Petite Mort (5 page)

– but that is 85 miles away; here, every log is a potential crocodile. The heat cracks wood and peels paint from doors.

The town has just one permanent fixture. The Orphanage stands at the Grosse Tete’s edge, its windows gazing northwards: two storeys of incongruously imported marble, dotted with mica which dances in the ever-present sunshine. It is run by nuns, stern and secretive, virtuously hiding their faces from strangers; the building has been there for as long as the town’s oldest inhabitant can remember.

Today is the first Sunday of the month, around midday, and shutters are slamming closed all around the village. Everyone knows it is Adoption Sunday: a monthly event when wealthy gentlemen seeking a new child visit the Orphanage, to take tea with the nuns and make their selection. There are few inhabitants who haven’t at some time or other, when passing the Orphanage, seen a child’s fingers spidered against an upstairs window – and in Grosse Tete, where superstitions outnumber residents, it is considered bad luck to witness the children being taken away.

Strange
, thinks Auguste Durand,
to find the place so deserted.
He peers from the curtained windows of his carriage, which rattles down Grosse Tete Main Street. His only audience are cats, sunning themselves, who leap to their feet in offence as the wheels spin gravel over them.
It is as though all the inhabitants have been spirited into the swamp overnight
, Auguste thinks – and it seems to him a plausible explanation. Don’t they say that is what happened to Thibodaux, thirty years ago? That the town vanished, leaving only the spars of foundations sticking up out of the bayou?

A part of Auguste’s fifty-four-year-old brain knows this cannot be true: Auguste has been a sugar-cane man, a plantation owner, all his life and his younger self would laugh at such fancifulness. But Auguste is not young. So, as he smoothes down his sober dark suit, and grips the Orphanage door knocker in his signet-ringed finger, his hand trembles: what if nobody answers, and his journey has been in vain? What will he tell his wife, waiting expectantly at home?

The nun who opens the door to Auguste sees a short man with faded blue eyes. From his clothes she would say he is a rich landowner, but his white beard is unkempt. She senses something: a halo of incipient madness. But a client is still a client, however eccentric, so she shakes hands in welcome.

Auguste doffs his hat and whispers his name to her. Once his relief has passed, he finds he is cowed by the schoolishness of the place – as though it is he who is on display, hoping to be picked, not the orphans.

The inside of the building is a shaded atrium; colonnades, festooned with thick ornamental swamp-creeper, run around the walls. The sun arches down into the central courtyard; Auguste blinks, dazzled; and realises that, directly in front of him, what he had taken for more columns are ten children, standing in a line, arranged from tallest to shortest.

The nun’s smile tautens. ‘M. Durand,’ she says, ‘if you would like to step this way—’

The children stand with their hands behind their backs, eyes fixed on a spot somewhere higher than his head: a mixture of boys and girls and – a little shock to Auguste’s sense of propriety – races. They all wear the same grey serge uniform; faces are scrubbed clean, and the girls’ hair is plaited where possible. The smallest is a toddler still, with a halo of nappy fuzz standing out from his head, and his finger hooked through the hand of the boy next to him. The oldest and tallest, a girl whose thin white hands seem to be all bone, looks to be about seventeen.

What will become of you
, Auguste thinks, staring into her face,
when you get too old to live here any more?

The nun clears her throat. In his scrutiny he has walked right up to the tall girl: she is leaning back away from him, nostrils flared, a sapling in wind.

Auguste steps back, embarrassed. These children are all too old; they already have pasts and histories to themselves. He looks around the room in despair and notices something, someone, else: a boy of about eight, standing watching from beside one of the columns. He is looking directly at Auguste.

The boy’s eyes remind Auguste of the sea, which Auguste visited once as a child. The beach was disappointingly grey, and so was the water, not the blue of picture-book illustrations. Undaunted, Child-Auguste had run to the line where the water met the land; but dipping his fingers in the surf, the froth bubbled away to nothing.

The nun has noted Auguste’s interest. Ideally he would take away one of the older children who has less time left to find a family, but she understands an inevitability when she sees it; she moves across and places a hand on the boy’s shoulder – but gingerly.

