Blackness turns to grey; then the soft shape of Victoire’s bare shoulders. She is turned on her side away from the door, but there’s no sound of breathing, just a sound of listening. In the room is the sharp smell of sex.
Luce crosses to the bed and stands there, with her arms folded.
The waiting is terrible, but also pleasurable.
Victoire doesn’t move.
Luce puts a hand on the girl’s shoulder to half-turn her – no resistance. So she stoops, her hair trailing over the girl’s face and exposed collarbone, and presses their lips together.
Nothing. Then the girl makes an indeterminate sound; after a moment her mouth starts to move under Luce’s.
Luce can smell André’s cologne on her.
The girl’s eyes half open – shining slits in the grey light – she reaches her arms up and loops them around Luce’s neck.
Lower in the bed there is an indeterminate shifting and straining under the covers; Luce reaches a hand down and begins to rub over the sheets, at the fork of the girl’s legs.
‘Victoire,’ Luce says. The girl sighs Luce’s name. Sighs again. But then jerks: starts to struggle and push the hand off, and sit upright.
Now she looks startled, half-mad, her breath heaving.
‘No,’ she says.
Luce bends closer to calm her, placing a cool palm on the girl’s forehead: this time the girl shrieks in alarm, tries to bat the hands away, and when it doesn’t work, shouts out, a loud, inarticulate sound. Luce releases her; the girl pulls the covers close up under her chin.
‘What is this?’ André says, standing on the threshold in his nightgown, hunting rifle in one hand, lamp in the other. ‘I thought we were being broken into.’
‘I was asleep!’ Victoire says.
‘You were not asleep,’ Luce says.
André puts the lamp on the bedside table, takes in Victoire’s expression, and looks at Luce. He is looking hard at her now, trying to see under her skin.
‘What is this?’ he says again.
Victoire says, clutching at the sheets, colouring: ‘She is a madwoman, she tried to kiss me, and come to me in my bed.’
‘Hypocrite,’ Luce says.
André looks at her as if he is seeing someone new.
‘Why should you always have what you want, and I never?’ Luce says.
‘I will go to the police,’ Victoire says. ‘I will go to the police and tell them Luce Durand is a monster!’ She hops down from the bed, all white-eyed, and runs across the room to the door.
André catches her in mid-flight and holds her firm; now he has her by the waist, turns his face to whisper calming words in her ear; she stands transfixed, listening to him.
André places the point of his chin on the girl’s head: over the top he looks at Luce, and his lips curl upwards.
It is very simple for Luce to cross and close her hands around the stock of the hunting rifle in his hand, without really knowing what the gun is for and what she would do with it, and silently André’s hand tightens on the barrel, and they struggle, while Victoire buries her head in his neck and sobs and does not see.
Then plaster is flaking from the wall by the door and her ears are ringing, and the girl is no longer standing but lying on the parquet, dark red spreading over the sheet still wrapped round her. André is looking down at the gun in his hands, at his finger still wrapped around the trigger. He drops it. It clatters to the floor and falls next to the girl.
André is the faster thinker. He ushers Luce out – closes the door and when the servants come running, tells them it was just the sound of the storm, a tree falling, a natural occurrence.
When the sun comes up he goes to the servants’ quarters and gives them an unexpected day off.
They walk out to the lake, sure of being unobserved, with the bundle slung over André’s shoulder in a fireman’s lift, Luce walking behind.
At the lake he wraps Victoire in the canvas covering. Luce has a last glimpse of the girl’s face. She looks very young, almost a child; but the beauty makes Luce feel nothing; or rather, it only makes her feel cold.
André slips stones inside the canvas wrapper and heaves her off from the bank at the point where he knows the water is deepest.
He goes to Luce and slaps her twice; once across each cheek.
Back at the house, with the servants starting to return, cheer and cooking smells, Luce shakes and begins to vomit. She makes no move to get to the commode.
‘I can’t stay here tonight,’ André tells her, but she doesn’t answer. The servants have come to hover in the doorway, afraid; André considers what is best and telephones Aurélie Vercors, who arrives just as he is leaving.
Aurélie crosses to where Luce is and puts her hands to her face. ‘Tell me everything,’ she says.
After that, she and André will not have anyone in the house but themselves and their long-term domestic staff. They never host a dinner or a salon; they make excuses not to invite guests in. There is no need, anyway: they are more in demand than ever, every night a new party to attend in Paris, arm on arm, smile on smile.
Luce is enraged by the stupidity of the ordinary maids, but neither of them suggests an alternative.
One evening, at the very start of 1913, the front door opens and another girl stands there, and André behind her.
‘This is Huguette,’ he says, ‘from Pathé. She has agreed to be your new helper.’
After the shock, Luce sees that Huguette is very plain – almost comically so. Her hair hangs like spaniels’ ears down her neck; her face has a sharp quality, as if she is inclined to be pettish.
André says to Luce, in the flat voice he uses when he does not want to show emotion: ‘I can’t watch you in difficulties over simple things.’
The girl watches the two of them, a private tennis match. Inside herself, Luce hunts for alarm, for some sort of echo, and feels nothing.
