True Romance
It was not the easiest time to find a date. The Great War had taken so many of the men, and those that had come home were survivors, they were changed, harsh and broken, all the romance in their hearts burned away by the whistling shells and the blood they had shed. Looking to those few who had been left behind was an even more dangerous proposition given the fact that even criminals had been set loose from prison so that they could join in the battle against the German invaders. The elderly and the infirm had been barred from service, but so too were they removed from the dating pool for the most part. These were not modern times when a woman could marry for love alone and know that she would be able to support herself should the need arise. Times were changing, but they were changing so slowly that to look upon the change as it transpired was akin to watching paint dry. A man needed to be a provider, and the number of independently wealthy men who’d sat out the war, thanks to some existing ailment or by some special dispensation, left slim pickings that only the most beautiful or most well-connected had any hope of snatching up.
These unfortunate circumstances meant that when the time came to seek a husband or even just a lover, French women had to lower their standards somewhat. They had to be willing to overlook certain eccentricities and demurely accept stories riddled with conspicuous holes. They had to look the other way and pretend that the man that held their hand was not telling them any lies when it was blatantly obvious that they were.
To take up with a widower would once have been considered a relatively minor scandal, but now a well-to-do widower was considered a prize catch. A man who had been in good enough shape that another woman had at some time wanted him suggested that there was hope. It meant that they’d likely be a touch older than might have been entirely desirable, but on balance, probably worth the sacrifice.
Added to these challenges were the circumstances of the woman in question. Women with children already kicking around would once have been shunned as the lowest of the low, mothers of bastards, disreputable. The war had created a great many widows, but just as many young girls had given up their virtue to their sweethearts before they went off to battle on the promise that they would be reunited when all was said and done, only to discover that their lover had never returned from the trenches. If there was no father currently in the picture, most people would extend the courtesy of pretending that there had been a marriage somewhere in a girl’s past. It provided something of a free pass for a great many of the girls of looser morals who had found themselves in such predicaments before the war began, but it seemed fair to give them that pass so that the many women who had lost their men would not suffer undue indignity.
For La Belle Mythese, such a free pass was her only hope of passing in society. During the war, she had made a name for herself among the soldiers as an entertainer of great renown. Famed across the hospitals from Paris all the way to the Rhine. The exact kind of entertainment that she provided to soldiers had never been made explicit, even when they discussed such matters in later years, but it seems entirely reasonable that whatever minor musical talents she may have displayed in the mess halls would not have resulted in the massive compensation that she received from those who departed the halls with her afterwards.
In her late thirties now, her future was beginning to look bleak. With the war over, she was now only one among a great many “entertainers” at work in Paris rather than the sole available starlet willing to spend time with non-commissioned officers of the French Army, and as such, she had retired into the obscurity of her birth name of Marie Marchadier. She kept a small apartment which was rapidly devouring what was left of her savings, and before long it became apparent that even the squalor in which she now lived was beyond her means. At one time she had dined in the finest restaurants of France and been gently placed upon the finest eiderdowns in the great houses of the country, but now she was forced to post an advertisement in the paper for people willing to buy her furniture.
It was a new low for her, parting with the last measures of finery that she’d been able to carry off with her from one place to the next as she went through her post-war decline. Some of the furniture had been in her family for generations. It was not only her personal fortune that was being passed off so that she might keep food in her belly, but the history of her entire bloodline being brought to so sorrowful an end.
She should have been overwrought and riddled with shame, but shame was something that she had long ago left behind, and the grim emotions borne from having to part with her belongings could be set aside for now. She had always been good at escaping into the safe and warm parts of her mind until moments of discomfort had passed. It had very nearly been the only prerequisite for her career.
As she sat there across from the bald and bearded tradesman who had come to strip her of the last vestiges of a good life, she found to her immense surprise that she had no need to hide from the situation at all. He was soft-spoken and kind in a way that she could not have predicted. Soft in all the ways that men who had been in the war could not have been. He offered his sincere sympathies as readily as his business card and with unexpected gallantry helped her inventory her remaining belongings, evaluating which items would sell for the most and which the least in an effort to leave her with as many of her treasured keepsakes as possible – earning her enough money to sustain her through these hard times.
