Disturbed by Her Song

by Lee, Tanith

  Georgina drew back, not quite knowing what she did, and stared, as if to deceive Sula below – should she chance to look up at these windows – out along a narrow adjacent street.

  Oddly (it seemed in those moments extremely odd), a very beautiful unknown woman was standing some way down this street, looking in at the window of a shop there, a flower shop, Georgina thought. The woman wore black, and her longish hair was the stony obdurate pure white that can only be natural, the winter frost of old age. But she was straight and elegant, and her profile, dimly, distantly noted, seemed clean and aquiline. How beautiful she was, how alluring, that woman. That woman who was not Sula Dale. How odd, odd to see someone like that, and to react like this, at such a moment, the other already on the stair—

  But Georgina averted her gaze, and sat back in her chair, She too straightened up, and took a small gulp of wine. Any moment now, Sula would enter the room. Georgina fixed her eyes on the door, and held them steady, not even blinking. Like a soldier, blindfold refused, about to face the onslaught of a firing squad.

  She maintained this position rigidly, until her eyes began to water. Then she did blink. Fool. Her watch showed her several more minutes had elapsed. But Sula had not appeared. Once more Georgina craned to the window. The street below was briefly empty. No taxi. No Sula. In the sidelong narrow street people went up and down. The other woman had vanished also.

  A sigh escaped Georgina. Fate could always play such tricks. The woman from the taxi, evidently, had not been Sula at all. For God’s sake, it was two o’clock. Georgina downed all her drink. She looked about to catch the waiter’s eye. And then the restaurant door opened and into the restaurant walked the other woman, the old, beautiful woman she had seen outside.

  The woman stood for an instant just within the doorway, posed with such poise and grace, in her slender black suit and her chestnut-colored boots. Her white hair was marvelously cut, it framed so descriptively her face. Of course – a waiter came at once to attend on her. They spoke. He had led her to one of the pair of still empty tables.

  Caught in total mesmeric enthrallment, Georgina switched her stare hastily away. The woman too was gazing questingly about. But only for a second. She seemed unmoved by anything, removed. She sat down, and began to read the menu. White haired, older than Georgina, she did not require spectacles at all. Contacts, perhaps. Well...

  Georgina must catch the waiter’s attention.

  She did not move. She sat staring, once more without subterfuge, at the woman who did not need glasses.

  The woman’s skin was lightly creased, and the lines by her mouth, above and below her eyes, cut deep. She had a beautiful mouth, softly colored. Her hands had pale oval nails. They were veined with age, but articulate, strong and delicate as a fox’s paws. Ah. She shook back her hair. A girl’s unstinted gesture. And abruptly her eyes flashed up again – truly they did flash, some effect of the bright wet day outside – and scanned the room. Georgina, who had just now fallen in love, (for the first time in over twenty-four years) saw inside the woman’s eyes the light of a green sun through lenses of bronze. The woman was Sula Dale. And even out there on the street, misted with distance and time, and sight weaker than her own, even that way, and unrecognized – oh, yes, the dissolving pelvic bones and membranes, the familiar long-ago constant, surrender and desire, noiseless tumult, world’s end. I knew her. I fell in love with her again.

  But I would have known her in disguise. In a mask. In a decontamination body-suit. In a wheelchair, bald and speechless. Inside a coffin with the lid nailed shut. Even not knowing her, I knew her. In the distance, half seen. Through the rain.

  Sula was turning her head again now. She was looking over at the door, with that touch of former remembered irritation.

  But I’m here. You just looked at me. Or – your eyes met mine and then passed on.

  What had happened? It was easy, though neither of them had thought of it, it seemed. Each had reserved a table, in her own name. So Georgina was led to the Kendry table. And Sula to the table kept for Dale.

  But she does not know me. I knew her, even when I never knew her. But she does not know me. Never knew me. Never will.

  Georgina rose. As she walked past Sula Dale’s chair, Sula Dale glanced up at her, a fleeting glance, coolly courteous, impartial. And away. It was obvious: Georgina was not the one she was waiting for.

  The waiter stayed perfectly amenable about Georgina’s sudden departure. “I have to be in some meeting. Damn nuisance.” Georgina paid for her single expensive drink, and tipped him. After all, she might, some day, want to come back.

  Outside on the street she went by the flower shop, and crossed over into the main thoroughfare. Traffic growled. People passed up and down. Rain spangled like beads along the edge of everything.

  So this was growing up. This was coming of age.

  She would call Bar later, explain about the rushed trip to America – her sick friend. (Such helpful lies.) The TV team could manage without the writer. She would let them do what they wanted with Winter Sun. It no longer mattered.

  Georgina walked unhesitatingly on, as her fantasies fell from her, quite painless now in the great tide of Nothing that already swam inward to replace them.

  She didn’t remember me. She didn’t know me. She never heard me sing.

  If Georgina ever had bravely stood below Sula’s windows, in that square so contradictorily named Decoulter Gardens, and sung her heart and her soul out in a lover’s serenade, now she was well aware that Sula Dale would not have run to her balcony or her door, alight with reminding and passion. Indeed, if Georgina had ever dared such an impertinence, she understood now quite bitterly well, Sula Dale would only have been exasperatedly, embarrassedly, impatiently and angrily disturbed by her song.

  And down the glittering slope of the city then, grey and silent, stripped of dreams, the nightingale flew far away.