The Death of Corinne

7

Sleep and His Brother

Eleanor didn’t know how much time had passed. She was sure she hadn’t been asleep, not quite, only floating in some self-induced trance-like daze.

She had been thinking of that golden September day twelve years previously, when Griff and she had taken a leisurely drive up the coast from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara. It had been extremely hot to start with but then, just south of Ventura, there came that magical instant when the air cooled and the ocean appeared without warning in a blaze of reflected sunlight, a sudden flash of infinite sky and dazzling cobalt blue, waves breaking on reefs like lace on a glass table. The beauty had been so great, so overpowering, it rendered them speechless. It had felt like receiving an unexpected draught of some clarifying narcotic. ‘If only we could stay here for ever,’ Griff had said.

Eleanor felt confused and disoriented. Her heart was beating like a drum. For a couple of moments she had no idea where she was. Was this a train? She never travelled by train – never! She’d always had a beautiful chauffeur-driven car at her disposal – her 1954 Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith Six Light Saloon. Trains made her feel ill. She needed to get out – she felt a panic attack approaching – where was the emergency button? Gasping, she half rose from her seat.

‘Would you like more tea, madame?’ The waiter had come up to her. She saw him look at the heap on the table as though he disapproved, then back at her.

‘I don’t want anything, thank you very much,’ Eleanor managed to say.

‘Is there anything wrong?’

‘No – nothing wrong!’ Eleanor snapped. She felt annoyed, which was a good sign for it meant that she had recovered. She resumed her seat. The waiter lingered and stared… Arrogant puppy! Sleek raven-black hair. Beetle brows. Melodramatically flaring nostrils. Buffed up through regular workouts. Very male, impossibly macho – oh so full of himself!

‘Not long until we arrive at Waterloo,’ the waiter said.

‘Have you heard of Corinne Coreille?’ Eleanor asked on an impulse, making it sound like an insult.

‘Who?’ He appeared startled. He was no more than twenty-eight or nine.

‘Corinne Coreille.’

‘Oh. She was a singer, no? Very old?’

‘She is not very old,’ Eleanor bristled.

‘No? She is dead?’

‘She is not dead. She is in England.’

‘In England? I thought she was dead.’

Eleanor watched him swagger down the aisle. Why couldn’t she have had a son like him? Somebody who thought Corinne Coreille was dead and shrugged his shoulders with eloquent indifference when told she wasn’t.

Then the thought came into her head again. Without Corinne Coreille’s lachrymose French songs Griff wouldn’t have killed himself. Eleanor was now convinced of it. Corinne Coreille’s voice had been the catalyst. Yes. It had – tipped the balance. Corinne Coreille’s songs were bad for sensitive, vulnerable boys of Griff’s kind.

Eleanor’s research had revealed that Corinne Coreille sang the French version of ‘The Little White Cloud That Cried’, which, she had gathered, was what was known as a ‘gay anthem’; it was played regularly at Le Chevalier d’Eon.

She held out her hand before her in an eloquent gesture. ‘You must stop at once. Wasn’t it enough that you killed my only son? This is a matter of life and death, can you not see that?’

She broke off. She had had the sudden sensation of being whirled round in one of those revolving wheels at the circus. She felt giddy, nauseous, completely powerless… What she experienced next was a terrifying fragmentation – a total dissolution of her identity. Who am I? Eleanor moaned. She longed for peace, for deep, dreamless sleep – for oblivion – for death even… Sleep and Death. They were brothers, weren’t they, according to the ancient Greek proverb?

My emotional repertoire is not up to tragedy, Eleanor had once wittily said at a party in New York – to Gore Vidal, as it happened. But it was true – she was not equipped for dealing with tragedy… Pull yourself up, girl, she murmured. Perhaps she could take a sedative? She picked up a bottle of pills and capsules and unscrewed the top. Now which was which? Were the orange capsules sedatives and the blue ones stimulants, or was it the other way round? What were the yellow ones for? It was so unlike her to forget! She took one of each. Three capsules in total. Then, on an impulse, she took a fourth – a yellow one. The same colour as her gloves. She closed her eyes.

Eleanor used to enjoy sleeping. The ancient god Sleep – whom she always saw as a gracious host resplendent in Byzantine robes and a crown – used to conduct her into what she privately thought of as her true dimension, in which she became a vivid player, weightless and sometimes skittish, embroiled in obscure adventures, some risky, some very odd indeed, most of them delightful, which puzzled her only when she woke up – but since Griff’s death, sleep had become something of a burden. She regularly had nightmares, from which she woke screaming, sweating and gasping for breath, with skin-crawling recollections of being pursued, buried alive, mutilated or infected with hideous diseases.

The dream she had had the night before had not been as terrible as that, but it had been harrowing enough. After a long journey, having walked down endless dark corridors, stumbled through a swamp, in which something had swirled and hissed, and inched her way across a narrow bridge slung high above a dark abyss, she had at long last managed to confront Corinne Coreille. She had felt angry – furious. She had spoken in a choked voice – My boy, what did you do to my boy?

She was clutching a knife in her hand, the army knife that had been between her teeth earlier on, its blade flashing in the bright light, blinding her. She had worked herself into an unbridled frenzy and kept thrusting the knife forward in the direction of Corinne’s face. In response Corinne only gave a sad smile and held out her hand gently, in an imploring manner, palm upward, as though saying adieu to a parting lover. You crazy bitch. Infuriated, Eleanor slashed at Corinne’s neck several times, but the odd thing was… there was no blood. Not a drop of it. And the knife met with no resistance at all!

Sinking into sleep once more, Eleanor heard a voice whisper in her ear.

She is a false creation. She is just a name and a voice. She does not exist.