Petite Mort (20 page)

IN THE SALON, DURING THE DAY
, we did everything we could not to meet each other’s eyes.

Sometimes we caught each other out. She straightened her back, arching her neck to release the tension from reading, rubbing the nape with one palm, and in the course of looking at the ceiling, her eyes wandered to mine.

On those occasions time slowed and stopped. Her hand stayed where it was; a smile hovered on her face; the hand rubbed gently, ruefully over her neck, forward and back. The moment would lengthen out until one of the many sounds that made us jump, made us jump: a clatter of pots and pans from the kitchen, or Thomas’s step on the stair.

At supper, the sharp pain of watching her speaking to André. In the first days after his return, he had seemed quiet, almost wary of her. But night by night he became more boisterous: drinking more wine than before, making tasteless jokes, watching her with a flushed attention that I could not look at. And at the other end of the table, she laughed where appropriate, exchanging gossip: only a little pallor to show anything was wrong at all. And when he wasn’t looking, she would glance at me, warning me to smile, laugh and make conversation: to pretend.

At night, I’d undress for her: a slow tease, the garments falling one by one. She’d lie propped on one elbow, smiling crookedly; and when I was naked, she’d look at me. From ankles to eyelashes. ‘You’re beautiful,’ she’d say. ‘Come here.’

Juliette and Adèle
1967

The last of the lunchtime crowd is dissipating; bars of dusty sunlight across our table.

I say: ‘Didn’t you worry about being discovered?’

Adèle smiles. ‘Of course. But then again, not.’

Her fingers hover in front of her mouth: ‘I had this fantasy: being caught out. The five short minutes to get dressed; the servants lining the hall. André ejecting us from the house. Our suitcases being flung down the steps behind us. To be alone with her on the drive, with all her ghosts streaming out ahead of us, evaporating on the morning air.’

IN BED, SHE MADE ME WAIT
, trailing a fingertip over me till I almost cried; she turned me into someone I wasn’t: I barely recognised the sounds from my own mouth.

But when I tried to return the favour, most often, she’d smile, and shift me gently onto the bed beside her, and turn away from me, onto her other side.

One day, we took a picnic to the Bois de Boulogne.

Hubert dropped us on the side of the main road through to Paris; leaning into the cab, she arranged to have him pick us up at five. She carried the picnic hamper and I took a blanket, and we walked away from the path towards where the trees grew a little thicker. It was a fine afternoon: the leaves and grass buzzed with activity, but as it was a week-day, other visitors were few and far between. We picked our way between the patches of tufty grass and the tree roots, and finally found a spot where there was just one other couple visible in the distance.

We ate in reflective silence, and cleared the plates away into the basket; then she piled her coat behind her head and lay down, shading her eyes with her hand.

I watched her, found myself smiling.

‘What?’ she said, laughing.

‘Nothing,’ I said. I’d been thinking how I’d come to the house hoping to take her place. But now there was no longer anything outside her or around her – no films, no future.

She squinted up at me under her fingers, still smiling.

‘I’d swear you’re taller,’ she said.

I looked down at myself.

‘Yes, you are. You’re only seventeen. You’re still growing.’

We smiled at each other again.

‘Seventeen,’ she said, uncertain. ‘An ingénue.’

There was a pause. She laughed, but the laugh faded quickly away.

I suddenly thought I understood. I sat down beside her.

‘Is that it?’ I asked. ‘Is that why? Because I’m young?’

She blinked, lowered her eyes. ‘Is what why?’

I bent over and kissed her.

‘Adèle,’ she said, in her old commanding voice, ‘if somebody comes—’

‘They won’t.’

The sun in her eyelashes; the sound of the birds in the trees, oddly magnified.

When I moved my hand between her legs she caught at my fingers. I took her hand and flattened it on the grass and left it there.

‘Do you think I care that you’re older? Do you think I’m too young to know my own mind?’

Her face fell.

I slipped my hand under her petticoats. This time she didn’t try to stop me.

She turned her head to one side, frowning.

Oh
, she said. Turned her head to the other side. I cradled it with the crook of my arm, protecting it each time she turned, again and again, fighting to escape.