‘This is André,’ she says. ‘A fine strong boy, who loves his building blocks. He would be an asset, M. Durand – am I right in thinking you are in sugar?’

‘Yes,’ Auguste says, distracted.

‘And as you and Madame Durand have not yet been blessed—’

The nun lets her voice trail off, intimating visions of the heirless future, the plantation burning, lighting up the night – Auguste pictures the stillborn boy, its full head of black hair, and shakes himself down. He ought to ask a question. He looks at the child’s bewitching stare.

‘Who were the boy’s parents?’

The nun spreads her arms in a shrug. But Auguste’s thoughts have already flitted into a great uprush of joy: he is going to be a father. Just as quickly his eagerness becomes paranoia: is the nun thinking him unsuitable? Will she snatch defeat from the jaws of victory?

‘Yes,’ Auguste barks, ‘I’ll take him.’ With one arthritic hand he gestures to the boy to follow. André trots after the old man as he scuttles out to the waiting carriage. A curl of smoke drifts lazily upwards from the chimney of the Laughing Woman. Though Auguste turns, triumphant, to display the child to the waiting world, there is nobody to see them go.

The sun is an unforgiving white disc; a fine house comes into view as the carriage rattles on down the dusty trunk road, like something out of a painting: white and formal against the blue of the sky. The carriage sweeps through the valley below the house – a forest of rustling stalks, head-high. In between the stalks, heads lift. Plantation workers – the sons and daughters of sons and daughters of slaves – have paused in the cutting of sugar cane to see the carriage, with its precious cargo, sweep by.

The carriage rocks uphill, arriving at a verandah that extends to the front of the house. Auguste leaps out as the wheels stop rolling; his feet make the verandah’s floorboards creak. André follows him, taking in the view with his arms laced behind his back, as the nuns taught him, indicating his politeness.

‘Caroline,’ Auguste calls, repeatedly and in mounting excitement.

A young woman steps from the dark oblong of the door. Caroline is all porcelain and gold and in her early twenties.

‘This is André,’ Auguste says, his voice quivering: it is his great moment.

She looks at André, looks at his poor serge suit. André’s pose shifts and becomes genuine: he wants to please her, never having seen anyone like her.

But though she stares at him, he understands that she does not really see him.

She kisses Auguste’s dry cheek and turns to go back inside.

Over the next few weeks, visitors come to pay their respects to the child. They perch on the horsehair settee and look at André, and he feels special, he feels somebody, in his new suit with the high white collar. He learns to rank them in importance based on how anxious Auguste becomes when greeting them. Caroline isn’t upset at all, not by anyone: she sits, laughing at their jokes, when he can see she doesn’t really mean it; when he turns to look at her, she quickly looks away, and coldly, as though he has been too bold.

One day a man with a handlebar moustache comes. He takes tea in the salon like the others, and the moustache twitches when he drinks and André longs to put his hands up to it and feel the bristle against the palm of his hand. This is Maître de la Houssaye, Auguste says, he is a lawyer come to help Papa with a dispute amongst the workers: would André like to come to the office and see?

André nods, one eye always on Caroline. He wants her to be the one to give permission.

‘Kiss your mother goodbye, then, we’ll be a while.’

The room hushes; André knows that this is a kind of test; and also that he isn’t the only one being tested. He slips off his
small chair and hurries across to Caroline. She bends down, awkwardly, and loops her arms round his neck. He understands from her stiffness that she is not used to this, that perhaps she doesn’t hold people. It feels entirely strange.

‘Come on, boy,’ calls his father from the doorway. ‘We haven’t got all day.’

SOMETIMES ANDRÉ WOULD
pop his head round the door of the costume department during the day. With a very straight face he would say, ‘Everything ticking over, ladies?’ And I would bend my head to the sewing machine and beat my foot on the pedal, and his gaze swept over me and back. He would nod and retreat: the picture of the caring boss.

‘Such a charming man,’ my colleagues would sigh, touching their hands to their hair; and I would feel the secret warm me up.

