English Correspondence (12 page)

Paul didn't speak, or even give her a warning look. Lucien was eating biscuits, perched on a stool. There was nowhere for his knees to go, crammed against the side of a work block and, even though he had his back to her, Sylvie could see he was uncomfortable. He didn't turn round. Paul didn't look at her either. She wanted to say, why didn't you tell me he'd been sent home from school and give me the chance to be an ordinary mother. Her rudeness to Paul, just now, her account of Jacques' offer, seemed merely silly. Water was running over a pile of green leaves in one of the sinks. It hit them at an angle and splashed up and back down again, but not tidily. A subsidiary fountain was spraying the floor. Paul and Lucien were both ignoring it. Sylvie crossed the room and turned off the tap. It was suddenly quiet, apart from a few remaining drips and the continuous breathing sound of the oven. She went over to Lucien and put her arm round him.

‘What are you doing back home?' she said.

He didn't reply. Sylvie looked at Paul.

‘What's been happening?' she said.

‘The school secretary called me and said Lucien had a stomach ache and thought he was going to throw up.'

‘Did you?' she asked Lucien.

‘I went to collect him,' Paul said. ‘He wondered where you were. Obviously he expected you would go for him.
I told him you would be here when we got back. But you weren't.'

‘You're feeling better, now, though, are you?'

Lucien didn't speak. He prodded his middle, then nodded without looking at her.

‘It's nearly lunch-time, sweet. You come and sit at my desk in the hall and run and tell me if anyone comes in. Will you do that? I need to come back and talk to Paul for a few minutes.'

He didn't agree but he got down from the stool and took her hand when she held it out.

When she got back to the kitchen, Paul wasn't there. She waited.

There were various framed certificates on the wall and a photograph of Paul. He was smiling, in his regalia, and looking relaxed by a table of food. There was a silver cup twinkling behind him. He had wanted to hold it but Sylvie had said it would look better on the shelf above his left shoulder. An identical photograph hung in the hall. It had caused a few problems. Paul had wanted to get the team to stand in a line, with him in the middle, like God the Father. To be fair, he hadn't actually said he would be in the middle, but the chef always was in these cases. If the number was even, they wheeled on an extra, the gardener or someone. The result would be hung in the hall or the dining room. Sylvie had been scandalised. It showed in her face before she could stop it. She knew, because his face reflected it back to her, not the same look, but the extremity of it. Paul couldn't understand what was wrong, became very defensive. She had said that there weren't enough of them, they would look silly. It would be like a classroom photo in which half the children were off school with chickenpox. He took it badly; made out that she was suggesting he hadn't made it, got a big enough establishment. He had backed into this hole before, though he didn't like being there and she could honestly say she didn't recognise it as anywhere she had put him. The whole thing
was stupid. Somewhere there was a parallel argument going on with a different opening, the one she hadn't been able to use because it was too complicated. That she wouldn't be able to bear seeing them standing there, smiling and trapped, lined up eternally – she, herself, looking aberrant, less photogenic than Maude. So she had been sad on two counts; that they weren't having the row they should have been having and that they were going through the moves of a pointless one. She had mentioned the photo to George in a letter; made a joke of it. She hadn't written about the argument.

She heard Paul's shoes on the floor behind her. He touched her arm above the elbow. Sylvie turned round immediately. She saw his expression. He looked as if he was making an effort. To think or to keep control, she wasn't sure which. She wished then that she hadn't turned round, that she had closed her eyes and rested against him. They could both have rested. Now they were straight back where they left off. She could hear it in her voice, but she couldn't stop it.

‘I shouldn't think I'll go,' she said. ‘You don't need to worry. It was a nice thought, that was all.'

‘That isn't what I meant. I'm not worried about that.'

‘Le Coq?'

‘No.'

‘That's a shame. What, then?' she said.

‘I hoped that as things settled down you'd get back to normal,' he said.

‘You make it sound perfect.'

‘Make what sound perfect?'

‘Normality.'

