You don’t want a powerful man to feel he owes you something.
I began to think back to that evening in the costumery. And I started to wonder, what was it they would find, if the summer was a dry one?
Juliette and Adèle
1967
‘And then?’
‘And then. Inspector Japy got up from the front row of the gallery, where he had sat throughout the trial, and made a case that the trial should be halted whilst an investigation was made of the lake at the rear of the Durand property.’
She sips her coffee. ‘The courtroom was cleared, the police marshalled, the Durand house emptied of servants, and the special department set up camp in the grounds.’
‘What did you do in the meantime? Were you free to go?’
‘Denis and I waited in his apartment, in cafés, in the Jardin du Luxembourg. We enjoyed the sun.
‘On the eighth day we were sitting on a bench in the Jardin des Plantes, admiring the panthers prowling round and round their cage. A sergeant came running to where we were, and asked whether I could follow him please.
‘We were taken in a police cab. We arrived at the woods just as it was starting to be twilight: pale air, fluttering things in the bushes. The police experts were still working all around the lake. They had arranged on the ground all the objects they had found: coins, old strips of fabric, a couple of wedge-shaped pieces of blue-and-white china. Relics of picnics past.
‘They led me to a shelter by the far bank and drew back the curtain and showed me a set of bones, laid out on a soggy tartan blanket, with dead leaves still underneath. They had not cleaned the whole skeleton yet, only the femurs – bleached yellow, like a museum exhibit. I remember how long they seemed in comparison to the rest of her body.
‘I told them to cover her up. The policeman was surprised. He said: “We are not the malefactors.” I told him I didn’t care, and I pulled the blanket over her.’
She holds her hands out on the table in front of us.
‘How did you feel?’
She considers this. ‘The policemen took me out onto the bank and asked me, Is this where what happened to you, happened? I said yes and showed them where it was I woke up after the attack, on the west side, by the trailing willow. They wouldn’t look at me; they kept their eyes on their work.’
She smiles faintly. ‘I was glad to see that they had to look down.’
Luce and André, ii.
And suddenly there is just this girl, standing in the hallway with enormous eyes taking in all the things she can’t be used to seeing. And André standing behind her, watching her look; and she, Luce, says nothing because she doesn’t want to break up the tableau.
André says: ‘I want you to meet Mlle Doulay, from the costumery, who is here to look through your wardrobe and alter the things that need altering.’
Luce says: ‘How nice to meet you, Mlle Doulay,’ and the girl positively gapes, then a smile breaks out all over her pretty face. She has extremely good teeth but doesn’t smile as if she knows it.
André says: ‘I’ve had the spare room made up for an overnight stay, since your wardrobe is extensive.’
They all laugh, and go their separate ways – the girl escorted upstairs by Thomas, and André, over his shoulder, gives Luce a white-toothed challenge of a grin.
That night, over dinner, the girl doesn’t know what cutlery she should use; she plunges in, and then waits, confusion puckering her brow, looking to her hosts for help.
She is breathlessly enthusiastic; answers questions about Pathé (‘It is the finest, most splendid place in the entire world, probably, so vast and so rich’) and the costumery (‘We are a sort of band of sisters, all working to help each other, and the materials are so fine’), wide-eyed and serious, so that Luce has to try not to catch André’s eye. But after every answer there is a pause where it is impossible not to just look at her: at the cream of her skin and the freckles on the backs of her hands.
Towards the end of the meal, emboldened by the wine, which she can’t be used to, Mlle Doulay starts to ask questions. Have they enjoyed the state of wedded bliss long? She talks like an etiquette manual from the 1890s. André says, frowning to hide his smirk, just under six years, pretending not to remember the precise date.
And has your union been blessed with fruit?
Even the girl senses it was not the right question, and colours, but does not know how to get back. André does well: he says, a little coyly, Not yet: but we hope, and snaps his fingers for Thomas to bring the wine.
