Monet's Angels

Jennifer Pulling

Description

MONET'S ANGELS is a story of passion and intrigue, of two women drawn together by destiny. It is set in the last golden days before the First World War when a beautiful house and garden inspired some of the world's greatest paintings. In the Normandy town of Giverny two women meet. Their backgrounds are worlds apart: Blanche, provincial French and middle aged, Judith a young, beautiful, rich heiress. Their common ground lies in Claude Monet, the impressionist painter, but their motives are very different. It is 1913 and the elderly Monet is fighting his failing eyesight to create his Water Lily panels, which will be his swansong. Blanche, his dutiful stepdaughter, has renounced her considerable painting talent to support him. Into this orderly household, Judith arrives like a shooting star, fascinating everyone she encounters. She is determined to flout her parents' wishes for a strategic marriage and live her bohemian dream. Her reckless presence heralds change and disturbs long buried memories of the past. Blanche relives her ill-fated love affair with John Leslie, when she defied Monet's disapproval, while Robert, an American artist, is alarmed by Judith's wild passion for life and strives to protect her from herself, conscious as he does so that he is trying to change his own past. Initially welcoming Judith as an invigorating influence on Monet, Blanche comes to realise that the young American is eroding her close relationship with her stepfather and when she learns of Judith's fling with Michel, an under gardener, which threatens the happiness of her favourite laundry maid, Lilli, it is the final straw for Blanche. She intervenes with tragic results. Gradually the old partnership between Blanche and her stepfather returns. She can finally lay her memories and regrets of John Leslie to rest, reconciled to her life living and working with Monet. She never really had a choice.

Informations

• Publié par: RedDoor Press
• Date de parution: 25 juin 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780992852054
• Langue: English

Extrait

Monet's Angels
 
Monet's Angels
Jennifer Pulling
 
 
2014 Jennifer Pulling
Jennifer Pulling has asserted her rights in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
First published and printed in 2014 First published in eBook format in 2014
ISBN: 978-1-78301-539-9 (Printed edition: 978-0-9928520-5-4)
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the Publisher.
Although some of the characters in this book are based on real people, the story is the product of the author s imagination.
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To another house and garden a long time ago
CONTENTS
– ONE –
– TWO –
– THREE –
– FOUR –
– FIVE –
– SIX –
– SEVEN –
– EIGHT –
– NINE –
– TEN –
– ELEVEN –
– TWELVE –
– THIRTEEN –
– FOURTEEN –
– FIFTEEN –
– SIXTEEN –
– SEVENTEEN –
– EIGHTEEN –
– NINETEEN –
– TWENTY –
– TWENTY-ONE –
– TWENTY-TWO –
– TWENTY-THREE –
– TWENTY-FOUR –
– TWENTY-FIVE –
– TWENTY-SIX –
– TWENTY-SEVEN –
– TWENTY-EIGHT –
– TWENTY-NINE –
– THIRTY –
– THIRTY-ONE –
– THIRTY-TWO –
– THIRTY-THREE –
– THIRTY-FOUR –
– THIRTY-FIVE –
– THIRTY-SIX –
– THIRTY-SEVEN –
– THIRTY-EIGHT –
– THIRTY-NINE –
– FORTY –
– FORTY-ONE –
– FORTY-TWO –
– FORTY-THREE –
– FORTY-FOUR –
– FORTY-FIVE –
– FORTY-SIX –
– FORTY-SEVEN –
– FORTY-EIGHT –
– FORTY-NINE –
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ABOUT JENNIFER PULLING
– ONE –
ROBERT

