Petite Mort (21 page)

‘You look well,’ she said to Luce. ‘What are you feeding her, André?’

André bowed his head. ‘The finest foie gras.’

The Duchesse sniffed. ‘The finest foie gras is from my estate in the Cévennes. Luce, your father never writes to me any more.’

André slugged back his champagne and excused himself. Luce said: ‘May I present Mlle Roux?’

The Duchesse looked over my shoulder at the arriving guests. ‘Oh! It’s Aurélie Vercors.’

Luce looked at me, and dipped her eyes, left me and walked over to Aurélie.

The Duchesse peered at the Ex-Minister. ‘Of course, he was in trade—’

I was watching Aurélie and Luce embrace, their torsos entwined from the breast upwards. ‘Darling,’ Aurélie said, pushing Luce away to search her face, ‘you look delicious.’ Luce gave her a small, brave smile that turned my stomach; put her hand on Aurélie’s arm and led her away into the room.

‘—ghastly little
arriviste
,’ the Duchesse finished, with a last swallow of her champagne, and turning away from me, vanished into the swelling crowd.

People milled around me, talking. I looked around for André, but he was half in the hallway, welcoming guests.

A laugh made me look up. Aurélie and Luce were sitting on the window seat, facing each other, Aurélie telling a story, using her hands, and Luce had thrown her head back, tears of merriment in her eyes. Wiping them, she turned her head and looked at me, sprinkled her fingers to me –
come over
.

Next to her, Aurélie smiled thinly and without encouragement.

Flushed, I drained my champagne glass and looked at my feet. Luce’s face turned blank –
please yourself
– and Aurélie leant forward to begin another anecdote.

Heads around me turned towards the door; there was an anxious murmuring. I craned to see who the new guest was, and saw Peyssac. But he didn’t appear to have come unannounced: André was gravely shaking his hand, and Peyssac’s eyes were darting around the room, settling on Luce and sliding away. The guests around them put their heads together and whispered behind their hands. André said something into Peyssac’s ear; and with a final clap to his shoulder, he propelled Peyssac into the room and stood back, his face showing nothing.

Luce was sitting upright, her expression cold. Aurélie stopped talking and turned, put her fingers to Luce’s arms and rested them there. I turned my face away.

A cough by my shoulder. Peyssac was there, his goatee bobbing anxiously. ‘Mlle Roux. Might I have a private word?’

Luce’s eyes on a point between my shoulder blades.

I said: ‘Will the hallway be private enough?’

The noise level in the hall was softened, the light a yellow slit under the door. Peyssac stood, pulling at the rings on his fingers with his other hand. ‘Mlle Roux, I have an indelicate request.’

I couldn’t think what he meant: what was he doing, making a proposition in the hallway of someone else’s house?

Peyssac looked at me, evidently discouraged by my stare, then said: ‘I am afraid you will think the worse of me; but it is an idea that has been growing and growing in me since I first saw you at my apartments in the summer.’

I glanced at the light under the door. ‘I don’t know to what you’re referring,’ I said coldly, ‘but please excuse me. I have to find someone.’

Peyssac stepped forward and took my hands in his, just hard enough to make them impossible to retract. I recoiled and he held on tighter.

‘Forgive my clumsiness,’ he said. ‘You have, Mlle Roux, such an open quality: I cannot now consider anyone else in the role.’

Cold air on the back of my neck.

‘You will think me despicable,’ he said, rubbing his thumbs into my palms. ‘I have you in mind for the heroine of
Petite Mort
. Oh, yes, you are quite right to look at me like that: the same part that your mistress wanted.’

With a last rub he released my hands. He was looking at me with an expression of pained eagerness.

‘I haven’t got any experience,’ I said.

‘You have the right look, and a natural elegance.’

Peyssac watched my face. He said: ‘My girls go on to such wonderful things. To America, some of them, to Italy. My good
friend Lily Lemoine, who started out in my pictures, has me to visit every year in her house on Como. She has other houses, of course, on the coast, in the south, where I believe you’re from?’

Somewhere in the house a door opened and closed.

‘I can’t,’ I said.

