The Bugatti Queen

by Miranda Seymour

  2000

  0.101

  THE POSTMASTER’S DAUGHTER

  1

  BEGINNINGS

  ‘In my end is my beginning.’

  MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS (ALLEGEDLY)

  Nice, winter 1975

  She had kept the gloves because they reminded her of the way in which one of her most charming lovers, Philippe de Rothschild, had introduced himself to her. She had been sitting at a café table in Paris, chatting to a friend, when she first noticed that a man, strongly built, well-dressed, bronze-faced, had stopped as he walked past. He hadn’t moved for about a minute. He was looking directly at her. She wondered if he was after an autograph; he didn’t look like a journalist. Good eyes; nice mouth. She gave a wide bold smile and watched him come towards the table. He spoke her name, asked how long she had been back from her American tour, indicating familiarity with her career. She said she seemed to know his face too, and burst out laughing when he identified himself. A racer himself, and of Bugattis: no wonder that he had such a familiar look. She introduced her friend, a girl she had met when they were both dancers at the Casino, and gave her a quick significant glance. Diana took the hint, remembered an appointment, smiled at them both and moved out of the yellow shade of the awning into the hard afternoon light of the Champs-Elysées. That was when Philippe de Rothschild lifted her left hand from the table and, correctly, identified the name of her glovemaker. Turning her hand over, he undid the four tiny pearl buttons which held the moulded kid tight against her wrist, smooth on her flesh as a second skin. Her bare arms were sunburnt; here, at the pulse point, the skin was white as a baby’s. Smiling, he lifted her hand to his mouth and, looking into her eyes, touched the tiny area of revealed skin with his mouth and, very lightly, the tip of his tongue. It was the most delicate of gestures. She knew at once that the experience of being made love to by this man would give her pleasure.

  Sitting on the edge of her bed at four in the morning, she lifted the gloves to her face, as if to bring back some scent of the past. Nothing remained but the softness of the kid. As for Philippe de Rothschild, she didn’t even know whether he was alive or dead. Sighing, she stretched out her toes, feeling for her slippers before she knelt to pull the precious trunk from its hiding-place – she trusted nobody – beneath the iron bed-frame. Wincing at the effort, she levered back the heavy lid.

  There they were, her hoard of treasures, the tarnished racing cups, the silver commemorative plate from Brazil, the book of stamps collected from her travels: all were safe. She lifted the plate aside to reach the sheaves of yellow cuttings. Two envelopes of photographs and a handful of letters were taken out, ready for the day’s work.

  Sitting at the table under the window, she laid them carefully out. A cat mewed in the darkness and her head jerked up eagerly before she remembered that Minette, her companion over ten years, had been banished from this, the most desolate of her homes, by a landlord who refused to have pets on the premises. True, he had offered a bottle of champagne in consolation when he saw her distress, but you couldn’t stroke a bottle or talk to it, or please it with a scrap of fish. Beggars couldn’t lay down the law; given the choice between the cat and the room, she let Minette find a new home with the tobacconist at the end of the street. Now, the little minx didn’t so much as open her eyes when she hobbled in to buy the week’s supply of cigarettes. Faithless, in the end, as all the rest had proved to be.

  Brushing a skin of glue over the back of the tiny black and white photographs, with their images of better times, she began the daily task of sticking them to the pages of the scrapbooks, building up a record of the past, drumming her heels on the floorboards as she tried to remember a date for each one. It was a young interviewer from Monte Carlo Radio who had given her the idea when he came – five years ago? six? – to ask about the great day in 1929 when she drove a Bugatti at the Montlhéry circuit near Paris and beat the world record. He was a nice boy, and a good listener. She had enjoyed talking to him, but she couldn’t make him understand the joy of driving that car. He ought to drive one himself, she told him; that was the only way to do it. She showed him her trophy cups, watched his eyes widen in respect. He hadn’t, he said, realized how much she had achieved. Before he left, he urged her to try to put together a record of her career.

