The Dead of Winter

by Lisa Appignanesi

  My body doesn’t seem capable of movement. I stare at Marie-Ange and utter the question which has rumbled insidiously in my mind since the start of this conversation. ‘Do you know who Lulu’s father is, Marie-Ange? Did Madeleine know?’

  Marie-Ange fumbles in her purse and only meets my eyes for a moment before rising.

  ‘Madeleine was an extraordinary woman, Pierre. I don’t need to tell you that. And her life made it easy for her not to have to confuse love and fidelity. She was no puritan. And she had strong feelings about independence.’

  I follow her out of the door and try to decipher her words. I have an odd feeling that Marie-Ange loves Madeleine as much as I do, if differently, and is working to protect her memory. A little like Mme Tremblay when she sent me in search of journals which might provoke scandal.

  In the car I say to her, ‘So you’ve told me all this because Madeleine’s will, I take it, is largely in favour of her daughter.’

  ‘When she turns eighteen.’

  ‘I see. How old is she now.’

  ‘About ten.’

  Despite myself, my mind races with calculations which lead me nowhere.

  Marie-Ange is silent until we arrive at the house. In the greying dusk, it looks bleak. I hurry her past the casket where Minou lies, past the boarded-up window. Tomorrow I will have everything fixed, create a new order out of the devastation.

  ‘Perhaps we should have left this until tomorrow.’ Marie-Ange sniffs my mood.

  ‘No. I’m glad you’re here. I wasn’t looking forward to coming back alone.’

  She looks around with her perrceptive gaze as I turn on lights. ‘Funny you never remarried.’

  I shrug. I place Madeleine’s present on a corner table and stare at the two figurines and think they are perhaps a fitting good-bye. I try to find words with which to explain to Marie-Ange, but they don’t come.

  ‘Though after the whirlwind of Madeleine, it can’t have been easy.’

  ‘Thank-you,’ I hear myself mumble as if she had paid me a compliment.

  ‘I hadn’t imagined it like this.’ She waves her arm in a graceful arc.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘I had imagined something more modern, open plan, lots of white spaces.’ She stops herself, puts her hand over her mouth. ‘I’m being rude.’

  ‘Not at all. I never quite expected this of myself either. It’s my father’s house. He was a bit of a collector. And I’ve grown into it. Or slumped into it would be more accurate.’

  She laughs. ‘You’re very hard on yourself, Pierre. Madeleine never told me that.’

  ‘What did she tell you?’

  ‘Oh…lots of things. But show me round. I’m curious. Show me everything.’

  I show her. I take her through my father’s collections, give her anecdotes, tidbits of history, like a guided tour through a museum which has become myself. I even show her the police-sifted dereliction which is my bedroom. Her presence, her comments, approving or wry, with an occasional glint of humorous malice, are oddly liberating - as if this fresh eye on my accumulated life gave me a necessary perspective.

  It is when we reach the last room that I decide.

  ‘I’m afraid the attic’s a bit of a mess. Vandalised by Michel Dubois. But I’d like you to see.’

  I hesitate on the last step then fling open the door. For a moment vertigo overtakes me. The kilometres of film still undulate on the floor, topped by their flotsam of torn pictures and posters. Madeleine’s eyes gaze out at me. Her lips curl and pout.

  ‘I see,’ Marie-Ange whispers. ‘Yes, I do see.’ She throws me a keen look and stoops to pick up a reel. Then in a calm matter-of-fact voice, she says, ‘We’d better get to work, hadn’t we? Put this on the projector and let’s see how far we get. It should still wind.’

  While I right the heavy machine, she opens windows. Cold air blasts through the room. The projector whirrs.

  ‘It’s only film, Pierre. Film and paper. All replicable.’ She holds a strip up to the light with an experienced eye. ‘I’ll get you duplicates.’

  I shake my head. ‘Probably better that I pay for my seat at the cinema.’

  She gives me a hint of a smile, then unfurls the strips to feed them onto the loop, throws torn film aside, finds an empty spool and we begin again.

  We work. Gradually the room takes on a semblance of order, the walls bare, the pictures and posters neatly stacked on the table, the reels back in their cases, unmanageable strips heaped in a sack.

  ‘You owe me a drink,’ Marie-Ange says. ‘And this. I’d like this. I’ve never seen it before.’ She holds up a picture of Madeleine which has survived Dubois’ rage. It is an early photo. It dates from our days together in Montréal and shows Madeleine leaning against a mountain top balustrade, the skyscrapers of the city hazy beneath her. She is wearing jeans and a sweater. Her hair is piled on top of her head and her smile is pure carefree gamine.

  ‘I took that.’

  ‘I guessed. I’ll give you something in return.’ There is an air of mystery on her face.

  ‘You’ve given me enough. You’ve helped me clear this place.’

  I want to tell her that it has done me good, that she has both helped to rupture a kind of perverse magic and to expel Dubois’ shadow. I feel chastened. As if the cloistered stables of my mind had been swept clean. But I don’t know how to say all that.

