The Dead of Winter
Page 27
I know that writing. But I cannot know that writing. I touch the envelope superstitiously to check the strength of my hallucinative ability. It is potent. The envelope feels real. The stamps have serrated edges.
‘Documents, are they? Work following you home.’ Jerome has seen the packet-sized envelope too.
My voice is gone. I nod instead and touch the ink which spells out my name in that distinctive hand. What is it that Madeleine has sent me from the dead?
Despite my brother’s presence, I am about to tear open the envelope when the doorbell rings.
‘Shall I get it?’ Jerome asks, sensing my dismay.
‘Please.’
I pass my finger under the envelope’s edge. The glue comes away so easily. Too easily. It has worn thin from the crossing of too many boundaries. A stack of neatly printed sheets slips into my hand.
I glance at the top one and with a shudder wedge the papers back into the envelope. I don’t want to see this. I can’t see this. Not now.
With the furtiveness of a child caught in an illicit act, I thrust the packet into a corner cupboard. Two of my father’s fairground sacred hearts clatter to the floor. With guilty horror I force them back onto the shelf.
Passion comes in too many guises.
13
_________
The old anglepoise casts a yellow pool of light on the manilla envelope which lies on the windowside table in my bedroom. I trace the flourish of black ink which spells out my name. I examine the postmark for a date, but all I can make out is the blur of Montréal.
When did Madeleine post the packet which survived her? Why does it take longer for a letter to reach its destination than for a death to occur?
I try to think reasonably. I tell myself the holiday mail is always slower than a tortoise. I tell myself that even though Madeleine knew she was coming here, she wanted the parcel to arrive by post, even wanted it perhaps to precede her - to set a kind of agenda for an overdue conversation.
I breathe deeply. I think of things with which to calm myself. Distract myself, too.
The dinner with my brother and Maryla which began so awkwardly, ended well. Jerome’s presence which had initially made her doubly nervous, eventually soothed her; quieted her apprehensions about the murderer in our midst, as well. Then Jerome surprised me by slipping away in a fashion which made it evident that he fully expected Maryla to stay on and that she had his blessing. Perversely, his gesture made me realise that it was time to have that long delayed discussion with Maryla. I had been selfish and cowardly for too long.
We sat on the sofa and I stroked her hair and her hands and found words which approximated feeling. I told her she was a wonderful woman and far too good for me. Circumstances and need had thrown us together and we had sought consolation in each other. That was good, that could even, if she wanted to name it such, be called love. But the period had passed, for her in particular. She was wasting her hopes on me. I wasn’t marriageable, which was what she wanted. I was just her left-over habit. And a friend.
For a while. she didn’t say anything. She simply looked at me with her wide gray eyes and unconsciously toyed with the small golden cross she wore round her neck. Finally she nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It is best to be clear. Did your brother advise you to speak?’
‘In a way.’
We hugged each other and despite her residue of fear, despite my half-hearted offer of a bed in the spare room, she left. Left proudly. Left me to this.
I trace the black ink on the manilla envelope and then slowly open it and pull out its contents.
The odd sensation that someone is watching oppresses me again. It has been with me several times this evening. I glance out the window, but see only my own hazy reflection and beyond that the glimmer of snow. Perhaps it is Madeleine who is watching. Waiting for me to stop procrastinating so that we can at last have the conversation we never had.
The letters lie in front of me, a neat stack of papers - as pristine as a document which has just come out of a computer printer, except for the traces of the double creases they bore when folded into their original envelopes and posted from various locations outside Ste-Anne. Each carries a dateline denoting a month and a year, though no day. Each begins with the salutation, ‘Madeleine!’. None carries a signature.
What frame of mind compelled me to anonymity I no longer know. I think it began as a joke. An anonymous Orlando posting his epistles to the Rosalind Madeleine had once played. Or maybe it began as a wistful piece of nostalgia, a disembodied, retrospective seduction. To make good my many lacks.
