Moonlight Over Paris(68)

Chapter 24


28 March 1925

Dearest Mama,

Thank you for your letter, and for the recent photograph of you and Papa. I think it is the first one I’ve seen of him in which he’s smiling. Usually he looks rather fierce, as if he is only just restraining himself from shouting at the photographer or complaining that the room is too hot and someone needs to open a window.

I do apologize for not writing as often as I did in the autumn. You mustn’t fret—I assure you that I am happy, and healthy, and still enjoying my stay here in Paris. If I haven’t written it’s only because I am so terribly busy. I am still attending classes during the week, and then, in the evenings and on Saturdays, I spend every spare moment at the studio I share with my friends from school. We are all working frantically to finish off our paintings for the Salon des Indépendants—the exhibition at the end of April I mentioned in my last letter—although Mathilde and étienne are rather farther along than I.

I really must get back to work on my painting—it’s a large canvas depicting the Blue Train to Antibes, with everything in it looking as it ought to do (I am sure Papa will find this reassuring), without even a hint of abstraction or any puzzling motifs. I am feeling tremendously pleased with it and have high hopes that it will be received well by visitors to the exhibition. Once it is finished I shall take a photograph so you can see what it looks like, and I’ll describe all the colors, too, as they are such an important part of the piece.

I do hope you and Papa are well, and enjoying the spring weather.

With much love from your devoted daughter,

Helena


Another chore accomplished, and done well in spite of everything. It was an assortment of half-truths and outright lies, for she was the farthest thing from happy. She hadn’t seen or spoken to Sam in weeks; she was worried to death about Daisy; and she was anything but confident about her work.

It was Saturday evening, the end of another long day in the studio, and she had dashed off the letter to her mother while étienne washed his brushes and swept the studio floor. Mathilde had gone home early, leaving just the two of them to continue on to dinner at Rosalie’s.

“A good day?” étienne asked as they strolled along the boulevard du Montparnasse.

“I suppose. Every time I stand in front of the canvas, though, I feel there’s more I need to add. More I need to say, if that makes any sense.”

“It does.”

“Which of your paintings will you submit to Ma?tre Czerny?” she asked, weary of fretting about her own work.

“I’m not certain, not yet.”

She thought of the paintings he’d finished, hanging on the back wall of the salon, all of them superb; any one might become the talk of that year’s Salon des Indépendants. “What about the—”

“It is tiresome of me to persist in asking,” he interrupted, “but I cannot help myself. In my mind I can see it, see you, so clearly.”

“See . . . ?”

“Your portrait.”

Not again. He had asked her a half-dozen times at least, and she had always been very firm in her refusal. “étienne, you know how I feel.”

“I do, but I cannot help how I feel.”

“Is there no one else you wish to paint? We could find you a model. The young woman from our life class the other week—she was lovely.”

“She was, but she didn’t inspire me as you do. Why do you refuse me, Hélène?”

“I told you already—I don’t like being the center of attention. I never have.”

At some point in the last few minutes they had stopped walking and stood facing one another as passersby brushed past them impatiently. The silence between them grew and grew, so tangible she could nearly taste it.

And then it came to her. This was her year to live, but yet again she was allowing fear to rule her. Did she truly care what strangers thought of her? No. Would it help a dear and cherished friend if she were to say yes? It would.

“I’ve changed my mind,” she told him. “I’ll sit for you.”

They began late on Monday afternoon. The sun had already begun to set, so étienne turned up the lanterns until they hissed and sparked, bathing the entire studio in warm, enveloping light.

étienne had set the least battered of their chairs a few feet away from the little coal stove; the light was soft and kind, and she felt less exposed, there in the corner of the studio, than she’d have done in the middle of the room or next to the windows. Not certain of what pose he wished her to adopt, she sat up straight and folded her hands in her lap.

She was wearing her golden Vionnet gown, as étienne had asked her to do; not only was it the loveliest of all her frocks, but it was also the most comfortable. Her feet were bare, also at his direction; she had done nothing to her hair, she wore no jewelry, and her face was entirely bare of cosmetics.

Helena perched on the uncomfortable chair, the tips of her toes just touching the floor, and without moving her head she allowed her gaze to drift over the studio, the paintings on the walls, the calm and studied movements of her friend, and she thought of all that she had done, and all that had happened to her, in the space of a year.

Last spring, she had promised her parents she would return to London, but so much had changed since then. She had changed. And she wasn’t certain, now, that she could ever go back.