The Swan Thieves

jeopardize our search and at last fell back on my office manner. "That must have been very difficult for you."

Caillet smiled. "Oh, at the time it was difficult, but that was because I was young and I thought that it mattered. In any case, I liked Aude de Clerval. She was a wonderful woman, in her way, and I believe she made my friend happy. And she also made it possible for him to buy about half my collection, and that made it possible for me and for my brother"--he indicated the museum catalog on the table--"to paint. So life arranges things. Aude wanted to have the works by her mother that I had bought, especially The Swan Thieves. I owned that one only a short time -- it came from the sale of the estate of Armand Thomas, the younger brother, in Paris."

Caillet tapped his cigarillo in the ashtray. "Aude thought that was her mother"s greatest painting and also her last, although I"m not sure. Everybody was happy, you might say. But Aude died in nineteen sixty-six, so Henri has had to live for years without her. Apparently, Henri and I are both cursed with very long life. He is even older than I, poor man. And Aude was twenty-two years older than he. The queer and the old lady--they were an interesting pair. The heart does not go backward. Only the mind." He seemed lost in this for so long that I began to wonder if he was a user of substances other than the tobacco and the tequila, or if he had simply lapsed into the silences of living alone.

Mary broke his reverie this time, and her question surprised me. "Did Aude talk about her mother?"

Caillet glanced at her, his ruddy face alert, remembering. "Yes, sometimes. I will tell you what I remember, which is not very much. I knew her for only a little time, because after Henri fell in love with her, I left Paris and came here, to Acapulco. I grew up here, you know. My father was a mostly French engineer and my mother was Mexican, a schoolteacher. I remember that Aude said one day that her mother had been a great artist all of her life. "No one stops being an artist," she said to us. And I argued with her 494.

that a painter who stops painting is no longer a painter. It is the act of painting that matters. Yes, we were sitting in a cafe in the rue Pigalle. Another time she told us that her mother had been her closest friend in life, and Henri actually looked hurt. She was not a painter herself, Aude, and she collected only her mother"s work. She guarded The Swan Thieves jealously after she bought it from me, a tradition poor Henri has continued, I a.s.sume, since it has never appeared anywhere and has never been written about, to the best of my knowledge. I think Henri wanted Aude because she was so complete, so finished, so parfaite. She needed no one. He was part English, too--his father"s parents--always a little the outsider, and Aude was absolutely, totally French. And he wanted maybe to show to her that she could have one last friend in life. They went through the war together in terrible deprivation. He was faithful to her until the end. She died slowly."

Caillet tapped his cigarillo and pointed it to the ceiling in one raised hand. Clearly he could speak at length once he got going. "Aude was not exactly the beauty her mother had been, to judge by the little Olivier Vignot portrait--I mean, Beatrice de Clerval was a beauty. But Aude was tall, with a very interesting face -- what they call in French "jolie laide," ugly one moment and mesmerizing the next. I painted her myself one time, soon after I met her. Henri kept that one. I do not paint portraits often, and I do not trust self-portraits." He turned to Mary. "Do you paint self-portraits, madame?"

"No," she said.

Caillet regarded her a moment longer, one cheek resting on his hand, as if she might be an emissary from a tribe he had once studied. Then he smiled again, and his face was so transformed by indulgent kindness that I found myself thinking irrelevantly what a sweet grandfather he might have made--a.s.suming, of course, that he actually wasn"t one. "You came to see the paintings of Beatrice de Clerval, not a too-talkative old Mexican. Let me show them to you."

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C HAPTER 90 Marlow We got to our feet at once, but Caillet did not take us directly to Beatrice"s work. Instead, he gave us a tour, the lingering tour of the collector who loves his paintings and introduces them as if they are people. There was a small canvas by Sisley, dated 1894--which he"d bought in Aries, he said, for nothing, because he had been the first to authenticate it. There were two canvases by Mary Ca.s.satt, of women reading, and a pastel landscape on brown paper by Berthe Morisot, five strokes of green, four of blue, a dash of yellow. Mary liked that one best: "It"s so simple. And perfect." And there was an Impressionist landscape of such beauty that we both paused in front of it--a castle rising out of heavy greenery, palms, golden light.

