The Kiss (5 page)

‘Give him something, Dad,’ she says.

He tosses a twenty p coin into the young man’s cap.

‘Give him some more,’ she urges. ‘Twenty p is nothing.’

He throws down a pound coin and the young man winks at Sophie. He has a rather distinctive mark below his left eye. Looking closer, Cormac sees that it is a birthmark shaped like a kite. He puts a proprietorial hand under his daughter’s elbow, not that she would be likely to need his protection. She would probably be readier than he to deliver a swift kick to the man’s shins should he become obnoxious. They begin their ascent of the steps.

‘That doesn’t solve the problem, you know,’ he says.

‘I’m aware of that.’

‘Some of them could get jobs if they tried.’

‘They could always open sandwich bars. If they had the dosh.’

He makes no reply. It would be too boring to pursue the conversation. And he doesn’t want to have any arguments with his daughter on the one day in the week that they spend together. This is supposed to be what is known as ‘quality time’. Another phrase that makes him shudder.

They reach the High Street and turn down the narrow Fishmonger’s Close, watching their feet on the cobblestones slippery with bird shit. He loves the mediaeval old town, would have liked to have lived in it if it were not for the children and their schools. He likes the closed-in feeling of the streets, its areas of secret darkness, and the way the buildings huddle together, whereas Rachel prefers the space and light of the Georgian New Town. It was amazing that they had ever got on together, and yet not. Their recognition of each other was immediate and explosive, a meeting of minds and bodies. He remembers it vividly, the sudden wonder of it, the laughter, their inability to let go of each other. And now … He almost slips and is saved by Sophie’s hand.

‘Thanks, my love. I always knew a daughter would come in useful one day.’

The bistro, which is housed in a seventeenth-century building, lies at the foot of the alleyway. The low-ceilinged rooms are bustling and cheerful with the sound of talk and clink of glasses and cutlery and Cormac is delighted to be taking his daughter out to lunch. He holds her chair.

‘Can you afford this?’ she asks, peeling off her mittens and unwinding two long woollen scarves from around her neck. ‘Are sandwiches selling like hot cakes?’

‘Sure! No problem.’

He orders a bottle of house red with their food.

‘Will you have a glass?’ He doesn’t need to ask. She has two glasses, might have three if she were given the chance. But she is only fifteen. She leans her elbows on the table. She becomes talkative. She talks of going to Greece, of wandering from island to island. All normal teenage stuff. Dreams of freedom, casting off the parental shackles. Cormac is reassured. Rachel was saying that Sophie has been behaving oddly and playing hookey from school. She asked him to try to find out what Sophie is up to. ‘She talks to you more than to me,’ said Rachel.

‘How’s school?’ he asks.

She wrinkles her nose. ‘It’s so cut off.’

‘From what?’

‘The real world.’

He could start up a little homily on the value of education but decides against it. She knows what he thinks on the subject, anyway. And he is less sure about the value of anything now. What has it ever done for you? she might ask. Look at you, forty-four years old, all that taxpayers’ money spent on you, and there you are making sandwiches which any fool could do. You might as well have left school at sixteen. You might have worked your way up to owning a chain of sandwich
bars by this time with other people doing the cutting and slicing.

‘How’s your mother?’ he asks casually.

‘Seems OK. Busy. She’s always busy, isn’t she, with all her committees and whatnot? As if she’s afraid to stop.’

They have finished the wine. Cormac turns to catch the waiter’s eye and catches the eye of Clarinda Bain instead.

The police came to interview him the day after he was suspended. Two constables arrived, a man and a woman. He felt the woman’s aggression the moment he opened the door; it hit him like a slap in the face with a wet cloth. It was the first of many such looks he would encounter.

‘Cormac Aherne?’

He admitted his identity.

‘May we come in?’

He held open the door. He was prepared to co-operate; it would be foolish not to. He’d do anything to get out of this hellhole that he had been dropped into. Anything? That remained to be seen.

‘Look,’ he said to the constables as soon as they’d taken off their hats and seated themselves side by side on the pale-blue leather settee that he and Rachel had
purchased just before he’d taken off for Paris. Paris! His favourite city! Would he ever be able to go there again? ‘Look,’ he said again, extending his hand, appealing to them, ‘this whole business has got out of proportion.’

