Paris Requiem (27 page)

He hesitated and she rushed on. ‘I have no plans and I would really rather not be alone. Unless you would prefer a restaurant.’

‘No, no. Dinner here would be grand. Thank you.’

‘Good. I’m so glad. Make yourself at home. I’ll just be a few minutes.’

He must have dozed off for the next thing he knew someone was shaking him and he was stepping out of a deep, dank, hole – a grave, yes, where a succession of women lay. Maisie, sleeping peacefully. And Rachel twice buried, as herself and as Olympe and in two different garbs, one white and girlish and innocent, the other a concoction of veils shielding only nakedness from the musty earth which smelled painfully of excrement and lilac. But also Marguerite, her face
shifting
with the light so that she was a girl and then a wizened hag. No, no, it was his mother and Ellie, her mouth round in a soundless scream. All of them merging so that the grave became a catacomb with winding earthen paths and an assortment of doors behind which shadowy figures hid and mocked his slow, stiff passage.

His eyes felt sore from too much grit and too much seeing and he barely recognised the figure who muttered the soft
‘Monsieur, Monsieur, si vous voulez bien …’

James shook himself awake. The waves of sleep still pulling at him, he followed the butler up the stairs and along a corridor. ‘If Monsieur would like to do his toilette …’ The man opened a door, waved his arm in an arc and with a bow left him.

James found himself in an ample bedroom. Its dark blue curtains, narrow bed, and sturdy writing table, bore a
distinctly
masculine flavour. An inner door led to a bathroom and as if he were under an injunction to follow Pierre’s orders, he did as the man had bade him. A razor, badger brush and shaving soap lay neatly laid out by the sink and he made use of them.

The brush seemed still to contain some moisture. Someone had used it recently. As if in a dream, he opened a
wardrobe
door and found a selection of men’s clothes. He stared at these and wondered if he was still asleep, then wondered again if they might be Raf’s, if this might be the room Raf used when he stayed here. Or perhaps Marguerite still kept a room for her absent husband.

He examined the clothes with a curiosity which made him leery of himself and decided they couldn’t be Raf’s, the shoes certainly were far too small, the boots too highly polished. With an uneasy sensation, he closed the door and went to sit at the writing desk, despite himself opening the drawers, as if he had been metamorphosed into a mannerless Chief
Inspector
Durand who would stop at nothing.

He found some writing paper and envelopes and then in the second drawer, a lone silk ascot of blue-patterned paisley. He lifted it to his nostrils and sniffed, then stared out into the dark street, the shadows of dream gradually dispersing into a reality he would rather not have confronted. Raf had worn a tie just like this one when he was last in Boston. James remembered it clearly, had thought to himself that with that tie and jaunty corduroy jacket, Raf must think he was
masquerading
as the Prince of Wales.

Dinner was not in the grand dining hall but in a more
intimate
chamber which James characterised for himself as a breakfast room. It wore all the traces of Marguerite’s
particular
charm – a subtle understated taste which spoke of hidden depths and an intelligence which was still opaque to him. By the window there was a round table of medium size set for two with delicate china and glistening silver, at its centre a bowl of artfully arranged flowers. The furniture was mellow walnut with a light rococo touch. But the paintings were all in the modern style, bright daubs of colour merging into shape
only if one kept one’s distance. There were decorative clusters of vine and flower clambering over women’s gowns and along walls. There were lilies like dabs of moving light in dappled pools. There was a dance hall in which women in rustling skirts kicked their legs high, their faces harshly animal-like in the yellowish glare of lamplight.

‘Do you like my little collection, James?’

Marguerite had come into the room silently and he veered in surprise, his nod over-hearty.

‘Later I will show you the one I have of Olympe. It’s not by Max Henry and I’m not really certain it will be to your taste …’ her voice trailed off and then as if she were carrying on an argument with herself, she added emphatically. ‘But I like it very much.’

‘Olympe was obviously much painted in her brief life.’

She flashed him a dark look and he realised that he had made it sound a reprehensible matter, though he wasn’t sure that was what he had intended.

