“Clare,” he said. The first time he’d said my name in years. “Clare, will you?”
The question hung in the air. Behind me, the room quieted as artists and mutilés gradually filtered out, headed to suppers and homes and dreams still to come. Mine was right here.
“Luc.” I felt his name against the roof of my mouth. It tasted like summer. “I’ll help. Of course I’ll help.” I combed down his damp hair with my fingers. “But not only for the mask.” I hated the words as they came out of my mouth. “You have to do more than walk the streets again; you have to walk through life.”
He broke my gaze at last and put his face to a towel. “You make it sound so easy.” His voice muffled through the thick fabric.
“I know it won’t be.” I thought of Finlay, of his ups and downs, of his estrangement from his family, of those days when he had to fight with himself just to leave his flat. But also of his classes, Evelyn the model, and his newly hopeful letter. “But the mask is a bandage. To heal, there must be more.”
“Is there more?”
There had to be. Luc walked through the door of that studio, and suddenly the future stretched out, past the battlefields and shells. If he couldn’t step beyond all that, then what use was seeing the future at all?
I squeezed the wet sponge, leaving drops of water on my skirt. “Have you found employment?”
He shook his head. “Who would hire someone like me?”
“A hero of France?” My voice echoed in the room. Even Mrs. Ladd had gone down to the courtyard, to rinse the bowls and plaster brushes. “Plenty.”
That old guarded look was coming up again. “Wounds and medals don’t make a hero.”
“I’m sure you could take up your old place at the university. Finish your studies. War interrupted that.”
“But then what? I studied to be a teacher.” He wiped the corners of his eyes with a thumb. “I wouldn’t inflict myself on a roomful of students now.”
“You’ll have your mask.”
He stayed quiet. I didn’t know if he was considering or ignoring.
“Tennis?”
He reached to his shoulder in response. I wondered what old wound hid there. “Those days are past.”
“You could coach, I’d think. Couldn’t you?”
“Clare.” He sighed. “Don’t.”
“Maybe you need something new.” Water dripped into the basin. “I have a pamphlet I’ll send with you. There’s an institute now, you know.”
“To teach invalides and mutilés a trade. I know.”
I tried to push a brightness into my voice. “You can learn just about anything. Tailoring, shoemaking, tinsmithing. Clockmaking, I think. Typesetting, binding…oh, all sorts of things.” I blotted along the curve of his cheek. “I had one fellow who trained to be a bookkeeper. He thought of industrial design—that’s a choice, too—but decided—”
“Please stop.”
“Close your eyes again.” I moved the sponge to the skin beneath his brow. “Why not art, then?” I said quietly.
“Art?” Behind his lids his eyes moved. “I was never that good.”
“At teaching, you were.” Like at that lesson under the chestnut tree, my fingers were on his face. “I don’t know how you would have been at history or philosophy or whatever you were studying to teach, but as an art tutor, you were—” My voice caught. “You were very good.”
He exhaled against my wrist. I knew he was remembering the same scene. “And did it work?” he asked.
“Did what?”
“The lesson.”
“I ended up at the School of Art, after all.” I couldn’t keep the pride from my voice.
He smiled, the first one I’d seen in eight years. “See, you were too busy to miss me.”
“But I did,” I said without thinking. “Miss you.”
I expected more of that smile, but his face tensed. “Still so teasing, are you?”
“You once said you were always at my service.” The sponge reached the edges of his scar. “There were days I wished for a knight.”
“That night you spent in Paris,” he said. “You could have used one then.”
He had to be guessing. He didn’t know about the taxi ride to that house, about Stefan in the mirror, about the night huddled in the cemetery of a little white-stoned church. My fingers tightened on the sponge. “What do you mean?”
“What happened that evening.”
How could it be more than guessing? I didn’t tell him. I’d never told a soul. “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Water dribbled between my fingers.
“You didn’t travel with—”
“No,” I said, too quickly. The taste of Suze rose on my tongue, and it made me flush. I’d gone with Stefan. I’d taken the drink from him. I hadn’t locked the door. “I told you, nothing happened.” I dropped the sponge in the bucket with a splash.
He opened his eyes. “Please don’t. I’m…sorry.” He was saying it for now and for all those years ago. “Clare, I’m sorry.” Maybe even for Stefan and the night in Paris. “Don’t go.” He reached up and touched the knob of my wrist, just once.
Everyone else had left, but I had stayed by his side. And I would, as long as he’d let me.
I turned my hand. Our palms brushed. “I promise.”
—
The mask took me a month to complete. It wasn’t because I wasn’t diligent. No, it took me so much longer because I wanted it to be perfect. It was Luc. I couldn’t give him any less.
I cleaned the negative cast we took of his face. With fresh plaster of Paris, I made a positive and smoothed out any little lumps and divots left behind by the casting process.
“It was a good cast,” Pascalle complained. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“No, you followed the procedure,” I said quietly, scraping my knife across the dried plaster. “But this is one I need to do myself.”
She stirred a bowl of wet plaster of Paris. “This will start hardening in a moment. You need to take the next cast.”
“It’s not ready yet.”
I fiddled with smoothing until I’d ruined that bowl of plaster and had to mix another. Pascalle sighed, but she helped me make the second negative. We then filled it with plasticine clay to make a positive “squeeze.” An inelegant name for a piece of sculpture.
I lifted the plaster cast off the gray plasticine. Luc’s ruined face looked up at me from the table and I swallowed back tears.
“Miss Ross.” Mrs. Ladd was suddenly at my elbow. “Miss Bernard told me you’ve been crying.”
“No, I haven’t.” I shot Pascalle a look across the room, but she was studiously involved with a brush and some turpentine. “I’ve been tired.”
She settled into a chair across from me. “You understand why we cannot cry in the studio.”
“The soldiers are sensitive to their appearances,” I said automatically. “They have a difficult enough time with reactions outside of the studio. I know. But…”
“But you’re only crying over a squeeze. Is that what you were going to say?”
“Yes.”
“Miss Ross,” she said, “look at those soldiers sitting over there.”
Though they sat with wine and hearty conversation, there was an alertness about them. A tense watchfulness. They were like deer ready to bolt, waiting for the first sneer or startled look.
“They don’t care that you are only crying down onto a squeeze. In that squeeze, in that other ruined face, they see their own.”
I swallowed, and I nodded.
“Is this the same soldier as the other day?” She reached across and pulled the plasticine closer. “It is a clean cast. He doesn’t appear too bad. You should do well on this one.”
“I hope I can.”
“You always do. Why are you doubting now?”
I ran a finger along the edge of the plasticine face and didn’t answer. I couldn’t tell her how seeing all of the details, being able to touch each and every scar in the clay, made it seem so much more real to me. That, even though I helped soldiers worse off than Luc all the time, helping him meant so much more.