I think I wanted Madeleine to guess the letters were from me. She didn’t. Not until the end I imagine - though now I can never be certain.
The top sheet begins ‘Madeleine, or shall I call you Anne, for I have just seen Winter Spell again.’
I don’t need to read it. The text lingers in my mind, a playful fan letter, full of slightly wicked insight into her role with a dash of hyperbole about her performance.
The dateline is June 1986, the month after Madeleine purchased the Montréal flat. It must have been the concatenation of her presence in the city, our sudden love-making and its equally sudden end that spurred me.
Not that I hadn’t seen Madeleine in the intervening years before this. There was only a span of about two when we were utterly obscured to each other. My desert years I think of them as. When I returned from Africa to Paris at the end of 81, I rang her. She happened to be in town and she agreed to see me. At her suggestion, we met at the house. So that we wouldn’t be bothered, she said. Fame had its penalties.
One of them was a new alarm system which began at the front gate where a woman’s voice which wasn’t Madeleine’s grilled me. The second was the woman herself, a stern matronly figure who opened the door to me and cowed me with her gaze, before ushering me into the breakfast room.
I waited. I allowed myself to look around, a little fearful that I might find my shadow hovering, more fearful that I would not. Through the windows, the garden was wintry, a desolate span of bare black branches and sodden grass which Madeleine had obviously tried to cheer with the addition of some sculptural objects - or that’s what I took the strange circle of parking metres to be. They were planted in the centre of the lawn, equidistant from two polished bronze cylinders which evoked without quite replicating human shapes. The palms had moved into a conservatory which now covered one side of the terrace.
Inside, the house had not so much changed as spawned treasures. There were oils on the walls and modernist tapestries and more sculpture, not to mention Madeleine’s usual assortment of jumble. The table at which I hastened to reseat myself was a creamy marble slab, designed for the space. It was as if Madeleine, transported to Hollywood and fame, had now decided to exercise her early love for avant-garde adventure by collecting.
‘Forgive me. You’re punctual and I overslept,’ Madeleine’s husky, early morning voice breaks through my inventory.
‘I’m glad you could make the time for me.’
‘Not much of it, I’m afraid. I’m off again, day after tomorrow and the schedule is crowded.’
We talk nervously, hiding behind the armour of formal correctness. Her beauty in the flesh is so much more arresting than what my memory has fashioned, that I hardly dare glance at her. Briefly I tell her about North Africa. With equal brevity, she recounts her latest ventures. Then suddenly she laughs her low secret laugh, and says, ‘It suits you, Pierre, this nomadic life.’
Our eyes meet and the electricity is still there, rustling between us, as potent as ever, and I find myself asking what I promised myself I wouldn’t ask.
‘Are you with anyone, Madeleine? I mean…’
She cuts me off. ‘That’s not a question you’re allowed to put to me Pierre.’
‘No, of course.’
She busies herself with the croissant and coffee, her housekeeper, whom I now know as Mme Baudoin, has put on the table, then laughs again, differently now.
Her face has that mixture of vulnerability and boldness which thrusts me back to our childhood prehistory and I would like to touch her, just once, chastely, to feel her skin. But the sound of the doorbell intervenes and a moment later an elegantly suited woman with dark, commanding features comes into the room.
It is my first meeting with Madeleine’s new agent, Marie-Ange Corot, and as the woman sits and calmly examines me, I have the feeling that her early arrival has been pre-arranged, to prevent anything going amiss between Madeleine and myself. Oddly, the realisation of this, or perhaps it is simply Marie-Ange’s presence, soothes me and by the time I have drained my second cup of coffee, I am relaxed. We are all relaxed, as if nothing had ever gone disastrously wrong between Madeleine and myself and we still shared a life.
Madeleine sees me to the door. ‘It’s all right,’ I tell her just before I leave. ‘I’m not loony anymore.’
‘Good,’ Madeleine gives me a serene smile. ‘I knew it was a passing aberration. Where do you go now?’
