The Street Painter – Part 2: The Last Portrait

On his last evening, Hugo sat for the twelfth time.

The square was nearly empty. The café tables were being stacked. The other painters had folded their easels and gone for supper. A lamplighter's glow, orange and warm, lay over the cobbles. The sky above the rooftops turned from peach to violet.

"Don't think of anything," said Camille.

"Why not?"

"Just look at me."

He looked. Her charcoal moved across the paper, slowly this time. She drew his eyes first, and then the line of his mouth, and she did not look away from his face. The square was quiet. A pigeon cooed on the lamp.

When she finished, she did not hold the sketch up. She set it on her knee and sat very still.

"Is it good?"

"It's the best I've ever done."

"May I see?"

She turned it round. It was Hugo, unguarded and warm and a little afraid, looking straight out of the page. Under it, in neat letters, she had written: Hugo, who came back.

His throat tightened. "You've been drawing me for twelve days."

"I know."

"I fly home tomorrow."

"I know."

"I don't want to."

"Then don't go far," said Camille.

"Can I ask you something?" said Hugo.

"Yes."

"May I kiss you? I've been thinking of it every morning. It's the thing I was thinking of."

She laughed, her eyes bright. "Yes. And if you say stop, you must sit for the next one."

"There'll be a next one?"

"Hundreds."

He kissed her, gentle and surprised, a hand rising to her cheek, leaving a faint smudge of charcoal on his thumb. She kissed him back, warm and wholehearted, the beret slipping off her hair. The lamp glowed over the cobbles. The portrait fluttered on her knee.

When they parted, both of them were smiling.

"Green?" he asked.

"Green," said Camille. "Very green."

He returned in spring, and again in summer. The twelfth portrait hangs in his flat in Dublin. Beside it hangs the thirteenth, and the fourteenth.

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