‘If you move in the circles in which Olympe increasingly moved, it’s hardly rare. Actors, artists, bohemians, they mix and mingle.’

‘And you?’

‘Do you mean have I been painted?’ She gestured him towards a chair and he suddenly took in her gown, no longer black, but a rustle of palest peach silk which made her skin glow. Her mood had changed with her gown.

He nodded. ‘Not that any painter could do you justice,’ he heard himself murmur in an uncharacteristic compliment. ‘But what I also meant was that these are your circles too. I find that slightly curious, given all this.’ He gestured at the house, its ostensible wealth.

She laughed. ‘Artists have always needed patrons.’

‘You don’t behave like a patron. You behave like one of them.’

‘I shall take that, too, as a compliment, though I know you
didn’t intend it as such. You don’t altogether approve of my friends, nor I take it of your brother’s.’

‘Are they the same on all counts?’

‘Hardly.’ Her smile was impish. ‘I believe the other night at my soirée you met a few whom Raf would rather not
countenance
. He is not always tolerant, though I suspect his
intolerance
differs from yours. But that is as it should be.’

He considered this not altogether happily as Pierre came into the room balancing a tray. He watched the
impeccable
ease with which he served them, the heavy silver spoon dipped in the tureen, the carefully poured wine.

‘What I think I was getting at,’ he said when the man had closed the door behind him, ‘was that I find it slightly
difficult
to understand the facility with which you move between what you call the bohemian … and these others … these …

‘The gratin of the Saint-Germain.’

He nodded and returned her teasing smile. ‘Yes, and my brother.’

‘You might add yourself.’

‘I hardly count. I’m just passing through.’

‘Now it is you who are searching for compliments.’

‘No, no.’ He tasted the soup. ‘Maybe it’s the fluidity of social relations here that constantly surprises me.’

‘I never thought I would hear that from an American. Yours is the country where people rise from nowhere. Where mobility is everything.’

‘You mustn’t believe the myths. We’re as jealous of our hierarchies as the next nation.’

Her smile took on an edge. ‘But by here, I take it you mean my home, not Paris in general.’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘And by social, you mean rather more …’ Her laugh tinkled. ‘You are suspicious of me, James. I’m not sure whether I should be flattered at the interest it shows, or made desolate.
Let me tell you a little about myself. Perhaps it will help. Paris, you know, is not my first home. Like you, like Raf, perhaps even like Olympe, I’m something of a foreigner. And we foreigners have to learn to mould ourselves and the world around us a little, if we are to survive.’

‘You’re foreign?’ His tone conveyed all his astonishment.

‘Yes, in a way I most decidedly am. If not to France itself, then to the mysterious ways of this city. I’m a country girl.’ Her eyes teased him. There were flecks of yellow in them, like a cat’s and they drew him in hypnotically as she began her story.

It was a story of an ancient and noble family, rich in lands though no longer in money. Marguerite was the last of her particular line. Her father had already been old when she was conceived and had girded his loins for a son, not the daughter who had emerged. He had pretended not to notice the difference and had proceeded to bring her up as if she were the boy he had set his heart on, particularly once her mother had died when Marguerite was eight.

She had been given the freedom of the vast estate and the sizeable manor. She rode and walked and swam and played with the peasants’ and gamekeeper’s children. She hunted with her father, learned to set traps, skin rabbit and pluck pheasant. By the time she was nine she could handle a pistol adequately. The rifle had come soon after.

Not that her father put no store on a more cerebral
education
. He was a passionate naturalist and her earliest memories were of collecting samples of the local flora and fauna with him – of watching ants construct their extraordinary labyrinths, or woodlice at work on garden rubble. The house had a fine library and she was allowed free rein there as well. Governesses and tutors came and went, leaving her with a smattering of mathematics and chemistry, some Latin and more English, not to mention a love of drawing, particularly the butterflies in her father’s collection.

All this went on happily enough until she was sixteen, when a cousin of her father’s suddenly appeared from Paris and convinced him that this was no way to bring up a girl. Within a month, a wood had been sold off and, funds in hand, she was sent to Paris to live with her cousin and learn the ways of the capital. Translated into common speech this meant, of course, the art of finding a suitable husband.

