The Death of Corinne chc-2 Page 3

  This is not a detective story, Antonia reminded herself. Really, I should be ashamed of myself.

  3

  The Secret Adversary

  Eleanor Merchant sat in the dining car of the Eurostar, bound for London. They had left Paris some forty-five minutes before. She had taken the letters out of her bag, she couldn’t say exactly why, and arranged them fan-like on the little table in front of her. She had kept copies of every single letter – two copies – she was most particular about that kind of thing. She had written three times to Corinne Coreille and now six letters lay on the table. Although things had moved on and a confrontation was to take place soon, indeed seemed imminent, she was still curious as to why she had not received any answers. Corinne Coreille’s silence had hurt her. It was after all common courtesy to reply to personal messages.

  Earlier on Eleanor had had an argument with the waiter. He had brought her a tarte au citron, but she had asked for a tarte au chocolat! He had had the temerity to suggest that she had made a mistake, the arrogant puppy – that her memory might be failing her. A mistake! Her memory was of the fly-paper variety – she had told him as much. He had appeared unconvinced. He looked the kind Griff might have taken a fancy to, so she refrained from displaying the froideur and sharp edges of the iceberg that had sunk the Titanic. (Why did they have only French waiters on the Eurostar? There should have been English ones as well. They wouldn’t have been that good-looking for one thing, and then she’d have been able to speak her mind.)

  The reason for taking out the letters came to her. She wanted to prove that she had the phenomenal ability to recite extended texts from memory – without taking one little peek. Yes. Eleanor had re-read her letters a great number of times and she knew them by heart, word for word… Placing both her hands across the first letter, palms down, rather in the manner of one attending a spiritualist seance, she stared out of the window at the rapidly shifting landscape and started speaking.

  ‘Dear Miss Coreille – it was your voice my son was listening to as he lay dying. His blood had turned the translucent water in his bath scarlet.’ Since she had no travelling companion whom she might have been addressing, people passing by her table shot her startled glances. ‘You were the only one there. He had chosen you and you alone to share his last moments on earth. It was I who discovered him, you see.’

  Eleanor felt like calling the waiter and asking him to check and see for himself that she hadn’t made a single mistake, but decided against it. He might get the wrong idea. The common herd, she had noticed, was wont to jump to conclusions. She sighed and shook her head. Perhaps she should do it sotto voce – or, better, in her head? I will be my own witness, Eleanor thought with a sad little smile. That, alas, was often the way these days.

  She had flown over from Boston to New York. Alma, her niece, was getting married and it might have been the society wedding of the year, but Griff’s death spoilt things somewhat. Alma was extremely sore about it. Alma believed that Griff (short for Griffiths) had timed his suicide very carefully, out of sheer spite. That, she told Eleanor, was the kind of thing he would do, in keeping with the immature, theatrical, rather exhibitionistic side of his character. Griff was what Corinne Coreille would no doubt call un enfant terrible. Alma seemed to be equally cross with Eleanor, insinuating that somehow it had been her fault, the way Griff had turned out; Alma had implied that Griff had had an unhealthy upbringing, that Eleanor had been a terrible parent – the mother from hell.

  The press had been quick to pick up the family connection and that was not the kind of publicity her niece craved. Eleanor’s sister and brother-in-law, who was the governor’s right-hand man, had been more restrained, respecting her grief, or rather observing the decencies. They hadn’t said a word about Griff – but Eleanor was sure they shared their daughter’s views on the subject.

  Eleanor felt a sudden urge to rise to her feet and speak out – recite aloud – make the dining car ring with the sound of her voice – command everybody’s attention with her tragic tale. She fought the urge down. Her tale would be quite wasted. The common herd would think her unbalanced. Pity, really, because she had such a good voice. It was of the ‘cultured’ American variety – without a trace of a nasal twang. She sounded like the late British actress Margaret Leighton, she always imagined. In Paris, on several occasions, she had been taken for an Englishwoman of irreproachable birth and breeding. Well, she cut a most elegant and unusual figure. She had been aware of people actually staring at her, simple souls – in admiration, awe and wonder, she had no doubt – and she had brought joy into their drab lives by giving them the little see-saw of a royal wave. (The hand going up and down, up and down, the wrist held rigid.)

