The Restoration Artist (21 page)

Then the sun moved behind the clouds, the band of light
on his face disappeared, the colours dulled. But I had enough. I let my brush rest.

Sitting upright, Tobias blew on the letters burned on the box, then brushed his fingers over them and proudly displayed the results to me. “Nice work,” I said. Tobias scampered back into the chapel and immediately began to arrange his brushes and paint tubes in the rosewood box. I didn’t even notice when he left and crossed over to the main island, for by then I was busy at the big canvas. An idea had come to me. A way to proceed.

Beautiful as the black yew trees were, I nevertheless wiped them out. In their place I would put an apple tree, like the ones in Père Caron’s orchard, with a scattering of fallen fruit on the grass. A glimpse of forest to the far left, a curve of shore and sea to the right side. The chapel would remain, but the sky would be brighter. Not grey but cerulean blue. And my little donkey, he too would have a place. And just off-centre in the mid-foreground, the two figures would stand. The woman and the boy.

I worked intensely for the next few hours with an absorption and concentration that I hadn’t experienced since I was a student. I worked on as the light changed and it was necessary to start up the generator and switch on the lamps Père Caron had provided. I worked until I was weary, hungry and exhausted. But only in body.

When I finally left the chapel and headed for home my heart and my spirit were soaring.

S
OMETIMES IT SEEMED THAT THE ONLY RESULT OF
the operation was a small scar on his neck, a little squiggle that sat above the ropy line encircling his throat. Be patient, I told myself, it will take time. But time had passed. Tobias almost seemed to have forgotten the trip to Paris. He was his old self again, he came and went, sometimes sleeping at La Minerve, sometimes at his grandfather’s. He visited Père Caron, he helped me in the chapel, he tended to the goats. But no sound that could be called speech had passed his lips.

He probably visited Lorca too, but I had not spoken to her in a while now. In fact, I had not even glimpsed her. My walks took me all over the island, from the lighthouse to Les Hauts-Vents, from Le Bassin to the long empty beaches near LeBec. Inevitably, I contrived to pass La Maison du Paradis. I knew Lorca had not left the island. Smoke sometimes rose from the chimney, and Linda at the hotel mentioned that Lorca had been in for a drink. But I had not managed to cross her path.

Once, I heard music from her cottage, and I listened, but not for long. The sound of her clarinet pained me in a way that I could not explain and I left after a few minutes. I was resolved not to go to her. If there was to be anything between us, then the sign, the gesture, must come from her.

On my walks, I noticed a subtle change in the light, especially in the mornings, when the sun cast long shadows and the air seemed thick, almost palpable, no longer the white of full summer but with a crimson tinting the gold. Signs of a change in the season appeared, here and there, on the edges of summer, like the slight fraying on the edge of petals in a bouquet past its prime.

In the garden of La Minerve the figs were soft and pulpy, dropping in the slightest breeze. Starlings gathered in the branches twice a day, morning and evening, making a cacophony of whistles and chirps and sudden screeches. Bees hummed lazily on the fallen fruit.

Tobias was still engaged in his project of decorating objects with seashells. Lately he’d been gluing them to unusually shaped bits of driftwood. Perhaps he was going to be a sculptor and not a painter. His mania now was only for
troques
, the little spiral-shaped shells, like miniature escargots, that were coloured with delicate red stripes, as if a fine watercolourist had been at work on them.

One early morning I went out with him when the tide had just turned, the optimal time for beachcombing. The best place for them was on the sands at Le Colombier, below Lorca’s cottage. There was dew underfoot and a fine morning mist on the dune grasses as we descended to the beach. The tide line was fifty metres away and receding, leaving an array of shells sparkling in the rising sun.

Tobias had a straw basket slung over his shoulder. He immediately rushed down to the beach, chasing a flock of oystercatchers that lifted off in a grand arabesque. I sat down and removed my canvas shoes and rolled up the cuffs of my trousers. The black and white birds returned, digging into the sand with their long red beaks. Tobias scattered them again, dashing among them with his arms flapping, sending them into the air with high indignant cries.

