the chair, brushing her bobbed brown hair from her face, her lit cigarette burning between two fingers, waiting for me to paint.
I closed my eyes, and took two or three deep breaths before I noticed the darkness in my mind had turned into a swirl of colours, some bright as the sun, others a mix of blue and grey. What do I paint? Thoughts of the police, the urgency of what I’d heard at Antoine’s ebbed like a slow pulse through my veins. And the woman I saw at the Morris Column…
My eyes popped open, and I painted what was in my heart. A naked woman, beautiful, raw, and bold.
‘Christ, Adèle. You can paint.’ Mama held the lantern up to her eyes, leaning closer to the wall. ‘What is that you wrote underneath? Les Femmes de la Nation? It’s very good—this painting. Almost better than—’
‘Don’t say that, Mama. It’s not better than Charlotte’s.’
She shrugged. ‘Say what you will.’ She flicked her cigarette. ‘A Picasso if I didn’t know better,’ she said, and I laughed.
‘No, Mama,’ I said. ‘It is not.’
I dabbed the brush into the red paint to touch up the last letter before standing back to admire my work. I had to admit it was better than the painting I did at the convent. With this one, I almost thought it was worth a winter’s rationing of coal.
‘Did you hear about the woman in the square?’
‘I heard.’ Mama snubbed her cigarette out in the dirt wall, exhaling after a long inhalation. ‘This painting of yours would cause just as much panic for the regime.’
‘You think so?’
‘Think of how much commotion that woman caused in the square.’ Mama’s eyes brightened next to the lantern. ‘Adèle, you could paint this!’ she said, pointing at the wall. Her voice was full of excitement, something I hadn’t heard from her in a long time. ‘There are thousands of walls in Vichy that could serve as your canvas. You said it before, there’s enough paint to cover every wall in this city!’
‘I said that?’
‘You did,’ Mama said. ‘The last time we were down here together.’
Using Charlotte’s paints somehow seemed wrong, knowing how strongly she felt about painting. The leopard dress was one thing; she had thrown it out, didn’t even know Mama had saved it from the rubbish bin. ‘I don’t know…’
‘Does this have something to do with Charlotte?’
‘You know how she is, Mama. If she ever found out…’
‘She doesn’t visit. Even if she did, she wouldn’t come down here.’ Mama walked away holding the wall with one hand for balance, talking as she went. ‘Won’t even let me know where my granddaughter is buried…’ She yelped a little cry, and I chased after her.
‘Mama, wait!’ I said, and I caught up to her near the kitchen.
‘If Charlotte throws a fit that her paints are gone, so be it,’ she said. ‘I’ll have a talk with her. ‘I bought the paints.’ She patted my shoulder. ‘All right?’
She left me to go upstairs to her bedroom, and I stood in the dark. The vineyard was quiet, and so was the chateau, and I sat down at the table, waiting for morning.
I woke up to the sun rudely shining through the kitchen window, with my head slumped over on the table. I shuffled out to the patio, heavy and dog-tired, with a crick in my neck from sleeping slumped over on the table. The doors to the barrel cellar were closed, and there was a settled quietness.
‘She made it to Laudemarière,’ I said, yawning. ‘She must have.’
I rubbed my ears, yawning again, when the barrel cellar door burst open, and I jumped from the crack of wood on wood. The man from last night paced in circles. He looked to the vineyard and then the field making sharp turns. I rushed over.
‘It’s sunrise—she’s not back.’ He unravelled a crumpled piece of paper in his shaking hands, his lit cigarette glowing brighter with his breath, but then pounded his forehead with his fist. ‘I don’t know where this is,’ he said to himself.
‘She’s not back?’ I took the paper.
‘Would I be standing here now if she were?’ The cigarette slipped from his mouth onto the ground. ‘I’ll have to go in her place,’ he said, taking a frantic breath. ‘She was probably arrested. But I know nothing about the spas in the Auvergne.’
Arrested? The paper had been crumpled over and over from having been in his hands for hours; the writing now just faded scratches, but still