The Death of Corinne Read online

  ‘They used to be in the library,’ Payne said.

  ‘I mustn’t drop ash in the saucer – why doesn’t someone tell me off? Provost hates it when I do. Where’s the damned ashtray?’ Lady Grylls peered round in an abstracted manner.

  She seemed reluctant to divulge the true whereabouts of her scrapbooks. Emphatically vague, Antonia decided – and she wondered as to the reason.

  Payne said, ‘Corinne was badly affected by her parents’ death, wasn’t she?’

  ‘She was . . . terribly affected. Poor thing. She was twelve when it happened. They tried to keep her in the dark but it slipped out somehow. She’d gone to live with her grandmother. Madame Coreille came into a lot of money about that time and she opened her own clinic. I don’t think she gambled. Some kind of inheritance. Rory was of the opinion that the bloody Frenchwoman would only succeed in messing the gel up completely.’

  ’How bad was the trauma?’ Antonia asked – though what she really wanted to know was the exact provenance of Madame Coreille’s good fortune.

  ‘Bad enough . . . Corinne read the story of her parents’ death in some ghastly gossip rag – Ici Paris, I think. A magazine. Isn’t it odd that the French have no tabloid papers, only gossip magazines? Eaten Alive. Some such ghastly headline. The shock was so severe that Corinne lost her power of speech. She stopped eating – became extremely withdrawn. That went on for some time. Corinne didn’t seem to respond to any kind of treatment. Madame Coreille had tried analysis – she was at her wits’ end. Then, one day, something very strange happened. Can you –’

  ‘Corinne started singing?’

  ‘You are a dangerous woman, Antonia – nothing ever escapes you! Yes. Corinne started singing. Madame Coreille thought at first it was somebody on the wireless. She imagined it was Piaf or somebody. You see, Corinne had never sung before. She’d never shown any particular interest in music either. It was an extraordinary voice. Pure and light – like a bell. Puissant, I think was the word Madame Coreille used. She phoned me that same evening. A couple of days later I flew to Paris. I knew what she meant the moment Corinne opened her mouth. It was quite extraordinary.’

  ‘I believe I’ve heard the story before,’ Payne said. ‘You thought she sang like an angel. It made you blub.’

  ‘Don’t scoff, Hughie. You sound like Peverel when you do. Corinne did sing like an angel. And I did blub. Yes. It was a very special kind of voice . . . The more she sang the more her health improved. Madame Coreille hired a private music tutor for her, who was astounded and predicted that before long Corinne would have toute la France at her feet. Well, it happened seven years later. I was in Paris, sitting in the TV studio, next to Madame Coreille, watching Corinne appear on Jeu de la Chance.’

  ‘What game of chance is that?’ Antonia asked.

  ‘The show that discovers and promotes new singing talent. I think they still have it. I am sure you are familiar with the kind of thing? Fame Academy – Pop Idol. Don’t you watch them?’ Lady Grylls breathed incredulously as Antonia’s face remained blank.

  ’My wife’s viewing habits are uncompromisingly intellectual,’ Payne said. ‘She rarely watches the box and when she does, it’s only carefully selected programmes.’

  ‘Really? How very interesting. My dear Antonia, you don’t know what you’ve been missing. I wonder if it’s to do with you –’ Lady Grylls broke off. ‘What they have on Pop Idol is a lot of singularly talentless young people wearing extraordinary clothes, posturing and squawking in the most incredible manner. When they lose, they start crying. Such fun!’

  Antonia found herself puzzling over what her aunt by marriage had been going to say. I wonder if it’s to do with you – What? Being middle class?

  ‘Of course Corinne was a completely different kettle of fish. There was a collective gasp the moment she opened her mouth,’ Lady Grylls went on. ‘She sang two little-known Piaf songs. “La Fille de Joie” and “L’Homme Qui . . .” something or other. The man who – no, can’t remember.’

  ‘Qui m’aime?’ Payne suggested. ‘Qui m’assassine?’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Hughie. Anyhow. That launched her singing career. She was an instant hit. Never looked back. The whole of France voted for her. She got every single vote. They said General de Gaulle was one of the callers. Mr Lark took the next plane from America. He had watched the show on TV. He offered his services, was accepted and took control of Corinne’s career. He made sure Corinne was showered with offers. Olympia – Carnegie Hall. The rest, as they say, is history.’

