“The search was quite simple. I found three girls born in Paris who would have been under twenty-five at the time of your birth. Keeping within your budget, I was able to check all three of them. One married and went to Lyon, the other resides in Paris. The third, however, came from a family who are still to be found in the Saint-Antoine quarter. They have moved from their old address, which actually made it easier for me to seek information about them from old neighbors. In one evening I was able to discover quite a bit. It seems that Corinne found a position with a family in England and never returned. After her departure, the family never spoke of her. I cannot promise you, but I think it is very likely that this is the family you seek. What do you wish me to do?”
“Nothing more at present, monsieur. But I thank you.”
“A word of caution, mademoiselle. If you go to see them, they may not welcome you.”
“I understand, monsieur.”
But she didn’t.
She took the Métro to Bastille. To reach the address the lawyer had given her, she only had to walk eastward down the rue de Lyon and into the avenue Daumesnil. But when she emerged from the Métro, she found that the pale sunlight of the afternoon had given way to a dull, listless gray, and suddenly feeling that she wasn’t prepared for her encounter, she turned southward instead.
From the Place de la Bastille to the Seine, a line of wharfs ran down the side of one of the northern canals as it widened into a long basin, where the barges unloaded their cargoes. For a quarter of an hour she wandered there. Then a yellowish peep of sun seemed to signal that she should proceed, and so she crossed the water by the lock near the Seine and made her way eastward again.
The avenue Daumesnil was long, straight and grim. Immediately behind it ran a large, high viaduct that carried the railway trains out to Vincennes and the eastern suburbs beyond. She walked down the avenue. There were motor cars and buses in the roadway, but here and there a horse-drawn cart carrying coal or timber lumbered sadly by. Twice, a train from the viaduct let out a prolonged rattle that gradually died away behind the eastern rooftops.
The street she sought lay on the right. It was narrow. The storefronts on the street level mostly had shutters and their windows informed the passersby, with seeming reluctance, what might be found within. A selection of hammers, copper pipes and boxes of screws, accompanied by a familiar, metallic smell from the open door, announced the hardware and ironmonger’s emporium. Another window contained rolls of wallpaper, only one of which had deigned to reveal its pattern. And halfway down the street, a window containing a well-made table and bookcase, and a faded gold sign above the door saying PETIT ET FILS, told Louise that she had reached her destination.
The young man who emerged and stood behind the desk at the back of the little showroom was about her own age. He had brown hair and blue eyes. Nothing special. Did he look like her? Not really.
“May I ask,” she said politely, “if your family name is Petit?”
“Yes, mademoiselle.” He spoke respectfully. His accent belonged to the streets. She hadn’t thought of it, but she realized that, of course, whether in English or in French, she spoke in the accent of a different class from that of her real family.
“It is possible,” she said, “that we have a family connection.”
“A connection?” He was polite, but obviously puzzled.
“Through Corinne Petit.” She watched him a little anxiously.
“Corinne?” He looked mystified. Clearly the name meant nothing to him. “There is no one of that name in this family, mademoiselle. I have never heard it. It must be another family.”
“She went to England.”
“My uncle Pierre and his family went to Normandy once on holiday. That’s as close as anyone has been to England.”
“Is your father here?”
“He will be back tonight, mademoiselle, but not until late.” He looked apologetic, but then brightened. “My grandmother is here, if you would care to wait a minute.” He disappeared into the workshop behind.
His grandmother. My grandmother, perhaps, she thought. After a long pause, the older woman appeared.
She was slim. When she was younger, she would have had a figure very similar to her own, Louise realized. Her hair was gray, frizzed in the fashion of an earlier time. Her eyes were just like her own. But they were hard, and angry. She stared at Louise in silence for a moment.
“Mademoiselle?”
“I was asking your grandson …,” Louise began.
“He has told me.”
“I am the daughter of Corinne Petit, madame.”
She watched the old lady’s eyes. There was recognition. She was certain of it.
“There is no one in this family of that name, mademoiselle.”
“Not now. But I believe there was once. She led a respectable life in England, married and died. I never saw her. I was adopted by a banker and his wife.”
“You are fortunate, then, mademoiselle.”
“Perhaps. I was curious to know something of my French family, madame. That is all.”
“And why did you suppose you would find them here?”
“A lawyer made researches for me. He found three families with a daughter of that name born in Paris at the right time.”
“Perhaps your mother was not born in Paris, mademoiselle.”
“It is possible, madame, but I suspect she was.”
“I should know if I had given birth to a daughter named Corinne, mademoiselle. And I did not. You have come to the wrong place.”
She was lying. Louise knew it instinctively. She was certain of it. This old woman was her grandmother. Was the scandal really so terrible for the family, back then? Was her grandmother still implacable? Perhaps it was because the boy was there.
“I am sorry you cannot help me, madame,” she said sadly. She suddenly felt an urge to cry.
“I may be able to help you,” the old lady said. Was there a hint of pity, of kindness, in her voice? She paused. “My late husband had a cousin. They never spoke. There was a family quarrel—he never told me what it was about. But he had two daughters. One went to live in Rouen, I believe. The other, I don’t know. She could have been called Corinne. It’s possible. If you could find her sister in Rouen …” She turned to the young man. “Jean, I forgot that cake in the oven. Run upstairs to the kitchen, and take it out for me.”
