Page 4 of The Bookshop Ladies

3

2001

Fern had Margot to thank for this upturn in her professional success. Margot. They were as different as hives and chives – Fern, with her mane of thick curly red hair, could be picked out as Irish in a flash. Margot was so achingly French with her long poker-straight hair, frayed jeans and devil-may-care approach to people – Fern was slightly in awe of her. Fern had arrived in Paris on an art scholarship, a country girl from the west of Ireland, she might as well have landed on the moon. The people here were so… The Irish, she thought, by comparison were wishy-washy people pleasers – Margot was anything but that. It was Margot who introduced her to Yves Bachand. Margot was always running into interesting people, she seemed to draw them to her so her circle was a disparate bunch of overachievers and outsiders like Fern who she gathered up as she went along. People thought Paris was full of artists and poets and philosophers, but to Fern it seemed to be the same circles moving about each other all the time. Margot knew everyone. Fern knew that, she just hadn’t joined up the dots properly and imagined Margot could put her work the way of the city’s most respected gallerist.

But that’s exactly what she did and it turned out Yves Bachand loved her painting.

THEYves Bachand who had made world names out of a handful of artists lucky to be plucked by him from obscurity and now, thanks to that introduction, he was taking four of her paintings to New York, leaving her with instructions to get ready for the orders to start rolling in.

‘My first sale.’ Fern danced around the cramped Paris apartment she shared with Margot, waving the cheque for one thousand pounds over her head. It was a fortune, at least to her. It meant she could take a few weeks off to really be an artist; she could pay her rent and not worry about leaving a light on in the apartment lest she ran out of coins for the electricity meter. ‘Damn it, I feel so rich, I want to yank that bloody meter off the wall and order the most expensive champagne and candles from La Samaritaine.’

‘Relax,bébé,’ Margot drawled as she topped up their mugs, ‘you deserve this, no one paints like you do, from the soul. Yves can see what I see, every stroke on the canvas is considered, the perfect balance of light and dark.’ She raised her mug and cocked her eye in a way that marked her out as indisputably French. For all her Parisian cool, Margot had pushed Fern with the passion of an overbearing mother to ensure she succeeded. Fern loved her for it. ‘And he adores your paintings, he thinks you’re the next Hockney, but darker and without the swimming pools. It’s a match made in heaven, I think?’

‘Let’s hope so,’ Fern said. It helped that she liked Yves. Yes, she was a little in awe of him, he was after all one of those people who had been on the international art scene for years. In that world, he was a bit of a rock star actually. Isn’t that what power did for a man, it gave him a certainje ne sais quoi. But he was also a nice man, very down-to-earth, grounded, maybe even a little shy.

‘Either way, we can celebrate tonight. Tomorrow I’ll paint my little heart out, now that I have this wonderful opportunity. I have so much to thank you for, Margot.’

She slid onto the sofa next to her friend. A series of coincidences had thrown them together. They’d worked back-to-back shifts in a little coffee shop on the Rue de’Église for a while, but it wasn’t until they both put their hands on the same antique mirror at a local flea market that they actually realised they had more in common than a dislike of rude tourists and overly preened poodles. Margot let her have the mirror for Peggy. In return Fern offered to swap shifts so she could go to a reading in The Regular. From then, their friendship had grown and now they were sharing a flat – or more accurately a bedsit described by the landlord as bijou – it seemed that they had grown even closer. It was like having a sister, except it was even better than she’d imagined. Over the next few weeks, Fern set about creating a series that could sit together in an exhibition. She was going to call it ‘Paris’. Her imagination was filled with the city – how could it not be?

Oh, but she was losing the run of herself entirely! There had as yet been no mention of an exhibition. An exhibition was the height of wishful thinking, but she had to start somewhere, right? And if what she had read about Yves Bachand was even halfway true, then she knew that his first sale of her work would be swiftly followed by many more. So she worked like a maniac, painting and perfecting, then standing back and looking at the series as a whole. It had undoubtedly more depth than her earlier work, but still, as she waited for Yves to come and look over the paintings she had created since they last met, she was nervous.

‘Well, well,’ he said after standing for what seemed forever before each canvas and studying it silently. She couldn’t count how many times he went back from beginning to end, and his expression was inscrutable as he bent to examine an individual painting. ‘This may be…’ he started, but then he stood back.