She could not place the exact moment she knew for certain that he was overpaying her for the furniture. She had imagined that such craftsmanship was in short supply after all the destruction of the war, and that prices may have been driven up by the shortage, but surely there was no way that prices were driven so high on everything. After a moment of doubt, she felt confident that if she were to call up anybody else in Paris for this same assessment, they’d be offering her a fraction of the price.
Once or twice, she proffered an item that she knew was worthless and he found some hidden facet of the design that transformed it into a collectable. He was a blatant liar, but since his lies were clearly of benefit to her, it was difficult to be annoyed about it. Clearly, he wanted to give her money, he wanted to help her out, so why shouldn’t she let him? There was no rule in the books that said you had to reject the kindness of strangers. She’d never learned that lesson in church on a Sunday morning. An argument could be made that she’d been relying on the kindness of men to get by for her entire life, if you assumed that her relationships were founded on gifts and companionable revelry rather than on the starkly transactive reality.
But it was that more transactive reality that she had spent the past decade or more living in, and it was with an eye to that version of the world that she began to examine her visitor. He was older than her by a decade or more, but this would hardly be the first time that she had a suitor that she could not have gone to school with. His hair was thinning on the top, beyond thin and all the way too bald in truth, and his beard, while well-kept, was considerably more erratic than she might have liked in a man. Still, there was a warmth to him that she couldn’t quite reject, despite his relatively mundane appearance. An almost paternal care for her, and a willingness to set aside business whenever she desired and meander with her down the lanes of memory.
Almost as soon as she had met him, Marie felt as though she could trust him. And after the life that she had lived, that in itself was setting off alarm bells in her head. How could she trust anyone so quickly? Knowing what she knew of the true nature of men, how could she allow one to sit there and lie to her all day long, and take it as a kindness? It was madness to trust a liar, madder still to find excuses for him to linger around, hiding away pieces of furniture that she’d had no intention of showing. Even the secrets of her boudoir were laid out not as a temptation for this stranger, or even as an invitation, but as a sign of her trust. She could count on one hand the number of men that had seen the bedroom in which she slept at night.
Her two pet Brussels Griffon dogs seemed to take to this stranger almost as much as she did, laying their heads upon his lap as the man and woman sat speaking. It was quite uncanny – usually when she had gentleman callers the duo had to be locked in the kitchen to keep them from growling, but they had followed this fellow around as though he smelled like a roast dinner. Marie had caught no such aromas on the gentleman. If anything, he was meticulously devoid of any and all smells. She supposed that a man in the antique trade would have to be careful to avoid the scent of mustiness and assumed that he’d have covered it up with cologne, but all that she could really discern from him was a trace of carbolic soap.
She was not accustomed to the company of a man without a hint of sweat on him. Even when she was not engaged in those activities for which she had become famed, men around her had their eyes fixed on her – they had lewd intentions that rose to the surface in a prickling of salt water. Yet this stranger, for all that he showed intent fascination with her, was not lost to lust the way that she had expected. And it threw her more than she could have anticipated. To have a man show that he cared about her without wanting her carnally? It made no sense to her, and so, like a tongue prodding at a cavity, she kept on extending the time they spent in one another’s company, knowing that there would be this discomfort, but going back for more, again and again, all the same.
Before he departed, she had already made arrangements to see him again socially, and he had left her with a deposit on the furniture he meant to buy from her. It might as well have been a gift, for she knew that even if she never parted with a single item he would not demand its return. It was a down payment on time spent together, a cushion that she could rest upon while he tried to conceive of some way that she might get enough money to live without having to part with her heirlooms and such finery as she still clung to.
Although welcome, the money was not what remained at the forefront of her mind, but the other possibilities for the future that had started unfolding before her. If he could be entrapped, if he could be sheltered from the knowledge of who and what she once was, then he might provide her with everything that she desired. A real life, separate from the woman she had been.
The expected transaction never arrived. She kept on waiting for it, for the other shoe to drop, for the mask to fall away and for her new beau to reveal his true nature, but it just did not happen. Either he was truly a decent and kind man behind closed doors or he had suppressed all thoughts and feelings so thoroughly that even in their most intimate moments nothing could break to the surface. And in truth, after a month or more of dinner dates and sweet nothings whispered in her ear, Marie would have welcomed an open-handed slap when she talked back to him, or the whispered request for something she’d have to have charged extra for in her old career.