  ‘All my relatives disapproved of Griff and his lifestyle,’ Eleanor said with a sigh. Fury came over her in waves as she thought of her relatives’ low, narrow, bestial minds. ‘They wouldn’t have condemned him if they’d had the slightest understanding of the world and its tricks.’

  Her relatives had considered Griff an embarrassment – no, an abomination. Not the kind of person you’d care to acknowledge as cousin or nephew. Her relatives would rather Griff had never existed at all… None of them came to the funeral. Nor did Griff’s father for that matter. Eleanor had no idea where her former husband was. Perhaps he was abroad – he might be dead – or in jail. Lyndon had left her when Griff was seven. That, her shrink had told her, was when the trouble started. Absentee fathers had a lot to answer for.

  It was nonsense to suggest that she was in any way to blame for the way Griff had ‘turned out’… A mean, unpleasant creature, Alma. Her name should have been ‘Alice’ – then it would have rhymed with ‘malice’… Well, current rumour had it that her marriage wasn’t going at all satisfactorily – it was even suggested that Alma had been driving her husband to drink! Eleanor wasn’t the type to gloat, but she couldn’t help a little smile at the thought.

  A terrible parent indeed! Eleanor hadn’t been a terrible parent. Quite the reverse. She had been a marvellous mother. She and Griff had got on extremely well. No, they had got on stupendously. Griff had been her companion, her confidant, her playmate. Why, they had adored each other!

  Eleanor told Griff things she wouldn’t have dreamt of telling anyone else. She never bought a dress or a hat without asking his opinion first. (How many mothers did that?) She introduced Griff to great literature – to the very best of popular fiction as well. She made life for both of them exclusive and amusing. She took him to the Hamptons and Palm Beach for the vacations, and to Broad-way every other week – together they had seen Oedipus Rex and Rent, The Boyfriend and Dorothy After Kansas. She let him read her copies of Vanity Fair and Harper’s Bazaar. They had pillow fights to the accompaniment of Leroy Anderson tunes. Eleanor had the most fantastical costumes ordered for their dressing-up sessions. They had played games unknown anywhere else on the planet Earth! They had applied the principle of those bizarre multiple-choice teenage books (‘If you want to venture into the Lair of the Giant Dragonfly, go to page 23’) to the works of Proust and had come up with entries like, ‘If you wish to slip into bed with Marcel, go to page 6. If, however, you want to attend the Germantes’ dinner party, go at once to page

  546.’

  Eleanor remembered another rather complicated game, which they had called ‘Abominating Abraxas’, Abraxas being an unpredictable pagan deity with a chanticleer’s head and a serpent’s tail. Griff had done the most wonderfully scary drawing of Abraxas. The interesting – the really remarkable – thing was that Abraxas had since acquired a life outside the game – he had managed to break through its confines somehow – Eleanor kept seeing him!

  Why was the waiter looking at her again? What did he want? Hadn’t his mother taught him it was extremely rude to stare at strangers? Eleanor stuck out her tongue at him, then looked out of the window once more.

  She had been so happy that day… She had spent three hours shopping at Bloomingdale’s, had coffee and the
most delicious chocolate cheesecake, then went for a stroll in Central Park. She fed the ducks, then sat on a bench, basking in the warm sunshine. It was the first day of spring. She had been full of hope. She had decided to look Griff up and try to reach some kind of reconciliation.

  They hadn’t been in touch for a couple of months, there had been an estrangement of sorts, the silliest of spats, really. She thought it was ridiculous that they should have fallen out and still be at loggerheads over a remark she had made concerning one of his friends. Griff was morbidly sensitive about his friends, but then he was sensitive about most things. She had bought him two sugared doughnuts, which she carried in a paper bag by way of a peace offering. (Griff adored doughnuts.)

