Radiance

When I think of Clotilde Charbonneau I am surrounded by blackness, by softness. She loved furs, and my father was delighted with an obsession he could so easily satisfy. Otter, stoat, mink, fox, sable, rabbit. Wilder still—Martian beaver, Ganymedean woodmonk, Uranian glacierfox. All black, infinite and uncountable shades of black. I remember closing my fists in her furs as though she were an animal and I were her cub. I must have seen her without her furs at some point, some pale slip of a thing beneath her panther skin, but I cannot recollect it.

But her fingers—oh, yes, the fingers of Clotilde Charbonneau! In all the monochrome kingdom of Virago, Clotilde’s fingers were rainbows. She couldn’t help it; she wore the silver paint we all did, but by the end of the day it always rubbed away and her colours showed through: saffron and rose and moss and robin’s egg and lilac and lemon.

Miss Clotilde was a colourist, see. Percy had scads of them; a whole army, really. Squirreled away in a great grey barn hand-colouring every frame of whatever opus he could not bear to realise in black and white alone. They are strange beasts, those prints. Their colours lie on top of the image like fitful lovers, unable to quite sink into the impermeable silver world of my father’s heart. The vampires from The Abduction of Proserpine soaked in wriggling red. Peachy-golden quivering angels in Trismegistus, their vapour trails ghosting green. Clotilde’s fingers were saturated in those poisonous inks. All the water on Mars couldn’t out that damned spot. She began wearing gloves when she moved in (black, obviously), but I saw her secrets when she put me to bed, for a child needs human touch and not leather, no matter how fine.

So after all the Moon’s most eligible ingénues had eaten Percival Unck’s cake and sipped his tea and exclaimed over the very special beauty and intelligence and character of his daughter, he pulled a twenty-two-year-old colourgirl out of his barn, put ermine on her back, and sat her in a nursery that spangled and glittered like New Year’s Eve, every surface covered in silver and glass and white and shimmer. Because she was the best painter he’d ever met. Because she liked to drink and swear, even though she looked like the kind of girl who never would. And because she told him that she’d never see a single one of his movies in a theatre, for she’d seen them all already, flowing, frame by frame beneath her hands, and she liked the stories she made up in her head better than anything the dialogue cards could say. Fill her in like a new frame, Percy whispered to her. Make her red and green and peachy-golden. Trace the woman she’ll be around the child she is like indigo round grey. Make her leap off the screen in better colours than the real world has ever met.

Clotilde eventually tired of inking Uncks, both celluloid and flesh, in anonymity. I can’t blame her. She left us after The Majestic Mystery of Mr Bergamot premiered. I cannot imagine what an iron-sided soul she must have had to be the first to leave my father. To tell him no. The last words she said to me in that mirror-ball nursery weren’t even her own words, but they’re the only ones I remember her saying to me. It was a quote from Mr Bergamot.

[SEVERIN’S voice goes soft and tired, vanishing down into Clotilde’s Marseilles accent.] Buck up, baby blowfish. Just puff up bigger than your sadness and scare it right off. That’s the only way to live in the awful old ocean.

Funny thing about Clotilde. She remarried-didn’t even take long to manage it. To a Battersea backdrop artist indentured to Oxblood Films. Practically every forest and starscape and lonely moor you’ve ever seen were his, excepting the ones done by her after she signed on to his contract. His name was Felix St. John.

[SEVERIN extends her hand offscreen and pulls ERASMO ST. JOHN toward her. He perches delicately on the arm of the navigator’s chair, incongruously graceful for a man of his size. He kisses her; they grin at each other.]

ERASMO

Which mum are you on?

SEVERIN

I’d only just got through ours. But I already did Mary and Ada. It’s a little jumbled at this point.

ERASMO

Ah, then it’s Amal next, is it? Number Four.

SEVERIN

Queen of the Tigers. I’m impressed you remember.

ERASMO

[He reaches out, tucks her hair behind her ear.] I know your life story cold. It’s like the twelve days of Christmas. Five golden rings, four calling birds, three French hens, two turtledoves, and Amal Zahara the Tiger Queen.

SEVERIN