But there was something else about Raf’s behaviour in these last days which niggled at him. He put it into words for the first time. Raf might want with all his heart to uncover the particulars of Olympe’s death and to avenge it. Yet at the same time, he seemed averse to discovering anything about Olympe he didn’t already know. It was unthinkable to him that a woman who possessed the good fortune of his attention, should wish to do away with herself.
Then, too, the luminous portrait he had painted in his mind mustn’t be altered by fresh brush strokes. He had responded badly to Louise Boussel’s mention of a past suitor. Arnhem’s revelation of a second sister had been even worse. It had irritated Raf to the point that he hadn’t been able to think about anything else, as if Olympe’s omission constituted a veritable betrayal – not simply, in the circumstances, an understandable family secret. And now, he had fled, only to leave James alone amidst the material possessions of a mistress he had never met. But perhaps the dead urged on one a necessary blindness. The ideal had to be kept intact, now more than ever. If he understood little else about his brother, he could understood that particular need. He shared it.
With a shiver of apprehension, James took a handkerchief from his pockets and carefully opened a wardrobe. A rustle of silk and cool, smooth satin met his exploring fingers. He withdrew them abruptly, as if the material burnt. He forced himself to concentrate on the base of the cupboard, edged aside shoes. No, there were no boxes hidden amongst them. With relief, he wedged the door shut. Whatever his good intentions, he felt like a peeping Tom, an interloper transgressing the limits of another’s intimacy.
He looked at the portrait of Olympe and heard himself whisper an apology. Then steeling himself, he pulled open the drawers of the small dresser and finding nothing but lace and whites and a whiff of rose petals, closed them as quickly. He turned gratefully to the bedside table. Books were stacked on it. He examined their more familiar solidity one by one. There was Zola’s Bête Humaine, a novel by Anatole France and another by a writer he didn’t recognise, a few playscripts and volumes of poetry. Right at the base of the pile was a handsome leather-bound volume with gold-etched script. Shakespeare. Olympe’s tastes were serious. Curious about the translation, he moved the top dusted volume aside and lifted out the bottom tome. A drawer slid out spilling letters onto the floor, some loose, some tied with blue ribbon.
This was more like it. He picked up the letters carefully. Amongst them he noticed a small notebook. He spread the lot on the bed, apologised to Olympe’s captive image and perched to read.
As luck would have it, the first letters were from Raf. He scurried over their lover’s heat and feeling his own face grow hot, put them to one side. He had a sudden sense of his mother, hovering at his shoulder, that look of pure Bostonian disapproval straining her haughty features. To chase her presence away, he paused to take in the atmosphere of the room again. There was a kind of peace to the place, he suddenly thought, like a nest far above the fray of the streets, safe. He remembered the cramped, musty quarters the rest of her family inhabited and had an acute sense of the distance Olympe had travelled. In a way, a little like his brother, he didn’t altogether want to know how she had got here, what breaches of dignity had marred her passage. It was enough to know that she had arrived.
Only to be cut off, he reminded himself. Who could have wanted to do away with this brave girl? For a moment, he was filled with the sense of a malignant presence envying Olympe her new-found height. With a shudder, he returned to the letters. He assumed that the ribbon-bound letters were sentimental in content. Lovers that preceded his brother? Perhaps. With sudden compassion, he had the urge to burn these traces before Raf could come across them. He pushed them to one side and concentrated on the loose pages – perhaps more recent since they hadn’t found their place yet within a set. He noticed a leaf in strange scrawling script and pulled it to the surface. Hebrew, he decided. Perhaps from her father.
A knock at the door made him jump. Quickly, like a criminal caught in the act, he crammed what letters he could into the satchel he had used to carry Ellie’s present. He smuggled the all-but empty Shakespeare box onto the bedside table, and had almost replaced the remaining volumes when Madame Ribot bustled in.
She looked first at him, then round the room incompre-hendingly. ‘Where is Monsieur Norton?’ she asked with a trace of anger.
