‘I nodded and for some reason I went to the piano and I started to play. A little Mozart sonatina, I think it was. And as I played, she began to move. She touched things. The tablecloth, the petal of a tulip, she cupped it in her hand. She brushed the sugar from a millefeuille and brought her fingertip to her mouth. It was as if she was coming to life. I played and played and watched her and felt a kind of wonder. Felt like I had never felt before in my life. When the hint of a smile touched her lips and eyes, I had the sense that it was the first real accomplishment of my life.
‘I stopped at last. I was aware that Olivier would soon be coming home. We still lived together then. And for some reason, I didn’t want him intruding on us. I guess I felt he would frighten her back into her shell. I asked her if she would like something to drink now. She looked at me a little dazed as if she had forgotten my presence, but she nodded. And after we sat down, she said to me that she used to play. Play the violin, before … and she stopped. I pressed her a little, very gently and she told me it was before her mother died. I asked her whether she would like to come back the next day and play with me. I had a violin in the house. I had once played it, too. And no one here would object to our making as much music as we wanted. She said that she might.
‘I left it at that. I had all the tea things wrapped and told her she could take them home. She might feel hungrier later. Then I took her back in the carriage and said I would come and fetch her the next day at about two. If she felt like coming, she could.’
Marguerite paused. There were tears in her eyes. ‘And that I guess was the beginning of our friendship. It’s late, Monsieur Norton. We must both get some sleep.’
James gazed at her, hesitating, loathe to leave. ‘She was your Galatea,’ he said softly.
She smiled. ‘Perhaps. In a way. I certainly helped her find her new name. But that was some years later. First, she came back to make music with me. I was astonished at her talent. I didn’t know of her father’s then. Gradually, slowly, over the months, the story of her mother came out. One day I asked her whether she had a dream, a dream of something she would really like to do and she told me that before her death, her mother had taken her to the theatre as a birthday present and what she wanted, more than anything, though she knew it was impossible, was to be like one of those women. To act. So I set out to help her.’
Suddenly she covered her face with her hands. Her words were a stifled moan. ‘I had no premonition that …’ She rose and started to pace.
‘I’m so sorry,’ James heard himself saying. ‘So very sorry. You … you behaved wonderfully.’
She said nothing. She was wrapped in her own thoughts. He got up slowly. ‘May I presume to put one more question to you?’
She turned to him, a little bewildered, her eyes veiled in a sadness which only accentuated her beauty.
He looked away, suddenly uneasy with his question.
‘Do go on.’
‘I simply wanted to know when and how those episodes Olympe suffered from, the ones you mentioned to Arnhem, played themselves out.’
‘Decidedly you are no sentimentalist, Monsieur Norton. No, no, do not take offence. It is precisely what we need if we are to get to the bottom of this. Rachel, I call her that because she was not Olympe then, undertook, if that is the right word, most of her somnambulistic walking in the darkest months, just after her mother’s death. She would leave the house for, say the market, and two days later wake up in a village on the outskirts of Paris, altogether unaware of how she had arrived there.
‘Once, she went as far afield as Lyons, where she was picked up by a policeman and after long interrogation luckily transported back to Paris rather than to prison. Her shoes apparently were completely worn out. She didn’t know whether she had slept in fields or auberges or taken trains or walked all the way. It is truly astonishing and fortunate that nothing terrible happened to her – a girl alone like that.
‘There was only one episode after I met her. As far as I know, the illness then never recurred. Professeur Ponsard saw her a few times – the doctor I have recommended to Elinor.’ She paused. ‘When I got to know Rachel, I understood her ambulatory automatism as an altogether reasonable, though unreasoning, attempt to escape the horror that family life had become. It was one of the things her new life, her new interests helped her to overcome.’
‘But when I was here, you asked Monsieur Arnhem whether it might have happened again?’
‘You are truly a lawyer, Monsieur Norton. Nothing escapes you.’
‘Do please call me James. The hour is a little late for Monsieurs.’
She smiled. ‘And you will call me Marguerite.’