It was not for them to make any judgement on that; a complaint had been made against him by a minor, of a serious nature. She was not a minor now, he pointed out. But she was then, they retaliated. By a week, he countered futilely, but all this was just by way of being a red herring, of playing for time that was not available.

‘Can I just say that I did not attempt to seduce her!’

‘She claims that you did.’

‘She bloody well made advances to me.’

The policewoman looked at him stonily. Did he expect her to believe that? That a fifteen-year-old pupil would try to seduce her forty-four-year-old teacher who was already sporting a number of grey hairs and who was carrying more weight than when he was in his prime?

‘I’m not the first poor sod to be dumped in the shit like this,’ he told them. ‘It’s happened before. You must read the papers?’
Careful now, Cormac
. He could hear Rachel’s voice in his ear.
Don’t say anything that will antagonise them further
.

They were perfectly polite, he couldn’t complain about
that. They asked him to come down to the station with them and make a statement.

‘You’ll get your chance to put your side of the story then,’ said the male constable.

‘So it’ll be my word against hers?’

‘Unless there are witnesses,’ said the woman.

‘Witnesses?’

‘Other pupils. Teachers.’

He thought of Alec McCaffy, the teacher who had accompanied him on the school trip to Paris, standing in his felt slippers and paisley dressing gown in the rain outside their hotel watching him hand Clarinda Bain out of a taxi, and his spirit fell even lower. Rachel was right when she told him he could be such a fool.

‘I’ll take my own car if you don’t mind,’ he said.

But they did mind. They preferred him to come in theirs.

‘So that I won’t do a bunk?’

They smiled non-committally.

They escorted him down his garden path, one going out in front, the other bringing up the rear. He felt as if he were being frogmarched. A dangerous criminal, a sex maniac, who might leap out of the bushes at any young girl who happened to be passing. He did not dare look to right or left for fear
of encountering a neighbouring eye. The presence of the well-marked police car in the street would not have gone unnoticed.

After he’d made his statement he half expected to be charged but they said he might go. They would be continuing their investigations, interviewing witnesses, before deciding if there was a case to answer. There would be a case, he didn’t doubt that. The Bains, mother and daughter, would stretch their considerable imaginations to the limit. They wanted his blood. How was it that he used to extol the imagination at every opportunity?
Use your imagination!
he would tell his classes.
Don’t just sit there like turnip heads!
Some of them had listened.

He went for a walk in the Botanic Garden. He badly needed air and room to breathe. There was space here in this quiet oasis with its wide views of the city skyline. At this time of the morning few people were about except for the occasional mother with a pushchair. The day was fresh but mild and the colours were just beginning to take on the first tinges of autumn. A swirl of wind ruffled the dry leaves, sending a bright scatter across the grass in front of him. For a moment, his mind, like his sight, was taken by the colourful pattern of the leaves on the green sward, then it was swamped again by the knowledge that was cutting into the very
centre of his being: he was a man under suspicion and, if found guilty, might go to prison, as a sex offender. He stumbled into the rock garden. The gentians were blooming vividly. Flowers that he loved for their intensity of colour. But he had to turn away. The very intensity of that deep blue was making his eyes water. God damn her! Everything he saw or did brought him back to her, and to Paris.

They set off on their Rodin pilgrimage on the first morning of their stay in Paris. It was Robbie who dubbed it a pilgrimage.

Clarinda, they were soon to find, had an additional agenda. ‘Can we go first to the rue du Cherche-Midi?’ she asked. She had her own map and a notebook in which she had written down the various places in Paris she wanted to see, most of them having come from books lent to her by Cormac.

‘The rue du Cherche-Midi?’ he repeated, then nodded, following the tracking of her mind. He was quite willing to indulge her whim, if it could be so described. He always found enthusiasm difficult to resist and hers was palpable, almost mesmeric.

‘Gwen John lived there,’ Clarinda explained to the others.

‘Gwen John,’ echoed Cathy, one of the girls.

‘Don’t tell me you don’t know Gwen John!’ reproved Robbie, ‘Tut, tut. Such ignorance.’

‘Gwen John was a painter, a wonderful painter, sister of Augustus, but better in my opinion,’ declared Clarinda, leading the way, map in hand, leaving the rest of the group to straggle untidily behind. ‘She’s been compared to Modigliani, hasn’t she, Cormac?’

‘I believe so. Her work is very quiet,’ he told the others. ‘Very intense and delicate.’