"That is Majorca." Caillet pointed with a blunt finger. "My mother"s mother lived there, and I used to visit her when I was a child. Her name was Elaine Gurevich. She did not live in the castle, naturally, but we took walks there. It is her painting--she was my first teacher. She adored music, books, art. I would sleep in her bed, and if I woke up at four in the morning she was always reading, with the light on. I loved her more than almost anyone." He turned away. "If only she had painted more. I always felt I was painting for her, a little."

There were twentieth-century works as well -- de Kooning and a small Klee and the abstractions of Pedro Caillet himself, and his brother"s. Pedro"s work was surprisingly colorful and lively, while Antoine"s tended to lines of silver and white.

"My brother is dead," Caillet said flatly. "He died in Mexico 496.

City six years ago. He was my greatest friend--we worked together for thirty years. I am more proud of Antoine"s work than of my own. He was a deep, reflective person, a marvelous person. His labor inspired me. I am traveling to Rome for an exhibition of his work. That will be my final trip." He smoothed his hair. "When Antoine died, I decided to stop painting. It was cleaner that way, not to go on and on. Sometimes it is better for an artist not to last too long. That means I am no longer a painter. I buried my last painting with him. You know that Renoir had to have his paintbrush tied onto his hand at the end? And Dufy."

This explained the immaculate fingernails, I thought, the perfect blue-and-black clothes, the lack of studio smells. I wished I could ask him what he did with his time now, but the house, as exquisite as its owner, made the answer plain: nothing. He had the air of a man waiting thoughtfully for an appointment, the patient who arrives early in the waiting room and hasn"t brought a book or newspaper but disdains to pick up any of those glossy magazines. Doing nothing was apparently a full-time job for Pedro Caillet; he could afford it, and his paintings kept him silent company. It struck me that he had asked us nothing about ourselves, except whether Mary painted self-portraits; he didn"t seem to want to know why we were interested in his old friends. He had freed himself even from curiosity.

Now Caillet moved from his cave of a living room through the yellow-and-red doorway to the dining room. Here we saw something different: treasures of Mexican folk art. There was a long green table set around with blue chairs, with a perforated-tin lamp in the shape of a bird hanging over it, and an ancient wooden sideboard, all apparently waiting for no dinner guests. One wall was decorated with an embroidered tapestry, magenta and emerald and orange people and animals going about their business on a black background. The opposite wall displayed (incongruously, I thought) three Impressionist paintings and a more realist portrait in pencil, a woman"s head, which looked twentieth-century.

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Caillet raised a hand as if to greet them all. "Aude particularly wanted these three oils," he remarked, "so I declined to sell them to her. Otherwise, I was very polite, and I sold her all the others, my whole collection--which was not large, perhaps twelve pieces, since Beatrice did not paint that much."

The paintings were remarkable, even at first glance, evidence of a quietly splendid Impressionist talent. One of them showed a golden-haired girl before a mirror. A maid, shadowy background presence, was bringing her clothes to her, or perhaps taking something out of the room, or perhaps simply watching her; there was something furtive about the more distant figure glimpsed in the mirror, ghostlike. The effect was lovely, sensual, unsettling. I was seeing my first Beatrice de Clerval in the flesh, and in every one of her few works I"ve seen since then, there was an unease of this sort. In the corner was a strong mark in black, which looked decorative, like a Chinese character, until you deciphered the letters: BdC, a signature.

The largest oil showed a man sitting on a bench in the shade of roughly painted flowering bushes. I thought of the garden in Beatrice"s letters and took a step backward to see it in focus, moving carefully so as not to b.u.mp the blue chairs. The man wore a hat and an open jacket with a cravat at his neck. He was reading a book. In the foreground were brilliantly vivid flowers, scarlet and yellow and pink, blazing against the green, while the man was a blurred figure, relaxed and stable but far less important to the composition, I thought. Had Beatrice de Clerval found her husband so much less definite a character than her garden, or had she simply shrouded their intimacy in vagueness?