‘What is it, what do you think?’ she murmured, but feeling a knot of anxious nervousness, fingering the pendant that her auntie Peggy and uncle Albie had bought for her eighteenth birthday. Standing here, with Yves Bachand, was a million miles away from her life with her uncle and aunt in Ballycove. In spite of losing her parents in an accident when she was young, Fern knew how lucky she was to have the security of a family who even now, so far away, grounded and calmed her in this tense moment. Oh God, she had worked so hard to get these finished for today and she had thrown everything she had in her at them. They were a catalogue of every thought and emotion she had experienced over the last couple of weeks. They went from the optimism of the Eiffel Tower with shards of spring light peeping through the ironwork, all the way through to her own favourite,The Seine, which spoke of emotions she would rather not share. There was the darkness of losing her parents, the solidity of the family who had taken her to their heart, and also that ray of hope that Margot had brought into her life so vividly somehow; in painting her deepest emotions they had become a thing of great beauty.

‘I think it’s phenomenal. All of it. I think it’s…’ he turned to her, smiled a little sadly. ‘I think it could be the pinnacle of my whole career.’

‘You really think they are that good?’

‘I think they are fresh, superb, robust and, yet, exquisite.’ Despite the gravelly honesty of his voice, the imposter syndrome inside her doubted it all. Exquisite was a word she hoped he would not use lightly. He reached out and placed a hand on her elbow. ‘You have produced something close to alchemy here, bringing every emotion to the surface within the space of a dozen canvases. It’s possible these paintings will change how I see everything for a very long time.’

‘Oh.’ It was all she could manage. It was all surreal. After all, she was just an ordinary girl, who had travelled further than she thought she deserved and somehow managed to get a place in the École des Beaux-Arts. Back home in Ballycove, the height of her ambition might have been to call herself an artist, but to think she might create something that would convey such power… well, it caught her breath for a moment and she could not think of one appropriate word to say.

‘And even better that it is themed. I have some buyers already lined up, but they think they are getting bargains, like the others…’ he shook his head and smiled. ‘Leave this with me. This,’ he put his hand on the painting of the Seine, ‘this requires far more than just being sold to the highest bidder.’ He laughed then and she noticed a softening about his features. Something had changed in him; and she wondered, were they becoming friends?

An exhibition. They were going to have an exhibition. It was to be in Paris. In a small gallery just opened very close to Rue de Seine. Fern had to keep repeating it to herself. Paris – not Ballycove, not some small token affair, an actual real gallery wanted to host her exhibition. To make it more real, she had kept one of the printed invitations and placed it on her dressing table. It sat there, next to a photograph of her parents. They would have been so proud. At least Albie and Peggy could come and celebrate with her.

The night of the exhibition rolled round far too quickly. It was typical, one of those things that you wish the time away for and then, when it arrives, you realise you haven’t even managed to organise a snag-free pair of tights to wear to the blessed thing.

It was a wonderful evening, a whirl of introductions and speeches that made her head spin and, finally, she delivered a few words herself. Really, she had no idea what it was she should say, so she mumbled ‘merci beaucoup’s to her family, to Margot and, of course, to Yves who had done more for her career than all the four years she’d spent at the most prestigious art college in France.

She had a feeling, as she stood in the centre of the gallery allowing the success to wash over her, she would only really make sense of the whole evening in a few days’ time. For now, her head was spinning with exhilaration, she felt as if she could fly, given a half a chance.

For one night only, Yves had booked Fern, Margot and Albie and Peggy into the Ritz.The Ritz – the actual Ritz in Paris?Peggy had whispered as if to check that Fern had got it right. It was, Yves joked, a justifiable expense.

There was another hour left to mingle and network before the gallery closed up shop for the night.

‘We can do no more.’ Yves arrived with her jacket just as the front doors were being closed on the final stragglers of the evening. ‘Let’s get back to the Ritz, shall we?’ He looked tired.

‘Long day for you,’ she said as their black cab sped through Paris’s wet streets.

‘Yes. Sometimes, I think I’m getting too old for it all.’

‘You’re hardly ancient,’ she laughed.

‘I’m fifty-two,’ he said softly.

‘It’s a good age.’

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