I winced in embarrassment. She was slurring her words and was by now quite obviously drunk. “Why don’t you make coffee?” I said.
“Why don’t you!”
She leaned towards Neil and placed her hand on his. “Tell your brother, my husband has been resting — a long rest, I agree, but creativity is exhausting. As for writer’s block... tch!” She dismissed it with a wave of her hand and sent the bottle flying. Wine gushed over the tablecloth and onto my trousers but she seemed not to notice.
“But let me tell you this, Neil,” she continued, leaning still closer, “it’s a good job some of us still have ideas or we wouldn’t be paying the bills. Even if we aren’t real writers.”
Neil looked embarrassed and I averted my eyes in disgust. There is nothing more odious than an inebriated woman — especially an older woman. I plucked the wet fabric from my leg and squeezed it in a napkin.
Eventually Stella staggered to her feet and went to the kitchen. Penny excused herself and followed, presumably to find the bathroom, and Neil and I were left alone. “You must forgive my wife,” I said, all too aware that I was probably slurring too. “She rarely has more than a glass or two. It affects her badly.”
“We all do it once in a while,” said Neil generously.
“Not Stella,” I said. “Stella never lets go. Stella never allows herself to...”
But I didn’t finish the sentence. There was a muffled shriek above our heads, followed by heavy footsteps on the stairs. The door burst open and Penny came hurtling in. She threw herself at Neil and began to babble incoherently.
“Now what?” I cried, jumping to my feet and tipping over the chair, but Neil looked as bemused as I did. He gathered her into his arms and began stroking her hair, all the while murmuring “there, there” as if she were a child. The noise brought Stella from the kitchen.
“What’s happened? Is she ill?”
“God knows,” I said. “She’s talking gibberish.”
“I want to go home!” cried Penny with sudden lucidity. “I won’t stay in this house. It’s evil, it’s...”
“What’s she talking about?” asked Stella, swaying against the jamb. “She can’t go. She’s drunk.”
“Oh yes, I can!” screamed Penny, pushing Neil to one side. “Where’re our coats? Coats! Coats!”
I felt like slapping her. She was clearly becoming hysterical. She started rushing around the room like one demented, searching for the coats, as if we’d simply thrown them into a corner.
“Do something,” Stella said to me. “They’re drunk. They can’t...” She collapsed into a chair.
“I’m not their keeper,” I said, and fetched the coats from the hall.
I saw them to the door. Penny scrambled into the car as if the hounds of hell were after her, leaving Neil to mutter a few garbled words of apology and thanks. I stood outside and watched the lights of their Deux-Chevauxmove slowly up the track and vanish into the trees.
And that, I’m ashamed to say, is all I remember. My sudden exposure to the bitingly cold air must have been too much for me because I, too, succumbed to the excesses of the evening. For the first time in more than twenty years I was intoxicated to the point of oblivion.
I awoke in my bed, dehydrated and nauseous. I tried to get up but the pain in my head forced me back down. I reached across for Stella but the sheet was cold.
Some time later I woke again. The thirst was unbearable. I felt like death. It took me some time to realise that the intrusive hammering was not only in my head but also outside. Someone was banging on the door. I forced myself to sit up.
I was naked. Where were my pyjamas? More to the point, where were my clothes? I managed to stand and grabbed my dressing gown. “I’m coming,” I muttered angrily as I made my way downstairs.
I opened the door to find Jacques, his employer Monsieur Chicot, and a younger man whom I didn’t recognise standing on the step. They were bareheaded and solemn. It was Jacques who spoke.
It is difficult to be alert or coherent when in the throes of a severe hangover, even more so when one must converse in a foreign tongue. I couldn’t at first grasp what he was saying, and wished only that he would go away so that I could get a drink of water and some aspirin and return to my bed. I was aware of how I must look, unshaven and haggard, and of the coldness of the tiles beneath my bare feet. I gathered he was speaking of my wife and eventually I caught the word etang.
“Again,” I told him. “Slowly.”
I must go with them, he said. To the etang. There had been an accident.
My stomach filled with ice. “Stella?” I asked.
He hung his head.
It was the third man who had found her, the one they called Alain. He was a hunter and had gone into the woods to shoot. Normally, he said, he avoided the etang, but for some reason that morning he had been drawn. He had found her facedown in the water, frozen into the ice, and had run to Jacques, who in turn had called Chicot. The three of them had returned and dragged her out. Then they had come for me.
Somehow I managed to dress — I still couldn’t find my clothes — and followed them to the pond. They had left her lying on the bank, face upwards in the frosted leaves, as though staring at the cold circle of sky above the clearing. Her lashes were thick with ice. The grey woollen frock, saturated and (since they had come to fetch me) frozen over, clung to her body like a diseased second skin, coarse and putrescent. I turned away and vomited.
A moment later I heard shouting. The police had arrived. There was much arguing and gesticulating — mainly, I gathered, because the body had been moved. For the first time I looked at the dark gash in the ice. Already it was filming over.
Gabrielle appeared and, despite my wild protests and demands to stay with my wife, she, Jacques, and a policeman led me back to the house. They took me to the kitchen and stared aghast at the mess. The dining room was in even greater chaos — spilled wine, kicked-over chairs, sprawling empty bottles. Had we really behaved so disgustingly?
“Party,” I mumbled as Gabrielle made a space for me to sit down and began to clear the debris.
The following days were a nightmare. I kept expecting Stella to appear — there were so many things I wanted to tell her — but then I would remember and my stomach would churn. I howled with loneliness. The police interviewed me many times, but there was little I could tell them, other than that we had all drunk far too much and I had eventually passed out in a stupor. I cringed with shame. Neil and Penny confirmed my story but, like me, could offer no logical reason why Stella should have gone to the etang. Penny’s suggestion that she had been drawn by whatever evil presence lurked in the house was dismissed, quite rightly, as nonsense. Although I have since learned that Helene Bazire was not the first woman to die there, I still cannot accept supernatural intervention. For pity’s sake, we are no longer peasants.
The press, it goes without saying, were obnoxious. The incident had all the ingredients of a sensational story — mysterious death, well-known protagonists, hints of the paranormal. Even implications of foul play which I did my best to ignore. They couldn’t substantiate, of course — any evidence had been destroyed when Jacques and his companions removed her body and by our footprints walking to and fro — but it added to the speculation. Which did not displease my agent. Sales of my books soared. Penny too, I’m told, was paid handsomely for her chilling descriptions of “The Ghost of Le Coisel,” although I suspect the “woman pleading for mercy at the top of the stairs” was the product of a business mind rather than psychic disturbance, and I doubt if we’ll ever know what, if anything, she truly saw that night. I eschew the use of cliches but at times it is hard not to think of the proverbial ill wind.