Fic: Mistral’s Son (Inception, PG-13)
title: Mistral’s Son
Written for the first Harlequin Challenge @ harlequincepted
author: ilovetakahana
pairing: Arthur/Eames
disclaimer: I don't own the original story or the characters. Not making any profit, just playing in the sandbox.
Further edits to this story are pending, but it is complete as it stands now.
Betas: laria_gwyn, photoclerk
The plot of this story has been heavily adapted from the Judith Krantz romance, Mistral’s Daughter: They were three generations of magnificent red-haired beauties born to scandal, bred to success, bound to a single extraordinary man--Julien Mistral, the painter, the genius, the lover whose passions had seared them all.
Maggy: Flamboyant mistress of Mistral's youth, the toast of Paris in the '20s. Her luminous flesh was immortalized in the paintings that made Mistral legendary.
Teddy: Maggy's daughter, the incomparable cover girl who lived fast and left as her legacy Mistral's dazzling love child.
Fauve: Mistral's daughter, the headstrong, fearless glory girl whose one dark secret drove her to rule the world of high fashion and to risk everything in a feverish search for love.
From the '20s Paris of Chanel, Colette, Picasso and Matisse to New York's sizzling new modeling agencies of the '50s, to the model ward of the '70s, Mistral's Daughter captures the explosive glamour of life at the top of the worlds of art and high fashion.
Also archived at http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org/.
Arthur Lunel looked up at the house, and the breeze gusted through his hair. Bits of leaf and dead grass sweeping past his feet. The great brass gate before him, the chain and the padlock, the heavy ring of keys in his hand.
He wanted to turn around and flee, to run all the way across the Atlantic. He wanted to be back in New York. He wanted to be back home in his tiny studio, the walls painted in mint and gray, the photographs of his mother and his grandmother on the walls. The letters and postcards pinned up around his desk. The sketchbooks and pens he kept in a basket that he could shove beneath his bed.
Instead he was here, in the heart of Provence, and standing outside a house that he had fled at the end of a distant summer.
Julien Mistral’s house.
There was the sound of a car door closing behind him, and footsteps over the cracked dust. The hand slipping into his.
“You don’t have to go in now, do you?”
Arthur squared his shoulders, squeezed the other man’s hand. “I guess I do, Eames. If only so that I can tell Magali and Darcy that I followed the letter of the will.”
“Do you want me to stay here,” Eric Eames said, “or do you want me to accompany you?”
Arthur looked away from the house, then, looked to the man standing next to him. Eames, beautiful and patient and steadfast Eames. The wind sweeping though his shaggy dark hair, the lush mouth that was now thinned into a worried line, the piercing green eyes that saw the world in dimensions and measurements. Eames the soldier, now Eames the architect. Eames, whom Arthur had left at the train station on the night he left France.
They had danced in a village square on the night of le quatorze juillet; they had kissed in a country lane while a flock of sheep bumped and bounced off their rental car; they had prowled through the bookshops and museums of Avignon with their noses buried in their respective guidebooks. Eames, in whom Arthur had confided every secret he and this house had ever held.
Everything here was so painfully familiar, and so distant. Vineyards for miles around in each direction, and tucked away into so many corners, the little fruit orchards. Memories of peaches and apples, picked and eaten fresh from the trees. The swimming pool that had been the talk of the town.
“As much as I would love to have you with me in there - I have to go in by myself first,” Arthur finally sighed. “You understand.”
“All too well,” Eames said, and pulled him in close, dropped a kiss on his forehead. “I’ll come in and find you after fifteen minutes, all right?”
“D’accord.”
And Arthur gritted his teeth and opened the gate, the front door, and walked into the house, alone.
Turpentine and linseed oil; dust; dead vines and fallen seeds.
Arthur walked through the corridors like a silent ghost, looking around inside his memories. Only the slight tremor in his hands betrayed his emotions.
Here was the great table, made to seat eighteen, where his stepmother Kate sat at the head of the happy, noisy midday meal, with the workers and the house staff on the benches and Arthur himself at the foot, pouring wine and milk and passing great loaves of freshly-baked bread, everyone carving up the great ham or the sausages that were made right from the farm and its livestock and its herbs.
Here was the small, circular table in an alcove off to the side, where he and Kate had shared breakfast every morning during the summers, where they discussed her late pregnancy, where they had decided on the name “Nadine” for his stepsister.
Here was the room with the big fireplace, where they received visitors over wine and coffee and beer - the tax inspector, the mayor, Kate’s family, her art-dealer friends.
Here was the kitchen, the only place Eames had been in, and its great table where all the day’s meals were prepared. Roast leg of lamb rolled with garlic and herbs, bowls of hot chocolate and brioche with hazelnut spread and marmalade, tomatoes and onions and discs of tangy goat cheese.
Arthur turned his back on the great doors at the western end of the house, and went upstairs.
Here was Kate’s bedroom, where it had been Arthur’s task to fill the vases each morning with the fresh flowers that bloomed in rich profusion in the summer, each blossom taken from her little garden in the shade of the house. The shelves that had held Kate’s books and portfolios, the huge coffee-table books of exhibitions that she’d been to and curated and wanted to see. Off to the side, the little bathroom and its half-tub.