‘You can’t imagine the shock of it.’ Marguerite gave James a smile dazzling in its irony. ‘Not only the city with its
labyrinth
of streets and daily round of sensations. But the
complete
physical re-education. I literally had to learn how to walk, how to smile, how to lower my eyelids and turn my head and lift what seemed an eternity of skirt, not to mention an assortment of china and silver.’

‘You seem to have learned very well,’ James met her on it as Pierre cleared the dishes. They moved to the corner sofa for coffee.

‘Oh yes. I had excellent teachers. I’ll introduce you to my cousin one day. She’s no longer in her prime, but she’s a formidable woman. Quite frightening in fact. And within a year she had me engaged, to an altogether suitable party – moneyed, sufficiently so to save our family estate, and titled, though perhaps not quite so grandly as my father. And wonderfully eligible.’

‘The Conte de Landois?’

‘The very one.’

‘But you didn’t get on?’

‘The families got on. It was a fine match. And he cut a fine figure. So fine that for a time, I was really altogether
passionate
about him.’ She looked away, her voice receding into a near whisper. ‘He was a man of considerable experience and he taught me many things. More things than I think you would wish to know about, James.’

It took him a moment to guess at what she meant. He hid his
discomfort behind a cloud of smoke. When he met her eyes again, they shone with a troubled light. He had a sense that a lock had been turned and he was peeking into a bedroom. The bed was dishevelled, a bare leg rested against a sheet. He gazed down at the floor, but her voice brought him back.

‘And the count was proud of me, too, quite enchanted at first.’

‘Yet the marriage was not a success,’ James heard himself say in a voice that had a creak in it. Part of him wanted her to hurry on. This was dangerous matter.

Her smile had a trace of weariness. ‘There are things that go on between a man and a woman, as you well know, that are not altogether easy to explain. Olivier was, is much older than I am. He’s a man of the world, but where I was concerned he grew a little too forcefully restrictive.’ She laughed, turned her face away, though not quickly enough, so that he saw pain flash across it.

After a moment she said in a small dreamy voice. ‘The sphere of my possibilities shrank. It became far narrower than in my childhood. We were obviously incompatible.’

‘Yet you didn’t divorce.’

Her laugh tinkled. ‘Here we sometimes say that though love cannot last, marriage must. Olivier and I reached an accommodation. Now we get on very well. At a distance. He has learned to appreciate the country. And I the city. Which is why I began to tell you all this, I believe. Because I started off as something of a foreigner, not to mention an ardent observer of natural life, I’m drawn to the diverse company you wondered about.’

‘Amongst which you include my brother.’

‘Very much so.’ She smoothed her silk skirts with an air of almost girlish modesty.

He watched her in silence for a moment and he reflected on all that she had said.

‘You know, if I were Durand and I knew of your
relationship
with my brother, I would say that perhaps you had far more reason to want to see the end of Olympe than Raf, himself. The passion in that case would make sense. The
crime passionel
as you call it.’

Marguerite’s laugh held a touch of exhilaration. He
suddenly
imagined her with a pistol. ‘I can assure you, James, that I have usually won my men in other ways.’

‘But not, it seems, my brother.’

‘The story may not be over.’ Her eyes challenged him as if she were willing him to probe further or to meet her in a duel. ‘You don’t approve?’

‘No, perhaps not. But nor would I have approved of Olympe.’ He paused, chuckled at the bravery of the words that had leapt into his mind which he now spoke out loud. ‘Perhaps I would merely have wanted you both for myself.’

She studied him with what he suddenly saw as the cool glance of the naturalist. ‘You’re a handsome man, James. And you have a rare honesty.’ She rose and walked towards the windows, pulling the curtain back to peer out into darkness. When she turned back to him, there was a tremor in her voice. ‘What you say about Durand is, of course, true. I’m surprised he hasn’t been to question me.’

‘Your status shields you. Then, too, he might not know about your relations with Raf.’