“She did it to best you. There is a difference.”
“It wasn’t enough that she was one of the most talented in the school. She had to have you, too.”
I thought of the painting of Mother, tucked away up in Monsieur’s studio. Only one, but he’d never gotten rid of it.
“She doesn’t have me now.”
Madame must have stood, because I heard her pacing again, quick steps around the edges of the room. “I should have written to John Ross when she showed up on our doorstep. Did you know he hired an investigator?”
“The investigator did not come here.”
“And why would he?” Her heel came down sharply. “Would he go to question all of her old amoureux to see who else she begged to run away with her?”
“Ma minette, I didn’t go.” This was said almost wearily. “I wouldn’t have gone, even if she’d asked me twenty years ago.” He sighed. “Maud always spent more time lamenting the past than changing the future. She wore her regrets like a hair shirt.”
I clenched my fists at my sides. They talked about Mother like they didn’t know her. If she wasn’t looking to the future, she wouldn’t have left Perthshire, would she have?
“She said she’d paint her way across the world and not care what anyone else thought,” Madame said, the words rolled up in scorn. “I don’t know why I do.”
“Because she was and always will be your friend, despite all the rest. You worry about her like the mademoiselle does.” He patted the sofa softly. “Now sit back down.”
The springs creaked again as she settled in. “Did I tell you, Luc saw a painting? In the Galerie Porte d’Or right along the Quai du Voltaire.”
“Maud?”
I covered my mouth.
“Painted by Arnaud Duguay. Do you remember him from Glasgow?” She made an indelicate noise. “Second rate, even as a student.”
“But the painting, it was in Santi’s gallery?”
“Luc wrote to me. He thought it meant Maud was in Paris.”
I stepped back until I felt the edge of the hall table against my spine. Mother, in Paris? Could she be so near? Luc hadn’t said a word to me. All of those weekend afternoons together, all of those letters, and he hadn’t said a thing about a painting of Mother in a Paris gallery.
I inched back to the door in time to hear Madame say, “The girl needs a place, Claude. Is this really the best one?”
I ran back up to my room and out to the roof. At the top of the ridgepole, I could see over to the front of the house, at Mr. Bauer wheeling his motorbike down the linden-lined drive. I ducked into Luc’s bedroom window.
It was as shabby as the rest of the house, with a sagging bed and cracked leather armchair, but somehow neater. No spiderwebs, no jumbles of knickknacks, no riotous confusion of colors. His room was more somber library than bedroom. An old, gilt-edged desk, monstrous and magnificent, stacked with books and drawing pads. That leather armchair tucked near the side, with a curved desk lamp next to it. Deep yellow bed curtains—the color of marigolds, of French mustard. The gray walls were unpainted and mostly bare. A tennis racket, its wood worn bright, hung like a work of art. Two watercolors of the crumbling château, signed C. Crépet were as soft and blotted as though viewed through a rainy lens.
One painting was done in haunting oils—a thin woman, all angles and edges. She wore a drapey dress, touched with gold where the light hit, and slouched against the armrest of a square throne with arms carved into dragons’ heads, staring challengingly at the painter. She might be a queen, but she was no damsel in distress.
That queen, she wouldn’t let anyone put her in a corner. She wouldn’t let anyone leave her behind. She wouldn’t be overlooked.
And, in the middle of this room, this room of books and art and attempted respectability, stood Luc.
For a moment I didn’t say a word. He stood without a shirt on. His chest was thin and pale. A smooth brown stone, threaded on a thong, nestled beneath his collarbone. Standing shirtless, with head bowed, he looked so private and almost vulnerable. But I saw tacked above his desk that drawing of me, the drawing where I looked more like Mother than myself.
I stepped over the windowsill. “I thought you were my friend.”
His head snapped up and his eyes opened wide.
“I thought you were my friend, but now I can’t even trust you. You saw a painting of my mother in Paris, and yet you never told me. Why?”
But he didn’t answer my question. “You can’t just…push in like this,” he cried. He picked up his damp white shirt from where he’d dropped it on the floor and yanked it on.
“Push in?”
“That’s all you’ve been doing since you arrived. You’ve made me miss tennis matches and weekend studying. You made Stefan Bauer come all the way here and now he’s met you and I’m hearing about it. And then I had a lecture from Maman, as though it were my fault that you held my face like that.”
None of what he said made sense. I’d been the one dismissed earlier, when he introduced me to Stefan Bauer, but now he was acting as though I’d done wrong merely by being there.
“Push in?” I repeated.
“Into my room, into my life, into my mind, into my—”
“I haven’t pushed into anything. I was invited.” Now I was furious, too.
“I didn’t invite you.”
“But yet you come almost every weekend. You wrote me letters and brought me fruit under the chestnut tree. You’ve been always here.”
He angrily buttoned his shirt. “When Maman asks me to come to meet her newest stray, what am I to say?”
“I see.” I pulled myself back up into the windowsill. “I’m just another of Madame Crépet’s dogs or cats. Somebody else’s castoff. You’re only here to be sure I’m walked and watered, no?”
“Oh, that’s not what I meant.”
