Petite Mort (11 page)

I said, keeping my voice level: ‘This is very nice.’ A great wash of happiness:
Look, look where I had got to.

‘The Durands take the evening meal at eight. You will hear the dinner bell chime.’

When the time came, I hovered on the upstairs landing, waiting to hear them go down; not wanting to be the first to arrive. As soon as I heard doors opening and shutting I ran downstairs.

When I entered the dining room, I noticed a change in her straightaway: where in our interview she had been calm, now it was as if she was surrounded by a heat haze of energy. She was taking snails from their shells with a miniature fork, her other cutlery laid out before her like a butcher’s implements: knife, scoop, tweezers. Not timid: cheerfully pulling at them until they gave way.

A chandelier hung twinkling from the ceiling; servants stood blending into the walls, waiting to serve food from the sideboard. The polished table gleamed my own ghostly image at me; she was seated near the door and André sat at the far end, his back to the French window. He looked up at me and I felt,
as clearly as if he had really done it, his finger trace my cheek:
pretty little devil.

‘Do you find your quarters to your liking?’ he asked.

‘They are extremely comfortable. Thank you.’

He had risen into a reverential half-bow; now he sat back in his seat, his smile in the corners of his mouth.

I looked down at the finicky morsels of food:
amuse-bouches
, a miniature egg perched on a salad, and the snails and dish of sauce – toy dinner – and hovered over the cutlery until I could be sure what each was for.

‘Mlle Roux saved my life today,’ Terpsichore said.

André pressed his thumb into his wine glass: miniature pink lines sprang to life along the stem.

‘Yes, it happened like this: I was re-reading
Thérèse Raquin
by M. Zola, which as you know,’ – she paused to press her napkin to her mouth – ‘is a great tragedy of disappointed hopes and loveless loves.’ Her eyes were busy on the table as she spoke, and her hands swept the snails’ shells fussily back into their silver dish. ‘I had come to the final paragraph, so desperately sad, where Laurent and Thérèse take the poison and collapse into each others’ arms, unable to bear the weight of their guilt.’ She lifted her wine glass; her eyes twinkled over the top of it. ‘And I sat on my sofa and thought, nothing can surpass
Thérèse Raquin
– I have known it for some time in my heart of hearts. M. Zola is a towering inferno of genius who will never again pass amongst us, so what use is it, then, to stay alive?’

André smiled indulgently.

‘So I thought then:
What will it be? Knife, rope or drowning?
My resolve was fixed; I had only to determine the
modus operandi
– I barely heard the door, nor did I hear Thomas escorting Mlle Roux into the room, but unquestionably she rescued me from certain death by my own hand.’

André snorted and smoothed his cutlery, repositioning it on the tablecloth; then looked up as the fish course was brought.
‘How do we know that it was not Mlle Roux, performing voodoo in the back of our automobile, who put such thoughts into your mind in the first place?’

She levelled her knife at him down the table. ‘We don’t. Mlle Roux is therefore a rescuer or a bird of ill omen, depending on your point of view.’ She smiled her bright, interested smile. ‘In any case, the great work of saving me from myself begins tomorrow. Mlle Roux must always be on hand with matches, to set alight any book which might distress me; to remove tempting nooses, to whisk sharp objects out of my reach.’

André dipped his eyes to his food, smiling and prodding the fish with his fork. I looked up at her, and found she had absented herself, lifting her wine glass and staring at a point in the dark window past André’s head. Her neck drooped slightly, in the way that tall people’s sometimes do.

I dissected my sole into smaller and even smaller pieces, irritated by what she’d said. She expected me to be at her shoulder with the matches, always on hand to shelter the corners of furniture. It was as if I was a negative person – someone she would only notice through the things I removed.

The shutters in my bedroom window creak in the night air. At the doorway, André pauses: ‘The two of you don’t have to be enemies.’

‘You’d prefer it if we were.’

He grins, and is gone. His light footsteps patter down the stairs to his rooms one floor below, and there is the sound of his door gently shutting.

