At the Edge of Summer

Madame left me at the table in the rose garden while she went to give instructions to Marthe on refreshments. I pulled on my gloves, straightened my hat, sat back-straight on the crooked wooden chair. Not that it mattered. Luc and his friend didn’t look my way at all. I could have been crying my eyes out and no one would have noticed.

On a rectangle of lawn, Luc had ranged out a net and pounded it into the ground, amid apologies that the grass wasn’t clipped short enough.

“I thought you were joking when you said you did not have a proper court here,” Mr. Bauer said, opening a case with a polished racket. “At the weekends, do you not come here to practice?”

“I come…” He glanced at me, barely. “I come to help my maman.”

To help my maman. I tightened my fingers on the sketchbook on my lap.

“I know why you really come each weekend,” his friend said. “Crépet, perhaps we can teach the fräulein to swing a racket, eh?”

“With the tournament next week?” Luc bounced the ball. He’d changed into duck trousers and a white shirt like Mr. Bauer, though Luc’s were unpressed. He’d combed back his hair with pomade. He looked far too respectable. “I hardly have time to play schoolteacher.”

Though I hadn’t the slightest interest in learning tennis, at that moment I wanted nothing more. “I didn’t realize I was such an inconvenience.” I stood. “I’ll try.”

Luc glowered but Mr. Bauer grinned. “Fräulein, if you will come and take this racket, I will show you what to do.”

“This is really a waste of time,” Luc said, but I walked out onto the lawn and took the offered racket.

“Now, two hands, please, like this. Hold tight.”

Luc rolled his eyes.

Mr. Bauer was explaining how to keep my back straight, how to extend my elbow, how to keep my arms just like that, when Madame came out of the house with her writing case tucked under an arm.

“Mademoiselle!” Her voice was sharp, and I jumped away from where Mr. Bauer held the racket.

“Madame, I was just…”

She strode across the lawn to me. “Perhaps you’ve been in the sun for long enough.” Madame, who dug in the rose garden until she was as brown as a Gypsy, didn’t worry about the sun. And yet her brow was creased in a worry that I couldn’t explain. “Please gather your things.”

“Fräulein.” Mr. Bauer touched his hat. “I regret your departure.”

Luc, concentrating on his shoelaces, didn’t say a word.

Madame Crépet escorted me upstairs, leaving both me and my sketch pad in my tower room. She nodded, once, and said, “Perhaps it’s best if you stay up here the rest of the afternoon. The day has grown warm.” With no other explanation than that, she left.

The windows were open and I threw myself onto the bench beneath one. The breeze cooled my face. I hadn’t done a thing, and here both Luc and Madame were acting as though I’d done something awful. Why couldn’t they just explain things to me? Why couldn’t Luc just look me straight in the eye and tell me what I’d done? I leaned out and saw the stretch of green lawn and the river, but no sign of him or Mr. Bauer or their tennis match.

I took off my hat and gloves, pushed up my sleeves, and climbed out of my bedroom window.

I could hear the thwap of the tennis ball against rackets, punctuated by the occasional laugh and shout in French. I pressed my back against the wall and inched up the roof towards the ridgepole. The tiles were slick with moss, and my boots were worn on the bottom. I swallowed down any thoughts of how far it was to the ground and edged up, sidestep by sidestep.

But it was worth the climb. I could see clear around the house, from the river to the linden-lined drive in the front. Down the other side of the ridgepole was a window bordered in faded blue drapes. Through the window I could see a burnished tennis racket hanging on the wall. Luc’s room.

Over there, down on the wide back lawn, was the impromptu tennis match. Mr. Bauer moved, loose-limbed and nonchalant. He was the one laughing and calling out French insults. Luc played rigid and intense. Even from my perch on the roof, I could tell that he was silent.

I didn’t know what it was, why, in a breath, Luc had changed. When Madame and the sophisticated Stefan Bauer crossed the lawn, reminding us that the world was bigger than our quiet moment, Luc pushed me away. He acted the way he had that day he’d come home from the train station and saw me in my new white dress.

I didn’t know why I cared so much. He was just a boy, a boy I’d only known for a couple of months. Luc turning away from me wasn’t the same as Mother leaving. It wasn’t at all the same as Father dying. It wasn’t the same as Grandfather never coming home for Christmas. I balanced and let go of the roof. Then why did it feel the same?

I crept back down and into my room. I thought about finding Madame and apologizing for whatever it was that led her to send me there. I wanted to go back outside. I wanted to wait until Luc smiled again.