‘Closer to home. Ottawa.’
‘Write to me. And go and see Mémère.’
I nod.
She hugs me swiftly, too swiftly for me to hold on to her and steps back. Her golden eyes have an animal seriousness.
‘And Pierre. Find yourself another woman. One to keep, I mean.’
I take Madeleine’s advice. In Ottawa I strike up a relationship with a fellow journalist. We move in together. We are companionable. We have everything in common. We should be perfectly paired. Yet one morning after some six months together, I wake up and look at my partner’s sleeping face and have the odd sensation that I am living an after-life, that all my gestures are hollow, that all passion is spent. Has long been spent. I push away the thought and bury it in activity.
Not long after that Madeleine rings me from Montréal. She is passing through, would like to meet for dinner and catch up - if I can make the time. I make the time. And we catch up in more ways than one. Dinner stretches and stretches and we can’t seem to leave each other. We spend the night together in Madeleine’s hotel. The excitement of it engulfs me. There seems to be nothing so dangerously illicit as spending the night with one’s wife.
The next day the marvel of it is still there, a newness which is also repetition and we drive down to Ste-Anne together. We see both Mme Tremblay and my father. We spend the night together in Madeleine’s room. Mme Tremblay treats us like newlyweds and serves us a regal breakfast.
And then Madeleine is off. I take her to the airport where she is to catch the plane for her next destination. She turns to wave at me from behind her dark glasses, a star again, distant, mysterious.
There were three more interludes of this kind, erratic, fleeting, separated by months of silence or sporadic postcards. During one of them, Madeleine told me it was best like this. She was fated to passion, not to the everyday. Maybe it was the life she led. It demanded extremities, great surges of adrenalin, which left little over for what others called life. It was a kind of occupational deformation - one she knew she had both been intended for and had chosen.
Madeleine was aware of my relationship with Denise. When it ended, petering out on our own ill-temper at its lassitude, she told me she was sorry. Maybe that was why she would do no more than lunch with me when our paths crossed in Paris where I was chasing a Canadian delegation. Maybe it had more to do with our past there and an unwillingness to be seen with me where she was primarily a public person.
After I moved back to Ste-Anne, there were two more of our unpredictacble couplings. Once she stayed with me at the house, laughing at the strange secrecy of it, as if we were children again hiding from some vigilant parent’s eye. And then, just when I thought her acquisition of an official address in Montréal signalled a new departure for us, all that side of things stopped. I still don’t quite know why.
Madeleine never talked about her other men. At first I assumed that one of them was the reason and soon she would tell me. She didn’t. I scoured the gossip columns and though her name came up often enough, there was no other name I could tie her to with any certainty. Finally I asked her.
She looked at me with a surprised expression, her eyes wide, as if the matter hadn’t occurred to her. It made me realise how small a point I was on her horizon, how much she packed into the months between our meetings.
What she said was that she was going through that kind of phase, that she wanted us to be friends - it was the friendship that mattered - so old now, her oldest one, so much more important than anything else. Didn’t I agree? We didn’t want to sour that just because she stopped in Montreal more often these days. She was brutally frank then. With a catch in her voice she told me that I mustn’t assume the stoppings were intended for me. They were for her grandmother, who was getting old, who couldn’t come to her as easily as she once had.
I took all that. Took it lightly, at least on the surface. I agreed that our friendship was the crucial thing. I meant it. I enjoyed being Madeleine’s confidante and the mainstay she had named me - a solid, certain figure, far from the glare and whirl of the publicity machine. Nonetheless, a part of me curled into a corner - offended, yearning, angry.
Maybe that was the me who spurred the writing of the letters. It was certainly after that conversation that I began them.
I swallow the remains of my glass of brandy, feel the heat in throat and stomach and force myself to look once more at the letters. Unnaturally for Madeleine, they are in meticulous order of date.
