Читать книгу A Place of Greater Safety - Hilary Mantel - Страница 16

ANNETTE DUPLESSIS was a woman of resource. The problem which now beset her she had handled elegantly for four years. This afternoon she was going to solve it. Since midday a chilly wind had blown up, draughts whistled through the apartment, finding out the keyholes and the cracks under the doors: fanning the nebulous banners of approaching crisis. Annette, thinking of her figure, took a glass of cider vinegar.

When she had married Claude Duplessis, a long time ago, he had been several years her senior; by now he was old enough to be her father. Why had she married him anyway? She often asked herself that. She could only conclude that she had been serious-minded as a girl, and had grown steadily more inclined to frivolity as the years passed.

At the time they met, Claude was working and worrying his way to the top of the civil service: through the different degrees and shades and variants of clerkdom, from clerk menial to clerk-of-some-parts, from intermediary clerk to clerk of a higher type, to clerk most senior, clerk confidential, clerk extraordinary, clerk in excelsis, clerk-to-end-all-clerks. His intelligence was the quality she noticed chiefly, and his steady, concerned application to the nation’s business. His father had been a blacksmith, and – although he was prosperous, and since before his son’s birth had not personally been anywhere near a forge – Claude’s professional success was a matter for admiration.

When his early struggles were over, and Claude was ready for marriage, he found himself awash in a dismaying sea of light-mindedness. She was the moneyed, sought-after girl on whom, for no reason one could see, he fixed his good opinion: on whom, at last, he settled his affection. The very disjunction between them seemed to say, here is some deep process at work; friends forecast a marriage that was out of the common run.

Claude did not say much, when he proposed. Figures were his medium. Anyway, she believed in emotions that ran too deep for words. His face and his hopes he kept very tightly strung, on stretched steel wires of self-control; she imagined his insecurities rattling about inside his head like the beads of an abacus.

Six months later her good intentions had perished of suffocation. One night she had run into the garden in her shift, crying out to the apple trees and the stars, ‘Claude, you are dull.’ She remembered the damp grass underfoot, and how she had shivered as she looked back at the lights of the house. She had sought marriage to be free from her parents’ constraints, but now she had given Claude her parole. You must never break gaol again, she told herself; it ends badly, dead bodies in muddy fields. She crept back inside, washed her feet; drank a warm tisane, to cure any lingering hopes.

Afterwards Claude had treated her with reserve and suspicion for some months. Even now, if she was unwell or whimsical, he would allude to the incident – explaining that he had learned to live with her unstable nature but that, when he was a young man, it had taken him quite by surprise.

After the girls were born there had been a small affair. He was a friend of her husband, a barrister, a square, blond man: last heard of in Toulouse, supporting a red-faced dropsical wife and five daughters at a convent school. She had not repeated the experiment. Claude had not found out about it. If he had, perhaps something would have had to change, but as he hadn’t – as he staunchly, wilfully, manfully hadn’t – there was no point in doing it again.

So then to hurry the years past – and to contemplate something that should not be thought of in the category of ‘an affair’ – Camille arrived in her life when he was twenty-two years old. Stanislas Fréron – her family knew his family – had brought him to the house. Camille looked perhaps seventeen. It was four years before he would be old enough to practise at the Bar. It was not a thing one could readily imagine. His conversation was a series of little sighs and hesitations, defections and demurs. Sometimes his hands shook. He had trouble looking anyone in the face.

He’s brilliant, Stanislas Fréron said. He’s going to be famous. Her presence, her household, seemed to terrify him. But he didn’t stay away.

RIGHT AT THE BEGINNING, Claude had invited him to supper. It was a well-chosen guest list, and for her husband a fine opportunity to expound his economic forecast for the next five years – grim – and to tell stories about the Abbé Terray. Camille sat in tense near-silence, occasionally asking in his soft voice for M. Duplessis to be more precise, to explain to him and to show him how he arrived at that figure. Claude called for pen, paper and ink. He pushed some plates aside and put his head down; at his end of the table, the meal came to a halt. The other guests looked down at them, nonplussed, and turned to each other with polite conversation. While Claude muttered and scribbled, Camille looked over his shoulder, disputing his simplifications, and asking questions that were longer and more cogent. Claude shut his eyes momentarily. Figures swooped and scattered from the end of his pen like starlings in the snow.