She almost wanted the beautiful crystalline statue of a perfect future to show its cracks so that it would not be her fault when it was cast down to the ground and shattered. But he just wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t be anything less than the ideal suitor, and when the time came that he got down on one knee and proposed to her, never having asked about her past, never having slapped her across the face, never having pushed for anything obscene, she literally had no excuse to say no to him.
Why on earth would she turn down exactly what she had been hoping and dreaming about through these long hard months in Paris as everything dried up and she’d lost all she’d loved? To reject him would have been madness, and no matter how her old suspicions reared their ugly heads every time he showed her kindness, she could ignore them. She had to ignore them. She couldn’t go on living on bread crusts and charity.
She couldn’t go on living in Paris at all, where every so often a man’s head would turn as she strolled the boulevards with her dogs, and they would both know that the last time they had met each other had been in some stuffy back room after a performance, where she’d earned her keep and done her part for France to keep the war effort plodding on. Sweat and rough woven uniform fabric rubbing against bare skin. She could almost feel it in their gaze. The heat of the closets where she’d taken them. Where she’d earned her living and her reputation.
La Belle Mythese was dead, Marie had killed her, but everywhere that Marie went the ghost of La Belle was there. At a glance, in a hint of perfume in the air, a whiff of cigarette smoke. She was still being followed by the grand shadow of a wartime madam with every step, and the future that she wanted for herself might have held some trace of that old glamour, but it could not be built on the same foundations. It had to be real, not bought.
So she received the engagement ring, and refused to listen to the gnawing voice at the back of her head warning her that this couldn’t be real, that nobody would truly want her after what she had made herself become. Her suitor did not live in Paris, she knew – they stayed in hotels or in her embarrassingly small apartment when they made love. Yet she knew that he owned a home somewhere, the nature of his business would necessitate such a thing, even for the most itinerant of salesmen. So it came as no surprise when he informed her that he had a little chateau out in the country where he would like for the two of them to live together.
Once more, all of this felt like a dream, like something out of a fairy tale, a holiday in Arcadia. Even when she was on the train, with him sitting beside her, holding her hand, she could not quite bring herself to believe it. They would live together in sin for only a short while longer, then there would be a little chapel, a parish priest, and a future like she’d only seen in romance novels. All of the things that she had thought could never come into her life were suddenly right there for the taking, and all that she had to do was resist the urge to spoil it all.
When they arrived, he insisted upon picking her up and carrying her over the threshold, though they were still far from bound in matrimony. There were flowers growing everywhere that she looked, and though the house was small, there was such charm to it as she could scant believe.
To call it a honeymoon would not have been entirely apt, because the arrangements for them to wed had not yet been made, but it felt like one all the same. This change of scenery, this dream of a life being offered up to her on a silver platter. Who was she to complain if the platter was a hand-me-down? What right did she have to resent that there were already women’s clothes hanging in the wardrobes of her new changing room, clearly left behind by her widower’s former wife?
After only a few short weeks of being happily addled with the romance of her new situation, her suitor left her behind to go back out into the world to conduct his business. She began to feel her predecessor’s presence in whichever room of the house she entered. It seemed that the dead woman’s ghost followed her everywhere.
They never spoke of the woman that her lover had married before her. Never said her name, or discussed the life that they had lived together, or even mentioned the nature of her demise, but like a detective in one of the novels she so voraciously consumed, she began to piece things together for herself from the evidence that had been left behind.
It must have been some kind of wasting sickness that had taken his first wife. Something that had shrunk her stature over a long period of time. Why else would there have been so many different sizes of dresses hanging in the wardrobe? There were even shoes in different sizes. What must it have been like for that poor woman? To shrink and shrink away to nothing until even your shoes fell from your feet and you could do nothing about it. What a horror.
Worse, though, than the sickness must have been the loneliness. In the city, there had always been someone else around, an overabundance of people, in truth. She had left the city in no small part to break free from the constant pressure she felt as a result of the perpetual judgement she saw in the eyes of others. But out here there was nobody at all – the nearest neighbour was no longer on the other side of a hallway but, rather, a healthy hike away through the nearby woods. At least her dogs were greatly benefiting from all the space to roam free, and they would, no doubt, have loved the long walk through the woods for her to find another person to talk with, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to do it.
