Petite Mort (32 page)

They talk about everything. Mlle Doulay seems to like to listen to her talk. Luce tells her anecdotes of her time at the studio; which directors are pleasant to work with, which less so; tittle-tattle about the other stars in the Pathé portfolio. The girl frowns as she stitches, sitting with Luce’s dresses draped across her lap, listening and asking the odd question.

Occasionally she sighs. ‘It must be wonderful,’ she says, ‘it must be just wonderful.’

Luce says: ‘You could act, if you chose to. I could get you a role.’

‘Oh, not me, Madame,’ the girl says, holding a needle to the light to thread it.

One night, Luce lays her cheek to the door as usual. She hears Mlle Doulay’s breathing become rapid; the jerking of the bedstead, and André’s heaving groans.

Faster, closer. Then Mlle Doulay’s voice. Louder than normal, saying an intelligible word for the first time, not her usual vixen sounds: the word she is saying is a name, which is André’s.

She sighs it out, familiarly. Luce imagines her smoothing the curly hair from André’s brow, looking at him with tenderness.

She listens, to hear if perhaps she was mistaken. Then André says, low, as if giving in to something, another name: the girl’s, it must be.
Victoire
, he says, over and over.
Victoire
.

Luce turns and makes for the banister, and goes down the stairs as fast as she can. Undresses, tearing at the newly mended nightgown, and lies in the dark, her chest heaving but unable to get in enough breath.

In the morning she does not remember going to sleep. She remembers the dream she has had: the girl bending over her, smoothing the hair from her brow. In the dream Luce has mumbled something, and pulled the girl down beside her. Startled eyes clouding over; they reach for each other. When she wakes up she thinks for a moment the dream was real: perhaps it was.

She goes to the salon to wait for Mlle Doulay. The clock strikes nine; then ten past. At a quarter past the door opens. The girl comes in with head held low, and says: ‘I am very sorry. I overslept.’

She does look sorry. She looks strained.

‘You are pale,’ Luce says.

‘No more than usual, Madame.’

‘Yes, you are very pale.’

There is a pause. The girl sits in her accustomed chair, face down, reaching for her sewing. ‘You are kind to look out for me, Madame.’ Then she blushes, holding up a dress, and says: ‘This is ready to try on.’

Luce looks at the girl. Then she goes to her, takes the dress and makes a play of rubbing the fabric between her fingers. ‘Very good,’ she says, ‘very fine.’

Then she starts to change in front of her, slipping out of her day-gown.

The girl looks away, in a panic.

‘Let us see it with the petticoat you fixed the other day instead of this one,’ Luce says, and removes her under-things.

The girl won’t look at her. The autumn light slants through the window panes and illuminates her feet, which are the object of her special focus. She goes to fetch the petticoat without turning to face Luce, and when she hands it over, her fingers tremble.

‘Now help me into the dress,’ Luce says gently.

Where the girl puts her hands on her waist to help her, Luce feels how hot is the contact of their skin: it takes two attempts to fasten each button.

When it is over, Luce crosses to look at herself in the full-length mirror. As if she has been given a licence, Mlle Doulay’s face hovers over one shoulder, now looking and looking and blushing and blushing.

‘It fits,’ Luce says, smoothing the material over her hips.

The girl turns quickly away and busies herself collecting up Luce’s clothes.

‘What is your name?’ Luce asks. ‘I mean, your given name?’

‘I thought you knew. Victoire,’ she says. ‘It’s Victoire. I thought you knew.’

She straightens. She holds an armful of garments, flushed from the effort.

Luce smiles.

The girl spends all her days in the salon now. When she runs out of mending, she comes to sit on the floor by Luce’s feet, and reads.

One day, Luce reaches down and twirls a tendril of her hair around her finger. The girl says nothing. After a moment she inclines her head forward to give Luce better access to the nape of her neck. Her neck, her shoulders and cheeks are a warm pink. Neither of them speak. After a while the girl forgets to turn pages.

