Here’s a little peek at a piece I’m in the process of writing…it’s a work in progress, but I’d love some feedback – you can tell me all about it on the blog page…

 

The Necklace

Durand plantation is alive.  The house lies hidden in the swamps, away from the road, guarded by a long avenue of cypress trees.  So imbedded is it amongst the creepers and Spanish moss that it seems to have taken root itself.  The wood of its deep veranda bears the scars of numerous repair, of elemental battle – fire, flood, hurricane.  Its beaten appearance and the limbs of oak and cypress that embrace the house mask its scale; half its face is hidden by the vines that have adopted it as their own.  Wild now, and part of the marsh land that has claimed it, there is still something of its elegant past in the rotting façade.  When a visitor’s back is turned, Durand House will mock them.

The afternoon sun pours its strange, thick light against the glass of the highest left hand window, and glints on the garnets and diamonds that lie against the woman’s pale throat.  The skin there is soft and creased now, although the neck is still long and the head held with practiced elegance.  The hair that finely curls around her ears is steely grey – she gave up dying it long ago, when her hairdresser, the voodoo queen of New Orleans, vanished.

In the mirror on her dresser she surveys a reflection she does not recognise.  These days she prefers to gaze into the glass with her eyes closed, letting her memory conjure up the woman she wants to see.  When she opens her eyes she finds only the wrinkles, the watery eyes, the sparse eyelashes.  The ghost.  That is what she calls herself, but only to herself.  The ghost, shut away in her rooms at the top of the house, haunting a family that barely regards her. 

 

At her dresser, she rebuilds herself in the reflection.  Her chemises, her old corsets and even crinolines, which to her satisfaction still fit, slide around her faded frame and make the shell of her former self.  Her hair, once tended by the infamous Marie Laveau, eternally young and beautiful, is so used to the twists and braids that it almost folds up of its own accord.  Perhaps Marie bewitched it all those years ago.  She paints on her lips, draws on her eyes, sculpts her face from the soft skin that hangs from her bones.  When everything is in place, she clasps the necklace around her throat and sits, the light glinting on the jewels, and waits for time to turn itself around.

 

*

 

It was a fool’s decision to come here.  To leave my beautiful city and transplant our family here, to this marshland, this wild overgrown hothouse seemed madness to a seventeen year old.  It still seems madness to me now.  I remember thinking when we arrived only that there was so much green everywhere – the colour seemed to fill my eyes, every view crowded with savage vegetation, every living thing clamouring to thrust itself in to my sight.  Such vigour, such passion, felt unseemly to me in the face of my loss, as if the very swamp was mocking my broken heart.  But Papa thought America would be a safer bet than Paris, that the sugar plantation would be as rich as it was when Grandpere built it, a lifetime ago.  As far as Papa was concerned, Paris was changing too much, too fast – the war was encroaching on our lives, the black shadow of the Prussians rolling along like a thundercloud.  The city itself was changing too; buildings flattened, the twists and tunnels of Paris exposed as Monsieur Haussmann tried to sweep the slate clean by baring Paris’ dirty secrets.  Great swathes of the city flattened and widened out by his renovations.  But these changes simply made the city more accessible for the poor, the unseemly – with nowhere to hide the city’s underbelly could only spill out onto the newly broadened streets.  Papa did  not approve of all this, and feared that our address in Auteuil-Neuilly-Passy would no longer hold the prestige it once did, once the Haussmann renovations reached the left bank.  ‘My Bette should have an entire estate to herself!’ he declared in an attempt to cajole me along the journey.  But truly Papa’s pride was reason enough to up and leave, head for the colonies, the family’s old money growing in the sticky marshes of Louisiana.  It did not occur to Papa that the cloud of war had rolled over the Americas too, that sugar cane wasn’t as sweet a crop as it had been for Grandpere.  He was never too concerned with the affairs of the world, Papa.  Only how he would look in his place in it.

And so I had to leave.  I had to leave him, my Philippe.  I had no choice.

 

*

 

That plaintive tap-tap-tapping at the door means Cora has climbed the stairs to my attic stronghold to tell me it’s time for dinner.  I say nothing, wait for her to get uncomfortable and eventually poke her head around the door, to see if I’m dead yet.  It only takes a few minutes.

            “Pardon, Madame, dinner is served.”

I flick my eyes at her to show I’ve understood, and wait for her to retreat before I stand up.  It takes a little longer than I would like to get down stairs to the dining room, my old bones protesting at the eternal damp which has softened them from the inside at every step, but I will not rush.  Rolf will not start his birthday celebrations without me.  On the landing, at the top of the stairs, I pause for a moment.  I cannot help but put my hand to my throat, and cannot help but wince at the bare skin I feel there.  No garnets for me tonight.  The bitter taste that my daughter in law, the current owner of those gems – or rather, the temporary owner – brings to my mouth is steel enough to get me down stairs without trembling like the frail waif I have become.  Down here I cannot be ghostly.  Down here, amongst my son and his children, and their children, I must be made of more substantial things – salt and grit and metal.  Hard as diamonds.