The first sequence is an anatomy of her roles. Each letter, sometimes two or three, focusses on a film. I write of her hard, sexual radiance as Anne, the quality of her sharp, watchful innocence as Julie in Secret Woman. I rhapsodize about her ability to portray both falseness and a sullen sense of threat in Jacob’s Daughter, her seering, wounded passion in The Pink Tower. I lacerate her for the flimsy, frivolity of her role in La Parisienne. I talk about her eyes, their seductive downward flutter or the savage purity of her rounded gaze. I evoke particular gestures of her hands, or hips or feet. I analyse the films with the formal rigour of a reader of Cahiers du Cinéma. I am by turns playful, amusing, critical, enraptured. Yet I am always careful to put in only what anyone could know who saw her on the screen or followed her from the outside.
Madeleine showed me some of these letters once, not long after I had started writing them. She brought them to dinner and told me she had a new and perceptive fan who watched her films with the attentiveness one normally gave to Shakespeare or Racine. She was intrigued, enticed. She marvelled at their insight. She read me a passage and then another.
I sat very still. I was waiting for her to say she knew it was me. To say she had guessed. To pierce my cloak of anonymity. When she didn’t, disappointment made me leave her early. I think she suspected I was jealous of her new and discerning fan.
Gradually a different note seeps into the letters. They become more personal, as intimate as a kid glove slipping over a familiar hand. The woman behind the many filmed faces is explored, the mystery of her talent grappled with. The letters delve into the circumstances which might have shaped this talent. They probe the character of the sexuality which feeds her arresting screen presence. There are hypothetical scenarios in which the writer puts himself into Madeleine’s body and fantasizes her relationship to her shifting selves.
Even to my eyes now, these letters exude a kind of visceral heat, a fascination which borders on the unhealthy. Yet they are also love letters. They murmur love without naming it: ‘You have an unerring instinct for detecting men’s desires and being what they want. You have a gift for awakening and fulfilling dreams.’ They ask for tokens, make small demands. ‘Keep me in your mind.’ ‘Hold me close to your heart.’ ‘When you sit down, put me right there, between yo
ur thighs where your hand lay in the final scene of Jacob’s Daughter.’
When Madeleine next spoke of the letters to me, her tone was rather different. She was still intrigued, but the pleasure in the puzzle had vanished. Instead, she was troubled. She told me she was certain her anonymous fan was in fact an actor or a director she had once worked with - he knew her so well, sexually, emotionally. She was taking steps to find out.
‘You’re sure it’s someone you worked with?’ I remember saying, the challenge clear in my voice. She nodded without looking at me.
I should have told her then, but by now the writing of the letters had become something of an addiction. I looked forward to it as one does to a secret rite, without quite acknowledging to oneself that one is intent on engaging in it. I didn’t know what mood or moment might spur me. The letters had taken on a life of their own.
Towards the bottom of the pile come two letters which coil my stomach into tight knots and induce a dizzying nausea.
Madeleine!
I saw you the other night. Saw you in the flesh, so much softer, smaller, more pliable than that luminous presence on the screen. You were coming out of your apartment. I had tracked you, seen the lights go out on the eighth floor and stay out until you appeared, swathed in some glossy animal trapping, on the steps of the building. The superintendent waved. A car pulled up, a black saloon and swallowed you until you re-emerged in the shadows of the Hôtel de Ville. A man rushed up to embrace you. Familiarly. An old friend or a lover…
I cannot read on.
It was the second time I had followed Madeleine, tailed her this time all the way up to Montréal from her grandmother’s house. I don’t know why I did it nor what led me to put it into writing, but when Madeleine told me she was being followed, I assumed she was referring to this letter, referring to me.
We were having dinner together at Louis’, not far from the theatre. It was during the rehearsal period for Hedda Gabler. Madeleine was tense, as taut as a tightrope that might give the second any pressure was applied. She talked about her difficulties with the role. She told me she was having trouble making Hedda in any way sympathetic. And then, without any visible change of voice, she told me she was being followed. It scared her.