She had leaned across the table: ‘Darling, couldn’t you …’

‘One minute –’

‘If it’s so complicated –’

‘Here, you see, and here –’

‘ – talk about it afterwards?’

Claude flapped a balance sheet in the air. ‘Vaguely,’ he said. ‘No more than vaguely. But then the comptrollers are vague, and it gives you an idea.’

Camille took it from him and ran a glance over it; then he looked up, meeting her eyes. She was startled, shocked by the – emotion, she could only call it. She took her eyes away and rested them on other guests, solicitous for their comfort. What he basically didn’t understand, Camille said – and probably he was being very stupid – was the relationship of one ministry to another and how they all got their funds. No, Claude said, not stupid at all: might he demonstrate?

Claude now thrust back his chair and rose from his place at the head of the table. Her guests looked up. ‘We might all learn much, I am sure,’ said an under-secretary. But he looked dubious, very dubious, as Claude crossed the room. As he passed her, Annette put out a hand, as if to restrain a child. ‘I only want the fruit bowl,’ Claude said: as if it were reasonable.

When he had secured it he returned to his place and set it in the middle of the table. An orange jumped down and circumambulated slowly, as if sentient and tropically bound. All the guests watched it. His eyes on Claude’s face, Camille put out a hand and detained it. He gave it a gentle push, and slowly it rolled towards her across the table: entranced, she reached for it. All the guests watched her; she blushed faintly, as if she were fifteen. Her husband retrieved from a side-table the soup tureen. He snatched a dish of vegetables from a servant who was taking it away. ‘Let the fruit bowl represent revenue,’ he said.

Claude was the cynosure now; chit-chat ceased. If … Camille said; and but. ‘And let the soup tureen represent the Minister of Justice, who is also, of course, Keeper of the Seals.’

‘Claude –’ she said.

He shushed her. Fascinated, paralysed, the guests followed the movement of the food about the table; deftly, from the under-secretary’s finger ends, Claude removed his wine glass. This functionary now appeared, hand extended, as one who mimes a harpist at charades; his expression darkened, but Claude failed to see it.

‘Let us say, this salt cellar is the minister’s secretary.’

‘So much smaller,’ Camille marvelled. ‘I never knew they were so low.’

‘And these spoons, Treasury warrants. Now …’

Yes, Camille said, but would he clarify, would he explain, and could he just go back to where he said – yes indeed, Claude allowed, you need to get it straight in your mind. He reached for a water jug, to rectify the proportions; his face shone.

‘It’s better than the puppet show with Mr Punch,’ someone whispered.

‘Perhaps the tureen will talk in a squeaky voice soon.’

Let him have mercy, Annette prayed, please let him stop asking questions; with a little flourish here and one there she saw him orchestrating Claude, while her guests sat open-mouthed at the disarrayed board, their glasses empty or snatched away, deprived of their cutlery, gone without dessert, exchanging glances, bottling their mirth; all over town it will be told, ministry to ministry and at the Law Courts too, and people will dine out on the story of my dinner party. Please let him stop, she said, please something make it stop; but what could stop it? Perhaps, she thought, a small fire.

All the while, as she grew flurried, cast about her, as she swallowed a glass of wine and dabbed at her mouth with a handkerchief, Camille’s incendiary eyes scorched her over the flower arrangement. Finally with a nod of apology, and a placating smile that took in the voyeurs, she swept from the table and left the room. She sat for ten minutes at her dressing-table, shaken by the trend of her own thoughts. She meant to retouch her face, but not to see the hollow and lost expression in her eyes. It was some years since she and Claude had slept together; what relevance has it, why is she stopping to calculate it, should she also call for paper and ink and tot up the Deficit of her own life? Claude says that if this goes on till ’89 the country will have gone to the dogs and so will we all. In the mirror she sees herself, large blue eyes now swimming with unaccountable tears, which she instantly dabs away as earlier she dabbed red wine from her lips; perhaps I have drunk too much, perhaps we have all drunk too much, except that viperous boy, and whatever else the years give me cause to forgive him for I shall never forgive him for wrecking my party and making a fool of Claude. Why am I clutching this orange, she wondered. She stared down at her hand, like Lady Macbeth. What, in our house?

