Petite Mort (14 page)

She looks, astonished, at Berthe, who forces a smile; at the same time, the door to the acting audition room opens and Luce appears.

Luce says nothing to Berthe, who doesn’t ask, but simply thinks,
Lord be praised, now we can get on with making her respectable
, and gathers up the child’s scarf, still smiling tightly at Aurélie’s mother, who is holding Aurélie’s coat up for her to put on.

‘Did you get in?’ Aurélie asks, her arms held out behind her to find the sleeves. ‘You look like you did.’

Luce nods, intimidated by the older girl, and obediently wraps her scarf round her own neck.

In the dormitory, it is thought appropriate to have the younger children shepherded by the elder ones, and to mix disciplines, so that dangerous rivalries are discouraged. Aurélie and Luce start at opposite ends of the dormitory and conspire: swapping their way with hair ribbons and sweets down the rows until they are next to each other.

Aurélie teaches her ballet exercises to help her with her stage movements. ‘Pretend you are an oak tree,’ she says, pressing down on her shoulder.

Late at night, they confide their secret fears. ‘I’ll only ever be
corps de ballet
,’ Aurélie says, matter-of-fact and too loud, so that other girls in the long line of beds rustle. She whispers: ‘I don’t have it in me, the way some do.’

She looks speculatively at Luce. ‘They say you do.’

Luce thinks for a minute. ‘They say a lot of things, about how my aunt only takes me home in the holidays because otherwise I’d be a ward of the State and that’s common.’

It is a long speech for her, and has Luce’s characteristic way of closing off the subject at the end of the phrase. Aurélie settles the sheets about her ears and does a horizontal shrug; she knows different.

Luce takes her first role as a maid in a Scandinavian tragedy in a little theatre in the Faubourg St Honoré, and Aurélie sits in the front row on the first night. Aurélie’s face will always be too long and her expression too knowing, but the gentlemen see her nonetheless: rising from their seats and nodding to let her pass to the middle row seat, noting the ballerina’s long legs and her hands – even they are muscular – as they grip the stole about her throat.

The lights go down; the play starts. Luce, taken by a violent attack of nerves, looks out to the audience where possible, and at last spots her friend; she relaxes, and the rest of the first act goes better. Aurélie sits with a smile on her face, knowing that Luce has seen her.

The papers are full of it: ‘
The newcomer Mlle de Jumièges betrays her noble stock, speaking her part with a zest worthy of a much older actress. Her grace and poise are that of a dancer
.’ Those critics who have not yet come to the play flock to see her; the sound of frantic scribbling is all that disturbs the reverential silence. It only takes a couple of days before the stage name – Terpsichore, the muse of dance – is coined, which will follow her wherever she goes. Throughout the next year, Aurélie comes to all Luce’s engagements, sitting in the front row where possible, once taking an overnight train back from Marseille, where she is playing Odile, so she can attend a premiere.

Juliette, iii
.

‘See,’ says the editor, lifting the strip of film up to the light – delicately, gingerly, with his long pianist’s fingers.

‘Hand splice,’ he says, indicating the section of
Petite Mort
where the missing scene goes, ‘uneven, bad workmanship, almost certainly amateur, and now look at the other splices, done in the course of the assembly.’ His fingertip brushes a point further down the print, where a thin line joins two frames. ‘These were made with a splicing machine, of course, by the film’s editor.’

Then he says: ‘And you were right about the cement. It’s all the same stuff they used in the 1910s. Acetane and dioxane.’

I say: ‘So the person who cut up
Petite Mort
was a different person from the editor who made the rest of the joins? And our person couldn’t use a splicing machine? But could lay their hands on cement?’

‘Yes.’

‘That could be anybody.’

The editor has turned his back to me, storing the film strip in its box. ‘No,’ he says. ‘It would be somebody who had access to the materials, and who was familiar enough with the theory to attempt to cut and repair the film by hand. But who lacked the expertise to do it properly.’

He waits. Then, seeing that I have no further questions, he lifts the
Petite Mort
reel into its canister again.

As he is leaving, he stops, fingers on the door frame. ‘You said it was found in somebody’s basement.’

‘That’s right.’

