Sleep with Me

by Joanna Briscoe

  Mazarine stayed away from the new baby, and we snatched moments and hours together, already addicted. On my last night in France, we sneaked back to my room above the garage. I was in love with her by then, my every waking moment spent in a fever of longing for the troubled child who’d been my rival just a week before. We couldn’t stop. For eight hours that night, we said, we became each other’s bride.

  Mazarine left before dawn, and when I woke, the happy atmosphere of Sophie-Hélène’s cottage had unmistakably changed. I was barely given time to exchange kisses with my penfriend before I was ushered out by distracted adults and hurried to the airport by a mother who had clearly been crying. I never knew whether our underaged Sapphic activities had been discovered, or whether something else had happened. I didn’t want to think about that something else.

  What broke me – I could still nudge the scar two or three years later and feel the after-effects – was that Mazarine had promised to meet me behind the garage door to say goodbye. She would kiss me there in the oil-scented darkness, I knew, and excite me with her pained, ungovernable mind. The appointed time went, and I waited there, loitering and scuffing my shoe on grit in growing distress, until I was called from across the stream into breakfast. I wandered past the kitchen window whenever I could, clutching my napkin and muttering about needing the toilet, to check for movements of the garage door, and then I pretended I’d left something in my room and ran outside. Mazarine was not there, and I was sent back to England with a raw new strand of mourning.

  After my wedding, I had to get away from Richard, from his increasingly obvious infidelity and his lies and the way that he made me feel. More truthfully, with a hurt and competitive pride, I wanted to leave him before he left me. And more truthfully still, I could no longer keep myself from Sylvie Lavigne. I was too in love, too drawn to what a part of me had always wanted, and the sick mind it enclosed.

  The solution was not a glamorous one, but it suited our purposes well. A cousin by marriage of my father’s, my old Aunt Nanda, had been taken into hospital and there was the possibility she would then go into a nursing home. My sweet mother, understanding me now in my moment of need even as she gazed at me in a silent, fault-finding way, that may not, after all, have been as critical as I’d always imagined, had procured me the permission, had arranged for the keys to be available, and had kept Richard at bay for me, comprehending in a few brief sentences the state of our marriage.

  As we entered that concrete-balconied old-lady flat in Southwark with its scoured melamine kitchen, its lingering scent of other people’s long-gone toast and muddy river views, I felt a terrible pang for Richard. I yearned to be with him, back home. The flat’s phone had been cut off; post was gathering, and damp beige pensioner underwear was rotting in the washing machine. I wandered to the window, where the sound of roadworks far below vibrated through the glass.

  ‘Richard,’ I murmured into the glass. I love him, I thought with an unexpected new rush of emotion.

  I felt my bump. I gazed at the river. The cramped flat was on the twenty-first floor of a sixties tower block, the river swirling beyond the ledge of a balcony. Cranes swung on the horizon, glinting with summer light; the sound of the road drills rose a pitch. I remembered the fact of Richard’s mistress, that unknown threat polluting my life somewhere in London, and I swallowed a sob of panic. My baby shifted.

  Sylvie pulled my hair back and whispered in my ear, and as the afternoon progressed and we moved around the flat, throwing open windows to the cry of the seagulls and drills, tentatively arranging our possessions and setting out food and anemones brought by her, we were girls together again, the growing baby treasured by us, and I felt as happy as a child playing at houses.

  The tide lapped each morning with its own breath, muddy and noisy with seagulls; helicopters emerged through the heated river smog. On free afternoons after term ended we walked by the water, finding parts of London entirely strange to me, as alien from my old suburban life as a different country; or we went to bed, the blinds blocking out curious neighbours and the distant clamour of bus brakes beneath us. Richard came to me in sudden shadows, my heart racing with a thought about him.

