Petite Mort (26 page)

André nodded, arching an eyebrow, impressed.

I said: ‘When?’

‘Five months. Just before I went to Marseille.’

My throat made its own sounds, like an old person.

The ideas flew: keys slotting into one lock after another: ‘That night, at the party, the faint – you found out when the doctor visited, when he was examining you. That’s when he told you. That’s why they made you rest up, because of what happened before. You let me think that you were ill. You let me
think you were fragile, and dance attendance on you.’

‘I was going to tell you—’ she said.

‘—when? What did you think would happen?’

She looked skywards. André looked at her with an air of vicious interest.

She said: ‘I thought you might understand it was an accident. If you loved me, you might love the child.’

‘But it would be half him!’

‘And half me. And then, in time, maybe half you as well.’

I covered my face with my hands, not because she was wrong, but because she was right. I would love anything that was part of her.

‘Don’t cry,’ she said, ‘it isn’t broken.’

How would we know if it was broken? Such things needed time to determine. I looked at her eyes, enormous in her face, the lashes softened by tears.

André slapped his free hand against his thigh, mocking applause.

He said: ‘Did you know she took your part? When you were putting yourself in a state because you thought she’d left, she was filming
Petite Mort
with Peyssac?’

Luce’s throat worked; her eyes swivelled to look at me.

‘It isn’t the same,’ I said, ‘I only did it because I was angry with you, I regretted it as soon as I got there. I was going to tell you.’

André said: ‘Come back to the house.’

I spoke faster: ‘I was going to tell you, once we were away. I want you to listen. I want—’

André lifted the gun.

‘Please,’ I said.

Luce looked at me.

She took my hands in hers, gave them a gentle squeeze and then dropped them.

‘I, I, I,’ she said.

She turned her back on me and took a few steps to André;
stood apart from him, very straight, and looked at me.

André smiled, as if at a private joke; he lowered the gun a little, and said: ‘You could take an apartment nearby. If it keeps her happy. What do you say?’

I couldn’t say anything. Images came to me in a long cascade. Things that hadn’t happened yet: her arm linked through mine, the boom of surf on a pebble beach. The child.

She had raised her chin a fraction: its point angled to me.

I looked at her, really looked at her, and understood I had lost.

‘I’ll ruin you,’ I said. ‘I can tell it all over Paris.’

‘You won’t,’ André said.

Luce glanced at him. He had lifted the gun again: not levelled it, but raised it in his right hand, hefting it.

I said: ‘I will get a lawyer. Who knows what they might find in your past, if they go digging?’

Then I looked for something that might just kill him with words: ‘Your child will be taken away from you. It won’t know you.’

The gun lifted a notch. The hole at the end of its barrel pointed at my chest. André ground his hand into his eye socket; then, suddenly, he laughed, as if at the situation, and drew back slightly. The trees around us ruffled their feathers: it seemed as though we might, after all, reconcile. Weren’t we a household, after all?

The gun was shaking in his hand.

I heard a loud bang, an explosion: my skin and bone were the explosion, and that was how I died my little death.

Luce and Adèle, i
.

One day, just after André has left for the south, a note comes to the salon. It says that Feuillade wants her most particularly to rehearse over the next two weeks. If possible she must come into the city and take an hotel, so that they may work intensively.

She folds the note carefully. The clock on the mantel ticks her decision.

‘It is Feuillade. His daughter is ill. They are going to Switzerland for a cure. What bad luck.’

Adèle doesn’t say anything. She has her studious face bent to the paperback on her knees. One would hardly know she was listening at all.

‘I shall just have to hang about here, annoying you.’

Still nothing. A blink, then the crisp sound of a page turning. ‘You never annoy me.’

The first time she has said
you
and
I
in the same sentence: so little, it shouldn’t be enough, but it is.

