‘Vladimir! We are ready for you!’
Maud thought Tanya would speak to her on the pavement where the covered arcade of Passage des Panoramas gave out onto the wide, tree-lined expanse of Boulevard Montmartre, but instead she put her arm through Maud’s and waved her free hand at a smart blue motor which was waiting, its engine idling, under the winter skeleton of a plane tree. It rolled smoothly towards them and stopped precisely by the ladies. Maud noticed as the chauffeur hopped out of the machine and went to open the automobile’s rear door for them that his livery matched the dark blue enamel of the car itself. Tanya’s maid clambered into the front with the painting gear while Tanya herself ushered Maud into the back seat and said something in Russian to the driver. Maud heard the words Parc Monceau and the driver bowed before closing the door on them and returning to his seat.
‘I hope you don’t mind, Maud – by the way, may I call you Maud? Good. I need a little greenery after being shut up inside all morning. We shall run you to wherever you want to go later on.’ The Russian pulled off her leather gloves and lay back with a sigh against the heavily upholstered seat. Maud made some polite reply and looked out of the window as the car pulled away into the stream of other motors, carriages and motor-buses. What did this princess want of her? Did she perhaps have a drawing pupil for her? Pupils were hard to come by in a city packed to its heaving gills with artists, but if she did, a few extra francs a month would make all the difference to Maud. She felt the curl of hope in her belly under the hunger.
Paris ate money. Paint and canvas ate money. Maud’s training ate money. Paris yanked each copper from her hand and gave her back nothing but aching bones and loneliness. It was as if she had never quite arrived, as if she had stepped out of the grand frontage of the Gare du Nord, and Paris – the real Paris – had somehow retreated round the corner leaving all these open palms behind it. She was on the wrong side of the glass, pressed up against it, but trapped by her manners, her sober serious nature, behind this invisible divide. She spent her evenings alone in cheap lodgings reading and sketching in poor light. Her illness last winter – she had been feeding herself too little, been too wary of lighting the fire when the damp crawled off the river – had swallowed francs by the fistful. She must not get ill again, but she had even less money now. Sometimes she felt her stock of bravery had been all used up in getting here at all.
Even with winter closing in, the boulevard was full of activity – the shop girls in short skirts running errands with round candy-striped hatboxes dangling from their wrists, the women with their fashionable pinched-in jackets being ushered into restaurants by bowing waiters.
‘Tell me,’ Tanya said, ‘did you know Miss Champion well? I thought, perhaps, you both being Englishwomen…’
Maud shook her head; her thoughts were loose and drifting and it took her a moment to recall where she was. She blinked and found herself looking into Tanya’s large black eyes. She thought of Rose, all sharp angles and anger. ‘Not well at all. I found her rather … rather cruel, as a matter of fact.’
Tanya drew a small metal compact from her purse and examined her complexion, brushing away a little loose powder with her fingertip. Most women in Paris went into the world masked with heavy white foundation and their mouths coloured a false glistening red. Tanya’s use of powder and paint was subtle by comparison, but brought up as she had been, Maud found it rather shocking and was embarrassed by her own unworldliness. She had thought herself rather wise in the ways of the world until she came to Paris. Every day that passed, she was in danger of thinking a little less of herself.
‘I’m glad you say that,’ Tanya said and snapped the compact shut again. ‘Lord knows I am sorry anyone gets so desperate they hurt themselves, but she was terribly mean. I once asked her to comment on a study I was doing – it was my own fault really, I didn’t want her opinion, it was simply I admired her and wanted her to praise me – and her advice was “stop painting”.’
Maud laughed suddenly and covered her mouth.
Tanya grinned. ‘I know! I said it was my own fault, but still – what a thing to say! She painted beautifully, I think, and in fairness she was not vain about it.’
‘Yes, if one dared to say anything to her she looked as if she despised one,’ Maud replied. ‘She didn’t think of any of us as artists at all. Perhaps she was right.’
