Every Man for Himself - Beryl Bainbridge [39]
The room was cold; McKinlay had forgotten to close the porthole. I was tugging it shut when I heard Scurra exclaim, ‘Good God.’ I turned, thinking he had taken ill, but he was standing in front of my mother’s picture.
‘The painting,’ he said. ‘How strange to see it here on this particular wall. Surely it can’t be part of the ship’s furnishings?’
‘It isn’t,’ I said. ‘It was in my cousin’s house and I’m taking it home to my uncle.’
‘Do you know who the subject is?’
‘I do,’ I replied, and fetched whisky and glasses from the cabinet. He sat down on the sofa and regarded me steadily while I poured out our drinks. I was shaking. I knew instinctively that he was about to tell me something, something I’d been waiting to be told since first setting eyes on him in the breakfast room of the South Western Hotel. I saw him more clearly than I had before, noticed his large hands, his muscular neck, the threads of grey in his dark hair. For once, his eyes were sober, watchful. When I gave him his glass his fingers touched mine and I snatched my hand away, not wanting him to feel I was trembling.
At last, he said, ‘Don’t misunderstand me. I didn’t know her well. I can tell you very little on that score.’
‘Where was it?’ I asked.
‘In Provence. Twenty-four years ago.’ He explained that he’d been in Paris on business and had cause to go south, to Aix, to stay in the country house of a dealer in pictures. One day they had gone to the studio of a painter called Cézanne where the dealer had bought a still life and two portraits, one of an old man, the other of a girl—
‘My mother,’ I said.
‘I knew her name and knowing of the connection advised the dealer to get in touch with your uncle. He dislikes modern works, as you know, but in this instance I thought he would make an exception.’
‘And did you meet my mother?’
‘On two occasions only. Once in the painter’s studio and once in the local café.’
‘What was she like?’
‘She was just a girl. A little like the painting, a little like you.’
‘I look like her?’
‘A very slight resemblance . . . something about the eyes. It’s a long time ago. If I had known I would be interrogated I might have taken more notice.’
‘I thought you did know,’ I said, startling myself.
‘My dear boy,’ he remarked dryly. ‘Even I can’t be expected to know everything.’
‘You’ve told me very little,’ I cried, and was surprised at how angry I sounded. ‘I need to know more.’
‘There’s little more to tell,’ he protested. ‘A girl sitting on a lop-sided stool, a smell of rabbit glue from the iron pot on the stove, a smudge of cobalt blue on the stone flags of the floor—’
‘Who was she with?’
‘The first time she was alone, save for Cézanne. The second, she was waiting on tables.’
For some moments I couldn’t speak.
‘I’ve upset you,’ he said. ‘Forgive me, but you asked to be told.’
‘It’s hard,’ I said, my voice wobbling, ‘to think of her serving in a café.’
‘Come now,’ Scurra chided. ‘I thought you believed in the dignity of labour and the equality of man.’
‘I do,’ I shouted.
‘But not when it approaches too close to home, is that it?’
He was wrong. My thoughts were not really of my mother at all. In the newspaper cuttings she had figured as a widow whose husband, unnamed, had died abroad. I had never thought of my father, never heard him described, never known anyone who had spoken with him, not even my uncle. My mother and he had met in London, she had eloped to Paris with him, they had begotten me and two months before I was born he had vanished from the picture. It was my mother who came into my dreams and that only as someone I cried out for when the old woman made those terrible noises and the yellow bile jerked on to my cheek.
‘And did you never meet him?’ I blurted out.
‘Who?’ Scurra asked. He was sitting on the edge of the sofa, shoulders hunched, his expression guarded.
‘My father.’
‘She