  ‘I sometimes thought I’d never see you again,’ Sylvie said when we had been there for over three weeks and I was increasingly wondering, against my own will, when Richard would turn up. He was not the sort of person to accept defeat. All my confidence had gone: I wanted him to stride around town until he found me, and then I would know, and yet I wanted to put off that moment for a while longer and spend however long I had in that strange sex-filled limbo with Sylvie. My hand kept reaching for my mobile, since he had been texting me, unanswered, several times a day, but I’d left my phone in my office when I went to collect some books. I felt naked without it, perversely abandoned by Richard if I couldn’t read his messages. I went to Mecklenburgh Square once, to collect the post that had gathered in my absence, and he’d left me a letter on the table which I read several times, and then Sylvie hailed a taxi and played with the hair at the back of my neck, and she continued as we travelled back over the river.

  Sylvie and I had begun to talk about the past, to refer to incidents her fierce avoidance had always made impossible to mention, and so we treasured each new section that could be illuminated: Clemenceau, and those early days in London.

  ‘You know how I heard about you again?’ she said.

  ‘I thought you saw me by chance …’

  ‘It was when I was in Edinburgh. I went to an exhibition that featured some of Ren’s paintings – do you like those paintings?’ she said, shaking her head and frowning earnestly. ‘I loathe such– But he was there with Vicky and I heard your name mentioned.’

  ‘Oh!’ I said.

  ‘“I used to know a Lelia,” I said casually, my heart going. I asked the surname, and it was you.’

  ‘You remembered.’

  ‘Of course I did. I knew then that I might see you again.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I wanted to come to London–’

  ‘Why did you?’

  ‘Oh – it was time for me to leave,’ she said, briefly dropping her gaze. ‘Ren and Vicky were very kind to me. They let me stay with them for a few days when I moved to London, and I didn’t have any money for rent or know anyone. And then they arranged for me to stay with friends of theirs and–’

  ‘Who?’ I said.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, the shadows under her eyes lending her an intensity that drew me to her. I wanted to open my mouth against the fragrant surface of her skin, but she wasn’t touching me that afternoon. ‘I can’t remember–’

  ‘But–’ I said, frustrated. I stopped myself, having learnt, so long ago, that curiosity alienated her. The ends of her hair fell on my lips as she moved, but she drew her head back, and my nerves seemed to flicker still with the sensation of hair brushing as it passed.

  ‘I longed to see you. And you know,’ she said, circling my wrist with her fingers but still barely touching my skin, ‘twice I saw you crossing Russell Square, before I ever met you again through Ren. I thought you were beautiful: I loved to look at you. I loved all your clothes. I put your face to your name even then, and I watched you walking.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, shocked. ‘Why didn’t you come up to me?’

  ‘After I’d met you,’ she said, sitting up and twisting her hair off her face, ‘I even followed you – once – I wanted to see you so much. I followed you when you went to the doctor’s, and waited outside for you.’

  ‘Oh!’ I felt disconcerted. ‘I thought…’

  ‘And I was so excited that you were pregnant.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I think about her all the time,’ said Sylvie, her cheek just grazing where my baby kicked: the baby who had survived, after all, through blood and scans, and shifted like a dog in my womb, and punched and hiccuped.

  ‘She’s yours too,’ I said. ‘You’ve looked after her.’ I tried to kiss her ear; she pulled away
.

  ‘I want her,’ she said, her breath cool on my stomach.

  ‘You’ve fed her her fish and broccoli …’

  ‘I think I love her.’

  ‘She loves you,’ I said. ‘But why didn’t you come up to me when you knew it was me near the university?’

  ‘Wouldn’t that be weird?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Sylvie.

  ‘It’s weirder not to,’ I said, frowning.

  ‘I sometimes think,’ said Sylvie, and I caught a glimpse of the pain I so often saw in her now, hidden in our earlier days, ‘that I don’t know what’s “weird”. Is it because I’m not English?’

  ‘No,’ I said, laughing at her. ‘It’s because you’re you.’

  ‘Oh, don’t.’ Sylvie jolted as though I’d slapped her.

  ‘But I love that,’ I said, holding out my arms to her. ‘Why did I love you? You were a strange little girl. I loved you! And I wasn’t even your first,’ I said in wonder. ‘Not even your first.’