  It was something to do, to fill the long night hours when sleep refused to come. (The years when she slept as soundly as a child had ended for good in 1936, when a crash had nearly robbed her of more than the comfort of peaceful nights.) Now, the scrapbooks had become her solace, taking her back to another life. Another person, she sometimes thought, looking down at a news item about her American tour of 1930 which proclaimed the first-ever appearance of a woman racing-driver on the most dangerous board track in New Jersey, where she was expected to set a new speed record.

  The landlord was too mean to provide her with more than a single-bar heater for the two rooms she occupied at the top of the house. Shivering, she dragged a blanket off the bed and wrapped it tightly around her as she sat down again at the table. The photograph before her now was yellow, the images faint with age. A lace-smothered baby perched on the lap of a countrywoman wearing a long, heavy skirt and wooden sabots. ‘Mother and I, 1902, at Sainte-Mesme,’ she wrote on the back; no, that couldn’t be right. In 1902, they had been living at Aunay-sous-Auneau, outside Chartres. Was this a photograph of herself, or of Solange, her sister? That was the trouble with babies: swathed in bonnets and shawls, they all looked alike. It could very well be Solange, in which case the photograph was going back in the trunk. Where it would stay. Her family were going to have no place in her record of triumph.

  Boissy-le-Sec, 1898

  Boissy-le-Sec was a dead end of a village between Paris and Chartres, buried in the cornfields that stretched from one horizon to another. The women and their daughters wound the water up with an iron wheel that took four hands to turn it, from a well so deep that you could drop stones all day and never hear a sound come back. Léon Delangle and his wife blamed the icy water of Boissy for the deaths of their oldest boy, Maurice, who died there in 1897, aged only three, and the youngest, Gabriel, whom they buried in the same summer. Lucien, the middle child, cursed with long pale cheeks and a croupy cough, survived. Alexandrine Delangle was expecting again when a welcome offer came to leave the village.

  Léon Aristide Delangle was a postmaster, a government appointment which gave him a thousand francs a year (see conversion table on page xviii) and a roof over his head, and which licensed him to look down on his blacksmith cousin at Boissy. They had both married Alexandrines; it was all they or their wives had in common.

  Alexandrine Estelle Bouillie was a gaunt girl of nineteen when she married the thirty-year-old postmaster. Her own family were of simple origins and Alexandrine was intensely aware of her new and superior standing; it pleased her that Léon and she shared a big fourposter bed while his cousin the blacksmith’s wife lay in a humble tester. It was also gratifying to know that her husband and she had the only telephone in the village.* As the facteur-receveur, Léon Delangle was the local banker; sacks of coins were placed in his care. He was an educated man, able to read and write without difficulty; Alexandrine drew further satisfaction from the knowledge that the Boissy schoolmaster, who had never shared a table with the blacksmith’s family, had been to dinner with her husband and herself twice during their first year in the village.

  The postmaster Delangles made annual voyages to the coast, alternating between Deauville and Dieppe. They had been to Paris, twice, and had stayed in hotels. The blacksmith Delangles took pride in the fact that they never travelled beyond Rambouillet, once the forest of kings, lying on the northern edge of the great Beauce plain. Here, the green woods rustled with the wings of chaffinches, nightingales, turtle doves and larks. With a smithy full of guns to use on Rambouillet’s wildlife, there seemed no point in travelling twice as far to catch cold on an Atlantic beach. The postmaster was, in the opinion of his cousins, a
ltogether too ambitious in his ways. Boissy had always been good enough for them. A man came to no harm by knowing the landmarks of his own horizon.

  Never comfortable together, the two branches of the family separated easily as oil from water when the postmaster received offer of a transfer to nearby Aunay-sous-Auneau in June 1898. Alexandrine, while pleased by the opportunity to escape from her husband’s cousins, and a village she now associated with death, was anxious about moving at a time when their new baby girl was shedding weight at alarming speed. But word came down from the great Gothic headquarters of the postal service in Chartres that the process must not be delayed; they could take their chance now, or stay. So the house at Boissy was stripped of its modest furnishings. Kitchenware, chairs, bed, linen, a wooden chest and three down-stuffed quilts were roped on to the carrier’s cart and trundled away on the long white ribbon of track to Plessis, Garancières and Aunay. The family did not look back and their cousins did not come out of the smithy to wave them off.

