Petite Mort (10 page)

‘I can’t believe it,’ I say. ‘There must be something.’

A hiss of steam from the coffee machine; someone comes into the café, and Adèle Roux is looking at me.

‘I’ve got you wrong, haven’t I?’ she says. ‘I thought you were a person who let things happen to them, but you’re not. You have to find things out. You won’t rest until you know.’

It’s the best summary of myself I have yet heard.

She passes her hand in front of her mouth as if hiding a smile. ‘But when we come to the part about the film,’ she says, ‘you will see why I wasn’t concentrating.’

THROUGH THE GLASS PARTITION
, André’s driver tells me about his daughters. ‘Our eldest, we hope, may be a doctor one day.’ His eyes crinkle. ‘Why not? It’s changing everywhere, isn’t it?’ Failing that, he says, a doctor’s wife. ‘She’s turned out good-looking. A bit like you.’ He winks: complimentary rather than lascivious, but I’ve turned my face away.

Outside the car, the city has gone away without anything to go on. It seems one moment a white-aproned waiter inclines over a lady in furs, frozen in the act of obsequiousness; the next, the avenue is white dust and lined with poplars – neat façades behind high walls – countryside, but pruned and arranged for the rich, speeding along too fast, pressing me into the sides of the car as we corner. I fold my hands over my valise and wish he’d watch the road.

‘First time in an automobile?’ the driver says.

‘No,’ I say, and then: ‘When I was little there was a horse and trap; we hired it to take us on picnics. Only the pony was used to deliver milk the rest of the time, so it kept trying to stop in at every house on the way.’

He laughs out loud, confident hands on the wheel, and I feel a little better.

The house radiates wealth: gold stone, its shutters beaming wide, its windows blue in the summer evening. The mansard roof is slate and the lawn trimmed a perfect poison-green. In a spin of gravel, the car swings round a turning circle in the drive
and stops outside wide steps leading up to the front door.

The driver hops off the cab and clicks the car door open for me. He touches his cap: ‘Hubert, Mademoiselle,’ he says. ‘I look forward to being of more service to you in the future,’ and smiling, he steps away.

Inside, led by the butler, Thomas, the house isn’t what I expected: a smell of camphor and the old stone of the marble floor. The hall is dark apart from the yellow pool of a lamp, standing on a marble occasional table: as we move through, a wash of colour from a stained-glass window dapples my feet. Further back, a glimpse of a snail’s shell staircase, drifting up into the floor above.

Thomas stands for a moment listening outside a door halfway down the corridor, his hand in readiness on the door knob; he raps with his other knuckle and without waiting for an answer, goes in.

She is sitting on a sofa under the large front window, head bent over a book; as we enter, she puts it down on her lap.

‘Mlle Roux, Madame,’ Thomas says.

She says: ‘Oh – the new assistant!’ as if she has never heard of such a thing; Thomas withdraws, closing the door behind him.

She looks down, produces a bookmark and inserts it, marking the page. Makes a business of it; smoothing the covers and closing it and putting it down again, this time beside her; and then we look at each other.

You always ask yourself: how much of what I remember is real, and how much of it is detail that I have embellished afterwards? In my mind’s eye, she makes a quick movement, as if she is hesitating to speak, and we stay like that for I don’t know how long – but when I try to square that trembling image with what I know of her now, I can’t imagine her doing it.

I felt, in those couple of seconds, that I’d known her for a long time. I thought, as she finally started to smile, and her teeth appeared, I saw her recognise me too. Perhaps that was what she had been going to say, but stopped herself:
Don’t I know you?

‘My husband tells me you have aspirations in the cinema.’

Now she has fixed her eyes on the window behind me, with a slight frown, as if momentarily distracted by someone passing by, and I’m glad of the interruption, because her voice is a disappointment. Unremarkable: the accent aristocratic but not Parisian. Not the rich chocolate I’d imagined.

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I am extremely keen to learn.’

‘And can you read?’

‘Fluently.’