Caillet, on the other side of the table, confirmed some of my guesses. "That one is Beatrice"s husband, Yves Vignot, as confirmed by their daughter, Aude. You may know that Aude changed her name from Aude Vignot to Aude de Clerval after her mother died--fanatic loyalty, I suppose, or perhaps she sensed her mother"s achievement as an artist and wanted a little of her glory. She was too proud of her mother."

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He walked to one end of the dining hall and stood there, contemplating a ceramic duck studded with unlit candles that sat on a perforated-tin cabinet. Mary and I turned to study the third Beatrice de Clerval painting, which showed a pond in a park, its flat surface ruffled by wind that threw the reflections of the arching trees overhead into confusion. This skillful scene was brightened by a flower garden at one end of the pond and the shapes of birds on the water, including a swan just raising its wings for flight. It was a stunning piece of work; I thought to myself that--to my eye, at least--the handling of light on the water approached Monet"s. Why would anyone with such a gift ever stop painting? The form of the swan, swiftly brushed in, was the essence of flight, of sudden, free movement. Mary said, "She must have watched a lot of swans."

"It"s completely alive," I agreed. I turned to Caillet, who had propped himself against the back of a chair and was watching us. "Where was this painted, do you know?"

"Aude told me when she asked me to sell it to her that it was the Bois de Boulogne, near their home in Pa.s.sy. Her mother painted it in June eighteen eighty, just before she stopped painting. She called it The Last Swan --that"s what"s written on the back, in any case. It is really fine, isn"t it? Henri would almost have killed to buy it back for Aude. He wrote me three times about it when she was dying. The third time was an angry letter, by the standards of Henri."

He waved a hand as if that emotion had been dismissed for all the ages to come. "I believe this was the final painting that Beatrice de Clerval made, although I cannot prove that. But that would explain the t.i.tle--it is her last swan--and the fact that I have never been able to find anything about a painting with a later date. Henri, of course, thinks that his painting is the last one--the one called The Swan Thieves. He is very strange about it. It is true that there was not a later one in the first exhibition of her work in the nineteen eighties--it was at the Musee de Maintenon, in Paris. You know about that show? I loaned this large 499.

canvas to them for it. In the end, it does not matter," he added, leaning slowly forward with his hands on the back of a chair. "It is a superb painting, one of the best in my collection. It will stay here until I die."

He didn"t add what might happen to it after that, and I decided not to ask him. I pointed instead to the portrait sketch. "Who is this?" It was not quite a professional piece of work--a depiction of a woman with wavy short hair like that of a movie star from the 1930s, a little clumsy in execution but also expressive around the eyes, which were full of life, and the thin, sensitive mouth. She seemed to look rather than speak, as if she"d resolved not to say anything, then or later, and it increased the intensity of her gaze. She wasn"t a pretty woman, exactly, but there was something handsome and even arresting about her; she had refused, boldly, to be pretty.

Caillet put his head to one side. "That is Aude," he said. "She gave me that portrait while we were still friends, and I have kept it in her honor. I thought she might have liked to have it hanging here with her mother"s paintings. I am sure she likes that, wherever she is now."

"Who did it?" The sketch said "1936" in one corner.

"Henri. It was six years after they met. The year before I left. He was thirty-four and I was twenty-four and Aude was fifty-six. So I have his portrait of Aude, and he has mine--a nice symmetry. As I told you, she wasn"t beautiful, although he was."

