Petite Mort (12 page)

‘You don’t sound sure.’

‘I am.’

‘Not just answering her letters?’

‘No,’ I say, ‘why?’

‘No reason.’

He draws a line with his tongue and I drop back onto the pillow. ‘There’s nothing wrong with correspondence,’ he says. His tongue reaches its destination and I sit back up to watch.

Five minutes later he says it again: ‘Correspondence makes the world go round.’ His curls bounce on his forehead, perfectly in place.
One of these days
, I think,
I’ll tear one out, just to see the look on his face
.

As I walk into the salon she throws her novel down.

‘I thought we might pay a visit to my great friend Robert Peyssac. The studio gossip is that he has a film in the preparatory stages, and I want to talk to him about a role before the news gets out.’

Without waiting for my answer she leans across to pull the bell.

Hubert punches the horn despairingly as we rumble over the Pont-Neuf onto the Ile St Louis: horses and carts bombard the automobile, an omnibus trundles past, two rows of blank-faced passengers crammed in, their hat brims touching. At the end of the bridge a bread delivery-woman steps off the kerb, stops dead in the road and stares in at us, her hands gripping the arms of her cart; she mumbles her lip, and then proceeds slowly across the road, threading between the stopped vehicles. Hubert leans out towards her, tapping the side of his head.

‘Leave us here,’ Terpsichore says, as we turn onto the little central street of the island, ‘his house is just next door.’ Hubert rides the car up onto the pavement and hops down from the driver’s seat to let us out.

The air is sweet with lunchtime cooking smells from restaurants on the island: cassoulet and crêpes. The river flashes unexpectedly at us down an alleyway next to the block, barges drifting in the sunshine, tethered to the quays.

At the front door she turns to me. ‘How do I look?’

She is wearing a blouse and skirt in a cobwebby grey; the sleeves of the blouse taper where the freckles start to emerge at her wrists. In the strong light from the river I can make out the down on her cheeks and the flecks of her irises.

‘You look the part,’ I say.

Looking down at me from her great height, she smiles.

‘Now, Peyssac was used to my old assistant. He likes his women quiet; doesn’t like to be interrupted.’ She leans in to press the buzzer. Far inside the house there comes an answering ghost ring. ‘So let me do the talking. He liked Huguette, she was a paragon, quiet all over; her mouth moved but there was no sound.’

I hesitate, then turn my face casually away and say: ‘Is that why you hit her?’

‘It was a projectile. Not
mano a mano
. And besides, she recovered, for which we are all extremely grateful.’

‘You don’t seem grateful.’

Her smile is enormous. ‘So sharp, Mlle Roux, I could use you to peel an orange.’

I suddenly find I am hot all over: under my collar and on my cheeks, damp-palmed, and glad, because she is distracted: the door has opened, a retainer bows low. We step inside.

In the central courtyard of the big house there is a cobbled square of sunlight, scattered with pots of geraniums.

‘Please wait here,’ the retainer whispers, and vanishes through a doorway on the far side. Less than a minute later he reappears: ‘M. Peyssac will see you now.’

Terpsichore tosses her head and follows him back through the doorway. She has forgotten me now, sweeping down the corridor. I scurry after her, a solo duckling; up some stairs and into Peyssac’s parlour.

A grey stuffed gull glowers down at us from a glass case; in the corner, a column of
immortelles
ascends the striped wallpaper,
silhouetted lips parted in expectation of the hereafter. And in an armchair in the corner is a little man past the point of middle age, with an immaculate white goatee. He is framed in the light: I can imagine him adjusting his chair fussily as we were announced.

‘My dear!’ Peyssac cries, bouncing to his feet, all the while looking over her shoulder, his gaze darting everywhere, sliding off me. ‘How wonderful! And you are looking so well!’ He reaches up to hold her shoulders and look into her face.

‘Robert, it’s wonderful to see you again,’ she says, bending to put the
bises
on his soft cheek. ‘May I present Mlle Roux, my new assistant?’

I bob my head. Of course he is too polite to ask about Huguette.

‘Charmed,’ he says. ‘I am Peyssac.’

I nod mutely; from the corner of my eye, Terpsichore’s lips twist into a smile.