  There was a pause. ‘Was there ever a man in her life?’ Antonia asked.

  ‘No. I don’t think so. I don’t think she’s ever had a romance.’ Lady Grylls sighed. ‘Poor gel.’

  ‘No boyfriends?’

  ‘No. Nothing serious at any rate. She was too busy singing.’

  ‘Mr Lark. I seem to remember a rumour,’ Payne said. ‘Wasn’t there something between them?’

  ‘I may be wrong,’ Lady Grylls said, ‘but I don’t think she’s ever had an intimate relationship with a man. No, no girlfriends either. Out of the question. One simply doesn’t think of Corinne in those terms. Isn’t that extraordinary?’

  ‘Oh, but you are wrong. A lot of people do think of Corinne in those terms,’ a man’s voice said. ‘You’d be amazed.’

  7

  Sleep and His Brother

  Eleanor didn’t know how much time had passed. She was sure she hadn’t been asleep, not quite, only floating in some self-induced trance-like daze.

  She had been thinking of that golden September day twelve years previously, when Griff and she had taken a leisurely drive up the coast from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara. It had been extremely hot to start with but then, just south of Ventura, there came that magical instant when the air cooled and the ocean appeared without warning in a blaze of reflected sunlight, a sudden flash of infinite sky and dazzling cobalt blue, waves breaking on reefs like lace on a glass table. The beauty had been so great, so overpowering, it rendered them speechless. It had felt like receiving an unexpected draught of some clarifying narcotic. ‘If only we could stay here for ever,’ Griff had said.

  Eleanor felt confused and disoriented. Her heart was beating like a drum. For a couple of moments she had no idea where she was. Was this a train? She never travelled by train – never! She’d always had a beautiful chauffeur-driven car at her disposal – her 1954 Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith Six Light Saloon. Trains made her feel ill. She needed to get out – she felt a panic attack approaching – where was the emergency button? Gasping, she half rose from her seat.

  ‘Would you like more tea, madame?’ The waiter had come up to her. She saw him look at the heap on the table as though he disapproved, then back at her.

  ‘I don’t want anything, thank you very much,’ Eleanor managed to say.

  ‘Is there anything wrong?’

  ‘No – nothing wrong!’ Eleanor snapped. She felt annoyed, which was a good sign for it meant that she had recovered. She resumed her seat. The waiter lingered and stared . . . Arrogant puppy! Sleek raven-black hair. Beetle brows. Melodramatically flaring nostrils. Buffed up through regular workouts. Very male, impossibly macho – oh so full of himself!

  ‘Not long until we arrive at Waterloo,’ the waiter said.

  ’Have you heard of Corinne Coreille?’ Eleanor asked on an impulse, making it sound like an insult.

  ‘Who?’ He appeared startled. He was no more than twenty-eight or nine.

  ‘Corinne Coreille.’

  ‘Oh. She was a singer, no? Very old?’

  ‘She is not very old,’ Eleanor bristled.

  ‘No? She is dead?’

  ‘She is not dead. She is in England.’

  ‘In England? I thought she was dead.’

  Eleanor watched him swagger down the aisle. Why couldn’t she have had a son like him? Somebody who thought Corinne Coreille was dead and shrugged his shoulders with eloquent indifference when told she wasn’t.

  The
n the thought came into her head again. Without Corinne Coreille’s lachrymose French songs Griff wouldn’t have killed himself. Eleanor was now convinced of it. Corinne Coreille’s voice had been the catalyst. Yes. It had – tipped the balance. Corinne Coreille’s songs were bad for sensitive, vulnerable boys of Griff’s kind.

  Eleanor’s research had revealed that Corinne Coreille sang the French version of ‘The Little White Cloud That Cried’, which, she had gathered, was what was known as a ‘gay anthem’; it was played regularly at Le Chevalier d’Eon.

  She held out her hand before her in an eloquent gesture. ‘You must stop at once. Wasn’t it enough that you killed my only son? This is a matter of life and death, can you not see that?’

  She broke off. She had had the sudden sensation of being whirled round in one of those revolving wheels at the circus. She felt giddy, nauseous, completely powerless . . . What she experienced next was a terrifying fragmentation – a total dissolution of her identity. Who am I? Eleanor moaned. She longed for peace, for deep, dreamless sleep – for oblivion – for death even . . . Sleep and Death. They were brothers, weren’t they, according to the ancient Greek proverb?

