Petite Mort (31 page)

‘You are a good employee, Elodie,’ he said. He reached out to touch my cheek but he missed, and his hand fell away.

‘I don’t know what you mean, sir,’ I told him; he was already looking around the room as if he wanted to speak, but had forgotten what he wanted to say.

‘Terrible things happen in the world every day,’ he said.

‘Yes, sir,’ I said. I started to pack up my desk. I thought I had the measure of him then: an argument with his wife, and he wanted a listening ear and a woman to tell him he was worth something. Well, I wasn’t employed for that; I wanted to go home.

He mumbled some other things then which I couldn’t hear,
and went suddenly to sleep, or seemed to, his chin on his chest.

So I packed up my belongings and put my coat on, wondering whether to leave him there. Finally there was nothing for it but to go to the door and stand by the light switch ready to extinguish it.

‘Are you going to be all right?’ I asked him, trying to get him awake. On the one hand, I didn’t like to leave him; but the rest of me wanted to get clear.

He half-woke up. He said, quite distinctly: ‘Unless the summer is a dry one.’

I thought I’d misheard. ‘Whatever can you mean, sir?’ I asked him.

At that he seemed to come to. He looked just like his old self: that brazen stare, undressing you, if I may be bold. Then he laughed at me and said, ‘You’re a good girl, Elodie.’

I gave up trying to understand it. I shook my head at him and smiled back, and then I left. When I got to the courtyard I took a deep breath. I remember thinking how good it was to be there, in the fresh weather, with the evening ahead of me.

Q: And then?

A: Shortly after, the gifts began to arrive. A bunch of flowers, first, from him; but there was nothing between us any more – at work we avoided each other.

I then came home to find a fine necklace in a box pushed under my door, and his signature on the card. After that, a box of exotic fruit; a hat from Mme Chanel in the wrong size.

The kind of gifts men think women like. And never anything written on the card apart from his capital A.

You don’t want a powerful man to feel he owes you something.

I began to think back to that evening in the costumery. And I started to wonder, what was it they would find, if the summer was a dry one?

Juliette and Adèle
1967

‘And then?’

‘And then. Inspector Japy got up from the front row of the gallery, where he had sat throughout the trial, and made a case that the trial should be halted whilst an investigation was made of the lake at the rear of the Durand property.’

She sips her coffee. ‘The courtroom was cleared, the police marshalled, the Durand house emptied of servants, and the special department set up camp in the grounds.’

‘What did you do in the meantime? Were you free to go?’

‘Denis and I waited in his apartment, in cafés, in the Jardin du Luxembourg. We enjoyed the sun.

‘On the eighth day we were sitting on a bench in the Jardin des Plantes, admiring the panthers prowling round and round their cage. A sergeant came running to where we were, and asked whether I could follow him please.

‘We were taken in a police cab. We arrived at the woods just as it was starting to be twilight: pale air, fluttering things in the bushes. The police experts were still working all around the lake. They had arranged on the ground all the objects they had found: coins, old strips of fabric, a couple of wedge-shaped pieces of blue-and-white china. Relics of picnics past.

‘They led me to a shelter by the far bank and drew back the curtain and showed me a set of bones, laid out on a soggy tartan blanket, with dead leaves still underneath. They had not cleaned the whole skeleton yet, only the femurs – bleached yellow, like a museum exhibit. I remember how long they
seemed in comparison to the rest of her body.

‘I told them to cover her up. The policeman was surprised. He said: “We are not the malefactors.” I told him I didn’t care, and I pulled the blanket over her.’

She holds her hands out on the table in front of us.

‘How did you feel?’

She considers this. ‘The policemen took me out onto the bank and asked me,
Is this where what happened to you, happened?
I said yes and showed them where it was I woke up after the attack, on the west side, by the trailing willow. They wouldn’t look at me; they kept their eyes on their work.’

She smiles faintly. ‘I was glad to see that they had to look down.’

Luce and André, ii
.

And suddenly there is just this girl, standing in the hallway with enormous eyes taking in all the things she can’t be used to seeing. And André standing behind her, watching her look; and she, Luce, says nothing because she doesn’t want to break up the tableau.

