I TAPPED ON HER BEDROOM DOOR and opened it.
Wintry sunlight. Two pillows were propped behind her head, her hair spread on her shoulders; her arm in a sling.
I crossed to sit beside her; bent to kiss her. She put her arm up around my neck; we didn’t speak for a long time.
Then she dried her eyes and said: ‘They tell me I ruined the party.’
I pulled back. ‘Don’t you remember it?’
‘No. I just remember waking up and being here, with the doctor. I’ve always been prone to fainting. And I can never remember what I’ve missed.’
She talked on and on; the words tumbled out, she lost her thread and found it again, watching for my reaction, all the time clutching my hand.
I stared at her, not recognising her.
I said: ‘We were in the room at the end of the corridor. Something happened that startled you, and you fell.’
She looked fixedly at the window. At first I thought she was thinking. Then I saw that she was trying not to cry, the tears spilling out at the corner of each eye anyway.
‘Tell me what it was,’ I said.
For months, nobody saw the newlyweds. Autumn turned to winter; Paris expected its first glimpse of them at the Christmas balls, or skating on the Seine, and was disappointed. The house remained a blank gold façade; André sent his notes and ideas to Pathé by post.
In the spring came the news that took everyone by surprise: Luce was going to star in André’s next film.
At first it was not believed. Was she not cheapening herself by dabbling in the fly-by-night art of circuses and fairgrounds?
For a few months everything went quiet. It was said, with a wink, that she had reconsidered. The city settled down again: she would turn her hand to tending roses and breeding horses, as every aristocratic wife did, and that would be the end of it.
Posters of La Dame aux Roses began to appear on the city walls and outside cinemas. The critics chewed their nails; but when the film print was finally released, it was clear that the venture was anything but foolish, and so everyone pretended to have known all along. She dignifies the medium. She brings a finery to the coarseness of cinema. She is a star.
She began to act, not just for André, but for Peyssac, Feuillade, Blaché. The months ran by, turning into three years of relentless happiness: riches, professional success, plenty. And then Luce found out they were going to have a baby.
It is five months into the pregnancy – June, 1908 – and she is walking in the gardens behind the house. She is alone and exhausted by the extra weight she carries.
She has given up work because the bump was getting too hard to disguise. André wanted to tell everyone, but she would not allow it. So the journalists report that she is struggling with her childhood injury and has taken a leave of absence to recuperate. Nobody knows she is pregnant: not their friends, not their enemies – not even Aunt Berthe, who is a regular visitor now that Luce is famous.
André thinks she fears a miscarriage. Luce has let it slip that her mother suffered several, and so naturally he assumes she does not want anyone to know until she is almost to term. This is not the real reason for her secrecy.
Though it is still early summer, the day is very hot; the air is filled with the overpowering scent of flowers; she feels lightheaded. So she walks to the fringe of the Bois and ducks under the branches. There is an old path here, blissfully shady; she follows it, pushing the branches aside with her fingers as she goes.
After half an hour the path ends at the last thing she expected: a wide pond, twenty metres across. She has never come this far into the woods before; she had no idea the pond was here.
She almost laughs because the water is dark and glossy; she is looking at the exact twin of a lake on her parents’ estate in Normandy, which she had sat beside as a child.
How deep is the water here? She dips her toe; her shoe sinks through the water, to the ankle, to the calf, without touching the bottom.
How can she tell André the real reason she wants to keep the pregnancy a secret? How can she say I’m worried I won’t love the child? She cannot. She cannot say, Give me more time, lots more time before it’s born, and I will be equal to it, because she knows she will never be equal to it. It is like a dream from which she can’t wake; and with each passing day, she feels the thing inside her grow closer.
She could easily slip here, on the mud of the bank; her belly might bump against the pond floor, or she might swallow enough water to bring about an accident.
She stands, tempted and indecisive. For shame, she thinks, but distantly: she could have her career back, her old life; everything will be as it was before. She could crawl back to the house, weed draped in her hair, and nobody need ever know the fall into the water was deliberate.
And the child isn’t a child yet, is it?
Protesting, the baby kicks hard against her belly: the first time it has moved.
She pulls back from the lip of the pond and waits, fascinated, counting. Sure enough, ten seconds later, still reproachful but fainter, another kick.
As the baby kicks a third time, she finds herself flooded with the last thing she expects – not guilt, not irritation at this demand for attention, but worry for the child. Is it normal for it to kick so much? She puts her hands to her stomach and curves them around it protectively. The skin between her and the womb feels thin under her fingers. Who can she ask if this is normal?
Sadness and irony make her smile. Most women would ask their mothers. She turns and walks back to the house.
That night, André notices that the sparkle is back in her eyes. She goes to bed earlier than usual, kissing him chastely on the lips. He watches her go, relieved. He loves her, but recently he has not known how to help her; now he sees that whatever personal storm she was weathering has blown out to sea and away.
For the rest of the pregnancy Luce is covetous of each kick and murmur. She spends her days on the chaise longue, reading and resting as avidly as some people exercise, eating everything she is meant to eat; she passes the time imagining the baby. Now it is asleep in its permanent night, thumb jammed into its proto-mouth; now it is rotating, stub-fingers pressing the amniotic sac almost to breaking-point. What will you be, she wonders, a man of money and ambition like your father? Or will you be like me?
André is in his office when the note comes, in Dr Langlois’s precise hand: Labour commenced an hour ago. He flings down his pen and whirls his coat round his shoulders. The guards watch him go, astonished: though he has wanted to crow the news from the rooftops since he first heard, André has still not told anybody at Pathé that he is about to be a father.
