The Restoration Artist by Lewis DeSoto

into a studio in one of the old buildings on Powell Street in Japantown. There’d been a string of studios over the years, in Vancouver, then New York and then in Paris. Rooms for work, for painting in, with a bed in a corner behind a curtain, second- or third-hand furniture, a hotplate for cooking, usually a bathroom down the hall. I hadn’t minded. I was a painter and that was how artists lived. Until I met Claudine.
    In the beginning, after we were married and started living on rue du Figuier, it had taken me quite some time to settle in, to be comfortable in any of the rooms except the studio. I’d never had a dining room, or sitting room, much less a proper bedroom. We owned the apartment, bought with an inheritance from Claudine’s father, but it still took a couple of yearsfor me to get rid of the feeling of impermanence. I think it was only after Piero was born that I allowed myself to believe that I had a home and a family, that finally I was at home.
    And then how quickly it had all changed.
    On an impulse, I reached into my jacket pocket for the bleached oyster shells I’d collected on the beach, and arranged them in the sunlight on the windowsill.

C HAPTER 11
    R ATHER THAN GO BACK TO THE HÔTEL DES ÎLES THE same way I had come, along the route des Matelots, I decided to follow the shoreline towards the headland marked on my map as Le Colombier—the dovecote—where I had seen the house called La Maison du Paradis.
    The tide had risen higher while I was seeing to my new cottage and the waves now came right up to the dunes. The white dog was nowhere in sight, and the moon was high in the sky, looking much smaller and less impressive.
    The track meandered left, away from the dunes and across a heath, where a flock of crows rose into the sky protesting my presence, black flutterings on blue. Just visible through a dense grove of pines on the far side of the heath was a rooftop, and I made my way in that direction. It was immediately quieter in the trees, away from the breeze and the sound of the waves. Underfoot lay a carpet of dried pine needles. The house I had glimpsed was no longer visible and there was no path here, but I guessed I was heading in the right direction.
    I hadn’t walked very far when I heard a peculiar sound, a quick squawk, like the choked-off call of a gull. I assumed it was some kind of bird. The sound came again, like a voice, but not a voice, and not a bird either. I stopped. The breeze sighed in the pines softly. Then the sounds came rapidly, from some sort of musical instrument, a clarinet maybe.
    Yet these jumbled sounds could hardly be called music. Only once had I heard music remotely similar to this cacophony, and that was on Tenth Street in New York, at a party in a loft belonging to some musicians. They had played what they called “free jazz.” Try as I might to be hip, I had heard only a noisy confusion of sounds. It was like looking at the abstract expressionism everybody was painting—I saw no meaning, just a tangle of colours and shapes. Since then, I’d been a few times with Claudine to musical recitals at churches in Paris—Mozart, Vivaldi, that kind of thing—but my tastes ran more to the Mississippi blues of Lightnin’ Hopkins and Fred McDowell that I’d first heard in a coffeehouse in Vancouver.
    I moved forward, almost tiptoeing, my steps cushioned by the pine needles. But when I stepped on a dried branch the crack of the snapping wood was as loud as a gunshot. The sounds stopped immediately. I remained motionless, holding my breath, peering into the shadows. All was silence.
    The afternoon heat rose in waves from the ground at my feet, the resinous smell of the pines thick. I waited. Then the strange otherworldly sounds filled the grove again. Half a dozen goats came into view, foraging among the rocks or stretching their necks to nibble the leaves at the tips of branches. Just past them, a figure was perched on the rocks, holding a clarinet. The boy! He was