Petite Mort

by Beatrice Hitchman

  My father, my father, don’t you hear

  What the Erlking is quietly promising me?

  Be calm, stay calm, my child;

  The wind is rustling through withered leaves.

  It is as if she draws all the light in the room towards her; the notes flowing out, an unceasing stream. The tenor leans forward, his face a gargoyle:

  I love you, your beautiful form entices me;

  And if you’re not willing, I shall use force.

  Suddenly, slowing and quiet. The horse stands still, high-stepping, eyes rolling back; a light goes on in the farmhouse ahead.

  In his arms, the child was dead.

  You can hear the servants clearing away glasses in a room beyond; the elderly woman’s fan is motionless before her face.

  The tenor gives a tense little bow. Terpsichore closes the piano lid, and everyone is on their feet, clapping.

  I expect her to get up from the stool to receive the applause, but instead she is pale and pinched. Just as I am starting to worry, she recovers herself, looks towards the audience, and smiles.

  A tired-looking young man stands and recites some of his poetry, which has been composed entirely without the use of the letter A; then a thin-voiced woman sings a bawdy boulevard song, hands clasped before her, and everyone murmurs that it’s charming: but it can’t equal what has gone before; the crowd are restless and thirsty, and soon people begin to slip away to continue the evening elsewhere. The Ex-Minister has snared another victim and is showing her a medal case fixed to the wall. I feel Terpsichore’s hand close on my elbow, and she jerks her head towards the door.

  Since the music I can barely look at her, so I nod. Aurélie comes across the room and enfolds her in her arms, resting her chin on her shoulder blade: ‘It was a fabulous rescue; if I were a poet I’d write you an ode,’ she says, and then steps towards me and says crisply: ‘We’ll see each other again.’

  I give a little curtsy. ‘I’ll look forward to it.’

  For a few minutes, driving along with the river oily and shining on our right, we say nothing.

  ‘I didn’t know you could play.’ My voice sounds odd even to my own ears; I hope the darkness in the car will disguise it.

  ‘What surprises you? That I can play, or that you didn’t know?’

  ‘That you could play like that, and that nobody knew.’

  ‘Lots of people play.’

  I stare out of the window. I want to say, But people should only have one great talent, not more. People shouldn’t be so—

  ‘Anyway,’ she says, ‘Aurélie is far more accomplished than I am. She was just being modest.’

  I have made a mean little sound before I can stop myself; she turns her head, and I can hear that she has caught it.

  It seems as if she may say something, when suddenly the statue of St Jeanne slides past, lit up from beneath; at its foot, a pair of tramps swing a bottle and sing to each other; one of them raises the bottle to us as we pass, and Terpsichore’s face opens into a smile. She leans forward and cranks the window down: ‘Vive la France!’

  ‘Vive la France!’ they reply, arms looped around each other’s necks, midnight friends for life.

  She settles back into the corner, against the swaying wall of the car. In the gloom there is just the lustre of her eyes, gleaming like an animal. I suspect, but cannot prove, that she is looking at me.

  The car rolls up outside the house; in the now-familiar routine, Hubert hops out and holds the door open for her first, then me.

  The hour being late, there is only one table lamp on in the hallway, turned low. When we reach the door, Thomas looms up in front of us, ready to receive our coats. We shrug them off and he hangs them up, and asks Terpsichore if she requires anything else.

  ‘No, thank you,’ she says, and he leaves us, his footsteps padding away down the hall.

  She waves towards the staircase. A faint silvery light shows us the swoop of the spiral and the landing up above. ‘After you, Adèle.’

  There are things to say, but what? I do a little spasm, forward and back at the same time; decide on forward, if it’s what she wants: ‘Thank you, Madame.’

  Her laugh, high and not quite right. ‘Now we’ve been to a party together, I think you should call me Luce.’ She pauses; the sound of the sea swells and booms in my ears. ‘I think it’s time, don’t you?’

  I turn back to her, wanting to offer her something but not knowing what.

  She leans in towards me and kisses my cheek. ‘Goodnight.’

