English Correspondence (9 page)

Sylvie longed to get back. The walk, as a walk, wasn't working any more. She hated this happening. She couldn't stop it. One minute, whatever her thoughts, the outside outclassed her. The still air, the mist on the ground moving up through the trees. Even without feeling particular pleasure in what was around her, there was enough and to spare of it. Then, the next, it lost status; no more interesting than she was to herself.

‘Please let's turn round,' she said.

‘Are you tired, darling?'

‘We were very late last night. Yes, I am. It's caught up with me.'

‘Paul said there was going to be a big party. How did it go?'

‘It was quite difficult, but we got through it.'

‘That sounds rather negative. Was it so bad?'

‘Paul will tell you about it, I expect.'

Sylvie began to walk faster. Yvette hurried beside her, anxious not to miss any part of the story Sylvie might let fall. At this stage of the walk, the extra speed made her catch her breath. She couldn't keep up and ask questions.

Sylvie knew there was some sort of cruelty in her behaviour. She knew because she didn't like to see this woman, older than herself, struggling. She kept looking ahead, in order not to see, but she wasn't oblivious to Yvette. She had to get from where they were now, to where she needed to be. It wasn't a question of place, though that came into it. It was more that she panicked about the transition, feared she would get stuck in it.

As they walked across the gravel towards the restaurant Sylvie heard herself saying, ‘Do you want to come in and sit down for a minute before you drive back? We were out for quite a long time.'

Yvette immediately said that that was a nice idea, though she wasn't really tired, the exercise hadn't been especially strenuous. She was old enough to be proud of her mobility and liked to draw attention to it. So then Sylvie was stuck with her. She regretted the automatic politeness. It was all very well with the clients, but extended to family it encumbered her. Yvette said she would sit in the hall, she didn't want to get too settled. Sylvie was to get on with what she had to do. She sat on the arm of the armchair by the fire, to look provisional and less than elderly, and her daughter-in-law fetched her a glass of mineral water. Any type would suit, she wasn't fussy.

Sylvie only wanted to do one thing. It wasn't administrative; nothing to do with the restaurant. She glanced at Yvette sipping water and turning the pages of a magazine. She wanted to think about the book and the blue envelope. There was no past attached to them, or only a few minutes' worth of conversation exchanged with their owner. And there wouldn't be a future. She wasn't that stupid.

She had trouble with daydreams, though. She was wary of them. They sprang up like night dreams, then she was stuck with them, until they had run their course. It was as if she put her hands on a ouija board and the words arranged themselves calmly, then, without warning, went haywire. They slipped over into reality and she had to extricate herself politely. Clients were strangers and they turned to her, needed looking after. Men, she was thinking of. At the end, there was nothing, there never had been anything, but it always left her feeling foolish and, somehow, resentful. For the time it lasted, and a little beyond, it changed things with Paul. She never knew why.

These objects were real, however, the book and the envelope. They weren't hers, or addressed to her, but she could do something with them; hide them away for comfort or use them like tickets to get somewhere.

The telephone rang. It was Maude. Yvette seemed to be close enough to hear both sides of the conversation. Perhaps she wasn't. Maude was saying she expected Sylvie had called the hospital.

‘No I haven't. You have done, obviously.'

Yvette carried on flicking the pages but the pace altered.

Maude was re-running through the events of the previous evening and suddenly paused dramatically.

‘I'm sorry,' Sylvie said.

She was saying that it had happened – there – in the restaurant.

‘It happened
here?
What do you mean?'

Yvette was still.

Maude said, in a respectful whisper, that it had happened – there – before he got to hospital, before he was even taken away.

‘Oh, I see. The precise moment
when.
I don't think that matters does it?'

Sylvie fitted the curls of the telephone wire round the index finger of her left hand. The voice carried on talking. The loops looked like exotic black rings on her finger, slightly
menacing. She would never wear anything like that. Maude asked her if she was cross with her for talking about it. She said she hadn't meant to sound cross. Maude paused, then said Paul would want to be told what had happened.

