Maud was woken by a peal of laughter from above. It was deep dark outside, and she lay still for a moment, wondering if she could get back to sleep again. Upstairs, someone had begun playing the flute. It was a strange, open song. Almost too subtle, too gentle, flowing on as if the rules of music meant nothing to it. The voices grew quiet. Maud swung her legs out of bed and lit her candle; match after match failed until she managed it. She remembered Sylvie’s shaking hands over the opium lamp, the feel of her skin as she took the matches from her. She tried to stand, bent over and still half-leaning on the bed. Her muscles were weak and complaining, as if they had forgotten the way to keep her upright. She waited, then stood straight in the shadows. It was a small victory but it felt like her first in a long time. The wooden floor was cool, almost soft under her bare feet.
She knelt down carefully, leaning on the bed again as she did so, then reached beneath it till she touched the varnished wicker of the suitcase. She pulled it slowly towards her, unbuckled the leather strap and opened it. Her materials were all in their usual places; her sketchbooks just as she had left them. She looked at her hands, spread out the fingers then relaxed them again. It was almost two weeks since she had drawn anything, and her fingers felt stiff and old. It was the longest time she had gone without drawing since she was an infant.
She undid the ribbon that held her palette to the inside of the upper lid; it tilted into her waiting hand and she saw tucked beneath it her oil sketches, one of Tanya and some from the atelier, and the painting of Sylvie, all where she had left them, pressed flat against the lining of the case. She laid them down to one side without looking at them, then pulled at the slippery upper lining of the case with her fingernail until it came loose. There was her collection of fifty-franc notes, her savings from her time with the Morels. She stared at the notes in her hands as she had done on that first night, but rather than feeling rich, looking at them now she felt a tearing darkness in the middle of her chest. This was what she had cost.
She put the money back in its hiding-place and was about to replace the oil sketches, but the portrait of Sylvie stared up at her and she could not put it away with the rest. All the while the flute continued to play, meandering, exploring the air. She placed the painting on the floor while she tucked away the others, then twisted round, her legs folded under her, to look at it properly. The candlelight gave it movement, as if the smoke of the pipe was still moving in the air. She reached forward and touched the line of Sylvie’s shoulder, feeling under her fingertips the texture of the paint. How had these things come back to her, found her among the dead?
She closed her eyes and she could see Morel in her room, in black and white like a film, his movements jerky, bundling her few clothes up to send to the poor, burning the cards she’d left by her bed in the fireplace, leafing through the sketchbooks and wondering if they could be turned to his advantage, an opportunity to check that the story had taken.
Maud opened her eyes and let her fingers brush Sylvie’s hair, half-pinned up. The interview with Sylvie and Morel on that last evening came back to her in all its details, the injustice of it, the cruelty. She tried to believe she had seen in Sylvie some softening or regret, but she could only think of her casual ease as she stepped over Maud’s body after she collapsed. For a moment Maud felt too sick to live. She was nothing, she had meant nothing, and she had not belonged in those comfortable rooms. She belonged nowhere. She bowed her head and listened to the slow flow of the flute then she clenched her fists. A sigh went shuddering through her, then she stood, staggered a little, set her jaw and found her balance. The wall of her cell was covered in drawing pins. Holding her painting by one corner she shuffled across the floor then pinned up the portrait where she could see it from the bed. As she turned away, the strange song of the flute ceased and there was a burst of applause, cheers and whistles. A man was calling for more wine, someone began to scrape at a violin.
Maud stumbled back into her bed and pulled the blankets round her. Her eyes closed, and with terrible familiarity she found herself returning to the scene of her drowning. The waters and darkness surrounded her as soon as she slipped into sleep. The shock of the cold never lessened. Her confusion was as complete as it had been in that first moment. Horrified, betrayed, stupid and trapped in her useless body. ‘It will be over soon,’ the dark water said to her. ‘Breathe me in and you will never be lost again. Let go, and be with me.’ For a moment in her distress she did let go: warmth, peace soaked through her and pulled her down. Then her self called out to her. Images and sounds. She saw her mother dead, her father drunk. She held her little brother Albert in her arms and whispered him promises, she threw dirt into her father’s grave and watched her step-mother ride out of town, blowing kisses and waving like a spring bride. She tried to move in the water, close her mouth to it. The lonely warehouse full of rotting cast-offs. She cheered the flames chewing up the walls, roaring and ripping apart the humiliation of the place with their red and yellow teeth. Not like this. She would not die like this.
