on my knee. I took this as a sign of his unconscious approval. I thought he thought that I was very fine. Probably he thought that I was a fool. All I wanted in the whole world was to lay my hands in those curls of hers, lose my nails in that dark river of hair. I thought she owed me that, at least, for rescuing her scarf, for condescending to adore her. I was very young.

The old man continued, ‘Her father loved her very much and, since he was an artist himself, he knew that it is an easy lie of the common folk that artists have no morality. They have their own morality. They are dedicated to their truth, to portraying it as beautifully and powerfully as possible, even when it makes the small folk uncomfortable.

‘Little Lottie lived a long time with her father in their safe little house at the edge of the forest. They were happy a long time, but happiness is not real if it lasts forever, and one day little Lottie woke to find her father burning in a fever, coughing blood into a rag.' The old man coughed here, wetly, into his handkerchief. I didn't know then that he was not acting.

‘Before he died, he comforted the daughter he loved more than his own life. He said “Darling, do not be afraid. After I have made my home in heaven I will ask God the Father to send down to Earth the Angel of Music. He will sing to you in my voice and your art will improve until it glows from you like flame”.'

‘What happened then, Father?' Christine looked much younger than fourteen, leaning forward to him, her delicate hands digging into his knees, her eyes wide, gleaming with the sheen of tears.

The old man bent and kissed her once on her furrowed forehead, a move I longed to make myself. I would have killed to taste the salt of her skin.

He said, ‘He died, daughter. It was very hard for Lottie, then. She grieved. But in time he kept his word. The Angel came. She sang better than she ever had before. She sang so well, in fact, that her people brought her to Paris and she became the greatest diva ever to sing in that great city. She ruled the stage for many years, and lived happily, so happily, ever after.'

And with that he ended the story. I went home, to my real home. It was time to take my place with my brother, learning the business. It was years before I learned what life gave Christine. I loved her image, faithfully, from a great distance. I never thought to write to her. In any case, it would not have been proper. At the time she was a member of the serving classes, though daughter of a great musician.

3.

Six years passed before I saw her again, my angel, my Christine. I never expected our reunion to come about in the way it did. My brother Philippe had been a patron of the Paris Opera since 1870 (the very year I met Christine). He continued his patronage when the opera company moved into the newly completed Palais Garnier after a long-delayed construction, interrupted by the famous siege of Paris. During that time of unrest and confusion several of the architects working under Garnier vanished in circumstances that, given the war, were not very mysterious. They seemed much more violent later, those deaths, those hangings. When the dust settled and the torn corpses were cleared from the streets, the group of architects that attended the Master was found to have been reduced to one – Charles Garnier himself. It was no great loss, he said. The three whose bodies were found were hardly better than incompetent. The sole exception was the Mussliman whose corpse they never found, a man who had apparently travelled from the courts of the Shah in darkest Persia. The man who always wore a long-sleeved cashmere kaftan and his head draped with a keffiyeh that covered most of his oddly smooth face. My brother said that his loss was the only one Garnier really felt, and that the old architect grieved that they never found the body. He was, Garnier said, the only one with any real skill. My brother commented that Garnier's grief seemed oddly pronounced, as though he had lost a son and not an assistant.

In any case, Philippe had long been contented to sit on the sidelines of the theatre, courting his vague little dancer (He was always rather conventionally romantic, my brother. He was the type who would have thought it daring to drink champagne from the toe of her smelly little shoe.) Philippe was deaf to every rumour of misfortune that haunted the cast almost from the time the doors opened, but my brother had a fixed idea of himself as a patron who could earn a profit. He funded the purchase of the contracts with a full quarter of the money that our father left him, and backed the managers he hired when they purchased the deed to the building itself.

Messieurs Firmin and Andre were two of a kind, both short dumpy men with a flair for the theatrical, as shown by their gleaming brushed beaver-top hats, bright scarves and elaborate, waxed mustachios. Their facial hair was so pointed, so hardened with wax, that they looked as though they had swallowed a pair of tiny bulls. Speaking to the one was, my brother said, exactly as good as speaking to the other. But they were dedicated to turning a profit and eagerly obeyed his commands, so they were tolerated.

The night that I returned to Paris (I had spent the last year on a ship learning the family business, accompanying reams of fabrics and spices from India) my brother welcomed me into his home, a massive, empty sprawl of bachelor opulence (his predilections betrayed by the filthy female undergarments strewn in the wash-chamber) and begged that I come out with him that night to enjoy the début of a new opera by Bizet.

‘I know you'll enjoy it,' he said to me, forty years old, blond, bland and grinning like a schoolboy as we jostled forward in the coach, ‘the composer has a soft-spot for gypsies and an earthy sensibility. You won't see La Carlotta in the lead role, unfortunately. There was, apparently, a misunderstanding regarding her contract. The new girl they've got in to replace her, Christina something, is very young, but supposedly good for the role. And her youth will be a boon to us. The role she's playing is apparently quite tempting. This
Carmen
has a lot of fire in it, a lot of amour. A lot of amour and very little dress. Nothing like a good young pair of nicely rounded … limbs filling out a delicate red garment. I expect to turn quite a profit with this show.'