I stopped walking. Thankfully, so did she. “I’m not very good at this.”
She turned.
“I’m not very good at knowing the right thing to say.”
“I’m not either.” She pressed her hands to the front of her skirt. I realized that she’d left her sketch pad back in the studio.
“I wouldn’t worry too much about it.” I took a step closer. “Papa, he paints all sorts of things. Not all of it means something.”
“Did you not listen to a word I said in there earlier? About art being honest, meaningful expression?”
“But you’re wrong. Not all of it means something,” I repeated. “You need to see Hat Rack, with Cat.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Follow me.”
Hat Rack, with Cat, was Papa’s very first painting, at least the very first that he allowed Maman to frame and hang on the wall. It was tucked away down at the end of the west hallway, next to the blue powder room that no one ever used. I took Clare there and waited with crossed arms while she puzzled over it.
It was, literally, what it claimed to be. A striped tabby draped on the top of a nearly empty hat rack. Only a singular top hat, shiny and bent, hung from a peg. The painting bore none of the angularity that marked Papa’s later illustrations, but it played with color, like a Matisse. The cat’s whiskers were lined in blue, the old top hat shadowed in green. Come to think of it, it might have been the same hat Clare had tried on in the studio.
“It’s about the weariness of familiarity,” Clare said finally. It sounded like the thing an art student would parrot.
“Isn’t it just a cat?”
“Is a cat ever just a cat?” She threaded her fingers behind her back and paced, the way Papa always did before a painting. “Is not a cat sometimes a…a…” She gave the cat an accusatory stare. “Goodness, what else could it be?”
“Friendship.” I straightened the frame. “At least that’s what Papa always said.”
“Friendship?” She took a step closer. “Well, the cat, he’s a Manx cat. See here?”
“So? Papa’s never been to the Isle of Man.”
“Beneath the cat’s paw is a herring.”
“Herring?” I bent. “There is?” I’d walked by the painting hundreds of times and never noticed the gray herring between the claws. “Papa’s never been to Man, but he had a friend from there. Used to visit in the summers nearby when they were boys. I don’t know his real name, because Papa always called him ‘Herring.’ ”
“Ah-ha!” She nodded, satisfied. “And the hat rack?”
“Herring wanted to be a milliner? I don’t know.”
“He wanted to be great.” She snapped her fingers. “He wanted to be on top.” I was skeptical, but she was delighted. “You’re wrong. It is more than a cat. It’s a story of boyhood dreams.” She waited a moment before adding, “Told you.”
Though I thought she was ridiculous, I brought her to Eleven Apples, a still life of eleven apples, carefully arranged in a pyramid atop a gleaming plate. “Surely this speaks to him balancing his career and his family,” she said. I showed her The Ribbon, a rosy ribbon curled on top of a scarred wooden table, with a tight knot right in the middle. “This must be when he met your mother. Lovely, yet strong right at her core.” With Cheese Pots, Unguarded, a painting with two open crocks of the soft cheese eaten in Picardy, she said, “He was feeling nostalgic, missing Picardy all the way from Glasgow. And he felt vulnerable because of it.”
Those paintings of Papa’s lining the walls of the château had always been just that to me. Still lifes, landscapes, illustrations, the occasional portrait. But Clare, she found a story in each.
She’d stand before one, hands locked behind her back or thoughtfully stroking her chin, and weave thoughts, emotions, adventures for poor Papa. “Really, they’re like the pages of a diary,” she said, “spread all over the house.”
His early still lifes, down the west hallway, morphed into his illustrations, framed and hanging in places of prominence in the front of the house. Those defiant, forbidding, arresting paintings in the Glasgow School style, all sharp lines and murky colors. Truth be told, those paintings terrified me as a child. Evil queens, stubborn princesses, unflinching knights. Bluebeard’s wife, holding a bloody key aloft. Little Red Cap caught beneath the jaws of the wolf. Sleeping Beauty, twined with roses, but with an ogre’s eyes glowing beneath the bed. I used to run down the front hall with hands to the sides of my eyes, like horse blinders. I didn’t want to catch a glimpse before bedtime.
As though reading my mind, Clare said, “I used to think they were frightening. Perrault’s fairy tales, that is. And your father’s illustrations fit them so well.”
“He painted other fairy tales too. Not as part of a commission, but just because he liked them. Snow White and Rose Red, battling the wily dwarf. Trusty John, turning to stone. Rapunzel, wandering alone in the wilderness.”
“I like this one.” Clare touched a frame. A girl, red curls resting on a pumpkin, lay in front of a smoldering fireplace.
“Cinderella. He mixed soot in his paint to get the texture exactly right.”
“It’s not that.” She sighed. “She looks so lonely.”
A nearly orphaned girl, sleeping in a borrowed place.
“She wasn’t completely alone.” I reached past and pointed to the mice and crickets tucked into the corners of the painted kitchen, the starlings peering through the window, the lean dog nestled against Cinderella’s bare feet. “There are always friends if you look.”
She turned and peeked up through her eyelashes. My face suddenly grew far too warm.
“My favorite,” I said, clearing my throat, “is the queen from Rumpelstiltskin, sitting on her throne, her spinning wheel in the background. He borrowed a spinning wheel from Marthe’s mother and stood it in the corner of the studio for ages while he painted. I played with it until I accidentally ‘pricked my finger.’ It was only a splinter, but I didn’t know that. Maman found me lying in the rose garden, convinced I was doomed to sleep for a hundred years.”
“And when you awoke, did you find true love?”
It was a silly question, tossed off over her shoulder. There had been adolescent kisses in country lanes, infatuations with cabaret dancers, and an earnest crush on my uncle’s long-legged mistress, Véronique. But no love. I barely had time enough for tennis.
She noticed I’d stopped. “As for me, I don’t think it exists. True love. It’s as make-believe as a magical spindle.”
“I’m French. We’re supposed to believe that one can fall in love once a week.”
“Then why haven’t you?”
Something in her question was expectant. An expectancy that surprised me, given that this was only our second real conversation. Clare Ross, when she gave her trust and her friendship, gave it completely.
But I evaded. “If you see how my maman used to dress me, you’ll understand why I’ve never inspired a great passion in any girl.”
I took her to see the few portraits in the east hallway. She followed the string of Lucs down the hall—a fat-cheeked baby clinging to the back rail of a chair; a scowling boy in a hated lace-collared blouse and long curls; a boy, prouder and freshly shorn, posing with a tennis racket and a smile. She laughed at each one and I blushed.
“They’re not very good,” I mumbled. “I didn’t really have hair as long as that.”
“Pity,” she said, with a glint in her eye. “I think the curls are rather fetching.”
I refused to answer.
“It’s interesting, though, how even the portraits of you contain so much more than your face.”
“My tennis racket, of course. And in that one, my rocking horse. He put my favorite things in the paintings.”
She stepped closer to the one of me scowling at the painter. I was almost seven in the picture, furious to be sitting in a moth-eaten ruffled blouse rather than off meeting other boys. At seven, I was sure I was missing out on some vital part of manhood, both in the outfit and in the time spent sitting still.