Paris Requiem

by Lisa Appignanesi

  ‘Who is it?’ A ringing voice called out.

  Not knowing quite how to answer, James identified himself as a friend of Olympe Fabre. It took a moment, but the door opened a fraction to reveal the disgruntled face of a young woman, not, he was almost certain, Oriane Martine. ‘Vous êtes qui?’ she demanded in a surly tone.

  James identified himself and heard another voice. ‘Oh let him in, Marianne. What does it matter!’

  He walked into the small, cluttered dressing room. Clothes hung from a rack. Bouquets of flowers gave off a dense, sultry scent. A woman sat in front of a large, yellowing mirror. Her hair was tied back and she was rubbing paint from her face with some white cream. Her features were pointed in a foxy prettiness. Beside her stood a portly man in a frock coat.

  ‘Leave us, mon ami. Wait for me downstairs.’ Oriane Martine smiled into the mirror, her cheek dimpling.

  The man seemed about to argue, then giving James a slightly sullen look, left with a bow.

  Dark-lashed blue eyes studied James from the mirror and measured his worth. He seemed to have passed some test, for the hair was quickly released and shaken out and Oriane turned to give him her non-reflected face. ‘So you were a friend of Olympe’s?’

  James shifted his weight. ‘Not exactly. My brother Rafael Norton …’

  ‘Oh, of course, Monsieur Norton,’ Oriane laughed infectiously, then put a staying hand over her mouth. In a moment, the face had grown into a tragic mask. ‘How heartless of me. I really was very very sorry to hear of Olympe’s death. I don’t know what kind of black mood could have gripped her.’

  ‘Do you think playing the part – your part – might have affected her, influenced her in some way?’

  Oriane looked at him with visible incomprehension, then as it dawned crossed herself swiftly. ‘You mean the nightly dying? No, no. We’re professionals. And Olympe was well. Seemed to me to be very well. We used to be good friends, you know. Years back. It’s dismal that … how shall I put it, her terrible misfortune was my gain.’ She pouted sweetly. ‘Yes, I suddenly found myself in a lead part. We didn’t know, of course, last week, when she disappeared that she was …’ She stood up and paced the tiny room for a moment, picking a shawl off the floor, admonishing the girl who had opened the door to him.

  James found himself liking her directness. ‘Of course not,’ he murmured.

  ‘I’m very sad for her. Can I offer you a glass of wine, Monsieur.’

  James nodded and accepted an inch of red in a glass which wasn’t altogether clean.

  ‘Yes, three years back, maybe four, when we were both mere girls, Olympe and I travelled together. There’s nothing quite like it for making or breaking a friendship. Twenty-five towns in thirty days. Tours, Nantes, Nîmes, I can’ t even name them all. You can imagine. It produces railway fever. Sometimes you don’t even remember what town you’re playing in. Olympe and I, we enjoyed the movement. We shared our centimes. Often, even our beds. You save money that way.’ She shook her head in fleeting nostalgia, then met his eyes. ‘She was a real trouper.’

  James cleared his throat. ‘And you were still friends. In Paris?’

  ‘Oh yes. A little less, though, with the years. Olympe’s star was rising. She was very busy. Mine wasn’t … well, all that’s changing.’ She gave him a radiant smile, which crinkled her eyes in wry intelligence, so different from the demented passion of her role that he began to wonder at her performing power.

  ‘Did Olympe leave the theatre with anyone last Thursday – after the performance?’

  Oriane shrugged, made a throwaway sound. ‘I didn’t see her. My part was small, over by the interval and I left early.’

  James nodded.

  ‘But Antoine, that’s our director, he told the police that she had left alone.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘She arrived with someone though.’ Oriane chuckled. ‘A real toff.’ She screwed up her eye to mimic a twitching monocle. ‘Don’t know where Olympe finds them.’

  ‘Do you know the man’s name? Did she introduce you?’

  ‘No. He was just helping her out of a carriage. They were bantering. They felt like friends. He was quite unlike your brother. Quite unlike Monsieur Rafael. She always spoke of him. We all spoke of him. L’Américain.’

  ‘Did you tell the police about this other man?’

  ‘No, why should I?’ She frowned.

  It was James’s turn to shrug.