He feels the change as soon as he sets foot in his house. The servants are keeping downstairs, out of harm’s way, and everything is very still. He runs up the stairs three at a time, up, up to the attic floor, where Thomas stands, holding a fresh bowl of water, outside the door of the confinement room.
The door is half open; André steps forward, suddenly unsure of himself, even on his own turf. Being an orphan, he has no map for this event: aren’t fathers supposed to stay outside?
When he peeps round the open door, he sees Luce stretched – but really stretched, not just lying, every tendon arching in pain – out on the bed. The room smells of exertion. At the foot of the bed stands grey-haired Dr Langlois, peering into his wife, exhorting her with gentle murmurs, over which she screams and screams.
Dr Langlois sees André standing appalled on the threshold, and Luce’s head turns to follow the doctor’s look, so he receives both looks at the same time: the doctor smiling his reassurance and Luce baring her teeth. He does not know which to believe, but ‘Perhaps you’ll wait outside?’ the doctor says, still encouraging and kind; so he does. Time passes slowly but at least it passes; the screams become weaker. ‘That’s a good sign,’ he says to Thomas, ‘she is in less pain, the baby’s coming.’
They hear Dr Langlois’ voice slightly raised, as though he is telling Luce off. Then the screams become fainter. André nods vigorously – they are almost there now. He does not care if it is a boy or a girl, doesn’t care whether it is tall or small or gifted or plain, as long as it’s theirs. The day is not quite gone; a pale streak lines the sky above the horizon but that is all.
The sound of crying, quickly stifled; but not a child’s crying. Dr Langlois appears in the doorway, wiping blood into a cloth; not his blood.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, still kindly, ‘she’s conscious, and she’ll recover, but she has lost the baby.’
André smiles, polite and uncomprehending.
‘Stillborn,’ Dr Langlois says, shaking his head. He reaches out and puts one palm on André’s shoulder, steadying him; the palm is damp.
André pushes past him and into the room. He won’t believe a trick until he sees its outcome.
The thing is laid out on a chair, swaddled in its swaddling clothes up to the neck. Its features are all there – the mouth half open, the eyelids fat and closed – but an object more than a human. He expects it to burst into life and take a breath at any moment, but it persists in its silence and its stillness.
‘It may have stopped growing a couple of months ago,’ Dr Langlois tells him. André shakes his head to say, But we were so careful, thinking of Luce sitting beautifully on her couch; and then shakes his head again. He can’t see anything of himself or of her in this tiny half-amphibian.
Luce watches André from the bed. She knows what has happened; tears ooze from under her eyelids. When they try to tell her some things about the baby – sex, size – she lets her face go blank, and doesn’t hear them. Two days later André arranges a small funeral in the grounds of the house, which she does not attend.
But it isn’t over, not yet. They tie her to the bed in the attic, and she forgets things: she forgets who André is and when he comes to sit beside her, she thinks it is a stranger, unpardonable in his rudeness, gripping her hand. How dare you, she hisses, and hearing how much like a stranger she has become herself, she laughs.
To try to make it clear to her, they move the empty crib they had bought for the baby into her room. Every day a doctor comes and asks her: Do you know what this is? Do you remember what it was meant to be for? Sometimes she thinks she has become an animal: a cat or a wolf or an owl, staring at her own sleeping form on the bed from the other side of the window. She learns to slip the knots around her wrists, and goes wandering through the attics, chafing the skin of her hands to warm the joints, she walks up and down the corridor, thinking she has heard the baby calling for her. But when Thomas comes to fetch her he tells her it is only an owl hooting, and there it is – bluish and terrifyingly large in the moonlight – perched on the windowsill, looking in at her. I did hear the baby, she hears herself insisting. Deferential, with a bob of the head, the owl slips off the sill and takes flight; Thomas smiles – Madame, take your medicine – and she watches fascinated: the owl’s wings move mechanically, a stage prop flying away.
When they escort her downstairs, she is surprised to see that it is still autumn, or autumn again. André’s hand is on her arm, guiding her; at her questioning look, he nods: yes, a year has passed.
Everything looks frail but familiar. The chaise longue is as it was, but wafer thin in the pale afternoon light; the desks, chairs are watery and sly; even the books on the shelves seem to be holding their secrets away from her.
From this she deduces that she is still not quite well.
André is in the room, in another chair, but she doesn’t know what to say to him. A year!
She knows the stillbirth was her fault, because she had once thought of killing it, and someone, somehow, knew.
It is time André was made aware; it is carrying this secret which has kept her chained to the bed. She opens her mouth to tell André, but feels his hand laid over her own, a warning to keep quiet.
The silence runs down from their joined hands and over them and spreads out over the carpet, blending with the sunset, which is unexpectedly fiery and distinct. They sit like statuary of a king and a queen, saying nothing to each other. Eventually the silence fills the whole house.
The man from public records sighs; it’s his lunch hour.
He says: ‘The cottage that is currently owned by Mme Ruillaux was built in 1930.’
I scribble 1930 on my pad; prop the telephone in the crook of my shoulder and ask: ‘By whom?’
Another sigh. ‘A M. Undin. But he never lived there; he was an absentee landlord. According to this, it was occupied on a short-term basis until 1945, when M. Undin was killed. Mme Ruillaux bought it at auction.’
I ask: ‘How short-term?’
‘The tenants changed every year or two.’
‘Can you see anything about their occupations?’
He sounds affronted. ‘Of course. This is Public Records.’
‘Is there anyone who worked at the Pathé factory?’
I imagine him running his finger down a list of names. ‘I’m sorry. There’s nothing here that I can see.’
‘There’s no connection? No wife or husband or other tenants?’
‘I’m sorry. No.’
I say: ‘Can you send me the list of names anyway?’