  My emotional repertoire is not up to tragedy, Eleanor had once wittily said at a party in New York – to Gore Vidal, as it happened. But it was true – she was not equipped for dealing with tragedy . . . Pull yourself up, girl, she murmured. Perhaps she could take a sedative? She picked up a bottle of pills and capsules and unscrewed the top. Now which was which? Were the orange capsules sedatives and the blue ones stimulants, or was it the other way round? What were the yellow ones for? It was so unlike her to forget! She took one of each. Three capsules in total. Then, on an impulse, she took a fourth – a yellow one. The same colour as her gloves. She closed her eyes.

  Eleanor used to enjoy sleeping. The ancient god Sleep – whom she always saw as a gracious host resplendent in Byzantine robes and a crown – used to conduct her into what she privately thought of as her true dimension, in which she became a vivid player, weightless and sometimes skittish, embroiled in obscure adventures, some risky, some very odd indeed, most of them delightful, which puzzled her only when she woke up – but since Griff’s death, sleep had become something of a burden. She regularly had nightmares, from which she woke screaming, sweating and gasping for breath, with skin-crawling recollections of being pursued, buried alive, mutilated or infected with hideous diseases.

  The dream she had had the night before had not been as terrible as that, but it had been harrowing enough. After a long journey, having walked down endless dark corridors, stumbled through a swamp, in which something had swirled and hissed, and inched her way across a narrow bridge slung high above a dark abyss, she had at long last managed to confront Corinne Coreille. She had felt angry – furious. She had spoken in a choked voice – My boy, what did you do to my boy?

  She was clutching a knife in her hand, the army knife that had been between her teeth earlier on, its blade flash-ing in the bright light, blinding her. She had worked herself into an unbridled frenzy and kept thrusting the knife forward in the direction of Corinne’s face. In response Corinne only gave a sad smile and held out her hand gently, in an imploring manner, palm upward, as though saying adieu to a parting lover. You crazy bitch. Infuriated, Eleanor slashed at Corinne’s neck several times, but the odd thing was . . . there was no blood. Not a drop of it. And the knife met with no resistance at all!

  Sinking into sleep once more, Eleanor heard a voice whisper in her ear.

  She is a false creation. She is just a name and a voice. She does not exist.

  8

  That Obscure Object of Desire

  Peverel de Broke, Lady Grylls’s other nephew, the son of her late brother Lionel, was a year younger than his cousin Hugh. He was very tall and managed to look at once languid, athletic and rather distinguished. But for a weak-ish chin, he might have been thought handsome. Lady Grylls had observed that his was the kind of face that sixty-five years ago would have been considered incomplete without one of those silly toothbrush moustaches and a rimless eyeglass. The kind of man who would be equally comfortable in a dinner jacket and an old Barbour, thought Antonia. Peverel was clever, Hugh had observed, in that whimsical English way that disconcerts and misleads foreign diplomats. Lady Grylls resented what she called ‘Peverel’s tiresome propensity for meaningless badinage’. (She had been particularly annoyed by a joke Peverel had told in which somebody confuses Eton with Eden.)

  Peverel’s sun-bleached hair and eyebrows in conjunction with his deep tan suggested an explorer who spent half the year in hot climes, which was not too far from the truth. He had returned from Shanghai a couple of days earlier. Peverel travelled round the globe in the capacity of a trend spotter, an unusual and, he had hinted, highly lucrative occupation, which his aunt for one refused to take seriously.

  The night before, Peverel had sat explaining exactly what it was he did. He collected information for brands like Volvo, Intel, British Airways and Nestlé. He diagnosed and explored trends in everyday life. (Antonia thought it all a bit obscure.) He went to supermarkets where he stopped people, pointed to items in their shopping basket and asked why they had bought them. (‘Infernal cheek,’ Lady Grylls had said.) He eavesdropped on conversations on trains, planes, buses, beaches and boats. (‘Not at all surprised,’ Lady Grylls had said.) He and his colleagues never knew when a snippet of information might prove useful. They took what was happening ‘out there’ and translated it into ‘stuff our clients could use’.