André says: ‘I want you to meet Mlle Doulay, from the costumery, who is here to look through your wardrobe and alter the things that need altering.’

Luce says: ‘How nice to meet you, Mlle Doulay,’ and the girl positively gapes, then a smile breaks out all over her pretty face. She has extremely good teeth but doesn’t smile as if she knows it.

André says: ‘I’ve had the spare room made up for an overnight stay, since your wardrobe is extensive.’

They all laugh, and go their separate ways – the girl escorted upstairs by Thomas, and André, over his shoulder, gives Luce a white-toothed challenge of a grin.

That night, over dinner, the girl doesn’t know what cutlery she should use; she plunges in, and then waits, confusion puckering her brow, looking to her hosts for help.

She is breathlessly enthusiastic; answers questions about Pathé (‘It is the finest, most splendid place in the entire world, probably, so vast and so rich’) and the costumery (‘We are a sort of band of sisters, all working to help each other, and the materials are so fine’), wide-eyed and serious, so that Luce has
to try not to catch André’s eye. But after every answer there is a pause where it is impossible not to just look at her: at the cream of her skin and the freckles on the backs of her hands.

Towards the end of the meal, emboldened by the wine, which she can’t be used to, Mlle Doulay starts to ask questions.
Have they enjoyed the state of wedded bliss long?
She talks like an etiquette manual from the 1890s. André says, frowning to hide his smirk,
just under six years
, pretending not to remember the precise date.

And has your union been blessed with fruit?

Even the girl senses it was not the right question, and colours, but does not know how to get back. André does well: he says, a little coyly,
Not yet: but we hope
, and snaps his fingers for Thomas to bring the wine.

As the last plates are cleared away Mlle Doulay does not realise she is supposed to excuse herself before the hosts; her face reddens as the silence grows, and she finally palms-up from the table and says goodnight. Luce listens to her light footsteps ascending the stairs.

They are left alone together in the dining room; things unsaid flutter around the candlelight.

The following morning, Mlle Doulay sits on the salon floor surrounded by taffeta, tulle and organdy, scissors snipsnipping gently along a seam. Always the frown of concentration: everything is to be taken seriously, but not just in a general sense – each thing she comes across, Luce thinks, is a new thing.

The girl holds aloft a gown whose bodice has been ruffled to hide the fact that it has been let out and let out again around the waist, and says: ‘Are you sure this must be altered? The silk ruching is very fine and we won’t be able to save it.’

‘Yes,’ Luce says. ‘Put it on the mending pile. I have lost so much weight recently.’

Mlle Doulay lifts the dress and looks past it to Luce’s thin waist, and nods, understandingly but without understanding. Anyone else would have arched an eyebrow, asked the question: but facts roll off Mlle Doulay like water, and she bends her head obediently and goes on snipping.

‘I have been unwell,’ Luce tells her, ‘and have only been back on my feet a few months. Flat on my back for almost a year!’

Nothing.

Later, Mlle Doulay spreads the dressmakers’ thin paper onto the parquet and draws arcs in pencil on it; her hair snakes loose and falls over her eyes but she doesn’t notice this, either. Luce watches one tendril fall, then the next, until more hair is out of the chignon than in it; then watches as the girl sighs and sweeps it off her face and behind her ears.

That evening, the girl drinks more than is good for her. Perhaps she isn’t sure what is the polite formula to refuse wine; or perhaps she doesn’t want to. What she wants is to hang on André’s every word, nodding rapidly, and making little observations not to the point, just for the sake of saying something to him.

At the end of the meal she excuses herself – placing a hand on the table to steady herself – and bobs a curtsy to Luce as she leaves. Her steps scurry up the stairs.

A moment later, hurriedly, André pushes back his chair, mopping his lips with his napkin.

At the door he says: ‘You only have to tell me not to.’

Luce thinks about it, shrugs, and smiles. He hovers, momentarily uncertain, wanting something more from her, and then ducks his head and exits the room; his footsteps jog up the stairs after the girl’s.

Luce lets a few minutes pass and then she follows, her hand crabbing up the banister into the darkness of the stairwell.