When she returned to her guests – the perfumed blood under her nails – the performance was over. The guests toyed with petits fours. Claude glanced up at her as if to ask where she had been. He looked cheerful. Camille had ceased to contribute to the conversation. He sat with his eyes cast down to the table. His expression, in one of her daughters, she would have called demure. All other faces wore an expression of dislocation and strain. Coffee was served: bitter and black, like chances missed.

NEXT DAY CLAUDE referred to these events. He said what a stimulating occasion it had been, so much better than the usual supper-party trivia. If all their social life were like that, he wouldn’t mind it so much, and so would she ask again that young man whose name for the present escaped him? He was so charming, so interested, and a shame about his stutter, but was he perhaps a little slow on the uptake? He hoped he had not carried away any wrong impressions about the workings of the Treasury.

How torturing, she thought, is the situation of fools who know they are fools; and how pleasant is Claude’s state, by comparison.

THE NEXT TIME Camille called, he was more discreet in the way he looked at her. It was as if they had reached an agreement that nothing should be precipitated. Interesting, she thought. Interesting.

He told her he did not want a legal career: but what else? He was trapped by the terms of his scholarship. Like Voltaire, he said, he wanted no profession but that of man of letters. ‘Oh, Voltaire,’ she said. ‘I’m sick of the name. Men of letters will be a luxury, let me tell you, in the years to come. We shall all have to work hard, with no diversions. We shall all have to emulate Claude.’ Camille pushed his hair back a fraction. That was a gesture she liked: rather representative, useless but winning. ‘You’re only saying that. You don’t believe it, in your heart. In your heart you think that things will go on as they are.’

‘Allow me,’ she said, ‘to be the expert on my heart.’

As the afternoons passed, the general unsuitability of their friendship was borne in on her. It was not simply a matter of his age, but of his general direction. His friends were out-of-work actors, or they slid inkily from the offices of back-street printers. They had illegitimate children and subversive opinions; they went abroad when the police got on their trail. There was the drawing-room life; then there was this other life. She thought it was best not to ask questions about it.

HE CONTINUED to come to supper. There were no further incidents. Sometimes Claude asked him to spend the weekend with a party at Bourg-la-Reine, where they had some land and a comfortable farmhouse. The girls, she thought, had really taken to him.

FROM QUITE TWO YEARS ago, they had begun to see a great deal of each other. One of her friends, who was supposed to know about these things, had told her that he was a homosexual. She did not believe this, but kept it to hand as a defence, in case her husband complained. But why should he complain? He was just a young man who called at the house. There was nothing between them.

ONE DAY SHE ASKED HIM, ‘Do you know much about wild flowers?’

‘Not especially.’

‘It’s just that Lucile picked up a flower at Bourg-la-Reine and asked me what it was, I hadn’t the least idea, and I told her confidently that you knew everything, and I pressed it –’ she reached out – ‘inside my book, and I said I’d ask you.’

She moved to sit beside him, holding the large dictionary into which she would cram letters and shopping lists and anything she needed to keep safe. She opened the book – carefully, or its contents would have cascaded out. He examined the flower. Delicately with a fingernail he turned up the underside of its papery leaf. He frowned at it. ‘Probably some extremely common noxious weed,’ he said.

He put an arm around her and tried to kiss her. More out of astonishment than intention, she jumped away. She dropped the dictionary and everything fell out. It would have been quite in order to slap his face, but what a cliché, she thought, and besides she was off balance. She had always wanted to do it to someone, but would have preferred someone more robust; so, between one thing and another, the moment passed. She clutched the sofa and stood up, unsteadily.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘That lacked finesse.’

He was trembling a little.

‘How could you?’

He raised a hand, palm upwards. ‘Oh, because, Annette, I want you.’

‘It’s out of the question,’ she said. She picked her feet out of the scattered papers. Some verses he had written lay on the carpet folded with a milliner’s bill she had found it necessary to conceal from Claude. Camille, she thought, would never in a thousand years ask questions about the price of a woman’s hats. It would be beyond him; beyond, and beneath. She found it necessary to stare out of the window (even though it was a bleak winter’s day as unpromising as this one) and to bite her lips to stop them from quivering.

This had been going on for a year now.

THEY TALKED about the theatre, about books and about people they knew; really though, they were only ever talking about one thing, and that was whether she would go to bed with him. She said the usual things. He said that her arguments were stale and that these were the things people always said, because they were afraid of themselves and afraid of trying to be happy in case God smote them and because they were choked up with puritanism and guilt.