Arthur closed the door quickly on that room. Too many painful memories. The light in Kate’s eyes fading, her skin and the tepid bathwater soaked in blood, the smile full of pain and regret, her mouth moving faintly as she saw Arthur and closed her eyes for the last time.
Another set of stairs at the end of the corridor, and Arthur was climbing a well-known path. He had spent exactly ten summers in the tower bedroom, where the sun threw its rich light into the windows each morning, where Arthur would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night to the moon and the stars hanging low over the vineyards.
The bed was still there, too small for him now since he had a final growth spurt soon after arriving in New York, eyes too old to be seventeen. Posters still clinging to the walls, the names and the faces obscured under a thick coating of dust. His dresser, a small closet, a bookcase full of magazines and his own collections. The leaves were still there, brittle and fragile and nearly translucent; the pebbles and the graceful little twigs. Pieces of crystal; a cheap little toy car he’d found somewhere else in the house.
His mother Teddy had never actually come to this room, but the room was full of her anyway, with the presents she sent him from all over the world. Postcards from Battambang and Ontario, a mille-fiori paperweight from Venice, a length of ikat from the Philippines, a beautifully painted replica of the Tsarevitch Fabergé egg. Three crystal turtles that he had always been content to look at instead of play with. Half a dozen perfume bottles in various shapes, all empty by the time they’d arrived, but all sent on to Arthur as soon as she’d emptied them. For every time the Lunel Agency sent her on a modeling job that took her to the farthest reaches of the planet, she sent Arthur a gift, and always a letter in her looping scrawl.
I love you. I miss you. Can’t wait to see you again.
Teddy
And in large baskets at the bottom of the bookcase, baskets full of pencils and crayons, pages and pages of paper, a handful of battered sketchbooks.
Arthur had started sketching almost as soon as he could hold on to something, and he’d covered countless scraps of paper with his childish lines - lines that soon evolved, leading to a bold, but concise style, where he could evoke all the leaves on a tree with just a handful of strokes.
He could still remember the sense of wonder he’d felt when he had first been allowed past the doors downstairs, the doors that led into his father’s studio.
He had counted it as a victory when Mistral simply went on painting, knowing he was there through the summer days, never throwing him out. Every day, the two of them worked side by side: Arthur with the pencils and sketchbooks that both Kate and Teddy lavished on him; Mistral with canvases and brushes and his own hands, in the oil paints that he had used all his life.
As he refined his lines and picked up technique, Arthur watched his father paint the Stella series, the portraits of the men that Mistral had toasted and sketched and drunk with at the local village bar. He’d been there when the great canvas had been shipped in for one of Mistral’s largest works, the painting of the tumbledown castle overlooking the town, known to the world as Hill’s Guardian.
But Mistral had never wanted to see his own son’s work.
And in the end, Arthur had quietly taken the sketchbooks away with him; in the end, only Eames had seen his sketches. Kate’s gardens in full bloom; Eames’s battered old Peugeot, down to the slightly crooked front bumper. Eames’s parents Avigdor and Marianne, and their summer cottage with the walls covered in ivy and roses; a cat perched in the windows of the local store. He kept them in the bottom of the basket in his New York apartment.
Arthur carefully sat down on the stripped bed frame, heedless of the dust, and put his head in his hands. Too many memories. Too many emotions.
Julien Mistral was dead.
He had fought his own grandmother and her husband in New York, three days ago, in their shared offices at the Lunel Agency, the world’s top-ranked modeling agency.
///
“I’m not going,” Arthur said. “I’m staying right here. But you should go to Provence.”
“Arthur,” Magali said sternly. “You must go. Julien is - was - your father.”
“Just an accident,” Arthur answered, ignoring the tears that were sliding down his cheeks. “I...no, Magali. You too, Darcy - don’t even start.”
“Whatever happened between the two of you, Arthur,” Darcy said, placing himself between them, “you shouldn’t continue to hold it against him. Don’t let it taint his memory.”
“He did that himself.” Arthur shook his head angrily. “You don’t understand. Magali - you knew him at a different time. What he did, to me and to Teddy and to Kate - what he did was monstrous. He might as well have abused us all. He deserved to die alone.”
“For all his monstrosities he is still one of the few men I’ve loved in this world, Arthur,” and then Magali drew herself up to her full height, turned her piercing gray eyes on him. “And I will judge him myself. Tell me what he did to my daughter Teddy, to poor dear Kate, and to you.” And then her hands came up to his face, graceful, strong, carefully holding him. “Tell us everything.”
///
“Arthur? You in here?”
And he turned and he held his hands out, silently, and Eames sat down on the bed frame with him, pulled him in close.
Arthur could hear his own words from Magali’s office as though echoing here, in the only safe space in the house, the space that had never been touched by Julien Mistral - his own son’s room. The tangled lives of Mistral and Kate and Teddy - how Mistral had found and bought the house. How Kate and Teddy had suddenly found each other in the same spaces, both hopelessly drawn to the painter’s powerful charisma, and in the end had become friends. How Teddy had written loving letters to all three of them, to Mistral and to Kate and to Arthur, and how Kate and Arthur had eagerly written back.