As though it were a place that you were flung from and to which you gratefully crept back after a moderate length of time. With any luck you wouldn't be flung too often in a lifetime. But she didn't speak because she knew she was repelled by the phrases he was using and that this was unreasonable. He wanted to help her and she wanted help, though not this sort. He wouldn't understand if she told him.
She herself wouldn't have understood a month ago. Then she was approaching death a step at a time. It was a progression, not entirely uncomfortable, seemingly adult and accepting. She wasn't aware that this was what she had thought, until it had gone. Now she couldn't get back there. This thing that was her life, and that took up so much time and all her energy, was a box she moved around in. She tapped the sides and looked in corners, and outside death was stretching out for ever, in every direction.

‘I wonder if you should go and talk to someone,' Paul said.

There was no point in pretending she didn't know what sort of person he had in mind.

‘What makes you say that?'

‘You're so odd, Sylvie.'

She didn't reply. She could put up with being odd and his thinking her so, but she couldn't bear that he should divide the oddness up piecemeal and tell her about it.

‘Don't say any more. Please.'

‘All right. Not if you don't want me to.'

‘Thank you.'

‘Promise me you'll give it some thought, though. Will you?'

As if she ever stopped thinking.

‘It's not just me who's worried. Other people. My mother. She was really disturbed by you the other day.'

‘Your mother. What was she on about?' This she could cope with. ‘I just couldn't be bothered to go into it all. Surely you understand that. She'd have wanted all the details.'

‘What are you talking about, Sylvie?'

‘Maurice and the heart attack. I simply didn't want to talk about it.'

‘I didn't mean that.'

‘What did you mean, then?'

‘Telling her your father had a woman living with him.'

‘I didn't tell her.'

‘Suggesting, then.'

‘Well, he might have done. It's not so implausible. I wish he had done. For his sake.'

‘But he didn't. You know he didn't.'

Sylvie said nothing.

He looked at her. ‘You do make things up. I don't know if you know you're doing it. Did you make it up about the man in the bar? You haven't had a cigarette in years.'

Sylvie still said nothing. She walked away from him and stopped by a large copper bowl. She saw herself in it, glinting and distorted; her mouth stretched beyond endurance across her face. She turned it the right way up.

‘How's Maude?' she said.

‘You know as well as I do,' he said. ‘She was here at the weekend. Don't start on that.'

‘All right. If you say not.' She smiled.

‘Sylvie. You have no cause to be jealous.'

‘No? I don't know that I am. Not jealous. That's not the right word. It's hard to explain.'

She always did this, got caught up on accuracy and lost him, lost herself on some point of definition. She should have gone back to the beginning, to the time when they seemed to be together. Eve had said she mustn't put up with second best, which had annoyed her. Women like her mother needed to be, or to pretend to be, passionately in love to have sex at all. They didn't seem to realise how nice it was anyway. Sylvie had felt worldly and clear sighted.

‘Are you going to try to explain?' Paul said.

She couldn't start from the beginning. This thing with Maude was a ragged fingernail, at the far end of a limb nearly detached from a body; capable of causing pain, but nerveless. She couldn't bear to re-connect it.

‘I read something that made sense to me about it. I can't remember exactly. I could go and get the book.'

She left abruptly; walked back through the dining room and into the hall. Lucien wasn't there, though her chair was askew. Through the glass in the front door she caught sight of the couple who had come in earlier. He must have taken
flight when he heard their footsteps on the stairs. She stared out. The couple were making their way to the car park. The man was several paces behind the woman and carrying two umbrellas. The sky was slightly lighter than it had been. Sylvie watched for a while. Then she went across to her desk, leant over and pulled the drawer open.

‘Right,' she said in a purposeful voice, not like her own. ‘This will sound peculiar because it's hard to translate and it sounds pretty peculiar anyway.' She turned pages over. ‘Here it is.'

This would get her nowhere, reading bits to Paul out of books.

‘That's the book that got left behind, isn't it? You didn't send it back, then?'