‘Yes, I'll tell him. Thank you for letting me know.'

Yvette glanced up, as if she expected Paul to walk in.

Sylvie thought, that must be the end, but it wasn't.

‘Are you sending flowers?'

‘I expect we will. I'll sort something out. I'll call the flower shop.'

‘I wonder whether calling is special enough? They might not give it their full attention.'

‘Well, yes, I suppose I could go round there in person, but it's not really necessary. I know the woman there. She'll tell me what she's got that's decent.'

Maude calmed down and then started up again. ‘Sylvie. There will have to be a message. You mustn't leave it to the florist.'

‘Of course I won't leave it to her. I'll tell her what to put.'

Maude talked rapidly and quietly and seemed to end up saying something not quite clear. Her name.

‘
Your
name? Sorry I don't understand.'

Added.

‘Added to what?'

Yvette took another sip of water.

She was telling her what to write. Paul, Sylvie, Maude. She showed some restraint in the order.

‘I see. I'd have thought something more general. But that's all right. I'll do that.'

‘I did know Maurice,' she said. ‘I'm not trying to be pushy.'

‘No, it's all right. I said so. I'll do it. It's fine.'

‘Is it really all right?'

‘Really.'

‘You'll tell Paul, won't you?'

‘Yes, I shall. Bye.'

Sylvie put the telephone down and switched on the computer.

‘That was Maude,' she said.

She need not have said anything. But the person she had been speaking to and the person in the room had met. She had no idea what they thought of each other, though she guessed that there was admiration there somewhere. It would have been unnatural to keep silent. Yvette left the magazine open as if she might continue with it. She looked at once blithe and sympathetic.

‘Is everything all right, darling?'

‘Maude told me that Maurice – that's the man we were giving the retirement party for yesterday evening – he died.'

‘That's terrible. When did that happen?'

‘Last night. He collapsed.'

‘Here? You don't mean here, darling?'

‘Yes.'

‘Where?'

Sylvie said nothing.

‘In the dining room? Not at the table?'

Still nothing.

‘Darling, why didn't you tell me? Such a shock for you. A dreadful shock.' She paused and thought. ‘You said it had been a difficult evening. I'd no idea it was anything like this. Why didn't you tell me?'

‘I don't know really. I didn't feel like talking about it.'

Yvette looked at her, didn't get up. She was about to say something and thought better of it. She heard Sylvie's reply in advance from across the room, though neither of them spoke. Faint and cross it was going to be. Brought what all back? What's
he
got to do with it? So Yvette never mentioned George after all.

Sylvie knew that her mother-in-law was hurt that she had failed to confide in her about Maurice, but she ignored the grievance and got on with composing the note to accompany the flowers. She did it in her head. A formula was best, simple
and unsentimental with their names at the end, Maude's by request. She would avoid naming the restaurant; macabre publicity at the graveside. If they didn't know who they were from, that was just too bad. She had read the messages that people had sent with George's funeral flowers. They were all different: some to him, some for or about him, some misspelled by the florist. Don had advised her against. He had told her to say Family Flowers Only. But this seemed hard on the friends and the flowers – and left the family, which was really just her, rather exposed.

She took advantage of her efficiency with the note, made it carry over into writing the letter to the Englishman. So that ended up straightforward too. She wrote it as soon as Yvette left. She said he'd left his book behind. She'd quite like to read it, if that was all right, before sending it back, but if he wanted it sooner she'd post it. None of the strange, almost spellbound feelings she'd had about finding it got into her letter, which was a good thing or he never would have replied. She realised that and also realised that it was just luck that they didn't.