‘He had to go. He asked me to thank you if he didn’t catch you downstairs.’ James was at his most gracious.
Her face was all narrow-eyed suspicion. ‘Well you can’t stay here. I don’t know you.’
‘I was just going.’ James bowed politely.
She grumbled something, then walked heavily across the room. James saw her remove the photograph of Olympe from its frame.
‘You’re still standing there?’ she turned on him. ‘It’s for the police not for me. They’ve sent somebody back. They want the photo, don’t they? They’re going to check it against their records. Measure it. Ears, eyes, nose, everything.’ A sly look came over her face. ‘He’s waiting downstairs. Now get out of here, before I tell them you’ve been snooping.’
James wished her a polite goodbye. He was fairly certain she would say nothing, if only so as not to implicate herself.
At the next landing, a door creaked open. A dark sullen face peered out at him, furtively sizing him up. He could feel the eyes on his back as he continued down the stairs. They made his skin prickle. He nodded briefly to the uniformed policeman at Madame Ribot’s front door and rushed away.
With the approach of evening, the streets had grown more crowded. Music poured from the open doors of bistros and bars. Unkempt youths with feverish eyes jostled with men in frock coats, laughing women on their arms, their skirts raised against uneven cobbles to show a flash of ankle. The narrow lanes of the quarter, still almost a village unto itself, had gained a reputation for pleasure and danger, the second spicing the first.
Uncertain of his destination, James followed the wind of the streets. At a juncture, he came across the old wooden windmill which served as a beacon for the dance hall he had gone to with Yvette, all those years ago. He paused to watch the smiling couples in their summer finery parade through the doors, was almost tempted to track that mingled scent of lemon and perspiration to its source. He didn’t. He hurried on, remembering that he still hadn’t replied to his mother’s letter.
It came to him that his ambassadorial zeal was fading with an astonishing rapidity. It had been so strong on his arrival a few short days ago. He had been prepared to overcome any and all of Raf and Ellie’s resistance and coerce or persuade them home immediately, so that he could wrap himself in the soft blanket of habit once more. And now?
They hadn’t been short days, he corrected himself. Long days, so replete with events and sensations they had transformed Boston into a faint murmur somewhere at the far edge of his consciousness.
It came to him, too, with a louder surge, like a wave breaking on the shore, that he had spent much of his life as an intermediary – arguing on behalf of others whom he believed more or less, negotiating the finer points of contracts that touched him in no particular way, a shuffling go-between. So he should have been well cut out for his present mission. But the firmness of its initial outlines had grown blurred. He could no more see the imperative of shepherding his siblings back to Boston, than he could of returning himself. Olympe’s death had taken him over, as if she had been one of his own, as densely present to him as Maisie had once been – though there was no justice to be found in the first case unless he locked himself up. Which he had done in a manner of speaking, James acknowledged with restless irony.
His thoughts faltered, dispersed by an uncanny sensation of eyes on his back. He turned, half expecting to see the sullen face that had peered out at him on his way down from Olympe’s apartment. Under less tense circumstances, he would have stopped to interview the neighbour. But the policeman had been there. He was here again now.
J
ames clutched the satchel in his hand more tightly. With a show of casualness, he stepped past a braying donkey. The open door of a tavern beckoned. The large painted sign above it showed a hare leaping out of a casserole and James leapt across the threshold with the same alacrity, half turning to see if the policeman would pass him by or follow him. The man paused to give him a steely glance, but then walked on. James calmed himself. His own guilt at pinching Olympe’s letters was affecting his nerves.
The stares of the motley crew assembled in the tavern didn’t help. They eyed him with the morose curiosity of regulars. He hastened to a table in a dim corner of the ramshackle room. As his eyes grew accustomed to the smoky half-light, he was struck by the oddity of his surroundings. At a long wooden refectory table at the centre of the room, a hirsute man with the look of an ancient mariner picked a desolate tune from his guitar and sang a plaintive ballad. Around him sat a heterogeneous assortment of men and women. Bohemians, James thought, and then taking in the wild assortment of paintings and sculptures which hung from the dark walls or were poised on tables and chairs, altered his thought to conclude that he was in some kind of artists’ den. On the bench not far from him, one man was stretched in sleep or perhaps drunken stupor. A couple looked dreamily into each other’s eyes over glasses of absinthe.
