Petite Mort (6 page)

It was harvest season, an October day; he was idling in the salon, long legs lolling as he sketched on thin paper at the table, when Caroline, threading a needle through embroidery, raised her head, the perfect skin between her brows puckering into a frown. Through the salon window the small dot that had caught her attention was getting closer: Auguste’s head and flyaway white hair, running towards them along the rows of cane. Following his progress, other heads were bobbing up from the cane on either side: indentured workers, sensing trouble.

Caroline laid down her embroidery and waited.

A minute later Auguste burst into the room. ‘All wrong,’ he said, ‘no good,’ and put his hat down on a horsehair chair. On his face was the kind of look that once, she might have wanted to comfort. ‘What is?’ she asked.

‘The engine in the mill. Stopped.’ He tried to smile and ended up grimacing instead. ‘Can’t fathom it. Just stopped.’

The steam engine they used for grinding cane was twenty years old, and a friend to Auguste. He still remembered setting the donkeys free from the old horse-powered mill; opening the new mill, his first wife cutting the ribbon, already frail but smiling at the childishness of the task. But it was also the
sine qua non
of his business. Merchants in New Orleans were tapping their watches even now, waiting for him to deliver cargo. What nobody knew but Auguste: how perilously the whole enterprise tottered on the edge of disaster. His friends had all made
the switch into other crops when the slaves were set free, and laughed at Auguste for keeping going. He had shaken his head and smiled at them, not understanding how anyone being set free could be a cause of loss.

‘What do the engineers say?’ Caroline asked.

Auguste reddened. ‘How should I know? I don’t understand a damn word.’

He put a hand to his eyes; took it away, and sat slowly and gingerly on the arm of a chair. ‘I don’t know,’ he said again. ‘I don’t know.’

‘It will be all right,’ Caroline said, and when he looked at her, child-like, she nodded once, encouragingly, and waited for him to get to his feet again, and put on his hat and walk to the verandah door. ‘Best go and see,’ he said, and ducked his head sheepishly under the lintel.

It wasn’t fixed. Auguste reappeared once more, an hour later, to curse and slump on the arm of the horsehair chair; soothed by Caroline, he departed for the mill again. The light began to fail: an orange Louisiana sunset, twinklings in the cabins of the workers, and Caroline finally closed the door.

‘Tidy away now,’ she told André, ‘we’ll have supper, just us,’ and she clicked her fingers for the maid.

The soft chink of cutlery, neither of them looking at the other; and it was not until the dessert course that Auguste walked into the dining room, his face so thunderous as to preclude any conversation.

‘Don’t ask me,’ he said shortly, and then immediately began to tell them, talking as if to himself. ‘It’s not the crankshaft, and it’s not that a cog is missing,’ he said. ‘What the devil do I pay them for?’

André said, stabbing at his dessert, ‘If it’s heated beyond endurance it will fissure. Perhaps that’s it.’

Auguste’s fascinated face; Caroline’s frown. André got up
from his seat and walked back into the salon. After a moment Auguste and Caroline followed, to find him standing over his sketches. André indicated a spot on a delicate drawing of the interior of a steam engine and said: ‘Here is your weakest point.’

That night, Auguste undressed thoughtfully.

‘He needs proper tuition,’ he told his wife.

Caroline put her book aside. ‘I can give him lessons,’ she said, ‘more advanced than what he gets from the governess. Until we can find someone more suitable.’

Auguste nodded; nodded faster. It had always been a source of great pride to Auguste, the son of a farmer: his wife’s urbanity, the unusual lightness of her mind. She could teach him things a tutor couldn’t, all the accoutrements of a gentleman. Wasn’t that what Auguste wanted for his son, at the end of it all? Hadn’t they seen, this afternoon, the proof that André could be not just a good person, but a great one?