He turned away, as if the conversation had come to its logical conclusion, and if he wanted it to, it had. I rapidly pictured them all: he had left for Mexico just before the war, then, escaping not only love troubles but also the coming disaster in Europe. He had been ten years younger than Henri, and to an artist in his twenties, Aude must have seemed ancient at fifty-six (only four years more than my current age, I realized with a pang). But the woman in the sketch did not look ancient, and she did not look like Beatrice de Clerval, if the Vignot portrait was to be trusted. Not in 500.

the least, unless you counted the glow of the eyes. Where and how had Aude and Henri gotten through the war? They had both survived it. "So Henri Robinson is still alive?" I couldn"t help saying as we followed Caillet back to his gallery living room.

"He was alive last year," Caillet said without turning around. "He sent me a note on his ninety-seventh birthday. Turning ninety-seven makes one remember all one"s former amours, I suppose."

When we reached the sofas again, he did not make his gracious gesture for us to sit down but remained standing in the middle of the room. I realized that he must be eighty-eight himself, if I was calculating all this correctly. It hardly seemed possible. He stood in front of us, graceful, upright, his dark-red skin smooth, his white hair thick and brushed neatly back, his black suit with its unusual cut well-pressed, a man perfectly preserved, as if he had stumbled on the gift of eternal life and had wearied politely even of that. "I am tired now," he said, although he looked as if he could have stood there all day.

"You"ve been very kind," I told him at once. "Please forgive my asking you one more thing. With your permission, I"d like to write to Henri Robinson for some further information about Beatrice de Clerval"s work. Do you have an address you"d be willing to share with me?"

"Of course," he said, folding his arms, the first sign of impatience I"d seen. "I shall find the information for you." He turned and went out of the room, and we heard him calling someone in a controlled, low voice. After a moment he returned with an ancient address book, bound in leather, and the man who had brought us the tray of drinks. There was a little negotiation between them, and the man wrote something out for me while Caillet watched.

I thanked them both--it was an address in Paris, with an apartment number. Caillet checked it over my shoulder. "You may give him my best wishes -- from one old Frenchman to another."

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He smiled then, as if viewing something familiar from a great distance, and I felt guilt at having asked a favor so personal.

He turned to Mary. "Good-bye, my dear. It is nice to see a beautiful woman again." She gave him her hand, and he kissed it respectfully, without warmth. "Good-bye, mon ami." He shook hands with me--his grip was strong and dry, as before. "We probably will not meet again, but I wish you the best of luck with your research."

He walked us in silence to his front door and held it open; there was no sign of the servant now. "Good-bye, good-bye," he repeated, but so gently we could hardly hear him. I turned on the walk and waved to him once, where he stood framed by his roses and bougainvillea, impossibly upright, handsome, embalmed, alone. Mary waved, too, and shook her head without speaking. He did not wave back.

That night, as we made love for the second time ever--swimming into the current with more confidence, old lovers overnight--I found Mary"s cheeks wet with tears.

"What is it, my darling?"

"Just--today."

"Caillet?" I guessed.

"Henri Robinson," she said. "Caring for so many years for the old woman he loved." And she ran her hand down my shoulder.

502.

C HAPTER 91 1879.

She comes in to breakfast a little late but fresh, washed, only her eyes heavy. Her body is entirely new, unrecognizable to her, her hair done in the simple style she uses when Esme is not there. Her soul tugs inside her. Perhaps that is the reality of sin, to know the shape of the soul and feel it chafing inside the body. But her heart, shamefully, is light, and that makes the morning seem fair--the sea outside the windows is a giant mirror; the muslin of her skirts feels pleasant against her hands. She asks the innkeeper for news of Olivier, disingenuously, trying to look right at her. The old lady says that monsieur has gone out early for his walk and left an envelope for Beatrice on the front hall table. When she goes to see, the note is not there; perhaps he has removed it himself to give to her. She must ask him later.

