The door swung open and a rather short, square woman looked up at them.
‘On whose introduction are you here?’
Maud did not catch the name Tanya gave, but it seemed to satisfy their host. The woman smiled, shook their hands and their little party was ushered inside. They entered a large high room, white-washed to the ceiling, with various odds and ends of heavy-looking furniture pushed against the walls, which were filled with the most bizarre and confusing canvases Maud had ever seen.
Tanya put her arm through Maud’s. ‘Are you glad we have come?’
‘I am.’
Maud’s day had been so disorientating it seemed only right it should end here. Tanya had not wanted to release her when they left Miss Harris and invited her to spend the evening with her. Maud had agreed, was touched by Tanya’s transparent delight, and within an hour was enfolded in the luxury of Tanya’s house in Rue Chalgrin. Tanya ushered her up the wide curved staircase and into her bedroom. It was a massive room, exploding with white and gold, but before Maud could get her bearings she was being chivvied into the dressing room which was almost as large again. Tanya’s French maid was summoned and Maud was persuaded to try on any number of evening dresses. Tanya left her to telephone a couple of young men approved of by her aunts who would take them to the Steins’ At Home and then out to supper. Maud was on the other side of the glass certainly, but if she liked it or not she was still too dizzy to say. She was wrapped in one expensive dress after another while Tanya skipped about with delight and kept offering her more food, mostly chocolate.
‘The pink, Maud! There’s no doubt. You must wear the pink.’ Tanya was sprawled on the chaise longue in a long evening dress of gold with black beading which shimmered as she moved. Maud felt the maid’s quick hands adjusting the dress that Tanya had picked out for her. Her arms felt bare and cold.
Tanya glanced at the maid then said in English, ‘What did you think of that young man, Maud?’
She looked over her shoulder and the maid sighed. Tanya was unwrapping another chocolate, dropping its gold wrapper back into the box and staring up at the chandelier. ‘The American? Mr Allardyce? I thought he seemed very pleasant.’
Tanya frowned. ‘Just pleasant? You didn’t think he was handsome?’
Maud smiled. ‘Handsome too.’ He was handsome, now she thought of it. They had met for a few moments in the hall as they were leaving the house in Avenue de Wagram, and even in the confusion of her feelings Maud had noticed how he had looked at Tanya. Could these things happen in such a way? They had never happened to her.
Tanya begin ferreting about in the chocolate box for another bon-bon, then as soon as she had found one, dropped it again. ‘He has a nice voice, I think.’
The maid presented Maud with a pair of low-heeled shoes dyed to match the dress and Maud was just slipping them onto her feet when the door opened and a large woman in a wide purple dress thirty years out of fashion though crackling with newness swept into the room. She spoke to Tanya loudly and in Russian, and the tone did not sound happy. A smaller lady in a dress of a similar cut albeit in yellow silk appeared behind her. It was the second lady who noticed Maud first and murmured something to the woman in purple. The titan paused and Tanya spoke in French.
‘My dear aunts, may I present Miss Maud Heighton? I have invited her this evening, and really it’s very respectable – half of Paris goes to the Steins’.’
‘Yes, but which half?’ the woman in purple replied, her French rich and dark as Tanya’s gold-wrapped chocolates.
‘Maud, my aunts, Vera Sergeyevna and Lila Ivanovna.’
Maud curtsied neatly and Vera Sergeyevna lifted her lorgnette to watch her do so, then nodded slightly. ‘And who might you be? I do not know you.’
She would have replied, but Tanya was too quick. ‘Miss Heighton is a fellow student at the Académie.’ Vera Sergeyevna’s eyes widened. ‘Mikhail Pavlovich Perov is taking us to the Steins’ this evening,’ Tanya continued in a rush. Vera’s gaze shifted to her niece and her expression softened slightly, then she and Tanya had a short conversation in Russian after which the two older ladies departed rather more calmly. Vera only inclined her head to Maud as she left; the other woman smiled at her more warmly.
When they had gone Tanya collapsed back onto the sofa with a deep sigh. ‘Thank goodness I spoke to Perov. They are forever badgering me to accept his invitations so they couldn’t protest now.’ She grinned up at Maud. ‘I don’t suppose you have a cousin who is a baronet, do you, darling?’
‘No, I do not. Is that what you told them?’
