Mesmerised (6 page)

I never wanted to leave you

But we knew
I had to go

The pale light of morning came much too soon

I should have told you so.

Voices from the audience join her.

I should have told you so.

At the next table, a woman wearing a silver brocade dress, hair high in a chignon, croons with a far away expression. Her hands rest on the table in front of her. It is as if she is making a confession. The barman stands mesmerised with his arms behind his back. Edouard pats his own knee in time to the music and I squeeze Blanche’s fingers gently in my own.

Then Victorine’s performance is over and Blanch
e goes behind the bar to get her violin. She holds the instrument by its neck and walks through the applauding crowd. As she stands inside the ring of lamps with chin-rest at her neck and eyes closed, she raises the bow and waits. The whole room is encompassed in a rich, commanding sound as the bow slides over the strings. Then a breath-taking silence for several seconds before Blanche plays an old melody. Her soul is inside the music, to my mind, not exactly like a picture in sound but suggestive, so that at one point I feel the warmth of a summer sea at sunset lapping against the shore at Deauville and the next minute I am tasting something cold like a snow flake upon my tongue. When she finishes people are standing, handclapping, and shouting ‘Bravo’. She walks towards me, laughing with her eyes. Edouard leans over and whispers in my ear, ‘You must bring her to one of my mother’s soirées.’

My Work

May 1st

‘Paint the essential character of things.’

Camille Pissarro

As a medical student, I did my apprenticeship in the Hospital for Sick Children. Those vivid times taught me to
become the doctor I am today. I can still see those hurrying nurses carrying vessels filled with body fluids amid the choir of maternal wailing that accompanied the moans of children. Patients lying still and dumb in the cacophony; overheated flesh and dull pleading eyes between sheets stained with blood and shit. Big rectangular rooms like barracks, spirited by disease; floor to ceiling windows bringing light and brightness for the too sick to shun; pockets of silence hanging around the few beds that were stripped back to their greying mattresses, and the families that once surrounded them disappeared into the ether.

Memories of
Doctor Emile Trousseau, in his white coat and scorpion tail moustache entering the scene:

‘Next!’ he used to shout, clapping his hands.

A nurse pulls a baby away from its mother. ‘He has diphtheria. He must have the operation.’

Then being told in the staff room how it all made sense really
. That yes, the majority of the babies do die, but best to perform the tracheotomy anyway, and remove the laryngeal obstruction. Science will one day arrive at a place where the babies will live to tell the tale. But whilst we wait for that to happen, those who haven’t the time queue on the stairs to my apartment. Once again, I am careful not to pinch skin or cloth with my footsteps. Every few yards I say hello to no one in particular. The door to 2C is slightly ajar. An old and wizened person with an androgynous face pops their head out into the hallway. ‘Get away with you,’ their world-weary voice calls in my wake. ‘Get away with you and your fucking circus here every day.’

The door slams, the sound reverberates and the walls and floor send tremors
as if from an earthquake. First in line are a mother and child. I open the door, usher them in, stooping to pick up my post.

It is a fine day
. Through the window, the sun is so bright and warming that I have to close the shutters. I sit behind my desk and wave for my patients to sit down in front of it. The mother wears a brown serge shapeless dress. She has fair hair and ruddy cheeks as if she has been drinking. The boy sits beside her with no shoes, picking his nose.

‘How can I help?’ I ask.

‘I am Madame Bonnet,’ she says. ‘And this is Gustave. It’s not all the time, Doctor, but when Gustav shits there is no time for him to get out into the yard. He ruins his clothes with it and our house stinks.’

I watch the boy. He kicks his legs and
stares at the wall. The mother smacks his arm. He turns around to face me. I make a guess that he is about six years old.

‘What’s it like?’

‘What’s what like?’

‘The stool, his motions.’

The mother looks at me. Her brown irises are vacant.

‘The shit,’ I say.

‘It’s like water, green, with jelly bits and it keeps on coming and coming and coming,’ she is making waves with her arms.

‘All day?
He seems all right
now
.’

‘No, only in the morning but his stomach makes noises like those machines in the pub.’

‘Gustav, will you come and stand next to me for a second, I want to have a look at your belly.’

Gustav ignores me but swings his legs with greater gusto. His mother lashes out again and he stands abruptly then slowly saunters over to my desk.

I rub my hands together to make them warm, lift the boy’s holey chemise to reveal a swollen abdomen beneath dusty, grey skin.

‘How often does he have a bath?’

The mother guffaws.

‘Do you have a standpipe close to your house?’

‘Just outside. We don’t live in the country, you know.’

‘Make him wash his hands before he eats. Actually, it would be better if the whole family did this. Do you feed him vegetables, meat?’

The mother guffaws again.

‘Do you get pain, Gustav?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Where do you get your pain?’

‘Here,’ he says, pointing to his navel.

‘And what do you do when you get your pain?’

The boy comically walks around the room, holding his middle, bending over and crying, ‘Aw, it hurts. It really hurts.’

His mother and I share a smile.

‘Any vomiting?’

‘Yeah, but not ’
im,’ she says.’

‘You?’

Madame Bonnet rubs her belly. At least, hers is a healthy condition. I know the remedy that will alleviate Gustav’s symptoms, but the problem is from eating rotten food and lack of hygiene and I doubt this will change. I leave them alone whilst I make up his medicine in my dispensary.
Podophyllyum
, common name, Mayapple. I pour about twenty tiny pillules of the 30
th
potency into a small vial. I tell the mother she must administer the prescription twice a day until he’s better. She must not leave the medicine in direct sunlight. I show her how I have made an indent in the cork so she can pour the remedy into it and directly into Gustav’s mouth and I tell her to come back next week. She takes four grimy sous out of her pocket and places them reluctantly on my desk. The money barely covers the cost of the medicine.

