A Good Woman

by Lisa Appignanesi

  At the corner of their street, which is also mine, we part.

  ‘I’ll take you out for ice-cream after Easter,’ I say to Marie-Françoise. Her dark eyes flash with greed, but she looks to her mother before replying.

  ‘We’ll see,’ Beatrice says matter-of-factly. Then she turns her serene face on me. ‘Perhaps tomorrow then?’ She hugs me as if to reassure me.

  I nod, and make my way back to Saint-Germain. I wonder why I am so interested in finding Beatrice in Marie-Françoise. Do I want to redeem my sins against the mother in the daughter?

  I think of the few children I have known. There was only one of Marie-Françoise’s age. Michael’s daughter. Michael was divorced and on the occasional weekends when she was with him, he would bring his adored Corinne along with him to see me. I imagine he thought it would help convince me to marry him, which was what he wanted. He thought she was wonderful. But the child, quite rightly, loathed me. She would scowl at me behind his back and turn the television up so loud that it blotted out all possibility of conversation anywhere in the apartment. I was briefly intrigued by the sheer force of her hatred and experimented with various seductive measures to see if I could lessen it. Needless to say, they failed, and since I was more interested in Corinne’s loathing than in Michael’s love, it was not a relationship which lasted very long.

  I choose a quiet café, find a table at the back and plunge again into my true crime stories. They are as wild and cruel as the fairy tales I read as a child and it comes to me now that it was never the happy end which fascinated me then, those moments when the Prince kissed sleeping beauty awake or Cinderella waltzed into true love, but rather all the moments of horror in between: Donkey-Skin’s brutally incestuous father; the poisoned apples and chalices that witch-like step mothers prepared; the blindings and imprisonments and parched desert journeys of long-haired damsels who could with the flick of a page become the torturers of once wicked sisters and ugly old crones.

  The story I am reading now has all the accoutrements of a fairy-tale. We are in the remoteness of New Zealand. Two girls, one stocky and plain, with something of a limp, the other tall and willowy with the face of an English rose, become not the worst of enemies, but the best of friends. They feed off each other’s imaginations, sleep together, ride together, write stories together, create a world which is richly their own, and then plot their escape from humdrum surroundings and interfering parents. They will live together, be prostitutes, cabaret singers, pay their travels across the globe. But the father of the English rose announces he is taking her off to England and the mother of the other girl says that there is no question of her accompanying her friend.

  A few days later, the mother is found dead, beaten to death with bricks and stones on a lonely path. Caught in their interlocking fantasies, the girls have murdered her.

  They really have. At the end, since this is a true and not a fairy tale, there is no glorious transformation. The only happiness is society’s. And it is the grim resolution of the law: separation, punishment, imprisonment. For its own peace of mind, society demands judgment and a kind of retribution. It is strange, but I cannot remember any courts in fairy tales.

  As I sip my coffee, I wonder about these two girls. Would I have recognized them as potential murderers? Would I be capable of their act? If things had been different would Beatrice and I have been capable of that ferocity? I think of the vileness of the children when together in the playground and everything seems possible: the wild joint fantasies, the sense that an unbounded world is ours and ours alone, the violent desires. Everything except that final passage into the act itself - the step where fantasy brutally abuts in reality: the hand which lifts the brick and launches the first blow, the blood, the scream. I cannot imagine playing out the frenzy of the act itself.

  Beatrice would think I was mad pondering such things. But I would like to talk to someone about it. Perhaps it is a subject I can raise with Paul Arnault, though he might wonder at the sensationalism of the reading material I have immersed myself in, in preparation for my job.

  -15-

  Rain beats with noisy insistence against the zinc panelling of the office windows. The digital clock on the shelf reads 15.58, so precise a time that it needs interpretation. My first Friday meeting with Paul Arnault is scheduled for 4.30. That is an hour I can grasp.

