The Dead of Winter

by Lisa Appignanesi

I find myself returning the pressure of her hand. ‘I wish I could, too, Gisèle.’

  She gestures towards the empty chair opposite me and I nod, wave the waiter over for another carafe, a second glass.

  ‘I knew Madeleine was upset. But I never thought…’ Gisèle’s hand finds her hair again, as if reassurance lay in its bristling texture. Her wide mouth trembles, settles in an expression which would like to be a smile but doesn’t quite make it. ‘You know how you retell yourself stories once you know their end. So you can make some sense of them. Exonerate yourself, maybe. Well hell, I’ve been trying with Madeleine. Ever since I heard. You live down there, now, don’t you? In Ste-Anne. Where she did it.’

  I nod. ‘Did you see a lot of Madeleine these last weeks?’

  ‘Not so much at the very last. I’m the publicity director. My work’s all at the beginning.’

  ‘And the beginning wasn’t exactly propitious this time round…’

  ‘Not exactly.’ She scowls. ‘The bastards had it in for her. I think they wrote their features, even their reviews, before they saw the play. I warned her. We laughed about it. Madeleine and I go way back, you know that. She even scribbled a mock piece for me, told me we should publish it ahead of time, anonymously. A pre-emptive strike, so the bile would be puked up early. It went along the lines of “Madeleine Blais returns to the Montréal stage. Perhaps she shouldn’t have bothered to honour us with her fading presence. All those years in the movies have made her forget… blah, blah.” ’

  ‘But she was hurt, nonetheless.’

  ‘Yes. No. I don’t know.’ Gisèle pulls out a cigarette and lights it with a shaky hand before I can locate the matches. ‘She didn’t really seem to care, that was the odd thing. Not really. At first I thought she was just putting on a brave front. But then… I changed my mind. She really wasn’t thinking about the reviews, even about the play.’

  ‘Only about the killings.’

  ‘So you know?’

  I shrug. ‘We talked about it briefly. Once. What did she tell you?’

  ‘It’s not so much what she told me. It’s what she did. Not only did she go to the vigil, to the funeral mass, she went to the hospital to visit the wounded. She thought she could give them something, cheer them perhaps, with her presence - the famous star and all that. She even tried to see the parents of the dead girls. One of the fathers talked to her at length, wept in her arms for hours. I know about that, because she was late back to the theatre and we had to postpone the curtain for fifteen minutes.’

  Gisèle shivers, stubs out her cigarette. ‘She looked me in the eyes and said “It should have been me. That poor girl was just a child. She had her whole life in front of her. They all did. I’ve already had more than my share.” ’

  We stare at each other.

  ‘I should have suspected then. I should have said something. Done something.’

  I squeeze her hand. ‘We all feel like that.’

  Silence covers us, an airless capsule. The voices of the other diners, the clatter of glass and silver, seem to come from another galaxy.

  At last I say, just to say something, ‘Would you like to eat, Gisèle?’

  She shakes her head. ‘I’m with friends. I should get back to them.’

  But she doesn’t move. She frowns. ‘Maybe you don’t know, but on the day of the assassinations, Madeleine was over there. At the University. Not at the Polytechnic. But next door. In the main building. She was going to see someone. I don’t know who. But when she came out the ambulances were already there. The police. Maybe that’s what it was. Maybe because she saw the stretchers, the bodies…’

  She reaches for another cigarette, then changes her mind. ‘She didn’t want to talk about that. But I’ve been thinking. Maybe she also saw something beforehand. Maybe she saw the killer. Maybe she felt guilty.’

  ‘We’re all shrouded in guilt, Gisèle.’ I cut off her speculations and she nods sagely, like a dutiful girl who has just been reprimanded.

  ‘Did you see her? See the body I mean?’ she asks after a moment.

  The wine I am pouring spills over the edge of the glass.

  ‘I can’t talk about that.’

  ‘No.’ Her voice is small, but her eyes hover over me insistently. ‘I …’

  ‘But I wanted to ask you something. Was she seeing anyone? A man?’

  ‘Oh Pierre!’ Gisèle squeezes my hand again, mistakes the motive for my question. Maybe it is only half-mistaken.

  ‘Was she?’ I press her.

