The Dead of Winter

by Lisa Appignanesi

  With a shiver, I get up to close the window, secure the double pane, and crawl beneath starched sheets. To console myself, I imagine Mme Tremblay lying in Madeleine’s bed and conjuring her up in exactly the way I am doing, though her Madeleine will be different from mine. For a moment those differences engross me. Where I see a playing with fire, Mme Tremblay will see dedication. Where I see an inability to distinguish between work and life, Mme Tremblay will see a genuine actor’s temperament. She is not wrong. Neither am I. Truth, where Madeleine is concerned, is never a simple business. Tangled in the thickets of mourning, we both need to constitute Madeleine in our own way, so as to eradicate that rope around her neck.

  So as to make sense of it.

  It is the thought that there might not be any sense, which makes me plunge into the past. If I lie very still and don’t force the pace, don’t allow future knowledge to contaminate prior experience, the full sweetness of our early life together is still there within me, like a flower untrammelled by later storms.

  Yet the work of memory is not easy for me. A man in love is always tainted with the ridiculous. More absurd than heroic. The abasement, the blurring of critical faculties, the sense that one’s equilibrium is in thrall to another though one cannot explain even to oneself what it is that constitutes the loved one’s uniqueness, what singles her out as the sole repository of one’s happiness - all of this unmans one. One becomes a blind, snuffling infant, searching for the breast.

  There is a searing contradiction here. Women want us to be manly and they want our passion. Yet the second desire attained destroys all the characteristics of the first. Can a woman still love the abject person who is the man in love?

  The only male passion in our culture which is heroic is Christ’s. And he too is feminized, passive in his suffering. Or infantilized, a child calling on an absent parent.

  Throughout my life-long passion for Madeleine, we struggled with these things. Sometimes I thought she preferred me feminized, loved me as a woman. Homosexual love, it occurred to me, does not have to be tied to gender.

  Sometimes I knew she hated me and I made myself withdraw, shored myself up, made myself hard with defences, indifferent and manly and desireable.

  Sometimes I hated her, too, for the abyss she thrust me into, though I must have been half in love with that easeful death.

  But I don’t want to think of that now. I don’t want to run ahead of myself. I am still on that first journey to France. It is early days.

  Madeleine’s Napoleonic producer offered us a room at his villa for what remained of the night. The next morning, Natalie Barret announced she would be driving us back to Avignon. She had good news to convey to Madeleine.

  I listened to the good news from the back seat of the car as Natalie zipped carelessly round bends. I learned that the man with the brisk pace and intent eyes was the director of the film Martineau was producing. I learned that late the previous night he had signalled an interest in Madeleine. Natalie’s agency would now take Madeleine onto their lists. They would arrange for a screen test, for a necessary series of photographs. Madeleine was a fortunate young woman.

  Madeleine sits very still as if the bright southern sun has lulled her into a half sleep. She doesn’t let out the whoop of elation I expect.

  At last, she runs a hand through her hair and says cooly that she will consider Natalie’s proposal. She would like to do the screen test, of course. But it would have to be arranged quickly. She has a commitment to a play in Montréal on her return. So the timing of the film, too, would have to be right. And she needs to know a little more about the part. Martineau has been vague.

  Natalie throws her a curious glance, taps a Gaulloise out for herself and passes the pack round to us. We drive in silence for a few kilometres and then she starts to talk about her agency, about the famous clients she handles.

  Madeleine asks her sweetly whether she has a sister agency in Hollywood. We listen to a slightly obfuscating answer. By the time we reach the centre of Avignon, Natalie is vigorously promising Madeleine any number of parts, telling her she is certain the screen test can be arranged for the day after tomorrow.

  ‘You can leave a message for me at the theatre.’ Madeleine gives her a lukewarm smile as we wave goodbye.

  I find myself chuckling. ‘Yesterday, I thought you were over the moon about this film.’

  Madeleine beams, drags me towards a café on the Place de l’Horloge and curls into a seat. ‘I am.’ She giggles.

  ‘So?’