  I have not seen him for more than five minutes since our Monday session, when in business-like fashion he again laid out the measure of my task. Since then, during my days in the office, I have bumped into Tanya Walker, who greeted me with measured coolness, clients sitting in the waiting room, René Cournot, who courteously presented me to Maître Gustave Foch, another partner he happened to be speaking with. It is Madame Duval who is my mainstay. It is she who took me out for lunch on my second day and in measured tones which had nothing of gossip in them gave me the low-down on who was who in the office. Gradually, too, she has introduced me to everyone. But their comings and goings are so distant from my attic room, that I am hardly aware of them. As for Maître Arnault, if his previous insistence gave me illusions about the nature of our working proximity, these have all evaporated. Apart from Monday, the few times I have seen him, he has done no more than smile absently and ask me in a way that anticipated no answer, how things were going.

  I am not unhappy. The draft of the first part of the book is rivetting, as is the material I have been immersed in, though some of it is slow going. I have had to buy myself a legal dictionary and a primer on penal law just to keep up. To get the lay of the land, I have also made my first foray to the law library.

  As for the rest, I went to the demo on Sunday, though not with Beatrice. There were street players and music and a fair number of people, all but matched by the number of police. I saw Beatrice there, but she didn’t see me. I didn’t want her to. She was surrounded by a little group and holding up one pole of a banner which read,’To be a racist is to be off-colour’. She had that serenely radiant look on her face. It made me think of Jeanne d’Arc in the school-book etchings. Perhaps the young man holding up the banner’s second pole had the same thought for he kept shooting little admiring glances in Beatrice’s direction, as if sustenance were to be found in her stance. I considered it for a moment, but I decided he couldn’t be her husband. For one thing, he seemed too young to have a son of fourteen. And there was no other man around I could readily designate as a husband, though I tried to find one.

  Nor have I seen anything distinct through the windows, except the flashes of a television screen and once, Beatrice’s profile. They draw the curtains in the evenings and I have been home so little this week. Still the proximity, the sense that she is there just opposite, that I know what time she turns the lights off, consoles me. Once, in that half-sleep of early morning, I caught myself thinking that my mother lived over the road. When I realized the mistake my dreams had made, I was happy.

  But I have to be wary of mornings. I wouldn’t like to meet Beatrice as I leave the house before I have told her I am here. And there is no way of preparing. I can’t see her front door from my windows. Soon, soon, as soon as I feel a little stronger, I will tell her.

  I have dressed with particular care for my meeting today, a soft black woollen dress, stockings, an agate pin at my neck. I don’t altogether know why I have taken such care except that I feel like a student about to be tested. I wonder if the Maître remembers that this is the end of my trial week.

  Like a dutiful student, I now copy the file of notes I have prepared for him and look over the list of the material I have gathered in the course of the week, together with attendant queries. Armed with my folders, I knock at his office door.

  The ‘come in’ is muffled and it is only when I open the door that I realise he is on the telephone. He flashes a mechanical smile at me and waves me towards the chair in front of his desk. I try hard not to listen to what he is saying or watch the impatient intentness of his features. I would not like that impatience directed at me.
My notes provide a foil for my nervousness, but my eyes keep wandering towards the series of ears, chins, moustaches, brows, which crowd the walls, like so many wandering parts in search of a human whole.

  ‘Don’t let Bertillon worry you, Maria,’ Paul’s chuckle takes me by surprise. ‘I don’t think you’d recognize yourself in the line-up, even if you were there.’

  ‘Bertillon?’ I smooth my dress to cover my uneasiness. The only Bertillon I can think of makes ice-cream.

  ‘Alphonse Bertillon, creator of the first photographic police archive, precursor of the identikit. He had a mania for anatomizing the human face and detailing minute differences. The trouble was the faces wouldn’t sit still so the precision of measurement and description had somehow to make up for time’s passage. Otherwise yesterday’s criminal might be confounded with today’s lawyer. Or politician or baker or researcher. How have you gotten on?’ he asks without an intervening pause.