Her dark eyes fluttered wide and innocent. ‘Yes – and that you’ve just arrived in Paris and your luggage was lost. I had to, otherwise by tomorrow Vera would be writing to my father about my keeping low company, though it was Perov who saved us. Are you sure? I thought everyone in England had a cousin who’s a baronet.’
‘Not everyone, Tanya.’
‘Ah well, I suppose you know best. Now what shall we do with your hair?’
* * *
The crowd in the Steins’ atelier was almost as interesting as the paintings on the walls and, Maud found, far easier to look at. Tanya had told her what she knew of the place while they were dressing; a pair of Americans, a brother and sister called Leo and Gertrude Stein, amused themselves by purchasing the most extreme examples of the new art they could find in studios and from specialist dealers, then allowed anyone with an introduction to visit them and be appalled by it any Saturday evening at their home on Rue de Fleurus.
There were already a great number of people in the room when the girls and their escorts arrived, some clothed as they were in fashionable evening dress, others à la bohème in loose trousers and high jackets for the men, peasant skirts and blouses for the women, who hung on their arms and took the cigarettes from their mouths when they wished to smoke. Maud heard German, French, English and what she thought might be Hungarian running off the tongues around her. She tried to ignore them and looked instead at the pictures. These were the wild, animalistic paintings that had come snorting and stamping into the Salons in the last few years, the colours of nature made somehow blistering and violent, the figures simplified until they were more ideas of humans than their likenesses. There was a portrait of their host, her face flattened into planes as if she were carved. Maud stood with her arm through Tanya’s, at last so lost in what she was looking at that she forgot to be self-conscious about her dress or the way in which Tanya’s maid had arranged her hair for her.
The girls walked slowly round the room until without consulting one another they came to a stop in front of a painting of a pair of circus performers, a mother and father sitting with their baby, an ape squatting at their feet and looking up at them. There was something of the Nativity Scene about it, a sense of calm, the gentle warmth of the colouring. Maud felt almost as if she were intruding on them by looking at it so closely. The harlequin father of the little group wore a costume of the same pale pink as Maud’s borrowed dress.
‘We shall have to take it down now, I suppose,’ a voice said beside her in English. Maud turned to find her host, Miss Stein, beside them, her strong plain face shining with a religious intensity. ‘He is painting quite differently now. You can see the whole of the modern revolution in art between the canvas you are looking at now and that one over there.’ She pointed to the image of a woman, but cut up into geometrical planes, straight-edged shapes and black curves, and lurching, animal-like towards the viewer, her face a crude mask. Tanya peered up at it, lifting her white throat so that the jewels on her neck sparkled, trying to see by the yellowish gaslight.
‘When I look at that, I feel as if someone is very angry with me,’ she said at last.
Miss Stein laughed, a single exclamation.
‘I shall tell Pablo that, but it is the future. He and Matisse are the only painters in town.’ Then she added more quietly, ‘I’m afraid your men are getting bored, girls. Best take them away quickly before they say something stupid and one of the artists punches them. Happens once a month at least.’ She turned to greet some new arrival and Tanya glanced over her shoulder. The two men whom she had telephoned to come with them were slouching against the desk in the centre of the room, apparently oblivious to the art. Mr Perov was examining his nails and Mr Lebedev was yawning widely. Tanya’s eyes narrowed.
‘Oh Lord. I suppose she is right and we must take them away before they become offensive.’ She looked up again at the butchered figure on the wall. ‘Is that the future, do you think? It seems very cruel.’
‘I do not think it is mine, Tanya.’
The Russian girl nodded. ‘Yes, I hope some people will always want pictures that resemble something in the real world. Not all Americans are like the Steins, are they? Some of them might even prefer the way I paint.’
Maud wondered if she was thinking of Mr Allardyce again. ‘I am certain that is so, Tanya.’ The Russian girl smiled very brightly and led Maud over to their lounging escorts.
* * *
The following morning Maud woke in her narrow room wondering if the previous day had been a dream. Not until she saw the dusky-pink evening gown with its heavy beading of ribbons and pearls could she believe it had happened at all. Rose Champion dead. Miss Harris. The strange pictures and then supper at Maxim’s. The images came back to her as if refracted through glass, and the gypsy band she had heard there seemed still to be playing their insistent music inside her head. Champagne, cigar smoke and laughter. Everywhere Maud looked, men and women had been laughing, heads flung back and their throats open. They had reappeared in her dreams, braying like donkeys till they grew long furred ears to match. The two Russian gentlemen had ordered supper for them then amused themselves by abusing the paintings on display at the Steins’ house.