‘This isn’t the safety film stock we use today – it’s the old stuff – nitrate cellulose. Highly flammable. If it’s stored above twenty-one degrees centigrade for any length of time, it degrades. If you don’t handle it right, it may even catch fire.’

I frown. ‘What are you saying?’

‘Talk to the person who handed it in.’

WE WAITED FOR AN ANSWER
to one of the two letters that Terpsichore had written.

The weather had turned dreary; the window panes were spattered with sudden bursts of rain. Terpsichore set me to classifying household bills at the writing desk while she fidgeted and read; when I looked up, I would often catch her staring out of the window, or picking at the lunch tray that Thomas brought, her face pale and thoughtful.

She rarely asked me what I was doing, or told me what she was reading. She just sat there, neck drooping, saying nothing and chewing her lip, for hours at a time.

Dinner times, since the Day of Peyssac, were strained. André always started the meal confidently, talking about the studio and his plans for the next season’s films, but finished by speaking almost exclusively to me, as Terpsichore stared over his head to the garden beyond, making the minimum possible response.

At the end of the week, suddenly, over supper, Terpsichore spoke. ‘I don’t suppose you want to go to Aurélie’s party?’

He looked up. ‘To what?’

‘The salon.’

The crystal sparkled, holding its breath, and he frowned as if trying to remember having discussed it. ‘No, but you go.’ He made a long arm for a copy of
Le Temps
that was lying on the sideboard.

‘Take Adèle,’ he said, sheltering behind the news, ‘if you need company.’

I didn’t dare to look at her, in case I saw disappointment on her face.

But instead she looked neutral. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I might do that.’

He cleared his throat, closing the subject.

‘There you are,’ she says when she greets me the next morning. The air is different in the room: tinged with anticipation. All around her on the settee are copies of
La Femme Moderne
and
La Mode Parisienne
, flipped through and discarded, as if she were looking for something but the thing she wanted has not come to hand.

‘I think,’ she says, not looking at me, her voice too light, ‘I think what we need is to go shopping. I have a violent urge to spend my husband’s money.’

Rue de Rivoli is streaming with people; Hubert drops us on the corner of the place du Louvre, swearing under his breath at the hurrying crowd: ‘Madame, it’s the closest I can get without murdering somebody.’

‘We’ll only be an hour,’ Terpsichore says, and climbs slowly down from her side of the car; I follow, jostling her through the people standing open-mouthed in front of the window displays. The great sign of the department store, LES GALERIES ST. PAUL, twinkles overhead, gold against the grey colonnaded façade; all around me are
oohs
and
ahhs
at the clockwork soldier in the window beating a wooden drum.

She leads me past the shop, and down a side road, and we come to a halt at a front door halfway down the street, next to which a discreet plaque reads: WALLACE MONGE, MAISON DE COUTURE.

The door opens before we knock. A slender man with brilliantined hair stands in the doorway, and holds out his arms
with an expression of goodwill. He embraces Terpsichore silently, and holds out a hand to me. ‘Wallace Monge,’ he says, and I nod, pretending I know the name; ‘Come in, come in,’ he says, and leads us inside.

I want to look everywhere at once. The walls of the tiny room are papered with designs – elegant female silhouettes. There are orchids in pots, and a miniature palm tree, and a table, behind which a girl my own age is sewing a hem by hand. A row of silk turbans in ascending sizes march along a shelf above her head.

‘I have just the thing,’ he is saying to Terpsichore, ‘let me find it—’ and he disappears behind a screen.

The girl looks up from her sewing and smiles at us. I return the smile as best I can, feeling awkward; but she doesn’t seem to mind that I am a customer.

‘Here,’ says the man, reappearing with a sketchbook, which he flips to the back page and holds up for her, so that only the two of them can see.

‘Yes,’ she says, critical at first, then convinced. ‘But can it be ready for tomorrow night?’

They discuss measurements and delivery times; my eyes wander. Gowns hang from hooks on the wall: steel-grey, watermelon, butterscotch. But the dress which catches me out is on a mannequin at the far end: red silk with a wide skirt, the whole embroidered with tiny flowers.

‘And for Mademoiselle?’ asks Wallace Monge, smiling at me.

Terpsichore says: ‘I think she has decided what she wants.’