How Kate had struggled through the summer of the pregnancy, how it had been Arthur who had rushed her to the local hospital on the night she lost the child. How he had dug a grave for his stillborn stepsister, among the flowers in Kate’s garden. How Mistral had never even noticed that Arthur had once again walked past him with his hands covered in blood, on the morning of Kate’s suicide, the day before Arthur was to return to New York.
How the house had heard of the news of Teddy’s death - shot by a deranged admirer, the summer after Arthur turned seventeen. How Mistral had flown into a rage and dismissed the household, to the last man. How Arthur was the last person to know, told to leave as though he were just another member of the staff. How he had simply packed away his clothes and his sketchbooks and the final gift Teddy had sent him, still in its wrappings.
How Arthur had turned up on the doorstep of the Eames cottage, eyes red but dry, and his bags covered in dust because he had walked the twenty kilometers from Mistral’s house. How they had all fussed over him; how Eames had kissed him, right in front of his parents, and Marianne had snatched him away, only to enfold an unresisting Arthur in her arms. How Avigdor had plied him with beer until he had fallen asleep, muttering about his mother, at the kitchen table. How Eames had driven him to the train station; how they had kissed through desperate sobs on the platform, as the train drew up beside.
How Arthur had returned to New York, alone and in mourning for his mother, and never spared another thought for Julien Mistral.
Until now.
“Did you tell them everything,” Eames said, quietly.
“Yes,” Arthur whispered back. “I told them that Mistral could not be my father; he was no such thing. He never saw us. We were as nothing to him.”
Now Arthur pulled a sodden handkerchief from his pocket and buried his face in his hands again, let the tears come, hot and silent.
Eames stayed with him.
He wanted nothing more than to leave. When he was down to sobs he got up and prepared to walk out the door, still holding on to Eames’s hand.
That was when he saw the note pinned to the dresser mirror.
///
Eames pried the note from Arthur’s shaking hands, and opened it carefully. There were streaks and gobs of dried paint - and over it, the nearly-illegible handwriting:
If you find this, Arthur, know that I leave my home and my studio and my final work to you, my son. It is but a small offering for all the years between us, for all the pain that I have caused you. Let me make my own restitutions to Teddy, to Kate, to Nadine - to those who have gone before us. I pray that Magali will also be able to find it in her heart to forgive me, for I have given her much distress - but I pray, first and foremost, for your kindness, Arthur. I am sorry, truly, for everything.
Julien
“Arthur.”
“Eames,” he answered, quietly.
“Did they mention anything about this when they read the will?”
“Only that the house had been left to me, and the contents of the studio.” Pause.
Eames waited him out, standing next to him as if to brace him on his feet.
“Eames. Julien never wrote. Not to me when I was at school in the States, not to Kate when she was traveling, definitely not to Teddy when she was working. He never responded to Magali, when she came here to see me in the summers. And...and he never knew about Nadine. Not even her name.”
Eames crushed him in an embrace.
They stood there in the tower for a long moment, and then Arthur shook himself back together. “Come on, let’s get this over with,” and Eames watched him hunt through the ring of keys for the largest, as stained with paint as the note in his hand.
Back down through the house and his memories of watching Arthur disappear into it every night. The kind smile on Kate’s face on the one evening he came in, a summer storm beating a soothing tattoo on the roof; a large plate of sausage and bread, a bottle of Orangina gathering condensation next to his wrist. The fumes of paint and thinner, such a contrast to the dusty-sweet smell of graphite and charcoal that hung around him and Arthur both. The endless vineyards, ruler-straight through the landscape.
The strange thing was that he and Arthur had managed to keep in touch, that they had exchanged letters nearly constantly, from the moment that Arthur had fled his father’s house. They’d gradually switched over to electronic communication, which meant that they could keep their letters in an archive somewhere and always have them available - but Eames still took out the old letters from time to time, hasty scribbles on Lunel Agency stationery, the occasional snapshot. The little sketches hidden in the corners. Arthur’s sharply defined script.
After they went back home, Eames served a tour with the Royal Marines. He was teased, once or twice, for writing so faithfully to his parents and to Arthur both, one letter a week even when he was deployed - and he kept on writing the letters even after the accident that killed his senior officer, in which he came within a hair’s breadth of losing his left leg below the knee.
How strange it had been to wake and see Arthur sitting beside his hospital bed, back safe in Bickleigh after he was helo’d home. The suit crumpled beyond saving, the deep shadows beneath his eyes, the passes for Tokyo Fashion Week sticking out of his pocket. He hadn’t stayed - he left that same day, his apologies written all over his face - but Eames had smiled back at him, at the worried smile in those grey eyes.
And then Eames had enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts, following in his father’s footsteps to train as an architect - and every week the letters and postcards from all over the world as Arthur worked his way to the top of the fashion world. It was no wonder Eames had lived for Arthur’s quick, passionate visits: a few days’ vacation, snatched after Paris Fashion Week; a stopover on the way back from some boutique opening in Shanghai; a weekend in the autumn lull just before Thanksgiving and the holiday season.
