The Death of Corinne (4 page)

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 passé everything looked. (That, as it happened, had been their catch phrase of the moment – passé.) ‘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 Congrès concert of 1989.

Eleanor remembered her exact words. ‘Good heavens, is she still around? Just look at her. So passé, 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 Griff 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
fi
lle
éternelle
. 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.

She had given an account of what she had done in her first letter to Corinne Coreille.

‘You may call it my one attempt at “counter-magic”. The first pin went into your dainty little nose, the next two into your beautiful eyes, the third and fourth into your shell-like ears, the fifth into your smooth forehead. I went on till the doll was transformed into a pincushion – no, into a porcupine! It made me laugh and for a couple of moments I felt better. (I don’t suppose it hurt?)’

It occurred to Eleanor that that was the way she had recited poems at school – fluently, expressively, without stumbling over words, pausing at all the right places. Anyone listening to her could tell the parentheses from the commas, the semicolons from the full stops. At school her favourite poem had been Browning’s
The Laboratory
. (
Not
that I bid you spare her the pain
–
Let death be felt and the proof
remain!
) She was particularly good at ‘doing’ highly strung women in the grip of uncontrollable emotions.

‘I was there when Griff was born,’ Eleanor said in a tragic voice, placing her hand at her bosom. ‘You were with him when he died. There is a fearsome symmetry about this. I would very much like to meet you. Maybe I am being too hard on you? Perhaps I am doing you a grave injustice? You don’t seem real on TV or in photographs. Too perfect for one, not a hair out of place, always immaculately groomed, always glowing.’ Eleanor touched her own face and hair with an ironic gesture. ‘I would like to see with my own eyes what you are really like.’

The waiter had silently beckoned to one of his colleagues and the two young men stood further down the aisle and watched Eleanor’s performance furtively but with the liveliest interest.

‘I never used to consider myself a “maternal woman”, despised the type rather,’ Eleanor went on, ‘but all I can think of now is my dead son. I don’t expect you to know what goes on in a mother’s heart because you have never had any children, but perhaps you could try? I hope you write back. For Griff’s sake. Your songs clearly meant a lot to him. It is a complete mystery to me why that should have been so, but then I am not exactly one of your aficionados . . . You may at least have the decency to apologize, you fucking crazy bitch. I don’t know exactly why I wrote that last sentence, but it seems right somehow, so I will leave it –’

Eleanor Merchant’s throat felt dry and a bit sore, so she took a sip of tea. The tea was cold now, tasteless and quite revolting. She glanced down at the second letter through the spread fingers of her right hand, then she covered the letter with both her hands. She had written the second letter a month after the first and again she had sent it by airmail as well as registered, c/o Fabiola, Corinne Coreille’s record company in Paris. Corinne Coreille had not deigned to reply to either letter, though Eleanor was absolutely certain that she had received them.

‘Fucking crazy bitch,’ Eleanor repeated.

4

Les Parents Terribles

‘Have you ever seen her in concert – I mean live?’ Antonia asked.

‘As a matter of fact, we have,’ Payne said. ‘At the Royal Albert Hall. Aunt Nellie took us. My sister and me. Corinne Coreille’s first concert in England. She gave two concerts, I think?’ He turned to his aunt.

‘Goodness, yes . . . That was ages ago.’ Lady Grylls spoke distractedly. ‘
Ages
ago . . .’

‘Darling, is anything the matter?’

‘Why can’t one revisit the past, the way one does a foreign country? Of course I remember Corinne’s concert.’ Lady Grylls sat up. ‘Sorry – lost in a brown study . . . I remember it vividly. What d’you want to know about it?’

‘I believe the French ambassador was in the audience or did I dream it?’

‘No, you did not dream it. He was. Madame de Gaulle was there too, with Lady Soames, the wife of our ambassador in Paris.’ Lady Grylls flicked cigarette ash recklessly on to the carpet. ‘Corinne was big in France in the late ’60s. Everybody was talking of
la nouvelle Piaf
. Corinne was said to be a particular favourite of General de Gaulle. Her first English concert was a glittering gala devised to revive the flagging Entente Cordiale. It has always been in trouble, hasn’t it? There were other French singers – Maurice Chevalier, no less. Sacha Distel. On the English side there was Vera Lynn and – what was the name of the chap who sang about wanting to be released?’

‘Engelbert Humperdinck.’

‘Oh yes. Ghastly name. He also wrote operas, didn’t he? No, that was the other one.’

‘It must have been 1969 . . . It was 5th May. I was on leave from Sandhurst.’

Antonia smiled. ‘You remember the exact date? Did you find Corinne that attractive then?’

Payne started relighting his pipe. Antonia was visited by the unworthy suspicion that he was doing it to gain time. Eventually he spoke. Corinne hadn’t been conventionally beautiful, but rather sweet in a
jolie laide
kind of way. (‘Sorry, Aunt Nellie, I know we said no frog, but there’s no English expression that means quite the same, is there?’ – ‘Can’t you say, her looks were no great shakes, strictly speaking, but
such
charm and sweetness, and that’s always half the battle?’) Although she had been twenty-one, Corinne had had the air of a little girl about her . . .
Not
his type.