The dinner bell makes them both start. The girl gets to her feet hurriedly, smoothes her skirts and almost runs from the room.

Luce sits thinking, her eyes gleaming in the firelight.

The following night, September 25th, is a wild one: trees rock outside the windows, and the light goes quickly, leached from the sky in a single swoop.

‘We’ll sleep well tonight,’ André says over supper, rubbing his hands idiotically. Mlle Doulay looks down at her plate. Luce wants to reach for her hand: can it be the girl is afraid of storms?

They finish the meal in silence; just the rain bursting across the dining-room windows in great spatters. André gets to his feet, mopping his mouth and smiling at them.

The girl still won’t look at Luce until the last moment; and then it seems she cannot tear her eyes away.

‘Goodnight,’ she says.

‘Goodnight,’ Luce replies, and, as an afterthought: ‘Sleep well.’

‘Yes,’ the girl says, distracted.

Luce doesn’t go to listen that night. Nor does she undress.
Instead she waits in her bedroom, reading
Thérèse Raquin
, for half an hour; then shuts the book and pads to the door, opens it and goes to the stairs.

She has guessed correctly. From the floor above comes the soft closing of André’s door; his footsteps across his bedroom floor.

She mounts the stairs; one flight; two; until she is standing outside Victoire’s door.

She lays her cheek to the panels. No human noise: just the wind that is everything, going through the house.

Softly she turns the handle and pushes the door inwards, waiting at the threshold until her eyes have adjusted.

Blackness turns to grey; then the soft shape of Victoire’s bare shoulders. She is turned on her side away from the door, but there’s no sound of breathing, just a sound of listening. In the room is the sharp smell of sex.

Luce crosses to the bed and stands there, with her arms folded.

The waiting is terrible, but also pleasurable.

Victoire doesn’t move.

Luce puts a hand on the girl’s shoulder to half-turn her – no resistance. So she stoops, her hair trailing over the girl’s face and exposed collarbone, and presses their lips together.

Nothing. Then the girl makes an indeterminate sound; after a moment her mouth starts to move under Luce’s.

Luce can smell André’s cologne on her.

The girl’s eyes half open – shining slits in the grey light – she reaches her arms up and loops them around Luce’s neck.

Lower in the bed there is an indeterminate shifting and straining under the covers; Luce reaches a hand down and begins to rub over the sheets, at the fork of the girl’s legs.

‘Victoire,’ Luce says. The girl sighs Luce’s name. Sighs again. But then jerks: starts to struggle and push the hand off, and sit upright.

Now she looks startled, half-mad, her breath heaving.

‘No,’ she says.

Luce bends closer to calm her, placing a cool palm on the girl’s forehead: this time the girl shrieks in alarm, tries to bat the hands away, and when it doesn’t work, shouts out, a loud, inarticulate sound. Luce releases her; the girl pulls the covers close up under her chin.

‘What is this?’ André says, standing on the threshold in his nightgown, hunting rifle in one hand, lamp in the other. ‘I thought we were being broken into.’

‘I was asleep!’ Victoire says.

‘You were not asleep,’ Luce says.

André puts the lamp on the bedside table, takes in Victoire’s expression, and looks at Luce. He is looking hard at her now, trying to see under her skin.

‘What is this?’ he says again.

Victoire says, clutching at the sheets, colouring: ‘She is a madwoman, she tried to kiss me, and come to me in my bed.’

‘Hypocrite,’ Luce says.

André looks at her as if he is seeing someone new.

‘Why should you always have what you want, and I never?’ Luce says.

‘I will go to the police,’ Victoire says. ‘I will go to the police and tell them Luce Durand is a monster!’ She hops down from the bed, all white-eyed, and runs across the room to the door.

André catches her in mid-flight and holds her firm; now he has her by the waist, turns his face to whisper calming words in her ear; she stands transfixed, listening to him.

André places the point of his chin on the girl’s head: over the top he looks at Luce, and his lips curl upwards.

