Petite Mort (4 page)

The siren wailed to a halt – a baby that had cried itself out.

As we came close to the chimneys, the stream of workers diverted – they called their goodbyes to each other and marched smartly to left and right, disappearing along the avenues between the factory buildings, until nothing was left but the ringing sound of boots in the distance.

Then it was quiet, and I was alone, and stood clutching my invitation. In every direction were buildings whose shining windows gave nothing away.

‘Mademoiselle? Can I help you?’

A young man trotted towards me across the courtyard. A wide, anxious face peered at me from beneath a fringe of
carroty hair; the buttons on his guardsman’s uniform were carefully polished.

I showed him my note. He peered at it. ‘The
Fée Verte
audition? You want the
Société Cinématographique
studio. That glass one there.’

I thanked him with my warmest smile, just to watch the colour flood up from his neck and drown his face in pink.

‘I’m Paul,’ he said, to nobody, as I walked away.

I had expected glamour – a taste of my future – in my surroundings, but the audition waiting room looked unloved: dusty, with seats arranged around the walls, and just one small window giving onto the courtyard. The only sound came from the rustling of notes and play texts; five other women sat around the room, their heads bent in nervous last-minute study.

My hand went to my hair, and I sat down next to the window, and opened my play text at Lady Macbeth’s famous soliloquy.

The door to the audition room opened, and a man’s head appeared in the gap. Everyone’s head snapped up. ‘Lemesurier, Bérénice!’ the man said. A woman on the other side of the room got to her feet, smoothing her skirts nervously, and followed him through.

It grew stuffy in the little room. I turned my face to the window behind me and let the breeze dance across it. The sun was high in the sky, which was a faint, creamy blue. In the distance I thought I heard, carried to me on the wind, the sounds of the city: catcalls, the hum of traffic.

I recited my audition speech under my breath to myself one more time.

Five minutes later the door to the audition room opened, and Bérénice Lemesurier walked across the antechamber without hesitating. At the exit she paused and turned to face the room.

‘Good luck, everyone,’ she said, and left.

The morning progressed. One by one the women went silently in, came out just as quietly, and left. At last there was just me and one other; a thick-waisted woman in her thirties with a bright, expectant look on her face. She was obviously too old, and her features too coarse, to hope to succeed; but even so, when the door opened and her name was called, and she turned to smile bravely at me, I wished she wouldn’t go.

A siren wailed, very close this time. There came a patter of feet on flagstones, and a gaggle of dark-uniformed women crossed the courtyard outside, laughing to each other. Behind them came three young men, jumping and whooping.
Of course she will marry you!
cried one man to another;
of course!
and one of the girls turned round and beamed at him. The sun lowered itself another notch, and the door burst open, and the woman hurried out, head down, not looking at me; a man’s voice called my name.

Three men sat behind a table at the far end of the room. The windows were small and high on the walls and gave little light.

The men looked at me with interest. One narrowed his eyes and drew on his cigarette, then puffed the smoke from the side of his mouth thoughtfully; the second, a large man in an embroidered waistcoat, looked up from doodling on the notepad in front of him.

It was the third man who caught my attention. He sat very still, with his hands loose on the table in front of him. His hair was dark and curly, worn too long, I thought, for a man in his thirties; his chin was a point as sharp as a weapon.

‘Mademoiselle Roux, Adèle,’ the cigarette man said, drawing out the
e
in my name. He frowned at a piece of paper on the table. ‘You wrote a letter, is that right? To M. Durand here?’

He indicated the curly-haired man, who inclined his head
and smiled as though a private joke had been made.

‘
I am of no little beauty
,’ the cigarette-man read out loud, ‘
and have memorised the principal roles of the theatrical oeuvre.
’

He sat back and folded his arms. My hair stuck damp to my forehead.

‘Shall I start?’ I asked, finally.

The fat man put his fist to his throat and cleared it, a loud, amused
harrumph
: ‘Please do, Mademoiselle.’

Halfway through my speech, the audition room had faded into a castle shuddering in high winds, its walls spongy with moss. Crows tottered on the battlements; ambitious servants whispered behind cupped hands. The curly-haired man was the one I had chosen to fix upon as my nerveless husband; he watched me back, but with an expression that I couldn’t read.