She thought (privately) that he was more afraid of himself than anyone she had ever known: and that he had reason to be.

She said that she was not going to change her mind, but that the argument could be prolonged indefinitely. Not indefinitely, Camille said, not strictly speaking: but until they were both so old that they were no longer interested. The English do it, he said, in the House of Commons. She raised a shocked face. No, not what she had so clearly on her mind: but if someone proposes a measure you don’t like, you can just stand up and start spinning out the pros and cons until everybody goes home, or the session ends and there’s no more time. It’s called talking a measure out. It can go on for years. ‘Considered in one way,’ he said, ‘since I like talking to you, it might be a pleasant way to spend my life. But in fact I want you now.’

AFTER THAT FIRST OCCASION she had always been cool, fended him off rather expertly. Not that he had ever touched her again. He had seldom allowed her to touch him. If he had brushed against her, even accidentally, he had apologized. It was better like this, he said. Human nature being what it is, and the afternoons so long; the girls visiting friends, the streets deserted, no sound in the room except the ticking of clocks, the beating of hearts.

It had been her intention to end this non-affair smoothly, in her own good time; considered as a non-affair, it had had its moments. But then, obviously, Camille had started talking to somebody, or one of her husband’s friends had been observant: and everybody knew. Claude had a host of interested acquaintances. The question was contended for in robing rooms (scouted at the Châtelet but proposed in the civil courts as the scandal of the year, in the middle-class scandals division); it was circulated around the more select cafés, and mulled over at the ministry. In the gossips’ minds there were no debates, no delicately balanced temptations and counter-temptations, no moral anguish, no scruples. She was attractive, bored, not a girl any more. He was young and persistent. Of course they were – well, what would you think? Since when, is the question? And when will Duplessis decide to know?

Now Claude may be deaf, he may be blind, he may be dumb, but he is not a saint, he is not a martyr. Adultery is an ugly word. Time to end it, Annette thought; time to end what has never begun.

She remembered, for some reason, a couple of occasions when she’d thought she might be pregnant again, in the years before she and Claude had separate rooms. You thought you might be, you had those strange feelings, but then you bled and you knew you weren’t. A week, a fortnight out of your life had gone by, a certain life had been considered, a certain steady flow of love had begun, from the mind to the body and into the world and the years to come. Then it was over, or had never been: a miscarriage of love. The child went on in your mind. Would it have had blue eyes? What would its character have been?

AND NOW THE DAY HAD COME. Annette sat at her dressing-table. Her maid fussed about, tweaking and pulling at her hair. ‘Not like that,’ Annette said. ‘I don’t like it like that. Makes me look older.’

‘No!’ said the maid, with a pretence at horror. ‘Not a day over thirty-eight.’

‘I don’t like thirty-eight,’ Annette said. ‘I like a nice round number. Say, thirty-five.’

‘Forty’s a nice round number.’

Annette took a sip of her cider vinegar. She grimaced. ‘Your visitor’s here,’ the maid said.

The rain blew in gusts against the window.

IN ANOTHER ROOM, Annette’s daughter Lucile opened her new journal. Now for a fresh start. Red binding. White paper with a satin sheen. A ribbon to mark her place.

‘Anne Lucile Philippa Duplessis,’ she wrote. She was in the process of changing her handwriting again. ‘The Journal of Lucile Duplessis, born 1770, died? Volume III. The year 1786.’

‘At this time in my life,’ she wrote, ‘I think a lot about what it would be like to be a Queen. Not our Queen; some more tragic one. I think about Mary Tudor: “When I am dead and opened they will find ‘Calais’ written on my heart.” If I, Lucile, were dead and opened, what they would find written is “Ennui.”

‘Actually, I prefer Maria Stuart. She is my favourite Queen by a long way. I think of her dazzling beauty among the barbarian Scots. I think of the walls of Fotheringay, closing in like the sides of a grave. It’s a pity really that she didn’t die young. It’s always better when people die young, they stay radiant, you don’t have to think of them getting rheumatics or growing stout.’

Lucile left a line. She took a breath, then began again.

‘She spent her last night writing letters. She sent a diamond to Mendoza, and one to the King of Spain. When all was under seal, she sat with open eyes while her women prayed.

