‘Invite her by all means.’ Ellie threw him a coy look. ‘But I don’t really think Marguerite will find it very interesting after Paris. Boston, in fact, is of no interest at all.’
‘Elinor!’ Mrs Elliott chastised. ‘How can you say such a thing. One of our great cities. Why we have our university, our symphony, and the aspect is quite glorious.’
‘And I dare say Raf and Jim’s joint presence would make it more so. But I fear they have too much to fascinate them right here. Isn’t that so, Raf?’
‘Yes, Ellie,’ Raf muttered, then reprimanded. ‘I do think your choice of topic is quite tasteless. If you’re trying to draw me into an argument, you may yet succeed.’ There was a muted threat in his voice.
‘Tasteless. I have grown tasteless, Mrs Elliott. You shall have to coach me. Ah the food, let’s hope it’s less tasteless than I am. On parle du goût,’ Ellie translated in case Ponsard and Henry hadn’t understood.
‘Taste is a strange human faculty,’ Dr Ponsard began while the soup was being served. ‘I have patients who complain of having lost all taste. Yet I can find nothing at all wrong with them.’
‘So you hypnotise them into taste, Dr Ponsard. I can see the theatre of it now. You put them to sleep and you tell them that when a lemon comes their way, they’ll screw up their faces and their mouths will shrivel. Or this soup, you tell them it’s smooth and creamy and as soothing as the memory of mother’s milk. But what do you do when your patients have lost their taste for life?’
‘Ah, that, Mademoiselle, that is a question. I think I might tell them to take a walk through this city of ours, so extraordinary on the eve of a great new century. And to look, to watch, to observe carefully, to see all the things they haven’t seen yet. The progress of science has been truly remarkable of late, let alone the progress of technology. Think of it – electricity, the telephone. A bright world where the most distant is close. In the coming century, technology will …’
Ellie cut him off. ‘And if your patients can’t see?’
Ponsard’s genial face wrinkled in sudden laughter. ‘You bring me back, Mademoiselle. You are quite right. Back to the ordinary, to the human. All right. If a patient is incapable of seeing, I would tell her to listen, to listen to the stories people tell. Why just yesterday, I was in the market near the Saint-Germain and this woman came up to me to beg for a sou and she told me the most intricate story – of the great house she had worked in near Bordeaux, of the master’s son, who was a little slow, but who had seduced her, so that her mistress sent her down, and how the son had promised to join her in Paris, but had never come, though she was certain he would. Meanwhile …’
‘Stories are always stories of woe.’
‘It is possible to intercede to make them otherwise. I told this woman that if she presented herself at my house on Monday, my butler would be interviewing for a new chambermaid. I shall put a word in for her. But the point is that by approaching me and speaking, this woman began to alter the course of things.’
‘You are a kind man, Dr Ponsard. There are not many like you. My brothers are kind, too. They will always help a poor woman in distress. It is when the woman reaches out for equality that they lose their sight and their hearing, and perhaps even their taste.’
‘Elinor.’ This time the reprimand came from Harriet.
Ellie shook her head. ‘I’m always shocking you, Harriet. I promise that I do not intend to.’
Marguerite’s voice rose from the other end of the table to engage Mrs Elliott in English. James hoped it blocked out the sound of Raf’s low hiss.
Tears leapt into Ellie’s eyes. ‘Let’s be friends, Raf. Just today. Just before I go. Just for a few hours.’
‘We’re all friends, Ellie.’ James patted her hand. It was ice cold. ‘We love you very much.’
She was looking at Raf. Grudgingly, his brother patted her other hand. ‘It’s true,’ he mouthed.
After that, Ellie behaved. James made sure he showered attention on her, prodded Raf to do the same. His brother was taciturn. He kept stealing glances at the empty chair. He only moved into conversation when prompted by Marguerite, who wanted to know how he thought the new military tribunal would conduct itself over Dreyfus.
To James’s relief, no sooner had the cheese platter gone round, than Ellie pleaded fatigue. The guests soon took their leave. Only Marguerite stayed for an extra moment. She hugged Ellie and whispered something into her ear. For a moment, Ellie’s face turned as stony as one of the statues in the Luxembourg Gardens. Then she recovered herself and gave Marguerite a coy little smile and bade her adieu.