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  There is something in the way she says it, her eyes on her wineglass, her fingers tapping its edge nervously, that makes me think she is trying to protect my feelings. I want to rephrase my question, but a spectacled man I vaguely recognize, interrupts us.

  ‘The food’s come, Gisèle.’ He looks at me and pauses. ‘Pierre Rousseau? I’m sorry. I didn’t realise…’

  ‘It’s alright. I was just going.’ I extricate myself from social discomfort, give Gisèle a peck on the cheek.

  ‘Ring me,’ she calls after me. ‘I haven’t got your number.’

  A thin spray of frost coats the car window. Restlessly I wait for heat and windscreen wipers to do their work. With a bare wedge of visibility, I race towards the Chemin de la Côte-Ste-Catherine. Something in the meeting with Gisèle has fueled my impatience. I don’t know what it is. But I am avid now for what Madeleine’s apartment may reveal.

  Perhaps my speed is simply a way of outflanking ghosts.

  I don’t slow down to glance at the imposing bulk of Jean Brébeuf, my old college. Yet I find myself veering left and then left again to make a slight detour along the Boulevard Edouard-Monpetit. Even if from the distance of a slope, I want to see the site of the tragedy which so disturbed Madeleine.

  The area is deserted. A lone man walks down a path and pauses beneath a streetlamp. In the light his face is like finely wrinkled parchment. Behind him the university buildings are shadowy, pale coffins unlit from within. The lack of chattering, hurrying students makes the place feel ominous.

  I stop the car and get out. I walk and breathe in cold, crisp air. Wedged in the snow, a stark reminder of horror and grief, is a clump of carnations, as red as blood. I shiver.

  I try to imagine that fateful afternoon, try to imagine it as Madeleine must first have seen it - the milling students, the raised voices, the nervous anticipation of exams. And then, the scene when she emerged from her meeting, the scream of sirens, the panic in the air, the sobs, the bodies. I taste her fear, the distress she communicated to me. The taste is foul, bitter. It settles in a rancid unswallowable lump in my throat as I stare at those smudges of red in the snow.

  I tell myself Madeleine’s unconsolable grief is enough of an explanation for her decision to take her own life. I do not quite believe myself. I know too much.

  Back in the car, I make a u-turn, and find myself at the corner of the Rue Fendall. It was here I lived during one of my years as a law student. Lived well. I was house-sitting for a professor on sabbatical. It was here, too, that my adult life with Madeleine began.

  I race past the house, suddenly afraid of the memories its innocent facade conceals, and make my way past the cemetery, up and over the hump of the Côte-des-Neiges and down the steep crest of the south side of the hill. But there is another memory waiting to pounce on me here. I cannot avoid it, can never avoid it. It is there indelibly etched in my mind. It controls my limbs, forces my foot to the brake, whether I want to slow or not.

  Dawn. A low milky sun finds crevices between buildings, throws slats across the road. We are hurtling downhill in an old car, a 1950s Dodge with razor sharp fins and painted in unbelievably tacky tones of pink and purple.

  I am in the back, my elbows planted on the front seat, my face visible in the rear-view mirror, where I can also see Madeleine’s profile. She is wedged against the driver, a broad shouldered, square-jawed hunk, whose thick fingers grasp the wheel. Nestling on his crotch, its nozz
le pointed towards the floor, lies a gun. One of his hands moves repeatedly from the steering wheel to the gun and back again. Madeleine’s fingers are on his thigh. They grip and fondle by turn. Her face is alight with a kind of soaring excitement.

  Crowded against the door in the front seat is the cameraman whom I don’t watch, whom I am not allowed to see. Not that I would want to. Between Madeleine’s hands and face, between the gun and the speed, my attention is more than fully occupied.

  We repeat this race down the hill six times. The cameraman isn’t always with us: on three occasions, he sits in an open backed van which precariously matches our speed. And though Madeleine’s expression is meant to replay itself each time, I can feel the shifts in her, her mounting exhilaration.

  I clutch the back of the seat and wonder why I am doing this and wait for the crash I know must come at the intersection of Guy and Sherbrooke, where fate and script coincide to provide us with a red light to run.