  I swallow, pass over the diskette I have copied for him. ‘That’s this weeks pickings,’ I say, ‘Summaries of the Ruth Ellis and Myra Hindley cases. There’s a lot more work to do on the latter.’

  He slides the diskette into his computer and his face lights up with boyish pleasure as soon as the screen lights up with my words. The technological magic visibly delights him. I’m not certain if my synopses do, but he reads on in silence while I try not to fidget.

  After some minutes, he grunts and looks at me, ‘Ruth Ellis’s advocate didn’t exactly do her much good, did he?’

  I don’t quite know how to answer this. I am not an expert. How does one adequately defend a woman who confesses to having murdered her betraying and exploitative lover?

  ‘He didn’t approve of her, if that’s what you mean. The reports make that clear. She wasn’t as you explained to me one of the good girls who wear their blouses buttoned up and apologize for what they’ve done. And he made no effort to make her appear such.’

  ‘Nor did he cross-examine witnesses to any effect, which the British system allows so much more leeway for. Your quotations from the trial make that clear. That’s good. You’ve done that well.’ He smiles at me briefly then gets up and starts to pace.

  ‘You do realise that in France, far from being hung, Ruth Ellis would have gotten off with a brief sentence and probably have become a local heroine. The crime passionel. Sexual passion is the one form of madness every French juror can identify with and understand.’

  His expression makes me feel I am being baited. He wants my opinion on this, but I don’t know what to say. Is passion a form of madness, a frenzy which parallels the state in which crimes are committed? I don’t want to acknowledge this and yet perhaps the difficulty I have in imagining the actual murderous act of the two New Zealand girls is related to the difficulty I always have in imaginatively recapturing the sensations of the sexual act once passion has fled. I cannot put this to him coldly, here, in this file-cluttered room, so instead I quote the judge in the Ellis trial.

  ‘Mr. Justice Havers would have it that, “The jealous fury of a woman scorned is no excuse for murder. That is the law of England.” ‘

  ‘So it would seem,’ Paul chuckles, looks down at the screen again.

  ‘But things have changed,’ I add for good measure, still a student on trial. ‘Partly as a result of the outcry over Ruth Ellis’s sentence, hanging was abolished in England a few years later.’

  ‘Are you enjoying the work, Maria?’ he asks me suddenly.

  I nod.

  ‘So you’ll stay on?’

  ‘If you want me to. If what I’m doing is what you want.’

  ‘It’s just what I needed. At this rate the book will be finished more quickly than I dared hope.’ He looks at me seriously in a way which would have made my pulse race, if I still had that kind of pulse.

  ‘Now tell me what you thought of the draft. You’re my first reader, you know.’

  I tell him, honestly, that I found it rivetting, though there were things I couldn’t altogether grasp. My notes provide questions and he explains various processes of law to me. I learn that the most important person in any case can easily be the behind-the-scenes ‘juge d’instruction’, the investigating magistrate who, like a chief inspector and more, puts together the dossier on which the trial, and too often the sentence, is based. The jury trial, itself, is, as far as he is concerned, too often structured mainly for drama and spectacle and the President, the chief interrogating judge, is its star, grilling all parties for days on end and then also sitting on the nine-person jury and guiding its decisions, along with two fellow judges.

  We talk then of the wave of crimes passionels which swept France from the 1880’s through to the first world war and I tell him I find it extraordinary that so many women were treated so leniently by so many juries.

  Paul eyes me quizzically. ‘You’d be harder on them?’

  ‘Perhaps.’ I shiver as I imagine the number of times a jealous wife might have taken a gun to my head, if years in a state penitentiary had not acted as a deterrent.