Arthur stopped, then, and Eames blinked back to the present, facing the great doors into Julien Mistral’s studio. Knowing Arthur’s feelings on the subject did not make it any easier for him to sort out his own emotions - for he knew the power of Mistral’s works, the sheer life he put into his subjects whether they were people or landscapes or buildings. He had studied the man’s paintings as soon as he knew who Arthur was, and he remembered being taken aback by the smiles in the La Rouquinne series - the woman he now knew was Arthur’s grandmother Magali, laughing and dimpling and completely unashamed to be painted in the nude. He hadn’t even thought about her skin; he had been transfixed by her eyes, the eyes that Arthur seemed to have inherited from her.
He looked at those eyes now, at Arthur’s pinched expression, and he made to take the keys. Arthur let him.
So Eames opened the doors just as the afternoon sunlight burned through the cloud cover, throwing a magnificent light into the studio.
When he looked up at the great canvases he felt his mouth go dry; and for a few long minutes he didn’t even understand what he was looking at.
A series of massive portraits propped up on the walls of the studio. Julien Mistral, as he must have been in the prime of his life. Broad shoulders, the muscles of a man who worked with his hands. His white t-shirt and black trousers stained and flecked with paint; a brush in his hand. A muted light in his eyes, a restrained smile on his lips. He was standing before an easel and a canvas. The Mistral in the painting was posed as though to look off to the side, to the next part of the series.
The next painting was named Magali. The same woman as in the La Rouquinne paintings, but more mature; the laugh in her eyes, the huge bouquet of carnations in her hands. She was sitting on a low-slung wooden bed frame, one bare foot dangling to brush the floor. Sunlight attacking the cloud of her hair, long and loose and wavy, a complex blend of copper and russet and silver. A simple white blouse over a long black skirt.
There were carnations, too, beneath the feet of the next subject; the painting was named Teddy. Her hair was a much darker shade of red, in a densely layered bob. Here she was in most of a suit - white tuxedo shirt, black waistcoat with a silver chain, black wide-leg pants pinstriped in gray, bare feet. Her face was turned up to the sun: beautifully angled cheekbones, a broad forehead and a too-wide mouth. She was reaching out toward the next subject.
Kate, said the legend on the next painting. She was reaching out to Teddy as Teddy was reaching out to her, but her eyes were focused on the charming little girl by her side, a girl with Kate’s kind eyes and Julien’s mouth, curved in a gap-toothed smile. Here was Kate in a little white dress and a wide black belt, her long hair in an elaborate braid; here was the girl in a blue pinafore and red shoes. Their heads were very close together, and the girl looked like she was whispering a secret.
The subject of the last painting was Arthur himself. Here he was, caught mid-jump, his dark hair flying around his face. The face that distilled all the other portraits into a strangely harmonious whole. Magali’s grey eyes, Teddy’s cheekbones, Kate’s unabashed smile, the streaks of paint all over his white shirt and his black jeans. Here he was at twenty-two, the portrait painted as though from immediate life, though Eames had only seen him like this on a handful of occasions.
From the details, from the color and the vivid expressions, it was clear that Mistral had expended his final energies on the five paintings. The power of their gestures, the eyes full of history and life. Each person was fully realized, a completed entity - and yet all six subjects were linked together, by the colors of their clothes, by the gestures and the expressions.
Eames pulled himself out of his shock - just in time to catch Arthur when he fell to his knees. “Arthur.”
“Eames,” was the very quiet reply. “What is this? What are we looking at?”
Eames settled on the floor, then, sitting comfortably before pulling an unresisting Arthur into his lap. Raising his eyes to the portrait of the other man, he thought for a long moment, and then: “History. Atonement. Family. I think he’s trying to send you a message.”
“Me?”
“You. His son.”
“I’m not going to be his heir, Eames. I’m not going to be like him. Yes, I know what he is, I know about his talent - but I’ll never follow in his footsteps, not if it means destroying things and people, like he did to us.”
Eames laughed and pressed a kiss into Arthur’s hair. “I think that you should already know by now how very far you are from being your father’s son. What about Kate, hmm? You gave her light and hope; I’ve never forgotten the expression on her face the night you had me in here, with the storm coming down and you gone to get me something dry to wear. She told me she saw you as her friend and as her companion; she told me you were so ready to support her when she was pregnant.
“And Arthur. You could have given me up when we parted at the train station; but there you were, writing to me. I woke up in the hospital and you were sitting with me, red eyes and all. My life’s a far better thing than it would have been if we’d never kept going.”
“You make me sound like I’m more than just an ordinary man. Just a man who loves. Who loves you.”
“Because you’ve never gotten it through your thick head,” and Eames laughed, softly, “that that was all you needed to be. And maybe, just maybe, at the end of his life, your father realized it, too - and he painted you as he thought of you. That light in your eyes, that smile that holds all your heart.”
Arthur finally smiled, a bare sliver of delight. “Are you sure you’re not a painter yourself, Eames?”
“Oh, I can only think in terms of buttresses and lancets and ribbed vaults,” Eames teased back. “Though I might be convinced to change my mind, just for you.”
