A Good Woman

by Lisa Appignanesi

  ‘A little tactless,’ I offered. ‘She can’t quite match style to intent.’

  ‘Oh?’ He scrutinized me.

  ‘Mmm, she’s a little brash for some accounts.’

  ‘I’ll check it out.’

  ‘Nice wine,’

  ‘Very.’

  I swallowed another mouthful and nestled into his shoulder. ‘Grant, is it true that you give good head.’

  He started to laugh, ‘Mostly when provoked by lean young writers.’

  I remembered that some weeks back I had left a party with Will Sykes, partly with a sense that it was a favour long overdue, but mostly because I liked him. I hadn’t known Grant was there, but perhaps someone had simply mentioned the fact to him. So that explained Amy.

  ‘And otherwise?’

  ‘You should know.’

  I touched him. I knew.

  Some weeks later Amy disappeared from the office. I thought of Madame de Pompadour and the power of mistresses.

  PART TWO

  _____________________________________________

  -12-

  The raw silk sofa has the same milky hues as the one in my first apartment in New York. But I have married it with the soft luminosity of golden mahagonny. On the corner of the long refectory table which is my desk stands a claret red globe of a bowl. Like some tribal fetish, it haunted me for days until I returned to the antique shop on the Rue du Cherche Midi where I met Beatrice, and purchased it. Perhaps it was once used to carry blood.

  I have spent the last weeks furnishing the site of my new life. I have bought a bed and a fridge and a cooker and a dozen leafy plants for the glazed hall. I have bought scatter cushions in bold African prints and a quilt of startling yellow with a single black zigzagging line down its centre. I have scoured exhibitions and come back with two oils by the same artist. His palette has the ochre and sienna and Titian reds of a lost Italian century, but his figures live in the tormented planes of a contemporary world.

  Why I have done all this, I do not know. I have no intention of inviting anyone here. Perhaps one day Beatrice will come and give my rooms her benediction. But I haven’t phoned her yet and I do not want her to realize that I have moved in on the other side of the street. Instead, I sit and gaze out the fourth floor window in the certain knowledge that sooner or later I will catch sight of her in the building opposite. This week two of the floors are shuttered. From the emptiness of the Paris streets, I have deduced that we are in the midst of school holidays. Beatrice must be away. She will return. Then she will become my teacher.

  Meanwhile I read. In my teens and when I first came to New York, Balzac was my favourite novelist. I devoured the key volumes of the Comédie Humaine - Lost Illusions, Old Goriot, Cousine Bette. The cutthroat gaudiness and worldly hypocrisies of Balzac’s characters thrilled me. My mother would try to suggest that I was too young for that jaundiced realism, those cynical certainties about the ways of the world that I paraded triumphantly before her. She urged me to read the Brontës, but the passionate longings of the Yorkshire sisters made me squirm or filled me with hilarity.

  Now I have gone back to Balzac, but the old thrill has disappeared.

  I glance at my watch and leap off the sofa. Time has vanished again. It is almost four and my interview is at five. My interview.

  The letter arrived just before I moved. Its Paris postmark confounded me, stoked the embers of paranoia. I couldn’t imagine who in Paris might be writing to me. The few letters I received were from Steve in New York. Once there was an envelope from my publishers containing a few other envelopes. But Paris? And then I remembered. The ad. Women who kill. What on earth had induced me to respond to it? And why had anyone bothered to answer?

  Yet they had and the single sheet asked me to attend for interview on one of three dates from which I could choose. Maître Arnault would be available then. I slept on it and the following morning, I telephoned. I was curious.

  Paris is full of naked women: they curl lazily into the walls of metro stations, throw their heads back in ecstasy at street corners, leap off billboards like prowling tigers, or stand proudly pregnant, their rounded lines mimicked by this year’s new car. No one seems shocked. The female nude here still speaks the rich language of seduction, a lingua franca of beauty. In New York it has been silenced in public spaces, is relegated to the sleazy porn shops of 42nd street, where it can only mutter the gutter expletives of rape and violence.