  He shrugs. ‘They thought of love then as an essential dominating power. In thrall to that power, it was absurd to speak of full personal responsibility for an act. Then as the century turned, the unconscious came into fashion - a deeply unsettling unconscious which was understood as a mechanism which could release nervous charges so powerful that they would momentarily seize absolute control of any ordinary person’s behaviour and thrust her into what was called an état passionel. On top of that, the social psychologists talked about an urban frenzy, which gripped people, took them over. The claustrophobia, the noise, the intensity of burgeoning city life, could overload a woman’s already fragile nervous system and make her prey to violent passion. So, as the experts testified in court, ‘no responsibility’, and for the jury that meant, no conviction,’ he grins, ‘though of course far less men were absolved than the weaker sex.’

  The last words are a deliberate tease and I know he expects me to bristle and react in the usual way. But we are not talking about usual situations. ‘Women are often weaker,’ I say.

  He gives me a provocative glance, then seizes on my gist. ‘Not in nerves, but in physical size, yes. And that can have a very real impact on behaviour, which the courts, as our esteemed Tanya Walker points out to me daily, are slow to take on board. For example a battered woman will not defend herself in the same instantaneous way that a man might. And the courts have trouble understanding what can be a long-delayed violent reaction as self-defence. I like to draw an analogy with terrorism in such cases. No one thinks that if, after weeks of torture, the captive turns on his sleeping terrorist jailer, that this is anything other than a legitimate form of self-defence.’

  He looks suddenly at his watch. ‘I had no idea it was so late,’ he murmurs. ‘Will you excuse me a moment.’ He picks up the telephone.

  I walk to the other side of the room and read the spines of books while he punches out a number. It is almost eight and I realise that he must be phoning home. Despite myself, I listen, hear him talk to someone called Pauline who is to convey his apologies to Madame and tell her he will be there within the hour.

  ‘I am sorry to have kept you so long,’ he says to me absently as he rifles through the files on his desk and picks out two. ‘Do make sure you keep a note of your hours for Madame Duval.’

  ‘I’ll make sure.’

  He looks up at the sound of my archness.

  ‘I mean it,’ he is stern, then smiles, ‘And next Friday if you’re free, perhaps you’ll let me take you out to dinner after our session. It’ll give us longer. I’m afraid I can’t even offer you a drink this evening. I’m late. But a lift. You’re on my way home, the Rue d’Oudinot, isn’t it?’

  I am about to contradict him when I change my mind. ‘Just drop me anywhere on the St Germain,’ I say.

  His eyes are on me as I gather up my things. There is a momentary tension between us. I know this tension. It is to do with transitions. Transitions between one k
ind of time to another kind of time. Work to life. Narrow passages difficult to negotiate.

  ‘A date?’ he asks, just as I say, ‘I’ll get my jacket upstairs.’

  I don’t answer him.

  ‘Meet me at the door of the car park round the corner. Ten minutes.’

  I am there before him and while I wait I wonder whether this little step towards greater proximity is wise. He is there before I can answer it, balancing two vast bouquets of carefully arranged flowers. He hands one to me. Lilies starkly white and waxen against the lustrous green of their stems. Interspersed with them, the frothy white of gypsophilia.

  ‘For all the overtime,’ he says.

  I murmur thanks, wonder what the choice of flowers suggests. The other bouquet, I notice, is in stark contrast to my own. A mass of ranunculas, pink and soft and pretty as a spring garden. His wife is not like me.

  -16-

  The trees which line the northern avenue of the Cimetière Montparnasse have turned a pert leafy green. The sun bursts upon them sporadically from rushing cloud and leaps off the granite and marble of the tombs. As I wait for Beatrice by the gates, two English tourists in anoraks stop and ask me in heavily-accented French whether I can point them to Baudelaire’s tomb. Beatrice is right behind them. She is dressed in black and carrying a large pot of daffodils. I had not thought of flowers. Flowers are for the living, I imagine. Now I feel a little ashamed. But Beatrice kisses me and gives my hand an especial squeeze.

  We walk without speaking towards the d’Esté family tomb. A group of blue-clad nuns comes at us from a side lane. They are chattering away in an incomprehensible language, their unadorned faces girlish, animated, beneath the stark white bands of their headdress. In response to Beatrice’s polite nod, one of them waves at us gaily.