  ‘I didn’t like her manner. Yesterday either. No one does me favours.’ She studies me, her face suddenly serious. ‘I’m not a poor provincial relation. I’m good, Pierre. When I saw the rushes of that shoestring film we did in Montreal, I knew I could be very good.’ She stirs her coffee reflectively. ‘And that woman hasn’t even taken the trouble of seeing our productions. I may be hungry, but I’m not starving.’

  I squeeze her hand. When Madeleine behaves like this, I am in awe of her. There is a focussed certainty about her, a professional pride. Unlike so many of my Québecois compatriots, unlike me, she has none of the bloated oversensitivity, none of the timber-sized chips on the shoulder, none of the excessive gratitude for crumbs, which make up the character armour of those long nurtured in second-class citizenry. Madeleine knows the exact measure of her value. She has cooly assessed its circumference and extent. No first-class citizens phase her. It reminds me how much I love her.

  ‘I didn’t like her manner either,’ I confess.

  ‘I couldn’t help but notice.’ She tweaks her nose and makes a face which is all disgust.

  We burst into unstoppable laughter. We get up and arm in arm amble through the town. The sun beats down on red slate roofs and heats the giant stone slabs of the papal palace. Pigeons peck away at invisible crumbs and flap their way up to turrets. We listen to a busker twanging out the nasal lyrics of a Bob Dylan song. We throw each other complicit smiles and gaze across ramparts at the lazy course of the river..

  We are young. We are free. We will not be compromised.

  That night after the show Madeleine triumphantly thrusts a note in my hand. It is a message from Natalie. It contains effusive congratulations on Madeleine’s performance of Saint Teresa. It also names a time and place for a screen test the day after tomorrow.

  I don’t go with Madeleine. Instead, I write an article into which I weave news of this latest success of Madeleine Blais, certainly an actress destined to go far. When I tell Madeleine of this she is unaccountably angry. Superstition grips her. One doesn’t count, let alone publicize, one’s chickens, until they are hatched, she tells me.

  I take her out of the piece and she softens, makes me promise that I will come to the cast party that night. It is their last performance and I must be there to celebrate. What she doesn’t tell me until the next day is that she has arranged to have dinner with the director on what was to be our last evening and one of our few alone together in Avignon.

  It is my turn to be unaccountably angry. I know that this meeting is necessary and important, yet I feel betrayed, resentful. Not that I say anything. I bury my sullen mood in work and pretend good cheer. There is a performance by a Québec chansonnier in a small club and it will be useful for me to cover that.

  Yet when I sit at the marble-topped table in the stuffy room which smells of sewerage, I can barely bring my eyes to focus on the spot-lit stage. Nor can I concentrate on the plaintive ironies of lyrics which evoke the little people of Québec, who have nothing to console them except the dance of the snow-flakes and the flow of the river and their unrecognized language.

  I force myself to sit through two sets. My watch tells me it is not quite late enough to return to the hotel. I invite the chansonnier to my table, share a few drinks with him, conduct a half-hearted interview and then head-off into the crowded night-time streets of the city.

  The atmosphere is festive. Music and voices thrum through the summer air. They do nothing to infect me w
ith their evident pleasure. I wander into emptier streets, find myself by the ruins of the church of the Cordeliers, where Petrarch’s Laura was interred in the mid-fourteenth century. The melancholy of that unrequited love pervades me. I brush it away, an unwanted omen, and hurry on. At last, at midnight, I tell myself Madeleine will be waiting for me and I slope back to our hotel.

  The room is empty. I throw myself on the bed and wonder what business there is that can be talked about at this late hour. Then I tell myself in the same plaintive tones as the chansonnier, that just because I desire Madeleine, it hardly follows that every man in the world shares my desire. After that, I lie there for I don’t know how long and force myself to formulate phrases for my last article from France.

  When I hear Madeleine at the door, I pretend sleep. She curls next to me. Her breath is soft on my face. For a moment, I think she has dozed off, then I feel her fingers on my chest, smoothing my skin, curving round my neck. She wants me awake. I refuse to open my eyes, refuse her touch. I keep my breathing even.

