The Drunk oil on prepared board 45.7 × 40.7 cm
The background is roughly sketched; in places the prepared board is left unpainted and the brushwork is light and loose as if the brush can hardly bear to create the face. Note the lowered brow and the blotched pink and white of the skin, the mouth slightly open and the eyes wide. Its raw power disturbs even now.
Extract from the catalogue notes to the exhibition ‘The Paris Winter: Anonymous Treasures from the de Civray Collection’, Southwark Picture Gallery, London, 2010
15 December 1909
The late-afternoon calm of the apartment in Rue de Seine was shaken by a hard and rapid knocking at the door. Maud closed her book and left her room, then hesitated in the corridor. They never had visitors and the waiter who brought their supper in the evening was not due to arrive for another hour at least. And he never struck the door so violently, rather announced himself with a tap and delivered their food with the gentleness of a ghost. Sylvie’s door remained closed.
The thought that M. Morel might have had some accident decided her. Maud opened the door but instead of the concierge with an urgent message she found herself faced by an elderly woman. She held herself very straight but with her head jutted forward, her lips pursed tight, and she was frowning so hard her eyes seemed to have disappeared into their sockets. Her coat was threadbare, old-fashioned; her hair was coming loose from its pins and her hat was a little battered. Around her neck she wore a ragged fox fur, the thin head still attached and its black bead eyes glinting. The woman’s expression was one of violent disgust, though in the twitch of her thin lips there was something of triumph.
‘Where are they?’ she demanded at once, peering round Maud into the apartment. ‘Where are the devils? I have found them! I have run them to ground at last, the dirty monsters! Oh, the pretty little devils! How can they sleep so comfortable, knowing they have stolen every penny from a poor widow! Not that I was poor then. Oh no, I was rich when I met them – and hardly a bone to gnaw on now! All charity!’
The creature was obviously insane. ‘Who are you and what do you want?’ Maud said.
‘I want nothing from you, you silly tart. I want Christian Gravot and his bitch childwife!’
Maud started to close the door. ‘There is no one here by that name. Good day.’
The old woman was too quick for her, and put her hand round the doorframe. Maud could only close it now by slamming it on her fingers, and she did not have the courage to do that.
‘Morel, then! That’s what they call themselves.’ She was very close now, but if Maud stepped back she was afraid the woman would push her way into the flat. She felt her heart thudding in her chest.
‘They are not at home. Perhaps if you left your card.’
‘Ha!’ The woman reached into her bag, continuing to block the door with her shoulder, and pulled out a piece of card which she flung straight at Maud’s face. Maud flinched away, covering her eyes, and it fell at her feet. The woman pushed the door fully open and loomed hideous as a witch towards her. Maud felt panic tightening on her throat. ‘There. Do you think he’ll call? Do you think he will visit me at my hotel? After all the letters and telegrams from me and nothing, nothing from him in six months?’ She took a step forward again and stared about the apartment, at the flowers on the hall-table, the gleaming floors, the calm polished comfort of it all. ‘Where is he? Where is he now? Tell me, or I shall smash up your pretty home – and don’t think you can stop me. I will have what is owed.’
‘Monsieur Morel is at his club – The Travellers in the Champs Elysées. If you have any business with him, go there.’ Maud’s voice was high, protesting. The woman smiled, seeing Maud afraid, and her own voice became soft and wheedling. She looked up at the girl through her thin pale lashes with lizard eyes.
‘What of the bitch who used to hold my hand and call me Granny? Where’s she? Where has she hidden my diamonds? Did she eat them? Did he? I will have what I am owed.’ Maud could not help herself; she glanced towards Sylvie’s door and the old woman saw it. She began to glide towards the door with her wrinkled hand outstretched. Maud tried to make herself step forward, but failed.
There was a shout on the stairs and the concierge appeared with her husband lumbering up behind her. The old woman left the door to Sylvie’s room to face them.
‘There’s the old monster!’ the concierge said, her thin chest heaving with indignation and red spots showing on her cheeks. ‘Sorry, miss, but she got by me. Now will you leave the ladies in peace, or will Georges here have to pick you up and carry you?’ She put a hand on the old woman’s shoulder and was shaken off.
‘Paid in advance, has he, dear? Paid with a bit extra for you to keep an eye out? Count your silver before he leaves. That’s all.’
The concierge’s husband hunched his shoulders. ‘What are you thinking of, Granny, coming round and disturbing people? What sort of house do you think this is? Come on, out of here, you old baggage.’
The woman looked back at the door to Sylvie’s room. Maud wondered if she was thinking of making a dash for it, forcing the door open and attacking the girl. Maud could see it in front of her: the horror of the struggle, the vase smashed, Sylvie’s screams and the howls of the madwoman.
Georges took a small step forward and the old woman looked back at him and growled. ‘All the same to me!’ she said, sniffing and pulling her coat around her. ‘I’ll be off to the club then, now I know where to ferret him out. And I’ll sing my songs there.’ She turned on Maud then, her eyes small and angry. ‘And you, you silly tart, if you’ve got a shred of decency left, you should put your coat on and clear off out of it right now.’
Maud said nothing, unable to speak or act in her own defence or to save Sylvie.
‘Enough of that! Time to go,’ Georges said, his voice rising, and the woman let herself be jostled away. Maud found she could move again and followed them on to the landing to see them go. The old woman kept turning to look at her as they went down the stairs, muttering to herself. In the hallway below, she burst out again: ‘I shall have you, Christian Gravot! I shall have you in this world or the next, you monster!’