‘Charmed,’ he says again, nodding approval at the straightness of my spine. He snaps his fingers to the butler standing in the doorway: ‘Tea? Coffee! Cake!’ To us: ‘Well – sit,’ and waves to two wing chairs. I am careful to perch on the very edge of mine.

Terpsichore: ‘It’s so nice to see you again, Robert. How are the children?’

Peyssac waves away the question, chortling: ‘Manon is so high, every time I see her she’s shot up another foot. Micheline does the most astonishing sketches: a real little talent!’

‘And Marguerite?’

‘The same. Perpetually exasperated with my long hours, but she says she still loves me. What more can one expect?’

Terpsichore nods and laughs, as if charmed by his witticism. The sunlight slants down to a point in the middle of the Turkish rug, and suddenly the conversation has grown strained. She and Peyssac smile at each other, and he says: ‘To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit, Luce?’

I flush, and hope nobody notices. Had I thought Terpsichore was her real name?

‘They say you are making a new film. A sort of revenge fantasia, featuring a ghost?’

‘As to that! We are at the mercy of Charles Pathé for the money. But surely you know all about
Petite Mort
from André? We are relying upon him to work his tricks for the ghost scene. Surely he has mentioned it?’

Shouts from the bargemen float through the open window, filling the thunderstruck silence. I sneak a glance at her: her throat is mottled red, but she laughs, and if her voice is not quite ordinary then maybe it is close enough: ‘Robert, if I listened to one-fifth of what my husband tells me—’

Peyssac slaps his thigh. ‘Quite so! Oh, very good! I must remember to tell Marguerite.’

Whilst he is wiping his eyes, Terpsichore rises to her feet. ‘We must dash.’ She crosses the room and bends over him so that he can plant a full Judas kiss on either cheek.

She straightens. ‘Our best to Marguerite and the girls, and good luck for the film.’

‘
Au revoir
, Mlle Roux,’ says Peyssac miserably as I pass.

But she cannot resist. My chest aches; I want to tell her not to – as we reach the door, she turns and points at Peyssac, smiling. ‘If there’s a role, Robert, think of me?’

He freezes, a child with his fingers in the jam pot. Her face freezes too; she turns and marches away from him down the corridor, with me trailing in her wake.

We do not stop on the pavement; she marches us to where the car is waiting and stands, white-faced, as Hubert fumbles with the handle.

He hums as we pull away from the kerb; I watch the wheel spin in his capable hands. We drive back over the river and along the rue de Rivoli with its crowds of tourists and shoppers.

‘You see, Mlle Roux,’ she says, smiling but not really, ‘one is
only as good as one’s last good role.’ She turns her face to the window.

She is quiet again until we are back on the Left Bank, and then she puts her hand over her mouth; her voice comes through her fingers.

‘They are piss-weak. Men! Let themselves be pushed and prodded—’

Her great eyes staring out of the window. She says: ‘Even when I was the toast of the Comédie Française, it was always doublespeak! Even when the Crown Prince of Russia waited outside my dressing-room every night – even then, parts came, parts went, and we never knew which of us actresses would be favoured next. I didn’t come to Paris to be rotated on a spit, and kept in the dark, and played against my friends. Do you know what he said to me, the Tsarevich, staring down his imperial nose?
In Russia we would never treat our artists so
.’

She’s too bright to be looked at, and yet it is impossible not to look at her: the flared nostrils, the flush on her neck.

‘Peyssac will have asked Eve Bray,’ she says, biting the tip of her thumb, ‘or Lily Lemoine, or Vivienne! She couldn’t act her way out of a sack—’

I search frantically for something to distract her: ‘How did you come to be an actress? How did you come to Paris?’

She stares at me; for a long, awful moment it seems she will reach for something, anything to throw at me; then her outline softens.

Luce, i
.

Luce’s family were Norman, but Luce is not a Norman name. It has echoes of the Mediterranean, and Luce’s parents, minor aristocrats, felt sheepish at the christening. Nothing could be further from the south: the wind howled around the abbey church, and mist swept in from the Channel. A maiden aunt stifled her cackles in the third pew – just outside of those reserved for proper family – and remembered the time she and a young cousin had tried to bottle light in a jam-jar during a seaside trip. It was to this sound – high unrepentant laughter – that Luce was given her name.