‘At eight o’clock the Provost Marshal came for her. At her priedieu, she read in a calm voice the prayers for the dying. Members of her household knelt as she swept into the Great Hall, dressed all in black, an ivory crucifix in her ivory hand.

‘Three hundred people had assembled to watch her die. She entered through a small side door, surprising them; her face was composed. The scaffold was draped in black. There was a black cushion for her to kneel upon. But when her attendants stepped forward, and they slipped the black robe from her shoulders, it was seen that she was clothed entirely in scarlet. She had dressed in the colour of blood.’

Here Lucile put down her pen. She began to think of synonyms. Vermilion. Flame. Cardinal. Sanguine. Phrases occurred to her: caught red-handed. In the red. Red-letter day.

She picked up her pen again.

‘What did she think, as she rested her head on the block? As she waited: as the executioner took his stance? Seconds passed; and those seconds went by like years.

‘The first blow of the axe gashed the back of the Queen’s head. The second failed to sever her neck, but carpeted the stage with royal blood. The third blow rolled her head across the scaffold. The executioner retrieved it and held it up to the onlookers. It could be seen that the lips were moving; and they continued to move for a quarter of an hour.

‘Though who stood over the sodden relic with a fob-watch, I really could not say.’

ADÈLE, HER SISTER, came in. ‘Doing your diary? Can I read it?’

‘Yes; but you may not.’

‘Oh, Lucile,’ her sister said; and laughed.

Adèle dumped herself into a chair. With some difficulty, Lucile dragged her mind back into the present day, and brought her eyes around to focus on her sister’s face. She is regressing, Lucile thought. If I had been a married woman, however briefly, I would not be spending the afternoons in my parents’ house.

‘I’m lonely,’ Adèle said. ‘I’m bored. I can’t go out anywhere because it’s too soon and I have to wear this disgusting mourning.’

‘Here’s boring,’ Lucile said.

‘Here’s just as usual. Isn’t it?’

‘Except that Claude is at home less than ever. And this gives Annette more opportunity to be with her Friend.’

It was their impertinent habit, when they were alone, to call their parents by their Christian names.

‘And how is that Friend?’ Adèle inquired. ‘Does he still do your Latin for you?’

‘I don’t have to do Latin any more.’

‘What a shame. No more pretext to put your heads together, then.’

‘I hate you, Adèle.’

‘Of course you do,’ her sister said good-naturedly. ‘Think how grown-up I am. Think of all the lovely money my poor husband left me. Think of all the things I know, that you don’t. Think of all the fun I’m going to have, when I’m out of mourning. Think of all the men there are in the world! But no. You only think of one.’

‘I do not think of him,’ Lucile said.

‘Does Claude even suspect what’s germinating here, what with him and Annette, and him and you?’

‘There’s nothing germinating. Can’t you see? The whole point is that nothing’s going on.’

‘Well, maybe not in the crude technical sense,’ Adèle said. ‘But I can’t see Annette holding out for much longer, I mean, even through sheer fatigue. And you – you were twelve when you first saw him. I remember the occasion. Your piggy eyes lit up.’

‘I have not got piggy eyes. They did not light up.’

‘But he’s exactly what you want,’ Adèle said. ‘Admittedly, he’s not much like anything in the life of Maria Stuart. But he’s just what you need for casting in people’s teeth.’

‘He never looks at me anyway,’ Lucile said. ‘He thinks I’m a child. He doesn’t know I’m there.’

‘He knows,’ Adèle said. ‘Go through, why don’t you?’ She gestured in the direction of the drawing room, towards its closed doors. ‘Bring me a report. I dare you.’

‘I can’t just walk in.’

‘Why can’t you? If they’re only sitting around talking, they can’t object, can they? And if they’re not – well, that’s what we want to know, isn’t it?’

‘Why don’t you go then?’

Adèle looked at her as if she were simple-minded. ‘Because the more innocent assumption is the one that you could be expected to make.’

Lucile saw this; and she could never resist a dare. Adèle watched her go, her satin slippers noiseless on the carpets. Camille’s odd little face floated into her mind. If he’s not the death of us, she thought, I’ll smash my crystal ball and take up knitting.

CAMILLE WAS PUNCTUAL; come at two, she had said. On the offensive, she asked him if he had nothing better to do with his afternoons. He did not think this worth a reply; but he sensed the drift of things.

Annette had decided to employ that aspect of herself her friends called a Splendid Woman. It involved sweeping about the room and smiling archly.

