Mesmerised

  BIOGRAPHY

  A long time ago, Michelle Shine arranged travel for Peter Gabriel, Spandau Ballet, Boy George, Phillip Green and other famous names. Then in 1989 after the miraculous cure of her eldest son’s epilepsy and allergic colitis by homeopathy, she was compelled to find out more about the medicine that the German pharmacist Samuel Hahnemann discovered in the very late 18th century.

  In 1993 she graduated from the College of Homeopathy in Regent’s Park, London and embarked on a career, spanning twenty years, as a homeopath in North West London. When her husband died suddenly and tragically at fifty-eight she gave up her practice to write full time. The result is Mesmerised, her first full-length novel.

  Michelle Shine is the author of What About the Potency? A homeopathic textbook now in its third edition and The Subtle Art of Healing, a novella which was long listed for the Cinnamon Press Novella Award in 2007. Her short stories have appeared in Grey Sparrow, Liar’s League, Epiphany, Lover’s Lies and The Book of Euclid. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Birkbeck University, and is the mother of three grown-up children.

  MESMERISED

  MICHELLE SHINE

  Indigo Dreams Publishing

  First Edition: Mesmerised

  First published in Great Britain in 2013 by:

  Indigo Dreams Publishing Ltd

  24 Forest Houses

  Cookworthy Moor

  Halwill

  Beaworthy

  EX21 5UU

  www.indigodreams.co.uk

  Michelle Shine has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  ©2013 Michelle Shine

  A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted at any time or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without

  the prior permission of the copyright holder.

  Mesmerised is a work of fiction.

  Cover design by Ronnie Goodyer at Indigo Dreams

  Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe by Édouard Manet

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This story is a work of fiction where real events and people are intertwined with characters and happenings that are born solely of my imagination.

  All the artists mentioned, their families, the Academie Suisse, Père Tanguy, Doctor Charcot, Georges de Bellio, and Blanche Castets really existed.

  Victorine's letter resides in the Adolphe Tabarant archive at The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. MA 3950.

  Many of the homes, workplaces, and cafés have authentic addresses. Le Salon des Refusés really happened and the revelations of Edouard Manet’s life and death are well documented.

  Doctor Gachet did save Alfred Pissaro’s life with homeopathy, and was called in to try and help Edouard Manet on his deathbed.

  The London cholera statistics have been taken from the NHS, UCLH website.

  Any mistakes that might be contained in this book are my own.

  DEDICATION

  To the man of my dreams

  Jon Shine

  1950-2009

  and my beautiful children,

  Matthew, Rebecca and Daniel

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My gratitude goes to the lovely Nomads, my writing group who were instrumental in encouraging me to start the novel and continue it – Sarah Peak, Charlie Fish, Beth Cordingly, Helen Bain,Felix Harrison, Anna Baggaley, Deirdre Shannon, Skye Sherwin and Laura Allsop. And my early readers: Sue Young, Liz Shine, Elaine Ratner and Stacey Bernie. I’m indebted to the lovely people who worked in Paul Gachet’s house in Auvers sur Oise, and spoke to me at length about his life, but whose names were sadly swallowed by a house fire. Also, Anna Cassale, Howard Robin, Lisa Goll and Louisa Dreisin for their good advice and having faith in me as a writer. David Ratner for being a great dad. Clive Goldman for helping me to retrieve Mesmerised from a burnt-out computer after the fire in my home. Ronnie Goodyer and Dawn Bauling for picking up this manuscript and wanting to run with it. John Griffiths, my editor. Caroline True for the flattering photograph. Sophie Lewis and Ruth Kaye for ideas for the front cover. Malcolm Sevren, Keith Woolf, Raymond Stoltzman, Gary Rose and Gary Bobbe, for much need help, advice and friendship at a very difficult time. Renee Rose for picking up the baton. Kate Bush, a huge source of inspiration, always. And Teodora Berglund and Elizabeth Adalian, for their passion, creativity and promotion.