I wished one of those cries had come from the boy. Just a sound would be enough, not even a word, just a sound.

I strolled along in the opposite direction, leaving Tobias to his games, my footsteps taking me towards the headland near La Maison du Paradis. When I reached the dunes directly below her house, I paused and looked up, remembering the day of the dog fight and how angry I’d been with Lorca, thinking the dog was hers. What became of those dogs? I wondered. I’d never encountered them again. Perhaps they had belonged to someone visiting the island.

The beach here was dense with scallop shells that had been washed up on the tide, all of them picked clean already by birds. Among them were little clusters of the periwinkles I was collecting. I gathered the prettiest ones and stowed them in my pockets.

When I looked up I saw Lorca. She was facing away, looking in the opposite direction at a white ship heading out into the Atlantic on the distant horizon. The way she stood was so much like the classical contrapposto pose, with the upper torso slightly turned away from the hips, the shoulders and chest angled in a different position to the lower body, that I immediately regretted not bringing my sketchbook this morning. I
tried to memorize her posture, imagining how the pose of the woman in my painting could be adjusted.

When she turned and saw me, she took a step backwards, as if to hide herself, but I was already waving and I shouted her name. She returned the wave and came down the dunes to meet me.

I took her hand, her fingers were cold, and kissed her. “How are you?” I asked. “Are you managing all right?”

“I’m fine.” She blinked, smiled. She looked a little worn, I thought.

“I’ve missed you,” I told her.

“Is that Tobias down there?”

“It is. Why don’t you come and say hello. I’m sure he misses you too.”

“Oh, he was here yesterday.”

“I’m jealous that he gets to see you and I don’t.”

“He invites himself. Not that I mind. He wants to play the clarinet.”

“You mustn’t let him!”

“Don’t worry, Leo, I know better than that. In fact, I was a bit harsh with him last time.”

“Harsh, how?”

“He walked in, as he will, and just picked up the clarinet and started to blow on it. I grabbed it out of his hands and shouted at him. He’s so odd sometimes, like an animal. He put the clarinet down and stepped away, sort of in slow motion, like a deer, you know the way he lifts his feet sometimes, as if he is walking on glass. I said to him that he mustn’t strain his throat, that it was for his own good, but he just gave me a reproachful look and disappeared.”

“I wouldn’t worry too much. He never stays upset for long. Père Caron and I took him into Saint-Alban again the other day.”

“Yes?”

“He’s healing well. His throat is a bit raw inside still, but otherwise fine. He’ll be ready to go and see a speech therapist soon. Maybe even start the clarinet again.”

She paused and put a hand on my arm. “Leo, I know he needs someone to mother him, and my heart breaks over it, but it can’t be me. The closer I get to him the harder it will be to leave him. And I have to, eventually. A little boy like that will fall in love so easily.”

“You are something quite glamorous in his life,” I said, wondering if her words had been meant for me too. She fell silent, scuffing one sandalled foot in the beach sand.

“How is your music coming along?” I asked. “Are you composing much?”

Lorca shook her head. “I’ve done neither playing nor composing these last couple of days.”

“Oh. That doesn’t sound good.”

“No, it is good. I’m listening.”

“To the radio? Records?”

Another shake of the head. “Neither.”

“What then?”

“Everything.”

“Everything?”

She smiled. “Come sit down a minute with me.”

We moved to the bottom edge of the dunes, where the tide had not reached and the sand was dry. Lorca was wearing white shorts and a black and white striped St. Tropez–style
jersey. She kicked her sandals off and stretched her long legs out, then bent and scraped at the worn crimson nail polish on her toenails. She dug her toes into the sand, hiding them, and took her cigarettes from the pocket of her shorts. Bending her head against the slight sea breeze she cupped the flame from her Zippo and inhaled.

“My father was a musician,” she said. “Not a professional. He was the choirmaster at the school in our town. I remember once when we were on our summer holidays in the Pyrenees, the two of us were walking in the forest, looking at birds. He knew the names of every single species we encountered. It was phenomenal.”