James ordered one for himself and examined the art more closely. There was a strange, gnarled Christ half reclining against the wall, a view of jagged roofs from a disorienting perspective, a series of circus performers. An odd prickling started at the base of his spine. The tightrope walker with her striated skirt and bodice, her direct, musing gaze looked remarkably like the Olympe Fabre he had seen in the photograph so short a time ago.
‘Ça vous plaît, Monsieur?’ The young, raven-haired waiter deposited James’s drink on the table and followed his gaze.
James nodded his approval of the picture and then asked if he knew the model.
‘Oh yes, Monsieur. She lives nearby. She comes in often.’ His face took on a grimness and he lowered his voice. ‘Used to come in, I mean. She’s dead now.’
He was about to move away, but James held him back. ‘And the artist. Do you know the artist?’
‘Max Henry.’ He looked swiftly round the room. ‘No, he’s not here today. You’re interested in buying the picture?’
‘Yes,’ James said with sudden decision. ‘And in meeting Monsieur Henry.’
The youth gestured to the guitarist who strummed a few more chords and lumbered over. ‘This is my father. He can advise you.’
Some half-hour later James left the cabaret with the picture under his arm. He had paid too much, he reckoned, but the bearded owner had turned out to have more than a talent for the guitar and mournful ballads of the city streets. He was a fine salesman. He had told him that Max Henry might be a mere stripling now, but would go far. He had also told him all about the talented Olympe Fabre and her tragic demise. Why, he could see her clearly sitting right there in the far corner of the room nursing a drink with her friends and yes, sometimes entertaining them with a ditty of her own in the late hours, after the theatre was closed. Her beauty pierced, almost like a pain. He brought a gnarled fist to his heart.
With a new-found directness, James had asked him whether she was more than a model to Max Henry and the man had winked and draped an arm across his shoulder and murmured, ‘Ah, these young ones. They have hot blood, Monsieur. But I couldn’t say for certain. No, not for certain.’ Perhaps he had taken in the inadvertent look of disapproval on James’s face, for he had then added, ‘But it is some time back now. Max painted this series last year, maybe eighteen months ago. You must come back one night and ask him yourself. He is often here, later on though. After ten.’ No, the man didn’t have a recent address for Max.
James pondered all this as he followed the downhill course of the winding streets. Should he question Raf about Max Henry? He would have to test the temperature of his brother’s emotions carefully. On the other hand, Raf must be far more aware than he was of Olympe’s bohemian connections.
He clutched the small canvas to his chest and felt oddly happy with his purchase, as if he had brought a little of the dead girl to life. These were her streets he reminded himself and looked around him carefully, as if each cobble, each street vendor or brightly dressed juggler might give up a clue to her untimely death.
He had almost reached the bottom of the Butte now. The clatter of coaches and hoofs rose from the busy intersection. A policeman stood at its edge, and for a moment, James froze, as if the man were lying in wait for the stolen letters in his satchel. He squared his shoulders and put on his most authoritative mien, the one he wore for judge and jury.
But it was a different officer and the man’s attention was elsewhere. Parked in front of him stood one of those gleaming new motor cars with large spoked tires and headlamps as brazen as a lighthouse beam. A tall, weedy man in tattered clothes, cap askew over a lank abundance of hair, was running his hand over the car’s shining surface as he might over a prize-winning thoroughbred. He had a rapt look on his bony face.
In the blink of an eye, the officer stayed the man’s arm. ‘Papiers,’ he demanded in a bellowing voice. Passers-by scurried quickly away. Others stopped to watch, James amongst them.
The man looked dazed, as if he couldn’t quite emerge from his dream. Then fear contorted his features. He tried to shake off the staying hand. ‘Your papers,’ the officer repeated.
