The Death of Corinne

3

The Secret Adversary

Eleanor Merchant sat in the dining car of the Eurostar, bound for London. They had left Paris some forty-five minutes before. She had taken the letters out of her bag, she couldn’t say exactly why, and arranged them fan-like on the little table in front of her. She had kept copies of every single letter – two copies – she was most particular about that kind of thing. She had written three times to Corinne Coreille and now six letters lay on the table. Although things had moved on and a confrontation was to take place soon, indeed seemed imminent, she was still curious as to why she had not received any answers. Corinne Coreille’s silence had hurt her. It was after all common courtesy to reply to personal messages.

Earlier on Eleanor had had an argument with the waiter. He had brought her a tarte au citron, but she had asked for a tarte au chocolat! He had had the temerity to suggest that she had made a mistake, the arrogant puppy – that her memory might be failing her. A mistake! Her memory was of the fly-paper variety – she had told him as much. He had appeared unconvinced. He looked the kind Griff might have taken a fancy to, so she refrained from displaying the froideur and sharp edges of the iceberg that had sunk the Titanic. (Why did they have only French waiters on the Eurostar? There should have been English ones as well. They wouldn’t have been that good-looking for one thing, and then she’d have been able to speak her mind.)

The reason for taking out the letters came to her. She wanted to prove that she had the phenomenal ability to recite extended texts from memory – without taking one little peek. Yes. Eleanor had re-read her letters a great number of times and she knew them by heart, word for word… Placing both her hands across the first letter, palms down, rather in the manner of one attending a spiritualist seance, she stared out of the window at the rapidly shifting landscape and started speaking.

‘Dear Miss Coreille – it was your voice my son was listening to as he lay dying. His blood had turned the translucent water in his bath scarlet.’ Since she had no travelling companion whom she might have been addressing, people passing by her table shot her startled glances. ‘You were the only one there. He had chosen you and you alone to share his last moments on earth. It was I who discovered him, you see.’

Eleanor felt like calling the waiter and asking him to check and see for himself that she hadn’t made a single mistake, but decided against it. He might get the wrong idea. The common herd, she had noticed, was wont to jump to conclusions. She sighed and shook her head. Perhaps she should do it sotto voce – or, better, in her head? I will be my own witness, Eleanor thought with a sad little smile. That, alas, was often the way these days.

She had flown over from Boston to New York. Alma, her niece, was getting married and it might have been the society wedding of the year, but Griff’s death spoilt things somewhat. Alma was extremely sore about it. Alma believed that Griff (short for Griffiths) had timed his suicide very carefully, out of sheer spite. That, she told Eleanor, was the kind of thing he would do, in keeping with the immature, theatrical, rather exhibitionistic side of his character. Griff was what Corinne Coreille would no doubt call un enfant terrible. Alma seemed to be equally cross with Eleanor, insinuating that somehow it had been her fault, the way Griff had turned out; Alma had implied that Griff had had an unhealthy upbringing, that Eleanor had been a terrible parent – the mother from hell.

The press had been quick to pick up the family connection and that was not the kind of publicity her niece craved. Eleanor’s sister and brother-in-law, who was the governor’s right-hand man, had been more restrained, respecting her grief, or rather observing the decencies. They hadn’t said a word about Griff – but Eleanor was sure they shared their daughter’s views on the subject.

Eleanor felt a sudden urge to rise to her feet and speak out – recite aloud – make the dining car ring with the sound of her voice – command everybody’s attention with her tragic tale. She fought the urge down. Her tale would be quite wasted. The common herd would think her unbalanced. Pity, really, because she had such a good voice. It was of the ‘cultured’ American variety – without a trace of a nasal twang. She sounded like the late British actress Margaret Leighton, she always imagined. In Paris, on several occasions, she had been taken for an Englishwoman of irreproachable birth and breeding. Well, she cut a most elegant and unusual figure. She had been aware of people actually staring at her, simple souls – in admiration, awe and wonder, she had no doubt – and she had brought joy into their drab lives by giving them the little see-saw of a royal wave. (The hand going up and down, up and down, the wrist held rigid.)

‘All my relatives disapproved of Griff and his lifestyle,’ Eleanor said with a sigh. Fury came over her in waves as she thought of her relatives’ low, narrow, bestial minds. ‘They wouldn’t have condemned him if they’d had the slightest understanding of the world and its tricks.’

Her relatives had considered Griff an embarrassment – no, an abomination. Not the kind of person you’d care to acknowledge as cousin or nephew. Her relatives would rather Griff had never existed at all… None of them came to the funeral. Nor did Griff’s father for that matter. Eleanor had no idea where her former husband was. Perhaps he was abroad – he might be dead – or in jail. Lyndon had left her when Griff was seven. That, her shrink had told her, was when the trouble started. Absentee fathers had a lot to answer for.

It was nonsense to suggest that she was in any way to blame for the way Griff had ‘turned out’… A mean, unpleasant creature, Alma. Her name should have been ‘Alice’ – then it would have rhymed with ‘malice’… Well, current rumour had it that her marriage wasn’t going at all satisfactorily – it was even suggested that Alma had been driving her husband to drink! Eleanor wasn’t the type to gloat, but she couldn’t help a little smile at the thought.

A terrible parent indeed! Eleanor hadn’t been a terrible parent. Quite the reverse. She had been a marvellous mother. She and Griff had got on extremely well. No, they had got on stupendously. Griff had been her companion, her confidant, her playmate. Why, they had adored each other!

Eleanor told Griff things she wouldn’t have dreamt of telling anyone else. She never bought a dress or a hat without asking his opinion first. (How many mothers did that?) She introduced Griff to great literature – to the very best of popular fiction as well. She made life for both of them exclusive and amusing. She took him to the Hamptons and Palm Beach for the vacations, and to Broad-way every other week – together they had seen Oedipus Rex and Rent, The Boyfriend and Dorothy After Kansas. She let him read her copies of Vanity Fair and Harper’s Bazaar. They had pillow fights to the accompaniment of Leroy Anderson tunes. Eleanor had the most fantastical costumes ordered for their dressing-up sessions. They had played games unknown anywhere else on the planet Earth! They had applied the principle of those bizarre multiple-choice teenage books (‘If you want to venture into the Lair of the Giant Dragonfly, go to page 23’) to the works of Proust and had come up with entries like, ‘If you wish to slip into bed with Marcel, go to page 6. If, however, you want to attend the Germantes’ dinner party, go at once to page