Petite Mort (9 page)

ALL THAT MORNING
, the studio talked of nothing else. The vase had been crystal, and had lodged in shining splinters in the assistant’s face. The assistant had found a lawyer; the assistant had been paid off handsomely.

‘It’s the Absinthe Fairy producers I feel sorry for,’ Georgette piped. ‘Having to replace Terpsichore at the last moment.’

The others shook their heads. I stared at her, dazed by a new idea. Unsettled, Georgette gave her shoulders a mutinous little shake and said, ‘Poor M. Durand. All his film in tatters, and his wife too.’

There was general assent, and gradually the subject died away. But I was listening only to myself. I was overdue this, wasn’t I? With Terpsichore gone, who would replace her in the role, if not me? Somewhere in the building across the courtyard, André would be persuading the casting directors.
Let’s give the Roux girl a chance
, he was saying. And one by one the others would be slowly nodding:
Let’s
.

There was no sign of him in the early afternoon; three o’clock and four o’clock came and went. By the end of the day I was cross, taking it out on the others with needling little asides; Annick flushed once or twice and bit her lip; I had almost made her cry.

It was only at ten to five that a runner came to the door. ‘Message for Mlle Roux,’ he said, ‘M. Durand wants to see you in his offices immediately.’

Elodie looked up, surprised.

I beamed as I rose, smoothing the cloth of my skirt.

‘This way,’ the runner said, and I followed him up to the second floor of the building, where the upper echelons of staff had their offices.

There was a corridor with just one door at the end of it. The runner knocked, and André’s voice called out: ‘Come in!’

I opened the door to a long, low-ceilinged room. At one end was a green baize desk. Two of the walls were lined with bookshelves, and stuck to the third was a mass of paper – sketches and geometric drawings.

Where was André? I heard a clock ticking – no, not a clock – and there, making its waddling way towards me, was a monstrosity. A clanking figure made of metal, the size of a child. Someone had painted a crude face on it: red for the lips, blue for the eyes, though the paint had run on the mouth before it had dried, and it was this that made me squeak.

André’s laugh rang out, and he stepped forward. ‘Do you like her?’

I watched the automaton come towards me. It was nothing to be afraid of – stage-magicians used them. But this one was unfinished: though its legs marched smartly, its arms were mismatched pieces of metal and hung by its side. It wheezed up to me, fell over onto its side and froze, fixing me with its blue eyes.

André peered down into its face. ‘Back to the drawing board,’ he said.

‘Did you make it?’ I asked. ‘What for?’

‘Work,’ he answered, and for some reason, the room felt flat and irritable.

‘I was sorry to hear about your wife,’ I prompted.

He looked at me. ‘Adèle, she’s not dead. She just needs a rest.’

I decided to press my advantage, and crossed to him, placing my palms on his chest. ‘You have something to tell me, don’t you? That’s why you sent for me.’

His hand slid under my breast.

‘No,’ I said, pushing him away, ‘tell me what you want me for.’

He sighed. ‘Very well,’ he said.’It is an offer of some importance, after all.’ He was looking at me strangely, I thought, his lips twitching. ‘You will make a wonderful new assistant for my wife,’ he said.

In the corner, the automaton convulsed and then was still. ‘Are you—?’ I said. ‘Are you joking?’

Smiling, he shook his head.

From the stairwell outside the apartment, I heard an entirely new sound. High, yet girlish: it sounded like Mathilde laughing.

Shuffling from the ground floor caught my attention. I peered down through the banisters, and saw Monsieur Z rustling on his newspapery bed; he looked up at me and grinned, revealing pink and toothless gums. ‘Happy,’ he cackled, and indicated upstairs with his chin.

I opened the front door and stepped inside. The hall was in darkness, but a wavering, flickering light – candles – came from the salon. I hesitated, listening – and heard low chatter: Camille’s voice, as though telling an anecdote. And then again, Mathilde’s giggling.

I peered round the corner so that I could see into the salon.