  Thank you.

  January 1863

  I buy pure phosphorus from an old alchemist who lives in a slanted house on the hill that leads to Montmartre. His wife, Madame Armand, has a small plot of land where she grows vegetables and flowers to sell at the market. Many of the brown bottles in my collection contain fluids that were distilled from her produce.

  In Monsieur Armand’s laboratory, in the middle of the afternoon, all shutters remain closed. Thin streams of light trespass and fall in diagonal lines across glass vessels. Tubes lead from one to the other in a world of liquids that bubble and fizz.

  ‘This is a very combustible material.’ Leaning on his stick, he licks his lips, wrinkles deepening in concentration under strands of white hair.

  ‘Monsieur Armand, I really appreciate this. I know that you originally acquired the substance for yourself.’

  ‘Shh, say no more,’ he says, his free hand at my back.

  A baby cries.

  ‘That’s Madeleine, my grandchild,’ he says, eyes lit. ‘What are you going to do with the phosphorus?’

  ‘I’m going to make a homeopathic remedy.’

  ‘What’s that?’ He pulls down a book from a splintery shelf behind him. Dust puffs into the air like face powder in a thespian’s dressing room.

  ‘No,’ he says, opening the leather-bound and gilt-edged tome. ‘It’s not mentioned here. And therefore …’ He claps the pages shut using the outer cover, ‘… it does not exist.’

  Moving Home

  March 20th

  ‘It is not enough to know your craft – you have to have feeling.’

  Edouard Manet

  It is 7 o’clock in the evening and deceitfully dark. I sit on a crate in the centre of the main room in my new apartment in rue Faubourg Saint Denis. I face two large windows which look out upon a full moon that throws a white smudge at my feet. Inside, there is no light. The fireplace is silent in its unlit state. My greatcoat hangs on a hook behind the door wearing a lunar streak. I don’t feel cold inside although my feet are numb and when I touch my cheek with my fingers they are shockingly cold. The warmth in my chest brings me comfort. This room is embracing me.

  There’s the clip-clop of horses’ hooves, neighing, the closing of carriage doors and the voices of easily affronted Parisians three stories below. My heart lurches with my good fortune, for this is a great room. The walls are high, luminous, practically begging for art to adorn them. My desk, which seemed so large and cumbersome at my last address in rue Montholon, proudly occupies less than one third of the space, and is tucked away at one end. I imagine receiving patients here, putting chairs out in the hallway where they can wait. I will make the alcove into a kitchen/dispensary for my medicine. But not only that, this room is conducive to artistry. The light is good. It is where I shall paint.

  I will store my easel and my canvases in the cupboard in the small lobby leading to the bedroom, through the door to the right of the fireplace.

  I shall be happy here.

  A knock on the door jolts me from my thoughts. Without thinking to light a gas lamp or candle, I jump up.

  ‘Who is it?’ I call through the door.

  ‘Victorine Meurent.’

  Releasing the shiny new bras
s chain, I let her in.

  ‘Bonjour Monsieur Docteur, my dear friend Paul,’ she greets me. ‘It’s very dark. I wouldn’t have thought you were a man who was into séance,’ she says, bounding in and stopping short only a few steps beyond the threshold. She looks back at me.

  ‘Victorine,’ I tell her, ‘your vivid imagination influences you. I’ve just moved in. I’ve been sitting on that crate contemplating my new direction and inwardly celebrating. Let me bring some light to the situation.’ I rub my cold hands on my trouser legs and hunt blindly through packing boxes for matches, which I eventually find. I strike one and the phosphorus glows bright like the sun, dying as I spark up the gas lamps by their brass cords.

  ‘I’ve come to ask you when it would be a convenient time to call. I knew that it wouldn’t be now, but Camille gave me your new address and I’m desperate to see you professionally, so I thought I would stop by in passing just to ask you this question,’ she says, her body as composed as Savoldo’s Mary Magdalene, silver caped and waiting on a hillside wall above the port in Old Jerusalem.

