The Falling Thread, page 12
‘That seems a long way off.’
Tabitha had begun to perspire and wiped her face with a handkerchief.
‘Shall we take a break?’
The pair sat on a bench at the side of the court, fanning themselves. A family with two boys in sailor suits and a Pomeranian walked past.
‘Tell me the shape of your days,’ Tabitha asked. ‘You give away so little in your letters.’
‘I’ve a studio I share with a woman named Arabella Gladstone. I must have told you about her? It’s a smallish room, high ceiling, hard to heat. I paint until early afternoon then cycle over to the studio of Monsieur Vallier, who I assist four afternoons a week. He’s from a little town in the Rhône-Alpes though has lived in Paris for forty years, huge unwashed moustache full of tobacco and marble dust. His pieces sell for thousands. He’s fairly dour but he is the most exquisite craftsman and he always pays me on time and each season he throws a party for his collectors. Awfully good fun; ballerinas, opera singers, senators, the whole lot.’
‘Amazing you ever get any work done.’
Eventually the sisters restarted the game.
‘And how exactly does one come to meet someone like Miss Montana?’
‘Oh, the way one does,’ Eloise said, returning the ball. ‘We were at the apartment of an English painter, Julian White. It was late so there were only a few of us; Julian was playing a mandolin he had bought at the flea market. All of a sudden there was this tremendous hammering on the door – we thought it was the gendarmerie. To all of our surprise, it was a man named Vollard, who has a gallery on Rue Laffitte, and he was with Bessie. Vollard and Bessie were fairly ripe with drink, and she was insisting on meeting the finest young painters in the city. Julian was, at that time at least, considered one of them. Bessie came upstairs and drank all that remained of our wine then invited Julian, Arabella and myself to lunch the next day at the Gare de Lyon. For some reason I suspect still haunts him, Julian took offence at something Bessie had said, so it was only myself and Arabella. We cycled down and as it happened Bessie’s driver was dropping her and Vollard at that exact moment. Seeing us with the bicycles just delighted Bessie. She must have only had an hour or so’s sleep yet she was irrepressible. Vollard left for a train to Geneva, then Arabella went too. Bessie and I sat and talked, three hours or more. She’s been everywhere, Guinea, Bali, told me she once took a samurai as a lover and had to flee Japan fearing the wrath of the shogunate.’
‘And you believed her?’
‘I had no reason not to. It was through her my work was selected for the Armory. She is formidable, isn’t she?’ Eloise sent the tennis ball with a soft pock over the net. ‘My first great patron.’
There was another soft pock as Tabitha knocked the ball back to Eloise who stretched to return it but missed then stumbled.
‘You are not, well, how should I put this … well, what exactly is the nature of your relationship?’
Eloise stopped and picked up the ball. She walked towards the net.
‘Tabitha, what have you been reading? You’ll be asking if Miss Montana and I are amorously involved next. Do we nightly consort in dimly lit bordellos under the influence of hashish? Now come on, let’s play for points.’
It was three games all before the sisters began to talk again.
‘And how about you, Tabitha – any romantic entanglements?’
Tabitha frowned and moved forward again to receive Eloise’s serve.
‘Do you remember Mr Allardyce?’
‘The insect man?’
‘We corresponded briefly before he left for Patagonia. And you?’
‘There was an eye doctor on the Rue du Delta who tried to convince me to go and live in an artists’ colony he was setting up. The place was appalling, filthy, squalid, malodorous, terrible light. They all seem to think I’m far younger than I am.’
Tabitha played a drop shot which Eloise lurched forward to reach.
‘I’ve always been able to live quite well on my allowance. You see these silly boys squandering it all in the creameries and at the model market on Montparnasse, then going without soap for a month. Things have changed since Bessie took an interest, my studio is much warmer, and there are fewer men attempting to save me, which I very much approve of. I’ve a growing circle of collectors. Before we left for America we dined at the house of Edmond Sagot. He bought a set of etchings from me, of jugglers. His brother Clovis was once a clown at the Medrano Circus. Bessie thinks she can get him to take a couple of my larger canvases.’