  I walk along the Faubourg St Honoré without pausing to glance at elegant boutiques or designer dazzle or even the regal facade of the British Embassy. Number 126 bears a gold plaque announcing the Cabinet of Arnault, Foch, Cournot and Meyer. I take a deep breath, toss back my hair and let the elevator haul me up to the fourth floor. The office has nothing office-like about it. It feels like the well-appointed home of some nineteenth century dandy with a fetish for leather bound tomes and Grandville’s human zoology. I half expect an English butler, sleek as a seal, to appear from the door on my left, take my coat and settle me into the tawny chesterfield.

  Instead a woman addresses me. I follow the swish of her impeccably tailored suit into the next room and am startled to find, when she turns round to face me from behind her desk, that despite the briskness of her walk, she must be at least sixty. Though the understated make-up makes no attempt to hide her years, she wears them lightly and with a grace which announces that she is still an attractive woman. For a moment I am baffled. The codes are not what New York has accustomed me to. This woman is too old to be attractive in so diffident a fashion and also too regal to be a secretary. She must be Maître Arnault. I had expected a man.

  ‘I’ll take down some of your details to begin with, if you don’t mind,’ she smiles at me with polite correctness, a pen at the ready.

  ‘Of course.’ I already regret having come, regret it even more as the sundry details of address, and status and education, become a veritable grilling about the course of my career. At the same time the very speed of her questions and her pen mesmerizes me, so that I answer as efficiently as she interrogates.

  Some fifteen minutes in, it is she who ruptures the mood. She pauses and gives me a long, hard look, ‘Are you certain this is a job for you?’ she asks a little querulously.

  I stare back at her, shrug, ‘Forgive me, Maître, but not only am I not certain, I still have very little idea what the job is.’

  ‘Oh? Wasn’t the job description sheet I sent you sufficient explanation?’ She is visibly taken aback.

  ‘There was no such sheet in the letter I received.’

  ‘I see,’ she puts her pen down. ‘An oversight.’ Then suddenly she laughs, a throaty, rueful sound. ‘By the way, I am not Maître Arnault. He’ll see you as soon as his meeting is over … unless all this is a waste of time.’ She reaches into a drawer in her desk and passes me a single sheet of closely typed paper. ‘You had better read this.’

  She watches me as I skim the page, but before I have got to the end of the first paragraph, a door to my side opens.

  Simultaneously I see my interviewer spring up and a tall, loose-limbed man enter the room. He is wearing a dark, serious suit, but it floats carelessly round his frame and his shirt is open at the neck. His hair, more pepper than salt, is too long, as if he has forgotten to have it cut and it falls defiantly over his forehead. As he stretches his hand out to me, I see that his eyes beneath thick brows are a deep blue, almost black in their intentness. They fix me, examine, probe, and I feel some truth drug is being applied which lays me uncomfortably bare whatever defences I may call into action.

  He must be about forty, yet the smile is boyish, almost impulsive.

  ‘Paul Arnault,’ he grasps my hand firmly, ‘and you are…’

  ‘Maria d’Esté.’

  ‘Of course.’

  He waves me through the door into the next room. ‘Just give me a moment with Madame Duval and I’ll be right with you.

  The room is at once airy and oddly crowded. There is a large re
ctangular desk chaotically heaped with files, but at second glance, these appear to be ordered in fanlike clusters. By its side, like some reigning spirit on a pedestal, a man weeps, his sculpted face contorted in leaden sorrow. Above the fireplace and dotted round the room between the book cases, there are images made up of series of numbered photographic faces; and others composed of ears, eyes, noses, foreheads, chins, as if some mad cataloguer of human parts had been let loose with a camera.

  I turn away from these dismembered faces but find myself irresistibly drawn back to the numbered series above the mantlepiece. The top four rows are all images of women, trapped in the stillness of Victorian photography. Their hair is parted mostly in the middle and pulled tightly back, their lips unsmiling, grim. These are not photographs they have posed for happily.

  ‘Are you interested in Lombroso’s classification?’ Maître Arnault’s voice startles me.