  The film is a very low or no budget operation and Madeleine has railroaded me into playing a bit part. For free, of course. The director is a friend, a former teacher at the theatre school. Madeleine is thrilled. It is her first movie role and the plot, which has been cursorily explained to me, is good enough - a loose mix of new wave and B-movie.

  We are in the tail-end of the Duplessis era. Duplessis was our local, second-rate Franco. He ran Québec like his own feudal fiefdom. For sixteen long years between 1944 and his death in 1960, if a town voted in numbers usually larger than its population for his Union National party, it got new hospitals, new bridges, new schools, new roads. And a few dollars on top for individual pleasures. If it didn’t, too bad.

  Under Duplessis, Montreal boasted an exemplary underworld, full of small and bigger time hoods who doubled, when necessary, as strike-breakers. Full, too, of strippers and drugs and clubs. A liquor licence went for as much as $30,000. In 1961, when a new government finally came in, the price went down by $29,900.

  Duplessis collected an estimated hundred million in graft. The powerful English community remained silent throughout this corruption. In exchange they were allowed to run the province’s economy -- the trust companies, the banks, the insurance and brokerage houses.

  Yes, Duplessis was our very own despot. And like an African dictator, his authority was maintained by the complicity of the colonizers - or so a later generation of commentators would analyse his regime. In the early sixties after his reign was finally over, whenever we saw a road being dug up, we would laugh and say someone was looking for Duplessis’ buried treasure.

  The movie which had us racing down the slope of the mountain was to give us a critical take on the era. Its hero was a hood who was also a strike breaker, Madeleine, the floozy who makes him see the wrong of his ways.

  So, initially I wasn’t averse to playing a bit part as a fellow gangster. All in a good cause. And, of course, I was curious. But no one had prepared me for the dangers, both physical and mental, of film-making.

  Madeleine’s hand on our hero’s thigh, the excitement in her face, seems to me to have little to do with play-acting. Nor does the blare of the car we miss by centimetres at the junction of Guy and Sherbrooke. Certainly, the police who minutes later pull us over to the curb, have taken their lines from a different script. It requires rather a lot of explaining from our director and a great deal of tearful pouting from Madeleine - though this indeed does bear the authentic stamp of acting - before we are sent off with a reprimand and a ticket for running a light.

  The day’s filming is at an end. All of the crew have other jobs to go to. Madeleine refuses a lift and together we hop on a bus back towards my place. She is utterly unaware of the inquisitive stares the early morning workers cast at us. Amongst them, she looks less like an off-hours fifties floozy than a girl dressed up in her mother’s cast-away clothes. Yet the striped pedal pushers above high-heeled sandals, the fluffy turquoise angora sweater and equally fluffed-up hair suit her wonderfully. She is radiant. And as taut as an electric wire. Madeleine likes danger, thrives on risk.

  ‘I saw you,’ she says, as we edge into a back seat. Her tongue moistens the bright pink of her lipstick. She looks at me with golden eyes. ‘That was clever. Stashing the gun under the seat before the cops could notice it.’

  She presses close to me, puts her fingers exactly where they had been on that other man’s thigh. ‘Very clever. Alain thinks you’re good, you know. He told me. Musing and muscular, were his words. Good combination for the screen.’

  She laughs that teasing laugh of hers, as if she knows more than she is saying, then runs her nail along the inside of my leg, so that I have to imprison her caress. I no longer wonder at the actor’s speed. In fact, as Madeleine’s excitement seizes me, I no longer wonder at all.

  My hand is on her nape. It is slightly damp with with the heaviness of her hair. I touch it with my lips and feel her hand climbing higher.

  ‘Come on,’ she whispers. We leap off the bus and she starts to run. I am right beside her. We run the two blocks to my house and before I have closed the door behind us, she has kicked off her shoes and unzipped the pedal pushers. Her panties are wet, as moist as her mouth. I cannot say we make love. We are too hungry. As if it were the first time.

  It is always the first time with Madeleine and always potentially, the last. We fuck. Against the door, my hands on her buttocks, her taut breasts pushed against me. On the plush carpet, her hair streaming over my face so that I lose my sight as I arch against her, abandon myself altogether to the frenzied pulse of our desire.