The only person who remained immune to André’s charms was Elodie; when he came in she bent her head more closely to her work and hunched her shoulders as though trying to disappear. I could see no reason for her dislike; but in the end, I did not have long to wait before the answer was revealed, some weeks after my first encounter with André. At the eleven o’clock pause Elodie handed round cups of coffee and we rested our aching wrists. Along with re-modellings for the
Fée Verte
picture, due to be filmed in a few days’ time, we were making revolutionary outfits for the filming of Hugo’s
Misérables
. A hundred extras were to storm an improvised barricade in the Pathé courtyard that afternoon; blue, white and red strips of fabric were scattered around the room.

André stepped into the room with his usual deference. ‘Ah, the Uprising,’ he said seriously, reaching for an abandoned tricorn hat. ‘I must tell the other overseers to watch their step.’ I thought he had never looked so handsome than when he positioned the hat on his curls.

My colleagues tittered like schoolgirls and he doffed the hat to us – I coloured as with its final flourish he met my eyes. Then he dropped the hat onto my desk, and stepped back out into the corridor again. As he closed the door, when nobody else was looking, he winked at me.

There was a contemplative silence, then: ‘He looks tired,’ said Annick, winding a strip of electric-ginger hair around her finger.

‘Well, that’s no surprise,’ Elodie said, ‘considering who he’s married to.’

The other girls tittered, and I joined in, so as not to stand out. I had guessed from the start that André was spoken for. An air of well-fedness, of being adored – he did not have the lean look of a bachelor. But what other ties he might have had had little bearing on what I was asking from him. Night after night, I asked him to try me in a role.

The evening before, he had laid on his back next to me, drowsing; I had rolled into the crook of his arm to look up at him.

‘Do I get the part?’ I asked playfully.

He turned onto his elbow to look at me. ‘You’re certainly moving up the shortlist,’ he said. I kissed him again, in triumph. He had almost said it: it was only a matter of waiting for the right opportunity.

So as Elodie chattered on, I was able to tap my foot on the pedal and listen calmly – I was naturally intrigued to find out the name of my rival. ‘Of course he looks tired,’ she continued. ‘She keeps him busy enough, with all her carryings-on.’

‘Poor hen-pecked man,’ said Solange.

I tossed my hair back for my own benefit. André’s wife was suddenly taking on a form that differed from my idea. Tantrums: that didn’t fit, because he was such a connoisseur of women. Didn’t he tell me, every evening,
you are a beautiful little thing? My mannequin – my doll
? She must be rich by birth, a
patroness whom he’d married for her title. Liver-spotted hands chinking with rings.

Georgette said: ‘They say she sleeps on a mattress made of peacock feathers.’

Annick said: ‘I heard she employs a poison taster, and the last two died.’

Elodie stared at her work and said: ‘They say she’s a hermaphrodite.’

This met a blushing silence.

Georgette ran her needle along a line of cloth and sighed: ‘But the talent goes with the temperament, doesn’t it? And she can move an audience to tears.’

My stomach plummeted, my needle stabbed my finger; I pulled it away, sucking the blood off the tip. I felt the others staring: Elodie’s quick, bitter glance and Annick, her mouth hanging slightly open, flushing to clash with her hair. Only Georgette failed to notice. She prattled happily on: ‘At her
Dame aux Roses
, the crowd went quite wild! They say Sarah Bernhardt wept with jealousy!’ She giggled; and then, interpreting the sudden quiet, her face froze and she looked at Annick, Solange, Elodie: me.

‘What’s her name?’ I asked her.

‘Terpsichore,’ she said.

Juliette and Adèle
1967

I say: ‘So that was how you discovered they were married?’

‘Yes. Through their pity.’

‘Pity?’

Adèle narrows her eyes. ‘Of course! The girls were trying to help me. They had kept quiet about his wife, out of tact, for months. But when they decided it had gone too far – when they could see me pale before them, becoming absent-minded, losing myself to an impossible conundrum – then they told me who she was.’

‘They planned it?’

‘No. But it was an attempted rescue, just the same. I ran outside and stood against the wall of the factory building, where nobody could see me.’

She takes a demure sip from her coffee cup. ‘Kindness is so often mixed with other things. It can be hard to see it when it comes.’

André, ii.

André was fifteen years old when his gift was discovered.