“I’ll hold your hand all the time and won’t let you fall over.”
And when I saw the expression on my father’s face I could only rejoice once more in my boy and regret nothing just nothing-that had given him to me.
They were going on to Italy. My father wanted Clare to see those works of art which had affected him so deeply when he had had eyes to see them. I believed he would see them again through Clare.
She was so gentle with him, so kind, not fussing too much but just enough to let him know how much she cared for him, letting him do what he could for himself and yet at the same time always being there if he should need help.
I felt glad that they had come. It was as though a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I no longer had a dark secret which must be withheld from them. I should be able to write to them freely in future.
“Please, Clare,” I said when they left, “You must come and see me often. It is difficult for me to come to Farringdon, but do come again soon.”
They promised that they would.
Two years had passed. Kendal was now approaching his fifth birthday.
He could draw very well and there was nothing he liked better than to come to the studio in the afternoons when there were no clients there and sit at a bench and paint. He painted the statues he had seen in his favourite Luxembourg Gardens. Chopin particularly delighted him but he did some recognizable pictures of Watteau, Delacroix and Georges Sand. He had a skill which I thought was miraculous. I was writing to my father regularly for he was always wanting news of Kendal and was delighted to hear of his interest in painting; he wrote that at five years old I had begun to show such leanings.
“It is wonderful,” wrote my father, ‘to know that the link is not broken. “
He and Clare came to Paris twice during that period.
He was almost blind now and his writing was becoming difficult to decipher. Clare often wrote in his place. She told me that the decline in his sight, though gradual, was definite. However, he had accepted it and was very happy to talk with her, and she was reading to him more and more. He was up to date with the news and always liked to learn what was happening in France.
“I don’t read to him anything that I think might distress him,” she wrote.
“He did get a little uneasy about the situation over there.
There seems to be a certain dissatisfaction with the Emperor and with the Empress. She is beautiful, I know, but we hear that she is extravagant and then of course she is Spanish and the French always did dislike foreigners. Look how they hated Marie Antoinette. I think your father is always a little anxious that what happened eighty years ago will start all over again. “
I didn’t take much notice of that when I read it. Life in Paris was so pleasant. We had our soirees where beautiful and intelligent people congregated. We talked art more than politics, but I did notice that the latter were beginning to come more and more into the conversation.
Nicole was delighted with life, I think. She lived luxuriously and loved her soirees. I think now and then she took a lover, but there was no really serious relationship. I did not enquire and she did not tell me. I think in her heart she was always aware of what she called my Anglo-Saxon respectability, and she wanted nothing disturbed.
I was not without my admirers. I had never been beautiful but I had acquired something during my years with Nicole. A poise, I suppose. My work was highly successful and I was treated with great respect. It was considered a symbol of social rank to have a Collison miniature, and with the perversity of fashion, my sex, which had been a drawback, now became an asset.
I liked some of the men who made approaches to me, but I could never enter into an intimate relationship. As soon as they showed any signs of familiarity my whole being would shrink and I would see that face leering at me. It had become more and more like the demon-gargoyle of Notre Dame as the years passed.
We were all very happy. I engaged a nursery governess for Kendal. I could not expect Nicole to take him out every day although she liked to on occasions. Jeanne Colet was an excellent woman, kind yet firm.
She was just what Kendal needed. He took to her immediately. He was a very lovable child. He was mischievous occasionally as most children are, but there was always an absence of malice in his mischief. He wanted to find out how things worked and that was why he destroyed them sometimes. It was never due to a desire to spoil.
I suppose I saw him as perfect; but it was a fact that others loved him on sight, and he was a favourite wherever he went. Even the grim concierge came out to see him as he passed in and out. He used to run in and tell me about the people he had met in the Gardens. He spoke a mixture of French and English which was enchanting and perhaps one of his attractions.
However, people noticed him and perhaps that was why when he came back and talked about the gentleman in the gardens I did not at first pay much attention.
There was a fashion at that time for kites. The children flew them in the Gardens every day. Kendal had a beautiful one with the oriflamme the ancient banner of France emblazoned across it. The gold flames on a scarlet background were most effective and it certainly looked very splendid flying up in the sky.
He used to take the kite into the Gardens every morning and he would come back and tell me how high it had flown far beyond the other kites. He had thought it was going to fly right to England to see his grandfather.
Then one day he came back without his kite. He was in tears.
He said: “It flew away.”
“How did you let it do that?”
“The man was showing me how to fly it higher.”
“What man?”
“The man in the Gardens.”
I looked at Jeanne.
“Oh, it’s a gentleman,” she said.
“He’s sometimes there. He sits and watches the children play. He often has a word for Kendal.”
I said to Kendaclass="underline" “Never mind. We’ll get you another kite.”
“It won’t be my oriflamme.”
“I expect we can find another somewhere,” I assured him.
The next morning he went offkiteless and rather disconsolate.
“I expect it’s with my grandfather by now,” he said, and that seemed to comfort him. Then he said anxiously: “Will he be able to see it?”
His face puckered a little and he showed more than sorrow for the loss of his kite. He was thinking of how his poor grandfather would not be able to see that glorious emblem. It was that thoughtfulness, that feeling for others, which made Kendal so endearing.
“I’ll find another oriflamme kite if I have to scour Paris,” I said to “I’ll do the same,” she told me.
I had a sitting that morning but promised myself that I would go out to look in the afternoon. There was no need to. Kendal came back from the Gardens with a kite about twice the size of the lost one, and more, glorious, more flamboyant was the red and gold emblem of ancient France.
He was so joyous I just knelt down and hugged him.
“Mind the kite,” he warned me.
“It’s a very precious one.”
I looked at Jeanne questioningly.
“It was the gentleman in the Gardens,” she said.
“He was there this morning with the kite.”
“You mean … he’s given it to Kendal?”
“He said it was partly his fault that the other one was lost. He and Kendal played with it all morning.”
I was a little uneasy.
“There was no need for him to replace it,” I said, ‘and even so, to buy such an obviously expensive one. “
A few days passed and each morning Kendal went off with his kite. He had been flying, he told me, with the gentleman in the Gardens.
There came what I was waiting for a cancellation from a sitter and I seized the opportunity. I was going to see the gentleman in the Gardens for myself.