‘So, Marguerite,’ James took a certain relish in pronouncing the name aloud. ‘You thought that Olympe might have gone walking. Why?’
She shrugged. ‘I always worried, perhaps superstitiously, that if anything happened to reawaken those terrible days in Olympe, she might resort to the same strategies of escape. That was why I mentioned it. She always had a horror of fires – even the crackle from behind a fireguard.’
‘Had anything terrible happened of late?’
‘Not that I know of. As I said to you, we weren’t all that close in recent months. She had her own life. A full one.’
He wanted to explore the reasons behind their growing apart, but she was already walking towards the door. ‘My coachman will ferry you to your hotel.’
‘That’s very kind of you.’
She raised an eyebrow. ‘Of him, you mean.’
‘Of both of you.’ He bowed. Before he could help himself, a final question had leapt from his lips. ‘How much does my brother know of all these aspects of Olympe’s life?’
She was impatient now. ‘I imagine he knows much of it. Judith is a special case. Perhaps Olympe never mentioned her because one can never estimate what impact a person will have on her. And Rafael would certainly have insisted on meeting her. But you must ask him. James,’ she added with a lilt and laughed.
James leaned back into the leather of seats and listened to the rhythmic trot of horses’ hoofs. There was so much new information to digest – about Olympe, her family, Chief Inspector Durand’s suspicions.
He gazed out on the deserted street. Suddenly, a figure appeared in the glow of a lamp. He was hurrying, rushing in the direction from which James had come. It was Raf. His head was bare, his jacket akimbo.
James watched him with a fretful, dawning realisation. Too late, he considered asking the driver to stop.
Here was one more matter to ponder amongst the many that had come his way in the course of this long, eventful evening.
But for a moment emotion trampled reason. He was again like the boy who had been kept from the bright room into which his brother could run at will.
PART TWO
TEN
Like a piece of cork with no will of its own, James felt himself picked up by the gathering human tide and forced along the boulevard in a direction that wasn’t his own.
The mounting flow had caught him unawares as he walked away from Ellie’s apartment. He had once more been fuming at Raf and wondering what on earth could have impelled his brother to squander his Sunday at the races when so much more pressing business called – when his sweetheart lay dead, his sister ill, his mother waiting for him to disentangle himself from the clutch of his Parisian affairs. Not to mention the fact that a senior police officer suspected him of a serious crime.
He had indeed begun to think that the whole tawdry nature of Raf’s life in Paris had tipped him over the edge if he really presumed – as his note had specified – that James would join him at a café behind the Arc de Triomphe, so that they could go cavorting off to Longchamps.
Anger had blinded him to the life around him. The streets had taken on a frenzied momentum of their own. With a single, massed will the crowd had propelled him in its chosen direction and landed him amidst the roar and squeeze of a Champs Elysées transformed.
All aro
und him now, the tricolor fluttered. Men in the soft hats and caps and blues of the people sprouted red flowers from their buttonholes. They shouted, cheered, screamed, ‘Vive Loubet.’ ‘Vive le Président.’ ‘Vive la République.’
Stretching to his full height to catch a glimpse of the street before him, James saw a procession of carriages moving in stately rhythm up the middle of the avenue towards the Arc de Triomphe. As an open landau approached his field of vision, the cheers rose to a frenzied pitch. ‘Loubet. Loubet. Vive Loubet,’ the crowd chanted in rhythmic unison.
James realised he was a mere matter of yards away from the President of the Republic. He found himself joining in, shouting, ‘Vive la République’. A grinning man thrust a red flower into his jacket pocket, raised his fist in a rousing salute. And then to his side, he heard a jeering chorus, ‘A bas Loubet, Down with Loubet.’ There was a scuffle, a flash of fisticuffs. The crowd heaved. A file of policemen broke through, pounced and the crowd closed round again, their cheers mounting into the clear blue canopy of the sky.
