Petite Mort (24 page)

‘You don’t know anything about us. She loves me.’

There was something like tenderness on her face. At the same moment, the crowd parted and I saw Luce, laughing and talking, not ten feet away, a circle of admiring, fashionable women around her.

‘Come now,’ Aurélie said. ‘Did you really think you were her first?’

I stepped off the bank and half-skated, half-staggered as fast as I could across the ice. From the corner of my eye, Luce turning, confused, to watch me go.

On the other side of the lake, I took my skates off and started back down the path towards the house.

I had reached the lawn before I heard her footsteps behind me, looked around and found her close enough to touch.

She moved round till we were facing each other; stood watching me, her chest rising and falling. She looked like the person I had thought was mine, the person I had met in the salon all those months ago: her face lovely with exercise, her eyes sparkling from all the fine conversation and clever jokes.

‘Why didn’t you tell me about Aurélie?’

Her eyes widened. I saw it clearly now, how she darted here and there, looking for the right thing to say.

‘It was a long time ago. Nothing.’ Her eyes cut downwards. ‘Why, what did she say?’

‘That you use people up and let them go. Is that what you did to her? Were you in love with her? Are you still together now?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No, it wasn’t like that.’

I shake my head. ‘What haven’t you told me? What’s going on now, that you won’t tell me about?’

She closed her eyes, tight: but not before I had seen something flicker in them.

I slapped her. A casual, arcing blow, but hard, because it made the small bones of my hand hum.

Her head snapped sideways; she put her hand to her cheek to test for blood; finding it, she put her fingertip experimentally to her tongue, and was her old self again; all the way back, wiping out everything, to the person I had seen being expelled from Pathé, eyes narrowed and glittering. In the distance, the pop and fizz of New Year fireworks bursting over Paris.

Juliette and Adèle
1967

Adèle looks out of the window, watching something else.

At last, she takes a sharp breath in. ‘But you said you had something to ask me,’ she says.

I slide the list of names the man from Public Records had sent me across the table. She reaches for her handbag, extracts a pair of reading glasses, and perches them on the end of her nose.

‘What am I looking at?’ she asks.

‘These are all the people who lived in Anne Ruillaux’s house before her.’

‘Anne Ruillaux being the lady who handed in the film canister?’

I say: ‘Correct. Can you tell me if you recognise any of them? The man from Public Records said they had no connection with Pathé, but I just thought one of them might be familiar.’

She studies the sheet. Slides it back across the table.

She says: ‘No. I’m sorry. I don’t recognise anyone.’

She watches me for a few seconds. ‘When I have a problem, I turn the telescope around. Look at it from the reverse angle. Start again from the beginning, or recommence at the end. Might that be of some assistance here?’

I put my fingers to my temples and press inwards. ‘I’m not sure.’

‘What is the beginning of the mystery? When was the last time anyone saw the film?’

‘During the fire at the Pathé factory,’ I say. And look up at her.

Juliette, vi
.

The Pathé archivist beams when she catches sight of me, her pointed face opening.

She walks towards me, carrying a box-file, and puts it on my desk.

‘The Pathé fire of 1914,’ she says. ‘This is everything.’

‘Thanks.’ I pull the box towards me and lift the lid.

She hovers. ‘Is this to do with the missing film?’

I am leafing through the newspaper articles about the fire –
Inferno at Pathé factory – Workers evacuated – No fatalities…

‘They started the fire,’ I say. ‘The person who stole the print set the factory on fire to cover up the theft. I’m sure of it.’

The archivist frowns. ‘But the papers all said the fire was an accident.’

‘It’s the only way the thief could be sure nobody would know the film had been stolen. This way, everyone would assume it had just been destroyed along with everything else. It wouldn’t even be missed, and nobody would come looking for him. And you have the records, don’t you?’

The archivist stares. ‘But nitrate cellulose is so flammable. The reaction generates its own oxygen, so it just burns and burns. When a film reel caught fire at the Paris Bazaar in 1897, the fire continued for days. A hundred people died.’

I say: ‘You mean whoever started the fire couldn’t be sure the firemen would be able to put it out? Without loss of life?’

‘Yes. Whoever it was must have been really desperate.’

She looks down with distaste at the papers arranged in a fan on my desk.

‘He’s in there somewhere,’ she says. ‘Your ruthless person.’

I’D DR EAMED OF HOW
this would feel; the cosmetician asking me to bend my head a little to the right, and with deferential flicks of her wrist she dusted my right cheek with powder. Then she invited me to offer a pretend kiss to the mirror, and painted my lips, and then put kohl just underneath my eyes, which wavered away from their own reflected gaze.

‘All done,’ she said, starting to replace her pots and unguents in her make-up case with precision and fastidiousness. Everything in its proper place.

I wanted to ask her to stay with me until it was time to go to the stage, but she kept her back to me. I heard the snap of the clasps fastening her bag, and she left the room without saying anything else.

The dressing room is quiet apart from the ticking of the pipes overhead. I put my palms on my knees and listen to my own breathing.

A knock at the door: the camera assistant. ‘It’s time.’

It had taken me a few attempts to get through to Peyssac on André’s study telephone; a few tries to understand how the dialling worked, and which end one picked up. And then I had to choose my moment, before the household was properly awake and I could be interrupted.

Peyssac’s early-morning-peevish voice came through on the crackling line: ‘Yes? Who is it, please?’

‘It’s Adèle Roux.’

I thought:
Perhaps he won’t remember me
.

A hush, as he considered. ‘How wonderful to hear your voice again.’ The delicacy of the pause. ‘And do you have good news for me?’

‘Yes.’

‘Delightful. So pleased.’

