The Dead of Winter Read online

  THE DEAD OF WINTER

  LISA APPIGNANESI

  First published 1999 by Bantam Press

  ©Lisa Appignanesi

  For John, again

  Prince Escerny: ‘Can you imagine a greater happiness for a woman than to have a man wholly in her power?’

  Lulu (jingling her spurs): ‘Oh yes!’

  Frank Wedekind, Earth Spirit

  ‘Desire does not so much transcend its object as ignore it completely in favour of a fantastic recreation of it.’

  Angela Carter, Nothing Sacred

  Contents

  Copyright

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  PART TWO

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  PART THREE

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  ______________

  Ste-Anne-de-Beaulieu is a good place for death.

  Unrepentant snow covers the ground for seven months out of twelve. There is no spring. In the sapping heat of summer, the old people congregate on their creaking wooden porches. They rock. They watch thick honey strips grow black with flies buzzing towards the sweetness of a sticky end.

  Autumn brings the hunters. They inch along the narrow streets of the town and proudly display the bounty they have transported from the remoter reaches of the Laurentian range. Heavy-jowled moose and tender-faced deer decorate the fourwheel drives. Unblinking animal eyes point heavenwards with all the solemnity appropriate to funeral processions.

  The town itself stayed black with the swish of priestly robes far longer than Montréal, its cosmopolitan neighbour some hundred kilometres to the south. The nuns, too, refused the permitted shorter lengths. Change is not Ste-Anne’s principal business.

  On the main street, the one recent building of note is a funeral parlour, as sumptuous and glistening as the images which once played across the screen of the cinema it has replaced.

  The body was found in winter. Christmas day, 1989, to be exact. It was hanging from a rafter in the old barn behind the house on the hill. Amidst the cobwebs and frozen earth and little heaps of powdery snow which had blown through cracks, there was still some hay left over from a past life when it had served a purpose. The light clung to the scattered bale, as it had once clung to that vivid face.

  It was only as I gazed at that body, so slight and vulnerable within the folds of a brashly fake fur, that it came to me that I, too, had returned to Ste-Anne with a longing called death.

  PART ONE

  1

  ___

  That night the bells of Ste-Anne’s tolled out midnight mass with jubilant abandon.

  In my half-sleep, the sounds grew into giant birds travelling through the December darkness. Propelled from the arches of the silvery bell tower, they rode the currents above the red-tile and slate and metal roofs of the town, skirted the trees in the valley and landed here in the house on the hill to cover me with their wings. I let them lull me. I wanted sleep. I was eager for the morning.

  When a shriller ring set up a cacophony from my bedside, I thought it was the bells again. It took me a while to reach for the phone and by the time I did, only silence followed by a click and a signal answered my ‘Allo’.

  Madeleine. I knew it must be her. Who else would dare to ring so late? I almost punched out her grandmother’s number to return the call, but a mixture of tact and timidity prevented me. I could be wrong. In any case, it would do Madeleine no harm to think there were moments when I was unavailable.

  The red numbers on the clock radio beamed out one eighteen. I shook away the irritation that comes with broken sleep. After all, I didn’t have to leap out of bed before dawn this morning. There were no appointments awaiting me - no ancient Mme Groulx demanding yet another in the interminable changes to her will; no prospective divorcés rigid in mutual hatred, haggling over the property clauses spelled out in the outdated promises of a marriage contract.

  On Christmas Day and for a week thereafter, the offices of Pierre Rousseau, Notaire, are soundly closed, the answering machine deaf to calls. The week is necessary I have learned. Like hang-overs, the rashes of irritation family Christmases induce have to be allowed to settle before action is embarked on. And I am fond of my clients. I have known many of them for years. Sometimes I prefer to keep them distant from those expensive, binding clauses and intractable codes which make up the official part of my work. The law is blind to the upheavals of individual emotion.

  When I first took over the practice, I had no idea I would feel this way. It was with a grudging, sullen reluctance that I had let the mayor ambush me at the funeral reception he honoured my father by holding in his own suitably gilded salon.

  His plump, ringed hand resting on his girth, M. Desforges gave me his preening smile, turned his small shrewd eyes up at me and said, ‘Enough travelling, now, eh? Time to come home. When will you begin?’

  He was both determined and already convinced that I would step into my father’s well-polished shoes: there would be a third generation of Rousseaus to serve as notaries to Ste-Anne. Perhaps Desforges thought I would order his affairs, his slippery land and building deals, his municipal contracts, as smoothly and silently as my father had done.

  Weeks passed, but eventually I decided. Desforges had tickled my sense of justice by mentioning the Mirabel airport scandal. Several families in the vicinity of Ste-Anne had had their land expropriated by the federal government at the time the gargantuan airport was planned and now thirteen years later, when only 5000 of the 97,000 prime agricultural acres had been used, reappropriation claims were going ahead.

  To tell the truth, I was also at a low ebb, a piece of brittle flotsam flung back onto the shores of my native Québec. I had no desire to carry on with the journalism that had taken me to France, to North Africa and then to the Ottawa bureau of Le Devoir. My convictions had abandoned me. Maybe too much time abroad had undermined my sense of Québécois patriotism.