  She pulls back slowly, keeping her eyes fixed on mine: the pupils large.

  I turn and flee up the stairs, taking them two at a time, not stopping till I reach the corridor outside my bedroom, where I pause for breath. On my face, the cool pressure of her lips, now fading, like the touch of a ghost.

  Caroline Durand, i.

  Two days after Auguste Durand died, Caroline Durand went to Thibodaux-Nouveau to be fitted for her mourning clothes.

  As he wound the black crêpe around her, the tailor pushed his pins firmly into her flesh. The pins did not hurt much but she was surprised: only two days, and already the gossip must have begun.

  As she stepped out of the tailor’s, she felt the townspeople watching from doorways without speaking.

  Caroline lifted her chin and turned in at the lawyer’s offices.

  ‘Mme Durand,’ – the attorney pressed her palm between both his – ‘so sad – but if you’ll follow me—’

  In the inner office, she sat motionless as the lawyer opened the envelope and drew out the précis of Auguste’s will.

  ‘M. Durand left his estate to your adopted son,’ he said. There was no way to disguise the bald truth of it; he passed an embarrassed hand over his forehead. But Caroline merely nodded – it was as she had expected – and got up to leave.

  ‘Wait,’ the lawyer said, ‘there is something else. A painting – a painting of you?’

  Caroline nodded.

  ‘Your husband specified that you be allowed to keep it.’

  Caroline nodded again.

  For three months she kept up appearances, writing letters, answering condolence cards, eating less, snuffing candles out earlier, letting the servants go one by one. Of André there came no news.

  One day, a gentleman caller came, professing himself an old friend of Auguste’s paying his respects. Caroline guessed the man was one of those itinerant collectors who went from town to town enquiring after the recent widows, but she let him in anyway. The man accepted tea and made polite conversation: and as he did so, his eyes roved over the teak and the mahogany furniture and settled on her portrait.

  He looked at it for a moment, then looked away, but too late: Caroline had seen his interest flick its tail.

  As he left he passed her his business card.

  Another month went by. One day Caroline looked in the mirror and saw the delicate point of her wrist emerging from the sleeve of her black dress.

  She wrote a letter. A day later the collector sent his apprentice, a scrawny youth whose hands shook as he worked, to wrap up the portrait, and a banker’s draft was made out. It was enough for a passage to Canada, where she could be anyone she chose.

  When the picture was packed and tied with string and carried out of the door Caroline went to her room and lay in the dark for several hours.

  The following day she caught the train north.

  She loaded her small valise onto the rack herself, sat slowly blinking in her seat. Outside, green turned into distant blue: mountains unrolled, whose tops she couldn’t even see, forests of trees that weren’t gummy-leaved or trailing. The gradually lowering temperature left goose pimples along her arm.

  Juliette and Adèle

  1967

  ‘The painting meant that much to her? That she’d starve herself to keep it?’

  Adèle leans forward. ‘But it wasn’t just a portrait.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘It was herself, at her best, in
a time where everything seemed possible.’

  Her eyes sparkle. She says: ‘Oh yes, Juliette. An object can be a soul.’

  Luce and André, i.

  A gallery opening in Montmartre, six years later. The low-ceilinged room is crammed with the rich and the modish, making it difficult to see the pictures on display: but nobody is there for that. The artists huddle resentfully in the corners, smoking; and in another corner, with a private table and a private bottle of champagne, two young women sit, their heads bent close in conversation.

  Aurélie has brought Luce to the opening to cheer her up. Success has come at the price of exhaustion; a matinée and an evening show to perform every day for the past three months, leaving Luce wan and on the verge of tears, questioning her career. ‘I can’t remember the lines,’ she will say, distraught in front of the mirror, and Aurélie, never at a loss, has a constant stream of events up her sleeve – shows, galleries, intimate parties – with which to distract her friend.

  While Aurélie gets up to fetch more champagne, Luce leans forward in her seat, looking at the room. Without thinking about it, she finds herself studying one picture that is already attracting quite a bit of attention amongst the gallery-goers. Luce feels singled out by the woman subject’s gaze, which seems to be directed at her.