Maud turned back into the flat. The door to Sylvie’s room was still closed; for a moment she considered knocking, but to what purpose? The card that the woman had thrown at her was still lying on the floor. Maud bent down to pick it up. It was a visiting card. Madame Prideux, 4, Place Saint-Pierre, Luxeuil-les-Bains. She carried it back into her room and stared at it while her heart slowed to its usual beat. The old lady had not seemed the type to have a visiting card. Perhaps she had found it on the street.
Maud sat in her usual seat by the window and took out her sketchbook, tucking the card between the back pages. She thought about what she had said to Tanya about being brave, about taking care of herself, and felt ashamed. She then pulled the pencil free of the book’s spine. She had thought she was going to draw that hard angry face with the threadbare fox fur and its dead glass eyes staring up from under the woman’s pointed chin, but instead she found herself drawing her father.
* * *
When Maud’s mother was alive her father had been a ghost in her life, a brooding presence slouched in an armchair with the whisky bottle at his side, staring into the fire while her mother sewed or read to them. Maud thought her mother had been beautiful, though she had never been photographed and Maud’s memories of her face were hazy and ill-defined. When she died, quietly and quickly when her illness could no longer be concealed, Maud and her father were strangers. She realised then how much of the work of Creely & Sons, the auctioneers business her father had inherited, her mother had been doing. As long as Maud could remember, when she came down for breakfast her mother was already at the table working at long columns of figures in black account books or writing letters with neat scratches of her fountain pen. Later in the mornings Maud would accompany her mother as she made her calls around the town, playing with the black and white cat at the grocer’s while her mother placed her order for the boy to bring round in the afternoon, or sitting on a sofa quietly while her mother talked to her friends in their dark living rooms full of heavy furniture and loudly ticking clocks. She was told that she was a good child and given paper to draw on, then her mother’s friends would tell her how clever she was. She revelled in being a good child, a quiet child, an obedient child, rewarded with praise and her mother’s love. It never occurred to her she could be anything else.
She had no hope of taking her mother’s place. She was far too young and had not been trained to it. A month after her mother’s funeral she began to see the home she knew becoming neglected. Two maids left in quick succession and her father spent days now as well as his evenings in his armchair with the bottle at his elbow. She went for a fortnight without a bath and only realised it when she overheard the butcher’s wife saying she needed to be washed. She became deeply ashamed and hid away from the town as much as she could. She was no longer a good child to be admired so she stayed at home, only occasionally going to the back of the grocer’s to meet her old friend the cat. The grocer’s wife would bring out biscuits and milk and look at her with troubled eyes.
Maud’s father started coming home less, and when he did he stank of tobacco and beer. The latest maid never looked at her and fed her on bread and butter and the occasional herring. Maud wanted very much to sit in those rooms with the ticking clocks again with her hair brushed and be told she was a good girl. One night she put on the cleanest pinafore she owned and waited for her father to come home. He looked surprised when he saw her sitting on the stair. She stood up and went to stand in front of him and asked if they might have their old maid back because she needed to be bathed and did not want any more bread for her supper. He bent towards her, his breath wheezing in and out of his lungs as if he’d been running, and his face red. His nose was covered with little broken veins but the skin around his eyes was oddly white. He watched her for what seemed an age, then he pulled back his arm and slapped her hard across the face. It knocked her to the ground. She heard him go into the parlour and slam the door behind him. A week later she was struck because she cried over the sold art books. Another time because he heard her complaining to the maid about her food again.
Someone must have seen the bruises. The grocer’s wife probably. Maud’s elder brother James arrived two days after the last bruising. He had qualified as a solicitor the year before and was freshly established as a junior partner in a firm in Darlington. She saw him walking up the road from the station in his high white collar and brown waistcoat and did not recognise him until he turned up their garden path. He was nine years her senior and as much a stranger as her father. Doors opened and closed downstairs, and before long Maud could hear her father’s voice buckled with rage. A few minutes later, James came into her room and told her to pack her things. She was to go to school in Darlington.
She still had to come home during the holidays. Before her first full year had passed, her father had married the barmaid from the local pub. She at least dealt better with his drunken rages than Maud had done, happy to strike back when he raised his hand. She had a child and made her husband work, rationing his drink and screaming at him to support his children. Maud remained in her own room sketching and reading. Her step-mother tried to be kind to her, but Maud shrank from her loud laugh and her teasing. Her step-mother thereafter confined her efforts to her husband and child, though Maud was not struck again and was grateful.
For all her step-mother’s efforts there was very little of the business left when her father died. He fell one day in the shop when Maud was at home for the Christmas holidays, and the first she knew of it was the jangle of the bell on the ambulance. He died three days later in hospital, and though her step-mother asked if she wished to go, Maud did not visit. She did not go back to school in Darlington but remained in Alnwick under her step-mother’s care. After years of having little to do with each other, they developed a wary sort of mutual affection. Her father’s will split his estate equally between his wife and surviving children, though other than the building itself, that amounted to only a few pounds. It was a shabby place, and her step-mother could find no one interested in taking it on.
Three months after the funeral, her step-mother left, saying only that she had met a drover from Newcastle she liked the look of and would be on her way. It seemed to Maud that she was miserable to leave her son, Albert, but James and Ida were married by that time and offered to bring him up as their own. Maud watched the woman decide, and having decided she acted. She took three pounds out of the savings account in her and Maud’s name and said they were welcome to keep whatever the building fetched, she’d rather be shot of it. James invited Maud to join them in Darlington. She refused and for a month lived alone in the family home. Then came the fire, her share of the insurance money and Paris. She left many things in Alnwick, but more than anything she wanted to leave her father dead among the ashes. Now he appeared on the page in front of her in profile with his chin lifted.
The time unrolled and Maud was surprised when a far lighter knock came at the front door: it was the waiter from the corner café bringing them their supper. M. Morel arrived as he was bowing his way back out of the apartment.