The woman puts hot coffee and rolls before her, with a tart of jam; this thick, elderly person in a blue dress, bent at shoulders and waist, is Olivier"s age. She feels a kind of indignity on behalf of the old lady, whom Olivier could properly marry and make happy. Then she thinks of a little pa.s.sage from the night, something, a particular caress that must have lasted two or three minutes at most but that has stayed like a presence on her skin. She asks humbly if there is more b.u.t.ter and hears the woman"s "oui" spoken on the in-breath, and the pressure of a warm, impersonal hand on her shoulder. Beatrice wonders why she feels guiltier about this stranger, with her ap.r.o.n and her air of contentment, than about Yves, the overworked and now betrayed husband. But it is true. She does.

503.

And then he is there--Yves Vignot. It is one of the two strangest moments of her life. He comes into the dining room like a hallucination, peeling off his gloves, his hat and walking stick already somewhere at the entrance--now she remembers having heard the front door open and shut. The small hotel is full of him, he is everywhere, a blur of neat dark jacket, bearded smile, his "Eh, bien!" He has counted on surprising her, but the surprise that fills her is almost faintness. For a moment, the pleasant provincial room, a little raw and new, merges with their rooms in Pa.s.sy, as if her delight, her guilt, have summoned him to her side, or her to his.

"But I"ve really startled you!" He throws down his gloves and comes to kiss her, and she manages to rise in time. "I"m sorry, my dear. I should have known better." His face is all regret. "And you"re still a little unwell--how could I have thought to surprise you?" His kiss on her cheek is warm, as if he knows this will restore her.

"What a lovely shock," she manages to say. "How did you get away?"

"I told them my beloved wife was ill and that I needed to see to her--oh, I didn"t advertise any dangerous illness, but the supervisor was sympathetic enough, and as everyone else answers to me..." He smiles.

She can think of nothing to say that won"t come out with a quaver or sound like a lie. Fortunately, he is full of the pleasure of seeing her and of the adventure of his trip, so that by the time they sit down again to her cold coffee, he has already concluded that she looks better than expected, and that the train line is better than he remembered, and that he is thoroughly pleased at being away from the office. After he has washed his hands and had two cups of coffee and a large portion of bread, b.u.t.ter, and jam tart, he asks to see her rooms. He has already booked a room for himself; he won"t infringe on her little kingdom, he adds with a squeeze to her shoulder. He is so large, so dignified yet cheerful, his beard thick and well-trimmed. He is, she thinks, so young.

504.

On the way upstairs he puts his arm around her waist. He has missed her, he says, even more than expected. Not that he"d thought he wouldn"t miss her, but he missed her even more than that. His joy makes her want to weep. She has forgotten how safe his arm feels, how st.u.r.dy; now she remembers, from the touch of it. In her bedroom he shuts the door behind them and admires all her arrangements with the lightheartedness of a vacationer: the sh.e.l.ls she has collected for the dressing table, the small polished desk where she sketches if the weather is bad. She explains each of these things for as long as possible. He stands smiling at her through all of it.

"You look wonderfully healthy, now that I get a better view. You have real roses in your cheeks."

"Well, I have been out painting nearly every morning and afternoon." She will show him her canvases next.

"I hope Olivier goes with you," he says a little sternly.

"Of course he does." She finds her canvas of boats from the first sessions and hands it to him. "In fact, he has encouraged me to work every day, as long as I"m warmly dressed. I always remember to dress myself warmly."

"This is beautiful." He holds the painting up for a moment, and she thinks with a pang how encouraging he has always been, long before Olivier came along. Then he sets it down, careful, understanding that it is still not dry, and takes her hands. "And you are radiant."

"I"m a little tired still," she says, "but thank you."

"On the contrary, you"re blushing--there"s your old self indeed." He imprisons her hands in both his own, firm now, and kisses her lingeringly. His lips are second nature to her, and frightening. He gathers her face in his hands and kisses her again, then takes off his coat, murmuring something about not having yet bathed. He locks the door and draws the curtains. Travel, the release from work, have made him young again, he says--or she thinks this is what he says, because she hears it from behind the curtain of her 505.

hair, the pins loosened out of it, and then again during his gentle unb.u.t.toning, unbuckling, unhooking, his drawing a line down her body on the bed, taking her in his slow, matter-of-fact way, her long-accustomed response, the gap between them closing with a fiery familiarity in spite of the images behind her eyelids. It has been months since he has approached her, and she realizes now that he has probably been holding back out of concern for her health. How could she have thought otherwise?

