Petite Mort Read online

  The door to my old bedroom creaked under my hand.

  The room was warm with sleep. Camille lay in my bed, huddled over on herself like a small animal, the blankets clutched between her legs. On the tiny desk, she had laid out the tools of her trade – the half-used pots of rouge, the eyelash curlers, the hand mirror.

  As quietly as I could, I stole my best dress from the cupboard and then I fled into the street.

  Two days later, the letter would have arrived.

  It was a Sunday – Agathe’s day off, and so she would have been up early – it would have been Agathe who found it and tore it open, never mind that it was addressed to Mathilde, greedy hands ripping the paper in case there was something personal inside. Levering herself into a chair, she would have read André’s brief note explaining where I had gone and why. Post as secretary. Hope this will cover unpaid rent. Expenses. Thank you for your kind understanding. Do not hesitate. Yours, &c.

  And then it would have dawned on her that money was in the envelope – she would have held it upside down and the notes would have fluttered out and lain on the parquet, twitching in the breeze from the open window. One hundred, two hundred, three hundred. Agathe’s fingers flexing; her piggy-eyes glinting, for André, with his rich man’s lack of understanding, had more than bought off my deposit and my three months’ notice; the three hundred francs was a sum the like of which Agathe could not have earned in several months.

  She would have made a rapid calculation, and folded the notes quick as winking into her pocket, and the letter – the letter she would have burnt, letting the fragments sprinkle into the breeze, as she stood at the window where we always used to smoke together. She would have spread herself with a grunt into the place I used to occupy, and thought no more about it.

  Mathilde would have continued hoping for a word from me to explain my sudden absence. ‘Do you think we should alert the police?’ she would have asked, and flinched at Agathe’s snort. And then, what would she have said? We run an honest little boarding-house, officer, visited only by a few discerning gentlemen…

  Nevertheless, she would have waited for a note or a letter. Late at night, thinking she heard a light step on the stairwell, she would have paused in her needlework and listened.

  ‘You shouldn’t be surprised,’ Agathe would have said, flicking her cigarette end high over the rooftops and watching it fall in a firefly, ember-tipped arc, ‘she was always flighty.’

  Juliette and Adèle

  1967

  ‘So you just left without saying goodbye? Without leaving an address?’

  ‘Imagine if she’d followed me to the house. It was my big opportunity.’

  She looks out of the window, and I don’t interrupt her: I’m getting used to these pauses.

  Eventually she says: ‘Did you say you were going to see the film tonight?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then you’ll see what I was like as a girl. I was beautiful.’

  She still has that absent expression. I wait.

  She says: ‘One day, five years ago, I went to see a plastic surgeon, a man with fine hands and an office behind the Palais-Royal. He took my face like so, pinching the skin here, and smoothing it here, and he never once looked me in the eyes. At the end of the examination he said: Good news, Madame. We can nip here, tuck here. I can give you back what you’ve lost.’

  She draws herself up, indignant at the memory. ‘What do you think I told him?’ she says.

  I think about it. Realise I know the answer.

  ‘Nobody can give another person what they’ve lost?’ I say.

  She looks at me, faintly surprised. Then she levels her finger, like the barrel of a gun, right between my eyes. ‘Very good, Mlle Blanc.’

  Juliette, ii.

  In the dark of the viewing room, a flickering light, and then the picture forms.

  An intertitle:

  LA PETITE MORT

  OUR TALE BEGINS IN BOHEMIA, A LAND ROAMED

  BY FELL BEASTS AND BANDITS…

  The screen changes: a jagged landscape, triangular mountains and floating cardboard clouds, and in the background, a tiny turreted manor house.

  IN THE CASTLE BISMARCK, THE BARON IS

  PLANNING THE WEDDING OF HIS YOUNGEST

  DAUGHTER…

  A room at the top – cut-out stars and moon visible through a window. A middle-aged man appears, gesticulating and striding up and down. Sitting stage right is a young woman with her face in her hands.