I shuddered to a close.

The curly-haired man had sat back away from the light so that his face was invisible. The thin man stubbed his cigarette indifferently into a saucer. The fat man’s face was stretched in a yawn. ‘No,’ he said. The material of his waistcoat strained as he sat forward to the table. ‘No, André,’ he said to the curly-haired man, ‘it won’t do. What was all this business with the hands?’

He moved his arms in a grotesque windmill, and swivelled to stare at me crossly. ‘Don’t tell me you can see her playing the Absinthe Fairy.’

None of the other men spoke.

‘Our old faces do us perfectly well,’ he said, drawing a line in ink on his notes – which could only be my name, being crossed off a list – ‘no need for any new ones.’

I made a twitching movement towards the door, and nobody tried to stop me.

The sky was speckled with early stars; when I reached the exit I
laid my forehead on the stones of Pathé’s gatepost and thought of Mathilde’s thin smile.

It was only vaguely that I heard the sound of purposeful steps coming towards me, and my eye caught the flicker of a coat-tail; then the curly-headed man was leaning against the wall next to me.

His eyes were very fine: amused, smoky-grey, with pupils which extended far into the iris.

He smiled widely. ‘I am André Durand and, as I think we have established, you wrote me a letter.’

I tossed my head. Had he come to humiliate me further?

‘You may know we have just set up a department of seamstresses for our larger productions. We need a costumière for the
Fée Verte
film.’

There was a twang in his accent –
kos-toom-iaire
– a tiny imperfection that gave him away: not French.

‘Steady work with prospects,’ he said. His gaze travelled brazenly up over my best dress as far as my throat. ‘Anyone can see you are interested in couture.’ (
Koo-toor
.)

My one chance had slipped through my fingers, and now this man was offering me a job handling cloth. Was it mockery?

But André gave me the gentlest of reassuring nods.

ALL THAT NIGHT
I thought about him; about the point of his chin and the way his voice sandpapered over its vowels.

The very next morning, I appeared at the Pathé gates, a quivering vision in my best shawl, certain that André would be waiting for me, craning my neck to look for him as I was bumped along by the waiting crowd; listening in rising irritation to the creak of the gates and the complaining siren. He would appear out of nowhere, take my elbow and smile an apology:
Yesterday was a travesty. Chances like you don’t come up very often
; then usher me into my own dressing room, the pressure of his fingertips warm on my forearm.

But when the crowd cleared, instead of André a lumpen young woman stood in the courtyard, her hands folded officiously over her apron. Where her flesh met her blue uniform it stuck in great damp patches; her waist was thickish, her feet flat. When she saw me she attempted a smile: a crooked thing, more than half dislike.

‘I’m Elodie, the head costumière. M. Durand sent me to show you where we work.’

I returned the smile in the spirit it had been given. She turned on her heel and crossed the courtyard, turning left into an alleyway between buildings.

In a minute or so, we came to a long, low block at the end of the alley. A number was painted in white on the side facing us.

‘Building Number One,’ Elodie said, ‘where Charles Pathé
has his offices,’ but I was unable to comment, for a cloud of flies had materialised in front of us: I spat several into my handkerchief. Elodie laughed. ‘The chemicals from the filmstrip building bring them. You’ll get used to it.’

Eyes streaming, too proud to complain, I pressed my handkerchief to my nose, and was glad when we walked up the steps and in through the front entrance of Building I; corridors flashed past; soon we were in the bowels of the building. I craned my neck round every corner, hoping to hear a confident laugh, or catch a glimpse of André’s immaculate torso and curly hair.

‘In here,’ Elodie said, pushing open a heavy door.

The room’s single humming light bulb showed me an Aladdin’s Cave of garments: racks of clothes, rubbing shoulders gorgeously, stretching away into felty darkness.

Nearest the door was a set of tables with sewing machines upon them, and a set of women to go with it.