  ‘Olympe didn’t like the police. Anyhow, the toff wasn’t important. I was going to mention him to Monsieur Rafael when he came to talk to me, but then I thought, why plant ideas where they’re not needed. Olympe wasn’t, how shall I put it, like the rest of us.’ She fluttered thick eyelashes, perused him with a coquettish smile. ‘You know what I mean. She didn’t indulge in ever-changing patrons.’

  ‘Why didn’t Olympe like the police?’

  The woman stared at him in incredulity. ‘Does anyone? Anyone like us, I mean.’ She swept her arm round the small space in a grand gesture, then looked sharply at Martine who was listening with a fixed intensity. ‘Go and tell Monsieur Cailleboux I’ll only be another five minutes.’

  Oriane disappeared behind a painted room divider. James heard the rustle of silk and petticoats and wondered whether he should leave. But she was out again a few moments later in a pale blue ruffled gown. She did up the last few hooks on the bodice in front of him, as if to do so were the most natural act in the world. James watched her in the mirror.

  ‘Did Olympe have any more particular reason for not liking the police?’

  Oriane’s eyes narrowed in suspicion.

  ‘I only ask for the best of reasons. We, my brother and I, want to be certain that anyone involved in … well involved in her death, comes to justice.’

  She didn’t answer immediately. When she did, her voice took on a hoarseness. ‘Are you suggesting that someone else was involved in Olympe’s death?’

  James nodded. ‘Perhaps.’

  She shivered. Her glance scurried round the room, darting into corners.

  ‘There was something you wanted to say … about Olympe and the police,’ James prompted.

  ‘Oh that. I think they tried to accuse her of blackmail once. It was a long time ago. And a complete lie. Nothing came of it. Olympe wouldn’t. Never. She was an honourable soul.’

  ‘Who was she meant to be blackmailing?’

  ‘I don’t know. A count somebody or other. It was before we toured together. Just malicious gossip. Not everyone in our world loves everyone else.’ She shivered again.

  James chose his words carefully. ‘You mean this count wrongly accused her of blackmailing him because he thought she was threatening to expose an affair they’d had. Whereas, in fact, the threat came from someone else?’

  Oriane’s sudden burst of laughter took him aback. ‘You must come from another planet, Monsieur, if you think that is cause for blackmail in Paris.’ She looked into the mirror with a kittenish moue to hide her nervousness and pinned her hair up. ‘Your French is nonetheless delicious.’

  ‘But the wife of a respectable man or his parents might feel threatened …’ James persisted. She cut him off.

  ‘We are actresses, Monsieur,’ she said, her head thrown back in defiance. ‘Olympe was a particularly fine one. Any man would have counted himself honoured to gain her favour, his reputation heightened.’ She paused and turned to meet his eyes. ‘But I think you should forget everything I have just said. It is all utterly irrelevant now.’

  She placed her hand on his arm, her expression suddenly beseeching, her voice urgent. ‘I have been foolish, have let my tongue run away with me. It’s always like that after a performance. Don’t say anything about this … this nonsense. Not to anyone. Especially not to your brother, Monsieur. He is a fine young man. Olympe would have wanted his memories of her to be untarnished by suspicion.’

  EIGHT

  James woke to bright light streaming through the shutters and making a jagged pattern on
his bed. The streaks hurt his eyes. He had been traipsing through a world of shadows who summoned him with demure glances. They murmured in foreign voices always slightly outside his comprehension only to disperse as he approached.

  He raised his head slowly. The bed was an untidy heap of papers. Olympe’s letters. He had fallen asleep with them around him. And yes, he acknowledged with a sudden constriction of the heart, hers was the shape-shifting presence he had pursued in his dreams. A new face rising to beckon him at every turn – a face of utter girlish innocence, a face of vulgar lascivious intent, a face of piercing melancholy, haunted by tragedy. How could this unknown woman have taken such a hold on him?

  He rubbed his eyes and shunted himself into daylight practicality.

  Had he really garnered anything useful from Olympe’s letters except that the girl liked to keep amorous or flattering notes from admirers? Which was hardly surprising and hardly a crime. One of the more persistent correspondents signed himself Marcel and it was from these evocative letters that James’s sense of Olympe’s presence on stage had grown. Praise aside, the letters were full of instruction – about Olympe’s singing, her movement, her phrasing. Perhaps the author was a director or critic or some kind of acting coach. It should prove easy enough to find out. He could always go back to the theatre and ask Oriane. Unless Raf knew, though James was again in two minds as to what to reveal to him about the letters.

