She is standing there, looking out: just her silhouette, the slender, dizzying height of her. She’s further away from me than she has been before: and I know – seem to have known for a long time – what I have to do to bring her back.
It will be easier to say it like this, with her facing away.
‘There’s something I have to tell you,’ I say. ‘About your husband.’
It feels like a failure; an abomination. There is a humming in my ears.
The clock on the mantelpiece ticks away another second, and another.
She turns to face me. Pale and tall. ‘It doesn’t matter. Does it?’
I stand rigid where I am.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she says again.
She walks across the room, slowly and deliberately and stands in front of me; centimetres away. Close enough to see her chest rise and fall in the half-light.
She puts her fingertips to my face and says my name.
Dawn: bruised light. Book spines, arranged on the mantel, came gradually clear; she lay on her side away from me, with her arm flung out.
As I watched her, she opened her eyes – sharply, as if she wasn’t sure who she expected to see – and turning, reached for me.
When the first household noises began, we tiptoed up the stairs, her little finger laced in mine, without speaking.
She walked me up to the third floor landing, and there we stopped and looked at each other.
‘I can make sure André doesn’t come to your room any more,’ she says. ‘If that’s what you want.’
‘It’s what I want,’ I say.
Under her eyes, the shadows were violet. Standing there, she kissed me for a long time, until we heard the servants’ voices, very faint, downstairs.
16. août 1913
I SLEPT FOR A FEW HOURS. At half past ten I heard André’s cheerful shout hello, and then his footsteps going up to his study; and then nothing, just a long silence and the breeze in the trees.
At half past one I got up and went to her salon. She was sitting upright on the sofa, straight-backed, reading.
Her face softened.
Thomas’s footsteps, up and down the corridor.
She bent back over her novel; a high red spot on either cheekbone.
For distraction, I crossed to sit at the desk, arranged myself, picked up a letter. I have never met you but I love you, wrote a man from Normandy.
At four o’clock I went to my room. There was nothing to do but wait. I looked out of the window, at the high, white, unreal sky, and wondered how she would dissuade him. What she could be planning, and if it could work. We’d fallen out, André and I, but I was still living in his house: there for the taking.
I went down for dinner at eight. He was there, lounging in his seat, tanned from his trip, but otherwise the same. Looking at him, I wondered how I had ever mistaken his silken waistcoats for sincerity.
He looked up at me, a quick glance under his eyelids. ‘You look well.’
‘Do I?’
‘Very.’ He reached casually for bread. I folded my hands in my lap and stared at them. She hadn’t said anything yet, or the plan hadn’t worked.
Luce said: ‘So your trip—’
André tipped his chair back and laced his fingers behind his head, all his teeth on show. ‘You should have seen his workshop. He has an automaton so realistic it could be sitting where Adèle is right now. She could be the automaton.’
‘I think we’d recognise the real one.’
André lifted his wine glass and swirled it. Then he asked: ‘Anything exciting happen while I was gone?’
Luce took a sip of wine – the muscles of her throat moved as she swallowed – and shook her head.
At the end of the meal, André sat swilling the dregs in his glass, staring at the wall; she was perfectly composed, opposite him. Eventually she turned her gaze on me.
‘Goodnight,’ I said, getting to my feet.
As I left the room, she rose too. For a delirious moment I thought she was coming after me. But she followed me to the door and put her hand on the handle.
I stood in the hall, staring back at her.
‘Goodnight,’ she said. On her face was a fierce look I had not seen before. She pulled the door closed.
I went upstairs to my room and sat in my nightgown, propped up against the pillows, to wait.
I thought about the last time with André. I could hardly remember it: I just had the impression of conserved energies, and no noise, as if noise were an expense he didn’t want with me.
After a while I heard the dining-room door open and close.
Her softer steps and his quicker ones going up the stairs: no voices.
I heard him walk up the second flight, clearing his throat. A pause, and his footsteps kept on coming, up the last flight of stairs to my floor.
I pulled my knees up to my chin and shut my eyes; then I reached for the stem of the lamp beside my bed. I lifted it an inch, to test its weight.
The footsteps had stopped; I breathed, and listened harder.
There was a creak of floorboards just outside my door. He was shifting his weight onto his other leg.
We waited, on either side of the door, in silence, for more than a minute.
Abruptly, there was a squeak as he spun on his heel – and then his footsteps jogging back down the stairs.
I waited half an hour, letting the sweat on my body cool, then slipped out of my room and stole down the stairs.
At his floor I paused, but of course there was nobody there.
I continued to Luce’s floor. Stood for a moment outside her room; brushed the door with my knuckles.
There was no answer. I pushed it open.
The shutters were faint silvery outlines. I couldn’t hear breathing, so she was not asleep; and sure enough, after a few seconds, her shape came clear. She was sitting up in bed.
I walked to the bed. Still no sound.
I climbed onto the bed, knelt over her and kissed her.
Her lips were cold under mine; barely moving.
She let me push back the covers. Her nakedness: a white slender body. The nipples dark circles. I reached out for one—
She held my head in place, and put her hands in my hair.