She reaches the third-floor landing and listens, unsure which
room has been given to the girl; aware, in her tingling hands and feet, of the attic and what the doctors said she must try not to remember. But there is no need to be anxious: it is very obvious which room contains Mlle Doulay, from the breathy, rhythmic ‘oh’ coming from behind the door closest to the stairs.

Luce shuffles closer and lays her ear to the cold wood panels, and now it is possible to hear André’s grunts, the creaking of the bed; even the rustling movement of the sheets tangled around their legs.

She always wondered what she would feel if this were to happen and now she knows.

Jealousy and distress, it turns out, are born of surprise; therefore she isn’t jealous or distressed. She only feels – and this is not a surprise either – a hollowing-out of the loneliness that has become habit over the short time she has been well again, making it deeper.

She tries to understand why it should be so, and realises that by this act of being with Mlle Doulay, André has taken action where she has not. He has chosen to cast out his solitude behind him, like a medieval devil. Sure enough, there it is, coming out: a hoarse, protracted cry from him, overlaid by the girl’s fluting moans.

The next morning, the girl sits on her salon floor, cutting out paper patterns, and they have a pleasant conversation. Luce recounts amusing stories of her friend Aurélie’s exploits being married to the Minister of the Interior; the girl listens, wide-eyed.

Even over dinner the conversation flows between the three of them. She watches the not-so-subtle glances Mlle Doulay shoots André over the top of her wine glass quite calmly, and when André hesitates at the door, she waves him away.

She doesn’t mean to go upstairs after them; she intends to turn off at her own floor, but finds that she has climbed the next two flights almost without thinking.

This time there is more noise: André is being rougher. The girl sounds almost distressed, her breathing reduced to thin wisps and then a strangled whimper.

Luce hesitates, her palm flat on the door. Then she turns and walks down the stairs to her own room and gets undressed for bed as usual. Her hand, when she reaches up to unhook her necklace, has a fine tremor in it. She looks at the tremor in the mirror, holding her hand level and watching it vibrate against thin air.

The next morning, the girl says: ‘You look pale, Madame,’ and Luce is so surprised that she answers, ‘I am always pale.’

‘I suppose that must be an advantage, in your career,’ the girl says. She is sitting on the salon floor with her patterns arranged around her: a child at play. ‘They say that Madame Sarah Bernhardt envies you your complexion, I read that in a magazine, is it true?’

Her neck droops as she leans to pick up a far-flung fragment of chiffon.

‘Yes,’ Luce says, ‘it’s true.’

The girl looks up, her mouth a perfect oval. Then she does another unexpected thing: she blushes. The colour creeps up her neck and over her cheeks until she is the colour of a radish. ‘Imagine,’ she says, ‘having Sarah Bernhardt be envious of you.’

Imagine that
.

Luce asks the girl questions, not vague conversational ones without issue, but listening to the answers with a kind of hunger in herself that she did not anticipate.

Mlle Doulay vouchsafes she has two brothers, both of whom are a little rough, and that she wanted to better herself. She considers working in the costumery to have bettered herself; she will be quite happy one day to become chief costumière, if she works hard enough.

Luce finds herself saying: ‘You could aspire to more.’

The girl bends her head. ‘I could never be like you,’ she says, and bites her lip. ‘The things you’ve done, the people you have met. And living in a house like this!’ She looks up and around, her face shining with happiness. Then she blows the hair out of her eyes and continues her work.

It has been months, it may have been years, since anyone has told Luce they wanted to be like her. She looks down at her hands: the tremor is still there, but the skin on the backs is flushed and healthy-looking. Come to think of it, she is warm, not uncomfortably so, but in the pit of her stomach, a slight fluttering. Something tethered about to take flight.

That night, she puts her cheek to the cold door as well as both hands.

You!
André shouts inside the room, then says over and over,
you, you
.

The girl moans. She sounds nothing like herself. She sounds older.

Luce shuts her eyes.

Days grow into weeks. Luce’s clothes are cut to pieces and reassembled under her fascinated gaze: the cloth supple and refined in Mlle Doulay’s hands. Nobody speaks of her leaving. The household seems better. André laughs like he used to laugh when they were first married: full-throated, teeth on show.