  Other writers fell into the category of star-struck lovers. Their heat, he had to admit, was contagious. But they didn’t seem to persevere for any length of time. Perhaps Olympe had admonished or rejected them, or simply failed to answer. It would have been useful to have Olympe’s side of all these correspondences. That would have revealed far more of her character. More consistent dating would also have been useful. He was irritated by the fact that most of the letters signalled only a day or a month, rarely a year, so apart from Raf’s, he had no clear idea to which part of Olympe’s life they belonged.

  Indeed, James reflected with a rueful grimace as he made his way to the bathroom, what Olympe chose to throw away rather than keep, might have been of the greatest interest.

  He shaved as he thought about the notebook. It had turned out to be an appointments diary, rather than as he had hoped, some kind of journal. And Olympe was not a diarist of exuberance. Initials and a time largely served her purpose. In comparison, the terse record of his activities that James kept in Boston, provided a veritable flood of information.

  Still, he now knew the initials of the people she had seen in her last days. Perhaps more importantly, the diary charted meetings and performances well beyond the date on which her body was found. Given the lack of any suicide note, this seemed to tip the balance in favour of a death which had nothing to do with her own will. On that score, Raf had been right.

  Once dressed, James quickly gathered up the letters and placed them in his desk drawer. He paused to look at the painting of Olympe as a tightrope walker. In the bright morning light, it added a slightly garish note to the propriety of his hotel room, but he was already more fond of it than he had imagined he could be.

  Slipping Olympe’s notebook into his pocket, he hurried down to the Café de la Paix. The sun was warm on the terrasse, the spectacle of strollers in their summer finery a pleasure, and he would have liked to linger over his breakfast of café au lait and croissants, but his watch told him he didn’t have all that much time. He had slept too late and he had still to buy himself a hat to replace the one lost in the demonstration, before attending to his next commitment.

  Three letters had awaited him on his return to the hotel the night before. The first was the reason for his hurry. It was from Harriet Knowles and it enjoined him in a small neat hand to meet today at eleven for a walk with his sister, should the weather continue fine. It also begged, in what seemed to be a hastily added postscript, not to mention Harriet’s note to Ellie. James allowed himself to reflect, but only for a quick moment, on the path of white lies and well-intentioned deviousness his sister’s condition forced on people even as upright as Harriet Knowles.

  He preferred to think of the second letter which was from Marguerite de Landois and invited him to a supper party at her home this very evening. She was always at home, she pointed out, on the second Saturday of the month and tonight marked her last of the season, so she hoped he would be able to attend. What James hoped, was that he could somehow steer her into a quiet corner. He had a sense that Madame de Landois’s perspective on Olympe and her death would provide him with a far fuller picture than he had yet had from his brother. Indeed, had the grand lady’s letter not arrived last night, he would have rung her this morning to try and arrange a meeting.

  James signalled to the waiter, paid the bill and made his way briskly towards the hatter’s he had noticed on the other side of the boulevard. He chose the first boater that sat snugly on his head and by 10.45 stood in front of his siblings’ building, a bouquet of flowers in his hand. He tried his brother’s door first, eager for any news Raf might have. But there was no response.

  Ellie’s bell was promptly answered by Harriet Knowles who welcomed him with a grateful smile. It reached all the way up to her grey eyes and warmed them.

  ‘Elinor will be so pleased.’

  ‘Who is that?’ Ellie’s voice reached them from the next room. ‘Oh Jimmy, how beautiful, you spoil me. I don’t deserve it.’ She looked up at him from her divan, her face a mask of pallor in which the dark eyes glowed like coals. ‘Bring the blue vase in from the dining room Harriet. These snapdragons will look so pretty against blue.’

  ‘How are you, Ellie?’

  ‘Pretty well.’ She gave him a nervous smile. ‘I’ve been reading. Paradise Lost. Listen to this, Jimmy.’ She scrambled through the pages of the book in her hand, sat up a little straighter, and with a dramatic look, intoned:

  ‘Why stand we longer shivering under fears

  That show no end but death, and have the power,

  Of many ways to die the shortest choosing,

  Destruction with destruction to destroy?