She was still afraid to show her face, the face which had once drawn crowds and made her famous, for fear that she might be recognized and somebody might tell her new husband of her history. It was not as though she had to walk on eggshells around her beau. He had never demanded any purity of her, never set her on any pedestal, in truth, had never made any sort of demand at all. All that he asked of her was her company, and even of that, he was not overly demanding. The move to the country had been a matter of course, rather than out of his desire to carry her off into the wilderness. She was here by her own choice. He had offered this new life up to her like a gift and she had seized it, the chance to escape, to be free of her ghost.
When her suitor came home, it was a beautiful place full of joy and laughter, but when he left – and he always left – the memories returned. The bad times souring the good, the men who hadn’t wanted to pay, the ones who’d slapped her around, the pain of pushing through when she never wanted to do it to start with. Picking up sweaty five-franc notes from a bed that was no longer fit for sleep.
It pried at her. Made her old suspicions flare up all over again. Made her go digging despite knowing that there was nothing she could find to make her life better. There were drawers in the antique furniture that were locked, the doors were all open, and the whole house was hers, but there were these odd little crevices that he claimed he didn’t have the keys for anymore, that he’d never had the keys for. Something to forget about, yet something that she couldn’t let go.
One bad night passed her by, all alone in the cold dark house, with her betrothed off in the city making deals to keep them both in comfort. With dawn she went to the kitchen, digging through the drawers that were open to her in search of some sort of answer. Some way that she could set her worries at ease and convince herself that there was no doom lurking behind the door, just waiting to burst in.
She took up a butter knife and went to work on the closest locked-up desk, jamming it into the crevice between drawer and top, levering up and down, up and down, setting the wood creaking, and splintering the antique varnish away, her wrist aching with the effort. A sharp ping rang out from inside the apparatus as the lock leapt out of place.
There should have been nothing inside, or the belongings of some old owner. Some lost old papers gone yellow with age or a dried-out quill, perhaps. Not letters. Not letters addressed to this chateau, to a man whose name was not her fiancé’s but was close enough that it could be considered a pseudonym. Not dozens, no, hundreds of letters from women all over France, correspondence just like she had sent to him, part business, part flirtation. Lonely hearts columns that he’d replied to. Advertisements for furniture for sale that he’d used to start conversations.
She had not expected him to be a monk before he met her, she knew that she had no moral high ground to stand on, but there was a world of difference between the degree of deception involved in her omission and all of this. She had kept things from him, that was true, but she had not kept something like this. This was not the sign of a healthy mind, this was a sickness, a perversion of the relationship that they had forged. He had not been speaking exclusively to her, he had not been speaking exclusively to any of these women, there were hundreds upon hundreds of different addresses, different letters, different stories that he was spinning. Lies, endless webs of lies to entangle all these different women. What purpose could all of this possibly serve? What was he trying to get out of this? He had only a single home to fill, a single bed to keep warm, what possible reason could he have had for keeping all of these lines in the water? It made no sense.
She crammed all of them back into the drawer. She did her best to smooth the ruptured wood back down. If her suitor looked too closely, her deception would be revealed, but he had never shown very much interest in the furnishings that were supposedly his entire profession. Now that some degree of suspicion had been confirmed, the floodgates of paranoia swung open. What did she actually know about this man? What could she say for certain, that wasn’t based on something that he had told her? What did she know, actually know, as absolute fact, about him at all?
He had told her that he had a business, that he had a home, that he was a widower, and that he wanted to spend his life with her, yet here he was corresponding with hundreds of other women with just as much warmth and intimacy as he had shown her. How was she meant to reconcile these two realities? For a day and a night, she could not rest or settle, she fussed with things around the house, trying to set them in some semblance of order, to counterbalance the disorder running rampant in her mind. But now, everything that she had seen and understood became a mystery once more. What if there had been no wife who died? What if there had been no gradual withering? All of the clothes could have been from other women that he’d tricked into this very same situation. Other women who he found when they were vulnerable and preyed upon, inviting them out here to live in sin with him until he grew tired of them. They had not set a date for the wedding, was this why? Had he never meant to marry her at all, just use her for her body and her company until he tired of her and lost interest?
The sinister voice of her past self cursed her for having been so easily taken in. She knew what men were like, why had she deluded herself into believing that this one was any different?