‘The rest of you mustn’t go yet.’ Ellie held onto Raf’s arm. She laughed, suddenly cheerful. ‘I just wanted them away. But the night’s still young and I want to go out. I want you all to take me out. For my last stroll through the Paris streets. It’s a beautiful evening.’
Raf looked at James, who nodded.
‘All right, sister, we’ll race you through the boulevards.’
‘Not the boulevards.’ Ellie’s eyes grew dreamy, her face serious. ‘The Tuileries. And the river, I want to see the river with the lights twinkling at its edges.’ She paused, her voice dropping to a murmur which was nonetheless a command. ‘I want to say goodbye. Goodbye to Olympe.’
Silver streaked the dense foliage of the gardens, silent but for the rustle of leaves and the crunch of gravel beneath their feet. They didn’t speak. They proceeded slowly. Hypnotised by Ellie’s injunction, their small party had taken on the aura of a funeral cortège. She herself sat in a capsule of unbreachable stillness, like an icon they were moving towards the altar in some darkened church. Her head was poised in solemnity, her expression mournful and unchanging. One gloved hand crossed her chest to fold over Raf’s who was pushing her chair. The other tensely clutched at her skirts.
Moonlight illuminated a couple clasped in embrace beneath the arching branches of a tree. At the sound of their procession, they tittered and fled into deeper shadows. James expected one of Ellie’s sharp asides. It didn’t come. Perhaps she hadn’t seen. He met Harriet’s gaze. It was full of silent intelligence. She, too, had been expecting an outburst. Something like fear crossed her face and made her lips move. But no words emerged.
At a gesture from Ellie, they turned into a path on their right, avoiding the arc of the Carrousel. It was darker here beneath the tunnel of trees, the sound of their footfall louder. James was glad of the sight of the Quai and the sudden brilliance of lamps. They crossed towards the river. Raf stopped at the edge of the balustrade so that they could all watch the choppy flow of the waters, scudding and silver-tipped.
After a moment, Ellie mutely urged them forward and when they reached the Pont Royal, she waved them onto the bridge. It was deserted. As they crossed its lonely expanse, James had an odd sensation that Paris itself had become a ghost town, abandoned by its inhabitants who had left behind homes and boats in an emergency departure. The water rushed beneath them, charcoal black and angry where the moon hadn’t graced it with light. He found as he looked down that his fists were tightly clenched in he didn’t know what emotion, but suddenly he had a vision of Olympe hurling herself over the stone balustrade, no higher than his waist.
It was at that moment that Ellie’s scream punctured the stillness.
‘What is it? What is it?’ He bent to her at the same time as Raf.
She stared at them, her eyes huge. ‘My purse. My best purse. I must have dropped it.’
‘We’ll find it for you, Ellie. Don’t worry.’
‘It can’t be far. I would have noticed. Back there.’ They were some three quarters of the way along the bridge and she pointed back towards the right bank. ‘Yes, it must have been where we stopped just before.’
Raf was already walking, his eyes glued to the ground.
‘Go with him, Jim. You, too, Harriet. You know he never notices anything. It’s the small, pretty one. My favourite. Father gave it to me.’
James met her ey
es. They glinted oddly. He knew better than to gainsay her in that kind of mood. Yet he hesitated.
‘Go on, Jim. I’ll be fine. Really, I will.’ She reached out to pat his hand. ‘Really.’ She gave him her sweetest smile.
He turned his back on her and followed the others. He could feel her eyes on him and he turned round once, but she waved him on. She was still smiling.
The sound erupted in the night air and inside him with the force of an explosion. A muffled underwater detonation like a boulder hitting water at speed. He knew instantly what it was but his mind refused the reality. From his point near the end of the bridge, he looked back fully expecting her smile. Instead he saw the chair, empty, and in the swirl of the waters, some pale silvery substance which might have been moonlight, but was a flurry of skirts. For a moment, everything froze. There was only that empty chair, the whirl of light on the river and his shout.