And then she was unrecognisable. Laughing and crying together. Her tears slid into my mouth.

Over supper that same evening, André lifted his wine glass and stared at her over the top of it.

‘You look healthy,’ he said to her. ‘Glowing.’

‘It must be the fresh air,’ she said, cutting demurely into her food.

ONE DAY SHE LOOKED OUT OF
the salon window and said: ‘I think this is the last fine day. What shall we do with it?’

I shrugged. It was true: the light had that slanted quality that meant autumn. I had no particular needs, now, apart from being with her, so it didn’t matter to me if we went out – but I wanted her to have what she wanted.

She turned, clicked her fingers. ‘The boating lake,’ she said.

In the car, she held my hand loosely, under cover of our coats, and pointed out the fashions of the ladies walking along the Allée des Acacias.

‘Do you remember when we met Aurélie by accident here?’ she said. ‘I thought you were going to knock her out.’

I smiled at the memory, but didn’t comment, because it seemed like another person. How small my aims had been then: grasping after fame. I never thought about acting any more.

‘My knight in shining armour,’ she said contentedly, snuggling down amongst the coats.

Hubert parked the car on a stretch of grassland. She told him to wait, and we walked towards the lake. There was a small boathouse, and a wizened old man hiring rowing boats. Luce picked her way towards him; I saw her flash a smile, and coins changing hands.

When she came back, she was triumphant. ‘He wanted five francs,’ she said, ‘but I beat him down to three.’

I rolled my eyes.

‘It was the principle,’ she said vaguely, already shading her eyes and pointing at the rowing boats drawn up on the bank. ‘That one, don’t you think?’

We crossed to the boat and hauled it down to the water. There was the business with setting it upright, and testing its water safety, and finding the oars; all of which I loved.

‘What are you thinking?’ she said.

I’d been looking at her shoulders: how she pulled the oar handles back, tight, then the release. The shower of tiny droplets scattering back into the water.

The lake was not busy – it was too cold for that. There was just one other couple in a rowing boat: a young girl and her beau. The girl clutched her hat and screamed as it tried to blow away.

‘Your shoulders,’ I said.

She smiled at me, and shook her head in mock disapproval.

I watched her face. That puckered frown she occasionally had, that I remembered from before, pulling her eyebrows tight.

The girl in the other boat finally lost her hat; it blew away from her, skimming across the lake. She shrieked, and stood up. The young man stood, too, to balance the boat. They teetered, for a moment, and then tipped into the shallows; laughing, they stood, the water running off their faces. Then he held up his hand to her and escorted her to shore. She stepped onto the grass as proud as a queen.

Luce had let the oars drift; her eyes had narrowed with enjoyment at the scene.

She turned her face away. Eventually she said: ‘What would happen if we just kept going?’

‘Where?’

‘If this lake had a tributary, a stream, leading off somewhere.’

The oars creaked in their rowlocks. A breeze made the boat tremble in the water.

‘Out to sea?’

‘Just as far as one of those dilapidated resorts. Those places people go to die. We could stay there for a while. Take a hotel.’

The idea of being alone in a hotel with her was so painfully beguiling that my mind tied the thought off. An image came to me of her on a pebbled beach, dissecting the fashions of the provincial ladies.

‘You’d last about five minutes,’ I said.

She smirked – ‘Perhaps’ – and looked down. Then up again, uncertain, and this time, she held my gaze. Her smile was the shyest, most gorgeous thing I’d ever seen.

ONE NIGHT, OVER DINNER
, André announced the party. ‘We haven’t entertained in months,’ he said. ‘I’m ready to be seen.’

He struck a pose. I turned my face away. I could barely see him these days without wanting to wind my plait round his neck. Just when it seemed he ought to recede into the distance, he was more present than ever: haunting the corridors of the house, always whistling just out of sight.

Luce said, slowly and to my surprise: ‘Yes. It’s an idea.’

André looked surprised too. ‘Saturday?’ he said.

‘Yes. Why not?’ She pressed her handkerchief to her mouth. ‘One condition: no Peyssac.’

André grinned. ‘In that case: no Ex-Minister.’