She pulled my nightgown over my head. The air in the room was summery warm, a gentle draught from somewhere.
As I was bending to kiss her again, she put a hand up to stop me; ran a finger down my jaw. The fingernail dug in.
She pushed me gently onto the bed and rolled towards me; put her hands on my thighs and spread them wide apart.
Looking at her expression, I understood that there was a price, after all.
‘He wasn’t even—’ I tried to tell her. ‘He never even—’
She covered my mouth with her hand; then, without checking whether I was ready, she pushed four fingers into me.
‘Am I anything like him?’
It hurt: a good pain, but shocking.
‘Did he do this? Or this?’
Each movement a separate sound from my mouth. Her eyes, half-shut, watching me.
I took her hand away from my mouth, rolled over and straddled her; took her wrist and pushed her further into me. Bent down and kissed her; told her that if this was how the account would be settled, I’d pay.
Much later, I woke to find her still asleep. Pale light was just beginning to show in the cracks of the shutters.
She slept with one arm curved above her head, protective. I watched her for a long time, then put my hand on her stomach.
Her eyes flew open. She stared at the ceiling; then at me.
‘What did you say to him?’ I asked. ‘To stop him?’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said.
I went on watching her. Her nostrils flared.
She said: ‘He won’t come to your room any more. Isn’t that enough?’
She closed her eyes again. Her hand came crabbing over the coverlet and seized mine convulsively: gripping
my fingers so tightly they turned red, then white, changing position every thirty seconds or so, finding a new hold.
22. août 1913
IN THE SALON, DURING THE DAY, we did everything we could not to meet each other’s eyes.
Sometimes we caught each other out. She straightened her back, arching her neck to release the tension from reading, rubbing the nape with one palm, and in the course of looking at the ceiling, her eyes wandered to mine.
On those occasions time slowed and stopped. Her hand stayed where it was; a smile hovered on her face; the hand rubbed gently, ruefully over her neck, forward and back. The moment would lengthen out until one of the many sounds that made us jump, made us jump: a clatter of pots and pans from the kitchen, or Thomas’s step on the stair.
At supper, the sharp pain of watching her speaking to André. In the first days after his return, he had seemed quiet, almost wary of her. But night by night he became more boisterous: drinking more wine than before, making tasteless jokes, watching her with a flushed attention that I could not look at. And at the other end of the table, she laughed where appropriate, exchanging gossip: only a little pallor to show anything was wrong at all. And when he wasn’t looking, she would glance at me, warning me to smile, laugh and make conversation: to pretend.
At night, I’d undress for her: a slow tease, the garments falling one by one. She’d lie propped on one elbow, smiling crookedly; and when I was naked, she’d look at me. From ankles to eyelashes. ‘You’re beautiful,’ she’d say. ‘Come here.’
Juliette and Adèle
1967
The last of the lunchtime crowd is dissipating; bars of dusty sunlight across our table.
I say: ‘Didn’t you worry about being discovered?’
Adèle smiles. ‘Of course. But then again, not.’
Her fingers hover in front of her mouth: ‘I had this fantasy: being caught out. The five short minutes to get dressed; the servants lining the hall. André ejecting us from the house. Our suitcases being flung down the steps behind us. To be alone with her on the drive, with all her ghosts streaming out ahead of us, evaporating on the morning air.’
25. août 1913
IN BED, SHE MADE ME WAIT, trailing a fingertip over me till I almost cried; she turned me into someone I wasn’t: I barely recognised the sounds from my own mouth.
But when I tried to return the favour, most often, she’d smile, and shift me gently onto the bed beside her, and turn away from me, onto her other side.
One day, we took a picnic to the Bois de Boulogne.
Hubert dropped us on the side of the main road through to Paris; leaning into the cab, she arranged to have him pick us up at five. She carried the picnic hamper and I took a blanket, and we walked away from the path towards where the trees grew a little thicker. It was a fine afternoon: the leaves and grass buzzed with activity, but as it was a week-day, other visitors were few and far between. We picked our way between the patches of tufty grass and the tree roots, and finally found a spot where there was just one other couple visible in the distance.
We ate in reflective silence, and cleared the plates away into the basket; then she piled her coat behind her head and lay down, shading her eyes with her hand.
I watched her, found myself smiling.
‘What?’ she said, laughing.
‘Nothing,’ I said. I’d been thinking how I’d come to the house hoping to take her place. But now there was no longer anything outside her or around her – no films, no future.
She squinted up at me under her fingers, still smiling.
‘I’d swear you’re taller,’ she said.
I looked down at myself.
‘Yes, you are. You’re only seventeen. You’re still growing.’
We smiled at each other again.
‘Seventeen,’ she said, uncertain. ‘An ingénue.’
There was a pause. She laughed, but the laugh faded quickly away.
I suddenly thought I understood. I sat down beside her.
‘Is that it?’ I asked. ‘Is that why? Because I’m young?’
She blinked, lowered her eyes. ‘Is what why?’
I bent over and kissed her.