‘Next week I won’t charge but I want to see him, even if he’s
better.’

The mother nods. When they leave, I open my letters quickly before I invite the next patient in. One is from my friend Camille. His wife is in labour. The midwife has just arrived. Would I come along whenever I can? The second is from my father
, which reminds me that he might be interested to learn I will be exhibiting a painting at the Salon des Refusés.

More memories.

A conversation with my father:

‘You’re a sympathetic young man, Paul. Can’t you forget art, which is never going to earn you a decent living and, I don’t know, be a doctor?’

‘Be a doctor?’

‘Yes. Go to Paris. Study at La Sorbonne.’

Those last few months at home were bittersweet. The weather had been fine. I’d taken my easel outside, to paint what was left of the inn in a series of canvases that caught the light at different times of the day. I did not want to leave Lille. I was already practising the only thing I ever wanted to do. But my father had paid for a place at the university.

‘I’ve heard there are studios where you can receive art tuition in your spare time. I know how important the subject is to you. It can be your hobby. More than a hobby perhaps, but not a career.’

The days shortened and, as they did, I felt a tug of rebelliousness.
I was curt with my father, offhand with my mother, slamming doors and hitting the wall with my fist. My father cornered me, slapped me verbally with good reason until I had to admit that helping people with their ailments could, possibly, be a satisfying profession.

I tear open the envelope. As usual, his writing is full of concern. He asks if I am being over generous with my time and if I have enough money to eat. I have told him I do well enough several times but still he sends me a cheque every so often for several hundred francs. I rub the cheque
between thumb and forefinger, finding it something tangible to show he cares.

I take a hansom to La Varenne. On the ride into the countryside, I realise that I didn’t have an opportunity to mention to Charcot that Victorine would like to make portraiture of Bella Laffaire. It is not within my nature to feel comfortable about letting someone down and I am upset by the realisation that this is exactly what I have done. Modern art is important and not just aesthetically, it is a visual historical document of our world.

To the clip-clop of horse’s hooves
, I travel down an avenue where the tall trees filter light as if through a lace curtain. The fields to either side are Camille’s current inspiration. I recognise the vivid greens and pale yellows.

When I
arrive, I walk through Julie’s vegetable garden that is less than luscious at this time of year, and enter the equally spare house with its timber walls and copper pots. Camille meets me at the door. He is brimming with pride.

‘It’s a boy,’ he tells me excitedly. ‘We’ll call him Lucien.
Let me pour you a glass to celebrate.’

I missed the birth but they did not need me. Julie is wan. She has Lucien
at her breast. Both mother and baby seem extremely content.

‘W
ill you give the baby something, to keep him well?’

I sit down at the wooden table with its hand-embroidered tablecloth and Camille brings over a bottle of local red wine. He pours two glasses and pushes one towards me. I take a sip.

‘You can’t be more well than well, Camille.’

‘It’s a dangerous world.’

‘In an epidemic we can give a remedy to ward off any symptoms. In the meantime, I will come here anytime you are worried. This is excellent wine,’ I say, tipping my glass to the light to watch it glow.

‘Would you like a glass Julie?’ Camille calls to other side of the room.

‘Do you want to get your baby drunk, Camille?’

‘He’ll get drunk i
f you drink wine? Through the milk?’

‘How come men don’t know anything?’ Julie asks me.

‘Anyway, I need to pay you for coming,’ says Camille.

‘We’re friends, it’s
all right, I would have come anyway.’

‘I am a friend but you still have to survive.’

I look around at the humble surroundings and so many canvases stacked up against the walls. ‘And so do you,’ I say.

‘This is your work. You must
take something. I’ll be affronted if you don’t.’

‘A
painting then.’

Camille’s dry, fleshy hand reaches across the tabl
e. I grasp it. The deal is done.

It is late in the evening. I’m outside Blanche’s home, leaning against a street lamp, blowing clouds of frozen air towards the starry sky. I wear my old coat and scarf but my nose is so cold it reminds me it’s there. This time it is I who has brought her dinner. A friend of mine, a fellow artist, owns a restaurant where they make the best onion soup. His wife has sold me a pot, together with a chunk of pungent Gruyere and a freshly baked baguette, all packed with pink tissue paper in a straw bag. When Blanche arrives we don’t speak, she simply takes the bag and opens the front door.

‘I’ve run out of kerosene,’ she
says eventually.

By the light of the moon, we manage to spark a fire in the small square room at the front of the house
. There is a velvet armchair but no other furniture. Blanche has brought in a stool and a music stand. I have a large piece of paper attached to a canvas on a frame, which I place on the music stand. I sit on the stool facing the armchair where Blanche has settled. Charcoal pinched between my fingers, I take it to the page. The music stand collapses. Blanche laughs and I fumble to set it straight again. Flames lap up the sides of the chimney and glow on her face. All around me are candles so I can see what I draw, but I don’t think I can draw now. I stare at her face. Look away. If this is going to be a portrait I must ascertain her physiology. I must understand how her clothing falls over her person. I must contemplate the flesh beneath, her breasts and the muscle of her thighs. My lips and my mouth are dry. She coughs into a handkerchief and dark shadows appear on the cloth.

‘Please humour me, let me find you a remedy,’ I say.