I hadn’t seen Madame’s blue turban down on the lawn, so I slipped from my room and down the hall to her morning room. Luc said it used to be her studio, back when she still sculpted. Now it was where she wrote letters, kept the books, and managed the business of Claude Crépet, artist.

The door was ajar, but I didn’t knock, not when I heard Monsieur Crépet’s voice within. He spoke softly, but Madame, her voice moving in the room as though she were pacing, did not.

“She’s not mine to worry over, Claude, yet I do. She doesn’t have a mother to do so.”

His reply, I didn’t understand, but I did understand the edge that came to Madame’s voice.

“If you’d seen her with her hands on Luc’s face, on his friend’s tennis racket. So like Maud.”

“Ma minette, you were always too hard on Maud. She had too much of her heart to share.”

“That wasn’t all that she shared.”

He made a soothing noise. “Come, sit.” He murmured something in French. The sofa creaked. “It was so long ago. You’ve forgiven me, but you haven’t forgiven her?”

“She did it to spite me.”

“She did it to best you. There is a difference.”

“It wasn’t enough that she was one of the most talented in the school. She had to have you, too.”

I thought of the painting of Mother, tucked away up in Monsieur’s studio. Only one, but he’d never gotten rid of it.

“She doesn’t have me now.”

Madame must have stood, because I heard her pacing again, quick steps around the edges of the room. “I should have written to John Ross when she showed up on our doorstep. Did you know he hired an investigator?”

“The investigator did not come here.”

“And why would he?” Her heel came down sharply. “Would he go to question all of her old amoureux to see who else she begged to run away with her?”

“Ma minette, I didn’t go.” This was said almost wearily. “I wouldn’t have gone, even if she’d asked me twenty years ago.” He sighed. “Maud always spent more time lamenting the past than changing the future. She wore her regrets like a hair shirt.”

I clenched my fists at my sides. They talked about Mother like they didn’t know her. If she wasn’t looking to the future, she wouldn’t have left Perthshire, would she have?

“She said she’d paint her way across the world and not care what anyone else thought,” Madame said, the words rolled up in scorn. “I don’t know why I do.”

“Because she was and always will be your friend, despite all the rest. You worry about her like the mademoiselle does.” He patted the sofa softly. “Now sit back down.”

The springs creaked again as she settled in. “Did I tell you, Luc saw a painting? In the Galerie Porte d’Or right along the Quai du Voltaire.”

“Maud?”

I covered my mouth.

“Painted by Arnaud Duguay. Do you remember him from Glasgow?” She made an indelicate noise. “Second rate, even as a student.”

“But the painting, it was in Santi’s gallery?”

“Luc wrote to me. He thought it meant Maud was in Paris.”

I stepped back until I felt the edge of the hall table against my spine. Mother, in Paris? Could she be so near? Luc hadn’t said a word to me. All of those weekend afternoons together, all of those letters, and he hadn’t said a thing about a painting of Mother in a Paris gallery.

I inched back to the door in time to hear Madame say, “The girl needs a place, Claude. Is this really the best one?”

I ran back up to my room and out to the roof. At the top of the ridgepole, I could see over to the front of the house, at Mr. Bauer wheeling his motorbike down the linden-lined drive. I ducked into Luc’s bedroom window.

It was as shabby as the rest of the house, with a sagging bed and cracked leather armchair, but somehow neater. No spiderwebs, no jumbles of knickknacks, no riotous confusion of colors. His room was more somber library than bedroom. An old, gilt-edged desk, monstrous and magnificent, stacked with books and drawing pads. That leather armchair tucked near the side, with a curved desk lamp next to it. Deep yellow bed curtains—the color of marigolds, of French mustard. The gray walls were unpainted and mostly bare. A tennis racket, its wood worn bright, hung like a work of art. Two watercolors of the crumbling château, signed C. Crépet were as soft and blotted as though viewed through a rainy lens.

One painting was done in haunting oils—a thin woman, all angles and edges. She wore a drapey dress, touched with gold where the light hit, and slouched against the armrest of a square throne with arms carved into dragons’ heads, staring challengingly at the painter. She might be a queen, but she was no damsel in distress.

That queen, she wouldn’t let anyone put her in a corner. She wouldn’t let anyone leave her behind. She wouldn’t be overlooked.

And, in the middle of this room, this room of books and art and attempted respectability, stood Luc.

For a moment I didn’t say a word. He stood without a shirt on. His chest was thin and pale. A smooth brown stone, threaded on a thong, nestled beneath his collarbone. Standing shirtless, with head bowed, he looked so private and almost vulnerable. But I saw tacked above his desk that drawing of me, the drawing where I looked more like Mother than myself.