‘Ellie,’ he screamed. ‘Ellie.’ And then his limbs moved. Raf, he saw, was ahead of him, racing down the steps to the embankment, plunging into the river. He took the opposite course, simultaneously shouting at Harriet, ‘Find a doctor. Quick,’ as he ran past the empty chair to the far quay and, shedding jacket and shoes, dived in.
The waters were icy, the current a fierce tug which willed him away from his destination. When he reached the point where she had plunged, there was nothing there but blackness. He saw Raf heading towards him, saw him gulp air and dive, disappearing for too long. James let the river carry him where it would and then went under, too. He fought to keep his stinging eyes open, but there was only darkness visible. He came up for air, looked for Raf and dived again. At the fourth attempt he saw it, some billowing substance mushrooming white at a distance beneath him.
Raf reached her at the same time and together they tugged her back to shore. Her skirts were so heavy that they seemed to act as a sail, relentlessly pulling her away from their joint strength. At last they managed to hoist her onto the bank. With a grim determination which had little to do with reason, they turned her over and in a repeat of the childhood lifesaving games they had practised on each other in Atlantic waters, Raf straddled her and began to pump water out of her lungs with rhythmic tenacity. It had little effect. Ellie’s will had always been stronger than theirs. It could be no different in the implementation of her death.
Only when Raf’s eyes met his own in desperation, did James see that tears mingled with the water on his face. He, too, was crying, he now realised. He put his arm round Raf and in the same instant, like a man waking from anaesthesia, became aware of the light shining on them and of the small crowd that had gathered.
A figure in a ragged suit was holding a lantern above Ellie and shaking his head. Dim lights glimmered in neighbouring houseboats. There was a blanket round his shoulders and another round Raf’s. Harriet emerged with a policeman who muttered something incomprehensible. Nothing in the ensuing commotion made any sense, neither the arrival of a sleepy doctor and more policemen, nor the journey to a Commissariat and the dilatory filling out of reports. Nothing had any substance. The only substance lay in Ellie’s smile as she said to him, ‘I’ll be fine. Really I will.’ And then, in that sodden, breathless body, that pale skewed face, over which the smile still seemed to hover.
He had known, James thought. That part of him which was attuned to his sister had known. She had wanted to die. What else but that had she spoken of in one way and another since his very arrival in this city? He also, he realised, knew why she had wanted to die, why she had chosen that very spot in which to end her days. Above his grief, it was that knowledge which terrified him. How long had he kept it at bay?
Later, on Harriet’s insistence, they went back to Ellie’s apartment and drank hot coffee spiked with brandy amidst a silence none of them seemed able to break. The heavy perfume of the blooms Ellie had filled the space with now took on an added significance. Their eyes kept darting towards the divan where she had lain propped on her cushions. So dense was the room with her presence, that it seemed impossible she was no longer there.
Harriet’s sudden movement startled them. Her face convulsed, she launched herself towards the divan and began to throw blankets and cushions to the floor, one after another, with machine-like frenzy. When there was nothing left to fling, she picked up the velvet coverlet itself and stripped the divan down to pale, pristine linen. There was a thud as something heavy dropped from the cover’s folds. They all stared. On the floor lay two thick leather-bound notebooks, the very ones Ellie had ceaselessly scribbled in during her delirium.
Harriet bent to pick them up, but stopped midway as if some higher authority forbade her motion. Tears streamed down her face. She turned away from the two men and bundling cushions and blankets in her arms, carried them out of the salon.
James reached for the notebooks. ‘Shall we?’ He asked softly.
Raf shuddered. ‘It doesn’t seem right. She always so insisted on her privacy. And her journal was her most private possession.’
‘I think she meant us to find these. Otherwise she would have destroyed them. The plunge wasn’t a whim, Raf. I know it. Know it with a certainty I’ve rarely had about anything.’
‘But how did she do it? I still don’t understand that. She hadn’t stood up for months. How could she …?’