At last, he sleeps against her shoulder for a few minutes, a tired, surprisingly young man with a growing bank account, a man who has escaped his life briefly and taken a train to be near her again.

506.

Dear Monsieur Robinson: Please excuse a note from a stranger. I am a psychiatrist working in Washington, DC; recently, I have been involved in the treatment of a distinguished American artist. His case is rather unusual, and some of it revolves around an obsession with the French Impressionist painter Beatrice de Clerval. I understand that you had both a personal and a professional connection with her and that you are a collector of her work, including the canvas known as The Swan Thieves.

Would you allow me to call on you at home in Paris for an hour or so in the next month? I would be very grateful if you could a.s.sist me with a little further information about her life and work. It could be of great importance to me in caring for my gifted patient. Please let me know at your earliest convenience.

Sincerely yours, Andrew Marlow, MD 507.

C HAPTER 92 Marlow Partly to distract myself from my visions and partly to see what he was doing, I went to visit Robert one time too many. I"d been in that morning, a Friday. When I returned to his room in the afternoon, I found him standing at the easel I had given him. It had been a long week for me, and I"d been sleeping poorly. I wished Mary would visit more often; I always seemed to rest well in her arms. As usual, I thought of her when I entered Robert"s room. I wondered, in fact, how he could look at me and not see the secrets I was keeping, and it reminded me how little I really knew about him. I could not hear his life through those well-washed old clothes, his frayed yellow shirt and paint-stained trousers, or even through the warm color of his face and arms below the rolled sleeves, the curl of his hair with its threads of silver. I could not even know him through the reddened, weary eyes he turned on me. Not knowing enough, how could I release him? And if I released him, how would I ever stop wondering about his love for a woman dead since 1910?

He was painting her today--no surprise there--and I sat down in the armchair to watch. He didn"t turn his easel away. I a.s.sumed that was a kind of pride, like his silence. She was faceless; he was still roughing in the rose color of her gown, the black sofa on which she sat. Part of his skill was this ability to paint without a model, I realized. Had that been one of her gifts to him?

Suddenly it was too much for me. I jumped out of my chair and took a step forward. He painted, arm raised, brush moving, ignoring me. "Robert!"

He said nothing, but he turned his eyes toward me for a split 508.

second, then went back to the canvas. I"m reasonably tall, reasonably fit, as I"ve said, although I don"t have anything like Robert"s imposing casual presence. I wondered what it would be like to punch him. Kate surely must have wanted to. And Mary. I could say, I did it for her. You can talk to anybody you want. "Robert, look at me."

He lowered his brush, giving me the patient, amused face I remember consciously turning on my parents as a teenager. I didn"t have any teenagers of my own, but this attention, which should have counted for something, made me angrier than any outburst on his part ever could have. He seemed to wait for the tiresome interruption to pa.s.s, so that he could paint again.

I cleared my throat, steadying myself. "Robert, do you understand my desire to help you? Would you like to lead a normal life again--a life out there?" I waved at the window, but I knew I"d already lost this round with the word "normal."

He turned back to the easel.

"I want to help you, but I can"t possibly do so unless you partic.i.p.ate. I have gone to some trouble for you, you know, and if you are well enough to paint, you are surely well enough to speak."

His face was gentle but closed now.

I waited. Could anything be worse than yelling at a patient? (Sleeping with his former lover, perhaps?) I felt my voice begin to rise in spite of myself. What angered me most was my sense that he knew I did not simply want to help him for his own sake.