‘Good. And you know the duties involved in being my assistant? Clerical, as well as the social aspect? You’ll answer my correspondence and help me keep my paperwork in order. And you don’t mind about the money? You will have your own rooms, your own suite, and you can eat your meals with us if you like. I expect M. Durand explained.’

I nod, thinking that I’ll have to be careful not to use his first name.

‘Are you able to start immediately? We can send for your things. There isn’t anyone at home waiting for you?’

‘No.’

‘Then I’ll ask Thomas to show you to your room.’

The smile broadens until all her teeth appear, and above them, her eyes, wide and amused.

Three days later I returned to rue Boissonnade one last time, to collect my things.

I went in the last hours of the night so that nobody would see me. Wisps of mist hung in the street and wreathed themselves about the hall door; I crept past Monsieur Z and up
the creaking staircase and turned my key in the lock of the apartment.

From Agathe’s room came the sound of snores. I moved on, past the salon door, which was propped open. In the dead light the furniture looked august and almost expensive; Mathilde’s family were frozen on the mantel, glinting in their silver frames.

The door to my old bedroom creaked under my hand.

The room was warm with sleep. Camille lay in my bed, huddled over on herself like a small animal, the blankets clutched between her legs. On the tiny desk, she had laid out the tools of her trade – the half-used pots of rouge, the eyelash curlers, the hand mirror.

As quietly as I could, I stole my best dress from the cupboard and then I fled into the street.

Two days later, the letter would have arrived.

It was a Sunday – Agathe’s day off, and so she would have been up early – it would have been Agathe who found it and tore it open, never mind that it was addressed to Mathilde, greedy hands ripping the paper in case there was something personal inside. Levering herself into a chair, she would have read André’s brief note explaining where I had gone and why.
Post as secretary. Hope this will cover unpaid rent. Expenses. Thank you for your kind understanding. Do not hesitate. Yours, &c.

And then it would have dawned on her that money was in the envelope – she would have held it upside down and the notes would have fluttered out and lain on the parquet, twitching in the breeze from the open window. One hundred, two hundred, three hundred. Agathe’s fingers flexing; her piggy-eyes glinting, for André, with his rich man’s lack of understanding, had more than bought off my deposit and my three months’ notice; the three hundred francs was a sum the like of which Agathe could not have earned in several months.

She would have made a rapid calculation, and folded the
notes quick as winking into her pocket, and the letter – the letter she would have burnt, letting the fragments sprinkle into the breeze, as she stood at the window where we always used to smoke together. She would have spread herself with a grunt into the place I used to occupy, and thought no more about it.

Mathilde would have continued hoping for a word from me to explain my sudden absence. ‘Do you think we should alert the police?’ she would have asked, and flinched at Agathe’s snort. And then, what would she have said?
We run an honest little boarding-house, officer, visited only by a few discerning gentlemen…

Nevertheless, she would have waited for a note or a letter. Late at night, thinking she heard a light step on the stairwell, she would have paused in her needlework and listened.

‘You shouldn’t be surprised,’ Agathe would have said, flicking her cigarette end high over the rooftops and watching it fall in a firefly, ember-tipped arc, ‘she was always flighty.’

Juliette and Adèle
1967

‘So you just left without saying goodbye? Without leaving an address?’

‘Imagine if she’d followed me to the house. It was my big opportunity.’

She looks out of the window, and I don’t interrupt her: I’m getting used to these pauses.

Eventually she says: ‘Did you say you were going to see the film tonight?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then you’ll see what I was like as a girl. I was beautiful.’

She still has that absent expression. I wait.

She says: ‘One day, five years ago, I went to see a plastic surgeon, a man with fine hands and an office behind the Palais-Royal. He took my face like so, pinching the skin here, and smoothing it here, and he never once looked me in the eyes. At the end of the examination he said:
Good news, Madame. We can nip here, tuck here. I can give you back what you’ve lost.
’

She draws herself up, indignant at the memory. ‘What do you think I told him?’ she says.

I think about it. Realise I know the answer.

‘Nobody can give another person what they’ve lost?’ I say.