  Maybe she guesses a little of it, for as we make our way downstairs, she asks, ‘Did Madeleine ever come up here?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Too bad. Your loyalty might have pleased her.’ She laughs, suddenly rueful. ‘Or maybe she would have ripped it all up herself. You could never tell with Madeleine.’

  ‘No. You could never tell.’

  She squeezes my hand in a gesture of complicity.

  The fire in the hearth blazes. We have pulled one of the sofas up to it and pushed the other, which might still contain a litter of splinters, up against the boarded window. With a practised eye, Marie-Ange has rearranged a side table and a lamp, so that the room still has a semblance of harmony.

  She is sitting at the opposite end of the sofa, her feet curled under her. Her feet, I have noticed, are surprisingly small. Despite her posture, despite all the work, she still looks immaculate. Maybe it is the smooth sheen of her hair. Maybe it is simply the Paris mould which I have forgotten.

  She holds her whisky glass up to the light, gazes at it, then gazes at me. I am a little afraid of her, yet I trust her. We are easy in our silence here in front of the flames.

  Then, abruptly she gets up only to come back a moment later with her handbag. ‘Right. I’ve decided.’

  ‘What have you decided?

  She doesn’t answer. Instead she takes an envelope out of her bag and hands it to me.

  I stare at it and with a shudder I hope she doesn’t see pull it open. ‘I don’t know if I’m ready for any more letters.’

  My tone manages lightness, but there is none in her face.

  The envelope contains two photographs. They show a girl with liquid brown eyes and dark hair held back by an Alice band. She has high cheekbones an impish smile which reveals gaps where teeth might be and a delighted dimple. She wears jeans and a yellow shirt and has a school bag hoicked over her shoulder. Behind her are the luminous colours of the south.

  ‘Louise?’ I ask.

  Marie-Ange nods.

  ‘Sweet. But…not at all like Madeleine. May I keep them?’

  ‘If you like.’

  I place the pictures on the mantle. When I turn around there is a puzzled expression on Marie-Ange’s face.

  ‘Can’t you see it?’

  ‘See what?’

  ‘The resemblance.’

  ‘No.’ I look at the pictures again. ‘She really isn’t like her. Maybe it’s the dark hair and eyes.’

  ‘Not like Madeleine. Like you. Why else would I bother…’

  ‘Me?’

  Marie-Ange nods. Her voice is soft. ‘She’s your c
hild, Pierre. Louise was born while you were in North Africa.’

  My head swirls with greater frenzy than last night’s blizzard. I think of Madeleine. I think of the nature of that explosive parting and her misery and mine. I think of my two year near total silence. I think of the course of our subsequent relations and suddenly the face in the pictures settles into mine. My face as a child. Captured in photographs. My mother’s face.

  Marie-Ange touches my hand.

  When I find my voice, it creaks, ‘Why didn’t she tell me at the time? Or didn’t she know until later?’

  ‘Madeleine was altogether certain. We talked about it during the pregnancy. She was equally certain you couldn’t live together.’ Marie Ange avoids my eyes.

  ‘No. I see.’ I gaze into the flames which bear the corrosive colours of guilt. ‘She was probably right.’

  Silence falls over us. It is not so friendly this time. It carries the burden of my sins.

  ‘We all live muddled lives, Pierre,’ Marie-Ange says at last. ‘Madeleine’s ended in tragedy. But there was brightness along the way. A good deal of it. And in her own inimitable manner, she loved you. She was loyal. She named you as Louise’s father on the birth certificate.’

  She pauses. My breath is too loud. It whistles through the fingers which cover my face.

  ‘So you see, I had to tell you. Prepare you. Just in case Louise, when she reaches the age of eighteen, wants to know. Though I wasn’t sure I would be able to do it. Or you were the right man to receive the information.’

  I look up at her. ‘And you decided I was?’

  She laughs. It is a warm, wry sound. ‘You’ll do. You can even meet Louise some time, if you like.’

  Like a beacon to a shipwrecked man, her words beckon me to a future which is not repetition.

  It is not a place I have imagined for what feels like a very long time.

  21

  __________

  The funeral of Madeleine Blais took place on Tuesday the ninth of January 1990. The small cemetery on the outskirts of Ste-Anne couldn’t contain the explosion of mourners. They thronged the snowy paths, spilled round the gates, flocked into the surrounding field.

  All of the townspeople were there. So were Madeleine’s friends and colleagues and a retinue of reporters and photographers. By the time everyone had trailed past the open grave, the flowers had reached the level of the ground. They decked the surrounding snow like exotic specimens.

  Madeleine would have been happy. The very size of the crowd gave the ceremony a festive flavour. The sky turned out in its best blue and the sun made diamonds of the snow. The spray of dark glasses provided an additional touch of glamour.