  She smiled at me, her mouth tilting at the corners.

  ‘Yes. But I was in love with you, from that day. I always wanted, wanted, longed to see you again,’ she said, and she idly lifted just the hem of my dress very slightly, then let it fall. The baby kicked.

  ‘Oh, hold me,’ I said.

  She gazed ahead as though she hadn’t heard me. ‘You have to eat,’ she said, glancing at my bump.

  ‘It’s too hot.’

  ‘No, you have to eat.’

  ‘I don’t feel like it this evening.’ I was desperate for her to hold me. She lay stretched out beside me, the slender curve of her hip lit by a broken wash of sunset, looking at me as though appraising me. I caught my breath. My body felt light, almost bilious or stormy. The evening drifted through the blinds in furred shadows, and the city seemed suspended, as though a brief silence had fallen before the sounds of night arrived. Sylvie reached out and skimmed my upper arm with the back of her nails, and I was in her thrall, as I always was, pregnant and on heat, my body ticking like wood. Please, I thought; I lay back a little, my legs resting open, my belly rising above me in one astonishing swooping curve, and she still held me in her gaze, a severe little eyebrow faintly raised, as though testing me with the perfect discipline she knew she possessed. Please, I thought, because only she was rough with me, so swift and certain and hard in a way I wouldn’t want a man to be; because she alone could take me into a kind of darkness I’d never experienced, my brain liquid and battered, where I saw something disturbing or even evil in her, disturbing but addictive, pumping the breath out of me. She controlled me; she played me; I gave myself to her, shocked and sore, desire just stirring again the following day.

  ‘When the baby is born, my love, we’ll see all the broccoli and mackerel and apricots I fed you in her pink fingernails. In her bright brown eyes.’

  Through the cloth of my dress, she trailed her finger over my linea nigra.

  I breathed out through my nose. ‘Again,’ I said.

  ‘Do you remember our last night together in France?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I know you do, darling.’

  A feeling of unease hovered as a light pressure on my forehead. She stroked my leg. ‘It was delicious, wasn’t it?’ she said.

  ‘I never stopped thinking about it,’ I said. I watched the pools of last sun that highlighted her hips convulse.

  ‘I thought about it too,’ she said.

  ‘I kissed my arm for years afterwards, trying to make my mouth feel that,’ I said. ‘My skin was alive. I didn’t – have sex – for so many years after that. Not till I was – well, I was nineteen. A shameful virgin. But I’d known that time with you.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I thought I’d see you on the street one day,’ I said. She pressed my shoulder so that she was above me. ‘When I went to Paris, I was sure I’d see you.’

  ‘I wasn’t there.’

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘Never really there. I’d like to be.’

  ‘Where were you then?’

  ‘I … I sort of – I suppose I hid from people. While you were living, being a student, falling in love, using your mind.’

  ‘And you didn’t? Didn’t do that, I mean?’

  She gazed at me, then her eyes seemed to wander, the hazel-green depths darker in the evening, and I suddenly sensed in her, as I had perhaps twice before, something slightly unclean, almost seedy, as though she was a slender, knowing little prostitute with shadowed eyes and an eroded soul.

  ‘Do you remember what happened that evening?’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I tried to make myself look at her.

  ‘We escaped,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I know. I don’t feel well,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just feel different. I need the loo. My stomach hurts.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Sylvie, pausing.

  I stood up. When I moved, I felt impossibly heavy, as though my changing centre of gravity was finally beginning to defeat me. I came back. ‘Tell me different things,’ I said. ‘Tell me stories. I feel strange.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Like – it’s a bit like period pain.’ I kept shivering.

  ‘Braxton Hicks!’ said Sylvie.

  ‘Is that it?’ I moaned. ‘It’s tight on my tummy. It hurts.’

  ‘It’s just little practice contractions,’ said Sylvie, swivelling round on the bed and placing her hand where the baby lay.

  I breathed out.

  ‘Is that all right?’ asked Sylvie gently.

  I nodded.