‘Solange,’ Elodie said, pointing at a pale woman in her fifties, who blinked at me from behind enormous spectacles. ‘Georgette,’ – barely fourteen years old, with wrists like twigs; ‘Annick,’ a woman with pale ginger hair that sparked under the electric lights. All the women were sewing costumes made of green velvet.

Elodie indicated a sewing machine on a vacant table near the entrance. ‘We’ll get you a uniform sorted out tomorrow. It’s costumes for that absinthe film today. A hundred forest fairies, we need. Patterns are on the cards in front of you.’

I stared at the machine.

‘You do know how to work one of these?’ she said.

Two hours later my foot ached from operating the pedal; my fingers were rubbed raw and pricked full of tiny holes, and my first fairy uniform lay mangled in front of me. The other women appeared to notice nothing; their faces were bent over their work. The hammering of the needles rang in my ears.

My nails sank viciously into the velveteen flesh of the fairy costume. Why had he buried me alive in here if he wanted nothing from me?

Pathé as a studio, of course, was never empty, the great production line worked twenty-four hours a day, would have worked more if it was possible; but in our small department we always went home on time.

At five o’clock on my first day my quota of costumes was nowhere near ready; I announced that I would stay until I had finished. The other women nodded indifferently and, one by one, vanished. Only Elodie paused in the doorway, looking at me suspiciously; thinking, I suppose, that I was plotting to usurp her role as chief costumière. During our midday break she had told us about her son, Charles-Edouard, to whom she longed to rush home each night; now she was caught between her affection for him and her own ambition. She had shown us a photograph of the child: a jowly baby and a younger Elodie, posed ridiculously in front of a painted seaside backdrop. I had eyed her scornfully, but was forced to admit that, once upon a time, she might have been attractive. Attractive enough, at any rate – I found out later that Charles-Edouard’s father was a minor aristocrat whose occasional cheques were never quite enough.

At last, with a worried smile, Elodie picked up her purse and straightened her hat on her head, and left. The door closed on her and I was alone; I stopped pressing the pedal, stretched and got to my feet, jubilant. I had never really intended to do any more work. On my own I could explore the studio further; perhaps seek out where André’s offices were, the better to bump into him as if by accident on some subsequent day.

In fact, I never left the costume department. Is there anything more gorgeous than a place of work without workers? Loneliness hung on the air; from the corridors outside I heard
nothing. I went first to the racks of old costumes behind our desks, and buried my face in their mothy scent.
It doesn’t matter
, I told the clothes,
I still love you
; their arms waved helplessly in reply.

Let’s be clear: it was not the word ‘love’ which summoned him; but there he was anyway, lounging in the doorway.

‘Evidently you are enjoying your first day.’

I dropped the dress which I had been holding up to my cheek in an asinine fashion.

‘You are an unusual person, Mlle Roux.’

‘Why is that?’ I asked.

‘Beautiful people do not usually feel the pain of inanimate objects.’

It was all I needed him to say. I surprised myself with my boldness in stepping up to him, and raising my chin so that it almost met his, asking for a kiss. He looked at me – eyes grey as the Pas de Calais – and we stood for a while. I placed hot palms on his chest; he laughed again, and then he did kiss me.

The kiss said,
look at you, a snake with your prey
. It said,
do you suppose this will secure you an acting role?

And mine said,
yes
.

I went home. Agathe, sensing a change, turned in her chair and looked at me for ten seconds or so. She rolled me a cigarette and we smoked it together. Far off, the pinnacle of the Bastille was pointing at the moon; that evening, the weight of her arm next to mine was not an intrusion but a comfort.

One other thing: I leant back after the act, gasping as women are supposed to gasp, and asked that hackneyed question: ‘Where did you come from?’

And to my very great surprise, he told me. Not all in one go – and not everything – only a fool would suppose André Durand ever bared his soul to anyone – but a little each night, piece by piece. Just enough to keep me wanting more.

André, i.

Grosse Tete, Louisiana, July 1886, population 245: a few tin huts, eternally catching their balance on the crust of mud separating settlement from bayou. Beyond the Grosse Tete Convenience Store and the Grosse Tete Laughing Woman bar, a signpost extends its white finger –