‘So,’ she said. ‘There are rules, and you won’t play by them. You’ve been talking about us to someone.’

‘Oh,’ Camille said, fiddling with his hair, ‘if only there were anything to say.’

‘Claude is going to find out.’

‘Oh, if only there were something for him to find out.’ He stared absently at the ceiling. ‘How is Claude?’ he said at last.

‘Cross,’ Annette said, distracted. ‘Terribly cross. He put a lot of money into the Périer brothers’ waterworks schemes, and now the Comte de Mirabeau has written a pamphlet against it and collapsed the stocks.’

‘But he must mean it for the public good. I admire Mirabeau.’

‘You would. Let a man be a bankrupt, let him be notoriously immoral – oh, don’t distract me, Camille, don’t.’

‘I thought you wanted distraction,’ he said sombrely.

She was keeping a careful distance between them, buttressing her resolve with occasional tables. ‘It has to stop,’ she said. ‘You have to stop coming here. People are talking, they’re making assumptions. And God knows, I’m sick of it. Whatever made you think in the first place that I would give up the security of my happy marriage for a hole-and-corner affair with you?’

‘I just think you would, that’s all.’

‘You think I’m in love with you, don’t you? Your self-conceit is so monstrous –’

‘Annette, let’s run away. Shall we? Tonight?’

She almost said, yes, all right then.

Camille stood up, as if he were going to suggest they start her packing. She stopped pacing, came to a halt before him. She rested her eyes on his face, one hand pointlessly smoothing her skirts. She raised the other hand, touched his shoulder.

He moved towards her, set his hands at either side of her waist. The length of their bodies touched. His heart was beating wildly. He’ll die, she thought, of a heart like that. She spent a moment looking into his eyes. Tentatively, their lips met. A few seconds passed. Annette drew her fingernails along the back of her lover’s neck and knotted them into his hair, pulling his head down towards her.

There was a sharp squeal from behind them. ‘Well,’ a breathy voice said, ‘so it is true after all. And, as Adèle puts it, “in the crude technical sense”.’

Annette plunged away from him and whirled around, the blood draining from her face. Camille regarded her daughter more with interest than surprise, but he blushed, very faintly indeed. And Lucile was shocked, no doubt about that; that was why her voice came out so high and frightened, and why she now appeared rooted to the spot.

‘There wasn’t anything crude about it,’ Camille said. ‘Do you think that, Lucile? That’s sad.’

Lucile turned and fled. Annette let out her breath. Another few minutes, she thought, and God knows. What a ridiculous, wild, stupid woman I am. ‘Well now,’ she said. ‘Camille, get out of my house. If you ever come within a mile of me again, I’ll arrange to have you arrested.’

Camille looked slightly overawed. He backed off slowly, as if he were leaving a royal audience. She wanted to shout at him ‘What are you thinking of now?’ But she was cowed, like him, by intimations of disaster.

‘IS THIS YOUR ULTIMATE INSANITY?’ d’Anton asked Camille. ‘Or is there more to come?’

Somehow – he does not know how – he has become Camille’s confidant. What he is being told now is unreal and dangerous and perhaps slightly – he relishes the word – depraved.

‘You said,’ Camille protested, ‘that when you wanted to get on terms with Gabrielle you cultivated her mother. It’s true, everybody saw you doing it, boasting in Italian and rolling your eyes and doing your tempestuous southerner impersonation.’

‘Yes, all right, but that’s what people do. It’s a harmless, necessary, socially accepted convention. It is not like, it is a million miles from, what you are suggesting. Which is, as I understand it, that you start something up with the daughter as a way of getting to the mother.’

‘I don’t know about “start something up”,’ Camille said. ‘I think it would be better if I married her. More permanent, no? Make myself one of the family? Annette can’t have me arrested, not if I’m her son-in-law.’

‘But you ought to be arrested,’ d’Anton said humbly. ‘You ought to be locked up.’ He shook his head …

THE FOLLOWING DAY Lucile received a letter. She never knew how; it was brought up from the kitchen. It must have been given to one of the servants. Normally it would have been handed straight to Madame, but there was a new skivvy, a little girl, she didn’t know any better.

When she had read the letter she turned it over in her hand and smoothed out the pages. She worked through it again, methodically. Then she folded it and tucked it inside a volume of light pastoral verse. Immediately, she thought that she might have slighted it; she took it out again and placed it inside Montesquieu’s Persian Letters. So strange was it, that it might have come from Persia.

