The Chrysalis

by Catherine Deveney

  “You know who killed him, Marianne, don’t you?” Charpentier said last night, bringing his face so close to mine I could smell the Gitânes from his breath. “You know who killed Patrice Moreau?”

  I watched him, cool as a cucumber, and said nothing.

  “Admit it, Marianne.”

  “I have told you about the blonde woman. Why are you not questioning the blonde woman?”

  “Oh I can question the blonde woman if you wish, Marianne. We both know who the blonde woman is. She is your Raymond, isn’t she? That perversion of a man you call your ‘husband’.”

  He spat the word ‘husband’ out with disgust. His face was so close I could see the coarseness of his skin, the pitted, uneven surface of his cheeks. His ridiculous moustache. I simply held his gaze and he stood up straight again.

  “Raymond is transsexual. He was dressed as a woman that night when he was with Patrice Moreau. Isn’t that so?” he continued. “You have used the blonde “woman” ever since as a decoy for us. We were looking for someone who did not exist. ‘She’ was really a he, playing in his perverted playground.”

  I was not going to accept that.

  “Do not talk about Raymond that way,” I told Charpentier sharply. “Raymond is not perverted.”

  “I suppose Moreau is the same,” said Charpentier, ignoring me. “I don’t know why I am bothering with him really. Why should I care who killed such a creature?” He took a pack of Gitânes from one pocket and a lighter from the other.

  “You can’t smoke those in here,” I said.

  He ignored me and lit up. It was further evidence that he is screwing that nurse. He would not have dared otherwise. The pungent smell of Gitânes filled my nostrils. I would have killed for one but I would not stoop to ask Charpentier for anything.

  “The thing is,” he said inhaling deeply, “I don’t like loose ends. I don’t like people like you who think they can break the rules, take things into their own hands. The clean middle classes who get away with crimes that people like me would not.”

  Hmm, he has a chip on his shoulder. A nasty, working-class chip. He has no idea where I came from. He could not possibly guess at the significance of a blue babygro, or understand the taste of abandonment that has always filled my mouth. What does he know? The nurse walked by my bed at that moment and totally ignored Charpentier. It was as if she simply did not see him. How could she do that?

  “Is she your lover?” I asked. “Is that why she does what you want?”

  Charpentier merely laughed.

  “Never mind her,” he said, though I noticed his eyes lingered on her retreating figure. “Just tell me one thing. It was Raymond, wasn’t it? Raymond who killed Patrice Moreau. Admit it and then I can leave you.”

  “Why are you not questioning Jasmine? She was there. There in the lane. “

  “As were you,” said Charpentier in a flash.

  I simply closed my eyes in response.

  When I opened them again, Raymond was there but he kept insisting he was not Raymond and that his name was something else. I forget what.

  “When did you arrive?” I asked him. “I have been waiting hard for you. Listen, Charpentier has been here.”

  I am not sure he believed me.

  There was a strange conversation conducted round my bed tonight that I did not understand. I came round from a sleep and Raymond was there, and that woman Rae whom I do not entirely trust. There is something about her that does not convince me. I am not sure she is who she says she is.

  Rae kept asking when I was going back to England. What business it was of hers, I do not know.

  “Oh no,” I said. “I am not going back to England. Raymond asked me to stay. I am going to stay here, in the south of France.”

  They had not realised I was awake until I spoke.

  Rae looked agitated.

  “No, it is impossible to stay here. Not now.” She looked at Raymond. “Things have deteriorated too much. I do not know how to look after her now.”

  I do not like that woman. She meddles in things that do not concern her. This was about me and Raymond. About being together as we always should have been,

  “Raymond will look after me, won’t you Raymond? You said.”

  “Marianne, I am Zac, not Raymond,” he said.

  I just looked at him without responding. I knew there must be a reason why he was pretending to be someone else, so I kept quiet. Perhaps Charpentier was around somewhere, though the tell-tale aroma of his cigarette smoke was missing.

  “Where is he?” I hissed.

  “You see, Zac,” Rae said urgently to Raymond. “There is no way that I can deal with this.”

  I do not know why she called him Zac. She is up to something that woman.

  “I understand,” said Raymond, putting a soothing hand on her arm. “There is no need to be upset. Marianne will be well looked after.”

  “We are staying here, then?” I said to Raymond.

  “No, Marianne. We will go back to England.”

  I was surprised but delighted. I have no desire really to stay here in France. I just wanted Raymond. If he comes to England, it is even better. We can make a new life there. Just so long as I do not go back to the bay window and the rhododendrons and the buzzers and Annie and the creeping, pasty-faced Shona.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Zac

  Marianne’s hospital consultant was a tall, elegant woman, kind enough in her way but with a certain briskness and a manner that Marianne, had she been more aware, would have dismissed as containing a certain hauteur. Much like Marianne herself, in fact. Zac had made an appointment with Madame Bertrand, but had taken Rae with him.

  “She is not herself,” Zac explained to the consultant. “And yet, we are told there is no evidence of concussion.”