THE NEXT MORNING
I woke up naturally for the first time in years. It was wonderful: listening to the sounds of other people having to work; scratching at André’s leftover papery scales with my thumbnail.

The house was all small sounds: the clatter of pans in the kitchen, the sweep, sweep of the housemaids scrubbing down the terrace outside; the regular tread of Thomas carrying food trays to the different occupants of the house’s three floors. What there wasn’t: polite conversation between Mathilde and Madame Moreau, comparing last night’s prices on the landing; Monsieur Z’s whining sea shanties echoing up from the street. I’d write to Camille later.

Finally the footsteps came outside my door, and there was a discreet knock and the rattle of a breakfast tray being set down. ‘Madame expects you in her study at nine-thirty,’ Thomas whispered, and then his soft pad away down the stairs again.

I hopped out of bed and dragged the tray into the room; examined the meal. They had gone to the other extreme from last night’s picky nothings: now there was fried kidneys and coffee thick as oil. I pushed the tray out of the room again with one toe, unable to stomach it; and then, because it was still before nine o’clock, dressed and went to explore my domain.

The corridor was warm and sunlit: to the right of my bedroom, doors ran away along a corridor to a picture window at the end, beyond which a tree moved soundlessly, its leaves quivering in a light wind.

I stepped across the carpet runner to the door almost opposite my room, and tested the handle. By daylight, the paintwork in the hall had a bleached-out, dusty look of disuse; the door knob rattled uselessly in my hand. Pursing my lips, I walked to the next door – another set of weary paintwork – and gently turned the handle. Nothing. The same for the next door, and the next, by the window. The leaves outside ruffled, discontented; I tried the rooms on the other side of the corridor, but they were locked right the way back up the passageway to my own room.

I stood outside my bedroom with my hand on the door frame.
This floor is yours
, Thomas had said, beaming at me. But he had not even given me keys to my own room, let alone to the rest of my miniature empire.

Just then, from inside, the clock on the mantelpiece chimed nine-thirty. I pulled the door shut and crossed to the top of the stairs.

When I reach Terpsichore’s floor I don’t know which is her study so I listen, and sure enough, there is the rasp of a page being turned, behind the door at the far end of the passage.

I knock at the door and hear her clear her throat. ‘Come in!’

She has laid the novel on the sofa beside her and now her hands are clasped together. She isn’t the only one posing: the room is long and light, with bookcases lining two walls. It reminds me a little of Père Simon’s front room, but these books are all new, and if dust spirals in the shaft of light from the windows, it is only showing off. On her left, propped against a cushion, is her discarded breakfast tray: a brioche bleeding a dab of jam.

‘Just in time,’ she says, and casts her eyes at the novel splayed on the seat beside her, ‘I was almost at the poison scene again.’

I’m confused. ‘Didn’t you read that last night?’

‘I needed to look at it more closely.’

‘Why?’

She smiles a wicked-fairy smile. ‘I wish to understand the best method of poisoning someone.’

‘Who?’

‘My husband. I’m running away.’

I don’t know the rules of this game, so I go quiet.

‘So my routine,’ she says, ‘until the studio comes to its senses: I read in the morning, scripts or studio business, and the afternoons are for exercise and social calls. Does that sound amenable?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good.’

She looks at me, eyes slightly narrowed, thinking me over.

‘You may begin by answering some of my correspondence,’ she says, and gestures to the desk under the window, where a stack of handwritten letters is waiting. ‘Just write a brief note of acknowledgement to each.’

I don’t need a second invitation to sit to something straightforward, and besides, I want to show her what I can do; I pick up the topmost letter, dip the pen in ink, and bend my head. For a while the only sound is the scratching of my nib on the paper, and the soft turning of the pages of her novel. Sneaking a look, I can see that she has started again at the beginning.

