55 
“stumbling”
Tom and I sat at a terrasse table of the Rotonde, coats wrapped around us, Kir Royals in front of us, ankles locked together.
“How can she have been so different here to how she was at home?” I asked. “Matisse said I was lucky to have had her as a mother, but she was so… censorious.”
“Maybe she wasn’t censorious. Maybe you just assumed that she was.”
“But Father would rant and yell at some minor infraction and she would say nothing! At most she would say, ‘As you wish, Reginald,’ when he asked for backup.”
“So, she didn’t argue against your father’s censorship… but did she actually say, ‘Do this, not that,’ and so on?”
The dusk was falling briskly, the night clear, the lights of the city punctuating the sky. The fur of my peacock coat smelt of hot chocolate and my fingers smelt of a hundred cigarettes. Looking at Tom in his black overcoat, stained on the lapel, I couldn’t call up a single memory of my mother admonishing me, just ones of her watching, impassive, as my father’s face went red with yelling.
“She didn’t do anything much, really. No help… but I suppose no hindrance either.”
“Then that’s the real question, isn’t it? Why she wrote in her diaries how much she loved you, but toward you she was cold and remote.”
“She was going to visit me here… oh yes, I told you already, I’m repeating myself. I wish…” I couldn’t finish. Tom took the cigarette from my fingers to kiss my palm.
“It would have been a brave new world, Button. But at least now you know.”
“Russell lives in Sydney… she didn’t mention meeting him in her diaries.”
“But you think she might have.”
“She had an odd way of writing in those books, as though… almost as though she feared they might be read. I mean, if it’s a private diary, why would you hide the name of your lover? And she’s very lyrical, she writes a lot about street scenes and the sky and the sensations of her body in light… but after a while, I could see patterns. She used the same type of descriptions over and over…”
“Like a code.”
“Like an idiosyncratic cipher for what was really going on. It was one of the reasons reading her diaries was so addictive. While I read them, I felt that I was part of her personal landscape.”
“So, Russell is in those diaries as… a type of weather?”
“Yes… but I’d need to read them again to make sure. Her way of writing only really makes sense to me now.” The last of my drink went down too easily.
“I could have met him,” I said, “Russell.”
“You still can.”
“Not unless he comes here.” I looked directly into Tom’s dark blue eyes. “I’m never going back.”
“Not even…”
“I went back for a funeral once and it took me a year to leave. If I go back for another funeral, I might never make it back to Paris. That place is Hades for me, Tom. It’s no-man’s-land.”
He kept my gaze. He didn’t even look up when the waiter brought us another round.
“It seems I’ll just have to get a job on a London paper then.”
“They’re not sending you home, are they?”
“Not yet.”
“More correspondence, Button? Don’t you just go down to the café to get all your news?”
“This is a telegram, fooligan.” I waved the yellow paper in his face. “That can only mean Fox and associates, or my father.”
“Let’s hope it’s your father.”
“Unlikely, as I haven’t spoken to him since I left him after mother’s funeral, when was that, November last year?”
“But he knows where you live, doesn’t he? He’d have to, or you couldn’t have heard about your mother…”
But I wasn’t really listening to Tom, not with the telegram in my hand.
“What is it?” Tom looked over my shoulder. “What’s the sad face for?”
I handed over the telegram.
JOHN RUSSELL 22 PACIFIC ST WATSONS BAY ADDRESS IN BACK OF DIARY ENTRIES JUNE 12 TO 17 1921
“What the hell does that mean? Who’s it from?”
“Look at the address.”
“Westminster?”
“It’s from Fox. He has my mother’s final diary.”
“How?”
“How indeed. That date is a few months before she died.”
“But… she died in Sydney.”
“She did. So how did he get the diary? How on earth did he get her final diary?”
“Alright, Button, it’s alright…”
“No, it’s not! It’s far from alright!”
“Have a cigarette…”
“Fox sends me all this evidence of how he tried to get rid of you—then he sends me a note that says he knows all about me and my mother—where will it end, hmmm? When will he stop pulling my strings like a puppet?”
“When you stop letting him.”
“How can I? How can I leave you in danger if I have any chance to stop it? How can I… my mother… how I can say I don’t want to know? How…”
I sobbed then. It couldn’t be helped. It had been such a fierce few weeks, after such a year. I hadn’t slept properly for days, my leg throbbed, my head throbbed, I was hungry and thirsty and couldn’t get a moment’s peace. We stood in the stairwell and Tom took me in his arms, kissing the top of my head as I wailed into his chest, full wrenching sobs that seemed to come from somewhere outside of me, the noise of my cries alien to my ears. I couldn’t work out how to inhale and almost choked. I hadn’t cried like that for years, which meant I had to cry for everything, for my mother, for all the broken men I had nursed, for all the boys I had known and would never see again, for all the dead. Eventually Tom had to half-carry, half-drag me up the stairs to my apartment, still sobbing, wash my face and take off my shoes and push me into bed. He lay down beside me, holding me and stroking my hair with his sore hands, singing lullabies in his deep, rough voice, until exhaustion overwhelmed me and I sank into oblivion.