I stepped over the windowsill. “I thought you were my friend.”

His head snapped up and his eyes opened wide.

“I thought you were my friend, but now I can’t even trust you. You saw a painting of my mother in Paris, and yet you never told me. Why?”

But he didn’t answer my question. “You can’t just…push in like this,” he cried. He picked up his damp white shirt from where he’d dropped it on the floor and yanked it on.

“Push in?”

“That’s all you’ve been doing since you arrived. You’ve made me miss tennis matches and weekend studying. You made Stefan Bauer come all the way here and now he’s met you and I’m hearing about it. And then I had a lecture from Maman, as though it were my fault that you held my face like that.”

None of what he said made sense. I’d been the one dismissed earlier, when he introduced me to Stefan Bauer, but now he was acting as though I’d done wrong merely by being there.

“Push in?” I repeated.

“Into my room, into my life, into my mind, into my—”

“I haven’t pushed into anything. I was invited.” Now I was furious, too.

“I didn’t invite you.”

“But yet you come almost every weekend. You wrote me letters and brought me fruit under the chestnut tree. You’ve been always here.”

He angrily buttoned his shirt. “When Maman asks me to come to meet her newest stray, what am I to say?”

“I see.” I pulled myself back up into the windowsill. “I’m just another of Madame Crépet’s dogs or cats. Somebody else’s castoff. You’re only here to be sure I’m walked and watered, no?”

“Oh, that’s not what I meant.”

“It’s what you said,” I shot back. “One more person who doesn’t want the burden of having me around.”

“Now you’re twisting what I’m saying.”

“I heard your maman say that she didn’t think my place was here.” I swung my legs out of the window. “Don’t worry. I’ll find someone who does. I’ll find someone who cares.”

I slid down the roof to my own window, only realizing after that Luc hadn’t answered my question about the painting, the whole reason I’d gone looking for him. But what did I expect him to say? Confess that he’d kept things from me? Confess that, all along, my mother had been a train ride away?

I opened the door to my room. The little brown-eyed maid was in the hallway right outside my door, looking concerned. Clearly, she’d heard the shouting all the way from Luc’s room upstairs. “Please tell Madame that I am feeling unwell tonight. I won’t take any supper, thank you. Tell her I will be going to bed early.”

The maid left and I pulled my small travel valise from the wardrobe. I filled it quickly, watching the door, afraid she would come back in. I buttoned up my new gray jacket and tucked in my little purse of money. From the valise, I took a yellowed envelope. In the corner was an inked fleur-de-lis. I opened it and, in my coat and hat, read the short note inside, though I could recite it by heart.

My Clare, I must go, to see the world, to find the art that I lost long ago. It’s no longer in Scotland. I’ll wilt away here if I stay. Forgive me.

I folded the note, folded the envelope, and put it in my coat pocket. Maybe she found that art. Maybe I could find her.

I slipped from my room and down the back staircase to the kitchen. Marthe was out cutting herbs, so no one saw me leave the kitchen and Mille Mots.

I only had the faintest idea of how to get to the train station. When Madame had brought me to Mille Mots all those weeks ago, it had been in a borrowed automobile, my first. I retraced my steps as best I could, along the river, through a village, up a ridge, until I saw the gleam of train tracks in the distance.

The waiting room at the station was empty, but there was one more train to Paris due.

“You can wait outside on the platform,” the stationmaster said.

I patted my pocket to be sure I had my small purse and stepped outside.

But the station wasn’t empty. I saw, in the shadow of the platform, a pale suit.

“Mademoiselle.” Luc’s friend stepped from the shadow, wheeling a motorbike. “Or, as we say in my country, ‘fräulein.’ ” He touched his chest. “Stefan Bauer.”

“Ah, yes.” I looked back over my shoulder. “How do you do?”

He followed my glance. “Are you being followed, fräulein?”

“Yes.” I shifted the valise in my hands. “I mean, no.”

“May I?” He gestured towards my bag.

I hesitated, then handed it to him. “I’m going to Paris, too.”

“How exciting for you.” His English was so correct, like I imagined the king’s to be. “Visiting friends?”

Hands behind my back, I crossed my fingers. “Visiting family.”

He leaned forward, almost confidentially. “All alone? You are brave, fräulein.”

“I’m not alone right now, sir.” I hoped I sounded confident.

“No, you are not.” He offered an arm. “You are certainly not.”