  Griff had a flat on the tenth floor of an art deco building in the fashionable district of West Chelsea. Eleanor believed she was humming a tune – ‘Top of the World’? – as she let herself in with the key Griff had given her while they had still been on good terms. She stood in the hall, admiring the wonderful matt red walls painted with Muslim-style arches supported by slender columns of dull gold – Griff had always had such good taste. She called out Griff’s name. Her hands felt a bit sticky, so she went to the bathroom to wash them -

  ‘Sticky,’ Eleanor said. ‘It’s so hard to keep the line between past and present.’

  The next moment she had to bite her lip to stop herself from crying out. A flashback – she’d had a flashback! She had seen it all again. The redness. The stickiness. You mustn’t do it, the doctor had told her.

  ‘It is at that point that my life stops and the nightmare takes over,’ Eleanor said, her voice soft and hushed as if she were talking in church. ‘I haven’t been the same since.’

  The face that stared back at her from the mirror these days was a face she no longer recognized as her own. (She had never been a great beauty, but she had been attractive in an unconventional kind of way. Griff always said she had the face of an expensive cat.) Her skin was not too lined, but it was shockingly sallow and it had a ‘battered’ appearance. The despoiling power of grief! Eleanor spent ages making herself up and the effect was frequently disconcerting. Her eyes had lost their lustre; they looked empty and dull. Her mind kept getting into binds. She blamed the medication she had been prescribed for that – anti-depressants, stimulants, sleeping pills, painkillers, energy-boosters and she didn’t know what else. She was far from sure they did her any good but she continued taking them in bucketfuls. Sans souci, but I need to get my mouth round the Xanax – it helps me with my panics -

  Covering her face with her hands, Eleanor began to rock backward and forward. She shook her head and moaned. She expected tears to start flowing from her eyes in unstoppable streams, but that didn’t happen. She had run out of tears. She had reached the most dreadful part of her letter – she knew what was coming and she dreaded it – she wanted to cut the scene out, the way scenes that were considered too shocking were edited out of films – but of course she couldn’t.

  ‘The razor, an old-fashioned one, with an ornate mother-of-pearl handle, the stateliest of objects, lay on the floor beside the bath,’ Eleanor whispered. ‘It had belonged to Griff’s grandfather. It was covered in blood. There was blood everywhere, bespattering the walls, on the floor, even on the ceiling – the small cassette player that stood on the little table beside the bath was sticky with blood. I keep seeing that bath – I only need to shut my eyes. There it is now – and again – and again.’

  There had been no religious consolations for her in the aftermath of the appalling catastrophe. Eleanor had had a ‘God’ once, but after her husband had left her, she ceased to believe. She had been overcome by grief. She had imagined at first that she could draw on reserves of stoicism and imagination, on her sense of the absurd, but she had been wrong – she couldn’t. That was why she had ‘cracked up’ so fast. She’d gone right under. She had had a nervous breakdown. Her shrink had diagnosed something called ‘florid behaviour’. Eleanor had spent a month at a ‘rest home’, undergoing various therapies. She had only the haziest recollection of the things they did to her there. After she had come out, she had developed an interest in spiritualism. She had been keeping a psychic journal, in which she regularly recorded her attempts to reach her dead son.

  ‘Sticky,’ she said again.

  The bath was full of Griff’s blood, only his head and part of his shoulders showed above it. It was all appallingly, indescribably, grotesquely Grand Guignol. A scene straight out of one of those old British Hammer horror films she and Griff had always found hilarious – they had revelled in anything high camp – only now it was for real. Eleanor knew at once that Griff had been drained of all his blood; that was why his face was so pale, bluish pale, painfully thin and haggard. His eyes had remained open…

  Eleanor still did not remember going up to the cassette player, but she must have done. (There had been blood on her hands, as she had discovered afterwards.) She had rewound the tape and pressed the play button. She had expected to hear a final message from Griff, his last words, an explanation, an apologia, the sound of him sobbing or screaming or telling her that he had forgiven her, but what she heard instead was Corinne Coreille’s voice.

