Mesmerised (15 page)

Luncheon with Edouard

Sometime in May

‘It is the hour to be drunken! To escape the martyred slaves of time, be ceaselessly drunk. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, as you wish.’

Charles Baudelaire

‘The most stressful thing in my life is relationships.’ This comment is from me. I am quite drunk, lunching at
Tortini’s with Edouard. It is just the two of us at his usual table. We sit next to each other on a bench facing into the restaurant. Close to the Palais de l’Industrie, it is safe to presume that many of the diners have viewed our art this morning.

The sound of laughter and chatter mingles with the clinking of cutlery and the chinking of glassware. There is a sense of lightness in the air. I turn towards Edouard and
, in an effort to see him without blurred vision, I pull myself backwards as if I am longsighted.

‘I’m so glad you showed up today Gachet, Paul,
Doctor Paul Gachet, how do you like to be addressed? Oh, it doesn’t matter, because, because if you weren’t here today, if you hadn’t shown up, I would have been lunching alone,’ he says, sidling towards me. ‘That woman over there with the lilac dress and the neutral tan gloves and that stupid doily in her hair, look at the way she sits, poised, so attentive to her companion. I would say she’s beautiful. What about you, wouldn’t you say she’s beautiful? Anyway, it’s a pointless question whether she’s beautiful or not, the point I’m making is that she thinks I’m a prat. To be honest, they all think I’m a prat.
Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe
, let’s drink to it.’

I raise my wine. We toast. Pale gold liquid laps my glass and whorls like the ocean, but when the whorls hit my throat, I choke.

‘My fucking masterpiece,’ Edouard says, not specifically to me. He is looking bleary eyed at the jolly people. ‘Let’s talk about you. You were telling me of relationships.’

‘Yes, right now, relationships worr
y me more than art.’ I splutter and hiccough.

‘Are you
all right?’

A diamond at a woman’s throat catches the light.

I rub my eyes.

‘I’m
all right, yes,’ I say when the spasm has calmed down.

‘What of relationships?’

‘Difficult.’

‘Difficult?’ he says.

We both watch a pretty girl walking back to her table. She is fresh like the spring blooms in Camille and Julie’s garden: platinum hair in a chignon with a mother-of-pearl comb, skin like cream, and jade-green eyes. She walks tall, turning this way and that way, as if she’s dancing past the waiters. Edouard has lost himself and is smiling.

‘I’d like to paint that,’ I say.

‘It’s a Renoir, definitely a Renoir.’

‘No, not that, the grey mother-
of-pearl disappearing into … into a metallic lustre, of, of rainbow colours.’ I have my elbow on the table and I lean my head on my hand.

Edouard turns towards me and looks me in the eye. ‘Paul, I want to thank you for what you have done for my family. Leon’s grown. He’s tall now. Not sickly like he used to be. Must be something to do with the homeopathy,’ he says, tapping his forefinger against his nose. ‘And Suzanne’s cough is gone in just a week
.’ He slaps my thigh. ‘Although she has been a bit tearful,’ he whispers in my ear.

‘Family,’ I say.

‘Family,’ he confirms.

Suzanne is not his housekeeper
then, and the boy Leon … . He sits back and hangs his arms inside his knees like a little boy, taking a deep breath and blowing outwards. ‘Doesn’t work for me,’ he says, as he straightens his back. ‘You have to believe and I’m too much of a realist. You heard it here first, Paul. Oh, but why can’t they accept
Dejeuner
as just another piece of art, something new to admire like a
bite de luxe.’

What doesn’t work for him? Is he talking about relationships? It seems to me that on a personal level at least, he seems to sail through t
hose like a yacht on a calm sea. His art, perhaps?

‘If only there was a pill to make a man less sensitive.’

Then I realise, he is talking about homeopathy.

‘It doesn’t work like that,’ I say, suddenly sober.

‘What?’ he asks, and shakes his head.

‘You don’t have to believe in homeopathy for it to work. It’s not a religion. It’s the most scientific system of medicine that we’ve got.’

‘Well, doesn’t work for me, all the same.’ he says, turning away from me.

‘The minimum dose.
Potentisation. Infintesimal amounts of a substance too small to have an affect. It’s impossible. It can’t work. You might be cured by it but you, sir, are definitely a fool if you have ever believed in it.’ I shout.

Conversations are curtailed on the other tables. Edouard stares at me. I lower my voice so that only he can hear me. ‘We have proof that homeopathy works.
Scientific proof. Jean-Paul Tessier ran a trial at the Hospital Ste Marguerite.’