  Suddenly her hand coils round my penis. That doesn’t know how to feign sleep. It surges to her touch, frisks and bounds like an unleashed animal. Her mouth encloses it, laps and sucks. The pleasure is unutterable, yet somehow cool, detached, anonymous. I want it to go on and on, yet I also want to rebel at her power over me. I have an odd desire to punish her for my passion.

  With a moan, I tug at her hair, pull away from her, lift her towards me so that we are face to face. The streetlamp casts a faint yellow glow through our window. In it her eyes look huge.

  ‘I have the part,’ she chortles. ‘I have it.’

  My answer is half grunt. ‘I hope you didn’t have to do this for it.’ My hands are tight on her breasts, my cock inside her. I turn her over and fuck her hard and even before that violent blind shuddering takes us over, a great sadness brushes me with its wings.

  When I look at her again, tears blur my sight. Her face is reflective. She runs her fingers through my hair. ‘Would you rather I had let you sleep, Pierre? Or not come back at all?’

  The force of that makes me shiver despite the heat. I shake my head, try to gather my daytime self together. From somewhere within it I find a smile.

  ‘Congratulations. Tell me about it. Tell me everything.’

  She bends towards the table where there is an open bottle of wine. I watch the cello of her back, the dip of her arm as she pours two glasses. The brief distance between us suddenly seems too great. I reach to touch her, trace the wonder of those curves and lines, the ripple of movement.

  Madeleine smiles. She hands me a glass and lifts hers. ‘To movies,’ she says and falls back on the pillows with a laugh.

  The director was enamoured of her screen test. He wants to augment the part they had in mind for her. Shooting will probably start in January in Morzine. The fact that Madeleine skis is a definite plus. The film is a love story, older man, younger woman, with a bitter sweet ending. The man doesn’t get the woman. Her youth is watchable, loveable, but inviolate. It is a time for youth. He doesn’t want to sully it with his age.

  Or so Madeleine tells it to me. She also tells me that she is doubly pleased, because it will mean she can do the run of the new Québecois play which begins in September.

  The next day we don’t head back to Paris. At dawn I steal out and surprise Madeleine by returning with a car. We’re going to celebrate properly, I announce to her. We do.

  We drive south along leafy roads. The light dazzles as it leaps through the crests of giant planes and skims along mottled bark. We climb the Alpilles and play tourist. We scale the outcrop of Les Baux and meander along the streets of Arles and cavort in the Roman amphitheatre and head east to Aix where we spend the night in a small shuttered hotel where the air smells of lavender.

  The following morning, the windows of the car open to the wind, the radio blaring, we head for the Mediterranean. The rocks and the earth are honey pale and then ochre red, the sea deep blue, then turquoise, then blue again. There is the purple of bougainvillea, the crimson and orange of geranium. Her eyes as wide as a child’s, Madeleine speaks only to chart colour.

  We sit amongst the sophisticates of St. Tropez and sip cool white wine and gorge ourself on langoustines and watch the boats in the harbour. We buy the bathing suits we don’t have and miraculously find a tiny deserted cove where we swim and lie side by side and let the sun beat down on us. We are still lying there when the sea turns pink, then silver with the shimmer of moonlight. Wrapped in our sweaters and jeans and each others arms, we spend the night on that oval of grainy sand and somewhere in that night, Madeleine says to me in a soft, serious voice, ‘Whatever happens to us Pierre, let’s never forget we’ve had this.’

  I have never forgotten. I don’t really think Madeleine did either.

  8

  ________

  A rectangle of ashen light at the window signals dawn. My throat feels like sandpaper. My neck creaks like an old hinge as I bend to the sink and let water pour over my face and into my mouth. I shun the features in the small square of mirror.

  I stare out the window at the dark clustered green of pines and wish the day would tell me what to do with myself. It occurs to me that I could ring Contini and offer my services to him. Perhaps he would like me to accompany him in his interviews of Madeleine’s friends. Or I could offer to read through her journals for him.