She did know what men were like and because of this, genuine fear began to creep in. She had been safe while she believed him, while she trusted in all of his lies, trapped in a little bubble, held away from reality, but now that the bubble had burst, she would no longer be able to go on floating safely by. He was going to realize what she had learned. He was going to turn violent, like men always did when you poked a hole in whatever lie they were telling. All that she’d been hoping for was about to be snatched away, and if she was lucky, she’d get to crawl away with her tail between her legs. She pulled out her suitcase and started filling it up. All the nice clothes that she still clung to like the skin she should have shed. All the presents that he’d showered upon her since she had moved into his home. On the whole, it amounted to next to nothing, especially when compared to what she had lost. Her apartment was gone. Her furniture was gone. She had no money to her name. If she walked away from this place right now, she wouldn’t even have sufficient funds to get back to Paris. It would just be her and her two dogs wandering the countryside, sleeping under hedgerows until they all eventually died of starvation.
She looked down into that case full of all her worldly possessions, and she saw the future that she’d been dreaming of. Dresses that didn’t have to show anything off, because they were meant to keep her comfortable and safe at home. Costume jewellery that would only be worn for a fancy meal out on the town with her husband. All of the lies of her past are buried. All of the hardships were forgotten. And she had ruined it all by forcing open that drawer.
This didn’t have to be the end. She couldn’t go back to the way things were before she’d opened Pandora’s box, but she didn’t have to run. Her fiancé wasn’t like the men that she’d known before. He was gentle and kind. He loved her. She knew it in her heart. He did, he loved her. The nipping at her heels by the ghost of her past self could be ignored. Who she used to be would have been running by now, but she didn’t want to be that person anymore. She didn’t have to jump to conclusions and let paranoia win. She could just talk to him. There was no reason she couldn’t just talk to him and let everything go back to the way she wanted it to be. Maybe he had a good reason. Maybe this was his sales pitch, cosying up to these women so that he could make better deals. Maybe, just maybe, he had dated women before her. Who the hell was she to judge anybody for a checkered past when it came to romance?
She went back to the desk drawer, pulled out all of the letters, and laid them out on the top of the desk. They looked like a lot. They looked like so many letters to so many women, but if they had been spread out over the years and decades since his wife had died, she supposed that they could have been justified. If the clothes that had been hanging in her closet when she arrived had belonged to more than one of her fiancé’s past loves, was that really the most terrible truth that could have come out? She kept her past held tightly against her chest, so why wouldn’t he hold back the embarrassing truth that he’d been looking for somebody like her for a long time? Looking for love in all the wrong places until she came along.
When he came home, she would tell him what had happened. She would tell him that she had been trying to get some of the stuck drawers open so that they could make use of the furniture. She didn’t have to tell him that she went hunting for a reason not to trust him. There would be some degree of confrontation, she could not avoid it, but it did not have to be what her worst fears were telling her it would be. It didn’t have to be the end of all this. She just had to find a path down the middle.
It was only as she reached this same conclusion that she heard the griffon hounds barking. Not the aggressive sound they made when they caught sight of a stray cat roaming in the garden, but the excitement that had once been reserved only for the sight of her own return home. Her fiancé must have returned. She’d had no word of his impending arrival or she would have dressed up for the occasion – she was now every bit the country housewife that he had tried to make of her, with none of the glamour that had once been her calling card. The endless pursuit of it no longer interested her, but being able to whip it out, particularly in situations where things might be tense and she needed a man’s mind elsewhere, still made things all the easier for her. But of course, with no warning, no time to prepare herself, over-burdened with the weight of all the anxiety she’d spawned from days spent working herself up into a frenzy, she found herself at a loss of how to proceed. He was back and she hadn’t a clue what to do.
She could hear him walking up the path. There on the desk lay all of the letters, still strewn about, ready to confront him the moment he stepped in the door. An argument in waiting, an argument that might be the end of them. She heard his hand upon the door handle, and she ran. Through the chateau, out into the hall and straight into his arms. He dropped his case, wrapped his arms around her, met her kiss with an ardour that she had never hoped anyone might feel for her, just her, without any affectation.