It was only after the procession had passed and the crowd had begun to disperse, that James engaged the man who had given him the flower in conversation and learned what he had already begun to suspect. The President and his entourage were on their way to the Longchamps Races. This determined act on the President’s part was a brave signal to the anti-Dreyfusistes that he would not be bullied, despite the previous week’s attack on him at the Auteuil racetrack. Workers from Belleville and Montmartre, socialists and assembled pro-Dreyfus republicans had gathered in their thousands to voice their support for him. The police, too, were in heavy evidence, ordered for once to use their power in support of the President.
‘You can bet your tricolor,’ his informant told James, ‘that no toffs are going to wield their sticks at the races today.’
As he wound his way slowly towards the river, James chastised himself for the reproaches he had mentally hurled at his brother. He ordered himself to remember from now on that Raf was neither a child nor even a rebellious, hot-headed adolescent, but a man with his fingers on the pulse of the city. Yes, a man who knew far more about life here than he did himself. He was no longer, James acknowledged ruefully, the only sensible brother.
He leaned against a stone balustrade and watched the waters of the river rushing past. An image of Olympe’s body tossed by the current snaked into his mind. He shivered despite the warmth. In the course of the night, the poor lost girl had grown in his mind into a poignant, mysterious creature, as if a master painter had taken a rough, amateur sketch and added rich tinges of colour and shadowy depths to her being, far more enigmatic than the shades of his tightrope walker. It made him mourn her disappearance as well as the fact that he had never met her.
He was not far from the point at which the houseboat was moored. He peered downriver towards the left bank and thought he could make out its shape. He considered going there and talking to its owner, but then decided against it. No, he would do what he had only half considered doing earlier. The passing notion had taken on substance with his realisation that he had calumnied Raf. He would go if only to prove to himself and to his absent brother that he, too, could be useful. Tomorrow, after all, he would have to be wholly at Ellie’s disposal.
James hailed a cab and as he named his destination saw a look of something like fear cross the coachman’s gnarled face. He tapped his pocket and jumped in before the man could refuse him.
*
The Salpêtrière was a vast, imposing structure at the eastern extremity of the city. Its façade stretched for some two city blocks. An impressive dome rose from the building’s midst like the stiff skirt of some deity of Olympian proportions whose head was lost in the clouds.
James’s cab deposited him in front of an arched entrance building and whipped away so rapidly that James was left with a sense of having been abandoned in a hostile clime. He squared his shoulders and looked around him. To the corner of the arch an attendant sprawled sleepily in a chair and basked in the sunlight, as if signalling that Sunday was a day of rest, even here. James approached him and asked for directions to Dr Vaillant’s wards. The man lifted an eyelid to give him a querulous look, then pointed in a desultory manner behind him.
Beyond the gates at the remove of a flat expanse of lawn striated by paths, the bulk of the building stretched. It offered three visible entry points. A woman on crutches was hopping along one of the gravelled paths and he hurried after her, but she refused his question and hobbled on as if she hadn’t seen him. A couple with downcast faces walked past without meeting his eye.
With a shrug he made his way to the central door. He pushed open its weight and followed the length of a dark draughty hall. He had a sinking feeling. Muffled sounds reached him from he didn’t know quite where. Before him there was an emptiness, devoid of signposts.
He prodded open a second door. A few steps and he was in a cavernous domed space. The light was blinding. It poured through high windows to streak the marble floor. As his eyes adjusted, he made out a series of pale, life-size statues clinging to a wall. Beyond them was an alcove. A smattering of women, all in black, knelt there, heads bowed. Above them, a starkly simple wooden cross floated on a white wall. All around him, he now saw, were the chapels of a large church. The one on his right was empty, but for a solemn pietà bowed under the weight of her larger son.
He proceeded on tiptoe. It struck him that this was one of the barest churches he had ever visited, as if some rigorous iconoclast had set fiercely to work to wipe out any of the excesses of idolatry. He remembered Marguerite’s words about Charcot’s scientific project, his desire to eradicate the notion of any links between demons and insanity. Faith seemed to have vanished in the same breath, leaving the mad to a desolate world as harsh as the one Darwin had bestowed on them all. Science might illuminate, but it was rarely kind.