The first thing I saw was that the furniture had been rearranged. The dining table had been dragged to sit cross-wise in front of the fireplace, and the large mirror from over the fireplace placed on top of the table, so that the mirror’s back was supported by the mantelpiece. Mathilde’s family miniatures lay piled carelessly just inside the door. The room was
lit by two candles, one on either side of the mirror; and on the dining table were scattered an array of pots of powder and kohl.

Mathilde was sitting up to the table, facing the mirror, expectant and child-like; Camille was to her right, leaning in to dab at Mathilde’s eyes with a finger greased with Vaseline. Agathe stood behind Mathilde, watching the proceedings. Even she was smiling, enchanted at Mathilde’s transformation.

When she saw my movement out of the corner of her eye, Mathilde swivelled to look at me. She was painted chalky white, with black swirling details on her cheeks, and one black tear-drop eye: a pierrot.

Camille stood back, smiling. Her glance flickered to the corner of the room, where I saw the squat black valise she had arrived with.
A skill
, she had said the night she arrived:
I’ve got a skill.

‘You weren’t the only one who was clever,’ Camille said. ‘I’ve taught myself. I used to practise on the little ones after school.’

‘You never told me,’ I said.

Camille tossed her head, which meant,
you never asked.

‘Isn’t it wonderful?’ Mathilde said, ‘Isn’t it exciting – you can find her employment at Pathé! Surely some of the directors could make use of Camille?’

‘The actors do their own,’ I said coldly. ‘Most of them,’ I corrected. For what did I know about the individual habits of the stars?

Camille had waited patiently for Mathilde to stop speaking, and now bent gently to dust powder over her cheeks: I suddenly saw, as she moved into the candles’ range, that she had made herself up. It was no more than a touch of rouge and the lightest shading around the eyes, but she looked
finished.

‘So I’m afraid there are no opportunities at present,’ I said.

Mathilde turned to look at me, bewildered.

Camille said smoothly: ‘But you could have a word, couldn’t you, Adèle? I thought you and M. Durand were close.’

I fled to my room, curled up in bed, and held onto my own toes for comfort. The rain continued whispering at the window late into the night, and still the laughter came from the salon, and Camille did not come to bed.

I thought back to that afternoon.
What on earth were you thinking?
André had asked, grabbing my wrists after I had reached up to try to slap him.
An established actress will take over the Absinthe role. What did you expect?

He had let me struggle, turning my head away from him.

‘Think about it,’ he had said, ‘just think,’ over my tears. ‘Don’t you know how often the assistant becomes the understudy?’

I had sniffed and hiccuped, caught out.

‘Besides, you’d come and live with us. My wife finds it preferable to have someone there all the time. She and I each have our own quarters. You will be in the room just above mine.’

André smiled and gave my shoulders a little shake, till I began to smile in turn.

‘Really?’ I asked. ‘Really?’

‘You will have your pick of gowns. All the advantages of knowing the studio people. And me, of course. As much of me as you like.’

I thought of myself, whisking a costume away from my own assistant:
You have not sewn the hem correctly. Take it back, please.
Would I say please?

André looked at me with narrowed eyes.

‘I don’t want to be a costumière for ever,’ I said, trying out the words.

In the early hours, Camille came to bed. She turned away from me, and soon I heard her breathing steady and slow. Her nightgown fell below her shoulder blade, exposing the new
skin growing over her scars. They were healing on their own, without any help from me.

André had said: ‘I’ll send my driver for you tomorrow evening. Of course you will have to be vetted by my wife. My car will take you to our house in the Bois de Boulogne. All you have to do is be there to meet it.’

André, v.

A rainy November evening in 1904: five years after André stepped off the boat from New York to Paris, and into his proper life.

As usual, he was in the Pathé building long after everyone else had left, reclining and doodling on his sketch pad. He had nothing to do apart from be perfectly himself: there was an invitation, of course, to a gallery opening later in the evening, but he was not obliged to attend. He loved above all things the long hours after dark, when the hum of the human factory workers had subsided. He had his best ideas at night, because it was then that he was left alone with the noises he loved: the clanking of the stage-machinery pistons, the hiss of water in the pipes above his head, on its way to douse down the film-strip laboratory floor.