She tapped the ash from her cigarette and watched it fragment on the breeze. “We’d sat down to listen to a Dendrocopos major, what you call a woodpecker. A black and white bird with spots and a red patch on its head. Anyway, we weren’t listening to its call, but the drumming noise it made on tree trunks. My father suddenly put his hands over my eyes and said, ‘What do you hear?’ He had large hands, they practically covered my face. I can remember the smell of soap and his pipe tobacco.

“‘I hear the woodpecker,’ I said.

“‘Nothing else?’ he asked. ‘Listen harder.’

“I could hear my own breathing, and I told him that.

“‘Listen to what else is out there,’ he said. I tried to imagine the forest, any other birds, or sounds from nearby farms. I mentioned these things, but he said, ‘You are not really listening. You are thinking. Stop thinking. Just listen.’

“His hands were on my eyes the whole time. At first I heard nothing, not even the tapping woodpecker, which had stopped. Then, as if it had just sprung up, I heard the breeze,
like a distant breath in the trees, a rustling exhalation. A bird called, two quick peeps. An answer came from another direction. Then a faint drone sounded, far off, a tractor climbing the slope. I heard another drone, much closer. A bumblebee. I listed each one of these sounds for my father.

“‘What else can you hear?’ he pressed.

“He removed his hands but told me to keep my eyes closed. The light behind my eyes changed, became brighter, and it was as if sound flooded in with the light. Suddenly I could hear everything. A car on the main road, its tires hissing on the macadam; the flapping splash of a duck landing on the lake behind the trees; distant church bells across the valley; the sound of children’s voice from the town; the rustle and creak of my father’s leather jacket as he shifted slightly; the liquid sound of him swallowing. I seemed to hear even the beating of his heart. I thought to myself that if I listened carefully enough I would be able to hear faraway oceans breaking on beaches, and the whispering of light as it travelled from the sun to the earth. I even imagined I would hear the turning of the earth on its orbit.”

Lorca had closed her eyes while she spoke and she opened them now and looked at me. Her eyes were shining. “I think that was the real beginning of my musical education. Just listening. For the first time. My head and my ears have filled up since then, with all the sounds of life. I don’t hear the world in the same way any more.”

“And that’s what you’ve been doing all this time in your cottage. Listening.”

“Trying to. Does that make sense to you?”

“Absolutely. If I substitute the sense of sight for that of hearing, I know exactly what you mean.”

“But it’s not the world I’m listening for. I want to hear myself. You understand, don’t you? I want there to be a perfect silence, and in that silence I want to try and hear myself. If I can. I don’t know if I have ever done that. But until I try, I don’t feel I can call myself a musician, much less a composer.”

I nodded. I wanted to tell her of my own breakthrough, of my renewed creativity, my excitement over the picture I was painting.

As if divining my thoughts, she said, “I talk too much about myself. How is your own work progressing?”

“Why don’t you come and see it? Tell me what you think. I can always use a fresh opinion.”

She got to her feet and brushed the sand from her hands. “I will. Soon. Not just yet, though. You understand?” She touched my arm.

“Promise?” I said, though I felt an emptiness in my chest.

“I promise. Soon.” She peered down the beach to where the small figure of the boy was hunched over something on the sand. “I don’t think I’ll talk to Tobias today. I want to get home.” She leaned forward and kissed me quickly on the mouth, then turned and walked back over the dunes, head down, not looking back.

T
HE BOY STANDS IN THE FOREGROUND, JUST TO
right of centre. Part memory, part reality, part something else entirely. He wears only a pair of faded blue shorts, his skin young and brown and smooth, his thick dark curls unruly. There is no bandage around his throat, neither is the scar visible, although a faint shadow beneath his chin hints at it. He is half turned away, looking back towards a white stone chapel.

The apple tree that I had originally placed in the centre of the canvas had been erased, but at the boy’s feet, among the grasses and flowers, are scattered apples, green with a red blush. On the far left is a line of black yew trees. The light is diffused, but it is not that silvery misty grey light I used to paint and love so much, the Corot light. This light is rosy, the rising light of morning, the light that will not fail.