James pushed aside wayward thoughts. He was putting off the moment, as if the strangely silent corridors, the sudden appearance of this vast domed space, had awoken an unanticipated fear of what he was about to confront. He plunged towards a rear door and found himself outside again, on a path which led to a courtyard. There were more buildings all around him now. These had none of the stateliness of the edifice which fronted the main street. They were run-down, dilapidated. The capped figures of women peered through the windows, their foreheads pressed to glass, their faces contorted.
He walked, saw groups of old, wrinkled matrons, their backs bowed as they sat in the sun. Their glazed, blank stares forbade approach. Beside a crone in a wheelchair, he located a panel listing names of what must be wards. Vaillant’s name didn’t figure.
It came to him, while he strayed, that the hospital was in fact a labyrinthine complex the size of a small town. He had a sudden bleak sense of a world gone awry, as if madness stalked the streets of civilisation only to pounce at ever shorter intervals, so that the confines of asylums swelled and gradually swallowed up the entire city.
At last after countless deviations, he saw a nurse making her way through a door. He raced after her only to find himself in a dispensary. A row of people queued at a counter, chatting desultorily. He was about to ask one of them the way when through an open door, he glimpsed a waxy figure – supine, deformed, dead. He jumped back and felt the colour drain from his face.
One of the nurses let out a shrill, cascading laugh. Her headdress shook, her cheeks jiggled. James wondered for a moment about her sanity.
‘It’s the museum. Go on. You can go in. Charcot’s museum. Everyone comes to see it.’
The words bore a challenge to his manhood. James strode through the door. The long, narrow room smelled strongly of some chemical. It bit at his eyes. Through their rawness, he forced himself to confront the dead body, a poor, misshapen corpse with splayed hands and bulging feet. Only after a moment did he realise that this particular body was made of wax and that its deformities signalled a precise neurological condition. But all around him were bits
of real bone and contorted joints displayed behind glass. Each had its medical description appended – locomotor ataxia, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Like names of exotic countries, the words required slow reading. They kept him from the skeletons which reclined on pallets or stood, somehow propped, their deformations clearly marked. There were brains, too, floating in some sulphurous liquid in large jars, and strange machines, little black boxes with wires protruding from them and numbered dials and magnets.
Photographs, prints and drawings lined one wall. Ancient, naked women leaned on sticks, knees swaying; men tottered on skewed feet, their backbones curved. There were also beautiful girls with wild eyes and seductive expressions who seemed to have little to do with this catalogue of neurological horrors. One, he noticed, had her back arched in the way Marguerite had mimed to him. He realised these must be the famous hysterics. Amongst them was a portrait of a man with a strong, solid face, his gaze direct. Jean-Martin Charcot, the label announced.
Charcot, James told himself, was a far stronger man than he was. Without a backward glance, he slipped from the room. He hoped the giggling nurse would have gone. But she was still there and he smiled his thanks with what he hoped wasn’t too livid a face and asked for Dr Vaillant’s service.
She directed him to the next building, telling him she was certain Vaillant wouldn’t be in on a brilliant Sunday. ‘He’ll be at the races,’ she declared with another smile.
‘Isn’t everyone?’ James managed a rueful laugh. ‘Do you by any chance know a patient called Judith Arnhem?’
She paused to consider. ‘The second-floor ward, if I remember. I haven’t worked there for a while.’
James considered himself to be a man endowed with a requisite if not extraordinary amount of both courage and good sense. For all that, he was utterly unprepared for the pandemonium of the long, cramped ward. He felt as if all his senses were under attack. The shrieks and calls and hoots of the women on the high ranked beds fell on his ears like the mangling claws of birds of prey. Their emaciated faces and contorted limbs, their rocking and crouching forms brought to mind one of the circles of hell painted by a visionary master. There was a smell too, a high pungent reek he didn’t recognise, but it made his stomach lurch painfully. It somersaulted as a woman leapt towards him and pawed at his jacket, her strange beaked face emitting a cascade of sound he couldn’t begin to make out. He would gladly have retraced his steps if at that moment a nurse hadn’t run to his side and with a sharp word at the creature, scowlingly confronted him and asked his business.
Paris Requiem Page 16