‘Nonsense,’ Tanya said firmly and Maud blushed. ‘There are some women at Lafond’s who will do nothing more than paint nasty still lifes. There are others who are serious. You are serious, Maud. So am I. About my work at least.’ The compact went back into the little embroidered bag over her arm. ‘Now I shall be quiet for a minute and let you look out of the window.’
The sensation of being driven was very pleasant. Maud had been in her brother’s motor a few times before, but she couldn’t see why he liked it. The thing rattled your teeth and shook, and was forever making strange banging noises. This motor though was quite different; they seemed to float over the streets and the engine’s regular fricatives made Maud think of contented pets. For the past few weeks, walking through the city between her classes and her lodgings had been a bleak necessity rather than a pleasure. The cold was bitter and Maud could not afford a coat thick enough to keep it from getting into her bones, and you needed money to rest in the pavement cafés, heated with braziers and defended from the winds with neat barriers of clipped box-hedge. Now though, Maud was snug behind the window seals of the motor-car, her legs covered with a rug lined in fur, and Paris unrolled in front of them like a cinema film.
The car argued its way through the traffic under the fifty-two Corinthian pillars and wide steps of the new Eglise de la Madeleine, then swung up Boulevard Malesherbes past the dome of Saint-Augustin. All movement and variety. Street-hawkers and boulevardiers, women dragging carts of vegetables or herring. The charming busy face of Paris a thousand miles away from Maud’s draughty room in one of the back alleys around Place des Vosges, in a house just clinging to respectability, with its paper-thin sheets and the miserable collection of failed businessmen and poor widows who gathered around the landlady’s table in the evening and tried to pretend her thin soups and stews were enough to sustain them.
Tanya grew quiet and let Maud enjoy the view until they reached Parc Monceau and the motor-car came to a gentle halt near the colonnade. Tanya sprang out before the chauffeur had time to open the door for her. ‘Actual trees! Don’t you feel like a butterfly pinned up in a case in Paris sometimes?’
Maud followed her onto the path. ‘A little, I suppose. Though butterflies in cases are meant to be looked at, and no one looks at me.’
‘I wish I could go out and about without being watched sometimes,’ Tanya said casually, then turned to her maid and said something in Russian. You could try being poor, Maud thought. The conversation with the maid became a long and passionate debate that ended with Tanya stamping her foot and the maid crossing her arms over her bosom and frowning. The chauffeur had returned to the car and stared straight ahead the whole time, his face immobile.
‘My maid Sasha is convinced still water is unhealthy,’ Tanya said, taking Maud’s arm and flouncing with her towards the little lake. ‘She swears if I get typhoid she will not nurse me! You would think I had said I was going to swim the length of the Seine before lunch rather than take a little walk with you.’
Tanya’s indignation had made her eyes shine and she held her chin high. She reminded Maud suddenly of little Albert, six years old and always right, and always shocked at the gross stupidity and moral turpitude of his elders. ‘She had care of you when you were a child, perhaps?’
‘Yes, and I was a sickly infant. Now I must spend hours every day convincing her and my aunts that I am sickly no more. You are not too cold?’
‘Not at all, Miss Koltsova.’
‘Oh, I am Tanya. Call me that. I love to walk here. It is the most respectable park in Paris, so my old cats can’t complain, even if Sasha does.’
‘Old cats?’
‘My two aunts who live with me and make sure I am kept comme il faut. Vera Sergeyevna can tell you the order in which any company should come in to dinner within five minutes of entering a drawing room – she is an expert in all forms of protocol – and Lila Ivanovna, my late mother’s sister, is here to agree with everything she says. Papa would not let me come to Paris without them! Lord, the weeping I had to do to make him let me come at all. They are my guardian angels, apparently. Guardian gargoyles, they seem to me.’ She paused and Maud wondered if she was about to tell her what she wanted to hear: about rich pupils who wanted long lessons in warm houses. Instead she went on, ‘The best families in Paris send their nurses here with their little babies for their fresh air.’