  I couldn’t summon more than verbal outrage at the injustices a constitution repatriated from Britain to a federal home in Ottawa would engender for my French-speaking province. And I had an uncomfortable sense that the once desired language laws, which enforced the use of the French language and a French education, were building walls of parochial intolerance between and around us.

  In that state of personal uncertainty, the dry precisions of the civil code for which I had once been trained took on all the charm of a siren call.

  I moved into my father’s office, a red-brick building with its after-thought of plaster columns, at a stone’s throw from the rather better columns of the town hall. I moved into the inherited house as well. I even took over the car. With all the panache of a sleepwalker, I slipped into the routine of a small town notary - which my youthful ideals had taught me to loathe as a corrupt bastion of traditional power.

  It took me a few years to wake up. When I did, I realized the job was nothing like I had imagined it. Maybe I just wasn’t corrupt enough or interested enough in money. In any event, it occurred to me then that in fact my practice was half way between a priest’s and a psychotherapist’s. I was the keeper and recorder of the town’s secrets. Confidences can be dangerous. And lonely. Luckily, these days I am ade
pt at solitude.

  In the warmth of the duvet, thoughts of Madeleine steal over me again. I need to see her. I have to explain. Yes, I must explain. The temptation to slip over there now is overwhelming. I switch on the bedside light. The sudden brightness dazzles. Through lowered lids, I fumble for my clothes and make for the front door. As I leave the shelter of the porch, a gust of freezing wind attacks and scatters my purpose.

  This is folly. Can there really be any point to this trudge through cold darkness? I will see Madeleine as planned later today at her grandmother, Mme Tremblay’s house, for what she calls Christmas dinner, though it begins in mid-afternoon. It is odd that I call her Mme Tremblay, just as I did as a boy; odder still, since she is my nearest neighbour again, a mere garden and small wood away on the southern slope of the hill - which is not too far in the vastness of this countryside. We meet regularly for Sunday tea.

  Mme Tremblay, despite the passage of years, keeps to the habits of her Scottish childhood, though she speaks French to me, a French which is clear and correct and as insistently not Québécois as her checked woollen skirts and muted cardigans, her iron-grey hair and rigidly upright schoolteacher’s back, her taciturn dislike of gossip.

  The only thing Madeleine took from her was that French. It served her well in Paris.

  Madeleine in Paris.

  The next thing I know I am back in bed and mellow images of those early days in Paris lull me to sleep as surely as an oft-repeated childhood fairy tale.

  When the cold grey dawn creeps reluctantly through my window, the images have grown darker, fraught with the drama of our lives. I banish them and dash for the shower. I do not want to think of these things. Not today, when I shall meet Madeleine in an ordinary way - if anything can ever be said to be altogether ordinary in my meetings with Madeleine.

  The fluorescent lights in the bathroom are blinding. I remind myself that this is something else in the house I still think of as my father’s I must change, though I also know that the longer the list grows, the less I do. I close my eyes and let the water stream over me, hot and strong.

  When I last saw Madeleine some two weeks ago in Montréal, she wasn’t her teasing, quicksilver self. She was wearing an old pair of jeans, a dark sweater which swallowed her shape. Her hair was tousled, her eyes red-rimmed from lack of sleep. The week before, she had opened in a new play at the Théatre du Nouveau Monde, her first theatrical appearance in Montréal for some time and the critics had savaged her performance - the French press even more so than the English. All the trademark venom of a city which wishes itself big and knows itself small was deposited at the feet of a star who had made the cardinal mistake of coming home.

  The date of the opening was unfortunate. On the 6th, just two days before, a lone deranged assassin had gunned down fourteen women students at the Ecole Polytechnique, the engineering faculty of the Université de Montréal. The event had a grim horror to it. Like some concentration camp guard from another time and place, the killer had ordered men and women into segregated lines. Then, with his Sturm Ruger semi-automatic he had picked off only the women. ‘You’re all a bunch of feminists,’ he shouted. ‘I loathe feminists.’

  It was the last day of term. At first, in the cafeteria, then in the classroom, the students had thought the baseball-capped youth was a prankster. He had a smile on his face. But the blood which flowed was appallingly real. His own too. The carnage over - fourteen dead, thirteen others wounded - he had killed himself.

  In his pocket, the police had found a three page letter proclaiming the political nature of his act. Feminists, he stated, had ruined his life, had robbed him of opportunity. Attached to the letter was a hit-list of television personalities, senior government and trade union figures, an array of successful women.

  A stunned province mourned its dead. This was the kind of event we could imagine in New York, in California, in Texas - but not in Montréal, where it still isn’t altogether unusual for people to leave their doors unlocked.

  Thousands streamed to a silent vigil at the university, transforming the mountain road into a ribbon of light. Ten thousand queued to pay their respects the next day to eight of the dead, whose white, flower-strewn coffins were laid out in the university hall of honour. The funeral mass at the vast Notre Dame Basilica overflowed into the forecourt and found its echo in a mass of smaller memorial gatherings throughout the province and further afield.