Perhaps she was right: perhaps all that really did happen to someone else.
‘Yes,’ she says, ‘Why not? Yes.’
Juliette, x.
The archivist snaps the switch for the fluorescent tubes and they click on, one by one, keeping pace with us down the narrow aisle between the shelves, finger to her lips as she counts her way along.
‘P for Peyssac,’ she says, lifting down a large cardboard box. ‘This is everything that was left to the archive in his estate.’
We lift the lid.
A mushroom cloud of dust clears. The box is only a third full, its paper cargo yellowed and crumbling.
The archivist lifts the topmost layer of paper away. ‘Do you want me to read through these?’ she asks.
I shake my head, scanning the contents of the box. ‘We’re looking for a container. Something airtight, ideally – where he could put a strip of film.’
The first object to surface is a slim metal case, its hinges rusted.
The archivist looks at me; I snap it open. Inside the case is frayed blue velvet, in which a slender medal is nesting.
‘Croix de Guerre,’ the archivist says, turning the silver cross over. ‘From 1915. It must have been awarded to him just before he died.’
There is nothing behind the velvet and the back of the case.
The next thing is a set of fountain pens, their barrels dark with age; the archivist crouches, her elbows tucked into her body, and unscrews the barrels one by one.
The only other thing left in the box, aside from the letters, is a photo-frame, which I take out. I unclip the frame and lift off the wooden back; take out the photograph and check between the picture and the frame. Gently shake the ensemble.
There is nothing. I hold the photo for a minute, staring at the space between the frame and the back of the picture, then put it back on the desk.
We look at the empty box.
‘I’m sorry,’ says the archivist. ‘There’s nothing else.’ She smiles. ‘I suppose it’s lost for ever,’ she says.
‘I suppose,’ I say.
/> ‘Maybe he destroyed it.’
‘Maybe,’ I say. ‘But why go to the trouble of cutting it out in the first place? If it meant so much to him. If he wanted his work to be preserved for all time. This was the place to do it, wasn’t it? Temperature-controlled, safe. It doesn’t make sense.’
Something is fighting for attention: a tune I cannot identify. Something Rinaldi said.
I reach for the photograph again. Turning it over, I see Peyssac paterfamilias. His worried face set in a stern frown, he stands with one hand on the shoulders of each of his daughters; his wife hovering behind and to the left, her face a pale smudge. The little girls stare solemnly at the camera, their expressions blank. The taller is wearing a white dress, shoes and veil, posed in an attitude of piety. Just some spidery writing on the reverse of the picture. On the occasion of Micheline’s first communion; to my dear wife. Your Robert.
I’m still for so long that the archivist’s hand reaches out, and she gives my shoulder a gentle squeeze; I jump; we stand, confused, looking at each other.
‘Are you all right?’ she says.
‘It’s nothing,’ I say. Then: ‘People keep mementos of people, don’t they? Not of things. Images of loved ones. Like this photograph.’
The archivist shrugs. ‘I suppose so. Why?’
Juliette and Adèle
1967
‘And then?’
Adèle spreads her hands. ‘The trial, in the form it was, ceased. The charge against Luce and André was now murder on top of the attempt on my life, and as it was a capital charge, they were tried for it first. Victoire Doulay’s parents were the pursuers-injustice, and it was their lawyers who led, not Denis. The police took a month to assemble the burden of proof. The Doulay family hired an office for them to prepare the case. Although, as it turned out, there was no need.’
‘Why not?’
‘The judge asked her if it was she who had shot the girl, or whether it was her husband who had done it. He was giving her a chance to claim her innocence. I remember she waited, and she looked all over the courtroom, up to the ceiling and over to the windows as if someone passing outside would tell her what to say; and then she came to where I was sitting, at the table next to Denis.
‘“Yes,” she said, “I decided to shoot her.”’
I say: ‘Just like that?’
Adèle sighs. ‘Just like that. The easiest thing in the world.’
‘But why? Why did she confess?’
Adèle smiles. ‘Why? Because she was guilty.’
‘And then they questioned André?’
‘Yes. He did his best to pretend that she had implicated him maliciously, but her account of the shooting had been so clear that it was believed. Besides which, there were practicalities: it would have been difficult for her to have carried Victoire to the lake without help.’
‘They were shipped out to Guyana on the morning of the ninth of June.’
‘And what did you feel when you knew she had been transported?’
‘Some parts of me felt heavier, others lighter.’
‘And when you heard about André?’
‘I was surprised. I had not thought he would become involved in petty squabbles; certainly not before the prison transport even touched land. I had thought he would demonstrate more nous. The article said he was thrown overboard with the shank still in his guts.’
‘Then?’
‘I worked hard, and got promoted. I moved to Vincennes, to my apartment, and have been here ever since.’
‘Have you been happy?’
She takes a moment to think about this.
Then she says: ‘It has always been surprising. Aurélie Vercors came to visit me, after her divorce. She was with a woman about my age, who looked at her as though she was the beginning of everything.’
‘And Luce?’
Adèle says: ‘I read about it in the newspaper. There was a little article to say that she’d been released after five years at the work camp and lived in anonymity nearby for five more years. That it was only discovered who she really was when she died.’