Tanya walked on with a slight swaying step as if on the verge of breaking into a skip or a run; her long straight skirt swung and rippled round her. Maud began to think she had been wrong about the drawing lessons. Something like that could have been discussed while walking through Passage des Panoramas surely, and there was a nervous edge to Tanya’s chatter. Well, she would ask eventually. In the meantime Maud had never been to this park before, so she looked about her with pleasure and saw full, mature trees and pathways that wandered in curves; it made the Tuileries seem a desert.
The lake was edged with a semi-circle of Corinthian columns, not on the monumental scale of the Madeleine, but with the same classical decadence, narrow trunks topped with stylised foliage. Great swathes of ivy had been allowed to clamber over them in romantic festoons. It made Maud realise how ordered, how constructed Paris in general could appear. The grand boulevards seemed like a demand for order, the tree roots ringed with gratings as if they might escape. Here nature was controlled with a lighter touch. A handful of smartly dressed women read novels on scattered metal chairs, their faces hidden by the swooping brims of their hats. Maud looked at them, the angles of their necks and hands, the physical body in the world. A formally dressed gentleman complete with silk top hat looked out over the surface of the lake and smoked his cigar, creating a personal fog-bank. A dozen nourrices in their high white muslin caps and long cloaks pushed prams along the gravel paths, nodding to one another like society beauties in the Bois de Boulogne.
‘It is possible to see how rich the baby is by the quality of the cap and cloak of his nurse,’ Tanya said, watching one young woman pass them with her little nose in the air. ‘Look at those ribbons! The baby is either a prince or an American. Which here amounts to the same thing, of course. I am sure they are all shocking snobs, these girls.’
Maud wanted very much to say something light and clever in reply, but she was becoming tired and every woman here made her feel shabby and afraid. There was some trick of dress taught to every Frenchwoman in the cradle, it seemed. The trottins who fetched and carried for the dressmakers and milliners could be no richer than Maud, yet they seemed to know how to look neat and fresh. One of Lafond’s male students told her that the French gendarmes said they always knew the nationality of a suicide pulled from the river by their clothes; the English girls were always badly dressed. Maud had not been sure what reaction the young man had been expecting, but he saw something in her face that had made him apologise and back away quickly.
‘If I say something to you, will you try very hard not to take offence at it?’ Tanya said.
Maud’s heart sank. It did not sound like the opening of a conversation about drawing pupils, and if the Russian did say something offensive to her now she would have to leave at once, painfully hungry and further from home than she had been at the studio.
‘I will try and take anything you say as it is meant,’ she replied quietly.
‘Very well, dear.’ Tanya patted her arm. Maud glanced at her. Her face was shadowed by the brim of her hat, but one could still see the long clean line of her jaw. Her hair was beautifully black. She could not be more than twenty-two. ‘I am a little worried about you, my dear Maud. You are looking too thin and too pale for a girl about to face a Paris winter. I am afraid you are spending money on colours you should be spending on food.’ Maud felt herself blush and she straightened herself. Tanya was talking quickly, looking forward. ‘There’s no shame in it, naturally. The men behave as if poverty alone can make you a genius, but it is easier for them. So many girls come to Paris and find it rather more expensive than they had bargained for – it is Paris, after all. I am forever signing cheques to charitable foundations who are trying to get them back home before any greater harm comes to them!’
It was a sign of her hunger and the truth of what Tanya was saying that Maud’s discreet good manners were not enough to stop her tongue. ‘You wish to pay my fare home before I hang myself or take on a gentleman protector, Miss Koltsova?’
Tanya came to a sudden halt, and looked at Maud with wide and frightened eyes. ‘Lord, is it that bad? I only thought you were beginning to look a bit unwell! You’re not about to do either of those things, are you?’
‘Certainly not, but—’
‘I’m very glad to hear that! What a ghastly thought!’ She looked so shocked that Maud suddenly laughed. One of the readers lifted her eyes briefly from her novel. Tanya gave a great sigh and hugged Maud’s arm to her again. ‘Oh, you mustn’t tease me like that, I shall have nightmares.’
‘I did not mean to tease you. I meant to tell you to mind your own business, but you rather cut me off.’
Tanya looked a little guilty. ‘Yes, I suppose I did. I am sorry. Do you wish to tell me to mind my own business now?’