‘Adèle,’ she said, in her old commanding voice, ‘if somebody comes—’
‘They won’t.’
The sun in her eyelashes; the sound of the birds in the trees, oddly magnified.
When I moved my hand between her legs she caught at my fingers. I took her hand and flattened it on the grass and left it there.
‘Do you think I care that you’re older? Do you think I’m too young to know my own mind?’
Her face fell.
I slipped my hand under her petticoats. This time she didn’t try to stop me.
She turned her head to one side, frowning.
Oh, she said. Turned her head to the other side. I cradled it with the crook of my arm, protecting it each time she turned, again and again, fighting to escape.
And then she was unrecognisable. Laughing and crying together. Her tears slid into my mouth.
Over supper that same evening, André lifted his wine glass and stared at her over the top of it.
‘You look healthy,’ he said to her. ‘Glowing.’
‘It must be the fresh air,’ she said, cutting demurely into her food.
20. septembre 1913
ONE DAY SHE LOOKED OUT OF the salon window and said: ‘I think this is the last fine day. What shall we do with it?’
I shrugged. It was true: the light had that slanted quality that meant autumn. I had no particular needs, now, apart from being with her, so it didn’t matter to me if we went out – but I wanted her to have what she wanted.
She turned, clicked her fingers. ‘The boating lake,’ she said.
In the car, she held my hand loosely, under cover of our coats, and pointed out the fashions of the ladies walking along the Allée des Acacias.
‘Do you remember when we met Aurélie by accident here?’ she said. ‘I thought you were going to knock her out.’
I smiled at the memory, but didn’t comment, because it seemed like another person. How small my aims had been then: grasping after fame. I never thought about acting any more.
‘My knight in shining armour,’ she said contentedly, snuggling down amongst the coats.
Hubert parked the car on a stretch of grassland. She told him to wait, and we walked towards the lake. There was a small boathouse, and a wizened old man hiring rowing boats. Luce picked her way towards him; I saw her flash a smile, and coins changing hands.
When she came back, she was triumphant. ‘He wanted five francs,’ she said, ‘but I beat him down to three.’
I rolled my eyes.
‘It was the principle,’ she said vaguely, already shading her eyes and pointing at the rowing boats drawn up on the bank. ‘That one, don’t you think?’
We crossed to the boat and hauled it down to the water. There was the business with setting it upright, and testing its water safety, and finding the oars; all of which I loved.
‘What are you thinking?’ she said.
I’d been looking at her shoulders: how she pulled the oar handles back, tight, then the release. The shower of tiny droplets scattering back into the water.
The lake was not busy – it was too cold for that. There was just one other couple in a rowing boat: a young girl and her beau. The girl clutched her hat and screamed as it tried to blow away.
‘Your shoulders,’ I said.
She smiled at me, and shook her head in mock disapproval.
I watched her face. That puckered frown she occasionally had, that I remembered from before, pulling her eyebrows tight.
The girl in the other boat finally lost her hat; it blew away from her, skimming across the lake. She shrieked, and stood up. The young man stood, too, to balance the boat. They teetered, for a moment, and then tipped into the shallows; laughing, they stood, the water running off their faces. Then he held up his hand to her and escorted her to shore.
She stepped onto the grass as proud as a queen.
Luce had let the oars drift; her eyes had narrowed with enjoyment at the scene.
She turned her face away. Eventually she said: ‘What would happen if we just kept going?’
‘Where?’
‘If this lake had a tributary, a stream, leading off somewhere.’
The oars creaked in their rowlocks. A breeze made the boat tremble in the water.
‘Out to sea?’
‘Just as far as one of those dilapidated resorts. Those places people go to die. We could stay there for a while. Take a hotel.’
The idea of being alone in a hotel with her was so painfully beguiling that my mind tied the thought off. An image came to me of her on a pebbled beach, dissecting the fashions of the provincial ladies.
‘You’d last about five minutes,’ I said.
She smirked – ‘Perhaps’ – and looked down. Then up again, uncertain, and this time, she held my gaze. Her smile was the shyest, most gorgeous thing I’d ever seen.
7. octobre 1913
ONE NIGHT, OVER DINNER, André announced the party. ‘We haven’t entertained in months,’ he said. ‘I’m ready to be seen.’
He struck a pose. I turned my face away. I could barely see him these days without wanting to wind my plait round his neck. Just when it seemed he ought to recede into the distance, he was more present than ever: haunting the corridors of the house, always whistling just out of sight.
Luce said, slowly and to my surprise: ‘Yes. It’s an idea.’
André looked surprised too. ‘Saturday?’ he said.
‘Yes. Why not?’ She pressed her handkerchief to her mouth. ‘One condition: no Peyssac.’
André grinned. ‘In that case: no Ex-Minister.’
‘Then none of your stupid trick-film has-beens.’
‘None of your twittering fashion-obsessed friends.’
She took a long sip from her wine glass, enjoying, I could only suppose, this idiotic game of bargaining.
I looked from one to the other, trying to see beyond their faces, and failing.
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