They sat there, side by side, and Eames watched as Arthur finally smiled and laughed and reached out for his memories, for the vibrant life that could have been, in the bright strokes and splashes of paint.
fin
Written for the first Harlequin Challenge @ harlequincepted
author: ilovetakahana
pairing: Arthur/Eames
disclaimer: I don't own the original story or the characters. Not making any profit, just playing in the sandbox.
Further edits to this story are pending, but it is complete as it stands now.
Betas: laria_gwyn, photoclerk
The plot of this story has been heavily adapted from the Judith Krantz romance, Mistral’s Daughter: They were three generations of magnificent red-haired beauties born to scandal, bred to success, bound to a single extraordinary man--Julien Mistral, the painter, the genius, the lover whose passions had seared them all.
Maggy: Flamboyant mistress of Mistral's youth, the toast of Paris in the '20s. Her luminous flesh was immortalized in the paintings that made Mistral legendary.
Teddy: Maggy's daughter, the incomparable cover girl who lived fast and left as her legacy Mistral's dazzling love child.
Fauve: Mistral's daughter, the headstrong, fearless glory girl whose one dark secret drove her to rule the world of high fashion and to risk everything in a feverish search for love.
From the '20s Paris of Chanel, Colette, Picasso and Matisse to New York's sizzling new modeling agencies of the '50s, to the model ward of the '70s, Mistral's Daughter captures the explosive glamour of life at the top of the worlds of art and high fashion.
Also archived at http://ninemoons42.dreamwidth.org/.
Arthur Lunel looked up at the house, and the breeze gusted through his hair. Bits of leaf and dead grass sweeping past his feet. The great brass gate before him, the chain and the padlock, the heavy ring of keys in his hand.
He wanted to turn around and flee, to run all the way across the Atlantic. He wanted to be back in New York. He wanted to be back home in his tiny studio, the walls painted in mint and gray, the photographs of his mother and his grandmother on the walls. The letters and postcards pinned up around his desk. The sketchbooks and pens he kept in a basket that he could shove beneath his bed.
Instead he was here, in the heart of Provence, and standing outside a house that he had fled at the end of a distant summer.
Julien Mistral’s house.
There was the sound of a car door closing behind him, and footsteps over the cracked dust. The hand slipping into his.
“You don’t have to go in now, do you?”
Arthur squared his shoulders, squeezed the other man’s hand. “I guess I do, Eames. If only so that I can tell Magali and Darcy that I followed the letter of the will.”
“Do you want me to stay here,” Eric Eames said, “or do you want me to accompany you?”
Arthur looked away from the house, then, looked to the man standing next to him. Eames, beautiful and patient and steadfast Eames. The wind sweeping though his shaggy dark hair, the lush mouth that was now thinned into a worried line, the piercing green eyes that saw the world in dimensions and measurements. Eames the soldier, now Eames the architect. Eames, whom Arthur had left at the train station on the night he left France.
They had danced in a village square on the night of le quatorze juillet; they had kissed in a country lane while a flock of sheep bumped and bounced off their rental car; they had prowled through the bookshops and museums of Avignon with their noses buried in their respective guidebooks. Eames, in whom Arthur had confided every secret he and this house had ever held.
Everything here was so painfully familiar, and so distant. Vineyards for miles around in each direction, and tucked away into so many corners, the little fruit orchards. Memories of peaches and apples, picked and eaten fresh from the trees. The swimming pool that had been the talk of the town.
“As much as I would love to have you with me in there - I have to go in by myself first,” Arthur finally sighed. “You understand.”
“All too well,” Eames said, and pulled him in close, dropped a kiss on his forehead. “I’ll come in and find you after fifteen minutes, all right?”
“D’accord.”
And Arthur gritted his teeth and opened the gate, the front door, and walked into the house, alone.
Turpentine and linseed oil; dust; dead vines and fallen seeds.
Arthur walked through the corridors like a silent ghost, looking around inside his memories. Only the slight tremor in his hands betrayed his emotions.
Here was the great table, made to seat eighteen, where his stepmother Kate sat at the head of the happy, noisy midday meal, with the workers and the house staff on the benches and Arthur himself at the foot, pouring wine and milk and passing great loaves of freshly-baked bread, everyone carving up the great ham or the sausages that were made right from the farm and its livestock and its herbs.
Here was the small, circular table in an alcove off to the side, where he and Kate had shared breakfast every morning during the summers, where they discussed her late pregnancy, where they had decided on the name “Nadine” for his stepsister.
Here was the room with the big fireplace, where they received visitors over wine and coffee and beer - the tax inspector, the mayor, Kate’s family, her art-dealer friends.
Here was the kitchen, the only place Eames had been in, and its great table where all the day’s meals were prepared. Roast leg of lamb rolled with garlic and herbs, bowls of hot chocolate and brioche with hazelnut spread and marmalade, tomatoes and onions and discs of tangy goat cheese.
Arthur turned his back on the great doors at the western end of the house, and went upstairs.
Here was Kate’s bedroom, where it had been Arthur’s task to fill the vases each morning with the fresh flowers that bloomed in rich profusion in the summer, each blossom taken from her little garden in the shade of the house. The shelves that had held Kate’s books and portfolios, the huge coffee-table books of exhibitions that she’d been to and curated and wanted to see. Off to the side, the little bathroom and its half-tub.
