courting me.’
‘That is good news,’ she said. ‘But be careful. I don’t trust him. Not for one minute.’
I rubbed my arms for warmth in the cool cellar. Mama had jars filled with everything from rhubarb to carrots, all stacked nicely on wooden shelves. The canned meat she kept in dirt divots carved into the wall. The secret to surviving war was to prepare for it, she had told me.
‘Don’t let anyone know about your food cache, Mama. They’d come to steal, I know it.’
‘Over my dead body.’
Next to the shelves was a brass-buckled chest. Charlotte’s name had been painted on the top in childlike writing. ‘What’s this?’
Mama waved me off as she drank more wine from the bottle, but I opened it anyway. Inside were hundreds of metal paint tubes, bound by string according to colour—the remnants of Charlotte’s premarital dreams of becoming an artist. I ran my hands over them, counting the different shades and hues. ‘There’s so many tubes. Why are there so many?’
Mama scoffed. ‘She’s married, remember. She doesn’t paint anymore, or do much of anything if it isn’t for that husband of hers.’
I stopped counting when I realized I couldn’t count them all in one sitting. ‘There’s enough paint to cover every wall in the city!’
Mama peered into the chest, her lips wet with red wine. ‘Waste. All of it.’
Hidden behind the narrow end of the chest, covered in a thick layer of cobwebs, were several canvases that had been slashed right down the middle with a very sharp knife. ‘And what about the canvases?’
Mama flipped through them, checking to see if all the canvases had suffered the same dismal fate. ‘They’re all ruined. Shame. I suddenly had an idea we should paint a portrait of Pétain with one of his prostitutes and hang it at the Hotel du Parc!’
‘There’s not a canvas big enough for faces that hideous.’
Mama caught herself from gagging. ‘I can imagine. Fraud of a man, touting family values while sleeping his way across the country.’
I flipped through the canvases myself. Sure enough, every single one had been ruined. ‘Why would Charlotte destroy these?’
‘It does seem vicious, doesn’t it?’
Charlotte had always taken great care of her painting supplies, guarding them as if they were gold, so it didn’t surprise me she had stored the paints in the darkest corner of the root cellar for safekeeping. However, the fate of the canvases had been a shock, destroying them the way she did.
‘You remember, after she wed she took all her works off our walls, including that one of the Allier River, the promenade landscape she was so fond of. She says it’s hanging in her new apartment, but I have no idea since she never invites me over—have you been there?’
‘I haven’t seen it either. She’s been very private since her marriage.’
‘Mmm.’ Mama nodded as if she wasn’t surprised. ‘What she did with the rest of her works I can only guess. By the looks of the canvases, I’m sure they didn’t survive.’
The paint’s shiny, silver tubes glinted in the soft candlelight. In an odd way I felt as if I was intruding on their resting place, as if the lid was supposed to stay closed forever, and yet there I was, submersed in an intrusive curiosity. I lowered the chest’s lid slowly, the hinges creaking.
‘It’s all very sad.’
‘What is?’
I wiped the dust off the letters that made up Charlotte’s name. ‘Charlotte’s dreams. Forgotten as much as this chest, the paints.’
Mama stood silent, looking at the chest with Charlotte’s name written below the slashed canvases like an epitaph. A tear welled in one eye, and she sniffed it away. ‘I can only guide my children. I can’t make you do something you won’t—’ She hung her head down. ‘Sometimes I feel I can speak for you. But other times, I know I can’t.’
I assumed Mama was referring to the cadre of moments she tried to talk Charlotte out of getting married. Although Charlotte married her husband for love, the timing of her union was suspect, just after the armistice when Papa declared himself a staunch Pétainist, and her husband became a Vichy diplomat. Mama always said the path of Pétain was a dead one, and she had no plans to follow a dead man.
‘Is that why you didn’t tell me about Charlotte’s baby?’
Mama winced hard. I hadn’t forgotten she asked me to see Charlotte first thing when I came back to Vichy.
‘I’m sorry about that, Adèle. I am. I couldn’t bring myself to