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 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 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.
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 elan – 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 cancannish.’
‘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,’