  ‘Forgive me if I don’t ask you what the matter is right away,’ I say, indicating with my arms the bareness of the space around me.

  ‘It’s the usual.’

  ‘Ah!’

  Victorine is a city girl who like so many others, lives on her wits, but she has a talent for life and there is very little that she cannot do.

  ‘I’m not unpacked yet. You’ll have to come back tomorrow at around eleven. I will have what you want to hand.’

  ‘Paul, you’re wonderful,’ she tells me with her palms at my shoulders and her red lipstick making imprints on my cheeks, as usual.

  She leaves me alone again. Immediately, I extinguish the light and look around, re-focusing. Perhaps Victorine is on the street looking up, finding me odd to desire darkness in this way. I pick up the matches left on the mantel and strike a bulbous head against the grainy stone fireplace. Immediately it flares white gold and blinding. Phosphorescent. What is to be learned? I do this three more times then retire to bed.

  March 21st

  Dawn. There’s a lacy, iridescent frost at the windows. I am up early, blowing heat through my fingers, unpacking logs, kindling, old newspapers, and lighting the fire. It is Saturday, like Sunday, a day of rest for me, although not always. Sometimes there is work to do at the hospital and very often there are callers with acute ailments. Today Victorine is arriving at eleven. Georges de Bellio, a medical colleague of mine, will come to help with the building of shelves in my kitchen/dispensary, which shall also serve as a pharmacy. There is even running water there thanks to Haussmann, Napoleon III’s lackey, who rebuilt our city to a modern specification.

  With the fire crackling, I hunt through six boxes for the medicine required by Victorine. My desk shall separate us. She will sit opposite me and say she wishes for some more Mercury, just in case. I will talk to her again about condoms and how they are to be used. I will lecture her on hygiene as prevention against disease. She will purse her lips, rest one elbow on my desk and sit with her chin neatly framed by her hand. She will stare directly at me, and say, ‘Like I said, just in case’.

  No doubt I will sigh and dispense a small two-gram vial that will contain around fifteen pillules. She will take one every time she beds a man unprotected.

  She comes for this prescription once or twice a year, ever since I told her at the Café Guerbois, ‘Mercury is the medicine for syphilis but it is also a poison.’

  ‘Yes, but can you prevent syphilis, that’s what I want to know?’ she asked, blowing Turkish cigarette smoke up at the ceiling.

  ‘The disease is endemic.’

  Her attention wavered. She was looking at a man in the corner whose body was wrapped around someone smaller. He must have sensed Victorine’s stare as he let go of his companion and looked directly at us. His left cheek had what appeared from a distance to be a botched scar. His eyes were steely and challenging. His companion was not much older than a child. She swayed as if drunk. Victorine shuddered and pulled her shawl closer around her.

  ‘I met a man the other day. He sits on the board of the Faculty of Medicine. I can’t remember his name. He knows of you. He said that the medicine you prescribe outside the hospital is rubbish.’

  ‘Why don’t you try it for yourself? Mercury prophylactically, in minute doses.’

  ‘Fine. When can I come and see you?’ she said, smiling broadly as she turned back towards me.

  Georges arrives whilst I am still in consultation with Victorine. I make him a prisoner in my bedroom until she leaves.

  Coming out of hiding, ‘I propose breakfast,’ he says good-naturedly.

  I haven’t eaten since yesterday lunchtime and run wildly fast down the winding staircase. My hand brushes the cast iron balustrade, burning my palm, and I almost trip on the stone steps.

  ‘Take care, Paul, you’re far too young to die,’ Georges shouts down from under his bobbing handlebar mustachios, a robust figure in frockcoat, black and white spotted tie, opal pin and bowler hat. His voice is an echo all around him.

  ‘Come and join me. Don’t be pompous,’ I shout back up.