‘What’s this Gwen woman got to do with it?’ grumbled Sue, friend of Cathy. ‘I thought it was Rodin we were meant to be after.’

‘Apart from being a painter,’ said Clarinda over her shoulder, ‘she was a model of Rodin’s.’

‘There’s no holding our Clarrie once she gets going,’ said Robbie, lengthening his stride to catch up with her.

Their hotel was not far from the rue du Cherche-Midi. They reached it in a few steps.

‘Number 87,’ said Clarinda. ‘Top floor.’

They gazed up at the top of the four-floor typical Parisian apartment building of the nineteenth century with its long windows and narrow wrought-iron balconies.

‘What’s that supposed to do for you?’ asked Sue.

‘I like to see where people lived,’ returned Clarinda, ‘so that I can imagine them coming along the street, climbing the stairs to their room. It was in that room up there that she painted a number of her most famous paintings.’ From her notebook she produced a postcard depicting a basket chair and simple table on which rested a small bowl of flowers, the scene lit by filtered light coming through the muslin-curtained window.

‘I can see what you mean by quiet,’ said Cathy. ‘Not much going on in a room like that.’

‘That’s all you know,’ said Clarinda with a small smile.

Cathy made a face behind Clarinda’s back.

‘Let’s move on,’ said Cormac.

‘Can we go next to the rue de l’Université?’ asked Clarinda. ‘Please! I want to see where Rodin had his
atelier
.’ Cormac had never thought to seek it out himself on previous visits to Paris. He had spent most of his time in the Rodin Museum itself.

‘Rodin had his studio in the rue de l’Université before moving to the Hôtel Biron,’ Clarinda informed Alec McCaffy, the other teacher accompanying the pupils. ‘87. Just like Gwen John in the rue du Cherche-Midi. Lucky number.’

Alec was impressed. ‘They seem to know their
stuff,’ he observed to Cormac. He was pleased to see so many of them armed with maps and appeared to think it was due to his influence since he taught geography. He was happy to freely confess to knowing nothing about art, apart from the fact that he had heard of and seen photographs of the Mona Lisa and a few other similarly famous pictures such as Renoir’s lusciously appointed ladies or Degas’ ballet dancers. His mother had one of the ballet dancers on the lid of a box that had originally contained chocolates but in which she now kept loose buttons. Cormac’s mother had also had a button box when he was a child, probably still did. It was something he had in common with Alec McCaffy. He doubted if he had much else.

‘Clarinda knows it, anyway,’ said Cormac, although he suspected quite a lot had rubbed off on the others too. He would not expect them to express their enthusiasm so openly, however, since they worked hard to appear laid back.

When they passed number 83 in the rue de l’Université Cormac began to have doubts. The next building was a corner café, and then they were on the Place du Palais Bourbon.

‘It’s not the kind of area you’d find a studio, Clarinda. It was in the old marble depot if I recall rightly. That’s
the National Assembly over there. The seat of the government.’

‘It said 87 in the book.’ Clarinda was frowning.

‘You can’t believe everything you read in books,’ said Robbie, skipping over a puddle.

There were several police vans parked on the rim of the square and a considerable number of police gathered in and around it. Some wore protective coverings on their lower limbs and carried riot shields.

‘They must be expecting a riot,’ said Robbie hopefully. A couple of the policemen had turned to look them over. ‘Maybe they’ll think we’ve come to make a protest about student rights. They might even spray us with tear gas.
Bonjour!
’ He gave the two policemen a short bow.

‘That’s enough, Robbie,’ said Cormac. Robbie was known at school to be a tempter of providence as well as an occasional truant player. He truanted only when he got bored, so he claimed. He survived because he could do quite brilliant work when he put his mind to it.

‘It’s a pity we don’t have a camcorder with us,’ said Robbie. ‘We could make a video called
Looking for Rodin’s atelier in the rue de l’Université sur la Rive Gauche de Paris while the police play silly buggers with their riot shields
.’

‘And enter it for the Turner Prize,’ said Clarinda.

Robbie grinned at her and raised his thumb.

Clarinda was still looking round, hoping for enlightenment. Suddenly she stepped out and stopped a smartly dressed woman walking with a small yappy dog on a short lead. ‘
Excusez-moi, madame. Nous cherchons l’atelier de Rodin
.’

‘
Ah, l’atelier de Rodin!
’ The woman tapped the dog on its nose to quieten it, then told them that the street numbers had been changed at some point. It seemed to happen in Paris. She shrugged. ‘
Mais l’atelier de Rodin
—’ Why, she believed it had been demolished many years ago.