Another pause. What do you say to a co-conspirator?

‘Can you be free in two days’ time, say, at nine in the morning? We will arrange for a car. And – given your situation – yes, I think we can complete your scenes in a single day. Nobody need know until such time as you choose to tell them.’

‘Thank you.’

I was about to hang up when I thought of the money; I’d need it if I was going to live independently again. ‘I will want to be paid,’ I said.

Miles away, Peyssac spluttered. ‘Of course! Your wages will be available to be collected at the Pathé offices, the day after filming, as is customary.’

I replaced the receiver without saying goodbye.

The night before the filming, I packed my valise and slid it under the bed. Straightening up, I hesitated, listening.

Then shook my head: of course that sound was not footsteps, coming to my room. It was only the floorboards complaining as the house tacked into the wind.

‘That is our final shot. Thank you, everyone.’ Peyssac bounces forward, hands clasped. ‘Mlle Roux. Words cannot express – it has been an honour. I do most fervently hope we will work together again.’

The cameraman is turning away, collapsing the tripod. Extras mill about, chatting, getting out cigarettes. The light coming through the studio roof is tinged with pink.

In the dressing room, I am left alone to remove my make-up:
the Vaseline in long, greasy smears; the kohl, picking at it with watery cloths to get it out of the creases under my eyes.

At the factory gates I get into the car Peyssac has provided: the latest model, its engine builds to a roar before we purr away.

The streets unribbon. At a greengrocer’s, I see Mathilde. Her spidery fingers are engaged in examination of fruit – she holds a plump apple up, inspecting it for bruises, then drops it satisfied into her string bag and looks up, scanning about her for the next thing.

I raise my fingers to wave to her: she sees me, her head turning as the car passes; her face too unlined, her dress too fine – it cannot be her after all. Not-Mathilde: not someone I knew. The woman turns away, crossly, as if I have offended her.

When I get home there is a fluttering sound: looking up into the curve of the stairwell, hundreds of sheets of paper are floating down towards me with a sound like wings.

A silk slipper is discarded on the lowest step; its fellow has been hurled further, and lies on its side under the console table.

Thomas comes hurrying down, his carefully professional face disarranged. ‘Come quickly,’ he says, loops round and starts to run back up, with me in his wake.

I hop over a pair of silver-backed hairbrushes balancing on the steps. At the visible destruction something in my chest has begun to flutter inconveniently: by the top of the stairwell, the walls are lurching.
Can it be
, they ask,
that with your stubbornness you have finally made her candid?

‘Your valise had gone, so naturally she feared you had gone with it,’ Thomas says. He pushes at his brilliantined hair as he stands outside the salon door. ‘She will expect you to explain.’

Without waiting for me to tell him that the valise was only pushed out of sight, he opens the door inwards for me to go in.

The twin vases from the mantel have smashed, eggshell on the floor; books have been torn from the shelves and had their spines viciously broken. The writing table where I used to sit is an insect on its back with the legs snapped off. The only intact object in the room is the sofa where I used to sit, and this is where Luce is.

She doesn’t hear me come in: she is rubbing her face as though she wants the top layer of skin gone.

When she removes her hands, she forgets to be angry: her eyes fill up with grateful tears, and then she remembers, composing her face.

‘I’m so tired of being tired,’ she says.

Above her cheekbone there is still a bruise the colour of parchment.

She says: ‘With Aurélie, I had something, very briefly, a few years ago. I wasn’t myself, and I got better, and then it wasn’t important – at least, not to me. We carried on as before, and I tried to make it all right with her; but she’s never let me forget it, and now I don’t know if we’re even friends. I think I knew, unless I was careful, she would bring me trouble in the end. And now she has.’ A breath in. ‘I should have told you.’

Trees sway silently outside the window. It’s my chance to tell her where I have been. I want to say everything. How abandoned I felt when the make-up went on, sitting alone in the dressing room; how I could only think of how she would do this gesture, look in that mirror. Of how in another world she would be proud of me, playing this part.

I will say it. But before I can open my mouth, she says: ‘I think it’s time, isn’t it? I really think we ought to go away.’

Silently, from one fraction of a second to the next, in the great wash of relief, I let the chance of a confession pass. I will tell her when we are right away from here. Sitting on a beach, her knees bent under her, massaging a grey pebble as we look out across the Pas de Calais, she will pre-empt:
Did you think I
didn’t know you’d been to the studios? It never mattered
.

She is looking up at me. ‘Or have I burned my bridges?’

I poke at a shard of smashed vase with my toe. ‘You seem to have been burgled.’

She looks at me, dazed and miserable.

I say: ‘When we live together, we’ll get better locks.’

She looks at her feet and smiles, private at first, then wide open.

Then she says: ‘As soon as we can. Tomorrow, if possible. Is it possible?’

The last thing I expect, and the thing I most want: the sooner the better, for the less chance for the gossip to leak out of Pathé. Nevertheless, I’m so surprised by my good luck that I don’t quite know what to say. Was Aurélie right? Will she always pull her fingers back at the last minute and run to what she knows?

But look, look at the broken things all around us.

‘There is a small sum of money which is due to me,’ – this is the best I can do with the Pathé wage office – ‘that can be withdrawn tomorrow morning.’

She starts to laugh and cry, wiping impatiently at her eyes.

That night, in her room, we plan.

‘We’ll get right away at first,’ she says, ‘until the dust has settled and’ – she takes a shivering breath in – ‘we can come back to Paris.’

She smiles; turns her face away. ‘We need some out-of-theway, unfashionable place.’ She snaps her fingers and spins round. ‘England!’ she says. ‘We can take the boat at Calais.’