The Kiss by Joan Lingard Page A

had been surprised that his work didn’t look much like Rodin’s.
    ‘Why did you think it would?’ he’d asked them.
    ‘You always said he influenced you.’
    ‘That doesn’t mean I aped his work. Influences are more subtle than that.’
    ‘I couldn’t agree more, Mr Aherne,’ Mrs Bain had said. She had come with her daughter. ‘I know that myself. I am a great admirer of Burns but I would not presume to think that my poetry in any way resembles his.’ Clarinda had half turned her back to hide her discomfiture and was closely examining an exhibit. Her mother had adored everything as soon as she had put a foot over the gallery threshold and wished that she had enough money to buy the lot! ‘I would fill my house with your treasures, Mr Aherne, if I could,’ she had told him.
    He had seldom met a more invasive woman, he reflected, as he sat on a café terrace on the Boulevard St Germain remembering Mrs Bain at his exhibition. It was a wonder she had not found a way to accompany them to Paris. He found her quite alarming when she presented herself at his door on parents’ evenings, dressed in lurid, floating garments which concealed her size and shape, with jangling bangles encircling her plump wrists and various assorted chains hung about her person, and smelling so strongly of some musty scent that he had to move his head back to avoid suffocation. She talked too close to his face for comfort and he wastoo conscious of her plummy lips and the traces of lipstick on her teeth. She painted a little herself, she had confided on one visit, dropping her voice to a confidential manner. Watercolours. Oh, she was sure he would think nothing of them. She went to classes, though, and her teacher had been kind enough to say that she could be good enough to be a professional painter with a little more experience. She thought Clarinda must take after her. Apart from Clarinda’s own tendency to wear floating Indian cotton dresses he could see nothing of the mother in the daughter. Perhaps she took after the father who had ducked out of their lives many moons ago, possibly driven out of the house by the stench of perfume and the sound of rattling bangles.
    ‘I know he was thirty-five years older than her but it didn’t seem to matter,’ said Clarinda. For a moment Cormac was not following. ‘Gwen and Rodin,’ she went on. ‘My mother says age is irrelevant. She says she feels no different from what she did at eighteen.’
    ‘Really?’
    ‘You don’t agree?’
    ‘Unfortunately not.’
    A waiter had cleared the dirty cups from their table and was hovering, hoping for a fresh order.
    ‘Another cappuccino?’ Cormac asked Clarinda andwithout waiting for an answer he ordered for them both.
    ‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘I think you could be almost as good as Rodin. I do! If you were to concentrate on your sculpture and give up teaching,’
    He laughed. ‘Come now, Clarinda! You’re just buttering me up. Rodin is a giant. I am scarcely knee-high to him.’
    ‘Why don’t you have more faith in yourself?’ she demanded fiercely. His laughter faded, and their eyes engaged.
    At that moment, the rest of the group burst upon them with cries of ‘There you are!’ and ‘Where have you been?’
     
    When he returns home, having eaten his croissant and drunk two cups of black coffee and read his Sunday newspaper while doing so, he finds the flat still echoingly quiet. No further notes have been left on the table saying, ‘Gone to Claire’s or Timbuktu.’ It is now midday. He is wondering whether to call Rachel and ask her if she knows anyone called Mandy when the phone springs into life, startling him. He grabs the receiver, almost knocking the machine off the table.
    ‘Hi, Dad!’ Sophie is phoning from a call box andsounds breathless. She begins to gabble and he wants to break in and say, ‘Hey, slow down,’ but she isn’t listening. ‘Listen, Dad,’ she says, which is what he’s doing, ‘I’ll be home in a