H
e saw her before she saw him, indistinct in the smoky atmosphere, and somehow he knew it was the American girl. She was talking to a porter and, as he approached, she raised her voice to compete with the hissing steam.
‘How much? How much?’
Robert stepped forward. ‘Miss Judith Goldstein?’ He lifted his cap. ‘Robert Harrison.’
She whirled round, laughing with pleasure. ‘Oh Mr Harrison, I’m so relieved to see you. When I got off the train there didn’t seem to be anybody waiting for me. I thought perhaps… oh, I don’t know… maybe there’d been some mistake about the day.’
‘Hopeless places for rendezvous, railroad stations. You’d think they’d find a more twentieth century way of stoking trains,’ he grinned.
The blue-smocked porter was hovering.
‘What’s all this about?’ asked Robert, switching easily to the man’s patois.
‘They are big these baggage,’ the man said. ‘Very big.’
‘That is not the point. There is a set rate, we all know that.’
‘Well?’ demanded the young woman.
‘He’s trying to get away with charging you extra.’
‘Oh don’t worry about the money,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t that. It wasn’t that at all, it was… well… I just couldn’t understand him.’
Her voice was low and well modulated with just a hint of Yankee to it, he thought.
‘Don’t you fret. Now you’re here, you’ll be speaking French like a native in no time at all.’
Her dark eyes widened. ‘But I do. I do speak French.’
He wanted to say, yeah, but the French you probably learned in an expensive finishing school is nothing like that spoken in a provincial Normandy town but instead he instructed the porter to bring the trunk and two travelling bags to the front of the station.
‘And do be careful, they are Louis Vuitton,’ she tried in her careful French.
Robert translated and the man grunted and pushed her luggage roughly onto his trolley, jostling it against other more modest items. Robert noticed a brown cardboard-looking case and thought how incongruous it seemed cheek by jowl with the trefoil-patterned trunk. The porter trundled his load towards the exit.
‘Horrible little man, he hasn’t taken the slightest bit of notice. My poor Vuitton.’
‘You seem mighty fond of them,’ Robert smiled. ‘They’ll be fine, I assure you.’
‘Oh, I hope so. I really do.’
She turned to gaze at him and he was startled by her intensity, the inflection of her voice and expression in her eyes. He had a feeling that this defined her whether it was the fate of her baggage, her inability to make herself understood by the porter or something far more profound. He was intrigued.
‘You’re staring, Mr Harrison,’ she commented.
‘I beg your pardon, Miss Goldstein.’
‘No, I like people staring at me. In fact, it’s one of the things I like most in the world. Is it my hair? This is the very latest cut, don’t you know?’
Now that he had been given permission, he did stare. Her hair was bobbed to just below ear level and ended in soft waves. The colour was difficult to define as she wore a simple, narrow-brimmed hat but he judged it to be dark auburn.
‘Or my clothes?’
‘They are rather wonderful.’
‘Guess you’ve never seen any like this before? Madame Chanel paid me a compliment, don’t you know? She said I was just the kind of modern young woman to wear her designs. She hates the way the women dress on vacation and I so agree with her. All those furs and feathers, those silly hobble skirts, how could you dream of playing tennis in them?’
Robert did not remark that he had already seen the long V-necked sweater scandalously made in the same jersey used for men’s underclothes. The fluid skirt had also made its appearance in Giverny. Several of the young ladies who dined at Hotel Baudy were discovering Coco’s boutiques in Deauville and Biarritz. However, he had to admit they had rarely been worn with the flair of this young woman.
‘I couldn’t come to Europe and not do a shopping trip in Paris, now could I? I love her designs, don’t you? So easy fitting, so delightful to move in.’
To demonstrate, she executed a few steps of the Turkey Trot, hopping sideways with her feet apart, rising on the ball of her foot, then dropping onto the heel. It startled Robert. Vernon station had certainly never seen anything like this before.
‘ Magnifique !’ a voice called out. A man wearing a wide-brimmed hat had stopped to watch her. Others joined him, which encouraged her to continue. She hummed some bars of the Maple Leaf Rag , raised her elbows in a birdy movement and made turkey-like flourishes with her feet. The appreciative males in her audience were urged away by their tutting companions.
‘Disgusting exhibition,’ Robert heard a woman in an enormous feathered hat mutter as she swept her husband away.
‘Enough of that, young lady,’ he called with mock seriousness. ‘Come along, this way.’
Laughing, she followed him outside, into the heat of the June day. The sky was cobalt blue, the air sweet after the grey, smoky station. The lugubrious porter leaned against a wall, smoking. The precious Vuitton cargo was already stowed and the carter sat above his horse, waiting for instructions.
‘Mademoiselle’s baggage was very, very heavy,’ the porter growled. ‘Too heavy.’ He indicated the possibility of a hernia.
‘ Desolé ,’ murmured Robert and slipped him a twenty franc note. The man brightened.
Judith was staring at the debonair automobile parked by the kerb; its red paint and brasswork gleamed in the sun.
‘Swell, isn’t it?’ Robert said as casually as he could when it came to his pride and joy. ‘De Dion-Bouton. Latest model.’
‘Oh, Mr Harrison, a beautiful French automobile! I’m driving to Giverny in that? This is just so European.’
Her guileless enthusiasm was infectious but she was like a flame burning brightly, too brightly. The thought provoked a startling sense of familiarity and Robert shook his head to clear the unwanted memories.
‘Oh come now, it’s not that special. Nothing like the vehicles you must go about in in New York.’
‘Thank God, it isn’t,’ she laughed. ‘Thank God. I haven’t come all this way to live the American life. I want to be completely and utterly French!’
Again he was amazed by her intensity; she seemed almost feverish. Her eyes glittered, her pale skin glowed as if candlelit from within. She looked boyish and yet tenderly female, young, yet knowing. He felt drawn to her but not at the level she might suppose. There was more a sense of connection between them: visitors from an urban New World in love with the light and colour of rural France.
‘Well come on, Mr Harrison, what are we waiting for?’ Her smile was flirtatious.
He saw her give a last glance at the carter bearing her precious Louis Vuitton away before she let him help her into the two-seater.
‘Hang on to your hat,’ he yelled into the breeze and they shot out of Vernon and started on the road to Giverny.
Robert had travelled this way so many times in the last twenty-odd years he had almost reached the point of not noticing his surroundings, his concentration set on pushing the V8 engine to its limits, revelling in the speed it could achieve. Almost but not quite: there were occasions when the gold and scarlet of a cornfield scattered with poppies made him yearn to paint it yet again. When snow fell, he would stop the automobile to sit and analyse Monet’s technique for The Magpie , how the painter had traded his usual palette for icy colours of white, grey and violet. It was, he thought, more about perception than description, and might explain why the 1869 Paris Salon rejected it.
At his side, Judith kept up a running commentary, barely pausing for breath. ‘Just look at that rolling landscape, the hedgerows, the lines of poplars. And there’s the Seine, isn’t it? Oh my God, I can’t believe it. It’s all so… so impressionist. How I’ve dreamed of it.’
Robert wondered what had brought her to Giverny. He was aware of her expensive scent, its notes of carnation, iris and vanilla, L’Heure Bleue, he guessed. A c