Will I be able to do him justice?
Doubts assailed her right from the start. As she had predicted, he missed the first sitting and was ninety minutes late for the next one. Yet when he did arrive his manner was brisk and businesslike, and apart from taking three mobile calls in succession, in as many languages, he let Alexa make her first preliminary sketches without interruption.
‘May I see?’ he said at the end, and his tone of voice told Alexa that this was not a request, despite the phrasing. Silently she handed across her sketchbook, watching his face as he flicked through her afternoon’s work.
Pencil and charcoal were good media for him, she’d realised. They somehow ma
naged to distil him down to his essence. Beginning full-on with oils would make his looks unreal, she feared. No one would believe a man could look that breathtaking. People would think she’d flattered him shamelessly.
But it was impossible to flatter Guy de Rochemont, she knew. The extraordinary visual impact he’d had on her at her first encounter with him had not lessened an iota. When he’d walked into her studio earlier that afternoon she’d found, to her annoyance—and to quite another emotion she refused to call anything but her artistic instinct—that her gaze was, yet again, completely riveted to him. She simply could not tear her eyes away. She just wanted to drink him in, absorb every feature, every line.
When his mobile had rung, and with only the most cursory ‘excuse me’ he’d launched into French so fast and idiomatic it was impossible for her to follow a single word, she had actually welcomed the opportunity to resume her scrutiny of him. Unconsciously she’d found herself reaching for her sketchbook and pencil.
Now, as he flicked through her labours’ fruits, she was watching him again. He definitely, she thought, had the gift of not showing his reaction. Whether he approved of what she’d done or not, she had no idea. Not that his disapproval would have bothered her in the least.
If he doesn’t like what I produce, he can sack me, she thought, with a defiance she had never applied to her other clients.
But then never had she had a client like Guy de Rochemont.
As the sittings proceeded, intermittently and interrupted, as she knew they would—because his diary could alter drastically from day to day as with all such high-flyers who relied on others to accommodate themselves around them—she realised with what at first was nothing more than mild irritation that he started to disturb her. And it disturbed her that he disturbed her.
Even more that it was starting to show.
Oh, not to him. To him she was still able to keep entirely distanced during the sittings, to maintain a brisk, almost taciturn demeanour which, thankfully, mirrored his. He would usually arrive with a PA or an aide, with whom he more often than not maintained a flow of rapid conversation in a language Alexa did not understand, while the PA or aide took dictation or notes. Sometimes he took phone calls, or made them, and once he nodded a cursory apology to her when a second aide arrived with a laptop which he handed to his boss to peruse. After he had done so, Guy snapped it shut and resumed his pose again. Alexa coped with it all, and said nothing. She preferred not to speak to him. Preferred to keep any exchange to the barest functional minimum.
Yet it didn’t help. Not in the slightest.
Guy de Rochemont still disturbed her in ways that she just did not want to think about.
Unfortunately, Imogen did. Worse—she revelled in it!
‘Of course he’s getting to you!’ she trilled triumphantly. ‘Otherwise you wouldn’t snap when you say his name, or when I do. It’s a sure sign.’ She gave a gusty sigh. ‘It’s all totally theoretical, alas. He’s all over Carla Crespi. She’s preening herself rotten about it. Puts the pair of them in front of every camera she can find. Or buy. Even with your looks—if you bothered to do anything to show them off—you couldn’t compete with her.’
Alexa tightened her jaw and refused to rise to the bait.
Besides, she had bigger problems than Imogen winding her up.
The portrait wasn’t working.
It had taken her a while to realise it. At first she’d thought it was going well—the initial sketches had worked, the simple line drawing being ideal for catching the angled planes of that incredible face—but as she started to paint in oil, it didn’t happen. At first she thought it was the medium, that oil was not the best for such a face. Then, after a while, it started to dawn on her, with a deep chill inside her, that the problem was not the medium. It was her.
I can’t catch him. I can’t get him down. I can’t get the essence of him!
She took to staring, long after he had gone, at her efforts. She could feel frustration welling up in her. More than frustration.
Why can’t I make this work? Why? What’s going wrong?
But she got no answer. She tried at one point to make a fresh start, on fresh canvas, working from the initial sketches all alone at night in her studio. But her second attempt failed too. She stared, and glared, and then with dawning realisation knew that, however hard she tried, it was simply not going to work. She could not paint Guy de Rochemont.
Not from life, not from sketches, not from memory.
Nor from dreams.
Because that was the most disturbing thing of all. She’d started to dream about him. Dream of painting him. Disturbing, restless dreams that left her with a feeling of frustration and discomfort. At first she had told herself it was nothing more than her brain’s natural attempt to come up with a solution that her waking mind and conscious artistry could not achieve. That dreaming of painting Guy de Rochement was simply a means to work through the inexplicable block she was suffering from.
But then, after the third time she’d dreamt of him, and woken herself from sleep with a jolt at the realisation that yet again he’d intruded into the privacy of her mind, she knew she’d have to throw in the towel and admit defeat.
It galled her, though—badly. It went against the grain to give up on a commission. She’d never done it before, and it was totally unprofessional. But it was also unprofessional to turn in substandard work. That broke every rule in her book. So, like it or not—and she didn’t—she had no option. She was going to have to admit she couldn’t do the portrait, and that was that.