Wallace snaps his fingers, and the girl who was sewing jumps up and bustles to unpin the red dress from the mannequin. Then he leans in and pecks Terpsichore on the cheek. ‘Can I leave you with Denise?’

She waves him away with a smile, and he squeezes my elbow and turns to go.

Terpsichore is watching me, smiling as if from a long way away.

Wallace Monge’s foosteps disappear up the rickety staircase.

‘You can’t,’ I say, mortified.

She is trailing a fingertip along the neckline of another dress on another dummy. ‘Why? Don’t you deserve it?’

In the corner of the room there is a booth with a curtain on iron rings. The girl ushers me inside. She turns away modestly, pretending to fiddle with her tape measure, and when I am in my underthings, she kneels in front of me and begins to palpate, running the measure from my ankle to my hip. When she stands in front of me to pull the tape round my breasts, she whispers: ‘Is it her? Is it Terpsichore?’

‘Yes.’

She beams. ‘They said she had an account. Isn’t she lovely, though. Even more beautiful in the flesh!’

I hold my arms out to the sides, like a martyr in an old painting, and look at my face in the mirror over the girl’s bobbing head.

She makes notations in a tiny notebook with a pencil so worn down it is barely a stub, and snaps it shut. ‘There!’ she says, ‘we’ll barely have to alter it, now let’s just see it on—’

She helps me drop the dress over my head. It whispers past my hips, hanging just so, a sheen catching the light.

‘Shall we show Madame?’ the girl asks, sitting back on her haunches.

‘No, don’t,’ I say, but it is too late, she is jerking the curtain back, and I turn and there she is.

Behind her, the drawings on the wall replicate her to infinity; each of which could be her, the tall silhouettes in their many dresses. But she doesn’t say anything, only stands with a strange, blank expression. Her eyelashes sweep her cheek as she blinks once, twice.

It is awful to have her look at me like this: as if she’s a stranger. I bob a self-conscious little curtsy to her, trying to make it all right.

Still she says nothing; she lifts one hand, the palm cupping her cheek.

Eventually she says: ‘A little narrow in the shoulders.’

The assistant is putting pins in her mouth one by one like cigarettes, and saying through them: ‘Yes, of course. Now, shall we change her back?’

Terpsichore turns away, and the girl sighs happily, and rattles the curtain closed again.

When I emerge, smoothing my damp palms against my old skirt, Terpsichore smiles vaguely at me again and we move towards the till.

‘I don’t have to have it,’ I burst out.

‘Yes, you do,’ she says, taking the pen from the girl, and signing her name with a flourish. The girl blushes at the contact of their hands.

The dress arrives just after dinner. It is spread out on my bed waiting for me when I come back upstairs, and it is still lying there when André arrives.

‘Nice,’ he says, fingering the substance. ‘How much did it cost me?’

He runs his hands rapidly over the fabric, looking for a tag or a receipt; finding none, he gives up.

‘Very nice,’ he says, standing back. ‘I wonder if I should change my mind about the party?’

I bend low over the dress and start to fold it: ‘Perhaps tomorrow night, afterwards, I’ll keep it on for you.’

‘Why not try it on now?’

I push back my hair. ‘I just don’t feel like it, that’s all.’

I can feel him smiling in the dark room. He puts his cold lips to my neck.

MY REFLECTION IN THE MIRROR
in my room is fretful. I have smoothed my hair as best I can, but I’m ashamed of the small hairs that spring up on my temples which look so Mediterranean; of the tan of my skin, when everyone else will be pale. The only good thing is the dress, and when I look at it, I feel confused: it whispers to me as I move.

Walking nervously down the stairs, I am met by Terpsichore’s upturned face; but all she says is, ‘Very nice,’ and then turns to the mirror above the console to smooth her hair.

I thought she would look like a stranger to me in her new clothes – a dress in silvery silk, with wide sleeves, like a kimono – but she only looks more like herself. In the mirror, she stretches her lips into an oval and inspects the colour on her mouth, then bats her eyelids: light moves in bands over her hair.

The car rolls along the Quai d’Orsay; stern government buildings rise into the summer evening. A late starling sings from the shelter of the plane trees on the quais as we turn onto Avenue Bosquet; she leans forward to rap on the glass separating us from Hubert, and the car slows and stops outside a white stone apartment block.