  As the actress takes her hands away I feel – not recognition, because I don’t think anybody could see Adèle Roux, the person I know, in this frightened, hungry face.

  I WILL NOT MARRY FOR MONEY!

  The Baron shakes his finger at her:

  THE COUNT IS A MAN OF WEALTH AND

  DISTINCTION!

  BUT I LOVE ANOTHER!

  WE LEAVE FOR THE CHURCH AT DAWN

  TOMORROW!

  Adèle runs to the door, sobs against it, slithers to the ground; flings herself onto her bed. Cries; then lifts herself on one elbow and, after a moment’s thought, leaps from the bed, runs to a bookshelf near the door and pulls a large book from it.

  MY LOVE FOR MAURICE WILL NOT BE SULLIED.

  I WILL CREATE ANOTHER WHO WILL GO FORTH

  AND DO MY BIDDING.

  Her hands lift:

  WATCH ME AS I CAST MY SPELL—

  …

  …

  Lightning across the film – but not part of the film – and without warning the scene changes completely.

  ‘That’s where the missing bit was,’ the technician says.

  The castle tower is gone – now an Alpine field, strewn with tiny wild flowers. In the background there is a cardboard-looking church, and hundreds of guests milling about in front. They have the unmistakeable air of amateur extras, over-excited and unsure of themselves: one young man sneaks a glance direct at camera, looks away, then looks back and stands, mouth open, until the woman next to him tugs him away. The film technician chuckles.

  A man in a velvet tunic runs to and fro across the screen, his hands clutching at his scalp.

  The intertitle reads:

  THE NEXT MORNING, BEFORE THE WEDDING,

  MAURICE SEARCHES FOR HIS BRIDE…

  The technician cuts the motor and smiles apologetically.

  ‘We’ll never know,’ he says, unspooling the film from the reel. Holds it up to the light. ‘Here.’

  I hold the silky filmstrip, and together we look at the part where the two scenes meet. One minute mirror; next church.

  ‘Was it found in two halves? Did you stick it back together yourselves?’

  ‘No, it was like this when we got it. That’s editing cement. They use it to splice pieces of film together. Whoever cut the scene out must have glued it back together again after they’d removed it.’

  I run my thumb over the roughness of the join.

  A LITTLE DEATH

  10. juillet 1913

  ‘SO,’ ANDRÉ SAYS, slipping his shirt back over his head, ‘what did you think of my wife?’

  There hasn’t been time for talking, in the first tumble on my own feather bed. The room is moonlit grey; the ormolu clock on the mantelpiece of my new room ticks quietly. He sits on the edge of the covers, his hand still resting on my thigh, smooth under the rich person’s sheets.

  I arrange my face into the malicious smile he will expect. He smiles back, reassured; always fastidious, he clears his throat and buttons up his trousers. ‘No doubt you thought yourself more attractive and more talented,’ he says.

  ‘She’s what I expected,’ I say airily, and he nods and shrugs, happy with the diplomacy of the answer. ‘Same time tomorrow night?’

  I plump up the coverlet under my fingers. What he will expect me to do: look triumphant.

  Thomas had been the one to show me to my room earlier that evening; up, up and round the great spiral staircase, my valise handle sticking to my palm. The walls were papered in cool silk, embossed
with fleur-de-lys. Above us there was a cupola, a disc of indigo: an eye peering through the roof.

  Each member of the household had their own floor. Terpsichore’s was the first and smelled of nothing: the walls of the corridor were draped in pale yellow silk. André’s, the second floor, smelled of the factory: cordite and business sense.

  And then, knowing, expecting a reaction, Thomas said: ‘This is for you.’

  He had opened the first door in the third-floor corridor and stood aside to let me pass. I didn’t go to the bed or the wardrobe in chocolate mahogany or the cold china vase on the dressing-table or any one of the hundred other beautiful things the room contained; I didn’t exclaim girlishly – I was too proud, in front of Thomas. Instead, I crossed to the window and leant out from the waist, squinting into the sun. Directly below was a flagstoned terrace, with a balustrade, and two mossy stone lions for sentinels; it was lit with lanterns, just starting to show in the fading sun. Beyond it, the lawn stretched away for half a mile or so, until it met the fringe of the Bois de Boulogne.