The young man disappeared.
“I think you are my grandmother,” said Louise. “Was my mother so terrible that you have to lie?”
But now, with her grandson gone, the old lady changed abruptly. The look she gave Louise was venomous. When she spoke, it was quietly, almost a hiss.
“How dare you come here? What gives you the right? The person you speak of has been dead to us for more than twenty years. You want to come here with your stupid quest, and disgrace the next generation as well? We didn’t want her and we don’t want you. Now get out, and never show your face here again.” She went to the door and opened it. “Get out! Live your life elsewhere. But stay away from us. Forever.” She reached for Louise’s arm, seized it with surprising force and shoved her out into the street, slamming the door behind her.
Louise looked back at her grandmother through the glass. There was no hint of mercy in the old lady’s face. It was pale, and cold, and hard.
It was still early evening when Luc came by the restaurant. He’d been on a business errand.
Sometimes he told himself that he should work harder, but the twenty or thirty clients to whom he discreetly supplied cocaine provided him with all the ready cash he needed. Years ago when he was operating the bar before the war, he had run a few girls as well, acting as a protector mainly. But he’d given that business up. It was too much trouble. People had sometimes asked him if he could supply them with a nice girl. “If I find someone, I’ll let you know,” he had always told them. But so far he hadn’t come upon a good prospect.
He was carrying quite a quantity of cash, and was
going to put it in the small safe he kept in the office behind the restaurant. Then he was going to have a meal, walk up to his house, and go to bed early.
When he got to the restaurant, Louise was sitting quietly at a table. “She’s been sitting there two hours,” Édith told him. “Waiting for you, I suppose.”
He sat down opposite her.
“Have you eaten?” he asked.
She shook her head. He ordered for them both.
“I met my grandmother today,” she said. “She told me never to come there again.” She gave him a sad smile. “It seems nobody wants me.”
“You must eat,” he said.
As they ate, Luc did not try to comfort her too much. But he did try to explain. He pointed out that it was natural for the old lady to act as she had. “I dare say that’s how your mother was treated all those years ago when they threw her out. Plenty of families would have done the same. They do it to protect themselves. So when you appeared and threatened to upset the apple cart, she must have been terrified.”
Louise listened. She understood what he was saying, but she was still all alone in the world.
When they had finished their meal he asked her quietly if she would like to come with him, and she nodded. After they had left the restaurant, he put his arm around her shoulder, protectively, and she smelled the aroma of Gauloises in his clothes, and she felt comforted. Then they walked up the hill of Montmartre toward his house.
The affair between Luc and Louise lasted several months. At first, they would meet in the afternoons at his house. But after a little while, he found her an apartment. “It belongs to a businessman I know and it’s in a good quarter of the city, just north of the Palais-Royal and near the stock exchange, the Bourse. That’ll be convenient for getting to Chanel as well.”
“Won’t it be expensive?”
“No. He’s a rich man. His daughter was using it, but she’s left and he hasn’t decided whether to sell it or let it. For the time being, he’d be glad to have a respectable person there. Assuming he thinks you’re respectable, he wouldn’t charge you any rent, but you’d have to leave if he wanted the place back. That ought to suit you rather well.”
She’d met the man, a middle-aged stockbroker with a respectable family, who had been suitably impressed by her background. Sometimes Luc would join her there for the night, and sometimes she would go up to his house on the hill of Montmartre.
She quite liked the house. It was a little masculine, as one might expect, and it was permeated by a faint aroma of coffee and Gauloises, like a bar, but it was comfortably furnished with pieces that he had probably found in sales over a period of time. The salon contained a large sofa in the Directoire style, some Second Empire chairs, prints of Napoleonic soldiers on the walls and a thick carpet which, he informed her, he had laid himself. The bedroom contained a large bed made of the best African mahogany and handsomely inlaid. The kitchen contained a gas cooker and a fridge. He was a good cook, on the rare occasions that he took the trouble, but she liked to cook for him.
Luc was a wonderful lover. He was skillful, strong and considerate. In later years, she would say simply: “It was the right time for me.”
They met several times a week. Often they would explore the city together. She had thought she knew Paris fairly well, but soon she began to see it not as a big city but as a series of communities. She shared his memories of characters who had lived their eccentric lives in every corner of the city. She discovered ancient street markets, the places along the river where she could buy good flowers cheaply; he showed her where to eat the food of Normandy, or Alsace, or Provence; he showed her where the licensed brothels were, and where the old prisons and gallows had stood. He paid for everything, for he always seemed to have cash, and since she was living free, she could save not only her modest allowance but the small sums she got from modeling as well.
One benefit of working for Chanel was that, once in a while, she might be given small items of clothing. But most of all, she found that she was developing an eye for fashion. And with the advice from the other models, and information from Luc, she was able to assemble a little wardrobe that was getting quite chic.