  Aunay-sous-Auneau, named for the alder trees which are no longer in evidence on its river banks, was larger than Boissy and, having at least two big fêtes every summer, a little livelier. It was, nevertheless, another one-street village locked in by the golden carpets of the cornfields around which its existence revolved. Here, too, the landscape was enormous and featureless: size is the only claim the Beauce has ever made to a character. Clambering down from the cart as it halted on the road above the village, Alexandrine Delangle ignored the old church of Saint-Eloi and trained her eyes on the distance, searching the broad yellow ring of the horizon. Beyond it, out of view, loomed the grey spires of Chartres. Overhead, the sky stretched in cloudless calm, blank as the fields beneath.

  Their new home, squat and tiled in slate, stood opposite the smart new town hall and school which, ranged together, dwarfed it. Beyond, standing on the road to Chartres, defended by a high and rose-spattered wall and looking down an avenue of chestnuts, a recently embellished chateau lent an air of grandeur to the village. The owner, Dr Poupon, was more admired for his ownership of a touring car which lived in the chateau stables between a dogcart and a secretive closed sedan, home, in Aunay legends, to every star-crossed relationship the village had ever been sufficiently aware of to prattle about. The car was the village’s equivalent to a royal carriage. Every spring, the machine was ceremoniously unshrouded from dustsheets and towed into the light by two burly cart-horses belonging to Charles Foiret, principal landholder in the village. Dr Poupon, taking his role seriously, wore goggles, cap, gauntlets and a yellow coat which served to keep off both rain and the clouds of dust which rose from the Beauce’s unsurfaced roads. His groom, relishing the elevation to mechanic and chauffeur, wore a smart cap which hinted at a military background.

  Dr Poupon had recently been elected as the mayor of Aunay, giving him responsibility for the welfare of almost a thousand residents, most of whom were of farming stock. Conscious of ceremony, he was waiting outside the single-storey block of the little Maison des Postes et Télégraphes – the sign had just been repainted – when the Delangles arrived on the carrier’s cart. It was Dr Poupon who unlocked the door and led them hastily through a damp little office into what was, if he might express a view, an unusually comfortable and pleasant bedroom. (Enthusiasm was required: the initial candidate had rejected the job on the grounds that the house was unsatisfactory.) The view from the back of the house was, the mayor indicated with a flourish at a window which looked straight into the side of a thornbush, admirably private. The floors – he thumped his heel – were sound. A new Thierry stove had been installed for their benefit.

  The mayor paused, allowing this generous gesture to be appreciated before he delivered the one indisputable disappointment. No authority had been obtained for the provision of a bicycle to the new official and attempts to secure the services of a deputy postman had not proved successful. Deliveries must, nevertheless, be carried out to homes over a five-mile radius. And there, discomforted by the silence of the Delangles, Dr Poupon decided to bring his welcome to an end. They would, he said as he turned to the door, enjoy living at Aunay. The schoolmaster, Chopiteau, was a delightful man; Foiret, the principal farmer, was a good chap, always ready to help out with one of his carts if they were planning a trip to Chartres. He left before Madame Delangle, registering from his title that this small and strutting man was a doctor, could seek advice about the sickly baby girl who lay in her arms.

  Lucienne Delangle, aged four months, was buried two months later. At the end of August, with a mixture of gratitude and dread, Alexandrine Delangle found herself pregnant once more.

  Her luck had turned; no more Delangles would join the row of doll-sized graves at the back of the cemetery. Solange Andrée was born late in the spring of 1899, almost a year after their arrival at Aunay. On 15 December 1900 Alexandrine went into labour once again in the family bed.

  They named her Mariette Hélène. M. Julien the baker and Charles Foiret, the elderly farmer who had been commended by the mayor, were witnesses to the entry of her birth in the town hall register. Dr Poupon, who had been distressed by the Delangles’ loss of a baby girl so soon after their arrival at Aunay, volunteered himself as a godfather. He even produced a tiny ivory crucifix which had belonged to his mother, offering it as a baptism gift. The christening itself was modest, not followed by the usual supper and dance; misfortunes had made the parents superstitious. Drawing attention to their remaining children seemed imprudent; the less fuss, the better.