Then, mixed with the mechanical sounds, André heard something that should not have been there: footsteps, approaching his door. He frowned: a little flare of temper, and dropped his sketch pad as the knock at the door came.

‘Come in,’ he barked. The door opened a crack, and one of the runners poked his head into the space. ‘This came for you, M. Durand,’ he piped, holding out a flat, oblong parcel in trembling fingers.

André snatched the parcel, tossed it onto the table, and tried to get back to his thoughts. He locked his fingers behind his head and closed his eyes. The pitter-patter of the runner’s feet receded, and he sighed and inhaled the factory sounds.

But the parcel had made a dent in the weave: an oblong silence where there should have been noise. It lay staring up at him.

André swore. Who had sent him a film idea at this time of night? What could possibly be so urgent? But he would get no rest until he had, at least, looked at it.

One quick peek – and then it would go where ninety-nine per cent of the ideas he received went. Giving in, he tore the manilla envelope that was used for inter-departmental traffic, and found, as he had expected, a note from Charles Pathé:

This came from a friend. Of interest. Difficult trick. C.

André smiled. Declaring something
difficult
was a lure of Charles’s, designed to pique André’s interest: but it was a phrase without bite because they both knew that André never found camera tricks difficult. His films were the talk of Europe: his speciality was the illusion; films which made the audience cover their face with their hands; and he did it all with a shrug and a smile, finding it easy. Inevitably he would stride into Charles’s office the following morning and toss the script onto his desk, along with the sketch book containing the solution.
Not so difficult then
, Charles Pathé would smile, and André would answer:
Apparently not
.

He turned the paper over:

A drama of a haunting

André’s lip curled. Charles was losing his touch: when had there been a ghost which André could not conjure? Mercifully, the script was just a few pages long, and well formatted – not like some of the scribbles he got nowadays. He quickly found the scene which would require his attention:

The Doppelgänger, enraged, steps out of the mirror.

Intertitle:

The Doppelgänger wraps its hands round the girl’s throat.

The sluicing of the pipes overhead faded out and was replaced by the tingle in his elbow that signified an idea.

André tossed the script aside, and reached for his pencil and sketchbook. Designs ran down his arms and fingers and onto the page. He drew a stage model of the standard set-up for Pepper’s Ghost, the illusion which had so amazed London three seasons ago. The action ran as usual on the stage: but a sheet of glass was added during the interval, running invisibly stage left to right. Via a series of projections, the reflection of an actor in the wings was thrown onto the sheet of glass: and a ghost appeared to walk back and forth on stage.

In the silence of his room, André furrowed his brow. It was easy enough to duplicate a person in the same shot. One simply filmed the same scene in two passes, confining the action to one side of the shot only on each pass, and then laid the two sections of film over each other to get the full picture in the finished print. Or a better option might be to block off a part of the camera lens, and expose one side of the film – have the girl step towards the mirror – and then rewind the film, block off the other half of the lens, and shoot the other side – have the same girl play herself stepping out of the mirror.

But in this type of trick, the doubles usually stayed firmly on their respective sides of the set, and never touched each other. The contact of nebulous hands on living throat: that was more difficult.

Half an hour passed; the clock struck eight, and André tore the sheets from his pad and ripped them into strips. He flung the script into a drawer.

As he stared at his desk, unseeing, the invitation to the
gallery opening swam into focus. Suddenly he did not want to be alone in his office any more.

He locked the drawer with its shameful contents before he left, locked his office, smiled at the night porter on his way out, and hailed a cab which took him to Montmartre, and to a rainy pavement outside a gallery lit by electricity and champagne.

Juliette and Adèle
1967

I say: ‘But he did work out a method by the winter of 1913.’

‘Yes.’

‘How was it done?’

Adèle shrugs. ‘I don’t know exactly.’

‘Why not? You were there.’

She leans forward: ‘Have you ever stood under cinema lights? After two minutes, you smell your own hair burning. I was alone, faint and dazzled, being told what gestures to make, one by one. I do remember there was a mirror, and that the director became very irate, and kept moving me around, saying I wasn’t hitting my marks. But apart from that – a blank.’