  ‘Lombroso’s classification?’ I repeat inanely.

  He grins and his features provide such a lively contrast to those that I have been staring at, that I grin back, despite my discomfort.

  ‘Yes, Cesare Lombroso, the great Italian criminologist of the last turn of the century. In his search for the causes of crime, he identified a homo deliquens, a born criminal, whom he understood as a degenerate throw-back to a less evolved species. Deviancy, for Lombroso, was a biological reversion to the primitive - that very primitive which threatens the civilized social order.’

  ‘Really?’ What I mean by this ‘really’, is does he believe this rubbish, but I haven’t made myself clear and he goes on.

  ‘Really. He studied some 5907 criminals, and 383 criminal skulls of which he took very exact measurements. According to Lombroso’s revered predecessor, Peter Camper, the size of the facial angle formed by intersecting lines between forehead and upper incisors and ear to jaw determined one’s place on the evolutionary scale. Classical Greeks and, of course, Europeans had an angle of 80 degrees and above. Then one moves down through what he called yellow people to blacks and still further down to orang outan’s who only measured 58 degrees.’

  He makes a low rueful sound. ‘Criminals, needless to say, scored very low. Physiognomy is destiny. ‘

  I am shocked. I have the feeling I have walked into a madman’s den. ‘You don’t believe any of this?’ I say as I reach for my bag.

  He bursts into laughter. ‘Of course not.’

  It is a contagious laugh and I join him, but he stops abruptly. ‘The only thing I believe in is getting some semblance of justice for my clients. I’m a defence lawyer, you know.’ He says it, not to me, but to someone who is floating outside the window. Or perhaps only to himself. Then he faces me again.

  ‘But I find systems of classification fascinating. And we musn’t behave with too much superiority towards old Lombroso and his science. How very different, after all, is it to try to locate an extra ‘y’ chromosome in prison populations or to carry out genetic fingerprinting?’

  ‘You mean it’s just our technology that’s more sophisticated? Centrifuges instead of callipers. But biology rules.’

  ‘Exactly,’ he chuckles. ‘And then too, physiognomy still has its place in crime. Why else would the French police force today stop more people who look one particular way - say North African - than any other?’ He walks towards the many-faced print above the mantelpiece and waves at it recklessly.

  ‘Now according to Lombroso the degenerate criminal type had prominent cheekbones, a thrusting jaw, little hair on his face and a great deal on his head, a sloping forehead and drooping eyelids, not to mention a sombre and dissimulating expression and an effeminate aspect. As for the women…’ He pauses dramatically and begins to examine me as if he were Lombroso himself, callipers in hand, in search of anatomical exactitude.

  ‘The deviant, hence degenerate women were always virile - too tall, too strong, too muscular, with determined jaw and cheekbones and - needless to add - an excessive sexuality.’

  My hands grow clammy. Has he discovered my secret? I feel like some aberrant species of butterfly, pinned to the wall. I protest, ‘But the women in these pictures have little in common except for the central parting in their hair and the style of the photographer.’

  ‘Precisely. And the fact that they have been caught and condemned.’ There is that boyish grin again. ‘But systems of classification have a way of helping us to see what we want to see. In fact, Lombroso’s criminal woman was defined as everything that the sweet and simpering, feminine and passive Victorian Miss wasn’t. Or wasn’t meant to be.’

  He looks at me seriously as if waiting for a response I don’t have. Then his voice goes down a register, becomes oddly conspiratorial.

  ‘Crime is our other, Miss d’Esté. That which we would prefer not to see ourselves as being. It is our murky cultural mirror. Rampant childhood desires, tangled dreamstates, float through the glass and lie in wait for us, threaten us on dark nights. So we need to define the criminal carefully, lock it away in order to distance ourselves from it; and in order to bolster and justify our sense of legitimacy in our chosen social order.’

  He pauses.

  I clear my throat uncomfortably.

  ‘Why do you want to work in the area of crime, Miss d’Esté?’

  The sudden specifity of the question startles me. Again I have the sense that he knows more about me than he possibly can.