She was a tiny baby, with such odd-shaped eyes that the midwife’s first thought was of those children one sometimes heard of with the beginnings of second heads sprouting from their necks, or webbed feet, as though they were born for being underwater. The midwife had only once seen something of the kind, amongst a poor country family who had welcomed the baby just the same, whisking it away from her so quickly that she barely had time to believe what her eyes were showing her: the stump of a tail, still translucent in newborn frog-skin. It could be hidden under fashionable dresses, but the midwife wondered what happened to these children, all the same. When she handed Luce to the nursemaid, who handed her to her mother, it was with a downcast look, almost an apology.

There was no need. Luce’s mother, who at thirty-five fully intended this to be her last child, thought she had never seen anything so perfect.

‘She’s the picture of you,’ she said, holding up the baby to her husband.

As she grew, Luce was enthroned in her similarity to her parents.

She was younger than her brothers and sisters by six years, the only baby in the house, and visitors quickly understood she was the favourite, and took care to toe the line, exclaiming how like her father, how like her mother, she was. She was set apart from the other children by treats, presents, and time spent dandled on her mother’s lap; by kisses dropped on the down of her head. Where the older children had been brought into their parents’ company only a couple of times a week, to greet each other solemnly and perhaps recite a morsel of verse, Luce was in the great salon with them almost every afternoon.

The nursemaids pursed their lips, and muttered behind their hands – but the Marquis and Marquise ignored them. It was 1880: in America, Thomas Edison was founding his landmark magazine,
Science
. In Germany, Cologne Cathedral was finished, a mere six hundred years after construction was initiated. In Normandy, the neighbouring Duc de Polignac had married a Canadian steel magnate’s daughter for a dowry of seven million dollars – and he was still invited to every social function. The Marquis and Marquise, gazing fondly at their daughter, felt a daring thrill at treating her differently from the others; this warmth and proximity, the way they could brush the fine hairs on the child’s fontanelle whenever they chose, and hold her up to the window to see the horses being led out to pasture. Perhaps this was what it felt like, being modern.

What Luce’s brother would have said about Luce, aged five: she is an oddity. She won’t play games. When we try to trick her into playing hide and seek in a far-flung attic, she ends up back at the beginning, watching us run after her. And then, when she
can hear an adult is near, she cries, and when they ask her why she’s crying, she points the finger at me.

On Luce’s sixth birthday, the Marquis and Marquise organised a party for her, five times as lavish as for any previous child. A juggler and a puppet theatre, a collation for the villagers and servants served on the lawn. The older siblings were offered pony rides, and grew frantic with sugar; the afternoon took on a hazy logic of its own, and Luce, wanting a pony ride too, threw a tantrum.

She ground her fists into her eyes and turned puce: the Marquise held her, but she was inconsolable. As she howled, her brothers and sisters’ faces turned stony. Servants’ eyes narrowed, too; but her parents were distressed by her distress.

The Marquise snapped her fingers to have her own mare fetched from the stables, and to hoist herself side-saddle and have Luce hoisted up beside her.

The Marquis stepped forward. ‘Is she big enough?’

The Marquise smiled, and shrugged, and held the child closer. ‘Just a canter,’ she said, ‘just a run to the boundary and back.’

‘Take me riding, Mama,’ Luce said, imperious.

The Marquis’s instinct to protect vied with the enchanting picture before him – Madonna and child on horseback.

‘What harm can it do?’ he said.

It was only established afterwards, from a logical regression of the sequence of events, what had happened. The manservant who rode out in search of the Marquise two hours later found the mare, rolled on its side and white-eyed, and the Marquise a few feet away. They were on the other side of a hedge which the horse had failed to clear.

Predictable confusion. The manservant picked up the Marquise’s body and rode with it back to the house; the Marquis, who had sat waiting, his hands folded in premonition,
came out to meet him and collapsed. A second trip was needed to go out and look for Luce. It was dark by that time; the sweep of the lamps found her lying quietly just ten feet from the dead horse, with an open fracture where her femur protruded through the skin.

The wound healed gradually, leaving a patch of shiny skin where the bone had come through. In her attic room, Luce practised walking with two sticks, then one, then none. She was discouraged from spending time downstairs by the maids who looked after her.