  The idiocy of these thoughts only strikes me once I am dressed. I make my way quietly down the stairs. There is nothing for me to do but go home or go to my office.

  The idea of the office beckons to me like salvation. Even if there are no clients to see, there are papers I can immerse myself in, tortuous details which will annihilate memory, stifle emotion as surely as heaped earth obliterates breath.

  From the dining room, the aroma of brewing coffee wafts up the stairs. But the notion of making breakfast conversation with Giorgio Napolitano holds me back. Yet I will have to face him, pay my bill sooner or later. I hesitate.

  A wrack of snoeshows gives me an out. I pick out a pair and head for the door. The frosty air is more bracing than a cold shower. I head round the side of the chalet towards the hill behind. Where the path ends, I position my feet on the rackets and buckle the ties round my boots.

  The snow has a thin covering of ice and I have to pound down hard to prevent the rackets from slipping beneath me. The violence my tracks inflict on the virgin landscape is oddly satsifying.

  A pale lemon-yellow sun surfaces above the crest of the hill. Birds twitter and flap at my noisy approach. A white hare bounds from the cover of trees. I hear him before I see him. He hears me too. He pauses in utter stillness. We both hold our breath. Then in a flutter of ears, he leaps away and vanishes into whiteness.

  Madeleine, I suddenly remember, kept rabbits in the barn that first summer. Two fat white bundles of fur with pink ears and pink quivering noses. We fed them lettuce leaves and cabbage and carrots.

  ‘Mémère says “they breed like rabbits” is what the English used to say about the French. About them having lots of children. But I’ve never seen them breed. The rabbits I mean.’

  She is looking at me earnestly and I have the distinct impression that she doesn’t altogether know what this act of breeding entails and would like me to tell her.

  We watch the rabbits assiduously for the length of a morning and nothing happens. ‘Are you sure you’ve got a man rabbit and a woman rabbit?’ I ask her.

  ‘Can you tell the difference?’

  I hem and haw. ‘Not with rabbits,’ I finally manage to say. We look at each other and burst into giggles. We laugh so hard that the rabbits take fright and cower into the straw in the far corner of the cage.

  After Madeleine made that first film in France, I never laughed with her quite so freely again. I don’t know exactly what changed things and it didn’t happen all at once. It was a gradual progression.

  First there was the separation. Madeleine flew out to France just after Chri
stmas. A week passed and then another and another. I worked like a demon, but nothing I seemed to be able to do made the time pass. Each day I would wake to her absence with an acute sense of loss.

  By the third week, I began to make arrangements to join her. There was work I could do in France, I convinced my editor. I phoned and wired and by the next week indeed there was.

  As soon as I arrived in Paris, I hired a car and drove out to Morzine. It occurred to me as I covered the slow mountain kilometres that I would have been wiser to fly to Geneva, but that wouldn’t have fitted in so easily with work. By the time I arrived in the small mountain town, it was already dark. I congratulated myself on that. The day’s shooting would be over and Madeleine would be free. For me.

  I spotted Madeleine from outside. She was sitting in a window side seat of the hotel restaurant. I stared at her for a moment with a lump in my throat. I was certain she would turn and see me. I could feel her so palpably I couldn’t understand why she couldn’t feel me. I stood there stupidly waiting for her to look my way. But she was deep in conversation with her director and at last I gave up, made my way inside and forced myself, despite a second’s hesitation, to march right through to the restaurant.

  I murmured a hello and Madeleine looked up at me with momentary abstraction as if my features wouldn’t coalesce into a face she could recognise. When they did she stretched out her hand to me and squeezed my fingers. ‘Pierre,’ she breathed with a smile. ‘Give me five minutes.’

  It came to me then with a resounding thud that the time of separation had passed very differently for Madeleine than it had for me. She hadn’t actively missed me, hadn’t felt as if a limb had been wrenched from her body. All the hunger and tenderness of our love-making later that night couldn’t make up for that difference.