And then, as soon as the book was back on the shelf, she wanted the letter in her hand again. She wanted the feel of the paper, the sight of the looped black hand, to run her eye across the phrases – Camille writes beautifully, she thought, beautifully. There were phrases that made her hold her breath. Sentences that seemed to fly from the page. Whole paragraphs that held and then scattered the light: each word strung on a thread, each word a diamond.

Good Lord, she thought. She remembered her journals, with a sense of shame. And I thought I practised prose …

All this time, she was trying to avoid thinking about the content of the letter. She did not really believe it could apply to her, though logic told her that such a thing would not be misdirected.

No, it was she – her soul, her face, her body – that occasioned the prose. You could not examine your soul to see what the fuss was about; even the body and face were not easy. The mirrors in the apartment were all too high; her father, she supposed, had directed where to hang them. She could only see her head, which gave a curious disjointed effect. She had to stand on tiptoe to see some of her neck. She had been a pretty little girl, yes, she knew that. She and Adèle had both been pretty little girls, the kind that fathers dote on. Last year there had been this change.

She knew that for many women beauty was a matter of effort, a great exercise of patience and ingenuity. It required cunning and dedication, a curious honesty and absence of vanity. So, if not precisely a virtue, it might be called a merit.

But she could not claim this merit.

Sometimes she was irritated by the new dispensation – just as some people are irritated by their own laziness, or by the fact that they bite their nails. She would like to work at her looks – but there it is, they don’t require it. She felt herself drifting away from other people, into the realms of being judged by what she cannot help. A friend of her mother said (she was eavesdropping, as it happened): ‘Girls who look like that at her age are nothing by the time they’re twenty-five.’ The truth is, she can’t imagine twenty-five. She is sixteen now; beauty is as final as a birthmark.

Because her skin had a delicate pallor, like that of a woman in an ivory tower, Annette had persuaded her to powder her dark hair, and knot it up with ribbons and flowers to show the flawless bones of her face. It was as well her dark eyes could not be taken out and put back china blue. Or Annette would have done it, perhaps; she wanted to see her own doll’s face looking back. More than once, Lucile had imagined herself a china doll, left over from her mother’s childhood, wrapped up in silk on a high shelf: a doll too fragile and too valuable to be given to the rough, wild children of today.

Life for the most part was dull. She could remember a time when her greatest joy had been a picnic, an excursion to the country, a boat on the river on a hot afternoon. A day with no studies, when the regular hours were broken, and it was possible to forget which day of the week it was. She had looked forward to these days with an excitement very like dread, rising early to scan the sky and predict the weather. There were a few hours when you felt ‘Life is really like this’; you supposed this was happiness, and it was. You thought about it at the time, self-consciously. Then you came back, tired, in the evening, and things went on as before. You said, ‘Last week, when I went to the country, I was happy.’

Now she had outgrown Sunday treats; the river looked always the same, and if it rained, and you stayed indoors, that was no great disaster. After her childhood (after she said to herself, ‘my childhood is over’) events in her imagination became more interesting than anything that happened in the Duplessis household. When her imagination failed her, she wandered the rooms, listless and miserable, destructive thoughts going around in her head. She was glad when it was time for bed and reluctant to get up in the mornings. Life was like that. She would put aside her diaries, consumed with horror at her shapeless days, at the waste of time that stretched before her.

Or pick up her pen: Anne Lucile Philippa, Anne Lucile. How distressed I am to find myself writing like this, how distressed that a girl of your education and refinement can find nothing better to do, no music practice, no embroidery, no healthy afternoon walk, just these death-wishes, these fantasies of the morbid and the grandiose, these blood-wishes, these images, sweet Jesus, ropes, blades and her mother’s lover with his half-dead-already air and his sensual, bruised-looking mouth. Anne Lucile. Anne Lucile Duplessis. Change the name and not the letter, change for worse and worse for it’s much less dull than better. She looked herself in the eye; she smiled; she threw back her head, displaying to her advantage the long white throat that her mother deems will break her admirers’ hearts.