She pushed against the black waters, broke the surface and sucked in air and water – one breath, two – before the drug and the cold pulled too hard on her and took her down. Once more she fought, once more for the hours spent sketching in the Louvre, for every moment she had been hungry, for the loneliness and the fear; once more for the betrayal, the cruelty, the easy violence. Rage lifted her, the phoenix on the opium box. Another breath, and she was spent and fell again. If she heard the shout from the boatman, the flurry of activity from her rescuers, she did not know it. She drowned; she slept.
* * *
When she woke, Valadon was standing by the painting of Sylvie. Maud shifted in her bed and Suzanne looked over her shoulder.
‘This yours?’ Maud nodded and stretched her fingers. They were sore and stiff every time she woke. ‘You’re not as shit as I thought you would be.’ Valadon whistled and her wolfhound trotted in from the corridor. She crouched to greet him, taking fistfuls of his fur in her hands and shaking him while she shoved her face into his neck. The dog panted and wagged its tail. She looked back at Maud. ‘I’m going out. There’s coffee there and more of your soup. God, I love that old maid. What a face!’ She stood back up and lifted her arms above her head. ‘No rain this morning. I shall run up the hill and down again before I pick up a brush today.’
‘Suzanne? Thank you.’
The older woman lowered her arms and smiled crookedly. ‘Don’t think of it. We are at home to every waif and stray here. You’re just the latest. When I die I shall go to Saint Peter and he will say, “Suzanne, you’ve been a very bad woman, but I have to let you into heaven anyway because you are kind to outcasts”.’
Maud smiled. Her head felt clearer today. ‘And because you are a great artist.’
Valadon lit a cigarette and walked towards the door. ‘That should count for something, shouldn’t it?’
‘Suzanne, I need to write a letter.’
‘Can you make it down to Le Rat Mort on Place Pigalle? They’ll have all you need there.’
Rain oil on board 35 × 25 cm
It would seem from the fountain, just glimpsed in the background, that the painting is seen from the perspective of the interior of Le Rat Mort café on Place Pigalle, Montmartre. The café was a favourite for the artists and models of the area during the Belle Époque. Note the strong sense of movement from right to left across the secondary frame of the café window; figures dash past the viewer, sheltering under umbrellas or with their coats pulled over their heads. Note as well the heavy yellow light in the atmosphere and how the rain shows itself in the disturbances in reflections, the thinned and distorted edges of the gutters and figures seen through glass. Rain is a tour de force that makes us feel we too have just escaped a cataclysmic storm.
Extract from the catalogue notes to the exhibition ‘The Paris Winter: Anonymous Treasures from the de Civray Collection’, Southwark Picture Gallery, London, 2010
Maud should not have left her bed, let alone the house in Impasse de Guelma. She paused from time to time as she dressed to sit a moment and wait for the faintness to pass. She had only the clothes she’d been drowned in. They had been laundered and pressed, but she seemed to put the waters on with them and shivered. There was a broken mirror propped up behind the washstand. She wiped it on a corner of the bedsheet and looked at herself. Strange, she looked much as she remembered, only thinner in the face and with dark circles under her eyes. The good effects on her health of her stay in Rue de Seine had been wiped out when her hosts tried to kill her. She almost smiled at the thought then began to pin up her hair. The movements were familiar and mechanical and she wondered at them. How could anything be the same? Yet her fingers twisted her dark hair into the usual neat pile on top of her head and the pins held.
She pulled out the suitcase from under the bed, took out the sketchbook and turned to the last empty pages. It was still there, Madame Prideux’s carte de visite. She tucked it into her pocket, along with one of the fifty-franc notes.