‘Then none of your stupid trick-film has-beens.’

‘None of your twittering fashion-obsessed friends.’

She took a long sip from her wine glass, enjoying, I could only suppose, this idiotic game of bargaining.

I looked from one to the other, trying to see beyond their faces, and failing.

‘Fine,’ she said, smirking. ‘Then we’ll have a party.’

The following morning, seeing my expression, she said: ‘Is that why you didn’t come last night?’

She looked drawn and tired, but in her hand was a caterer’s order book.

‘It’s just a party, Adèle,’ she said.

‘I wish you wouldn’t plan things with him,’ I said. I could hear my own voice and hated it. ‘Why are you so excited about it?’

She lifted the order book, flapped it helplessly, and shrugged. ‘I’m not. These are the things we have to do.’

‘I heard you last night. You were flirting with him.’

She passed her hand across her mouth: for an awful moment I thought she was laughing, but the hand came away grim. She was too clever to say the dangerous thing that hovered between us. Her fingers tightened on the book. ‘Have you considered the fact that I am doing this for us? For appearances?’

Her colour was high; the long autumn light slanted through the window.

She sighed – a small, unhappy sound – and picked at the cover of the order book. ‘This is what people do, my love. They are seen.’

I hated this vision of myself. Didn’t I want her to have whatever she wanted? So instead, I said as bravely as I could. ‘Let’s be seen.’

Her face cleared – relief – sun moving over a landscape; her face twisted into an uncertain smile.

‘Our first argument,’ she said, and smiled until at last I smiled back. She put the book away, and did not mention the party for two days.

On the third day, the wife of the Ex-Minister visited. She didn’t send up a card and wait, she simply followed Thomas up to the salon and walked straight across to plant a firm kiss on Luce’s cheeks. She didn’t look at me.

‘It’s the talk of the town,’ she said, eyes sparkling, ‘your invitations arrived this morning. By ten o’clock I had a dozen phone calls asking me what you were going to wear.’ She sat down on a pouffe, her eyes never leaving Luce’s face. ‘So what are you going to wear?’

Luce tried to laugh this off. ‘I hadn’t thought,’ she said.

Aurélie crowed, and then turned to me: ‘
I hadn’t thought!
Whatever are we to do with her, Mlle Roux? My love, all the young directors are coming. Everyone who has a film in prep will be there.’

She sat back, for effect. Luce turned white, then red. ‘Really?’ she said, as though disbelieving. ‘Everyone?’

Aurélie leant forward, took her fingers in her knuckly hands. ‘Everyone. So let’s make a plan. Let’s make you seductive.’

I held my breath until I could be calm again.

Later, I sat flipping through one of the fashion magazines she’d left; Luce was reading, with every appearance of tranquillity.

Without lifting her head, she said: ‘She’s only trying to help.’

When I didn’t answer, she put her fingertips to her eyes. ‘She thinks she’s helping me, by inviting all these directors.’

‘Isn’t she?’

She lifted her head and stared at me. She had flushed bright red.

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said.

‘She’s always helping you, isn’t she?’

She stared at me.

‘Adèle,’ she said, ‘she’s my friend.’

I took a deep, shivering breath in; we looked at each other.

‘It’s just a party. Let’s just get it out of the way,’ she said, ‘please.’

She kissed me there on the sofa without a thought for the servants. Then she laughed, bent me backwards and pushed up my skirts. ‘You don’t have anything to worry about,’ she said.

SHE INVITED ME
to her room to prepare.

I changed quickly so that I could watch her put her make-up on; sat on the bed and pulled my knees up to my chin, savouring the moment.

She powdered her face with big, aggressive strokes; stared at her own reflection, eyes narrowed.

She smiled at me in the mirror.

‘Welcome,’ André said, walking forwards to the salon door with his hands wide. Standing next to me, Luce repressed a tremor of laughter; the first guest was the Duchesse de Guise.

As Luce did two kisses, the Duchesse’s hawky eyes scanned the room. ‘Charming,’ she murmured, looking at the sparkling gold of the lights placed on every available surface, the sheen on the silk sofas and the obsidian gloss of the windows.