It also amused her that, though he did not always say anything, Luc’s eye missed nothing. A grunt of approval meant that he had noticed the new blouse she was wearing. And once in a while, if she was carrying some elegant little bag she’d picked up somewhere, he’d ask sharply, “Where did you get that?” For he didn’t like to think that there was any bargain in the city that he didn’t know about. And she would say, “I shan’t tell you. A girl has her secrets.” And then, on and off, he might question her, “Was it one of those secondhand shops behind the rue Saint-Honoré, or that Moroccan dealer on the rue du Temple?” And even if he guessed right, she would always deny it. And though he would pretend to be annoyed, she knew he liked the challenge of these little games, and others that she learned to play, to tease him.
Yet despite all the time they spent together, she never discovered anything about his business. If he was out, he was out. That was it.
“Never ask a man his business,” he told her. “He’ll either get his whip or get bored.”
“Bad alternatives,” she said with a laugh.
“Voilà.”
She had the impression that he might be part-owner in other bars and clubs, and that there might be properties from which he collected rents, but that was all she knew.
Meanwhile, she was happy in the new quarter where she found herself. With the stockbrokers and financial men around the Bourse, the area was less residential than most other quarters of the city. But it had a feature of particular charm—a whole network of glass-covered arcades and halls, some of them more than a century old, that housed all kinds of stores and places of refreshment. She would often walk about these intimate malls, exploring happily for an hour at a time.
Only once during all this time did she glimpse another side of Luc—and even then, it was hard to say what she had seen. It happened at dawn, on a summer’s day, up at his house on the slopes of Montmartre.
She was suddenly awoken by a cry beside her. Luc was thrashing about wildly in the bed. Before she could do anything, his hands encountered her, and then suddenly seized her by the throat. She tried to pry them off, and scream, but his grip was so strong that she couldn’t even breathe. She was completely in his power, and he was still asleep. She hit out wildly, slapped his face as hard as she could. His eyes opened. He looked startled and confused. His grip relaxed.
“Luc, what are you doing?” she gasped.
“A nightmare.” She could see that he was still struggling into consciousness.
“Evidently. But you almost throttled me.”
“Chérie, I am so sorry.”
“Who were you trying to strangle?”
“A dog.”
“A dog?”
He propped himself up on one elbow and stared at her.
“A dog. I can’t explain. It was a crazy nightmare. Without any sense to it.”
And then he gave her a strange look.
“Did I cry out anything?”
“No.”
“A name?”
“You mean the dog had a name? What’s he called? Fido?”
“I didn’t call anything out?” He was fully awake now, and he was watching her in a strange way. She’d never seen him look like that before, and she found it disquieting.
“Nothing. You were thrashing around in the bed. That woke me up. The next thing I knew, you were strangling me.”
He continued to look at her. Then, apparently satisfied, his expression changed to one of tender concern.
“I hardly ever have nightmares. It must have been something I ate. Are you all right?” He kissed her softly on the forehead. “You had better hold me. I was afraid.”
They lay together for a little while. She held him. His fear subsided, and his courage grew. But just when she thought he was going to start making love, he got up
from the bed, and went to the window. Opening the shutter, he looked down into the little garden behind the house. His eyes seemed to be fixed on something.
“What are you looking at?” she asked.
“Nothing. I was listening to the dawn chorus. One could be in the middle of the country.”
“Come back to bed.”
“In a minute.”
And soon he did, and they made love, and everything was back to normal.
But she couldn’t forget the strange expression on his face when he was questioning her, even though she had no idea what it meant.
The girl. It was a long time since that vision had troubled him. Luc knew it was said that murderers revisit the scene of the crime, but he had never gone down into that cave again. The girl must surely be whitened bones by now. Even her name was forgotten. After all, it was more than ten years since she’d disappeared. A world war had come and gone. Millions had died. Bushes had grown across the hidden entrance behind the little shed in his garden. One would have to cut them down even to get into the caves now. There was no reason to give the girl a thought.
Nor did he, during his waking hours. But sometimes, in his sleep, her face rose up before him. Her pale face, her eyes angry and accusing. And he would know that she was a ghost, and be afraid.
But that night the dream had been different. He had seen her skeleton, in among the others in the cave. But a strange plant had been growing from the bones, sending out long shoots. And one of the shoots had turned into a long stalk that had started winding its way along the passage, yard after yard, until at last it found its way to the entrance hidden behind the shed in his garden, and somehow it had managed to creep around the back of the shed and out onto the grass where it lay, apparently exhausted by its efforts to make its way out of the darkness into the light. And from the end of the green stalk, now, small flowers like lilies began to grow.
Perhaps the plant might have remained there, doing no harm, had it not been for the dog that suddenly appeared. Luc had no idea where the dog had come from, but it seized the plant, and began to pull on it. Luc took the dog by the collar and tried to drag it away, but the dog would not be dissuaded from its task. It pulled on the long stalk and dragged it several feet. Then it leaped forward and grabbed the stalk farther up, and pulled that out from the tunnel too. Far underground, the skeleton of the girl began to move, and now Luc realized that if the dog kept pulling, it would pull the dead girl all the way up until she was back in his garden. He must stop the dog, before it dug her up again.
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