  “This, I’m afraid, is not unusual in elderly people,” explained Madame Bertrand, looking at Marianne’s notes and toying with a gold crucifix around her neck. “A fall can sometimes prompt a distinct deterioration in dementia, especially in patients who already show some signs of the illness.” She removed her glasses and looked at Zac.

  “Marianne was already showing signs of forgetfulness prior to this fall?”

  Zac hesitated.

  “A few signs. But nothing like this. She was usually perfectly lucid.”

  Madame Bertrand nodded.

  “It happens.”

  “She is hallucinating, getting us all mixed up. It is not like Marianne.”

  “There may be some improvement in that in a day or two as she gets back to normal, but I would not, if I were you, expect that to reverse completely. I see we have already tested Marianne for a urine infection which can also cause some of the symptoms we are discussing - particularly in the elderly. There were a few signs of minor infection there, so I have prescribed an antibiotic. That, too, may help.”

  Madame Bertrand sat back in her seat and looked at Zac and then at Rae.

  “And your plans for her are…?”

  “I will return with her to England when she is able,” said Zac.

  Rae said nothing but Zac, even without looking in her direction, could sense Rae lowering her head.

  Madame Bertrand shrugged.

  “There is no reason to delay particularly. Her wrist is set and we have done what we can. She will continue to take her antibiotics but the infection is mild. And the rest, well…” She threw her hands in the air in an expression of resignation.

  Zac looked at her expectantly.

  “The rest?”

  “There is little likelihood that waiting will lead to much improvement.” She closed the file in front of her. “I am sorry that I cannot be of more reassurance.”

  “No, that’s…” Zac floundered and looked at Rae, who would not catch his eye. He looked up at Madame Bertrand. “Thank you for what you have done.”

  Madame Bertrand smiled thinly and stood up.

  “You are welcome,” she said, and stood up, holding out a well-man
icured hand to alert them to the fact that the interview was over.

  Zac lumbered awkwardly to his feet, caught off guard by the sudden termination of the conversation. He and Rae headed for the door but then Zac stopped and turned back. Madame Bertrand, who had already sat down again and begun writing, looked up at him expectantly.

  “I wonder,” he said, “how much of what Marianne says now about the past is true. Will her recall of events be sound? Is it only recent events that will be confused?”

  Madame Bertrand looked nonplussed at Zac’s question, then raised her hands in a gesture of supplication that said, ‘who knows?’

  “I cannot answer this question,” she said. “After all, how much of what anyone says about the past is true? The best you can say is that it is true for them.”

  The hearse sat outside the funeral parlour in a side street close to Sainte Maria church, the coffin covered with an enormous bouquet of all-white daisies that spelled out Maurice’s name. The simplicity of the blooms sparked a rush of emotion that caught in Zac’s throat and he looked away.

  The mourners began to gather behind the car, a white faced sister of Maurice, slightly crumpled as he had been, looking confused in the melee. A distressed middle-aged woman in a black dress came towards her, grabbed her shoulders and kissed both cheeks. Zac looked on curiously at the silent frisson that rippled through the crowd beside the car, the stolen glances where eyes met and immediately looked away again. Maurice’s sister accepted the woman’s gesture, but barely reacted. Her body was limp and she merely nodded, before turning away to speak to a man Zac assumed was her husband.

  “Who is that woman in the black dress?” Zac whispered quietly to Rae. “The one who is crying.”

  “Francine,” mumbled Rae.

  Francine stood uncertainly for a minute and Zac noticed for the first time that she had a pink rose in her hand. The boot of the hearse was open still and Zac watched emotions flit like shadows across her face as the bouquets were brought from the parlour and placed inside the hearse. Francine waited for her moment, then quietly placed the rose on the coffin, her fingers trailing lightly over the wood. The intimacy made Zac look away and when he glanced back, she was gone.

  The crowd shuffled into place. There was to be a procession behind the coffin from the funeral parlour to the church. Zac stood amongst them with Rae and Jasmine, wondering how this ‘life’ in France had taken hold of him so quickly. He and Marianne should be flying home today, he thought, looking at the vapour trail of a plane in the sky above them. Instead, she was in a hospital bed still and he was here, at the funeral of a man whom two weeks ago, he had not even known.

  A two-week friendship, Maurice had said. He was right – more right than he could possibly have known. It had a beginning, a middle, and now it had an end. There were a few murmurs behind him from mourners talking sotto voce, a half-laugh, but he, Rae and Jasmine stood in silence. They had talked little in the last few days, taking over from one another methodically at the hospital so that there was always someone with Marianne.

  The cortège was moving now. The mourners processed silently behind the hearse that snaked slowly and silently down the hill and round the corner to the church where Fr Michel stood at the doorway to receive them. He wore an old-fashioned, black, ceremonial cloak over his vestments.

  “Ah, the Prince of the Church,” murmured Rae as the priest came into view.

  “Queen of the County, you mean,” retorted Jasmine.

  Zac stiffened and looked sideways at Jasmine. He had known, of course, from the priest’s look that night, his come-to-bed eyes, but still… to hear it articulated.

  “He’s gay?”

  “You think that cloak comes free with Trucker Weekly?”