‘Please
… .’

‘I need to tell you this. Over 8,000 patients were studied and the conclusion was homeopathy works best and at 1% of the allopathic cost. They once thought the Earth was flat, Edouard. Now they think a nude in a painting has to be shrouded in fantasy.’

‘But my gammy leg is still my gammy leg,’ he says.

‘You haven’t received the right remedy yet.’

‘Do you think I should come and see you?’

‘No.’

‘Why the hell not?’

‘I don’t think I would know what to do any better than Georges.’

A waiter drops a salver on his way to the kitchen. The noise pinches my face and lifts my shoulders to my ears. The world seems suddenly harsh.

‘Right then, I’ll get the bill,’ he says, looking directly at me and putting on his top hat that rested with his frock coat on the seat beside him. ‘This afternoon I’m going to visit Courbet in his studio. Come along if you lik
e, I’m taking Victorine.’

I ride the omnibus. It’s not a busy time and I manage to get a seat by the window. I refused Edouard’s invitation to attend an afternoon chez Gustav Courbet. I have more pressing things to do. But as I sit here and gaze at the eerie reflection of my own face in the glass, I have time to imagine the scene:

A very large space with a glass roof and sunrays pouring down like an umbrella of light.
Courbet holds court in the centre. An overlarge easel for his overlarge canvas, he paints
Basket of Flowers
in somewhat smaller proportions to the original. A dark background with a big white border, the light from within the picture is a luminescence for the petals and a trigger for their almost-scent. He paints with abandon, talks and laughs with his assemblage, but all the while, he remains focused and his brushstrokes precise. His sycophants marvel at the magic of it all.

Victorine and Edouard stand to one side. Out of reverence she is subdued in her attire, wearing black, although the dress is cut so low on her che
st that her breath is visible. Attention is drawn to a jet broach where the fabric meets her flesh. It has limp beads hanging down to humour the onlooker.

Edouard has his arm possessively around her waist. He wears the same cream frock coat that he had on at lunch with a
mousseline cravat and matching suede gloves. One hand is pressed upon the pommel of his stick, one foot neatly poised behind the other as he entertains Courbet.

The bus stops and I push my way to the front. I had not anticipated that I would alight here but I have just noticed we are in rue Hotel de Ville and decide to pay a visit to Suzanne
Leenhoff.

The entrance is open and I step into the coolness of the hallway with its stone mosaic floor. A gilt edged mirror hangs on
the wall. I climb the plush red-carpeted stairs and knock on a highly polished wooden door. Suzanne answers immediately with a smile that on realising who it is dissipates quickly. She pulls a shawl tighter around her shoulders. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she says, as if she’d done something wrong. ‘I was expecting someone else. Edouard said he wasn’t going to be painting this afternoon.’

‘I’ve come by to see how you’re getting on.’

‘Please come in. I haven’t been good,’ she says.

‘Thank you,’ I reply, removing my cap and following her through to the salon. I sit down on the sofa with my cap in my hands. She sits primly in the armchair opposite. A slight breeze comes through the windows and the cut glass crysta
ls of a lampshade make an otherworldly tinkle.

‘Please,
tell me how your cough has been since I last saw you. It’s worse?’

‘No, it’s not worse,’ she says. ‘It’s gone.’

‘I’m relieved. I thought you said it’s worse.’

‘I am worse,
Doctor Gachet. In myself I am worse. I used to have an uncontrollable cough and now I can’t stop crying all the time. Your medicine hasn’t cured me, it’s just moved things around.’

‘I see. H
as this ever happened before?’

‘Never,’ she says, emphatically, raising
her voice. Clamping her hand to her mouth she starts to cry.

‘Su
zanne, I think you are grieving. It has to come out.’

‘How do you know that?’ she asks.

‘From our last conversation, it seemed to be that way.’

‘What way? What way?’ She stands and starts to pace the room. ‘What way,
Doctor Gachet? You mustn’t presume because I
know
that I never told you that.’

The room goes quiet. I look towards the ground. I can hear the rustle of crinoline as she sits down.

‘People cry when they’re unhappy, mostly,’ I say.

‘I’m n
ot unhappy,’ she almost screams. When she speaks again her voice has lost its hysteria and is soft like a summer breeze. ‘I have lost someone,’ she says. ‘Not a relative, a friend.’

‘Suzanne, you don’t have to tell me.’

