Page 27 of Pictures of Him

The orchestration behind this surprise blew my mind. You had called my mother, scrolling through my phone to find her number, and asked her to send my passport.

‘You spoke to my mother?’

‘She was very nice. Very much in favour of our educational trip.’

‘Actually,’ you told me, as we nursed our plastic cups of coffee on the aeroplane, ‘there’s something else I wanted to show you. Aside from the restaurant.’

At Charles de Gaulle we took a cab straight to the Museé d’Orsay. My parents had taken me to Paris for my sixteenth birthday and we’d spent hours in this gallery, my teenage heart drawn to the easy sentimentality of Degas’ dancers. But you walked straight past the traditional checklist of Degas, Monet and Gaugin, taking me to the second floor, where we bypassed the swirling strokes of Munch, until you stood still in front of a picture of a woman leaning forward in a gilt-edged box at the theatre, a bouquet of flowers beside her. I thought it classic Impressionist fare; if you’d asked me I would have hazarded a guess at Renoir. But the artist was Eva Gonzales, someone I’d never heard of, the painting dated 1874.

‘Unusual for a woman to be an artist at that time,’ I said, wondering why you were looking at me so intently. Expectantly.

‘You can’t see it, can you? The woman is you. Her eyes,her brows, her nose, even her chin. When I first saw you in that tutorial, you reminded me of someone, and afterwards I realised it was her.’

You made me stand next to the painting while you took a surreptitious photograph, shooting your eyes over to the museum guard and back again.

Eva Gonzales was taught by Manet, you said; the bouquet in the picture was almost exactly like the one offered to Olympia in his portrait of the famous courtesan.

‘How do you know all this stuff?’

‘Too much time moping around galleries when I should have been on the lookout for girls like you. I moved out of my mother’s house when I was sixteen. Irreconcilable differences,’ you said with that airy voice I now understood you used to conceal pain. ‘I spent a whole summer holiday in Paris, hours and hours here and in the Louvre, staring at paintings, trying to work out what made them so great. And not so great. That was the summer I started painting.’

We lunched in a brasserie near the Place des Vosges, a Parisian pastiche of gigantic mirrors and art deco chandeliers, waiters in tails running back and forth across the black-and-white-tiled floor. We had steak frites and red wine that came in a little glass jug.

Perhaps it was just the wine, or perhaps it was the way you ate with your left hand so you could keep on holding my hand with your right, but I had a dizzying sense that this moment, you and me here in this beautiful restaurant, was perfectly preserved and I would remember it exactly, the sense of it, the feel of it, for ever.

I found the courage to ask you about your mother, whom you always described in scathing terms.

‘She’s a drunk,’ you said. ‘And like many drunks, she can turn. She says bad things.’

You paused, and I watched you being drawn back into a recollection, the sudden crease of a frown.

‘She said my father was a coward for dying the way he did. And I flipped out. Told her it was her fault he’d died. That she’d pushed him into it with her serial infidelity. All the love affairs she had and didn’t bother to hide.’

‘That must have been hard for her to hear.’

‘Not as hard as it was for me to live without my father.’

Your voice was raised, momentarily. You apologised and let out a long, shaky sigh.

‘It still upsets me to think about it. But the facts don’t change. I’ll never forgive her for cheating on him and she’ll never forgive me for blaming his suicide on her.’

‘Sorry,’ I said, the only word I could think of, and you smiled and squeezed my hand.

‘It doesn’t really matter any more.’

We heard music as we crossed the Place des Vosges and found an old guy playing his violin, a small crowd gathered round him. There was a café right here on the corner of the square, one of those dark brown places where you would spend hours just watching, you told me.

‘The French know how to live. Those small daily indulgences,’ you said. ‘Businessmen knocking back an espresso in a minute flat. Beautifully dressed women arriving at six o’clock for a solitary glass of wine. The English make a virtue out of drudgery and self-sacrifice. I can’t stand that.’

The Marais was your district; you’d lived just a few streets from the square for a whole summer. You showed me the ornate wooden doors that led to the seventeenth-centuryapartment you’d rented. You told me about the worn steps, so lethal you almost broke your neck one night falling down them.

I was about to say how lucky you were to live in Paris on your own at sixteen, but then I caught the edge of loneliness and I said nothing.

It was your idea to go into the Jesuit church of Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis, where there was a Delacroix you wanted to see. But it was my idea to light a candle.

‘Let’s light one for your father,’ I said as we reached the nave with its statue of the Madonna and the little iron holder where a dozen or more candles burned.

You looked astonished, then broken. I understood then that you had never been shown how to grieve, never been given permission. I wanted to grab hold of you and say, ‘It’s not too late now,’ but I couldn’t find the words.

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