Peyssac’s eyes glittered. ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘But in the service of art, we are all compelled to be unscrupulous, are we not?’

He produced a card from his waistcoat, slipping it into my palm. ‘Should you reconsider.’

With a gracious nod he insinuated himself back into the salon.

After a minute I was composed enough to go back to the party. When I opened the door, it seemed to me a hush had fallen. André was engaged in laughing conversation with some studio bosses.

For a good thirty seconds I pushed mindlessly through the crowd, looked anywhere but at her, and then gave in. She slithered off the seat and walked towards me; when she reached me, she took my arm and pulled me towards the door.

She marched me out into the hall and towards the stairs.

At the first landing she paused, but a giggling burst from behind one of the doors – some guests had evidently broken away from the main party. We walked on, up and up, until we were alone and everything around us was quiet.

She threw my wrist away from her and turned away, putting her hands up to cover her cheeks. ‘What are you doing? In front of everybody.’ Her eyes were huge in her face. ‘Everybody was laughing at me! In my own house.’

Anger made me cold. ‘I thought you didn’t care about directors. So what if I talked to Peyssac? You didn’t even notice I was gone!’

She stared at me through her fingers. ‘She’s my friend!’

‘She wants you for herself! And you encourage her…’

She shook her head; I crossed to where she was, but she took me by the shoulders.

‘What did Peyssac want?’ she said.

‘Nothing,’ I said. A void had opened in my chest: I felt as if I’d crack in two.

She narrowed her eyes. ‘What?’ she said, giving me a little shake.

I shouted: ‘Whatever he’d asked, I would have said no!’

I reached up and caught hold of her hands and did not let go.

Then she made a small sound, of abandonment and surrender: I pressed her against the wall of the corridor and kissed her.

I reached down and lifted her skirts around her waist. She was wet through the material of her petticoats.

I slipped my fingers inside her.

The sounds of her breathing, higher and higher—

All of her muscles tensed, poised on the brink, eyelids fluttering—

I knew immediately whose the footstep was, coming quietly up the stairs.

The top of André’s head was visible on the landing beneath. If he looked up, he would see the hems of our skirts.

Not my room: he would check there, and how would we explain it?

Her eyes were wide; frozen open, fixed pleadingly on mine. I took her by the waist and half-dragged, half-walked her down the corridor. We reached the end of the passageway and I fished in my pocket for the ceramic key, and slotted it into the keyhole of the door by the window.

I pushed Luce through it and closed it as softly as I could
behind us, turned the key in the lock, and pressed my ear to the wood to listen.

André walked up the corridor as far as my room. I heard that door open; then it was closed softly.

There was absolute quiet for thirty seconds – I counted them. Behind me in the darkness, Luce held my fingers.

André’s voice calling to her.

I tried not to breathe. Another eternity passed; my fingers convulsed on the door handle.

Eventually, there was the squeak of his hand running down the banister, and his feet jogging downstairs.

I turned to Luce: ‘We’ll say you needed a pin for your dress—’ but stopped at the look on her face.

Through the window, there was a faint light from the lamps in the courtyard outside, and the objects I had seen when I visited the room before glowed grey: the lamp, tall as a wading bird; a couple of half-unpacked cartons, the crib.

This is the direction of her gaze: the wicker, hooded object, with its pale mattress leaking stuffing onto the floor. Her hands are clutching at themselves; she does not seem to really be in the room at all, and when I call to her she turns to look at me as if I were a stranger with bad news.

She falls without warning and without cushioning herself: her elbow hits a chest of drawers behind her with a crack, and she lies, knees bent, at my feet.

Then I am pulling her bodily into the corridor, as far towards the stairs as I can. I am looking at her eyes rolled up under the lids; calling for Thomas and seeing André’s shocked face as he comes running up the stairs.

The door to Luce’s room closed in my face, so I stood outside and leant on the banister to wait.

It wasn’t possible to hear any detail – just low voices. Then a silence followed by a sharp cry. I started forward and hesitated, my knuckles poised to rap on the door – and then more talking.
Another silence. The door opened.

‘What is it?’

André held the door open for the doctor. ‘We’ve set her arm,’ he said. ‘She’ll need to rest. But there’ll be no lasting damage.’