‘I think I need to tell you Doctor Gachet, if you promise me that my words will be received in the strictest confidence,’ she says, once again her voice rising in tone.

‘Of course, but you just need to give yourself time. It’s the same for everybody. Grief is not an illness. It is part of life.’

‘It is a man. Are you surprised?’

‘No.’

‘I was beautiful once.’

‘You are beautiful now.’

‘You don’t have to lie. I like to think he loved me. I like to think I don’t delude myself. It’s just that lately things appear very different to the way they did before and they make me so upset.’ She cries into her fist. ‘Edouard and Leon hardly talk to me. They move stealthily around me like cats waiting to be pampered but I don’t know whether I’ll ever be able to cater to their needs again and be myself in the way that I was with them in the past. Am I making sense, Doctor Gachet? Please tell me that I am making sense?’

‘Can’t you talk to Edouard and tell him what you’re going through?’

‘Of course not.’

‘I see.’

‘But do you understand?’

‘It is more complicated than just grief.’

‘Exactly, it’s so hard to admit even to myself.’

‘You will grow stronger.’

She stops crying. Her lace handkerchief is balled in her fist and she looks aimlessly to one side. ‘I think this is worse than the cough and I’ve said too much. I feel like I’ve betrayed him.’

‘Honestly, you’ve said nothing except
share your feelings and whoever the man was, or is, he has not been betrayed.’

She walks me to the door.

‘Oh!’ she says. ‘I nearly forgot. Edouard has asked that you drop by the studio. He wants to settle what he owes you for both Leon and myself.’

‘Please tell him I’ll drop by.’

An Unexpected Patient

May 22nd

‘
Chamomile in the smallest dose seems to diminish in a remarkable manner over-sensitiveness to pain or the too acute sufferings of the organs of the emotions from excessive pain.’

Samuel Hahnemann
, Materia Medica Pura.

The window in my kitchen/dispensary is open, voices sweep through to me from the well outside.

‘
Merde
!’

A woman’s laughter.

‘Don’t you even ask if I hurt myself?’

‘Monsieur Breton, God did justice when you tripped up, ha, ha.’

‘I won’t tolerate you living here a moment longer.’

‘Oh, but Monsieur Breton, you do have to. A few days ago we paid you in front of your policeman friend, enough for a whole year.’

‘My policeman friend doesn’t have a good memory.’

‘That may be, but my husband would think nothing of causing a small accident and you are very clumsy, as we can see today,
n’est-ce pas
?’

‘Madame, you are despicable and that man, I understand, is not your husband.’

‘That’s not the case in the eyes of our Lord.’

‘And your Lord also has eyes for when a man breaks his ankle and a woman just stands there and laughs.’

‘I have to go; I have a slot at the wash shop.’

I go too –
downstairs to help the man.

In the well, the walls rise up like a chimney to the sky. Monsieur Breton lies on his side, on the damp, mossy paving stones and lifts
one leg in the air supported by his free arm.

‘Doctor Gachet, come quick and help, I think it’s broken,’ he says. ‘Oh, my God, this is so painful.’

Monsieur Breton scrunches his face like a baby with colic, squeezing out tears that dribble over his cheeks. On one knee, I carefully examine his ankle. My touch makes him wince even more.

‘Tell me what happened
and try to fill me in with as much detail as possible.’

‘Look,
I don’t have to tell you anything. I am in agony, I can hardly talk.’

His ankle has puffed out like a pudding but
there’s no hint of a break. A ligament tear is every bit as painful as a fracture and, although I can’t be sure, this is what I diagnose. The treatment for a minor crack in a bone and a sprain is relatively the same.

‘Monsieur Breton, I’m going to go up to my apartment and get a chair for you to sit on, then I will strap up your foot,
all right?’

‘Yes,
all right, but be quick.’

I fetch the equipment and help him into the chair. Sitting
cross-legged on the floor before him, I wind a bandage soaked with witch hazel around his ankle. He cries impatiently, ‘Do you have to do that Gachet? It’s fucking cold.’

‘Monsieur Breton, I have a remedy for you. I think you need it.’

‘What does it do?’

‘It’s
Chamomilla
.’

Chamomile, a flower from the
compositae/asteraceae
family, along with Arnica, Calendula,
Bellis Perenis
(daisy) and
Echinacea
are all remedies that hasten the healing of injuries.

‘But my daughter gives it to my grandson for teething. It’s for babies.’

‘Precisely,’ I say, slipping one under his tongue.