It is very simple for Luce to cross and close her hands around the stock of the hunting rifle in his hand, without really knowing what the gun is for and what she would do with
it, and silently André’s hand tightens on the barrel, and they struggle, while Victoire buries her head in his neck and sobs and does not see.

Then plaster is flaking from the wall by the door and her ears are ringing, and the girl is no longer standing but lying on the parquet, dark red spreading over the sheet still wrapped round her. André is looking down at the gun in his hands, at his finger still wrapped around the trigger. He drops it. It clatters to the floor and falls next to the girl.

André is the faster thinker. He ushers Luce out – closes the door and when the servants come running, tells them it was just the sound of the storm, a tree falling, a natural occurrence.

When the sun comes up he goes to the servants’ quarters and gives them an unexpected day off.

They walk out to the lake, sure of being unobserved, with the bundle slung over André’s shoulder in a fireman’s lift, Luce walking behind.

At the lake he wraps Victoire in the canvas covering. Luce has a last glimpse of the girl’s face. She looks very young, almost a child; but the beauty makes Luce feel nothing; or rather, it only makes her feel cold.

André slips stones inside the canvas wrapper and heaves her off from the bank at the point where he knows the water is deepest.

He goes to Luce and slaps her twice; once across each cheek.

Back at the house, with the servants starting to return, cheer and cooking smells, Luce shakes and begins to vomit. She makes no move to get to the commode.

‘I can’t stay here tonight,’ André tells her, but she doesn’t answer. The servants have come to hover in the doorway, afraid; André considers what is best and telephones Aurélie Vercors, who arrives just as he is leaving.

Aurélie crosses to where Luce is and puts her hands to her face. ‘Tell me everything,’ she says.

After that, she and André will not have anyone in the house but themselves and their long-term domestic staff. They never host a dinner or a salon; they make excuses not to invite guests in. There is no need, anyway: they are more in demand than ever, every night a new party to attend in Paris, arm on arm, smile on smile.

Luce is enraged by the stupidity of the ordinary maids, but neither of them suggests an alternative.

One evening, at the very start of 1913, the front door opens and another girl stands there, and André behind her.

‘This is Huguette,’ he says, ‘from Pathé. She has agreed to be your new helper.’

After the shock, Luce sees that Huguette is very plain – almost comically so. Her hair hangs like spaniels’ ears down her neck; her face has a sharp quality, as if she is inclined to be pettish.

André says to Luce, in the flat voice he uses when he does not want to show emotion: ‘I can’t watch you in difficulties over simple things.’

The girl watches the two of them, a private tennis match. Inside herself, Luce hunts for alarm, for some sort of echo, and feels nothing.

Perhaps she was right: perhaps all that really did happen to someone else.

‘Yes,’ she says, ‘Why not? Yes.’

Juliette, x
.

The archivist snaps the switch for the fluorescent tubes and they click on, one by one, keeping pace with us down the narrow aisle between the shelves, finger to her lips as she counts her way along.

‘P for Peyssac,’ she says, lifting down a large cardboard box. ‘This is everything that was left to the archive in his estate.’

We lift the lid.

A mushroom cloud of dust clears. The box is only a third full, its paper cargo yellowed and crumbling.

The archivist lifts the topmost layer of paper away. ‘Do you want me to read through these?’ she asks.

I shake my head, scanning the contents of the box. ‘We’re looking for a container. Something airtight, ideally – where he could put a strip of film.’

The first object to surface is a slim metal case, its hinges rusted.

The archivist looks at me; I snap it open. Inside the case is frayed blue velvet, in which a slender medal is nesting.

‘Croix de Guerre,’ the archivist says, turning the silver cross over. ‘From 1915. It must have been awarded to him just before he died.’

There is nothing behind the velvet and the back of the case.

The next thing is a set of fountain pens, their barrels dark with age; the archivist crouches, her elbows tucked into her body, and unscrews the barrels one by one.