Later, when Adèle’s head has fallen sideways in a doze, one watchful thumb still marking the page, she scrawls a reply to Feuillade:
…inconvenience you. Sadly no longer able. May I suggest as a replacement my former colleague Nelly Sinclair, an adept horsewoman…

With love, L. DURAND
. She presses the nib into the page and looks at the sleeping girl, whose eyelids flutter and jerk with the violence of her dream.

Testimony of Grégoire MOREAU, Sergeant, Gendarmerie de l’Ile St Louis

Q. Describe what happened on the morning of 8. Janvier
.

A. At about nine o’clock I was on desk duty looking after the waiting room when the doors opened and I looked up, expecting it to be Mme de Courcet again about her poodle, but instead there was a girl.

Q. Can you describe her?

A. Her sleeve up to her elbow was dark brown and her dress was torn. The hem was in ribbons; the whole had been cut about and she looked, in short, very badly treated.

Q. Proceed
.

A. Well, then she got close to the desk and asked ‘Can you help me?’ and I said ‘Your arm, Mademoiselle!’ and she looked at it: ‘Oh this! I cannot feel it now at all!’ Then a man waiting said: ‘Stop staring, can’t you see she is about to fall?’ […]

SOMEONE LAUGHING
became geese crossing an indigo sky.

Some time later I opened my eyes again. A weeping willow, stippling my forehead with insect-thin branches, drifting in the water around me. I began to panic and kick my heels for purchase. They met resistance: a light sucking sound and they touched mud, and the back of my head bumped against it too: I was floating in only a couple of inches of water, my hips resting on the bottom. I looked up and around, spitting out the cold water, and saw that I was only a foot or so from the bank; tried to push myself up but my left arm folded back in on itself.

A minute later I tried again, and this time managed to drag myself over the lip of the lake onto the bank and scramble backwards to lean against a tree.

I sat cradling my left elbow in my right hand, my fingers playing with the torn sleeve of my dress, then exploring higher. When I found the hole I drew my fingers away just as quick as I’d touched it. I was not brave enough to try again for a long time, but when I was, I found a ragged cylinder between my breastbone and my shoulder, into which it was possible to probe with the tip of one finger.

When I woke again, it was dark. I shivered, looking at the placid surface of the lake. There should have been scuttlings, the brittle noise of leaves drifting over each other, but there was no sound apart from my own breathing.

My shoulder flared, and with the pain came the memory. Three figures stood by the lake, one much beloved, another holding a gun, and the third was me. Luce’s fingers straying to cover her stomach and then the muffled explosion.

When the pain had subsided enough, I reached up and felt the weeds laced through my still-damp hair. I saw myself, as if I was someone else again, pushed backwards by the force of the shot and falling into the shallows; Luce and André watching me from the bank. André leading her back to the house, concerned above everything else for the baby: who knew what a shock like this would bring about?

The memory played over and over, now forwards, and now backwards: the cold water hitting my face as I fell, the explosion a horse’s kick to the arm, sighting down the hole at the end of the gun barrel and André’s trigger finger, a pink blur.

I swung my right arm sideways and tested my weight on it; managed to lever myself onto my knees and a second later, found that I could stand. I held my soaking skirts in my hands for a moment, weighing them; stood there, confused.

How could you think I’d let him do that
, she will say.
How could you? I was in the house all the time. And look, it is not serious: just a scratch. Come here
.

One step forward – two, more confident now – and I began to walk slowly back towards the path.

In the open, the wind met me, welcome and cold on my hot face; there was the house, black on the horizon, with its groundfloor windows twinkling yellow.

I went slowly in order not to jog my arm, my footsteps crunching across the grey lawn, but it was unavoidable: every few paces the pain would come. Each time it was too much I stretched my lips and showed my teeth, and in time the pain faded.

Now I began to feel serene: even if André were suddenly to leap out at me, there was nothing more that could be done; he
would fade helplessly back into the darkness of the garden and I would keep moving on towards her. As I walked, I grasped for understanding of the situation – something was nagging at me – but my thoughts slid over the essential and found her. She would pull back the curtain and see me; her hand would fly to her mouth, her eyes round with shock.
Your poor arm. Bring it here: we’ll call for help
.