  I said, keeping my voice level: ‘This is very nice.’ A great wash of happiness: Look, look where I had got to.

  ‘The Durands take the evening meal at eight. You will hear the dinner bell chime.’

  When the time came, I hovered on the upstairs landing, waiting to hear them go down; not wanting to be the first to arrive. As soon as I heard doors opening and shutting I ran downstairs.

  When I entered the dining room, I noticed a change in her straightaway: where in our interview she had been calm, now it was as if she was surrounded by a heat haze of energy. She was taking snails from their shells with a miniature fork, her other cutlery laid out before her like a butcher’s implements: knife, scoop, tweezers. Not timid: cheerfully pulling at them until they gave way.

  A chandelier hung twinkling from the ceiling; servants stood blending into the walls, waiting to serve food from the sideboard. The polished table gleamed my own ghostly image at me; she was seated near the door and André sat at the far end, his back to the French window. He looked up at me and I felt, as clearly as if he had really done it, his finger trace my cheek: pretty little devil.

  ‘Do you find your quarters to your liking?’ he asked.

  ‘They are extremely comfortable. Thank you.’

  He had risen into a reverential half-bow; now he sat back in his seat, his smile in the corners of his mouth.

  I looked down at the finicky morsels of food: amuse-bouches, a miniature egg perched on a salad, and the snails and dish of sauce – toy dinner – and hovered over the cutlery until I could be sure what each was for.

  ‘Mlle Roux saved my life today,’ Terpsichore said.

  André pressed his thumb into his wine glass: miniature pink lines sprang to life along the stem.

  ‘Yes, it happened like this: I was re-reading Thérèse Raquin by M. Zola, which as you know,’ – she paused to press her napkin to her mouth – ‘is a great tragedy of disappointed hopes and loveless loves.’ Her eyes were busy on the table as she spoke, and her hands swept the snails’ shells fussily back into their silver dish. ‘I had come to the final paragraph, so desperately sad, where Laurent and Thérèse take the poison and collapse into each others’ arms, unable to bear the weight of their guilt.’ She lifted her wine glass; her eyes twinkled over the top of it. ‘And I sat on my sofa and thought, nothing can surpass Thérèse Raquin – I have known it for some time in my heart of hearts. M. Zola is a towering inferno of genius who will never again pass amongst us, so what use is it, then, to stay alive?’

  André smiled indulgently.

  ‘So I thought then: What will it be? Knife, rope or drowning? My resolve was fixed; I had only to determine the modus operandi – I barely heard the door, nor did I hear Thomas escorting Mlle Roux into the room, but unquestionably she rescued me from certain death by my own hand.’

  André snorted and smoothed his cutlery, repositioning it on the tablecloth; then looked up as the fish course was brought. ‘How do we know that it was not Mlle Roux, performing voodoo in the back of our automobile, who put such thoughts into your mind in the first place?’

  She levelled her knife at him down the table. ‘We don’t. Mlle Roux is therefore a rescuer or a bird of ill omen, depending on your point of view.’ She smiled her bright, interested smile. ‘In any case, the great work of saving me from myself begins tomorrow. Mlle Roux must always be on hand with matches, to set alight any book which might distress me; to remove tempting nooses, to whisk sharp objects out of my reach.’

  André dipped his eyes to his food, smiling and prodding the fish with his fork. I looked up at her, and found she had absented herself, lifting her wine glass and staring at a point in the dark window past André’s head. Her neck drooped slightly, in the way that tall people’s sometimes do.

  I dissected my sole into smaller and even smaller pieces, irritated by what she’d said. She expected me to be at her shoulder with the matches, always on hand to shelter the corners of furniture. It was as if I was a negative person – someone she would only notice through the things I removed.

  The shutters in my bedroom window creak in the night air. At the doorway, André pauses: ‘The two of you don’t have to be enemies.’

