‘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.
4
Les Parents Terribles
‘Have you ever seen her in concert – I mean live?’ Antonia asked.
‘As a matter of fact, we have,’ Payne said. ‘At the Royal Albert Hall. Aunt Nellie took us. My sister and me. Corinne Coreille’s first concert in England. She gave two concerts, I think?’ He turned to his aunt.
‘Goodness, yes… That was ages ago.’ Lady Grylls spoke distractedly. ‘Ages ago…’
‘Darling, is anything the matter?’
‘Why can’t one revisit the past, the way one does a foreign country? Of course I remember Corinne’s concert.’ Lady Grylls sat up. ‘Sorry – lost in a brown study… I remember it vividly. What d’you want to know about it?’
‘I believe the French ambassador was in the audience or did I dream it?’
‘No, you did not dream it. He was. Madame de Gaulle was there too, with Lady Soames, the wife of our ambassador in Paris.’ Lady Grylls flicked cigarette ash recklessly on to the carpet. ‘Corinne was big in France in the late ’60s. Everybody was talking of la nouvelle Piaf. Corinne was said to be a particular favourite of General de Gaulle. Her first English concert was a glittering gala devised to revive the flagging Entente Cordiale. It has always been in trouble, hasn’t it? There were other French singers – Maurice Chevalier, no less. Sacha Distel. On the English side there was Vera Lynn and – what was the name of the chap who sang about wanting to be released?’
‘Engelbert Humperdinck.’
‘Oh yes. Ghastly name. He also wrote operas, didn’t he? No, that was the other one.’
‘It must have been 1969… It was 5th May. I was on leave from Sandhurst.’
Antonia smiled. ‘You remember the exact date? Did you find Corinne that attractive then?’
Payne started relighting his pipe. Antonia was visited by the unworthy suspicion that he was doing it to gain time. Eventually he spoke. Corinne hadn’t been conventionally beautiful, but rather sweet in a jolie laide kind of way. (‘Sorry, Aunt Nellie, I know we said no frog, but there’s no English expression that means quite the same, is there?’ – ‘Can’t you say, her looks were no great shakes, strictly speaking, but such charm and sweetness, and that’s always half the battle?’) Although she had been twenty-one, Corinne had had the air of a little girl about her… Not his type.
‘As for the date,’ he went on slowly, between puffs, ‘I remember it because it was my sister’s birthday. Amanda was passing through a Francophile as well as Francophone phase. She adored all things French. Amanda enjoyed the show so much that she asked me to take her to the second concert, but I had to go back to Sandhurst. I believe she went with someone else.’
‘Corinne sang a couple of winsomely wistful waltzes,’ his aunt said. ‘Extraordinary, how things come back to one.’
‘Amanda’s favourite was a song called “Adieu, Joli Matelot”, for which Corinne donned a sailor’s uniform and cap and played the harmonica with great elan – or do I mean esprit?’ Payne frowned. ‘Sorry, we said no frog… All the songs were terribly French. Either tear-jerkingly melancholy, or saccharinely sentimental – or crazily cancannish.’
‘There was a fourth kind, the military march-like song.’ Lady Grylls waved an imaginary banner.
‘Gosh yes. She sang “La Marseillaise”, didn’t she? Lest it be forgotten that the French are a nation of barricade-building Gavroches and Cosettes… She wound up with “The Trolley Song”. I think it was at that point that Maurice Chevalier joined her on stage?’
‘He did! The old fraud! He had his arm around Corinne’s shoulders and he kept pinching her cheek. He looked avuncular and brimmed over with bonhomie, yet I couldn’t help thinking there was something of the dirty old man about him.’ Lady Grylls sniffed. ‘It didn’t help that he sang “Thank Heaven for Little Girls”. I believe he had the idea of staging Gigi with Corinne in the title role, but then he died or something.’
‘I suppose the show could be called an extravaganza. With hindsight, it was of considerable curiosity value,’ Payne said. ‘Jolly old-fashioned, even then. I mean, it took place between the swinging ’60s and the raucous ‘70s. It was a rather self-conscious throwback to a previous age – la belle epoque, no less. The Beatles or the Rolling Stones might not have existed – or for that matter Johnny Halliday. 1968 Paris might never have happened.’
‘After the concert we went to see Corinne in her dressing room,’ Lady Grylls said. ‘It was filled with flowers, remember, Hughie? Some of the bouquets were as tall as Corinne!’
Payne nodded. ‘There was a highly charismatic friendly giant sitting there with her, smoking a big black cigar. He gave us champagne. He couldn’t have been anything but American. That was the great Mr Lark.’
‘It was Mr Lark who groomed Corinne for stardom,’ Lady Grylls explained. ‘The urchin hairstyle by Elrhodes, which became her trademark, was his idea – the tricolour dresses too. He organized all Corinne’s domestic and foreign tours and, generally, took charge of her life.’
‘Corinne drank nothing but camomile tea sweetened with honey. She was eating caramelized almonds out of a cellophane bag,’ Major Payne went on. ‘She ate like a little bird…’
‘I think you must have fancied her,’ Antonia said.
‘She was wearing a high-collared blue dress with white cuffs and a red bow at the throat. She was bourgeois respectability and wholesomeness personified. She was perfectly polite, in a monosyllabic kind of way. Extremely shy. She kept leafing through a book called The Language of Flowers. No coquettish toss of the fringe, no calling eye, no provocative laugh. In fact there was more than a whiff of the convent girl about her. I keep telling you, my love – not my type.’
‘Quite unlike her mamma,’ Lady Grylls said with a frown. ‘Ruse, you see, couldn’t have been more different.’
There was a pause. Again, Antonia was aware of a tension.
‘Aunt Nellie and Corinne’s mamma went to school together,’ Payne explained chattily. ‘They were the greatest of chums.’
Lady Grylls said that they had been to two schools together. Lady Eden‘s, then St Mary’s Ascot. At one time they had been inseparable. ‘Heaven knows why. We had so little in common. A case of opposites attracting, I suppose. Consider. I was pink, podgy, plain and placid. Ruse – her real name was Rosamund – was strikingly beautiful, wildly temperamental and extravagantly romantic. She had almond-shaped eyes and a touch of the tar-brush about her. I believe I had a crush on her for a bit.’
‘Something of a rebel, weren’t you, darling?’
‘St Mary’s was a terrible place – impossibly moralistic and repressive – consequently I rebelled, yes. One of my schoolmistresses, I remember, called me a force for anarchy. Nobody would have thought it, looking at me.’ Lady Grylls paused. ‘I stole sulphur from the chemistry lab to make stink bombs. I read The Virgin and the Gypsy at night, by torchlight, under the sheets… You know the scene where Yvette meets the gypsy and he knows at once that she is a virgin?’