Ahead of me was the balustrade of the terrace which led onto the lawn, coming clear; beyond it were the French windows of the dining room, the drapes half-drawn. A blur of movement through the gap: the gleam on the mahogany table, the flash of the footman’s white shirt as he bent low, placing cutlery, ready for dinner guests.

When I was almost at the lip of the terrace, I heard a noise and froze. The French windows had clicked open, there was a rush of warm air into my face, and neat footsteps came out onto the patio. Thomas’ craggy face flared briefly as he lit the lantern on the left-hand side of the dining-room doors. I waited; heard shuffling movements as he fiddled with the taper on the first lantern and moved to the other side of the door.

What had I been thinking? I couldn’t be seen by him, or by the staff: I must not be seen by anyone but Luce. I waited for him to glance out into the garden, agonised: but his gloved hands moved deftly, closing the catch on the glass door of the second lantern; he turned away. The doors clicked shut again.

I looked down at myself; I was standing in the half-shadows at the edge of the pool of light thrown by the lamps. Then, inside the dining room, I saw the door open: five dinner guests, men and women smartly done up, were now bustling into the room. Their lips were opened in laughter and the polite, pleasurable confusion over who should sit where; unable to decide, they milled about, cheeks flushed with drink, and their chatter a muted thrum behind the glass.

Before I could decide what to do, a woman in a fuchsia dress
broke away from the table and moved towards the window from inside. She was middle-aged and quick-eyed; she carried a fan which she beat very fast against her chest.

I was not five feet away – just the glass between us.

Charming
, I saw her mouth say, looking past me at the view.

I gazed, fascinated, at the plump hand with the fluttering fan.

Come over here, Luce, and look at the lamps
.

Luce moved slowly towards the window. She was wearing the dress she had worn for Aurélie’s soirée, and her hair in a chignon, and everything was just as it had been, except that two tired lines drew down the sides of her mouth.

I raised my hand to spider it against the glass; her eyes widened. I fought an instinct to turn and look over my shoulder to see what had frightened her: she was looking right at me. I saw her mouth open, her hand go to her throat and then heard, very faint behind the glass, a scream.

Panic broke out in the dining room. The scream went on and on. Luce covered her mouth, then her eyes, and then her mouth with her hands; amidst the scrambling guests André came running into the room, his legs very lithe and his murderer’s hands poised to grip somebody.

I saw André’s clutching fingers, felt the sharp cold on my neck and face, turned and ran away over the terrace and down the steps. I stumbled over the grass to the left; then changed direction and made instead for the side of the house.

Behind, I heard the alarm being given: men’s footsteps spilling onto the terrace to search for the prowler, and a woman’s well-bred voice – not hers – repeating over and over:
There was nobody there…

I stumbled onwards, listening to the voices grow faint behind me, my arm jogging helplessly against my ribs as I ran. At last I reached the corner of the house and slid round it; the soft stone crumbled against my back and the fingers of my spread hands.

I KNEW I WAS GOING
towards Paris because every half-hour or so, the lights of a car would dazzle me, shining through the trees on either side of the road; and then the car would crawl, low-slung, past me. Sometimes I would catch a glimpse of the driver’s speculative eyes – but those in the back, the rich men returning home from their parties and dinners, remained hidden.

Once a car slowed almost to a halt; a man’s face peered out from the rear window, assessing, then caught sight of my dress and the state of my arm and hurriedly gave the signal to drive on.

At last I came to an open stretch of parkland. There were tufts of bushes dotted over the turf – a clear plain half a mile long, leading away to trees, and then the trees dropped away, and beyond it was Paris.

The air was stale and cold: a thousand mansard roofs were just turning into slate, a hint of blue on the dawn. The sun was a rim on the horizon: as I watched, the Seine appeared, winking gold as it snaked towards me, and pinpricks of window lights near and far wavered off.