  ‘You hear that, Jimmy?’ She laughed. ‘The very first of my kind. The first woman. Eve. An oracle. It’s already there. On her lips.’

  James shot her a stern look. ‘You shouldn’t be reading such gloomy matter, Ellie.’ He took the book from her hand and placed it out of her reach on the mantlepiece.

  ‘Shouldn’t … mustn’t … Same old James. At least Raf does me the honour of arguing with me.’

  ‘All right. I’ll argue. If you read on, Milton doesn’t seem to think Eve’s notion of suicide is such a good idea.’

  ‘That’s because he’s a man.’ Ellie’s eyes sparkled. ‘He’s got a role in the world, things to do. Whereas I …’

  ‘You,’ James cut her off. ‘You are coming out. You’ve been indoors for too long. It makes you melancholy.’

  ‘There’s plenty to be melancholy about, isn’t there, Jim?’ A sly, girlish expression flitted across her face. ‘Olympe seemed to think so and she had no reason …’

  ‘Did I hear you say something about going out?’ Harriet intervened. She had been arranging the flowers in the vase and she now positioned them on the table near the divan.

  ‘I can’t go out like this,’ Ellie said with a stubbornness which spoke of an earlier argument.

  ‘Yes, you can, Ellie,’ James intervened. ‘Harriet will get your hat and I’ll roll up that chair. It’s a beautiful day. The sights will put happier thoughts in your mind.’

  ‘You think it’s that easy,’ Ellie grumbled, but she allowed herself to be lifted into the chair with a murmur of only, ‘All right. Because you both want to. And it’s Violette’s day off.’

  A parasol was duly found, the elevator called, which had room only for the two women and some fifteen minutes later they found themselves in the bright light of the June day. Ellie pulled her hat down more closely over her eyes and hunched into her chair with the look of someone for whom the outdoors
had become a fearful place, too large to manoeuvre.

  Harriet met James’s eyes in apprehensive complicity. ‘You’ll soon get used to it,’ she murmured to Ellie with the determined cheerfulness of a trained nurse. ‘And I’ve just remembered. There’s a concert in the park. The music will be a boon. It will relax you wonderfully.’

  ‘If I relax any more, I’ll forget how to lift my little finger,’ Ellie commented dryly. ‘And then how will I turn the pages?’

  ‘I suspect you’ve had quite enough turning of pages.’ James intervened. ‘What you want is to turn over a new leaf. Monday. I’m starting to look forward to the visit to that doctor.’

  ‘You begin to sound more and more like Mother, do you know Jim?’ Ellie threw a mischievous look at him over her shoulder. ‘Such confidence in the medical profession.’

  ‘We’ll have you back with her in no time.’ James took it equably enough. ‘And with all your old friends.’

  ‘All my old friends who’ve been popping out babies with feline speed.’

  Ellie’s language startled him, as did the bitterness in her humourless chuckle.

  ‘I had a letter from Lizzie yesterday, asking me if I’d like to be godmother to her next one. I’m about to write back and tell her I don’t know enough about godly ways.’

  ‘Elinor!’ Harriet’s rebuke was sharp.

  They had reached the bustle of the Madeleine. The market was at its height and they made a small detour to Fauchon’s to take in the double spectacle of gourmet foods and a lavish array of flowers.

  ‘You remember that the Madeleine was Father’s favourite church, don’t you, James?’ Ellie suddenly asked. ‘He liked its grandeur without fuss. Render God his due importance but keep him out of the way.’

  Harriet looked a little taken aback and James wondered whether the comment had been for her benefit. ‘I didn’t know it was Father’s favourite,’ he said in an even tone.

  ‘Didn’t you? Of course not. I’d forgotten. It was only Raf and myself who travelled with him that summer. The holiday was meant to take me out of myself.’ She laughed briefly. ‘It served its purpose, I guess. We had a high old time. And Raf took up with the son of some expat and was babbling away in French within weeks. He’s always had a facility. For languages … for friendships …’ She paused as they manoeuvred her across the busy boulevard and down, past Maxim’s, towards the Concorde. ‘I miss Father, you know, Jim. Sometimes I miss him terribly. We grew so close in that last year.’