  Afterwards, she strokes my hair and my chest and my groin and looks at me with that gamine smile, which is a mixture of surprise and shyness and impish delight. ‘You know, Pierre, I’ve been thinking. Now that divorce is so easy, we should get married. What do you say? It would please Mémère.’

  I am so startled, I don’t answer right away. I have never thought about marriage, but now its romance envelops me as surely as Madeleine’s scent. A Madeleine to have and to hold in a formalized forever. A wife who is Madeleine to be conquered anew everyday in the intimacy of familiar places. A Madeleine to be claimed and tamed in a large marital bed. A Madeleine in the morning shower, putting on make-up, parading new dresses for me, laughing. A joint pattern of meals and washing up and arguments and truces. A Madeleine to introduce to colleagues as ‘my wife’.

  As this fantasy of the quotidian plays itself out before me, I find we are making love again. There is a kind of solemnity to our movements, a slow tenderness, as if the event, once spoken, had already occurred. I marvel anew at the curve of her hip, the tawny perfection of her skin, the surprising weight of her breasts, the perfect marriage of our movements. I groan under the pressure of her lips and fingers and as I move into that warm, secret space, I murmur a yes and think I am the luckiest man in the world.

  I should have known that Lady Luck is the ficklest of women.

  5

  ______

  The apartment Madeleine took over some three years ago when she decided she wanted a more permanaent base in Montréal stands half-way down the hill which marked our first and only joint experience in film. I never dared ask her whether she had chosen it because of that.

  Now it is too late.

  The building is a large, modern, mustard-brick block with a drive and a collonaded entrance. I fumble with the keys, let myself into the brightly-lit, maroon-carpetted lobby and slope towards the elevator. I avoid the inquisitive glance of a tiny, fur-wrapped woman who emerges from its silent doors with a yapping poodle in her arms and quickly press the number eight.

  In the long corridor, I cross paths with a bald-headed giant of a man who avoids me as stealthily as I avoid him. Nervousness attacks me. What if Mme Tremblay’s intuition is the right one? The thought of murder rears through me and shakes the keys from my hand. A light flickers at the edge of my mind and then goes out covering everything in blackness. My feet feel as if they are sinking into quicksand. I force myself to
breathe deeply, grapple clumsily with the lock. No, not murder.

  The third key produces a click which rebounds along the hallway. But still the door won’t give.

  At shoulder level I notice a tiny new lock and an electronic eye. Madeleine’s fear has had concrete consequences. I insert the smallest key and at last, with furtive haste, I slip through the door and shut it softly behind me. To my side the alarm box is open and inactive. In my confusion, that strikes me as strange. Has Madeleine forgotten or simply not bothered to set it? Or has someone been here before me? Some of Gagnon or Contini’s men perhaps? Of course. Even Gagnon is not a complete slouch. Mme Tremblay’s thought has come too late.

  The apartment is a dazzle of lights. They leap through the vast picture window from the streets beneath like intimate stars. The fortress-like structure of the Convent of the Sacred Heart is just below me. To the left, the twin stone towers where the missionary Marguerite Bourgeoys once taught Indian children rise out of the darkened grounds of the old Sulpician seminary, now Le Grand Seminaire. If I crane my head to the left, I can see the river and the twinkling lights of the Champlain Bridge. Like a harlot, Montréal grows more beautiful by night.

  I draw the gauzy curtains and switch on a lamp. For a moment I cannot move. Though I do not know this apartment well, the teeming clutter which is Madeleine’s particular stamp is so familiar that it makes me gasp. How can all this chaotic abundance be here and not Madeleine?

  There are newspapers and magazines and books piled on every available surface. They all but obscure the television. Near the comfortable bulk of the two creamy sofas, they spill over onto the floor, which also here and there spawns shoes and mugs. On the alabaster coffee table shaped like a generous cello, a great white bowl heaves with a collection of the matchboxes she can never find. Amidst them are stone eggs in every mineral colour. The shelves atop radiators are crammed with the objects of Madeleine’s random and altogether unsystematic collections: cheap painted madonnas of folk art and commercial exploitation; tiny china houses, pierrots with white innocent faces and single luminous tears; hand painted pots in a riot of colours.