The Swan Thieves

Chapter 101 Marlow

Robinson greeted me cordially on my return to his sitting room. He did not try to stand up, but he was neatly turned out in gray flannel slacks, a black turtleneck, and a navy jacket, as if we were going out to lunch rather than planning to sit immobilized in his salon. I could hear the rattle of pans in the kitchen, to which Yvonne had retreated, and I smelled onions, butter frying. To my delight, he asked me at once to promise I would stay for lunch. I reported on the Musee de Maintenon. He made me try to recite the name of each canvas he'd given the museum. "Not bad company for our Beatrice," he said, smiling. "No--Monet, Renoir, Vuillard, Pissarro..."
"She will be appreciated more in the new century." It was hard to believe in a new century at all, here in this apartment where the same books and paintings had sat for perhaps fifty years and even the plants seemed to have been alive as long as Mary. "Paris celebrated pretty well, didn't she? The millennium?"
He smiled. "Aude remembered New Year's Eve of nineteen hundred, you know. She was almost twenty." And he himself had not yet been born. He had missed the century of Aude's childhood.
"Could I ask you one more thing, if that wouldn't be inappropriate? It might help me in my treatment of Robert, assuming you can find it in you to be so generous."
He shrugged without objecting--a gentleman's reluctant pardon.
"I wonder what you believe yourself about the reasons Beatrice de Clerval stopped painting. Robert Oliver is very intelligent, and he must have thought deeply about this. But do you have your own theories?"
"I do not deal in theories, Doctor. I lived with Aude de Clerval. She confided everything to me." He straightened a little. "She was a great woman, like her mother, and this question troubled her. As a psychiatrist, you can see that she must have felt to blame for the end of her mother's career. Not every woman gives up everything for her child, but Aude knew her mother had, and it weighed on her all her life. As I told you, she tried to paint and draw herself, but she had no gift for it. And she never wrote anything personal about her mother or about her own life -- she was a strict journalist, very professional, very brave. During the war, she covered Paris for la Resistance -- another story. But she sometimes talked to me about her mother."
I waited in a silence as deep as any I'd known with Robert. At last the old man spoke again.
"It is a mystery, your coming here, and Robert before you. I am not accustomed to talking with strangers. But I will tell you something I have told no one else, certainly not Robert Oliver. When Aude was dying, she gave me this package of letters you have so kindly returned to me. With them was a note from her mother to Aude. She asked me to read the note and then to burn it, which I did. And she gave the rest of the letters into my keeping. Aude had never shown me these things before. I felt hurt, you understand, that she had not, because I had thought that we shared everything. The note to Aude from her mother said two things. One was that she loved her, Aude, more than anything in the world because she had been the child of her greatest love. And, second, that she was leaving evidence of that love with her servant, Esme."
"Yes--I remember the name from her letters."
"You read the letters?"
I was startled. Then I realized he had been serious when he said he sometimes forgot things. "Yes--as I said, I felt I should read them for the sake of my patient."
"Ah. Well, it doesn't matter now." He patted sharp fingers on the arm of his chair; I thought I could see a worn spot under them.
"You said Beatrice left something with Esme?"
"I suppose she did, but Esme died, you know, soon after Beatrice. She had a sudden illness, and perhaps she simply did not manage to give to Aude whatever it was, from her mother. Aude always said that Esme died of a broken heart."
"Beatrice must have been a kind mistress."
"If she was at all like her daughter, then she was a wonderful presence." His face was growing sad.
"And Aude never knew what this proof of love was?"
"No, we never knew. Aude wanted so much to know. I searched for information on Esme, and discovered from a municipal record that her full name was Esme Renard, and that she was born in, I think, 1859. But I could not find anything else. Aude's parents bought a house in the village from which Esme came, but it was sold when Yves died. I do not even remember the name of it."
"Then she was born eight years after Beatrice," I pointed out.
He shifted in his seat and shaded his eyes as if to see me more clearly. "You know so much about Beatrice," he said, with wonder in his voice. "Do you love her, too, like Robert Oliver?"
"I have a good memory for numbers." I was beginning to think I should leave the old man before he tired again.
"In any case, I found nothing. Just before Aude died, she said her mother had been the loveliest person in the world, except" -- he cleared a catch in his throat--"except for me. So perhaps she did not need to know more."
"Surely it was enough," I said, to comfort him.
"Would you like to see her portrait? Beatrice?"
"Yes, of course. I've seen the Olivier Vignot piece in the Metropolitan Museum."
"A good portrait. But I have a photograph, which is very rare-- Aude said her mother did not like to be photographed. Aude would never let anyone publish it. I keep it in my album." He pushed himself up very slowly, before I could protest, and took a cane from the side of the chair. I offered my arm; he accepted, grudgingly, and we went across the room to a bookcase, where he pointed his cane. I took out the heavy leather album he'd indicated--worn bald in spots, but still embossed with a gilt rectangle on the cover. I opened it on a nearby table. Inside were family photos from several eras, and I wished I could ask to see them all: small children staring straight ahead in frilly dresses, nineteenth-century brides like white peacocks, gentlemanly brothers or friends in top hats and frock coats, hands on one another's shoulders. I wondered if Yves might be among them, perhaps that dark-bearded, bulky-shouldered man with the smile, or Aude, a little girl in a wide-skirted dress and buttoned boots. Even if they were there, or if any one of them was Olivier Vignot himself, Henri Robinson was skipping past them on his mission, and I didn't dare interrupt his fragile mind or hands. At last he stopped. "This is Beatrice," he said.