This was too precious to throw away over a misunderstanding. She would give him every opportunity to explain, she’d believe every lie, anything, so long as she didn’t have to give up her hope. Cynicism was for the young, there was not enough time left to live a good life if she didn’t believe in what she had, here and now.
Taking him by the hand, she led him through, letting him see what she had done without accusation or apology. He looked at the letters, all of the letters that damned him, and he let out a heavy sigh. The drawer was jammed, or so he had said. He had had no opportunity to clear things out. His expression was enough that she felt an apology would be asking too much, he showed such desolation at the sight of them all, at all the failed attempts to get what he now had with her. It went beyond embarrassment and into some sort of existential dread. For a time she could not place it, but then it snapped into place in her mind. He was afraid that she was going to leave him over this. Instead, she came up behind him and wrapped her arms around his body. She whispered sweet nothings in his ear, comforting him like she would a child. It was alright. She wasn’t going anywhere. He did not need to be ashamed.
He would not look at her, but instead pulled free, gathering all of the letters together and carrying them through to the lounge where the wood-burning stove that warmed the whole chateau stood. He laid them down on a table and turned to stoke up the flames. It was a mild enough day that she had kept only a few logs burned down to a charcoal smouldering, but he piled in wood until there was a blazing inferno within.
Then he turned from it, at last, the same stricken look still upon his face. He was going to pick up the letters, cast them in, and put the past behind him. He was going to explain it all away and everything was going to be fine, and they were going to move on. He need not have stoked the fire so high that she started to sweat, but she could always understand a man’s desire for dramatics. Why have an ember when you can have an inferno?
She did not reach for him and try to stop him, because in truth removing those letters from her home would have slain one of the many ghosts that still stalked her. It would have quieted that voice still warning her that this was a mistake, that she should run. If there were no letters, she didn’t have to think about what they meant, or what they meant to him. She didn’t have to worry that this was all some long con, like La Belle Mythese would have insisted that it was.
But it was not the letters he went to, with that look of desolation, it was her. And she opened her arms and let him step in close and drew him in tight against her in an embrace that she hoped would tell him all that he needed to know. That he was loved, that he was safe, that he had no need to worry about anything at all.
But his hands, they did not find their way around her. His arms were in between their bodies, not wrapped around the outside. They came up between them, brushing up over the length of her body, the way that the men in the dancehalls would sometimes pretend that touch was accidental. They spread as they passed over her chest, drawing a surprised gasp from Marie.
It was the last breath that she would ever take.
His hands closed on her throat. His arms forced her away, forced her down. He rode her body to the carpet, knees on top of her, hands locked tight about her neck. She could not breathe, and she could not understand. Why was he doing this? What was he doing?
She had already forgiven him. She had made sure not to anger him. She had done everything right. There was no reason for him to turn on her. For a moment, in her shock, she did not even fight back. When the men she’d whored for turned violent, she had always been ready, but like the fool she’d made herself, this time she had been so sure that the man was good that she wasn’t prepared to protect herself. Lo and behold, he was a man like all of the other men. A monster like all the rest. A beast, dressed in a suit, the better to stalk its prey.
By the time she got her hands on his wrists and started pulling them away, digging in her nails, trying so desperately to save herself, she was too weak to make him move. As she weakened, he seemed to grow more and more powerful with every passing moment, dragging her across the floor like a rag doll. Her mild-mannered antique dealer of a husband-to-be was throwing her around like she was a tiny mouse, and he a cat.
The dogs came tearing into the room then, and she thought that she was saved, that they would leap to her aid. But he had bought them with table scraps and walks in the countryside, he’d won them away from her without her even knowing. The dogs bounced and bounded all around them as they lay there on the floor. Barking and barking until her whole world was nothing but a wall of that noise and the ringing in her ears. At some point, they upended the table that held all the letters causing them to rain down on her even as her vision faded.
She should have left the locked drawer closed. She should not have looked the gift horse in the mouth. All her regrets echoed in her mind as she sank into darkness.
Then she was gone, and the fire awaited.
But her escape was elusive as she was still haunted, doubly haunted now, with the dead wife lingering around every corner and the dead whore lurking in the shadows waiting to pounce. Throughout the long dark hours of the night, both these ghosts swirled around her, scratching at the windows, creaking the wood frame of the house and making her flinch at the sound of voices in the road when dawn finally arrived.
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