The game petered out, the sisters making less and less effort to return each other’s shots. When Eloise sent the ball off into the pines both sisters returned to the bench with their rackets.
‘Ellie, will you do something for me?’
‘Anything.’
‘Do you have plans this evening?’
*
‘You’ll need this.’ Tabitha handed Eloise an oilskin. It was dark outside, rain hammering down after clinging to the gables of the nearby villas all afternoon.
‘Could we not ask Benzie to run us to wherever it is we’re going?’
Eloise was at the window of the drawing room, the raincape folded over her arm, holding back the curtain, addressing the watery image of her sister out on the drive.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Tabitha, as she fastened then smoothed down her own cape. ‘He’ll be in bed by now I should imagine,’ she added, a touch brusquely.
They set off on their bicycles, crunching down the gravel path, out onto the street lined with elms and elders, the neighbouring villas set behind dense hedgerows and coping stones grown mossy in the years since they were laid. Tabitha was ahead, streams of water sent up as the bicycles moved along the road. She stopped, turned and called to her sister, ‘Shall we go via the park? I know a gate that may be open.’
Eloise, who had paused to adjust her cape, called back, ‘Oh yes, let’s, it’s years since I saw it.’
They started pedalling again, spokes flashing where light struck the rainwater and steel.
As Tabitha had promised, a gate on the perimeter was open. They went in, lifting their bicycles over the step. Inside they set off towards the west edge of the park, freewheeling down a hill, past a boating lake where empty rowing boats bobbed beside lily pads. A massive glass building loomed in the darkness, its gable painted white. They continued towards it, rested their bicycles against the wall. Eloise inspected herself in the glass, pressing her face close up. The cacti were faintly visible in the moonlight falling through the glass ceiling with its scrolling metalwork.
‘Is this the place Charles is involved with?’
‘Yes, he sits on the board.’
‘If I were a cactus come all the way from Mexico I think I would have given up the will to grow upon arrival.’
‘There’s one in there named for him. Recently flowering, smells of honeysuckle. From a place called Ixmiquilpan. Don’t ask me how to spell it.’
‘I see you’ve been keeping busy.’
‘The only other place it’s ever flowered is New York.’
Tabitha climbed up the flight of steps that led to a side door of the Cactus House. She tried the handle, rattling it.
‘What are you doing, Tab?’ Eloise called up.
Tabitha came down the stairs and placed her hands at various angles around some of the smaller windows. She took a notebook from her pocket and wrote something down.
‘Well, must push on, come along, Ellie.’
She kicked the stand from her bicycle and set off, leaving her sister to catch up.
The line of people stretched around the building with its black downpipes and iron-edged paving stones. At the front of the queue a mongrel with a missing eye, a furred depression scooped from the side of its face, was trotting in circles around its owner’s feet.
‘What is this place?’
‘It’s the soup kitchen at the Mission,’ said Tabitha. ‘Don’t worry, they won’t bite.’
‘Hello, Sammy,’ Tabitha said. ‘How are we today?’
‘Still here, miss.’
His face had an angular quality to it. He wore a flat cap and a thick collarless shirt.
‘How’s Cissie?’
‘Fine, hard at it.’ He nodded towards the kitchen. Some of his bottom teeth were missing; he worked his tongue into the gaps between words.
‘Samuel was an iron fitter at Duckworth’s until they saw fit to let him go, but thankfully for us, since December he’s been our hall keeper.’
‘So how does it work?’ Eloise asked, surveying the busy kitchen, the row of empty tables and the long queue outside.
‘We toyed with the idea of giving out tickets, charging tuppence, thought it might be better for the balance sheet, what with gas, rates, rent, furniture repairs, hall keeper’s wages, though we don’t begrudge you those, Samuel,’ Tabitha said. ‘Believe it or not most of those who come here are in work, though we do get our share of idlers and vagrants. We rely on donations. I pestered Charles and finally managed to raise some money from the Exchange. Perhaps your Miss Montana would like to make a donation?’ Tabitha asked, flashing Eloise a cool, firm smile.