I TAPPED ON HER BEDROOM DOOR
and opened it.

Wintry sunlight. Two pillows were propped behind her head, her hair spread on her shoulders; her arm in a sling.

I crossed to sit beside her; bent to kiss her. She put her arm up around my neck; we didn’t speak for a long time.

Then she dried her eyes and said: ‘They tell me I ruined the party.’

I pulled back. ‘Don’t you remember it?’

‘No. I just remember waking up and being here, with the doctor. I’ve always been prone to fainting. And I can never remember what I’ve missed.’

She talked on and on; the words tumbled out, she lost her thread and found it again, watching for my reaction, all the time clutching my hand.

I stared at her, not recognising her.

I said: ‘We were in the room at the end of the corridor. Something happened that startled you, and you fell.’

She looked fixedly at the window. At first I thought she was thinking. Then I saw that she was trying not to cry, the tears spilling out at the corner of each eye anyway.

‘Tell me what it was,’ I said.

Luce, iii
.

For months, nobody saw the newlyweds. Autumn turned to winter; Paris expected its first glimpse of them at the Christmas balls, or skating on the Seine, and was disappointed. The house remained a blank gold façade; André sent his notes and ideas to Pathé by post.

In the spring came the news that took everyone by surprise: Luce was going to star in André’s next film.

At first it was not believed. Was she not cheapening herself by dabbling in the fly-by-night art of circuses and fairgrounds?

For a few months everything went quiet. It was said, with a wink, that she had reconsidered. The city settled down again: she would turn her hand to tending roses and breeding horses, as every aristocratic wife did, and that would be the end of it.

Posters of
La Dame aux Roses
began to appear on the city walls and outside cinemas. The critics chewed their nails; but when the film print was finally released, it was clear that the venture was anything but foolish, and so everyone pretended to have known all along.
She dignifies the medium. She brings a finery to the coarseness of cinema. She is a star
.

She began to act, not just for André, but for Peyssac, Feuillade, Blaché. The months ran by, turning into three years of relentless happiness: riches, professional success, plenty. And then Luce found out they were going to have a baby.

It is five months into the pregnancy – June, 1908 – and she
is walking in the gardens behind the house. She is alone and exhausted by the extra weight she carries.

She has given up work because the bump was getting too hard to disguise. André wanted to tell everyone, but she would not allow it. So the journalists report that she is struggling with her childhood injury and has taken a leave of absence to recuperate. Nobody knows she is pregnant: not their friends, not their enemies – not even Aunt Berthe, who is a regular visitor now that Luce is famous.

André thinks she fears a miscarriage. Luce has let it slip that her mother suffered several, and so naturally he assumes she does not want anyone to know until she is almost to term. This is not the real reason for her secrecy.

Though it is still early summer, the day is very hot; the air is filled with the overpowering scent of flowers; she feels lightheaded. So she walks to the fringe of the Bois and ducks under the branches. There is an old path here, blissfully shady; she follows it, pushing the branches aside with her fingers as she goes.

After half an hour the path ends at the last thing she expected: a wide pond, twenty metres across. She has never come this far into the woods before; she had no idea the pond was here.

She almost laughs because the water is dark and glossy; she is looking at the exact twin of a lake on her parents’ estate in Normandy, which she had sat beside as a child.

How deep is the water here? She dips her toe; her shoe sinks through the water, to the ankle, to the calf, without touching the bottom.

How can she tell André the real reason she wants to keep the pregnancy a secret? How can she say
I’m worried I won’t love the child
? She cannot. She cannot say,
Give me more time, lots more time before it’s born, and I will be equal to it
, because she knows she will never be equal to it. It is like a dream from which she can’t wake; and with each passing day, she feels the thing inside her grow closer.

She could easily slip here, on the mud of the bank; her belly might bump against the pond floor, or she might swallow enough water to bring about an accident.

She stands, tempted and indecisive.
For shame
, she thinks, but distantly: she could have her career back, her old life; everything will be as it was before. She could crawl back to the house, weed draped in her hair, and nobody need ever know the fall into the water was deliberate.