Maud shook her head. ‘No, I find the wind has gone out of my sails rather. But I still have enough money to buy my fare home, so I need not apply to one of those charities you mention. I do not want to go home, Tanya. I find life here … difficult, I admit that, but I have so much more to learn and no chance of learning it back home. I’d have to live with my brother and he’d try to marry me to one of his chinless friends.’
‘Urff, we have those in Russia too. When I marry, I shall choose a nice modern American. They are so beautifully clean.’ She came to a halt and put her hand to her forehead. ‘I have said things the wrong way about, then rattled off in the wrong direction. I had a terrible education, you know, and now I say what I think! That would never do in England, would it?’
‘Certainly not,’ Maud answered, thinking of her sister-in-law Ida, mistress of the pointed euphemism.
‘Thank goodness I am in Paris where they see me as an eccentric and think it charming. My eldest aunt is far worse. She tells the women they all dress like prostitutes and she has become quite the social success as a result.’ Tanya began walking again, pulling Maud alongside her. ‘I think I might be able to help you, and I did not mean to suggest you should go home, but do you really think you have so much left to learn? I mean, the sort of things that are taught rather than found in oneself, through work. I think your painting terribly accomplished. Perhaps you just need to learn to trust yourself. Be a little more free. Don’t you think that Manet and Degas have broken off our shackles? We must learn to stretch our limbs.’
Maud’s head was beginning to swim rather and to concentrate on her answer took effort. ‘Then I hope that can be taught, because I do not trust myself now. I think … I think if I could stay in Paris until next summer, then perhaps … But I cannot take charity, Miss Koltsova, however kindly meant. I would hate myself.’
It was as if Tanya had not heard her. ‘Have you visited the Steins in Rue de Fleurus near the Luxembourg Gardens? Oh, I must take you there this evening then. Such paintings they have on their walls! All wildness and change and new ideas. There are no rules left, it seems. I think while those painters charge ahead like bulls, sweeping everything away before them, they make some space for us to paint as we like.’
‘Tanya…’
The Russian paused again and blushed. ‘I asked you to walk with me because I want to take you to see someone this afternoon. Her name is Miss Harris, and she has a house in Avenue de Wagram for English and American girls who find themselves destitute in Paris. Oh, don’t bridle up again! She has a free registrar for work, and yes, I have contributed to her funds in the past. I am sure she might have something of use to you – English lessons or some such. You know, many ladies in Paris pay good money for a few hours’ conversation a week. Now, you cannot be offended by that, can you? We shall go there at once.’
The idea of asking for help, even if it were just a recommendation from a charitable English lady, made Maud shrink away. Her pride flared up. She had got this far by her own efforts, why should she start becoming obliged to people now? What would her brother say, if he knew she was reduced to begging for a few hours’ teaching English? If Tanya had asked her to teach some young relative or friend, then Maud could have felt the benefit of the extra francs and convinced herself that she, Maud, was the one granting the favour. To go and see this woman would be an open admission of failure. She felt as if all the activity in Parc Monceau had been frozen, as if everyone there, the ladies with their novels, the nurses with their pampered little charges, was staring at her to see if she would admit defeat. Whether by accident or design their conversation had carried them round the perimeter of the lake and they were once again beside Tanya’s motor-car. The chauffeur had already stepped out and opened the door for them.
Maud generally ate no breakfast on studio days, trusting in the little spiced cakes to see her through to lunchtime when for a franc she might get an omelette, bread and vin ordinaire at one of the cafés near the studio. That would then sustain her till evening, or nearly sustain her. There was no way to squeeze more nourishment from her coin, that she knew by long trial. She should have eaten that meagre meal almost an hour ago and she could feel her hunger turning darker and more threatening. The idea of going anywhere, doing anything with her stomach aching and a feathery weakness beginning to spread through her limbs was impossible, yet resisting or telling Tanya the urgency of her hunger was likewise unthinkable. She let herself be guided back into the car and heard Tanya give another address then sat in the car with her eyes downcast.