  “But what he said to Maurice. He said…” Zac broke off. What had Fr Michel said? It had been a call to celibacy, to obedience. “Turn from temptation,” he had said, as if Maurice’s inner being was a passing fad. “Live like the man you were made by God to be. Offer the sacrifice on God’s altar. Pain brings you closer to the Lord.”

  Jasmine smiled acerbically when Zac recounted the words.

  “The rules are for us, not for them, Zac.”

  It was Maurice himself who had been offered on the altar, Zac thought. The altar of orthodoxy.

  The hearse pulled slowly into the church grounds. The mourners gathered each side of the church door as the coffin was carried past. Zac couldn’t take his eyes off Fr Michel as he greeted the people filing past him into the church. He was loving the role, Zac thought suddenly, watching the swirl of the cloak and the dignified smile. He took the deference as his due.

  Rae and Jasmine moved forward to the church door. Zac stayed still. Rae looked back at him.

  “Coming?”

  “In a moment,” Zac said.

  He watched the last of the mourners disappear inside. He was shaking, shaking with anger. He detested Fr Michel. A voice inside told him that it was not Fr Michel who had killed Maurice. Maurice himself had done that. But the argument raged with two voices inside his head. The priest might has well have killed Maurice, he thought. Words were the most dangerous, the most lethal weapon in the world. Zac knew that despite his anger with the priest over Maurice, part of the anger inside was about himself. Fr Michel’s condemnatory words about deviancy applied to Zac, too. Once, other people’s disapproval had oppressed him, made him spiral into silence and self-loathing. Now, he realised he was beginning to kick back.

  Right this minute, he thought, feeling a tremble run through him, Fr Michel would be in there, poncing about on the altar. He would probably mention Maurice’s kindness, his love of God, his love of others. Zac looked up at a thin sun breaking through the grey clouds in bands of watery light, like a grid in the sky. There would even be a pious exhortation not to condemn Maurice for talking his own life, because only God could judge. But he had judged Maurice in life, hadn’t he? Zac thought. That priest in his fine robes. He drove Maurice to destruction with his judgement. Well, he wouldn’t drive Zac to destruction.

  The sound of singing drifted from the church. He looked up at the door, moved towards it, then stopped. For Maurice. He would go in for Maurice. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t for exactly the same reason. For Maurice. His two week friend.

  Zac stood in the back porch and looked through the window, just as he had the day Maurice sat slumped in the back pew. The church was full. People had turned out for him. In death if not in life, Zac thought bitterly. He looked through the window at the black clad figures in the pews but could not join them. His feet simply would not take him, whatever his brain willed them to do. He stayed where he was, shivering with a rage that kept erupting inside him like lava. What was it about, any of this? Not sex, that was for sure. Not sin. Identity, he thought. It was about identity.

  From the depths of the church, a thin, high wave of tremulous voices reached out to where Zac stood.

  “Be still my soul, the Lord is on your side

  Bear patiently the cross of grief or pain

  Leave to your God to order and provide

  In every change, he faithful will remain.”

  Rae sat in silence as Zac stirred a teaspoon round a coffee cup in a bar across the road from the hospital.

  “You think I am abandoning her again.” Rae said flatly.

  Zac looked up in surprise. “No, I don’t.”

  Rae looked at him tearfully. “Well I am. I know I am,” she said, burying her face suddenly in her hands. “I can’t do it. I am not strong enough. Zac, I just don’t know how to manage the fact that she does not know who we are. I had a chance to make amends but now it is gone. She came back and now she is lost again. I can’t. I simply can’t.”

  Zac laid a hand on Rae’s arm.

  “Rae, nobody is judging you. Certainly not me.”

  “You think I don’t know what love is?” Rae demanded with an edge of defiance.

  Zac looked bewildered. Who was he to judge? Who knew less than him
about the nature of love?

  “It would have been hard to look after Marianne. But I would have done it,” continued Rae. “But this is not Marianne. It’s just her shell. There is some imposter inhabiting her body and it feels as if she is dead. I wish she WAS dead.” She took a shuddering breath inwards. “God forgive me.” Zac touched her arm, but it made no difference. “God forgive me!”

  “It’s okay,” Zac murmured.

  “It feels like… like I shouldn’t allow her to go, but I can’t allow her to stay,” said Rae.

  “She thinks I am you, so she will go back with me willingly,” said Zac soothingly, wishing it was all over now. All of it. He could not cope with any more emotional stress. His stomach burned permanently these days.

  “I am weak… Marianne always said it.”

  “We are all weak.”

  “Not Marianne.”

  Zac watched a young couple at the next table scrape back their chairs and gather up their shopping bags, so engrossed in each other that they banged into Zac as they went.

  “Pardon!”

  Zac smiled absently then looked back at Rae. Perhaps he should tackle it now. There had been so little opportunity since Marianne’s fall, what with Maurice’s funeral and everything happening at once.

  “Rae…”

  “Zac…”

  They spoke in unison. Both smiled.

  “You first,” said Zac.

  “That question,” said Rae curiously, “that you asked Madame Bertrand about Marianne’s memory. Why did you ask it?”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  Rae looked at him expectantly.

  “The other night,” said Zac carefully, avoiding eye contact, “I was alone with Marianne and she thought I was you.”

  There was silence.