‘Another dream shattered,’ sighed Robbie, when woman and dog had departed. ‘So much for lucky 87!’

‘Oh, shut up, Robbie!’ said Clarinda, surprising him and Cormac by her vehemence.

A few days before they were due to leave, Anita Gibb, a member of the English department, came to see him with a couple of sheets of paper in her hand. ‘I’ve got rather an interesting essay here, from one of the fifth years. I thought you might like to read it. It falls into your province, rather.’ A little bemused smile was making her bottom lip twitch. ‘I set them an essay, you know the kind of thing, a day in the life of. The kind
of essay they might have done in primary but I thought it might be interesting to see what they would do with it now. They could choose to do anyone they wished, known or unknown.’

Cormac, remembering the essay now, looked at Clarinda frowning with frustration over her map. ‘I don’t think there’s any point in looking any further,’ he said.

‘Since we have obviously been chasing wild geese,’ said Robbie.
Clarinda came reluctantly. They turned back along the rue de l’Université and headed up past the massive pile of Invalides to the rue de Varenne and the Rodin Museum, formerly the Hôtel Biron, where Rodin had installed himself in 1908, renting the room on the ground floor with three tall windows looking onto the garden.

‘Gwen hated it when he left his old studio,’ said Clarinda. ‘She found the old one more friendly.’

‘Familiar, aren’t we?’ said Robbie. ‘
Gwen
.’

‘What do you mean by friendly?’ asked Cathy.

‘Intimate?’ suggested Robbie.

Clarinda was not to be drawn.

Before going into the house she went purposefully round the garden until she found the black marble statue she was seeking. The rest followed, as if she, with the long pale hair streaming behind her, were the Pied Piper.
The Muse,
sculpted as a memorial to Whistler, stood above them, armless, head bowed, mouth slightly open, her right foot lifted onto a high rock. Rodin had intended to do the arms at some point but had never got round to it. Cormac explained that Rodin often put together limbs and bits and pieces of bodies afterwards. In the museum out at Meudon one could see rows of casts for arms and legs and hands.

‘Gwen John was the model,’ said Clarinda, her eyes fixed on the downturned face.

‘Camille Claudel was his most important model,’ put in Cormac. It seemed necessary to get things into perspective.

‘Didn’t she go off her head?’ said Robbie. ‘Camille? Maybe all his models did.’

‘The statues she posed for are the most erotic and sensuous,’ said Cormac.

It was so much easier here in Paris to speak of sensuality and eroticism than back in Edinburgh within the constraints of the classroom where the pupils tended to giggle or catcall. Here they were determined to show they were fully fledged adults. Most of them had probably had some sexual experience, if statistics were to believed, and in this instance he was sure that they were. He had read somewhere that the average starting age for having sex in the UK was 15.3 years, whereas globally it was 15.9. These young people were not as he had been at sixteen and seventeen, gauche in his encounters with the opposite sex, and, apart from any experiences they had had themselves, they went regularly to the cinema and saw films marked 18.

‘If you look at Gwen’s face here or in her self-portrait,’ said Clarinda, ‘you would never imagine that she was so sensual and so passionate. Or so wild.’

‘I suppose she had it off with Rodin too, like all the others?’ said Robbie.

Clarinda ignored him and continued to address Cormac. ‘She seems so demure, wouldn’t you say? Do you remember reading about how she sat on rocks at the edge of the sea on the Welsh coast and a huge wave came and swept her out to sea and then swept her back in again? She called it “delicious danger”.’ Clarinda lingered over the last two words. ‘I understand that.’

‘You do?’ He did remember something about Gwen John liking to swim naked and go far out to sea but did not recall her being swept off rocks. But then it was a long time since he had read about her life, and indeed had not given it much thought until now. ‘It can sometimes be a mistake to get too interested in the lives of artists,’ he cautioned. ‘Especially taking one particular aspect of them, for that can distort the person.’ Rachel had once accused him of caricaturing his aunts by dwelling on their oddities whereas much of the time they were douce women living quietly and minding their own business; he had responded that it was their peculiarities that made them interesting and brought them into relief. But aunts did not come into the same category as artists whom one did not know in a personal way. ‘Better to concentrate on the work, Clarinda,’ he went on. ‘That, after all, is what matters.’