The man made a run for it. But the policeman was quicker and stronger. He caught up to him, and grabbing him by the collar of his shapeless jacket, shook him severely. ‘Your name?’ he said in the loud voice of one speaking to an imbecile. ‘Your address?’
‘A vagabond,’ the man who was standing next to James muttered with distaste. ‘A degenerate. Off to the Dépot with him.’
‘Send him back where he came from,’ another man shouted, cursing beneath his breath. ‘Too many of his kind here. Dirt.’
The officer seemed altogether prepared to follow the popular will. He was propelling his captive forward in a frogmarch.
Suddenly a woman appeared in front of them. She clutched at the policeman’s arm. ‘That’s my brother. Leave him alone.’
The officer sized her up. She had a frowsy, painted face and an expanse of cleavage that didn’t bode well. ‘Prove it,’ he sniggered. ‘Or join him at the Dépot.’
The woman’s face fell. With a single backward glance, she vanished into the crowd.
James moved on. Had he read it in one of those newspaper clippings or was it Raf who had told him about the stringent vagrancy laws which prevailed in the city? Tramps, vagabonds, wanderers, whose numbers had proliferated ever since the war with Germany, were seen to be a noxious social problem. They swelled the size of unruly mobs, could be used by any faction in need of numbers. Mad, alcoholic or simply travellers without the necessary identity cards, they were deemed also to be racial degenerates – dangerous microbes to be eliminated from the social stew lest they spawn and poison it utterly. Repeat offenders were bundled off to asylums or in the worst cases transported to penal colonies.
James hoped that the man he had seen transfixed by the motor car would be treated leniently and pardoned. He had probably only been dreaming about escape, a speedy escape, the kind that James could afford by simply raising an arm and hailing a carriage. A rigorous solution to social problems always seemed more attractive in the abstract, than when one saw its wounded, living face. Yet the problem remained.
A nearer problem hadn’t disappeared either, he reminded himself. He would go back to the hotel now and study the bag’s contents. After he had written to his mother, he promised himself.
He looked up to see if a cab was in sight and noticed a cluster of people on the opposite pavement. It took him a moment to realise that they were standing at the entrance of a theatre. The Vaudeville, curving letters on the iron-columned portico announced. It was the theatre at which Olympe had last played.
Wi
thout pausing to think, he quickened his step and joined the queue. Fifteen minutes later he watched the curtain rise on a play that bordered on melodrama. It told the risqué story of a triangle – a respectable older man married to a young woman who falls in love with the equally young man who comes to paint their portrait. Enraptured by the artist, their joint passion fed by romantic poetry, the two sin against her bonds and engage in an adulterous love which ends in a joint suicide pact. Only the woman dies. At the play’s end, the husband stands alone on stage, stroking his small son’s head and decrying the manipulability of women, the bitter tragedy of crimes of passion.
James watched on tenterhooks and tried to imagine Olympe in the role of the young woman, Olympe as he had seen her in the photograph, a haunting sadness accentuating the charm of her features. With an aching sense, it came to him that Olympe had been rehearsing death before meeting a real one.
He sat reflecting on this in his corner box until almost everyone had left the theatre and then, with sudden decision and a glance at the actress’s name on his programme, rushed to find the stage door.
A uniformed man barred his entrance. James reached for his wallet, all the time explaining that he was a friend of Oriane Martine, of Olympe Fabre, too, and needed to speak to Mademoiselle Martine. The size of the bill earned a nod and a grunt of ‘First door on your right on the second floor.’
The back-stage area was an airless warren of dusky corridors. A smell of must and tired heat rose from the walls. The floorboards creaked. A man ran past him as he climbed the stairs. With a start James recognised the handsome actor who had played the young lover, but he looked faceless now, tired. When he reached the second floor, the sound of laughing voices dispelled the gloom. Two women walked down the hall, arm in arm. They pointed him to Mlle Martine’s door, then giggled, as if sharing a secret.
James hesitated before the door. There were raised voices coming from the room, arguing over something. At last he knocked.
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