On the Boulevard Clichy a man sat on an upturned tea-chest playing a violin. On his knee perched a little monkey in a red jacket with its own tiny instrument and bow. A long chain ran from its neck to the man’s waistcoat pocket. It watched him, copying his movements, checking and chattering. The trams rang their bells all the way along the road in front of them. The sky was an orange-grey and Maud was not sure if it was the weather or her own illness, but the air seemed to press on her. She looked up.
‘Find cover, miss,’ the violin player said. ‘There’s a storm not a minute away.’ He started to pack up his instrument as he spoke. He stood and the monkey clambered swiftly up from his lap to his shoulder and crouched under the rim of his broad-brimmed hat. The man touched his forefinger to it in salute and sauntered up the road.
Maud crossed the clanging and blaring boulevard in the crowd, protected from the motor-cars by the mass of people around her, and found a place in the interior of Le Rat Mort just as the first fat raindrops began to fall. She sat in the warmth and comfort of the interior, listening to the civilised murmuring of the morning customers behind her, the snap of newspapers being opened and the chink of spoons on china cups as the readers stirred sugar into their bitter black coffees. All the surfaces were freshly polished and glowed with reflected electric light. Before the writing materials and her coffee had arrived the street outside was washed with rain, the gutters choked and plashed. The atmosphere outside was strangled with a thick yellow glow and the people fled past as if the thunder had let demons loose on the streets. She looked at the paper in front of her, let her head clear and began to write.
* * *
Maud was worse that afternoon, and when Sasha was told her patient had been out wandering the streets in the morning and got caught in a shower on her way home, she let forth a stream of Russian that Tanya refused to translate. Yvette grinned up from the floor. ‘I think we get the idea.’
Maud pulled herself up in the bed and drew the blankets around her.
‘Tell her I’m sorry, but I had my reasons,’ she said. For the first time she told them about the strange visit of Mme Prideux to Rue de Seine, Morel’s bloody story of the Commune and Sylvie’s casual announcement that the lady had died in a traffic accident.
‘Why didn’t you tell me then, Maud?’ Tanya said. She looked upset. Maud shook her head, not knowing how to answer.
‘They had you all tied up, didn’t they, sweetie?’ Yvette said sadly. ‘“Sylvie smokes opium – but don’t tell. Here are more of our secrets about the crazy lady because we trust you.” You weren’t going to gossip once they had you all grateful and helpful. I’d lay money that was why she pretended she’d chucked her supply that day – same day that she told you Prideux was dead. Nothing like making people feel part of your secrets and troubles to keep them quiet and loyal.’
Maud hugged her knees. ‘You’re probably right. Anyway, I wrote to Prideux’s son at the address on the card this morning. I told him I had met Mme Prideux and gave a hint at what Morel said of her. Then I wrote that I was thinking of investing money with Morel, but what she had said before her accident gave me pause. I mentioned that she called him Gravot too.’ Tanya had been softly translating for Sasha and the old lady looked startled and afraid, tutting and crossing herself as she listened and worked the stove.
‘Could that be done? To kill someone in traffic? Do you think Morel killed her?’ Tanya asked.
‘Yes,’ Maud said, wondering what it felt like to be well, to be free of this creeping sickness in her stomach, the pain in her head. ‘Tanya, I wrote the letter in your name. I’m sorry. That means the answer will come to you.’
‘Nothing easier than killing someone in traffic,’ Yvette put in. ‘Friend of mine died like that last year. I always thought her lover pushed her out into the road. He was so jealous and she liked to tease him.’
‘You were right to do that, Maud. And I’ll bring any reply as soon as it comes. My aunts will think I’m getting love letters, but as long as it’s not post-marked Paris, it should be fine.’
‘Where do they think you are now, your cats?’ Yvette asked.
‘At the Louvre. It is one advantage of Perov proposing – they don’t want to parade me around so much and it makes my request to stay on at Lafond’s seem more sincere if I spend all my free hours in the galleries. I have more time to think now.’