As the last plates are cleared away Mlle Doulay does not realise she is supposed to excuse herself before the hosts; her face reddens as the silence grows, and she finally palms-up from the table and says goodnight. Luce listens to her light footsteps ascending the stairs.
They are left alone together in the dining room; things unsaid flutter around the candlelight.
The following morning, Mlle Doulay sits on the salon floor surrounded by taffeta, tulle and organdy, scissors snipsnipping gently along a seam. Always the frown of concentration: everything is to be taken seriously, but not just in a general sense – each thing she comes across, Luce thinks, is a new thing.
The girl holds aloft a gown whose bodice has been ruffled to hide the fact that it has been let out and let out again around the waist, and says: ‘Are you sure this must be altered? The silk ruching is very fine and we won’t be able to save it.’
‘Yes,’ Luce says. ‘Put it on the mending pile. I have lost so much weight recently.’
Mlle Doulay lifts the dress and looks past it to Luce’s thin waist, and nods, understandingly but without understanding. Anyone else would have arched an eyebrow, asked the question: but facts roll off Mlle Doulay like water, and she bends her head obediently and goes on snipping.
‘I have been unwell,’ Luce tells her, ‘and have only been back on my feet a few months. Flat on my back for almost a year!’
Nothing.
Later, Mlle Doulay spreads the dressmakers’ thin paper onto the parquet and draws arcs in pencil on it; her hair snakes loose and falls over her eyes but she doesn’t notice this, either. Luce watches one tendril fall, then the next, until more hair is out of the chignon than in it; then watches as the girl sighs and sweeps it off her face and behind her ears.
That evening, the girl drinks more than is good for her. Perhaps she isn’t sure what is the polite formula to refuse wine; or perhaps she doesn’t want to. What she wants is to hang on André’s every word, nodding rapidly, and making little observations not to the point, just for the sake of saying something to him.
At the end of the meal she excuses herself – placing a hand on the table to steady herself – and bobs a curtsy to Luce as she leaves. Her steps scurry up the stairs.
A moment later, hurriedly, André pushes back his chair, mopping his lips with his napkin.
At the door he says: ‘You only have to tell me not to.’
Luce thinks about it, shrugs, and smiles. He hovers, momentarily uncertain, wanting something more from her, and then ducks his head and exits the room; his footsteps jog up the stairs after the girl’s.
Luce lets a few minutes pass and then she follows, her hand crabbing up the banister into the darkness of the stairwell.
She reaches the third-floor landing and listens, unsure which room has been given to the girl; aware, in her tingling hands and feet, of the attic and what the doctors said she must try not to remember. But there is no need to be anxious: it is very obvious which room contains Mlle Doulay, from the breathy, rhythmic ‘oh’ coming from behind the door closest to the stairs.
Luce shuffles closer and lays her ear to the cold wood panels, and now it is possible to hear André’s grunts, the creaking of the bed; even the rustling movement of the sheets tangled around their legs.
She always wondered what she would feel if this were to happen and now she knows.
Jealousy and distress, it turns out, are born of surprise; therefore she isn’t j
ealous or distressed. She only feels – and this is not a surprise either – a hollowing-out of the loneliness that has become habit over the short time she has been well again, making it deeper.
She tries to understand why it should be so, and realises that by this act of being with Mlle Doulay, André has taken action where she has not. He has chosen to cast out his solitude behind him, like a medieval devil. Sure enough, there it is, coming out: a hoarse, protracted cry from him, overlaid by the girl’s fluting moans.
The next morning, the girl sits on her salon floor, cutting out paper patterns, and they have a pleasant conversation. Luce recounts amusing stories of her friend Aurélie’s exploits being married to the Minister of the Interior; the girl listens, wide-eyed.
Even over dinner the conversation flows between the three of them. She watches the not-so-subtle glances Mlle Doulay shoots André over the top of her wine glass quite calmly, and when André hesitates at the door, she waves him away.
She doesn’t mean to go upstairs after them; she intends to turn off at her own floor, but finds that she has climbed the next two flights almost without thinking.