I would have known her anywhere; still, it was eerie to see her face from life. She was standing alone, one hand on a studio pedestal and the other holding back her skirt--the stiffest of poses, and yet her figure was full of energy. I knew the intensely dark eyes, the shape of her jaw, the slender neck, the abundance of curly hair swept up from her ears. She wore a long dark dress with a sort of shawl flaring around her shoulders. The sleeves of the dress were large at the top and narrowed to the wrists; her waist was small and tight, and her skirts trimmed at the bottom with a wide border of some lighter color, a cleverly geometric pattern. The lady of fashion, I thought: an artist in dress if not in practice.
The picture was professionally dated, 1895, and bore the name and street address of a Paris photographer's studio. Something veiled was pulling at me, a reminder, a figure from elsewhere, a melancholy I couldn't shake. For a long moment I thought that my memory was not much better than Henri Robinson's--far worse, in fact. Then I turned to him. "Monsieur, do you have a book of the works of--" What was it? Where was it? "I'm looking for a painting--I mean, a book of paintings by Sisley, if you happen to have one."
"Sisley?" He frowned as if I'd asked for a drink he didn't keep on hand. "I suppose I have something. It would be in that section." He jammed his cane in the air again, steadying himself on my arm. "Those are Impressionists, beginning with the original six."
I went to his shelves and began to look, slowly, and found nothing. There was a book on Impressionist landscapes, and this had Sisley in the index, but not what I was searching for. At last I found a volume of winter scenes.
"That is new." Henri Robinson was looking at it with surprising sharpness. "Robert Oliver gave it to me when he came the second time."
I held the volume--an expensive present. "Did you show him Beatrice's photograph?"
He thought for a moment. "I don't think so. I would remember that. Besides, if I had, he might have stolen that, too."
I had to admit it was a possibility. The Sisley painting was there, to my relief, as I remembered it from the National Gallery: a woman walking away down a high-walled village lane, snow under her feet, the bleakly dark branches of trees, a winter sunset. It was a stunning work, even in reproduction. The woman's dress swinging around her as she walked, the sense of urgency in her figure, the short dark cloak, the unusual blue border around the bottom of her skirt. I held the book up to Henri Robinson. "Does this look familiar to you?"
He examined it for long seconds, and then he shook his head. "Do you really think there is a connection?"
I brought the album over and rested the pictures side by side. The skirt was certainly the same. "Could this dress have been a popular model?"
Henri Robinson held my arm with tight fingers, and I thought again of my father. "I don't think that is possible. A lady would have her dresses made especially for her by a seamstress, at that time."
I was reading the text under the painting. Alfred Sisley had painted it four years before his death, in Gremiere, just west of his own village, Moret-sur-Loing. "May I sit and think for a moment?" I asked. "May I see your letters just for a second?"
Henri Robinson let me help him back to his chair and handed me the letters more reluctantly. No, I couldn't read the French well enough, the script. I would have to go through my own copy, Zoe's translation, back at the hotel room. I wished now I'd brought it with me--the obvious thing to do. Mary would have figured this out by now, I felt sure, with her jaunty, disrespectful "That's it, Sherlock." I handed them back in frustration. "Monsieur, I would like to call you this evening. May I? I'm thinking about what this connection between the photograph and Sisley's painting could mean."
"I will think, too," he told me kindly. "I doubt it can mean very much, even if the dress is similar, and when you are my age you will see that ultimately it does not matter. Now Yvonne is expecting us for lunch."
We sat across from each other at a polished dining room table, behind another closed green door. That room, too, was lined with paintings and with framed photographs of Paris between the wars, limpid, heartbreaking images: the river, the Eiffel Tower, people in dark coats and hats, a city I would never know. The chicken stewed with onions was delicious; Yvonne came out to ask how the meal tasted and stayed to drink half a glass of wine with us, wiping her brow with the back of one hand.
After lunch, Henri seemed so weary that I took my cue and prepared to leave, reminding him I would call. "And you must come to say good-bye," he told me. I helped him to his chair and sat with him a moment longer. When I got up to go, he tried to rise again, but I stopped him and shook his hand instead. He suddenly seemed to fall asleep. I rose quietly to my feet.
As I reached his sitting-room door, he called after me. "Did I mention to you that Aude was the child of Zeus?" His eyes shone, the young man looking out of the dazed old face. I should have known, I thought, that he would be the one to tell me aloud what I had thought for so long.
"Yes. Thank you, monsieur."
When I left him, his chin had sunk into his hands.