Yesterday Adèle had begun on that extraordinary conversation. Then she had walked into the drawing room and seen her mother slide her tongue between her lover’s teeth, knot her fingers into his hair, flush and tremble and decline into his thin and elegant hands. She remembered those hands, his forefinger touching paper, touching her handwriting: saying Lucile, my sweet, this should be in the ablative case, and I am afraid that Julius Caesar never imagined such things as your translation suggests.

Today, her mother’s lover offered her marriage. When something – blessed event, however strange – comes to shake us out of our monotony – then, she cried, things should happen in ones.

CLAUDE: ‘Of course I have said my last word on the matter. I hope he has the sense to accept it. I don’t know what can have led him to make the proposal in the first place. Do you, Annette? Once it might have been a different story. When I met him at first I took to him, I admit. Very intelligent … but what is intelligence, when someone has a bad moral character? Is basically unsound? He has the most extraordinary reputation … no, no, no. Can’t hear of it.’

‘No, I suppose you can’t,’ Annette said.

‘Frankly, that he has the nerve – I’m surprised.’

‘So am I.’

He had considered sending Lucile away to stay with relations. But then people might put the worst construction on it – might believe she had done something she shouldn’t have.

‘What if …?’

‘If?’ Annette said impatiently.

‘If I were to introduce her to one or two eligible young men?’

‘Sixteen is too young to marry. And her vanity is already great enough. Still, Claude, you must do as you feel. You are the head of the household. You are the girl’s father.’

ANNETTE sent for her daughter, having fortified herself with a large glass of brandy.

‘The letter.’ She clicked her fingers for it.

‘I don’t carry it on my person.’

‘Where then?’

‘Inside Persian Letters.’

An ill-advised merriment seized Annette. ‘Perhaps you would like to file it inside my copy of Les Liaisons Dangereuses.’

‘Didn’t know you had one. Can I read it?’

‘No indeed. I may follow the advice in the foreword, and give you a copy on your wedding night. When, in the course of time, your father and I find you someone to marry.’

Lucile made no comment. How well she hides, she thought – with the help of only a little brandy – a most mortifying blow to her pride. She would almost like to congratulate her.

‘He came to see your father,’ Annette said. ‘He said he had written to you. You won’t see him again. If there are any more letters, bring them straight to me.’

‘Does he accept the situation?’

‘That hardly matters.’

‘Did it not seem proper to my father that I be consulted?’

‘Why should you be consulted? You are a child.’

‘I might have to have a chat with my father. About certain things I saw.’

Annette smiled wanly. ‘Ruthless, aren’t you, my dear?’

‘It seems a fair exchange.’ Lucile’s throat was constricted. On the precipice of these new dealings, she was almost too frightened to speak. ‘You give me time to think. That’s all I’m asking for.’

‘And in return you promise me your infant discretion? What is it, Lucile, that you think you know?’

‘Well, after all, I’ve never seen my father kiss you like that. I’ve never seen anybody kiss anybody like that. It must have done something to brighten your week.’

‘It seems to have brightened yours.’ Annette rose from her chair. She trailed across the room, to where some hothouse flowers stood in a bowl. She swept them out, and began to replace them one by one. ‘You should have gone to a convent,’ she said. ‘It’s not too late to finish your education.’

‘You would have to let me out eventually.’

‘Oh yes, but while you were busy with your plain chant you wouldn’t be spying on people and practising the art of manipulation.’ She laughed – without merriment now. ‘I suppose you thought, until you came into the drawing room, how worldly-wise and sophisticated I was? That I never put a foot wrong?’

‘Oh no. Until then, I thought what a boring life you had.’

‘I’d like to ask you to forget what has happened in the last few days.’ Annette paused, a rose in her hand. ‘But you won’t, will you, because you’re stubborn and vain, and bent on seizing what you – quite wrongly – feel to be your advantage.’

‘I didn’t spy on you, you know.’ She wanted, very badly, to put this right. ‘Adèle dared me to walk in. What would happen if I said yes, I want to marry him?’

‘That’s unthinkable,’ her mother said. One flower, icy-white, escaped to the carpet.

‘Not really. The human brain’s a wonderful thing.’

Lucile retrieved the long-stemmed rose, handed it back to her mother. She sucked from her finger a bead of blood. I may do it, she thought, or I may not. In any event, there will be more letters. She will not use Montesquieu again, but will file them inside Mably’s disquisition of 1768: Doubts on the Natural Order of Societies. Those, she feels, have suddenly become considerable.