  Georges hails a hansom to take us to his favourite café in the Boulevard des Italiens, where green plants grow in pewter coalscuttles snaking around columns amid a passing scent of pancakes aux citron; sponged walls like marble in caramel and toffee; gilt-framed mirrors reflect black-tailed waiters carrying silver salvers. Women, with lavender and jasmine oozing from perfumed hair, are adorned in organza and lace. We order omelette aux pommes and drink bitter, Arabic coffee.

  ‘How’s the painting?’ my Romanian colleague asks, tapping his cigar in an ashtray with his podgy forefinger.

  ‘I’ve joined the Académie of Pére Suisse. I go twice a week.’

  ‘I envy you your talent.’

  ‘As a painter? Surely not.’

  ‘As a physician – consultant in nervous disorders at La Salpêtrière – it’s impressive.’

  ‘No, what’s impressive is that all your patients are artists and literati, and your consulting room is the Café Riche.’

  Georges sits back and smirks.

  ‘Clever me,’ he says.

  It’s still morning and yet the candle flames wag like tongues on every table.

  ‘Tell me, when did you last see Edouard?’ Georges asks.

  Needing to be back at my practice by noon, I had been in a hurry. I had spent the whole morning at the hospital, detained by a woman named Manon, a patient, who had just been informed that her father had died. Her pupils were dilated. I waved my hand in front of her face but there was no reaction, she just carried on staring without blinking. Months earlier, when she had lost her sister, she had cut off all her hair and run naked through the streets of Faubourg Saint-Honoré.

  I wanted to sit with her, hold her hand and be of some comfort, but needed to get across town to Rue Montholon. I stayed for a short while then caught a crowded omnibus, giving up my seat to a young girl who was pregnant and swayed with the vehicle till it came to a standstill. I grew agitated at the prolonged stop and craned my neck see through the window. There was a rumpus outside the courthouse. The police were arresting a man. Crowds gathered and no one could get through. Edouard stood on the steps of the Palais de Justice. No doubt he had just visited his father, who was a judge, perhaps for lunch. He seemed very self-assured: his hands thrust into his trouser pockets, his top hat connecting him to the gods. He was in conversation with Victorine. She was wearing a black coat, open at the throat. She cocked her head at something he said. I imagined Edouard with his forefinger slipping downwards from the velvet ribbon at her neck.

  I say nothing. That wasn’t the last time I saw him anyway.

  ‘He is not going to Académie Suisse?’ Georges persists.

  ‘Not of late, why do you ask?’

  ‘I haven’t seen him for a while that’s all. He used to come by here at least once a week. I’ve had his prescription in my p
ocket for the last month.’

  ‘When I saw him a couple of weeks ago, I noticed he had a slight limp.’

  George winces, calls over the waiter and asks for the bill, which he insists on paying.

  Academie Suisse

  March 25th

  ‘Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places.’

  Camille Pissarro

  Charcoal sketches on greying paper in simple black frames are knocked sideways on the wall as I climb. They boast the signatures of Courbet, Delacroix and Corot. It’s impossible not to shoulder them and cause mini avalanches in the cracking wall paint. The stairs demand trudging, each one placed too high above the one before. About half-way up there is one that has almost collapsed into a chasm. I have to manoeuvre my way around it and take a chance where I’m stepping. It’s an expedition. Only the brave come to Père Suisse.

  He is hovering at the door as usual, making sure no one enters who hasn’t paid a monthly fee. His suspicious eyes lift above his spittoon. He was an artist’s model once, lucky to have inherited this perfect studio to paint in. And he is sufficiently pleased with himself. You can see it in the way he wipes his mouth with the back of his hand after expectorating tobacco-phlegm into a real silver bowl. Père Suisse is the proprietor of a school that has the arrogance to exist without any formal tuition. But there is always an atmosphere of camaraderie in this grimy studio.

  ‘Ah,’ I breathe out, arriving with aching legs at the summit.

  Camille, Victorine, and Henri look around.