The Death of Corinne

9

Towards Zero

Having checked for any text messages from Griff, Eleanor Merchant switched off her mobile phone. It is only a question of time, she murmured.

So Chalfont Park belonged to Lady Grylls… Eleanor slowly ran her tongue across her upper lip. She was thinking about the call she had made minutes before the train had arrived at Waterloo. It was Lady Grylls’s butler who had answered. It was good to know the exact set-up. Lady Grylls. Fancy Corinne having such grand friends. Wrong number, Eleanor had said and rung off. Well, the more she knew about Chalfont Park, the better. Forewarned is fore-armed. She had heard her uncle, the General, say that on a great number of occasions. Eleanor had decided to conduct the whole thing like a military operation in a manner that would have made her uncle proud… Dear Uncle Nat. Ninety-six last fall but still going strong at his luxurious nursing home in Palm Beach.

Suddenly Eleanor Merchant had the feeling of having lived that moment before. She experienced a strong sense of deja vu… She was standing outside W.H. Smith’s at Waterloo, the grubby stole around her shoulders, her picture hat set at an even sharper angle, her yellow gloves on her hands, her brocade overnight bag at her side. She felt sure there was something French about her appearance. Well, when she had spoken to the butler earlier on, she nearly introduced herself as Madame la Duchesse de Saverini, an intimate friend of la chanteuse Corinne. That would have suggested that Corinne Coreille was on familiar terms with the highest echelons of French society, with personages whose ancestors went back to the halcyon pre-revolutionary days – to the ancien regime, no less! (Wasn’t The Laboratory’s subtitle L’ancien regime? Of course it was!)

Eleanor had no doubt she’d have been terribly convincing as a French noblewoman, but she had had second thoughts about it. She needed to be careful. The library at Chalfont Park almost certainly contained a copy of the Almanach de Gotha, and they might have wanted to check on her. They would have seen it was a bogus title and then they would have called the police. Eleanor nodded to herself in a satisfied manner. What a fine logical mind she had! How could anyone have ever suggested there was anything wrong with her?

Eleanor had a headache and just a touch of vertigo. Some twenty-five minutes before they had reached London, she had started counting telegraph posts and got to fifty-six. If I make it to sixty, Corinne will die, she had said to herself. As it happened, she failed to make it to sixty, but the physical effort of pinning her eyes on an object from a moving carriage, of swivelling her body round each time, had made her giddy.

What was that in her hand? A plastic cup filled with something the English called coffee. Eleanor had no recollection of buying the coffee and she wondered whether she might have picked up somebody else’s abandoned cup. This is a risk I am going to take, she thought solemnly as she placed four Solpadols on her tongue and washed them down with the coffee. She must have bought the Solpadol at the pharmacy called Boots, though again she couldn’t remember doing so. Boots, boots, boots, she recited. Old Kipling, of course. She had always preferred English poetry to American, Master Poe and Miss Emily Dickinson being the only exception…

There was something else she had to do. A map, yes. She was going to buy a map. She needed a map. She couldn’t proceed without a map. Then – a hotel. A hot bath followed by a little drink – a malt – no, nothing to eat – then a four-poster bed. A four-poster, Griff had said once, was the only bed worth sleeping in. Her original idea had been to get a room for the night at some unostentatious place in Bloomsbury, where she wouldn’t be noticed, but now that she had become la Duchesse de Saverini, nothing but the London Ritz would be good enough for her.

I am a woman of many parts, Eleanor thought. As she entered W.H. Smith‘s, she imagined she saw Griff standing beside one of the magazine racks, engrossed in a copy of Newsweek, but she was mistaken. It was somebody else – a stranger, but his hair, like Griff’s, was the colour of autumn leaves. How the poor boy started when she impulsively went up to him, placed her hand on his neck and tried to give him a kiss! Eleanor apologized at once and said she had taken him for her son.

I am not a mad woman, I am a wounded woman, she thought. ‘The Ritz Hotel,’ she told the cab driver. She sounded like one of those stuffy English dowagers now. It was some half an hour later and a map of Shropshire lay on her lap. She held up an imaginary lorgnette to her eyes. That was how she would set off in search of Chalfont Parva tomorrow morning, after some toast and a refreshing cup of Earl Grey tea. It all felt like a real adventure! ‘Soon at King’s, a mere lozenge to give – and Corinne should have just thirty minutes to live,’ Eleanor quoted from The Laboratory, substituting ‘Corinne’ for ‘Pauline’.

‘I don’t suppose you know your Browning, my good man?’ Eleanor said to the cab driver. The portly beturbanned Sikh looked at her in his mirror but said nothing. She clicked her tongue. ‘I thought not. I am so sorry I do not speak your beautiful language. I’d have loved to be able to recite Omar Khayyam in the original.’

If only Griff could have been with her now – how much he’d have enjoyed himself! The mixture of histrionics and high society jinks, a night at the Ritz, the trawl through Merrie England, plus the whiff of danger and the prospect of a police chase would have been to his taste. She could hear Griff say something on the lines of, ‘I do admire the English police. So stern and hardboiled. Quite a thrill, the whole business.’

Eleanor had a mental picture of the two of them, walking arm in arm in the formal gardens that surrounded Chalfont Park. She knew exactly what they would see. She thought she might be a bit psychic. .. Labyrinthine paths covered in sand as fine as gold dust that went courteously around and about. Geometric lawns that might have been designed by Pythagoras. Emerald-green bushes trimmed with clinical precision into cones, globes and pyramids. Maroon-veined marble balustrades. Slightly sinister statues in indecipherably enigmatic poses on colossal cubic plinths…

As the cab paused at traffic lights, she saw the god Abraxas, with his evil chanticleer’s head, the arms and torso of a man and the tail of an entwined serpent, cross the road slowly. He turned round and looked at her fixedly. She pretended she hadn’t seen him. That, she had discovered, was the right way to act. The last thing she wanted was to encourage Abraxas!

At least she’d had Griff cremated, not buried. She hadn’t been able to bear the thought of worms ravaging – feasting – on his poor body… Once more she saw the polished coffin sliding theatrically into the furnace… She missed Griff… If it had been possible, she’d have brought the urn with his ashes with her. On second thoughts, no, that would have been quite unnecessary.

Griff, after all, was coming back soon. It was only a question of time.