  ‘You’re not planning to commit a murder?’ he laughs, his face teasing. But the question hangs in the air.

  ‘Not that I know of,’ I laugh, too, pull myself together. ‘And as for working in the area of crime, I’m not sure I do want to,’ I say with emphasis. As I say it, I have that odd tingling sensation on the surface of my skin. I recognize its murmuring. ‘That one,’ it signals and firmly I tell myself, there will be no more, that one’s.

  ‘Oh.’ Anger flickers across Maître Arnault’s features. He taps a Gauloise out of a packet and lights it. ‘Have I dissuaded you with my ramblings?’

  I shake my head.’The opposite, perhaps. But I need to know more about the job. A description failed to reach me.’

  ‘I see.’ He looks a little impatient and begins to talk swiftly about a book contracted years ago on the subject of women who murder, which case work has prevented him from finishing. Now on top of it, there is a report based on similar materials to be prepared for the European Commission, with particular emphasis on the differences between France and Britain.

  ‘I need someone with a shrewd eye and a quick pen, who can summarize a great deal of material for me: hunt through legal texts, newspaper reports, interview lawyers, perhaps inmates. That’s the gist. The person will have a large degree of independence and if things work out there may even be a co-author credit on the book.’ He looks at me expectantly.

  ‘I have no legal background,’ I say perversely, since I now think I really would like to work with this man, whatever my skin signals.

  ‘I know,’ he chuckles. ‘Madame Duval told me. That’s why I’m interested in you. That’s in fact why I advertised in the Herald Tribune. I want an outsider. You’re the first candidate who’s turned up whose mind hasn’t been blurred by at least two years of study of French law.’ He starts to pace the room with a caged restlessness. ‘The French education system puts such a priority on abstract reasoning that facts become something which is beneath one’s dignity. Justice, here, is blind only to facts. It’s one of the primary problems of our legal system. I want someone who can tell a fact from a judge’s or journalist’s fancy, let alone from a theory. And then too, your English must be good, after all those years in America.’

  ‘You’ve learned a great deal about me very quickly.’

  He shrugs and looks at me. For the first time I have the sense that he is looking at me as a woman and I cross my legs.

  ‘It’s my job,’ he murmurs. Is it my imagination or has he chosen this moment to play with the thick wedding band that encircles his fourth finger.

  ‘Tell me mo
re about the project,’ I say.

  ‘So that you can interview me?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  We exchange tentative smiles and he goes on to tell me about how he has subdivided the material into types of crime: infanticide, murder of children, husbands, lovers, fathers - for women rarely it seems murder those they aren’t close to. About half the book already exists in draft; and he has very precise indications about what needs to be looked into next, though there is plenty of room for any surprises his researcher may find. Apart from actual cases, what he is most interested in are comparisons between French inquisitorial and British adversarial methods.

  ‘To see where justice works best,’ he stops, aware that he has lost me. ‘But I’ll explain all that more fully when you start. For you will take it on, won’t you? I think we’ll get on.’

  ‘Can I sleep on it?’ I need to decide whether I am fit to take on a job. I have been engulfed in my own world for so long.

  ‘Sleep on it.’ He smiles, all charm and sweet persuasion. ‘But first come and see the office. You can work from there or from home, between forays into libraries and travels. Three, four, five days, a week, as you choose. You’ll be paid accordingly. All that can be discussed with Madame Duval.’ He gives me that assessing glance again, ‘Though I would imagine that money is not your first priority.’

  ‘Not for the moment,’ I murmur, as he opens the double doors which lead into a narrow hall, then up a short flight of stairs into a long attic room. One wall is lined with thick manilla files and books. The other is a series of three windows which look over rooftops. A rectangular glass desk stands in front of the windows. Its pristine surface bears only a small laptop computer.

  ‘That would be for you.’ He switches it on and the menu appears. ‘The draft of the book is in here, as well as files for each of the book’s categories, details on certain cases, instructions on where material can be found, together with a possible order of attack.’ He says all this with proud enthusiasm, as if he is showing me the gadgets in his latest car.