  It takes her a while to get across the gallery floor, ignoring the curious stares, but eventually she stands directly in front of the picture. The brass plate says Unknown Woman in Louisiana, and there is a guide price for the following day’s auction, hanging on a little paper tag.

  Luce notices the woman’s expression: covetous, confident to the point of arrogance, but unfulfilled. There is something missing from the subject, she is certain, and she is so busy wondering what it might be that she does not notice a young man with dark hair cut in a fashionable style entering the gallery, turning the heads of the artists, who know a born model when they see one. He appears to know a few people, but not to want to talk. Then, abruptly, he stops in his tracks, cranes his neck, and heads for the same painting as Luce. The way he elbows his way through the crowd is barely polite. Art lovers edge away from him; a woman whispers to her neighbour that the strange young man looks on the verge of some kind of fit.

  André reaches the portrait, and stands next to Luce without appearing to see her, though she notices him; his mouth has opened and his face is grey; he manages to stand for a moment, then teeters.

  It is the first time Luce, never a sportswoman, has ever caught anything. To her astonishment the young man is not heavy: his lungs and upper body seem to be made of nothing but the air they hold, and she supports him easily on her forearms, her weight thrown forward over him.

  But the pose is too painterly, too perfect, to last, and even as the room’s artists are admiring the late romanticism of the tableau, Luce begins to shake. They hold onto each other for dear life, but the collapse is statuesque.

  Aurélie comes forward from the back of the room, the stems of two champagne flutes clutched in one hand.

  André and Luce bought the painting of Caroline Durand together that very same evening, as soon as André had come round from his faint. They paid half the money that was expected for the portrait – each haggling with all their charm, breaking down the alarmed dealer’s resistance – then split the price, paying half each, and signed their names next to each other. They left together, with their first joint purchase held awkwardly between them.

  STAGE SIREN ABSCONDS WITH EFFECTS WIZARD: it was all over Paris within the week. Debutantes wept and mothers cursed at André’s unexpected removal from the market.

  Luce’s Aunt Berthe returned home that same evening to a venomous little note about the catastrophe from her closest friend. Rushing upstairs, she verified that Luce’s room was indeed empty, and covered her powdered face with her hands.

  Towards dawn, Berthe lay staring up at the corniced ceiling of her bedroom; water hissed and boiled overhead, circulating around the pipes of her apartment, and she clenched her fists and boiled too; inside her hair-net, each strand had transformed into an individual snake. There was nothing for it: she rose early and summoned the carriage.

  She was forced to admit that the Bois de Boulogne neighbourhood was better than expected. This Durand must have some money. The carriage turned up a long drive and swept to a halt in the turning circle outside the front door. Nevertheless, Berthe tossed her head as she alighted from the carriage, and reached up to knock on the door.

  Thirty seconds passed – then a minute. Where were the servants? Berthe had never been ignored on a doorstep before. Then the door opened, and André stood there.

  ‘Yes?’ he said.

  Berthe was fascinated. The man was in his nightshirt.

  ‘I am Berthe de Jumièges,’ she told him in her woman-about-town voice, and smiled. Usually the name was enough.

  André shook his head, smiled and shrugged.

  The voice had been designed to reassure: We are people of the world together, it said unctuously, if there is an arrangement, we will be sure to arrive at it, you and I. Now Berthe felt her courage failing; the nightshirt’s edge twitched in the breeze. What she had come to tell him seemed far away and improbable now, but she steeled herself and said it anyway: ‘Her aunt. I’ve come to take her home.’

  André shrugged again, and smiled.

  ‘I don’t think she wants to go,’ he said.

  A burst of laughter, far back in the shadows of the hallway; and Berthe, peering, saw Luce sitting on the bottom step of the stairs, wrapped only in a sheet.

  Berthe tried one final line. ‘Her father is unwell. I have done my best to keep the newspapers out of his reach but there are limits to what I can do, and if he finds out, the scandal will be the death of him.’