Arthur closed the door quickly on that room. Too many painful memories. The light in Kate’s eyes fading, her skin and the tepid bathwater soaked in blood, the smile full of pain and regret, her mouth moving faintly as she saw Arthur and closed her eyes for the last time.
Another set of stairs at the end of the corridor, and Arthur was climbing a well-known path. He had spent exactly ten summers in the tower bedroom, where the sun threw its rich light into the windows each morning, where Arthur would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night to the moon and the stars hanging low over the vineyards.
The bed was still there, too small for him now since he had a final growth spurt soon after arriving in New York, eyes too old to be seventeen. Posters still clinging to the walls, the names and the faces obscured under a thick coating of dust. His dresser, a small closet, a bookcase full of magazines and his own collections. The leaves were still there, brittle and fragile and nearly translucent; the pebbles and the graceful little twigs. Pieces of crystal; a cheap little toy car he’d found somewhere else in the house.
His mother Teddy had never actually come to this room, but the room was full of her anyway, with the presents she sent him from all over the world. Postcards from Battambang and Ontario, a mille-fiori paperweight from Venice, a length of ikat from the Philippines, a beautifully painted replica of the Tsarevitch Fabergé egg. Three crystal turtles that he had always been content to look at instead of play with. Half a dozen perfume bottles in various shapes, all empty by the time they’d arrived, but all sent on to Arthur as soon as she’d emptied them. For every time the Lunel Agency sent her on a modeling job that took her to the farthest reaches of the planet, she sent Arthur a gift, and always a letter in her looping scrawl.
I love you. I miss you. Can’t wait to see you again.
Teddy
And in large baskets at the bottom of the bookcase, baskets full of pencils and crayons, pages and pages of paper, a handful of battered sketchbooks.
Arthur had started sketching almost as soon as he could hold on to something, and he’d covered countless scraps of paper with his childish lines - lines that soon evolved, leading to a bold, but concise style, where he could evoke all the leaves on a tree with just a handful of strokes.
He could still remember the sense of wonder he’d felt when he had first been allowed past the doors downstairs, the doors that led into his father’s studio.
He had counted it as a victory when Mistral simply went on painting, knowing he was there through the summer days, never throwing him out. Every day, the two of them worked side by side: Arthur with the pencils and sketchbooks that both Kate and Teddy lavished on him; Mistral with canvases and brushes and his own hands, in the oil paints that he had used all his life.
As he refined his lines and picked up technique, Arthur watched his father paint the Stella series, the portraits of the men that Mistral had toasted and sketched and drunk with at the local village bar. He’d been there when the great canvas had been shipped in for one of Mistral’s largest works, the painting of the tumbledown castle overlooking the town, known to the world as Hill’s Guardian.
But Mistral had never wanted to see his own son’s work.
And in the end, Arthur had quietly taken the sketchbooks away with him; in the end, only Eames had seen his sketches. Kate’s gardens in full bloom; Eames’s battered old Peugeot, down to the slightly crooked front bumper. Eames’s parents Avigdor and Marianne, and their summer cottage with the walls covered in ivy and roses; a cat perched in the windows of the local store. He kept them in the bottom of the basket in his New York apartment.
Arthur carefully sat down on the stripped bed frame, heedless of the dust, and put his head in his hands. Too many memories. Too many emotions.
Julien Mistral was dead.
He had fought his own grandmother and her husband in New York, three days ago, in their shared offices at the Lunel Agency, the world’s top-ranked modeling agency.
///
“I’m not going,” Arthur said. “I’m staying right here. But you should go to Provence.”
“Arthur,” Magali said sternly. “You must go. Julien is - was - your father.”
“Just an accident,” Arthur answered, ignoring the tears that were sliding down his cheeks. “I...no, Magali. You too, Darcy - don’t even start.”
“Whatever happened between the two of you, Arthur,” Darcy said, placing himself between them, “you shouldn’t continue to hold it against him. Don’t let it taint his memory.”
“He did that himself.” Arthur shook his head angrily. “You don’t understand. Magali - you knew him at a different time. What he did, to me and to Teddy and to Kate - what he did was monstrous. He might as well have abused us all. He deserved to die alone.”
“For all his monstrosities he is still one of the few men I’ve loved in this world, Arthur,” and then Magali drew herself up to her full height, turned her piercing gray eyes on him. “And I will judge him myself. Tell me what he did to my daughter Teddy, to poor dear Kate, and to you.” And then her hands came up to his face, graceful, strong, carefully holding him. “Tell us everything.”
///
“Arthur? You in here?”
And he turned and he held his hands out, silently, and Eames sat down on the bed frame with him, pulled him in close.
Arthur could hear his own words from Magali’s office as though echoing here, in the only safe space in the house, the space that had never been touched by Julien Mistral - his own son’s room. The tangled lives of Mistral and Kate and Teddy - how Mistral had found and bought the house. How Kate and Teddy had suddenly found each other in the same spaces, both hopelessly drawn to the painter’s powerful charisma, and in the end had become friends. How Teddy had written loving letters to all three of them, to Mistral and to Kate and to Arthur, and how Kate and Arthur had eagerly written back.