  Madeleine had attended both communal rites. She was still in a state of shock when we met, as if the killer’s hatred and gunfire had leapt over the mountain and been targetted directly at her. Her hand trembled as I lit her cigarette. She could concentrate on nothing but the unleashed horror of the event. My attempts at reason held out little comfort.

  We sat in a small Portuguese restaurant off the Main: white-washed walls made whiter by the slash of brightly turquoise slats, pictures of fishing boats in distant harbours. A cold, crystalline light poured through high windows which in summer drew back to create a terrasse. Madeleine didn’t like the light. She wanted to burrow into some obscure corner. Her dark glasses went on and off and on again as we talked.

  She told me she had tried to cancel the play’s opening; to stage a reading in honour of the dead women instead or close the theatre for a few days in an act of mourning. It was no time for plays, let alone a portrayal of the grand, pistol-loving daughter of General Gabler, that Hedda who provokes a man to a botched death.

  But the management had forced her to go on, had permitted only a brief tribute to the assassinated women before the curtain rose.

  Madeleine’s hand repeatedly brushes her cheek as if an invisible fly were trying to land on it.

  ‘I don’t understand it. I don’t understand why you hate us. Tell me, Pierre.’ She lashes out suddenly, finding a ready target in me for her vehemence. ‘Why do you want to hurt us, kill us? Why?’

  ‘Please Madeleine. This Marc Lépine was an isolated case. He was demented.’

  ‘So many of you seem to be demented. Men hating women. Violent men, killers, serial killers everywhere. Even here.’

  ‘There are far more serial killers in novels and in movies than in life, Madeleine. Most violence against women happens in the home. You’ve been reading too much, watching too many films.’

  She glares at me. ‘What about Bill l’éventreur, our very own ripper. And before that, the strangler, Bill l’étrangleur?’

  It comes to me with uncomfortable force that Madeleine is obsessed by serial killers because she is a serial lover. I banish the thought and say the first thing that leaps into my mind.

  ‘Next you’ll be telling me all serial killers are called Bill.’

  My humour falls as flat as a concrete pancake. Madeleine scowls at me.

  ‘Okay then. Just explain the hatred to me. Tell me why. And don’t tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about. Don’t tell me you haven’t heard them. Even this week on the phone-in programmes, there’s been a slew of them. Men venting their spleen, as if all their failures were women’s fault. As if the victims of Lépine were to be blamed for their own deaths.’

  ‘I don’t know, Madeleine. But I don’t think it’s a generic hatred. It’s not men against women. It’s just the losers - men whose wives have left them, men who’ve lost or can’t find jobs while women seem to be successful, men who might carry the childhood wounds of broken or brutal homes. It’s not the whole sex.’

  My attempt at reasonableness does little to dent her emotion. She puts her glasses on again. Her voice is suddenly low. There is a tremor in it.

  ‘Yesterday, as I was leaving the theatre, I accidentally brushed against a man. A stranger. And he turned on me, just like that.’ She snaps her fingers and the voice which comes out of her is a snarl. ‘ “Who do you think you are, eh? Eh? Bloody bitch! Marilyn Monroe? The Princess of Wales? Maudite pute!” And he spat at me. Spat.’

  ‘Horrible.’ I am quiet. I don’t know what to say. I want to hold her, but I know she won’t l
et me.

  ‘I apologize for my sex, Madeleine. But remember, Lépine was a single instance. There’s nothing to be afraid of.’

  She prods the salad leaves on her plate, moves them round. Not a single one has found its way to her mouth.

  ‘Nothing to be afraid of? You can say that today? This week? After all that’s happened. All that savagery.’ The face she lifts to me is now that of a waif’s, forlorn, abandoned. ‘And there’s something else,’ her voice crumbles into a whisper. ‘Eyes. Staring at me. Hot. Peculiar. I can feel them sometimes in the audience. In the street. Tailing me.’ She shivers. ‘As if they possessed me. Were entitled to all of me. Stalker’s eyes. I’ve told you before.’’

  ‘Madeleine, you’re an actress. You…?’

  She cuts me off, jabs at me as if I were another salad leaf. ‘I really don’t know how you can sit there so calmly and eat. You of all people!’

  ‘Will it help matters if I stop?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  I put down my knife and fork and fold my starched napkin back into a neat triangle. I stare at it. I am guilty, condemned by implication. I summon up the crimes against women I may have committed and shudder despite myself.

  Icy fingers curl round my wrist.

  ‘Sorry,’ Madeleine murmurs.

  It isn’t a word Madeleine uses often. I cover her hand with mine, try to read her eyes beneath the opaque blackness of the glasses.

  ‘I’ll come and see you in the play tonight.’

  ‘No! Certainly not.’ Madeleine’s hand is gone, despite my attempts to hold on to it. She leaps up. She pulls on her coat. ‘I’ll see you at Mémère’s. On Christmas Day. It’s agreed, isn’t it?’ She pauses uncertainly. ‘You’ll come? I’d like you to come.’

  I nod, make to rise. but Madeleine shakes her head. She doesn’t want my company. A tremulous smile which doesn’t quite curve her lips, a weary half-wave, and she is out the door before I can retrieve my coat. I don’t have time to say the ‘don’t be so frightened’ which is on my tongue.