Girl in the Afternoon by Serena Burdick

Author:Serena Burdick
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250106681
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Chapter 20

There were no more Thursday-night soirées. People heard there was a falling out between the Savarays and the Manets, but there were often disagreements between families. That was no reason to shut up one’s house. So it was concluded that the real reason must lie with the boy, Jacques, who had so curiously disappeared. Colette was notoriously flirtatious. It wouldn’t have surprised anyone if the child had not been Auguste’s. And this was the conclusion most people drew in the end.

Aspersions were cast on the morality of the family. Social engagements circled around the Savarays, only they were not at the center anymore, and they declined more invitations than they accepted.

* * *

Auguste stuck to his threat. He had the servants clear out Aimée’s studio, her paints, easels, palettes, knives, and brushes. He sold her paintings to a dealer, a skinny man with a craggy face who paid one thousand francs for all of them. It wasn’t until the man’s oily fingers hooked around the gilt frame of a rather exceptional landscape that Auguste felt a pinch of remorse. He would be the one responsible for all this wasted talent, but he was not going back on his word. He stood by as the dealer piled the paintings into a cart and rolled them away.

* * *

Aimée did not watch her work disappear down the street, or go into her empty studio. She did not miss the paintings themselves, only the ability to cocoon herself in the act of painting, to hold her emotions at bay by pretending Henri was beside her, Jacques playing happily in his bedroom, Leonie waiting to take her hand and kiss her cheek, Édouard nothing more than a family friend, her stomach a flat, seedless thing.

Boredom brought a restlessness Aimée had never known before. She became terrified of her own body. At night, she would lie on her back and dig her fingers under her hip bones where her stomach was no longer squishy and flat, but firm and gently sloped. She felt like she was growing sideways, her waist thickening in the wrong places. Hoping to bide a little time with her corset, she pulled the strings tighter than usual, imagining she was flattening the baby.

It took Madame Savaray until the end of November to come up with a plan. It was going to take a good deal of lying, but Madame Savaray was not beyond it. There were times a woman had to lie. She would take it up with God later.

Early one afternoon, she went into Aimée’s room where the girl sat at her desk staring at a gathering mass of clouds. “Get your coat,” Madame Savaray said. “We’re going out.”

Without question Aimée followed her grand-mère out of the room.

Clouds dark as coal billowed overhead, and a flash of lightning lit up the buildings on the rue de Calais as they stepped out of the carriage. A single drop of water hit the pavement at Aimée’s feet, and then a torrent of cold, biting rain hurled from the sky.

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