How Kate had struggled through the summer of the pregnancy, how it had been Arthur who had rushed her to the local hospital on the night she lost the child. How he had dug a grave for his stillborn stepsister, among the flowers in Kate’s garden. How Mistral had never even noticed that Arthur had once again walked past him with his hands covered in blood, on the morning of Kate’s suicide, the day before Arthur was to return to New York.
How the house had heard of the news of Teddy’s death - shot by a deranged admirer, the summer after Arthur turned seventeen. How Mistral had flown into a rage and dismissed the household, to the last man. How Arthur was the last person to know, told to leave as though he were just another member of the staff. How he had simply packed away his clothes and his sketchbooks and the final gift Teddy had sent him, still in its wrappings.
How Arthur had turned up on the doorstep of the Eames cottage, eyes red but dry, and his bags covered in dust because he had walked the twenty kilometers from Mistral’s house. How they had all fussed over him; how Eames had kissed him, right in front of his parents, and Marianne had snatched him away, only to enfold an unresisting Arthur in her arms. How Avigdor had plied him with beer until he had fallen asleep, muttering about his mother, at the kitchen table. How Eames had driven him to the train station; how they had kissed through desperate sobs on the platform, as the train drew up beside.
How Arthur had returned to New York, alone and in mourning for his mother, and never spared another thought for Julien Mistral.
Until now.
“Did you tell them everything,” Eames said, quietly.
“Yes,” Arthur whispered back. “I told them that Mistral could not be my father; he was no such thing. He never saw us. We were as nothing to him.”
Now Arthur pulled a sodden handkerchief from his pocket and buried his face in his hands again, let the tears come, hot and silent.
Eames stayed with him.
He wanted nothing more than to leave. When he was down to sobs he got up and prepared to walk out the door, still holding on to Eames’s hand.
That was when he saw the note pinned to the dresser mirror.
///
Eames pried the note from Arthur’s shaking hands, and opened it carefully. There were streaks and gobs of dried paint - and over it, the nearly-illegible handwriting:
If you find this, Arthur, know that I leave my home and my studio and my final work to you, my son. It is but a small offering for all the years between us, for all the pain that I have caused you. Let me make my own restitutions to Teddy, to Kate, to Nadine - to those who have gone before us. I pray that Magali will also be able to find it in her heart to forgive me, for I have given her much distress - but I pray, first and foremost, for your kindness, Arthur. I am sorry, truly, for everything.
Julien
“Arthur.”
“Eames,” he answered, quietly.
“Did they mention anything about this when they read the will?”
“Only that the house had been left to me, and the contents of the studio.” Pause.
Eames waited him out, standing next to him as if to brace him on his feet.
“Eames. Julien never wrote. Not to me when I was at school in the States, not to Kate when she was traveling, definitely not to Teddy when she was working. He never responded to Magali, when she came here to see me in the summers. And...and he never knew about Nadine. Not even her name.”
Eames crushed him in an embrace.
They stood there in the tower for a long moment, and then Arthur shook himself back together. “Come on, let’s get this over with,” and Eames watched him hunt through the ring of keys for the largest, as stained with paint as the note in his hand.
Back down through the house and his memories of watching Arthur disappear into it every night. The kind smile on Kate’s face on the one evening he came in, a summer storm beating a soothing tattoo on the roof; a large plate of sausage and bread, a bottle of Orangina gathering condensation next to his wrist. The fumes of paint and thinner, such a contrast to the dusty-sweet smell of graphite and charcoal that hung around him and Arthur both. The endless vineyards, ruler-straight through the landscape.
The strange thing was that he and Arthur had managed to keep in touch, that they had exchanged letters nearly constantly, from the moment that Arthur had fled his father’s house. They’d gradually switched over to electronic communication, which meant that they could keep their letters in an archive somewhere and always have them available - but Eames still took out the old letters from time to time, hasty scribbles on Lunel Agency stationery, the occasional snapshot. The little sketches hidden in the corners. Arthur’s sharply defined script.
After they went back home, Eames served a tour with the Royal Marines. He was teased, once or twice, for writing so faithfully to his parents and to Arthur both, one letter a week even when he was deployed - and he kept on writing the letters even after the accident that killed his senior officer, in which he came within a hair’s breadth of losing his left leg below the knee.
How strange it had been to wake and see Arthur sitting beside his hospital bed, back safe in Bickleigh after he was helo’d home. The suit crumpled beyond saving, the deep shadows beneath his eyes, the passes for Tokyo Fashion Week sticking out of his pocket. He hadn’t stayed - he left that same day, his apologies written all over his face - but Eames had smiled back at him, at the worried smile in those grey eyes.
And then Eames had enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts, following in his father’s footsteps to train as an architect - and every week the letters and postcards from all over the world as Arthur worked his way to the top of the fashion world. It was no wonder Eames had lived for Arthur’s quick, passionate visits: a few days’ vacation, snatched after Paris Fashion Week; a stopover on the way back from some boutique opening in Shanghai; a weekend in the autumn lull just before Thanksgiving and the holiday season.