JERRY DORNEY SLIT
open her letter with the knife he'd used to butter his toast. He had left his plate on the window sill and gone down three floors of common parts as soon as he'd noticed the postman's trolley on the pavement below. He hadn't come to terms with the trolley. He could still run up and down the stairs, even if the fellow couldn't heave a bit of mail. It was a habit from school days, rushing to the post. Rigmaroles from his Ma and his Aunt Lou, it used to be, an antiphonal chant, one week on, one week off. The second post of the day he always threw straight in the bin unopened. It wasn't worth bothering with; begging letters and mail order.

He had no idea who Sylvie Delacour was. Sylvie. His mind was a blank. He gave up.

On his way to work, about half an hour later, driving through London traffic, he almost ran a woman over. She just stepped out. He leant on his horn and she stopped. She didn't move, she stood in the road. The way her ankles were neatly lined up, the expression on her face, neither quite right in the circumstances, brought back another woman. Someone who had just stood there not far away from him. He remembered her. No, that's too strong. He was able to remember something about her.

The address at the top of the letter now made sense. He'd been trying to recall when he'd last taken a woman to a hotel.

He had gone to the house in the Vosges to catch up and he
probably would have done if he hadn't kept falling asleep. What catching up meant he hadn't defined properly, though he had used the phrase to himself. He had felt cheerful about going there, free of responsibility. It was the family holiday house, though they usually ended up taking their holidays somewhere else; paying twice over, in fact. He stacked up piles of paper and documents into a couple of old cardboard wine boxes with the slats taken out, put them in the boot of the car and brought them with him. They didn't lie neatly, as they were destabilised by slithery plastic covers and smaller fatter objects such as the calculator and the bundle of envelopes from the tax office. He was easy about it, he could put up with a certain amount of confusion.

The place was so quiet. He had never been there on his own and had imagined it would be the same as being there with Gillian and the children, only more peaceful, as if removing talk and disturbance left things neutral.

He lined up half a dozen bottles on the wide shelf in the kitchen, shoved the contents of a plastic bag into the fridge, turned the dial on the electric boiler from nought to five, while holding down the red button. He lit a fire with half a firelighter and some kindling and logs he'd bought in a garage. Nothing went too badly wrong and he felt quite active. He thought he would impose himself on the silence and the dark dampness. A couple of hours passed and it still hadn't happened. He put on an extra jersey. Stepping on a particular floorboard set up vibrations that made the cutlery in the drawer jingle, but after a while he didn't need to walk about. He spread out the papers he'd brought from home on the table and sat down in front of them. He got up to look for a pen and, when he couldn't find one, he retrieved the morning's newspaper from the log basket. He sat down again. He'd already read it pretty thoroughly in the Tunnel. The fire was getting going, taking out the oxygen. Within five minutes he was asleep, his head at an awkward angle on his arms.

That night he gave in to it, let the house have its own
way. He plunged into a deep well. Not just into sleep, but somewhere down among the tree roots. When daylight came he got out of bed, but he never resurfaced. He went to the bar in the village to call his wife and his secretary. They both asked how he was and whether he'd had a good journey, but neither seemed to have any sense of how far away he was. They talked to him as if he were in Berkshire. It's bloody freezing, he said, but this didn't give much idea of the cold quiet fog, breached by hooting and church bells, or the men, with ice on their boots and caps on their heads, laying claim to the first beer of the morning. Both women wanted, since he was on the line, to check a few dates. He could see them. Norma sitting in a sort of box in the office, like an island or a pew, with only her head and shoulders showing, leafing through his diary, licking her index finger to get a purchase on the pages. Gillian, at home, reading the wall calendar, stepping back from it because she couldn't find her reading glasses. Odd things it had printed on it, like Thanksgiving and the feast of the Immaculate Conception, that the family took no notice of. He disliked his diary, the way it got spattered on months ahead. For years it had been blank with only the coming week inked over. That was when he'd been in control of it. Now they sorted out his arrangements between them, Norma and Gillian, and he appeared in the right places like the Holy Ghost after the Ascension. That had been on the calendar too, though he couldn't remember when. Aunt Lou would know, or would have done before her mind furred up. There was no way of stopping it, any of it. Exorcism, something drastic.