  Fretting over their growing family, the Delangles paid little attention to themselves. Several people in the village commented on the fact that the postmaster always looked in need of a proper meal. He was a good-looking man with lustrous eyes and a bold white smile. At Boissy, his cousins had made jokes about the postmaster’s appetite which played on the affectionate glances he always drew from women. It angered Alexandrine to see him coming back from his rounds at Aunay with pockets full of fresh bread, pieces of cheese and even, on occasion, with a brace of birds or a hare weighing down the mailbag. Didn’t the farmers’ wives know that he got fed at home?

  Weight continued to fall off the postmaster until his handsomeness became that of a starved Christ. His approach could be heard half a street away by a deep rattling cough; his stride became a painful hobble; neither Poupon nor the doctor who reluctantly came out from Chartres on two occasions could think of anything more useful to prescribe than warm poultices and dandelion tea, brewed with mallow root. Neither poultices nor tisanes produced an improvement: Léon Delangle was only thirty-nine in 1901, but he stooped and trembled like a man of twice his age. When discreet queries were made about his ability to continue work, his wife, fearing that a replacement might be suggested, offered to act as his deputy.

  As an old woman, shivering in her attic on rue Edouard Scoffier in Nice, Mariette Hélène Delangle thought back to her first memory of her mother. She saw her by the dim glow of an oil lamp, bending to fold sheets of paper into her clogs and another under a close-fitting wool bonnet before she picked up the heavy mailbag, lit the wick in her lantern and went out into the freezing damp of a winter morning before dawn. The slap of wooden shoes trod away, echoing, down the silent street. A clock ticked. Above the high side of the rocker where she and Solange had lain, mummified in their separate quilts, she remembered the rattle of breath which came steadily down, hollow as pebbles in a glass jar, from their parents’ bed. She could not remember a time without that noise, familiar and lacking in sinister content as the crowing of roosters. It was, quite simply, the sound of morning.

  2

  1903: THE RACE TO DEATH

  What about racing?

  Oh, that will go. Already it has gone. It was necessary in

  the past for the testing of cars whose capabilities were

  quite unknown.

  THE HON C.S. ROLLS, INTERVIEWED BY THE MANCHESTER GUARDIAN, 26 FEBRUARY 1907

  She was three years old. In Paris, over two thousand
people now owned cars; in Aunay, it is unlikely that anybody had heard of the 30 kph restriction which had been imposed on country lanes to protect the safety of cattle and their keepers. Life here proceeded at the tranquil pace of the carriage in which Madame Foiret the farmer’s wife travelled to Chartres once a year, to honour the shrine of the Black Virgin.

  Bicycles had become a part of daily life. Girls a few years older than Hélène raced their Petites Reines up and down the village street; Madame Delangle had a tall La Grande Star on which to take round the morning post, while her husband, racked by the coughs from which no relief came, watched over Henri Louis, the baby who had most recently taken possession of the battered wooden rocker. Lucien, grown into a tall, stringy boy of eight, attended the new village school beside the town hall, where his two sisters, when old enough to wear button-up boots, would be introduced to dressmaking, drawing, and the rivers, flowers and departments of France. The world beyond was only glimpsed in the foreign stamps which sometimes proclaimed the continuing existence of a runaway from Aunay’s smothering tranquillity.

  In 1903, Hélène was taken across the road by her mother, to join her older sister for the afternoon ‘movement’ class, her first experience of dancing. Drab as mailsacks in their serge smocks and black aprons, the little girls raised their arms in obedience to the teacher’s call, fingers fluttering as they tried to imitate trees in springtime. Heads back and shoulders braced, they skipped around the yard. Hélène, jumping and waving as she grinned at the teacher, was praised for her enthusiasm. ‘My sister Solange was jealous of me, even then,’ Hélène wrote proudly seventy years later. ‘She was eighteen months older, but I did everything – everything! – better, from the first day I went to school.’1