Arthur stopped, then, and Eames blinked back to the present, facing the great doors into Julien Mistral’s studio. Knowing Arthur’s feelings on the subject did not make it any easier for him to sort out his own emotions - for he knew the power of Mistral’s works, the sheer life he put into his subjects whether they were people or landscapes or buildings. He had studied the man’s paintings as soon as he knew who Arthur was, and he remembered being taken aback by the smiles in the La Rouquinne series - the woman he now knew was Arthur’s grandmother Magali, laughing and dimpling and completely unashamed to be painted in the nude. He hadn’t even thought about her skin; he had been transfixed by her eyes, the eyes that Arthur seemed to have inherited from her.
He looked at those eyes now, at Arthur’s pinched expression, and he made to take the keys. Arthur let him.
So Eames opened the doors just as the afternoon sunlight burned through the cloud cover, throwing a magnificent light into the studio.
When he looked up at the great canvases he felt his mouth go dry; and for a few long minutes he didn’t even understand what he was looking at.
A series of massive portraits propped up on the walls of the studio. Julien Mistral, as he must have been in the prime of his life. Broad shoulders, the muscles of a man who worked with his hands. His white t-shirt and black trousers stained and flecked with paint; a brush in his hand. A muted light in his eyes, a restrained smile on his lips. He was standing before an easel and a canvas. The Mistral in the painting was posed as though to look off to the side, to the next part of the series.
The next painting was named Magali. The same woman as in the La Rouquinne paintings, but more mature; the laugh in her eyes, the huge bouquet of carnations in her hands. She was sitting on a low-slung wooden bed frame, one bare foot dangling to brush the floor. Sunlight attacking the cloud of her hair, long and loose and wavy, a complex blend of copper and russet and silver. A simple white blouse over a long black skirt.
There were carnations, too, beneath the feet of the next subject; the painting was named Teddy. Her hair was a much darker shade of red, in a densely layered bob. Here she was in most of a suit - white tuxedo shirt, black waistcoat with a silver chain, black wide-leg pants pinstriped in gray, bare feet. Her face was turned up to the sun: beautifully angled cheekbones, a broad forehead and a too-wide mouth. She was reaching out toward the next subject.
Kate, said the legend on the next painting. She was reaching out to Teddy as Teddy was reaching out to her, but her eyes were focused on the charming little girl by her side, a girl with Kate’s kind eyes and Julien’s mouth, curved in a gap-toothed smile. Here was Kate in a little white dress and a wide black belt, her long hair in an elaborate braid; here was the girl in a blue pinafore and red shoes. Their heads were very close together, and the girl looked like she was whispering a secret.
The subject of the last painting was Arthur himself. Here he was, caught mid-jump, his dark hair flying around his face. The face that distilled all the other portraits into a strangely harmonious whole. Magali’s grey eyes, Teddy’s cheekbones, Kate’s unabashed smile, the streaks of paint all over his white shirt and his black jeans. Here he was at twenty-two, the portrait painted as though from immediate life, though Eames had only seen him like this on a handful of occasions.
From the details, from the color and the vivid expressions, it was clear that Mistral had expended his final energies on the five paintings. The power of their gestures, the eyes full of history and life. Each person was fully realized, a completed entity - and yet all six subjects were linked together, by the colors of their clothes, by the gestures and the expressions.
Eames pulled himself out of his shock - just in time to catch Arthur when he fell to his knees. “Arthur.”
“Eames,” was the very quiet reply. “What is this? What are we looking at?”
Eames settled on the floor, then, sitting comfortably before pulling an unresisting Arthur into his lap. Raising his eyes to the portrait of the other man, he thought for a long moment, and then: “History. Atonement. Family. I think he’s trying to send you a message.”
“Me?”
“You. His son.”
“I’m not going to be his heir, Eames. I’m not going to be like him. Yes, I know what he is, I know about his talent - but I’ll never follow in his footsteps, not if it means destroying things and people, like he did to us.”
Eames laughed and pressed a kiss into Arthur’s hair. “I think that you should already know by now how very far you are from being your father’s son. What about Kate, hmm? You gave her light and hope; I’ve never forgotten the expression on her face the night you had me in here, with the storm coming down and you gone to get me something dry to wear. She told me she saw you as her friend and as her companion; she told me you were so ready to support her when she was pregnant.
“And Arthur. You could have given me up when we parted at the train station; but there you were, writing to me. I woke up in the hospital and you were sitting with me, red eyes and all. My life’s a far better thing than it would have been if we’d never kept going.”
“You make me sound like I’m more than just an ordinary man. Just a man who loves. Who loves you.”
“Because you’ve never gotten it through your thick head,” and Eames laughed, softly, “that that was all you needed to be. And maybe, just maybe, at the end of his life, your father realized it, too - and he painted you as he thought of you. That light in your eyes, that smile that holds all your heart.”
Arthur finally smiled, a bare sliver of delight. “Are you sure you’re not a painter yourself, Eames?”
“Oh, I can only think in terms of buttresses and lancets and ribbed vaults,” Eames teased back. “Though I might be convinced to change my mind, just for you.”
They sat there, side by side, and Eames watched as Arthur finally smiled and laughed and reached out for his memories, for the vibrant life that could have been, in the bright strokes and splashes of paint.
fin