So it was decided: they would convert the fifth bedroom into a schoolroom. Auguste clambered into bed; out of the dark bloomed the thoughts he kept for bedtime. The thoughts had started the first time he had seen André, but he dared not confide them to Caroline; they required careful handling in case they be disbelieved. Auguste might be the only one to see it for the time being, but it was clear that André’s grey eyes were growing to look more like Auguste’s blue ones every day. The boy’s lengthy stride was becoming shorter, to match the famous Durand bandy knees. Auguste tried not to breathe too fast, so as not to wake Caroline. It would be a wonderful surprise for her, when the time came. The boy he had brought home had turned out to be theirs, after all. It would help her be a mother to him: there had been, from the start, a sort of coolness towards the boy. He would wait until the evidence could no longer be ignored. He would wait until he could see signs of suspicion
on Caroline’s face: and then he would break the great news to her.

Outside the bedroom window the cicada song became a buzz. He let his drowsiness gather momentum. It made perfect sense to Auguste that the child had found its way back. There was no reason why all those lost years should stay lost for ever.

Two days later, Auguste left for Thibodaux-Nouveau before it got light. Caroline went downstairs with him and clasped his shoulders as she kissed him goodbye. The carriage stood waiting, the horses whinnying their discomfort at the cold air. Auguste was more distracted than usual, his eyes darting to left and right but never finding her face.

‘Give my regards to Maître de la Houssaye,’ she said to him, pressing her cold lips to his cheek.

‘Certainly,’ Auguste said, then hurried to rectify his mistake. ‘You wanted the blue silk, didn’t you? Or would you prefer muslin? I have it written down here somewhere.’

Caroline smiled. ‘I don’t mind. It doesn’t matter, does it?’

Auguste fumbled with the reins; guiltily he geed up the horses and was away.

But Caroline did mind. Over the past six months she had seen the depredations of senility on her husband: she’d seen the way Auguste watched André – a fascination that bordered on the awestruck; she had listened to Auguste’s excited breathing at night, and heard his elaborate, circumlocutive mutterings when he thought he was alone. His trip to town today was not to buy cloth for her Christmas dresses but to see the lawyer and change his will in his son’s favour. Now that André was grown, and apparently a prodigy, why delay?

When her husband died – and Caroline thought he must die soon, because how could his softening brain withstand everyday pressure for much longer? – she would not inherit.
Caroline had not been forced into marriage, but she had been pushed. She would have nothing to show for all the long dry years – André would acquire everything: the roof over her head, the clothes on her body.

But was he not also a commodity of sorts, something to be acquired in turn?

Auguste was not expected back from town till late. At two o’clock in the afternoon she summoned André to the schoolroom.

While she waited for him she arranged herself underneath her own portrait, which had been commissioned by Auguste shortly after their marriage. She was painted alone, wearing her white high-necked costume, the cane-fields swaying behind her. Her knees were pressed together and turned slightly to the right, sensuously outlined beneath the flowing white fabric in the painter’s one concession to the feelings she gave rise to. Her eyes met the painter’s; her hands rested on a sketchbook which lay open at a drawing of the whole scene in miniature, complete with green cane and tiny white figure.

Caroline looked up and saw André; smiled and patted the chair beside her with a white-gloved palm.

He stayed where he was, uncertain; but also something else.

As she crossed the room to him, she registered his tallness, and wondered who the boy’s father had been, to have given him such long legs. She reached him, put her arms around his neck and leant the whole of her weight against him.

THAT EVENING
, I didn’t stay late for André. I left early with the others, and Paris was drowning: rain fell in sluices, pooling in the courtyards and battering our umbrellas as we giggled and hopped our way out towards the street. The Metro steamed with the closeness of our bodies pressed together. Further down the carriage, a man smiled shyly at Annick; she smiled sweetly back and then, turning to us, she crossed her eyes and stuck her tongue out; we burst out laughing and the man looked down at his feet.

Annick and Georgette were the last to get out, arm looped in arm. The train moved off: for the final ten minutes of the journey I stood alone, looking at the pitch-black of the tunnel walls.
Let him wonder.

The train surfaced and I left the station and crossed the Boulevard Montparnasse with its array of winking red lights, and turned into rue Boissonnade. The surface of the cobbles shone with water; the rain had stopped, washing everything clean.

From the salon came an unmistakable clicking sound. Mathilde was sitting in her shawl, hunched over the flicker of her hands. When she saw me, she paused in her knitting and brought her lorgnette up to her eye.

‘There you are,’ she said, ‘working hard as usual.’