"d.a.m.n you, Robert," I said quietly instead of shouting, but my voice shook. It came over me that in all my years of training and practice, I had never behaved this way with anyone. Never. I was still looking at him as I left the room. I wasn"t afraid he would lunge at me or throw something--I was the one at risk of that myself. I wished later I hadn"t kept an eye on him at that moment, because it forced me to see the change in his expression; he didn"t return my glance, but he raised his face toward the canvas, and it wore a faint smile. Triumph: a paltry victory, but probably the only kind he had these days.

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C HAPTER 93 1879.

Yves stays half a week, walking the beach with a hand on Olivier"s shoulder, kissing Beatrice on the back of her neck when she bends to pin up her hair. He is having a veritable holiday--in private he calls it a honeymoon. He loves the view of the Channel; it rests him enormously. But he must go back, to his regret, and he apologizes for having to leave them so soon. She does not dare look at Olivier the entire time Yves is there, except to pa.s.s salt or bread at the table. It is intolerable, and yet there are moments when she glances at herself in the mirror, or sees them strolling together, and feels surrounded by love, beloved by both, as if this is the right thing. They take a hansom with Yves to the station in Fecamp; Olivier demurs, but Yves insists that he must come along so that Beatrice will not have to ride back alone. The train exhales loudly; the wheels begin their husky motion. Yves leans out the window and waves, his hat in his hand.

They ride back to the hotel and sit on the veranda, talking about ordinary matters. They paint on the beach and eat their dinner--an old couple now that the third guest is gone. By some mutual consent, she does not visit Olivier"s room again, nor does he visit hers. Every wall between them has fallen already, and she does not long for a repet.i.tion. It is enough to have this silent memory in their midst. The moment that he--or the moment that she -- or the way his tears of surprise and pleasure fell onto her face. She had thought he would belong to her forever after such a transgression, but it is equally the other way around.

In the train back to Paris, when they are alone, he holds her 510.

hand like a bird in his large glove, and kisses it before she alights to claim her luggage. They speak very little. She knows, without asking, that he will come to dinner the next day. Together they will tell Papa almost all about their vacation. They will begin work together on their great painting. She will remember him, his long smooth body, his silvery hair, the young man in love inside him, until the day she herself dies. He will always be near her, a spirit of the Channel.

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C HAPTER 94 Marlow Henri Robinson"s reply came as a shock.

Monsieur le Docteur: Thank you for your letter. I think your patient must be a man named Robert Oliver. He came to see me in Paris nearly ten years ago, and again more recently, and I have good reason to believe that he took something valuable from my apartment on his second visit. I cannot pretend to want to a.s.sist him, but if you can bring some light to this matter I will be happy to see you myself. I will consider allowing you to view The Swan Thieves. Please be aware that it is not for sale. Shall we say during the first week of April, any morning, if that suits you?

Respectfully yours, Henri Robinson 512.

C HAPTER 95 Marlow I wished devoutly that I could take Mary to Paris with me, but she had to teach. From the way she declined, I knew that she wouldn"t have come even if I"d arranged the trip to fall during her next vacation; it was too big a gift for her to accept from me after Acapulco. Once had been a pleasure, but twice would be a debt. I found a book on the Musee d"Orsay, which I knew she"d longed to see, and she turned the leaves over slowly.

Still, she shook her head, standing in my kitchen, her long hair catching the light. A decisive shake: no. It was less a rejection than quiet self-knowledge on her part. She was making breakfast for us as we talked, a surprising gesture of domesticity. It was the fourth time she"d stayed over at my apartment--I could still count those nights. When she departed, even earlier than I--for her university studio or cla.s.sroom, or for the cafe where she liked to draw on lighter workdays--I left the bed unmade behind me and closed the door to the bedroom, to hold her scent. Now she flipped over four eggs and some bacon and set them in front of me with a grin. "I can"t go to France with you, but I can cook you an egg, this once. Don"t get any ideas, though."

I poured coffee. "If you go to France with me, you can have those nice hard-boiled eggs in little cups with your bread and jam, and much better coffee than this."

"Merci. You know the answer."

"Yes. But what will you say when I ask you to marry me, if I can"t even get you onto a plane to France?"