‘I’m sure she would.’
‘Good,’ said Tabitha, ‘saves me writing to her. Our ambition is to raise enough so the Mission can run in perpetuity, from interest on capital. Our All Are Welcome policy puts some people off. They think us a seat of vice – they might not be wrong if they’d seen what Lily Callaghan was up to in the back room last Easter.’
‘Oh, do tell.’
‘Well, put it like this, I suggested she donate half to the Mission, along with extracting a promise she would not undertake such work for the next year.’
‘Do you get to know many of them?’
‘Some,’ said Tabitha. ‘It’s more the running of the place I’m involved with, making sure the likes of Samuel and Cissie here are paid on time. I mean, who are we to judge those who come here? We’ve all lived, haven’t we?’
‘Well, some of us.’
‘Well, yes, perhaps not all of us.’ Tabitha continued undeterred. ‘They get a quart of good nutritious soup and half a pound of bread and butter. If Samuel remembers to boil the kettle there’s sometimes a pint of coffee too. We experimented with stew after coming by a quantity of Australian beef, but it received mixed reviews – no reflection on Cissie’s cooking,’ Tabitha said, smiling at Samuel. ‘You see, soup doesn’t feel like charity but a square meal does, strange that, isn’t it? We’ve a night school in the summer, a mothers’ meeting and a sewing class, we’re not just soup,’ she said as if it were an advertising slogan or a line from a popular song. ‘You’d be surprised by some of the desiderata here in darkest England.’
‘And you come here every night?’
‘Most nights, more often than not.’
‘Since when?’
‘Almost five years now. I came to donate some of Mama’s clothes when we finally got round to clearing out her room. Feel I’ve rather taken it as far as I can, place runs smoothly without me. Come on, I’ll introduce you to Cissie and the others.’
In the brightly lit kitchen a woman was cleaning mounds of potato peelings from a metal table, coils of mottled skin and stark white undersides. There was a circular pan rack from which hung jam pans and dented jugs. An old dresser pushed against the wall was stacked with soup dishes and tin plates.
‘We’ve potato Monday and Tuesday, a broth on Wednesday. What is it tonight?’
‘Carrot,’ said one of the women.
‘Carrot,’ Tabitha repeated with a bright smile. ‘We’ve ten minutes before we open, why don’t we find ourselves a cup of something?’
‘Rum?’ asked Eloise.
‘I was thinking tea.’
They sat on a wooden bench. A girl with a very red mouth, sore and wind-chapped, came to Tabitha’s side and whispered something. ‘Excuse me a moment,’ Tabitha said, and made her way to the other side of the hall. Eloise surveyed the room; large and draughty, three long tables down the middle and behind them a serving hatch and kitchen, where women were busy preparing the soup. Samuel was carrying a metal pan and serving jug to the head of each table. A kerosene heater was struggling to warm the room.
‘Some nonsense in the line, an argy-bargy. They get like that, sometimes, the ones who drink.’
Tabitha moved the cup around in her hands. She looked across to the children, who had been let in ahead of the queue, spooning soup from shallow tin plates.
‘We take them to St Anne’s-on-Sea once a year, the little ones, to camp, with one of the larger missions up the road – they look down their noses at us as we’re non-evangelising.’
‘You go with them?’
‘Oh yes. The train journey alone is a great adventure for most. And they all come home half a stone heavier. I have this image of them racing up towards me on sand dunes, there must have been a hundred or more, all in their uniforms, cheering, slipping in the sand. Their small faces glowing red. In the evening we make cocoa, vats of the stuff, three bags of sugar in each, sing hymns at the campfire. You should visit St Anne’s, they’ve the most wonderful Moorish pavilion and a ladies’ orchestra who play twice daily.’ Tabitha paused. ‘Perhaps you would find it rather tame.’
A young girl came up and tugged Tabitha’s shirtsleeve. Tabitha put her arm around her in a well-intentioned but slightly clumsy manner.