‘And how did you feel when you heard?’
‘I had the impression that the walls of my apartment were made of a thick, viscous liquid: that I could put my hand through them if I wanted. Everything was fragile and surrounded by a radiant glow: if I tried to go to the door, the door would bend away from me. I thought I was in another room: the salon at the house. The quiet of the silk sofa and the spirals of mica in the sunlight from the window. I am a speck of dust. I am dancing for you. Except she was not in any room any more.’
The door to the café opens; someone comes in, orders coffee. The waiters’ voices laughing with the new customer.
Adèle is looking at me with a wide, blank smile.
I say: ‘And in that time, the time she was free, she never tried to get in touch with you? And you never tried to look for her?’
A shrug. ‘Everything we had to say had been said.’
Seeing my face, the smile twitches down at one corner. ‘What is it, Juliette?’
‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘Just cold.’
Juliette, xi.
Rinaldi opens the door on the second ring, his face showing perfect surprise, then awkwardness.
‘What can I do for you?’ he asks. ‘Is everything all right?’
‘I need to ask you about the photograph of the Pathé workers.’
He smiles warily. Then he relents. ‘Very well,’ he says, and turns to shuffle away down the corridor towards the salon.
‘I’m not sure how I can help you, really,’ he says.
‘I don’t think Peyssac took the film,’ I say. ‘I think it was someone else. Someone who had the opportunity, who was there on that day, but with a different motive.’ I take out the photograph. ‘I think it might have been this man.’
Rinaldi sighs. ‘Paul Leclerc?’
I run my fingernail over Paul’s eager eyes and hairless chin. ‘The security guard. The one Adèle Roux told me about. You said he tried to kill himself over a girl who worked at the factory.’
‘That’s right. In late 1914, I think. He almost hanged himself in the Bois de Vincennes. Very sad.’
‘Who was she? This love of his life?’
‘He never told me her name.’
I drum my fingers on the photo.
‘What happened to him?’
Rinaldi says: ‘He left the factory. He’d hurt his back; he wasn’t able to work afterwards. He did marry someone else eventually; he ended up living with his daughter on the outskirts of Paris. She and her husband looked after him. I had a card from her when he died.’
I lean forward. ‘What was the daughter’s name?’
‘Anne something. Something beginning with R.’
It is dark by the time I arrive at the house in Vincennes.
I hammer on the door for a full minute until there is the shuffle of footsteps coming down the hall corridor and stopping just on the other side.
‘Your father was a security guard at Pathé. He was the one who stole the film.’
The door stays shut. Inside the house, the dog begins to bark frantically.
‘Let me in. I could call the police.’
Silence.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight—
Anne Ruillaux opens the door.
She crosses her arms across her chest and suddenly begins to cry: child-like, her fists in her eyes. ‘He made me do it,’ she says. ‘He said, When I’m gone, take this to the archive, and say you don’t know how you got it. Don’t tell them I worked at the studio. We never had much because of looking after him. He said I was due some money. He said it wasn’t wrong because the real wrong had been done by the man who made the film. He said we were helping to make everything right.’
In the back, the dog howls its distress, flinging itself at the inside of the closed door in a scrabble of nails.
‘Why couldn’t you leave me in peace?’ she asks.
I say: ‘Was it because of the girl that he stole it? The one he was in love with and tried to kill himself over? Was it so he could have something to remember her by?’
She watches me.
‘It’s because she died, isn’t it?’ I say. ‘He wanted a memento?’
Silence. She shakes her head.
I stare at her, thrown. ‘What do you mean?’
Anne says: ‘She asked him to destroy the film completely. It would be dangerous to her if anyone saw it.’
‘Dangerous?’
‘Yes. She could get in trouble with the law.’
Somewhere in the distance an express train passes, on its way south; and when the sound is over, I find everything is clear.
The enormity of it: bile rising into my mouth.
‘But he didn’t destroy all the film,’ I say. ‘Your father cut out a scene and kept it separately. That part really was a memento, wasn’t it? It was the only scene she was in. That’s why he bothered to cut it out, instead of just keeping the whole film.’
A nod.
Silence. Then I say: ‘Do you know where he kept it?’
She says grudgingly, as if it’s of no consequence: ‘He asked to be buried with a cigarette case I hadn’t seen before.’
Juliette, xii.
You’re walking along the quais, between the Pont-Neuf and the Ile St Louis. Long, slanted light; breeze in your hair like someone running their fingers through it. The trees beside Notre Dame are shaking themselves free of their leaves.
You’ve come here because it’s where you go to make decisions, with the city around you like a blanket. The latelunch cooking smells. Near here a girl walked and bought a postcard of Max Linder; over there, a car rattled home from a party at the Ex-Minister’s apartment; the statue of St Jeanne d’Arc was lit up underneath the moon.
Of course there is a bruise: the burning sensation of being tricked, because she has been lying to you since you met. But underneath, what you feel is surprise. Surprise, because now that you’re here, there isn’t a decision to make.
To come to the end, and find you are not the person you thought you were.
Wind on the surface of the river. On the parapet above a tourist points his camera at you: click.
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