‘As for the date,’ he went on slowly, between puffs, ‘I remember it because it was my sister’s birthday. Amanda was passing through a Francophile as well as Francophone phase. She adored all things French. Amanda enjoyed the show so much that she asked me to take her to the second concert, but I had to go back to Sandhurst. I believe she went with someone else.’

‘Corinne sang a couple of winsomely wistful waltzes,’ his aunt said. ‘Extraordinary, how things come back to one.’

‘Amanda’s favourite was a song called “Adieu, Joli Matelot”, for which Corinne donned a sailor’s uniform and cap and played the harmonica with great
élan
– or do I mean
esprit
?’ Payne frowned. ‘Sorry, we said no frog . . . All the songs were terribly French. Either tear-jerkingly melancholy, or saccharinely sentimental – or crazily can-cannish.’

‘There was a fourth kind, the military march-like song.’ Lady Grylls waved an imaginary banner.

’Gosh yes. She sang “La Marseillaise”, didn’t she? Lest it be forgotten that the French are a nation of barricade-building Gavroches and Cosettes . . . She wound up with “The Trolley Song”. I think it was at that point that Maurice Chevalier joined her on stage?’

‘He did! The old fraud! He had his arm around Corinne’s shoulders and he kept pinching her cheek. He looked avuncular and brimmed over with bonhomie, yet I couldn’t help thinking there was something of the dirty old man about him.’ Lady Grylls sniffed. ‘It didn’t help that he sang “Thank Heaven for Little Girls”. I believe he had the idea of staging
Gigi
with Corinne in the title role, but then he died or something.’

‘I suppose the show could be called an extravaganza. With hindsight, it was of considerable curiosity value,’ Payne said. ‘Jolly old-fashioned, even then. I mean, it took place between the swinging ’60s and the raucous ’70s. It was a rather self-conscious throwback to a previous age –
la belle
époque
, no less. The Beatles or the Rolling Stones might not have existed – or for that matter Johnny Halliday. 1968 Paris might never have happened.’

‘After the concert we went to see Corinne in her dressing room,’ Lady Grylls said. ‘It was filled with flowers, remember, Hughie? Some of the bouquets were as tall as Corinne!’

Payne nodded. ‘There was a highly charismatic friendly giant sitting there with her, smoking a big black cigar. He gave us champagne. He couldn’t have been anything but American. That was the great Mr Lark.’

‘It was Mr Lark who groomed Corinne for stardom,’ Lady Grylls explained. ‘The urchin hairstyle by Elrhodes, which became her trademark, was his idea – the tricolour dresses too. He organized all Corinne’s domestic and foreign tours and, generally, took charge of her life.’

‘Corinne drank nothing but camomile tea sweetened with honey. She was eating caramelized almonds out of a cellophane bag,’ Major Payne went on. ‘She ate like a little bird . . .’

‘I think you must have fancied her,’ Antonia said.

‘She was wearing a high-collared blue dress with white cuffs and a red bow at the throat. She was bourgeois respectability and wholesomeness personified. She was perfectly polite, in a monosyllabic kind of way. Extremely shy. She kept leafing through a book called
The Language of
Flowers
. No coquettish toss of the fringe, no calling eye, no provocative laugh. In fact there was more than a whiff of the convent girl about her. I keep telling you, my love – not my type.’

‘
Quite
unlike her mamma,’ Lady Grylls said with a frown. ‘Ruse, you see, couldn’t have been more different.’

There was a pause. Again, Antonia was aware of a tension.

‘Aunt Nellie and Corinne’s mamma went to school together,’ Payne explained chattily. ‘They were the greatest of chums.’

Lady Grylls said that they had been to
two
schools together. Lady Eden’s, then St Mary’s Ascot. At one time they had been inseparable. ‘Heaven knows why. We had so little in common. A case of opposites attracting, I suppose. Consider. I was pink, podgy, plain and placid. Ruse – her real name was Rosamund – was strikingly beautiful, wildly temperamental and extravagantly romantic. She had almond-shaped eyes and a touch of the tar-brush about her. I believe I had a crush on her for a bit.’

‘Something of a rebel, weren’t you, darling?’

‘St Mary’s was a terrible place – impossibly moralistic and repressive – consequently I rebelled, yes. One of my schoolmistresses, I remember, called me a force for anarchy. Nobody would have thought it, looking at me.’ Lady Grylls paused. ‘I stole sulphur from the chemistry lab to make stink bombs. I read
The Virgin and the Gypsy
at night, by torchlight, under the sheets . . . You know the scene where Yvette meets the gypsy and he knows at once that she is a virgin?’

‘I know the scene.’ Antonia nodded. Her husband shot her a startled look.