‘How do they ever expect anyone to buy such things?’ Perov said, still apparently fascinated by the study of his fingernails. He had a thin sandy moustache that seemed to dribble past the corners of his mouth. ‘I would rather have this glass of champagne than everything that was on those walls. And the people! At least here one sees human beings properly dressed.’
He tittered, then waved to one of the crisply attired waiters and asked for more champagne while Maud winced at the gaiety around her. There was such noise. Everyone seemed to be speaking unnaturally loudly and the women moved so much when they spoke, pushing their shoulders back even as they leaned forward and constantly lifted their hands to the level of their heads. Maud noticed that the sequins on their dresses glimmered as they did so, and the shaded electric lights caught the jewels in their hair and on their hands with shifting rainbows of colour. Perhaps that was why they were doing it. The walls were golden and the pillars marble and mirrored so that everyone was forced to see a dozen shattered images of themselves in the crowd.
The woman on the next table wore a spray of ostrich plumes in her hair, fastened at their base with a diamond the size of a sovereign.
‘Fake,’ Mr Lebedev said, leaning towards her. She wondered if he meant her, that he had seen through the flim-flam of Tanya and her maid to the prudish poor Englishwoman who was not related to any baronet. ‘The diamonds,’ he elaborated, and she realised he meant the jewel at which she had been staring. ‘Most of them anyway. Half the people here are liars and frauds. All show.’ He then sat back in his chair again. It was as much as he had said all evening.
She sipped her champagne slowly – it tasted acid – and watched as any number of patrons approached the tables and spoke either to Tanya or one of the two men. The noise was shocking and the smoke from her neighbour’s cigar made her feel a little nauseous. There must be something else, she thought. Something between the hungry squalor in which she had been living and this. She saw great platters of expensive food and rich sauces slowly turning cold in front of the silk- and velvet-clad diners. After an hour she began to be afraid she might be ill. Only Tanya’s insistence meant that their escorts agreed to take them home with anything like good grace. Her old clothes were handed to her in a bundle by the chauffeur as he walked her to the door of her lodging-house and saw her let into the building. Perhaps the Morels would offer somewhere she could be comfortable, between the sinuous insinuating richness of the café with its twisted ironwork that pressed like a fever dream and the coldness of her room; between the wild anarchy of the painters who sold to the Steins and the facile decorations of the Académies. It formed a sort of desperate hope as she lay in her bed that Sunday morning, sick with surfeit rather than with hunger but sick nonetheless, and staring at the pink dress.
After an hour she managed to get out of bed and dress and spent a little time with her sketchbook until it was time to have her lunch; she then left the boarding house to spend the rest of her Sunday in the Louvre. Monsieur Pol was there in the gardens as always with his birds, and she thought of Rose Champion as she stopped to watch him whistling his songs. The birds settled on his outstretched arms and shoulders and they chirruped insistently back to him. Sparrows pretending to be canaries. She closed her eyes and hoped for deliverance.
* * *
On the Monday morning Maud took rather longer than usual making herself ready before she left for Lafond’s. She tried to make her dress as neat as possible and brushed and bound up her hair three times before she was content with what the ragged glass could show her. It did no good when she tried to tell herself to be calm; her imagination had begun to rage. What if M. Morel and his sickly sister did not like her? Might she seem too young? Perhaps a more matronly woman would be more suitable to be a companion for the sister. She thought of the elderly relatives – the ‘cats’ – who guarded Tanya. Perhaps she could say she was twenty-four rather than twenty-three. She smiled into the mirror. ‘Delighted to meet you,’ she said to herself then turned from the glass with a groan. She felt like a child about to be interviewed by a strict headmaster. And what if the Morels themselves were not quite right? What if they were vulgar or unpleasant? Rude or offhand? She tried to decide what level of respectability or otherwise would be acceptable for her comfort, what would the shy small-town miss in her think? Perhaps he would smell of drink. Perhaps she would. The thoughts argued and twitched at her all the way to the Académie then through the first hour.
