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.
8
That Obscure Object of Desire
Peverel de Broke, Lady Grylls’s other nephew, the son of her late brother Lionel, was a year younger than his cousin Hugh. He was very tall and managed to look at once languid, athletic and rather distinguished. But for a weakish chin, he might have been thought handsome. Lady Grylls had observed that his was the kind of face that sixty-five years ago would have been considered incomplete without one of those silly toothbrush moustaches and a rimless eyeglass. The kind of man who would be equally comfortable in a dinner jacket and an old Barbour, thought Antonia. Peverel was clever, Hugh had observed, in that whimsical English way that disconcerts and misleads foreign diplomats. Lady Grylls resented what she called ‘Peverel’s tiresome propensity for meaningless badinage’. (She had been particularly annoyed by a joke Peverel had told in which somebody confuses Eton with Eden.)
Peverel’s sun-bleached hair and eyebrows in conjunction with his deep tan suggested an explorer who spent half the year in hot climes, which was not too far from the truth. He had returned from Shanghai a couple of days earlier. Peverel travelled round the globe in the capacity of a trend spotter, an unusual and, he had hinted, highly lucrative occupation, which his aunt for one refused to take seriously.
The night before, Peverel had sat explaining exactly what it was he did. He collected information for brands like Volvo, Intel, British Airways and Nestle. He diagnosed and explored trends in everyday life. (Antonia thought it all a bit obscure.) He went to supermarkets where he stopped people, pointed to items in their shopping basket and asked why they had bought them. (‘Infernal cheek,’ Lady Grylls had said.) He eavesdropped on conversations on trains, planes, buses, beaches and boats. (‘Not at all surprised,’ Lady Grylls had said.) He and his colleagues never knew when a snippet of information might prove useful. They took what was happening ‘out there’ and translated it into ‘stuff our clients could use’.
Everybody knew that Helen Fielding had dreamt up Bridget Jones, but apparently it was a trend spotter who diagnosed the single white professional syndrome first. It wasn’t a trend spotter who invented the term ‘wigger’, to describe white youths copying blacks, but it was again one of Peverel’s colleagues who introduced it to the media.
Peverel had entered the drawing room and was looking down at what appeared to be internet downloads.
‘You’d be amazed to hear that from the very start of her career Corinne Coreille’s been the object of intense prurient speculation,’ he said. ‘According to a website called Rumour Has It, Corinne Coreille had simultaneous affairs with the octogenarian Charlie Chaplin and Sophia Loren during the making of A Countess from Hong Kong, though oddly enough she rebuffed Marlon Brando’s attentions. That was in 1967. A roll-call of her alleged lovers includes Maurice Chevalier, Brigitte Bardot, Mr Lark, Alain Delon, General de Gaulle -’
Lady Grylls gave her vast explosive snort. ‘Stuff and nonsense!’
‘ – Peter Sellers, Simone de Beauvoir, a defrocked Italian priest and the teenage Prince Albert of Monaco, whose later inability to marry some have attributed to the effect Corinne Coreille had on him.’
‘This is not Corinne Coreille’s official website, is it?’ Antonia said.
‘No. Corinne’s official website is maintained by a Belgian called Bruno Van den Brande and it is bland and somewhat boring. Want to know what it says? Corinne Coreille’s career was at its zenith between 1967 and 1989. She started as a Piaf clone and a variety vedette, but evolved into an international star, part pop, part diva. She became an iconic and later a cultish figure in Latin and Germanic countries and in Russia – also, in Japan, where a Corinne doll was produced last year. In 1972 Corinne’s face became the model for Marianne, the symbol of France. She was painted by Warhol and photographed by Cecil Beaton, Horst and Norman Parkinson -’
‘Wasn’t she in some film?’ Payne interrupted. ‘Or did they only consider her for one?’