This time there is more noise: André is being rougher. The girl sounds almost distressed, her breathing reduced to thin wisps and then a strangled whimper.
Luce hesitates, her palm flat on the door. Then she turns and walks down the stairs to her own room and gets undressed for bed as usual. Her hand, when she reaches up to unhook her necklace, has a fine tremor in it. She looks at the tremor in the mirror, holding her hand level and watching it vibrate against thin air.
The next morning, the girl says: ‘You look pale, Madame,’ and Luce is so surprised that she answers, ‘I am always pale.’
‘I suppose that must be an advantage, in your career,’ the girl says. She is sitting on the salon floor with her patterns arranged around her: a child at play. ‘They say that Madame Sarah Bernhardt envies you your complexion, I read that in a magazine, is it true?’
Her neck droops as she leans to pick up a far-flung fragment of chiffon.
‘Yes,’ Luce says, ‘it’s true.’
The girl looks up, her mouth a perfect oval. Then she does another unexpected thing: she blushes. The colour creeps up her neck and over her cheeks until she is the colour of a radish. ‘Imagine,’ she says, ‘having Sarah Bernhardt be envious of you.’
Imagine that.
Luce asks the girl questions, not vague conversational ones without issue, but listening to the answers with a kind of hunger in herself that she did not anticipate.
Mlle Doulay vouchsafes she has two brothers, both of whom are a little rough, and that she wanted to better herself. She considers working in the costumery to have bettered herself; she will be quite happy one day to become chief costumière, if she works hard enough.
Luce finds herself saying: ‘You could aspire to more.’
The girl bends her head. ‘I could never be like you,’ she says, and bites her lip. ‘The things you’ve done, the people you have met. And living in a house like this!’ She looks up and around, her face shining with happiness. Then she blows the hair out of her eyes and continues her work.
It has been months, it may have been years, since anyone has told Luce they wanted to be like her. She looks down at her hands: the tremor is still there, but the skin on the backs is flushed and healthy-looking. Come to think of it, she is warm, not uncomfortably so, but in the pit of her stomach, a slight fluttering. Something tethered about to take flight.
That night, she puts her cheek to the cold door as well as both hands.
You! André shouts inside the room, then says over and over, you, you.
The girl moans. She sounds nothing like herself. She sounds older.
Luce shuts her eyes.
Days grow into weeks. Luce’s clothes are cut to pieces and reassembled under her fascinated gaze: the cloth supple and refined in Mlle Doulay’s hands. Nobody speaks of her leaving. The household seems better. André laughs like he used to laugh when they were first married: full-throated, teeth on show.
They talk about everything. Mlle Doulay seems to like to listen to her talk. Luce tells her anecdotes of her time at the studio; which directors are pleasant to work with, which less so; tittle-tattle about the other stars in the Pathé portfolio. The girl frowns as she stitches, sitting with Luce’s dresses draped across her lap, listening and asking the odd question.
Occasionally she sighs. ‘It must be wonderful,’ she says, ‘it must be just wonderful.’
Luce says: ‘You could act, if you chose to. I could get you a role.’
‘Oh, not me, Madame,’ the girl says, holding a needle to the light to thread it.
One night, Luce lays her cheek to the door as usual. She hears Mlle Doulay’s breathing become rapid; the jerking of the bedstead, and André’s heaving groans.
Faster, closer. Then Mlle Doulay’s voice. Louder than normal, saying an intelligible word for the first time, not her usual vixen sounds: the word she is saying is a name, which is André’s.
She sighs it out, familiarly. Luce imagines her smoothing the curly hair from André’s brow, looking at him with tenderness.
She listens, to hear if perhaps she was mistaken. Then André says, low, as if giving in to something, another name: the girl’s, it must be. Victoire, he says, over and over. Victoire.
Luce turns and makes for the banister, and goes down the stairs as fast as she can. Undresses, tearing at the newly mended nightgown, and lies in the dark, her chest heaving but unable to get in enough breath.