  ‘You can practise now, and when she comes,’ she said, stroking the hair from my forehead, ‘we’ll be ready’

  I don’t know, I don’t know, I wanted to say.

  ‘She’ll be handed to you, and to me, and we’ll love her.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said weakly.

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Sylvie. Her face turned paler.

  ‘I don’t feel right.’

  ‘Darling, come here.’

  I lay beside Sylvie. My skin, always hot in pregnancy, had begun to prickle. The area between my breasts started to sweat, and yet I was cold.

  ‘In France–’ she said.

  ‘You know,’ I snapped, ‘I shouldn’t have been there at all. I was in a state. My mother should have kept me at home.’

  ‘You had a mother,’ she said. ‘She loved you. Look what she’ll do for you still,’ she said, raising her hand towards the flat. She smoothed my bump with her hand.

  ‘I did. And you …’

  She raised her eyebrow at me.

  ‘I don’t know if I ever saw you together,’ I said.

  ‘I saw you together, though. She chatted to you in the hall. I even saw her stroke your hair once as she passed.’

  ‘Oh, Sylvie,’ I said, pity softening me.

  ‘She drank too. Did you realise that?’

  ‘Did she?’ I said, the blank-faced doctor coming back to me with adult eyes.

  A tightness gripped my womb like a belt. A sound escaped from me. I had an image of a rubber slimming device from the fifties, a vibrating rubber girdle slapping against the fat of a smiling woman.

  I moaned. ‘It’s too early,’ I said.

  ‘Breathe,’ she said. ‘Do your NCT breathing. It’s just your practice contractions.’

  ‘How do you know?’ I said sharply.

  ‘She loved her drink,’ said Sylvie. ‘That was all.’

  The belt tightened.

  ‘Richard,’ I said, my voice louder.

  Sylvie turned to me, her face above me, her mouth a small circle.

  ‘What?’

  There was silence.

  ‘I–’ I thought I saw tears begin to form in her eyes. My eyes prickled in response.

  ‘Breathe, Lelia.’

  ‘Yes, I–’

  ‘That was what kept
her from me, I thought,’ she said fiercely, her mouth still altered and open, ‘as well as she loathed her reeking little runt of a daughter. Her fucking, fucking daughter.’

  I flinched.

  ‘Every evening, she drank,’ she said in a low voice. ‘All through her pregnancy. I thought the vodka might kill the baby. I didn’t make any fuss, because she might lose her temper. I read all day, didn’t I, Lelia?’

  ‘You had sex,’ I said. ‘You were a child who had a girlfriend.’

  ‘When Sophie-Hélène was there. And other than that, I read. There was nothing else to do. She was too inebriated, I thought. I thought she was incapable of loving anything. And then–’

  ‘But she worked so hard,’ I said, shivering. The tightness subsided. I tried to breathe slowly.

  ‘Oh I know, I know. She was brilliant. She worked like a hound. She could do both. She couldn’t in the end – they started noticing. I thought she only loved that stuff. All those ruby-red vintages. Oh! Her fucking vineyards. My dear departed father’s fucking vineyards. And then – surprise she didn’t only love that. She loved her bottle, and she loved her baby. She loved the infant through the fog like a mother demented.’

  ‘You sound demented,’ I said.

  ‘Shut up,’ said Sylvie.

  ‘You do,’ I said, recoiling.

  ‘Wouldn’t you?’ she said, feeling my leg.

  ‘It was hard,’ I said, ‘for you.’

  ‘I wanted what you had,’ she said, embracing me and pulling me to her.

  We lay holding each other. I still loved her smell.

  ‘I always wanted what you had,’ she said at last, her mouth warming the top of my breast.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I always wanted you to share that with me.’

  I shrugged, half-laughing.‘I didn’t have a father, or siblings. I was chubby.We didn’t have enough money; I was thwarted, and aspirational.’

  ‘But at least your father wanted you. My mother even liked you better, because of course she did, because of course you were so fucking charming, your skin and your mind, the way you spoke French. You–’