‘No.'

She didn't look at him. He waited.

‘OK. “
Jealousy would have been a relief to her
.”'

She stopped. She couldn't leave it at that, but looking at it again it seemed to be the only intelligible sentence.

Paul raised his eyebrows. ‘You could have remembered that, couldn't you? Actually, I can't see anything in it. It's not peculiar. What struck you about it?'

‘Well, on its own I suppose it isn't that startling. Perhaps it's the part that leads up to it.'

‘How does that go, then?'

This was a mistake. ‘It sort of goes on a bit, then it says “She fancied once that she detected the agreeable stirring of the brood of jealousy, and found it neither in her heart nor in her mind, but in the book of wishes, well known to the young where they write matter which may sometimes be independent of both those volcanic albums. Jealousy would . . .” etc.' She struggled through it, stopping and starting.

She shut the book but kept hold of it.

‘That means something to you, does it?' he said.

‘Yes,' she said.

He shook his head. ‘I'm glad it helps you. It wouldn't help me.'

‘I might go back to London,' she said. ‘Do something about George's flat.'

THE CEILING WAS
low and unembellished. Sylvie had thrown out the pillows and was lying flat, trying to align the length of her back with the mattress. The central heating was full on; the lights switched off, the window raised. Upstairs a telephone rang and she felt feet crossing the floor. Then, more demandingly, another one rang in the next room. She heard it through the open door. She didn't close her eyes; it was restful looking at the oblique light above her and the broken lines of shadow cast by the cross pieces of the sash window. She slowed down her breathing.

Eventually she picked up her watch from the table beside her and turned it until she could read the face. She thought of lists but she wouldn't make lists. She had done last time, in those days when the days ahead were dark, but not dark enough to conceal all that needed to be done in them. Blackout was what she'd needed. She had written down things she might forget, not the obvious ones like the registry office and the undertaker, but No chrysanthemums, buy black gloves and give money to Justine, how much, question mark. She was George's cleaner. They had looked incongruous and domestic on the page of her note book; nothing to do with her father. She hadn't trusted herself to do anything.

The bed was cool and clean under her. She had made it up with sheets from the cupboard. They still had paper tickets from the laundry pinned to them with stiff safety pins. She hadn't wanted to read them in case they had a date on. But she had done, and discovered that the faint typing at the bottom just said household and the price. She didn't mind lying here
half undressed. She had wanted more comfort than the sofa. But it wasn't time to sleep yet, not for hours. She was grateful for that; it allowed her acclimatisation. Rest, not sleeping. People used both words for death as though they were interchangeable. This wasn't stupid; it was truthful. In that place one word was as good as another. No distinctions. No meanings. No chrysanthemums. There weren't any words. There weren't going to be any.

She had known as she walked in earlier that this wasn't a refuge; it wasn't home to anyone. She had put her bags on the hall floor. There was nothing inside to pin her down. She had sensed that, confined as she was by the small unaired rooms behind the closed doors and George's serviceable furniture, she was still in flight. People felt secure in their houses, well balanced even, not realising that it was the familiar objects inside that were propping them up.

The sky was dusky and orange from the street lights. It came into the room. Not like the country where the sky stayed outside. She could still feel the motion of the car. That and the Tunnel, which produced its own sea legs. Too many layers of entombment and everyone pretending the water wasn't on top of them. Fish and sewage and cross Channel ferries and the weight of the water. The occupants of the other cars all carried on reading the paper. Sylvie envied them their distractions and their snail-like ability to make themselves at home. Out came the sandwiches in aluminium foil, the canned drinks and the sports pages. In the curve of a railway tunnel the passengers have a glimpse of what the driver sees; the bored hole and the light approaching. Under the Channel it didn't seem like a tunnel except at the beginning on the downward slope when, if she forgot and looked out, she knew they were sliding into a chute. At the far end, on the upward slope, knowledge returned, but by then her claustrophobia was retrospective, easier to deal with.