In the morning she does not remember going to sleep. She remembers the dream she has had: the girl bending over her, smoothing the hair from her brow. In the dream Luce has mumbled something, and pulled the girl down beside her. Startled eyes clouding over; they reach for each other. When she wakes up she thinks for a moment the dream was real: perhaps it was.
She goes to the salon to wait for Mlle Doulay. The clock strikes nine; then ten past. At a quarter past the door opens. The girl comes in with head held low, and says: ‘I am very sorry. I overslept.’
She does look sorry. She looks strained.
‘You are pale,’ Luce says.
‘No more than usual, Madame.’
‘Yes, you are very pale.’
There is a pause. The girl sits in her accustomed chair, face down, reaching for her sewing. ‘You are kind to look out for me, Madame.’ Then she blushes, holding up a dress, and says: ‘This is ready to try on.’
Luce looks at the girl. Then she goes to her, takes the dress and makes a play of rubbing the fabric between her fingers. ‘Very good,’ she says, ‘very fine.’
Then she starts to change in front of her, slipping out of her day-gown.
The girl looks away, in a panic.
‘Let us see it with the petticoat you fixed the other day instead of this one,’ Luce says, and removes her under-things.
The girl won’t look at her. The autumn light slants through the window panes and illuminates her feet, which are the object of her special focus. She goes to fetch the petticoat without turning to face Luce, and when she hands it over, her fingers tremble.
‘Now help me into the dress,’ Luce says gently.
Where the girl puts her hands on her waist to help her, Luce feels how hot is the contact of their skin: it takes two attempts to fasten each button.
When it is over, Luce crosses to look at herself in the full-length mirror. As if she has been given a licence, Mlle Doulay’s face hovers over one shoulder, now looking and looking and blushing and blushing.
‘It fits,’ Luce says, smoothing the material over her hips.
The girl turns quickly away and busies herself collecting up Luce’s clothes.
‘What is your name?’ Luce asks. ‘I mean, your given name?’
‘I thought you knew. Victoire,’ she says. ‘It’s Victoire. I thought you knew.’
She straightens. She holds an armful of garments, flushed from the effort.
The girl spends all her days in the salon now. When she runs out of mending, she comes to sit on the floor by Luce’s feet, and reads.
One day, Luce reaches down and twirls a tendril of her hair around her finger. The girl says nothing. After a moment she inclines her head forward to give Luce better access to the nape of her neck. Her neck, her shoulders and cheeks are a warm pink. Neither of them speak. After a while the girl forgets to turn pages.
The dinner bell makes them both start. The girl gets to her feet hurriedly, smoothes her skirts and almost runs from the room.
Luce sits thinking, her eyes gleaming in the firelight.
The following night, September 25th, is a wild one: trees rock outside the windows, and the light goes quickly, leached from the sky in a single swoop.
‘We’ll sleep well tonight,’ André says over supper, rubbing his hands idiotically. Mlle Doulay looks down at her plate. Luce wants to reach for her hand: can it be the girl is afraid of storms?
They finish the meal in silence; just the rain bursting across the dining-room windows in great spatters. André gets to his feet, mopping his mouth and smiling at them.
The girl still won’t look at Luce until the last moment; and then it seems she cannot tear her eyes away.
‘Goodnight,’ she says.
‘Goodnight,’ Luce replies, and, as an afterthought: ‘Sleep well.’
‘Yes,’ the girl says, distracted.
Luce doesn’t go to listen that night. Nor does she undress. Instead she waits in her bedroom, reading Thérèse Raquin, for half an hour; then shuts the book and pads to the door, opens it and goes to the stairs.
She has guessed correctly. From the floor above comes the soft closing of André’s door; his footsteps across his bedroom floor.
She mounts the stairs; one flight; two; until she is standing outside Victoire’s door.
She lays her cheek to the panels. No human noise: just the wind that is everything, going through the house.
Softly she turns the handle and pushes the door inwards, waiting at the threshold until her eyes have adjusted.
Petite Mort Page 24