  André’s expression cooled. ‘It comes to us all in the end.’

  Berthe gathered herself. ‘Then I think, I know, I can speak for the family, I can honestly say we wash our hands of her.’

  Luce’s stare said: You did that a long time ago.

  25. juillet 1913

  THE MORNING AFTER THE SOIRÉE, my eyes snap open, recalling what happened. What did happen? We went out for the evening. That’s all.

  The red dress is hanging on the back of the door, where I tore it off last night: I take it to the cupboard and push it behind the other dresses, so that it can’t be seen when I open the door. I get dressed quickly, but go downstairs slowly. I will make some breezy remark: Quite an evening last night! Does your head ache like mine?

  But when I get to the study, she is sitting at her desk again, holding a letter up to the light. Her fingers are glowing red where the morning sun shines through them, and what I had planned to say, I forget.

  She jumps when she sees me and her hand flies to her hair: ‘Adèle!’ and for a too long, appalling moment I think she is going to say, About last night… but she doesn’t; she looks away quickly, back at the letter.

  ‘Feuillade wants to see me,’ she says. ‘It seems he has something in mind for me, and wants me to visit him this morning and read a piece of my choosing.’

  She folds the letter thoughtfully; then darts a quick glance and a small smile at me. ‘Good news, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, and then: ‘I could come with you.’

  She looks at me for a moment; her hand goes to the back of her neck. ‘Oh no, you stay here in the cool. I’ll be back before you know it.’ She looks around the room hurriedly, and her gaze falls on a stack of correspondence by the sofa. ‘Could you send the money to the manicurist? And sort out the order for my hats?’

  Then she gets up and begins to bustle, looking for the things she will take with her to the audition, her back turned.

  I watch her go from the study window, the top of her head bobbing. Hubert smiles as he holds the car door open. The angle lets me see her sitting in the cab, grey behind the glass, her hands folded in her lap.

  She will be going up the steps to Feuillade’s office, she will be sit
ting, he will be steepling his fingers and earnestly outlining the proposal; she will be nodding and smiling, a real smile, like the one last night, over her shoulder, as Aurélie dragged her away.

  I close my eyes, tired – last night the Erlking galloped white-faced through my dreams – and when I open them, the sun in the room is so strong that it dazzles me; in the shaft of light and the flutter of the drapes I imagine Agathe standing there.

  She smirks: One would say certain things.

  Nonsense.

  You have the signs.

  It’s nothing.

  So last night?

  What about last night? It was a soirée between friends.

  Agathe studies her bitten nails. Friends. The curtain twitches in the hot breeze and she is gone.

  The clatter of the front door, and excited laughter; feet on the stairs and she walks into the room, with Thomas carrying her coat. ‘Imagine!’ she says, ‘he has engaged me as a highway-woman in a big film called Dick Turpin! And the best thing, the best thing is that if it’s successful, I am to tour America with it!’

  She looks at me, flushed and beaming. ‘America!’ she says.

  I am thinking of her far away in a city of electric light. ‘Wouldn’t you have to speak English?’ I have said before I can stop myself.

  Her face closes. ‘They will use an interpreter,’ she says. ‘Feuillade said it won’t matter.’

  She moves to the desk in the window and rearranges the corners of the stack of read scripts. She has her back to me.

  ‘What about M. Durand?’

  She waves a hand. ‘It might be best to keep it under our hat until the contract is signed.’

  The booming silence is back between us.

  ‘It’ll be our secret,’ she says. Then, when I don’t say anything, she blushes. ‘Why don’t you take the car? Go into the city for the afternoon.’

  ‘If you want,’ I say.

  She doesn’t look at me. She has turned away again, back to the desk.

  All that week, I presented myself to her in the study, only to find her hand on the nape of her neck; she was distracted, absorbed in paperwork. ‘You could visit the Jardin des Plantes, and see the leopard,’ she would say, with a smile that seemed wide and flat, like a painting, while she fussed with her hair; or ‘You could fetch my novels from the shop in rue des Ecoles.’