Forget Me Not by Patrice Chaplin

Author:Patrice Chaplin [Chaplin, Patrice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lume Books
Published: 2016-11-02T04:00:00+00:00

Twenty-Nine

‘On September the twenty-second, my life changed,’ Vicky told Jay in America, as they sat in a hotel in Cleveland. Serge was doing his tour of North America and Vicky was trying to keep up with it. She had called Jay in his rented haven in Connecticut and asked him to join her. ‘Serge says I’m to have some friends. I can hardly let Lorraine loose on him.’

Jay looked uncomfortable in the hotel suite.

‘You don’t approve of him, do you?’ she said. ‘Is it because he’s so successful?’

‘I hope so,’ said Jay. ‘No, I don’t like him.’ He sounded curt, hostile. ‘All that dazzling crowd-appeal makes me cautious. Is it an act? He gives himself to the music in front of thousands of people. But does he truly? He looks overcome and exposes his soul? But is he really? And the only reason he’s making those CD videos is because he’s good-looking.’

‘Music is his life.’

‘And you? Where do you fit in?’

‘I’m the reality.’ She blew her nose. She had a cold which she was trying to hide from Serge. Early mornings at the airports were the worst part. She would take homeopathic remedies and smile a lot and say she was thrilled to be along when she was just dying to be back in bed, the covers over her head.

She poured Jay more tea and assured him the Maestro was busy rehearsing.

‘So he proposed to you in September? That changed your life?’

‘On September the twenty-second, I was sitting in a hospital waiting room in London and I picked up a magazine and read about Modigliani and his mistress, Jeanne Hebuterne. And it was as though I was reading something I already knew. Was it a story from my grandmother? I’ve just read a biography but I long to know more about him. It’s like rediscovering a friend. I suppose it must have something to do with me. That’s what I wanted to tell you. There’s a lot more to life than I realized. The painted woman I dreamed about was really a painting by Modigliani of Lunia Czechowska. What you said about memory remaining and being activated could be right. Thoughts are solid things, you said. All those memories I feel in Paris, yet nothing much happened there in my past. So it’s another past, isn’t it? From another life.’

‘How do you prove it, Vick? There’s no scientific research that I know of that would reassure you. You’d have to go to a psychic or be hypnotized.’

‘The Lunia picture convinced me. I’m experiencing it again, that life. Re-living its dreams or — I’m not over that life. I really could see him, Modigliani. Yet he didn’t really look like the photographs I’ve now seen in the biography.’

‘So what are you going to do about it?’ he asked.

‘I’ll have to read all the existing material on his life, but it’s mostly out of print. I can’t get hold of anything until I’m in one major English-speaking city for more than a night.

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