  She would have laughed too, giggled at the spectacle of Mayor Desforges puffed up like a penguin delivering a sonorous eulogy to follow on from my brother’s more sombre rites. She would have smiled at the notion of a Centre des Arts, Madeleine Blais, soon to open its doors on the outskirts of Ste-Anne. Maybe she would have been chuffed as well.

  A small group of us stood to one side of the grave until the sun set pink and the throng dispersed. There was Marie-Ange, Gisèle Desnos, Giorgio Napolitano, Fernando Ruiz, Detective Contini and myself. Madeleine was no longer with us, but she had thrown us together. For the moment at least, it felt as if we would maintain the bond.

  When Mme Tremblay had finished with the shaking of too many hands, we lifted her up and like a triumphant figurehead carried her to the waiting cars. She protested, but smiled, waving on Jerome and a subdued Monique.

  Later that night after too many drinks and spatterings of tears and stories and reminiscences, we sat in a hushed cinema and waited for the first of the films in the commemorative retrospective of Madeleine Blais’ work. Contini was on my left, Marie-Ange on my right.

  No sooner had the first few scenes of Winter Spell unfolded, than he tapped my knee and murmured, ‘Pretty powerful stuff. What a woman, eh? I can see it all now.’

  His voice was reassuring, though I didn’t know quite what it was he saw. I was waiting. Waiting nervously for that terrible and secret blue movie effect. Marie-Ange wound her hand through mine as if she too were waiting.

  It didn’t come.

  Instead, I had a dazzling and fresh sense of Madeleine’s remarkable talent. And with it a rush of freedom, as if I had burst out of the solitary circle of the self - that fuzzy, fantasizing self which blurred public and private passion into one muddy ball.

  It came to me with a poignant clarity in the magical darkness of that hushed theatre that Madeleine was large enough to belong to everyone. Had to belong singly to everyone.

  In the world of common images, love is always at once unique and uniquely shared.

  Other Books by Lisa Appignanesi

  ___________________________

  Novels

  ______

  Memory and Desire

  Dreams of Innocence

  The Things We Do for Love

  The Dead of Winter

  Sanctuary

  Paris Requiem

  Unholy Loves

  Kicking Fifty

  The Memory Man

  Non-Fiction

  ___________

  All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion

  Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800

  Freud’s Women (with John Forrester)

  Losing the Dead

  Simone de Beauvoir

  The Cabaret

  Femininity and the Creative Imagination: Proust, James and Musil

  Edited Volumes

  _____________

  Free Expression is No Offence

  The Rushdie File (with Sarah Maitland)

  Dismantling Truth (with Hilary Lawson)

  Postmodernism

  Ideas from France: The Legacy of French Theory

  ACCLAIM FOR THE DEAD OF WINTER

  _________________________________

  ‘An intriguing novel… Richer and stranger than a mere thriller.’

  Guardian

  ‘Guaranteed to linger in your mind long after reading it… Elegantly plotten and beautifully written, this atmospheric read comes very highly recommended.’

  Prima

  ‘Lisa Appignanesi skilfully manipulates the reader through a maze of suspicion and fear to a tense denouement… (she) writes so well that she sweeps you along, prepared to believe in the events.’

  Sunday Telegraph

  ‘A compellingly moody psycho-thriller. Appignanesi paces the mounting emotional atmosphere beautifully. The Dead of Winter becomes, gradually and grippingly, not just the tale of a search for a women’s killer, but an exploration of obsession and guilt that leads to a shocking conclusion.’

  The Times

  ‘A highly atmospheric and subtle psychological thriller with a plot that keeps twisting and turning.’

  Mail on Sunday

  The Dead of Winter

  _________________

  ‘I don’t understand it. I don’t understand why you hate us. Tell me, Pierre.’ Madeleine lashes out at me, finding a ready target for her vehemence. ‘Why do you want to hurt us, kill us? Why? So many of you seem to be demented. Men hating women, violent men, killers, serial killers everywhere.’

  A deranged assassin has gunned down fourteen women students in Montreal. Celebrated actress Madeleine Blais, back for once in her native city, is haunted by a sense that somewhere out there, where her filmed image roams so freely, someone is determined to kill her too. Her old friend and lawyer, Pierre Rousseau, can do nothing to shift her growing despair. So when on Christmas morning she is found hanging in a barn close to her grandmother’s house in the small Laurentian town of Ste-Anne, the obvious verdict is that Madeleines depression has led he rto suicide. But has it?

  Pierre decides to take the investigation into his own hands. He trusts neither the canny Montreal detective called in by the mayor, nor the lazy local police chief. But as facts about Madeleine’s past and the moments where it shades into h
is own unfold, it emerges that Pierre himself has secrets to hide and until he confronts them, the mystery of Madeleine’s death will remain forever unknown.

  About the Author

  ________________

  Lisa Appignanesi is a prize-winning novelist, writer and broadcaster. She has been the President of English PEN, Deputy Director of London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, and is a Visting Professor in Literature and the Medical Humanities at King’s College London.