At the first break in their work she stayed at her easel, too nervous to eat and too distracted to exchange pleasantries with her fellow students. Tanya had yet to arrive. She studied the portrait in front of her and thought of those strange cut-up bodies at Miss Stein’s. It seemed to her they were about the painter not the subject, a painter trying to see everything at once and consume it, rather than know one thing and communicate that. She dipped her brush in linseed oil and then in the purple madder on the palette and with it began to thicken the shadows so that Yvette’s pale skin would seem more fragile by contrast. When Yvette spoke to her she started.
‘Miss Heighton? I was hoping you’d look a bit more cheery this morning. I passed by Miss Harris’s yesterday afternoon and heard they might have something to suit.’
‘Oh, good morning, Yvette.’ Maud blinked and turned away from the painting, becoming aware of the continuing bustle and chatter around her. The model held her tatty silk dressing-gown around her, her weight all on one jutting hip and a cigarette in her hand. There was something childlike about her thin face, a quickness, those large eyes that seemed to draw everything in, shivering with an animal glee. More fox than cat. ‘Yes, I am to go along and see a Monsieur Morel this afternoon with Miss Koltsova. Perhaps they won’t like me.’
‘They will. You know English is all the rage. Half the girls I know who normally make their money looking after kiddies can’t get work at the moment, because every mother wants their little ones to learn “proper cockney”. Any Frenchman would love to get his sister a real English miss as a companion.’
Yvette leaned forward to study the picture of her on Maud’s easel and blew a long lungful of smoke over the depiction of her own naked skin. ‘You’re coming on, Miss Heighton.’ She suddenly straightened and set her feet more widely apart, clasping her hands behind her back. The collar of her dressing-gown opened and Maud could see the bluish tint to her skin. ‘Your tone sense improves, but watch your lines around the model’s elbow, Miss Heighton. Anatomy! Anatomy! Is Yvette a human or a horse? For that is the joint of a horse, not of a beautiful Frenchwoman.’
Maud laughed. It really was a very good impression of Lafond. She put out her hand. ‘Call me Maud.’ Yvette shook it and gave a little bow, still in the character of Lafond. ‘I understand it was you who suggested Tanya take me to see Miss Harris. Thank you. If this Mr Morel and his sister like me, you’ll have made my life a lot easier.’
Yvette wrinkled her nose. ‘He’ll like you, and Tanya will be able to tell you if it’s a proper establishment for a lady like yourself. Her aunts have drilled that into her well enough, I think. It’s being poor she doesn’t understand. She sees in straight lines sometimes, and only looks for the pretty and charming. Not a bad way to be, but she assumes because she’s well fed, everyone who speaks nicely is well fed too. She never thought what a difference a bit of respectable work might make to someone like you. And never noticed you were too proud and lonesome to go and look for it yourself.’
Maud looked down at her palette, the grain of the wood as familiar as her own hands. ‘You seem to know us very well, Yvette.’
The model stretched her shoulders. ‘I spend half my mornings up there watching you all, and I know how hard Paris can be.’
Maud frowned suddenly, realising. ‘Yvette, did you try to help Rose?’
The model winced as if Maud had hurt her and twisted her body away slightly, looking tangled and upset. ‘I told her about Miss Harris, but I mucked it all up and she just swore at me.’
‘That’s why you asked Tanya to speak to me? You didn’t think I would swear at you, did you?’
‘No, but…’ She scratched her neck. ‘I could see you admire Tanya and I thought to myself, if she spoke to you, it might do some good. Would you really have taken advice on how to live from someone like me?’
Maud tried to imagine what she would have done if Yvette had spoken to her. She would have been offended, certainly. ‘I almost told Tanya to go to hell, so no, probably not,’ she admitted. ‘But I’ll try not to be so stupid in future.’
Yvette gave her a small, tight smile. On the other side of the room Mademoiselle Claudette clapped her bony hands and the students began to return to their places. Yvette dropped her cigarette and wound her way back to the dais. Maud watched her go. She was still a young woman – not more than twenty-five, Maud guessed – but thin as a boy around the hips and shoulders, and there was a wary edge to her that Maud normally associated with much older women. A certain guardedness even when she was teasing. Perhaps not always. When, a little later, Lafond arrived and during his progress round the room told Maud to watch the structure of the upper arm, she glanced at Yvette. The model was biting on the material of the collar of her dressing-gown to hold back her giggles. Maud only managed to keep her own composure by looking down and fixing her attention on her teacher’s shining black shoes.