I had begun by using sketches and memory for the figure of the boy, but then I had asked Tobias to pose, placing him near the door with the daylight on his skin. Later, I made a trip to the orchards on the east side of the presbytery and gathered
up a basket of apples, which I brought back to the studio, and I had Tobias stand beside them in the same pose while I painted the fruits. I paid careful attention to the faint hints of green reflected light on the boy’s legs, on the side where the apples were scattered. I wanted naturalism, and to that end I tried to paint what my eyes saw.

From the shore I made numerous oil sketches of the chapel at different angles, and then I rowed out in the skiff and sat at anchor, painting the chapel from the seaward side.

I worked on every aspect of the painting, except for one blank section of unpainted canvas. An absence. Tobias, who had helped me with bits of filling in here and there, once tapped the bare section and raised his hands palms-up in a querying gesture. I shook my head. I knew what was needed. I knew what I wanted to place in that void, to fill that absence. But I could not paint it from memory, and I couldn’t paint it from sketches. I would have to wait.

For long stretches of time I sat staring at the canvas. Sometimes I got up and crossed the floor and studied a particular section. Sometimes I reached for a brush and made an adjustment. When my eyes blurred and I couldn’t think straight any more, I scraped the dried paint from my palette and wiped it clean. I soaked my brushes in turpentine, then lathered them in soap and water and shaped the bristles and set the brushes in a jar on the windowsill.

One day I trimmed my hair with a pair of scissors and put on a white shirt, which was clean but wrinkled because I had no iron and had dried it on the clothesline in the garden. At first I put on shorts, but then changed my mind and dressed in my khaki chinos.

In the little garden, standing on a kitchen chair and reaching up into the branches, I picked a basket of figs, my hand seeking out those that were deepest green. The starlings had been at most of them, but there were enough hidden where the branches grew thick towards the trunk. I wanted figs that could be eaten within a few hours. Too soft and they would break at the slightest pressure, too firm and they would not yet have developed their full flavour. From La Minerve I followed the familiar route des Matelots and turned west along the chemin des Sirènes, pausing along the way to gather a small bouquet of pale violet malva that were growing by the wayside. They were very pretty next to the green figs.

The blue wooden shutters on the ground floor were fastened shut. The curtains were closed in the upper windows. I raised the iron knocker on the front door and let it fall. I waited a minute and knocked with my knuckles. No response.

“Lorca? Hello! Lorca?”

I went around to the walled garden at the back. A rap of knuckles on the garden door brought no answer. I walked down to the beach and surveyed the shoreline in both directions. Nothing but a solitary black-backed gull drifting back and forth above the sand. She wouldn’t leave without telling me. Would she?

I set the basket down on the sill and tore a page from my sketchbook.
I need your help
, I wrote.
With my painting. I’m in the chapel every day. Low tide is roughly between 8 and 3. Leo
. I wedged the note between two figs and nudged the basket closer to the door. She would come, or she would not come.

S
HE CROSSED THE NARROWS
with the rising sun behind her. Aurora, bringer of the morning. She looked like the vision that I had encountered on that far off day when I’d climbed the cliff after my fall. How long ago it seemed now. As if it had happened to a different person.

I was standing in the doorway when she arrived, and her greeting was brief, a clasping of hands, a kiss. She wore a thin white dress that reached to her knees, the cloth almost transparent, and she was unadorned, no makeup, rings or bracelets. She stepped into the chapel and stood in front of the painting, looking at it a long while.

“You once said to me that the island had a strange beauty.” I said. “A hush. As if something strange and beautiful were about to happen.”

Raising a hand she touched the section I had left unpainted, echoing the inquiring gesture Tobias had made. “You’re waiting to put something here,” she said.

I had missed the sound of her voice, that smoky, slightly hoarse way she had of speaking. “Yes.”

“What?”

“Who, you mean.”

She nodded slowly. “Me.”