She looks at me, faintly surprised. Then she levels her finger, like the barrel of a gun, right between my eyes. ‘Very good, Mlle Blanc.’

Juliette, ii.

In the dark of the viewing room, a flickering light, and then the picture forms.

An intertitle:

The screen changes: a jagged landscape, triangular mountains and floating cardboard clouds, and in the background, a tiny turreted manor house.

A room at the top – cut-out stars and moon visible through a window. A middle-aged man appears, gesticulating and striding up and down. Sitting stage right is a young woman with her face in her hands.

As the actress takes her hands away I feel – not recognition, because I don’t think anybody could see Adèle Roux, the person I know, in this frightened, hungry face.

The Baron shakes his finger at her:

Adèle runs to the door, sobs against it, slithers to the ground; flings herself onto her bed. Cries; then lifts herself on one elbow and, after a moment’s thought, leaps from the bed, runs to a bookshelf near the door and pulls a large book from it.

Her hands lift:

…

…

Lightning across the film – but not part of the film – and without warning the scene changes completely.

‘That’s where the missing bit was,’ the technician says.

The castle tower is gone – now an Alpine field, strewn with tiny wild flowers. In the background there is a cardboard-looking church, and hundreds of guests milling about in front. They have the unmistakeable air of amateur extras, over-excited and unsure of themselves: one young man sneaks a glance direct at camera, looks away, then looks back and stands, mouth open, until the woman next to him tugs him away. The film technician chuckles.

A man in a velvet tunic runs to and fro across the screen, his hands clutching at his scalp.

The intertitle reads:

The technician cuts the motor and smiles apologetically.

‘We’ll never know,’ he says, unspooling the film from the reel. Holds it up to the light. ‘Here.’

I hold the silky filmstrip, and together we look at the part where the two scenes meet. One minute mirror; next church.

‘Was it found in two halves? Did you stick it back together yourselves?’

‘No, it was like this when we got it. That’s editing cement. They use it to splice pieces of film together. Whoever cut the scene out must have glued it back together again after they’d removed it.’

I run my thumb over the roughness of the join.

‘
SO,’ ANDRÉ SAYS
, slipping his shirt back over his head, ‘what did you think of my wife?’

There hasn’t been time for talking, in the first tumble on my own feather bed. The room is moonlit grey; the ormolu clock on the mantelpiece of my new room ticks quietly. He sits on the edge of the covers, his hand still resting on my thigh, smooth under the rich person’s sheets.

I arrange my face into the malicious smile he will expect. He smiles back, reassured; always fastidious, he clears his throat and buttons up his trousers. ‘No doubt you thought yourself more attractive and more talented,’ he says.

‘She’s what I expected,’ I say airily, and he nods and shrugs, happy with the diplomacy of the answer. ‘Same time tomorrow night?’

I plump up the coverlet under my fingers. What he will expect me to do: look triumphant.

Thomas had been the one to show me to my room earlier that evening; up, up and round the great spiral staircase, my valise handle sticking to my palm. The walls were papered in cool silk, embossed with fleur-de-lys. Above us there was a cupola, a disc of indigo: an eye peering through the roof.

Each member of the household had their own floor. Terpsichore’s was the first and smelled of nothing: the walls of the corridor were draped in pale yellow silk. André’s, the second floor, smelled of the factory: cordite and business sense.

And then, knowing, expecting a reaction, Thomas said: ‘This is for you.’

He had opened the first door in the third-floor corridor and stood aside to let me pass. I didn’t go to the bed or the wardrobe in chocolate mahogany or the cold china vase on the dressing-table or any one of the hundred other beautiful things the room contained; I didn’t exclaim girlishly – I was too proud, in front of Thomas. Instead, I crossed to the window and leant out from the waist, squinting into the sun. Directly below was a flagstoned terrace, with a balustrade, and two mossy stone lions for sentinels; it was lit with lanterns, just starting to show in the fading sun. Beyond it, the lawn stretched away for half a mile or so, until it met the fringe of the Bois de Boulogne.