‘I remember Mama making a donation to a lady from the Society for the Care of Friendless Girls,’ said Eloise. ‘I somehow got it into my head that the money would be used to purchase the friends for the girls, I wondered exactly how they went about it, if these friends were real girls who were paid for their services or if they were large dolls or mannequins donated as friends. I suppose we were friendless girls ourselves in a way.’
‘Hardly. I think we had every advantage possible.’
*
New leaves, the colour of absinthe, cast a faint green light through the room. There was a rustle from the fire, which shifted and sank, then raindrops at the window blown from the branches outside. It had seemed an austere place in her father’s time but was more chaotic now, piles of papers stamped Wright & Co.
‘Yes, here it is,’ Charles said from behind the desk. It had been taken down a week ago, a square of unfaded wallpaper behind him where it had hung. It showed a couple by a river, sunlight through trees, sections of red earth around the path. It had a sketch-like quality, but was full of soft, clear light and complex shadow.
‘Oh yes, very pretty.’ Eloise perched on the corner of the desk.
‘Do you remember it used to be in the hallway?’
‘Mind if I smoke, Charles?’
‘The women were all smoking at Glazebrook’s last weekend.’
She took a cigarette case from her pocket, tiny sapphires along the lid. She tilted it towards the light.
‘Rather lovely, isn’t it? Gift from Miss Montana. I had my heart set on something more discreet, but Bessie insisted. Bought it before we left for America.’
She drew a cigarette from behind the elastic.
‘She’s taking a party down to Cornwall next month.’
Eloise lit her cigarette and took the faintest of puffs.
‘She has a notion true England is to the west. I told Tabitha she should join us.’
‘Good luck,’ Charles said, boyish for a moment. ‘It’s all we can do to have her come to Windermere. Her diary is fuller than many of my associates at Westminster.’
He sat down and lit a cigar with a series of clacks high in the back of his mouth.
‘Committees, charitable bodies, the Mission, I may hope to stand for Parliament but your sister is making a play for sainthood.’
‘From what Tabitha tells me you’re a dead cert to be joining them – the parliamentarians not the heavenly host.’
Charles looked suddenly very serious as if her prediction might jinx the enterprise.
‘Is that why you were down at Glazebrook’s? He was something in the last government, wasn’t he? What’s his line on all this?’
She pointed to the newspaper on the desk. Framed by dense columns of text was an image of a man in a round hat with a waxed moustache and a long row of medals. He was holding a pistol and leaning on an exotic-looking sword.
‘Balkan League squabbling. They’ve no stomach for war or any aptitude.’
‘Really?’
‘The Bulgarian tsar will emerge with a bloodied nose. Anyhow, none of this has any effect on the politics of Europe.’
He tapped ash onto the image, then pushed the newspaper into the waste-paper basket.
‘By the way, when people ask, what exactly am I to say you are doing in Paris? I don’t imagine you can still be studying, and you seem to withdraw fairly regularly from your account.’
‘Charles, you know very well what I do.’
‘I’m to say you are what, an … artist?’
‘You are welcome to tell your associates I am the King of Siam for all I care.’
‘No, I don’t think I’ll do that.’
Charles handed the painting to Eloise who squinted down at it, the cigarette pinched between her lips.
‘Are you sure you want rid?’ she said, blowing smoke towards the ceiling.
‘I’m told it will fetch a decent price.’
‘Mama was so fond of it.’
‘It’s to go, much to be cleared, now is the time.’
She watched the rain dripping from the branches outside; fat prisms catching the light, the greens of the new leaves.
‘You know if you’re in a predicament of some sort I’m sure Bessie could help.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Financially.’
Charles’s face had suddenly fixed, the corners of his mouth turned down. He sat blinking as if attempting to flush something from his eyes.
‘Eloise, I wish to be rid of a few old pictures. I was affording you the courtesy of viewing them before I did. You have never taken much interest in our businesses but I’d be very happy to talk you through a few aspects of their operation. We have three mills within ten miles of here, with highly specialised processes in each. We ship to Bombay and Shanghai. We have net capital expenditure … ’