“Yes. I want you to step into that landscape and complete it.”

She nodded again. “Tell me how. Tell me what to do, Leo.”

“Just like that, like you are, but move back into the light.” I took up a stick of charcoal. “The pose I want is called ‘contrapposto,’ where the upper torso is turned off-axis from the
hips. So that tension and graceful relaxation are contained in the same posture. It’s a classic stance. Artists have been using it since the time of the ancient Greeks.”

“Like the
Venus de Milo,”
she said. “Should I be nude?”

Bending to grasp the hem of her dress, she began to draw it up her thighs. I shook my head.

“Not nude. Much as I want to see you naked again.”

She graced me with a tiny smile. “Nothing sacrilegious, then?”

“This is a church, after all. But I like you in that white dress. It has a sort of timeless feeling.” I tilted my head and squinted. “Put your left foot forward slightly. And turn this way a little, your upper body, as if you have just heard something. A voice calling, from a distance.”

“Or music?”

“Or music.”

I worked quickly, charcoal giving way to brush, monochrome to colour, white and crimson and ochre mixing to create flesh tones. Then I reached for a tube of pure cadmium yellow. A touch of white and crimson gave it a hint of peach. Coming to stand just a foot or two away from her, I peered at her bare arms, then crouched and studied her calf, comparing the tones with the mixture on my palette.

“Perfect,” I said. My fingers grazed the top of her foot. “Exactly right.”

Returning to the painting I brushed in the new colour. Now came black, ultramarine blue, a smidgen of green, and I painted her hair, black as a raven’s feather.

Gradually, I stopped looking at Lorca, all my attention on the canvas. At a certain point it is the painting that is real, not
the model. When she relaxed her pose and went to sit on one of the pews, lighting a cigarette, I barely took notice.

I don’t know how much time passed before I set down palette and brushes. Finally I stretched my arms above my head and flexed my fingers. Lorca was stubbing out a cigarette in the bleached oyster shell on the table. I looked around the chapel like a man waking from a dream.

“Is it finished?” she asked, coming to stand next to me.

“For now. The idea is there, the feeling. The rest I can do without you here. Thank you for posing.”

“And now you can pour me a drink,” Lorca said, her voice lighter, forcing a change of mood. “I did see a bottle of wine here somewhere.”

“You are correct, m’lady. Stocked especially for your pleasure, and in the hope of your return.”

I brought out two glasses and uncorked the wine. We carried the glasses outside and settled ourselves against the warm stone of the chapel wall on the seaward side. I touched my glass to hers.

“Thank you again. I wish I could help you with your music in some way. But musicians don’t exactly need models.”

“Has Tobias seen the painting?”

“Oh yes. In fact, he’s helped me so much that I’m going to have to credit him as the co-artist.”

Lorca laughed. “Père Caron will be happy, I’m sure. It’s a wonderful addition to the church.”

“I hope so. It’s not really a religious painting, well not overtly. But I feel it is spiritual. He told me I should take Love as my subject.”

“What will you call it?”

“Mmm. I haven’t thought of a title.”

“Why not use your original title?” she suggested. “‘Love and the Pilgrim’?”

“But then I would have to paint myself into the picture.”

“You don’t need to. Leo. You are there already. Whatever those figures are waiting for has arrived.”

“Do you think so?” I took her hand and ran my fingers back and forth across her wrist.

“Things are changed,” she said. “The landscape has changed, you have changed. Tobias too has changed.”

“And you?”

“I … I think I’ve completed my work. Would you come and listen, Leo?”

“But that is wonderful! Of course I want to hear it. When?”

“Come tomorrow. But not too early. I want to practise a bit. Come in the evening. At dusk. It is a nocturne, after all.”

T
HAT NIGHT
I
DREAMED OF HER
, and in the morning I realized I couldn’t recall ever dreaming about a woman before. Not Claudine, not Hollis, not the few other women I’d known during those years before I married. Except for long ago, during the long nights at the Guild, when I used to dream about a woman who came and went, and sometimes called my name, and never quite showed me her face.