  ‘You’d prefer it if we were.’

  He grins, and is gone. His light footsteps patter down the stairs to his rooms one floor below, and there is the sound of his door gently shutting.

  11. juillet 1913

  THE NEXT MORNING I woke up naturally for the first time in years. It was wonderful: listening to the sounds of other people having to work; scratching at André’s leftover papery scales with my thumbnail.

  The house was all small sounds: the clatter of pans in the kitchen, the sweep, sweep of the housemaids scrubbing down the terrace outside; the regular tread of Thomas carrying food trays to the different occupants of the house’s three floors. What there wasn’t: polite conversation between Mathilde and Madame Moreau, comparing last night’s prices on the landing; Monsieur Z’s whining sea shanties echoing up from the street. I’d write to Camille later.

  Finally the footsteps came outside my door, and there was a discreet knock and the rattle of a breakfast tray being set down. ‘Madame expects you in her study at nine-thirty,’ Thomas whispered, and then his soft pad away down the stairs again.

  I hopped out of bed and dragged the tray into the room; examined the meal. They had gone to the other extreme from last night’s picky nothings: now there was fried kidneys and coffee thick as oil. I pushed the tray out of the room again with one toe, unable to stomach it; and then, because it was still before nine o’clock, dressed and went to explore my domain.

  The corridor was warm and sunlit: to the right of my bedroom, doors ran away along a corridor to a picture window at the end, beyond which a tree moved soundlessly, its leaves quivering in a light wind.

  I stepped across the carpet runner to the door almost opposite my room, and tested the handle. By daylight, the paintwork in the hall had a bleached-out, dusty look of disuse; the door knob rattled uselessly in my hand. Pursing my lips, I walked to the next door – another set of weary paintwork – and gently turned the handle. Nothing. The same for the next door, and the next, by the window. The leaves outside ruffled, discontented; I tried the rooms on the other side of the corridor, but they were locked right the way back up the passageway to my own room.

  I stood outside my bedroom with my hand on the door frame. This floor is yours, Thomas had said, beaming at me. But he had not even given me keys to my own room, let alone to the rest of my miniature empire.

  Just then, from inside, the clock on the mantelpiece chimed nine-thirty. I pulled the door shut and crossed to the top of the stairs.

  When I reach Terpsichore’s floor I don’t know which is her study so I listen, and sure enough, there is the rasp of a page being turned, behind the door at the far end of the passage.

  I knock at the door and hear her clear her throat. ‘Come in!
’

  She has laid the novel on the sofa beside her and now her hands are clasped together. She isn’t the only one posing: the room is long and light, with bookcases lining two walls. It reminds me a little of Père Simon’s front room, but these books are all new, and if dust spirals in the shaft of light from the windows, it is only showing off. On her left, propped against a cushion, is her discarded breakfast tray: a brioche bleeding a dab of jam.

  ‘Just in time,’ she says, and casts her eyes at the novel splayed on the seat beside her, ‘I was almost at the poison scene again.’

  I’m confused. ‘Didn’t you read that last night?’

  ‘I needed to look at it more closely.’

  ‘Why?’

  She smiles a wicked-fairy smile. ‘I wish to understand the best method of poisoning someone.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘My husband. I’m running away.’

  I don’t know the rules of this game, so I go quiet.

  ‘So my routine,’ she says, ‘until the studio comes to its senses: I read in the morning, scripts or studio business, and the afternoons are for exercise and social calls. Does that sound amenable?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good.’

  She looks at me, eyes slightly narrowed, thinking me over.

  ‘You may begin by answering some of my correspondence,’ she says, and gestures to the desk under the window, where a stack of handwritten letters is waiting. ‘Just write a brief note of acknowledgement to each.’

  I don’t need a second invitation to sit to something straightforward, and besides, I want to show her what I can do; I pick up the topmost letter, dip the pen in ink, and bend my head. For a while the only sound is the scratching of my nib on the paper, and the soft turning of the pages of her novel. Sneaking a look, I can see that she has started again at the beginning.