She paused, as though picking words. I rushed to forestall it: ‘I get paid at the end of the month,’ I said. ‘I can give you all of it, I promise.’

‘No, dear, it isn’t that,’ said Mathilde.

She paused again, as though trying to find how to say a delicate truth. Then she said: ‘A young lady came asking for you, who says she is your sister. I told her there must be some mistake because your family were all dead. But she insisted.’

Camille is sitting on my bed, facing the window. On the coverlet next to her is an envelope which I recognise as one of my own. It belongs to the letter I sent to Père Simon; the return address is scribbled on the flap. Inwardly I flinch, as I recall the closing phrase: …
almost certain that I shall be engaged as the lead in M. Durand’s
Fée Verte.
And we both know, my dear friend, to whom the first invitation for the premiere shall be sent!

Camille doesn’t turn straightaway.

‘I like your dress,’ I say.

She twists to look at me. With a jolt I see that the months since I last saw her have transformed her: the childish scarecrow has been replaced by poise. She plays with the hem of her calico –
this old thing?

‘Pa gave it to me as a leaving present,’ she says. Already she is lying to me; our father would never have allowed her to come of her own free will. She looks up at me, a trick I know well because I use it myself, the slow lifting of the gaze, making me feel the force of her eyes.

‘You can stay for a week,’ I say, at the same time as Camille says ‘I thought I could stay here for a while.’

The impasse stretches out into a silence that feels like falling. I let myself drift – how can I do otherwise: it comes to me suddenly that wherever I go, it will never be far enough. Seeing my face, Camille peels down the sleeve of her dress, revealing a series of vicious welts across her shoulder.

Putting my forefinger over them I can feel how the skin is raised to the touch: the stripe of a willow cane like the one my father used. And there are others, none of them very old,
forming a complex knot of scars intertwined.

Did I already know this, at the back of my mind? That when I left home our father would look for someone else to beat?

‘I can find work as soon as they’ve healed,’ she mumbles into my shoulder. I have pulled her into an embrace so tight that neither of us can speak.

Camille half-woke at three o’clock in the morning.

‘It’s so loud here,’ she complained groggily. I listened, and heard only ordinary sounds – the clink of Monsieur Z’s bottles in the stairwell, the carolling from the all-night restaurants on Boulevard Montparnasse.

I brushed the hair off her forehead to soothe her, and within a few moments she was asleep.

The noise from below faded; there was just the rustle of an old newspaper crackling on the pavement, and then the room was silent. But still I couldn’t sleep.

The street cleaners sluicing water over cobbles woke me at half past five and I lay watching the pale light filter in through the shutters until it was time to get up.

Camille turned over just when I thought I had reached the door without waking her. She propped herself on one elbow, and my heart sank as I recognised the expression on her face: matchless cunning that was not cunning enough to hide itself. It was as though the previous evening’s reunion had dropped away.

‘Are you off to work with Durand?’ she asked.

I was immediately on guard. ‘How did you know?’ I asked, trying to keep the strain from my voice.

‘Your letter, silly.’ She yawned. ‘Père Simon was so impressed.
A senior producer
, he said,
I always knew it
, he said,
always
, like this.’ She made her voice fluting, and clasped her hands piously to her chest, eyelids batting, expecting me to join in the joke.

Then her eyes narrowed.

‘You’re wearing your smart dress,’ she said. ‘There’s a boyfriend. You didn’t write about that.’ Her eyes glittered with joy of the discovery.

What tic of the mouth could I employ to convince her of my truthfulness, when my mouth was the same as hers?

‘It’s just an ordinary dress,’ I said.

She studied me for a few seconds, then her mouth twisted into a smile. ‘When you see Durand, you can tell him about me,’ she said. ‘Tell him I’ll come and work with him too. Tell him I’ve got a
skill
.’

She nodded proudly to her valise, still standing by the bed. For the first time I noticed it was new – square and black, more like an artist’s paint-box than a suitcase.

‘What
skill
?’ I asked.

Camille bit her lower lip between her front teeth, and shook her head at me. ‘Tell you tonight,’ she said. She flopped back down onto the bed and closed her eyes.