The letters are very mixed. They range from the romantic to the pornographic in tone, but are always fervent in their enthusiasm. Five contain the phrase:
You are the greatest actress of your generation
. Two are semi-religious:
A living star come from our Lord to save us
. Ten or more are fiercely competitive, as if she was an army to be laid bets on:
My brother and I have fifty francs that you will be more famous than Max Linder in half a year
. All of them, without exception, write as if they know her; seven ask for her advice on matters of the heart.
Should I marry the man my parents require, for his farmland? But he bores me to tears. And his fingers are so square, the backs of his hands so wiry-haired, and besides,
I always wanted tall children
. And then answer themselves:
I know you would tell me to marry for love, but where will I find a loveable stranger of reasonable height?

An hour or so passes and my writing hand starts to get tired. She looks up, though I have not spoken, only begun to massage the knuckles.

‘Do you need to stop?’

‘No.’

She bends her head to her novel again. Her eyebrows are drawn together in concentration, as if someone has put a stitch through them.

At midday the pile of outgoing letters is much higher than the incoming, neatly stacked instead of the tottering mess I had first found on the desk.

As the clock finishes chiming she closes the novel and looks up, smiling.

‘Quite the little worker,’ she says. ‘The previous—’

She clicks her tongue and looks at her feet; she was going to say,
The previous assistant
. ‘Not fair,’ she says.

I fuss with the composed letters, for something to do. I like the feeling of almost having been in on a secret.

In the afternoon, she shows me the garden behind the house.

There is a high wind which blows our hats half off our heads, and makes us walk at an angle.

After twenty paces she stops, and with a catch of a laugh says: ‘May I take your arm?’

For a moment I go blank, then I realise it is to steady her, and hold it out for her to take. She curls her arm round the crook of my elbow, and rests the palm on my wrist, a steady pressure but not too tight. The backs of her hands are very smooth, but unexpectedly covered in a mass of freckles.

She laughs as she catches me staring. ‘My whole arms are like that,’ she says, too loud because of the wind. ‘When we
made
La Dame aux Roses
, the amount of Leichner No. 2 to cover it, you wouldn’t believe.’

We walk on in silence for a few moments, and then she pauses, and looks around her, the mistress surveying her terrain, and says: ‘Where you’re from, is it like this, or something else?’

I pretend to be looking at the green lawn and the white blooms in the rose beds, and manage to think of a longish thing to say. ‘Not much like this. It’s hotter, and the plants are different. But there isn’t much, just a few houses, and occasionally people pass through on their way to somewhere else.’

She laughs. ‘Bandits and caravanserai, how exotic.’

‘No,’ I say, ‘just deserted.’

She frowns as she reaches for a white petal, bruising it between forefinger and thumb. ‘But you got out.’

I don’t say anything.

She pulls the petal off, taking a scattering of others with it, scurrying away on the wind.

We walk on for a while. Suddenly she stops, puts her hand palm up to the sky and tuts. ‘Rain,’ she says, and turns to direct us towards the house.

‘Thank you for your company,’ she says, when we are back in the salon. ‘See you at dinner.’

Then she bends to pick up
Thérèse Raquin
again.

All round the garden I’ve been thinking about whether I dare say it, and I do: ‘I’d use the poison from
Romeo and Juliet
by William Shakespeare, to put him to sleep, and then make my escape. That way nobody has to die.’

‘Very good,’ she says. She looks into my face, frowning; then the gaze wavers down my body to my feet, and all the way back up again. She looks down at the book, and turns one page, then another, as I leave the room.

The next day, the silence between us, as she reads, and I work,
is peaceable; drowsy, even, as the weather is warming, the chill spring winds having faded away.

Later that morning, I look up from my work and see how she frowns at the book she is reading, as if the text is upside down or in another language: her concentration is extraordinary. Her lips are puckered; occasionally they pull back into a sneer, and then purse again.

She looks up suddenly and smiles, crinkling her eyes and lifting the book to show me the new title. ‘I’ve moved on,’ she says. ‘No more poisoning.’

‘Any good?’

‘Yes.’

I want to ask something else, but she has dipped her head to the page again. She looks as abstracted as two nights before, when she stared out of the dining-room window; she lifts her thumbnail to her mouth, chewing on the skin there as she reads.

That night, I am propped on my elbows and André is kissing his way down my stomach. ‘Are you learning much to your professional advantage?’

‘Yes,’ I say, shutting my eyes.