James cut him off. ‘She could walk, Raf. At least the bodily part of her could. I saw it myself, when Dr Ponsard hypnotised her. It was uncanny. Maybe his treatment enabled her to do so when she was more aware … I don’t pretend to understand any of it. But she could. The sorry fact is that she did.’ He fingered the notebooks. ‘Let’s try and quiet Harriet and go back to your place. I think we need to read these.’
‘You read them, Jim. I can’t. Not yet. Not yet.’
James lay on the bed in Raf’s spare room and scanned Ellie’s journal. The script was sometimes neat, sometimes florid, sometimes altogether illegible. Several people seemed to inhabit even her writing. Except for the occasional note of a Monday or Wednesday, there were no dates, nor in this scramble of varying handwritings could he even be certain that the entries were sequential.
He skimmed, hoping that his eyes would fall on what he was looking for. There was so much here, too much for any single reading. Entitled ‘Paris – Days and Ways’, the journal began with Ellie’s impressions of the city, its people, the books she had read and plays she had seen, and even included some acerbic political commentary. The spark and bite of her wit were in ample evidence. Gradually, other darker notes crept in – an agonised cry of loneliness, a wail of pain, outpourings which took on a delirious quality.
He didn’t want to pause over this intimate matter. It felt like an invasion. He didn’t want to know about Ellie’s cloying love of Raf, the catalogue of her passionate longing for his continuous presence, the secret torment his comings and goings stirred in her. He tried to race on, but the leeches of her emotion had attached themselves to his skin, draining his lucidity. He found himself immersed in the whirlpool of her warring thoughts, the howls of rage and desire which lived just below the surface of the Ellie he thought he knew. Her ardent wishes were so out of keeping with the possibilities her life offered or she felt able to act on, the accompanying resentment so intense, that he felt breathless, trapped in the very paralysis which had eventually afflicted her body.
When had this war in her begun? What had caused it?
Dizzily, he leafed pages, until his eyes were riveted by a passage about his father.
‘Thinking on it, I have begun to understand that he had long hated her. He shouldn’t have. Her. Our mother. All those black moods, those splitting headaches. She was at their base. At the end, he wanted only me. Me to tend to him. I loved him, yet now I sense that I hated that poor, pale body with its sagging skin and distended joints. How I loathed the washing of him. Yet his need spoke louder, until it swallowed me up, cutting me off from life, leaving only a husk barely able to withstand the disgust of it. Only Raf was left to me.’
‘He has stopped talking to me, stopped telling me things. Why? Why did I ever introduce them! I fear the worst. When I said, oh so lightly and trippingly, that he was only attracted to her because of his passion for the Dreyfus case and the one over, so would the other be, he stormed from the room. He has not come back. He cannot have her. Mine. The only mine.’
James’s mind reeled. He forced himself to his feet and tiptoed to the kitchen. He poured himself a glass of water and drank it thirstily, following it with a second. The last entry had bludgeoned through the locked door of his perceptions and now threatened havoc. Olympe. Olympe and Ellie. He must have missed an earlier entry which named the girl.
He took the notebooks from the bed to the small desk in his room and switched on a brighter light so as better to concentrate. A quick leafing backwards produced no mention of Olympe’s name. On a whim, he turned to the second notebook and there, on the third page, he found it – the description of a visit to the theatre with Madame de Landois and the remarkable talent of a young actress, Olympe Fabre, who was this munificent woman’s friend. Three pages later, came a second report, this time of a musical tea at Marguerite’s house. Here Ellie sang the praises of the talented Olympe Fabre, who seemed so very much her own person, who had a refreshing air of freedom about her. The entry finished with an emphatic declaration of how wonderful it was to have found new and admirable friends, women who were untrammelled by their sex, women who had thought and read, but, unlike her, had also acted on their desires.
He skimmed more pages, but Olympe’s name had now disappeared from the entries where the writing was legible. James was mystified. Had all his recent suppositions been utterly wrong? He had been so certain over these last days that somewhere in the cryptic recesses of Ellie’s mind lay the essential clues to the mystery of Olympe’s death, but now at a rough scan he could find no mention either of her death or her funeral.
Paris Requiem Page 46