The Death of Corinne

546.’

Eleanor remembered another rather complicated game, which they had called ‘Abominating Abraxas’, Abraxas being an unpredictable pagan deity with a chanticleer’s head and a serpent’s tail. Griff had done the most wonderfully scary drawing of Abraxas. The interesting – the really remarkable – thing was that Abraxas had since acquired a life outside the game – he had managed to break through its confines somehow – Eleanor kept seeing him!

Why was the waiter looking at her again? What did he want? Hadn’t his mother taught him it was extremely rude to stare at strangers? Eleanor stuck out her tongue at him, then looked out of the window once more.

She had been so happy that day… She had spent three hours shopping at Bloomingdale’s, had coffee and the most delicious chocolate cheesecake, then went for a stroll in Central Park. She fed the ducks, then sat on a bench, basking in the warm sunshine. It was the first day of spring. She had been full of hope. She had decided to look Griff up and try to reach some kind of reconciliation.

They hadn’t been in touch for a couple of months, there had been an estrangement of sorts, the silliest of spats, really. She thought it was ridiculous that they should have fallen out and still be at loggerheads over a remark she had made concerning one of his friends. Griff was morbidly sensitive about his friends, but then he was sensitive about most things. She had bought him two sugared doughnuts, which she carried in a paper bag by way of a peace offering. (Griff adored doughnuts.)

Griff had a flat on the tenth floor of an art deco building in the fashionable district of West Chelsea. Eleanor believed she was humming a tune – ‘Top of the World’? – as she let herself in with the key Griff had given her while they had still been on good terms. She stood in the hall, admiring the wonderful matt red walls painted with Muslim-style arches supported by slender columns of dull gold – Griff had always had such good taste. She called out Griff’s name. Her hands felt a bit sticky, so she went to the bathroom to wash them -

‘Sticky,’ Eleanor said. ‘It’s so hard to keep the line between past and present.’

The next moment she had to bite her lip to stop herself from crying out. A flashback – she’d had a flashback! She had seen it all again. The redness. The stickiness. You mustn’t do it, the doctor had told her.

‘It is at that point that my life stops and the nightmare takes over,’ Eleanor said, her voice soft and hushed as if she were talking in church. ‘I haven’t been the same since.’

The face that stared back at her from the mirror these days was a face she no longer recognized as her own. (She had never been a great beauty, but she had been attractive in an unconventional kind of way. Griff always said she had the face of an expensive cat.) Her skin was not too lined, but it was shockingly sallow and it had a ‘battered’ appearance. The despoiling power of grief! Eleanor spent ages making herself up and the effect was frequently disconcerting. Her eyes had lost their lustre; they looked empty and dull. Her mind kept getting into binds. She blamed the medication she had been prescribed for that – anti-depressants, stimulants, sleeping pills, painkillers, energy-boosters and she didn’t know what else. She was far from sure they did her any good but she continued taking them in bucketfuls. Sans souci, but I need to get my mouth round the Xanax – it helps me with my panics -

Covering her face with her hands, Eleanor began to rock backward and forward. She shook her head and moaned. She expected tears to start flowing from her eyes in unstoppable streams, but that didn’t happen. She had run out of tears. She had reached the most dreadful part of her letter – she knew what was coming and she dreaded it – she wanted to cut the scene out, the way scenes that were considered too shocking were edited out of films – but of course she couldn’t.

‘The razor, an old-fashioned one, with an ornate mother-of-pearl handle, the stateliest of objects, lay on the floor beside the bath,’ Eleanor whispered. ‘It had belonged to Griff’s grandfather. It was covered in blood. There was blood everywhere, bespattering the walls, on the floor, even on the ceiling – the small cassette player that stood on the little table beside the bath was sticky with blood. I keep seeing that bath – I only need to shut my eyes. There it is now – and again – and again.’

There had been no religious consolations for her in the aftermath of the appalling catastrophe. Eleanor had had a ‘God’ once, but after her husband had left her, she ceased to believe. She had been overcome by grief. She had imagined at first that she could draw on reserves of stoicism and imagination, on her sense of the absurd, but she had been wrong – she couldn’t. That was why she had ‘cracked up’ so fast. She’d gone right under. She had had a nervous breakdown. Her shrink had diagnosed something called ‘florid behaviour’. Eleanor had spent a month at a ‘rest home’, undergoing various therapies. She had only the haziest recollection of the things they did to her there. After she had come out, she had developed an interest in spiritualism. She had been keeping a psychic journal, in which she regularly recorded her attempts to reach her dead son.

‘Sticky,’ she said again.

The bath was full of Griff’s blood, only his head and part of his shoulders showed above it. It was all appallingly, indescribably, grotesquely Grand Guignol. A scene straight out of one of those old British Hammer horror films she and Griff had always found hilarious – they had revelled in anything high camp – only now it was for real. Eleanor knew at once that Griff had been drained of all his blood; that was why his face was so pale, bluish pale, painfully thin and haggard. His eyes had remained open…

Eleanor still did not remember going up to the cassette player, but she must have done. (There had been blood on her hands, as she had discovered afterwards.) She had rewound the tape and pressed the play button. She had expected to hear a final message from Griff, his last words, an explanation, an apologia, the sound of him sobbing or screaming or telling her that he had forgiven her, but what she heard instead was Corinne Coreille’s voice.

‘It came as a shock. Another shock. As though I hadn’t had enough! How I hated you at that moment,’ Eleanor recited from the letter. ‘There is something about your voice – a certain haunting quality. It’s like no other I have ever heard. Griff had played your songs all the time, that was what the neighbours said. They imagined he was French because of his taste in music, also on account of his “flamboyantly European lifestyle”, whatever that may mean. They sounded as though they too disapproved. I would have expected people living in that part of Manhattan to display a greater degree of sophistication, but there it is.’

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

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.