  Everybody knew that Helen Fielding had dreamt up Bridget Jones, but apparently it was a trend spotter who diagnosed the single white professional syndrome first. It wasn’t a trend spotter who invented the term ‘wigger’, to describe white youths copying blacks, but it was again one of Peverel’s colleagues who introduced it to the media.

  Peverel had entered the drawing room and was looking down at what appeared to be internet downloads.

  ‘You’d be amazed to hear that from the very start of her career Corinne Coreille’s been the object of intense prurient speculation,’ he said. ‘According to a website called Rumour Has It, Corinne Coreille had simultaneous affairs with the octogenarian Charlie Chaplin and Sophia Loren during the making of A Countess from Hong Kong, though oddly enough she rebuffed Marlon Brando’s attentions. That was in 1967. A roll-call of her alleged lovers includes Maurice Chevalier, Brigitte Bardot, Mr Lark, Alain Delon, General de Gaulle –’

  Lady Grylls gave her vast explosive snort. ‘Stuff and nonsense!’

  ‘– Peter Sellers, Simone de Beauvoir, a defrocked Italian priest and the teenage Prince Albert of Monaco, whose later inability to marry some have attributed to the effect Corinne Coreille had on him.’

  ‘This is not Corinne Coreille’s official website, is it?’ Antonia said.

  ‘No. Corinne’s official website is maintained by a Belgian called Bruno Van den Brande and it is bland and somewhat boring. Want to know what it says? Corinne Coreille’s career was at its zenith between 1967 and 1989. She started as a Piaf clone and a variety vedette, but evolved into an international star, part pop, part diva. She became an iconic and later a cultish figure in Latin and Germanic countries and in Russia – also, in Japan, where a Corinne doll was produced last year. In 1972 Corinne’s face became the model for Marianne, the symbol of France. She was painted by Warhol and photographed by Cecil Beaton, Horst and Norman Parkinson –’

  ‘Wasn’t she in some film?’ Payne interrupted. ‘Or did they only consider her for one?’

  ‘Well, Alfred Hitchcock told François Truffaut that he wanted to shoot a murder scene in a cabaret where Corinne Coreille sits and watches her doppelgänger perform on stage. Buñuel did give her a walk-on part in his film That Obscure Object of Desire. She isn’t credited. She appears for about two seconds.’

  ‘From such trivia is fanatical cinephilia born . . .’

  Lady Grylls rolled her eyes at Antonia as though to say, Heaven preserve me from
clever nephews.

  ‘Quite . . . An independent Swiss director intended to shoot a Gallic version of The Wizard of Oz, with Corinne as Dorothy, but plans were abandoned when the L.M. Baum estate objected strongly to the script on account of the “great number of inappropriate scenes” . . . The proposed title was L’Histoire d’Oz . . . What else do you want to know?’ The sheets rustled in Peverel’s hands. ‘In her prime Corinne modelled for Yves St Laurent and Chanel, but she has a particular weakness for Lacroix. She won the Euro-vision song contest in 1970. She performed songs from The King and I in French for the Duke and Duchess of Windsor at a soirée at their villa in the Bois de Boulogne on 4th July 1971.’

  ‘Le Roi et Moi?’ Payne murmured. ‘Doesn’t sound right somehow.’

  ‘She sang Russian gypsy songs at the Kremlin for the Brezhnevs, “Hands Across the Sea” at the White House, for the Nixons and later for the Reagans, and “C’est Si Bon” for the whole Communist Politburo of China. In one single year she gave three hundred performances on German television. She is a member of the controversial Kabbalah movement, which promotes an ancient brand of Judaism and promises immortality. She appears on a triangular San Marino stamp and an orchid in Liechtenstein was named after her.’

  ‘There seem to be the devil of a lot of websites devoted to her.’

  ‘A reasonable number – nothing like Madonna. Most are perfectly innocent but some are unwholesome . . . A little too esoteric even for my understanding . . . We are talking fetish.’ Peverel cleared his throat. ‘Mule, Octopus, Pendragon, Elf, Pigsnout, Oedipus R, Killerbitch, Flasher, Weasel . . . Some of these men – I assume they are men – are interested in Corinne’s hair, others in her hands. I bet you didn’t know that the little finger of Corinne’s left hand is as long as her index finger, did you?’

  ‘D’you mean there are people who get a kick out of that sort of thing?’ Lady Grylls suddenly guffawed.