‘Oh, I used to get such a kick out of it! I knew several Mae West songs by heart – some unspeakably dirty ones. I used to spread rumours concerning the proclivities of our gym mistress. Well, we were all sex-mad and impossibly knowing. Ruse was particularly keen on the chaps and she used to tell everybody she was having a tempestuous affair with a guardsman. She also claimed she had Ethiopian blood in her. She was an incorrigible fantasist – a terrible liar, in fact. But she almost always managed to be extremely convincing.’ Lady Grylls stubbed out her cigarette.

‘Is that why you called her Ruse?’ Payne asked. ‘Because of her penchant for porkies?’

‘I suppose so. She got the Ethiopian idea from a book – some legendary Ethiopian saga. Had a snake in the title. What was it?
Cobra
something?’

‘
Kebra Nagast
. The legendary Ethiopian saga.’

‘Yes. Goodness, Hughie, how do you find the time? You mustn’t allow him to read so much. Saps a man’s energy,’ Lady Grylls told Antonia. ‘That’s what Hughie’s uncle used to say. Rory never read a novel in his life. He started a Dornford Yates once and it nearly killed him . . . Incidentally, has Hughie taught you to ride yet?’

Antonia answered that he had – but she had been hopeless.

‘You weren’t too bad.’ Payne kissed her. He turned towards his aunt. ‘Tell us more about Ruse, darling.’

‘Well, her people were frightfully conventional. Her father was a stockbroker, her mother played bridge. They lived in a mock-Tudor house in Kettering. Extremely well off – her father had made a fortune on the Stock Exchange – but frightfully conventional. Ruse despised them, rather. I became Ruse’s confidante when she fell in love with
le
falcon noir
. That was the name we had for the Frenchman who was eventually to become Corinne’s father. Franglais, you know.’

Lady Grylls paused and her eyes narrowed. ‘His name was François-Enrique. He was much older than us, at least twenty years older. Tall, terribly good-looking, in a dark, brooding way. Yellow-grey eyes. His nose did resemble a beak and he wore a long, black coat with a scarlet silk lining. He was a prosperous French businessman who had divorced his English wife. I was there when Ruse first met him, you see.’

‘Where did you meet?’

‘At an Ascot tea shop. He chatted her up. Started talking about the difference between French pâtisserie, English cakes and American cookies – of all the unpromising chat-up lines! Ruse was smitten. She went very white. They started meeting regularly and she dragged me along with her, as some sort of chaperone. We used to play truant, so that we could go and meet him. One weekend, I remember – light, Hughie.’ Lady Grylls had taken another cigarette from the pack. Her cheeks had turned pink. ‘One weekend he got us on a plane and flew us to Paris where he gave us dinner at Maxim’s and took us back later that same night. It was a magical experience.’ She inhaled deeply and shut her eyes. ‘Extraordinary man.’

Payne gave her a sly look. ‘You were in love with him too, weren’t you?’

Lady Grylls’s eyes remained inscrutable behind the thick lenses. ‘As a matter of fact I was. I too was smitten . . .
Le
falcon
carried a whiff of danger about him. There was something indefinably
wrong
about him. The kind of man my father called “a bad hat” and warned me against. That only added to his attraction. I remember being consumed with jealousy for quite a bit, resenting Ruse’s success, really hating her. Anyhow. He courted her and we were snapped by photographers at all sorts of places. I mean
they
–’ Lady Grylls corrected herself with a laugh. ‘Wishful thinking!
They
were snapped by photographers. Ruse and
le falcon
were so glamorous, so photogenic. The photos appeared in the
Illustrated London News
– in the
Tatler
and so on. I used to cut them out and paste them in my scrapbooks.’

’Golly. I used to
love
Aunt Nellie’s scrapbooks.’ Payne smiled reminiscently. ‘The Aga Khan and a mystery blonde. Princess Margaret and Peter Townsend. The Duchess of Argyll and a mystery man. The young Queen and a horse.’

‘Ruse and
le falcon
got married and went to live in Paris,’ Lady Grylls went on. ‘They had Corinne in 1948. They discovered common ground in gambling. Both were inveterate gamblers. They went to places like Monte Carlo. They became regulars at the casinos. They played roulette, blackjack and
chemin de fer
. They made pots of money, but the tide turned and they lost what amounted to a fortune.
Le falcon
then landed in the soup – had a brush with the law, a pretty serious one, I dare say. He was suspected of what they call financial impropriety – of embezzlement on a large scale – of having cheated his firm’s clients out of millions and millions of francs. Something on those lines – though they could prove nothing. Ruse adored him and she stuck with him. They were made for one another.’

‘Did they love Corinne?’

‘Hard to say. Well, they didn’t make any fuss over her. They went picnicking
en famille
at the Bois de Boulogne, though I suspect their hearts weren’t in it. They were infinitely happier inventing systems for winning at roulette. I didn’t mind a flutter every now and then myself, but with them it was an obsession. They talked about little else at dinner.’ Lady Grylls paused. ‘Lethal gamblers – the term might have been coined with them in mind. I found that quite tedious, eventually. Still, I was quite shocked when they died . . . They died together, you know.’

Antonia looked at her. ‘They . . . died together? What happened?’