  ‘It came as a shock. Another shock. As though I hadn’t had enough! How I hated you at that moment,’ Eleanor recited from the letter. ‘There is something about your voice – a certain haunting quality. It’s like no other I have ever heard. Griff had played your songs all the time, that was what the neighbours said. They imagined he was French because of his taste in music, also on account of his “flamboyantly European lifestyle”, whatever that may mean. They sounded as though they too disapproved. I would have expected people living in that part of Manhattan to display a greater degree of sophistication, but there it is.’

  She rubbed her hands together, Lady Macbeth fashion. ‘Sticky,’ she said. ‘After all this time.’

  It was eight years earlier that Griff had fallen under Corinne Coreille’s spell. He was fourteen at the time. They had been watching television together. They had been lolling on a sofa upholstered in mauve velvet that was big enough for eight, under the Sargent portrait of Eleanor’s English great grandmother. They had been eating Hershey’s fudge ice-cream and drinking vanilla soda. It was high summer – late afternoon – Eleanor remembered clearly the golden glow that filtered into the room. All the windows were wide open and the filmy curtains fluttered in the delicate breeze. Earlier on they had had a cushion fight…

  Eleanor had been wearing a tea-gown decorated with emeralds as big as quail eggs, 1920s style, and knee socks. Griff had a frilly Byronic shirt on, gleaming white. They had been watching an old Marx Brothers comedy, but got bored with it. Eleanor had started flicking idly through the channels, complaining how drab and tedious and passe everything looked. (That, as it happened, had been their catch phrase of the moment – passe.) ‘Wait, what was that, Eleanor? Go back,’ Griff said. (He always called her ‘Eleanor’, never ‘Mother’.)

  That had been his first glimpse of Corinne Coreille. It had been Corinne Coreille’s Palais de Congres concert of 1989.

  Eleanor remembered her exact words. ‘Good heavens, is she still around? Just look at her. So passe, don’t you think? Orchids and absinthe and Shocking by Schiaparelli.’ She knew that was the kind of remark that amused Griff, but now he remained serious. He asked what the singer’s name was. Eleanor told him.

  If only they had continued watching the Marx Brothers going on causing havoc and large-scale destruction in their habitual manic manner, the catastrophe would have been averted – or perhaps it wouldn’t have? Not for the first time Eleanor Merchant asked herself the question and pondered on the role of chance in one’s life and whether everything that happened to people hadn’t in fact been pre-ordained.

  Corinne Coreille had been singing something heart-wrenchingly sad. So sad, it had made Eleanor laugh. It was one of those ridiculously melodramatic songs. (‘C’est toi qui partirait’?) She had asked Grif
f if he wanted another scoop of ice-cream but Griff hadn’t answered. Griff’s eyes had remained fixed on the TV screen. Griff had been entranced by the image of the small figure with the dark fringe, smudgy eyes and little black dress… When the song was over, Griff held out his hand, palm upwards, as though pleading with a departing lover, which was an exact replica of what Corinne Coreille was doing at that very moment.

  ‘I think you are a witch,’ Eleanor said slowly. ‘You cast a spell on Griff that day. How else can one explain the fact that you have stayed young? Your appearance hasn’t changed one bit over the years. You are four years older than me, but you look like a girl. Une fille eternelle. As my grandmother used to say, to look that good at fifty-five, you must have been sleeping with Satan.’

  Eleanor’s thoughts turned to the Corinne doll she had found in Griff’s bedroom. The doll was fashioned in Corinne Coreille’s exact image and bore a ‘Made in Japan’ tag. Eleanor had found herself sticking pins in it – at first casually, but then she had got angry and become quite frantic with it.