She dozed, and tossed, her mind wandered. She got up and took aspirin. She had a shower, put her clothes on and went and bought some food and wine which she didn’t eat or drink, except for some clementines. Next to the hotel was a shop which sold old linens, sheets and pillowcases, towels, teatowels, soft faded quilted bedcovers, glasses, plates, flowery fragile teacups. Twice she went in and talked to the woman about making curtains from old sheets. Nothing original about this. She saw it in a magazine.
That’s a bad cough, said the woman.
Oh, it’s going okay, she said.
There were some heavy sheets, coarse, dark cream coloured, rough. Never used, said the woman. They’d soften up a lot if you washed them.
They have a seam down the centre, sewn with small stitches. Narrow fabric, said the woman, needs to be joined.
There’s two small red initials as well. J. B.
The first time the woman clearly thinks she’s just a passerby. An idle tourist entertaining herself. The second time she takes her a bit more seriously. Maybe she will buy sheets to make into curtains. Clare herself isn’t sure. She does need curtains, the dining room is newly painted pale yellow and the old greenish curtains, twenty years old, and quite dispirited, don’t look any good; she is serious. But it may be all too much effort.
I’ll ring up my daughter, says Clare, and get her to measure the window. She likes ringing her daughter, this loving little thread of connection over the phone is something to hang on to.
They’re big, says the woman. Two metres by two and a half.
Could you send them to Australia, asks Clare.
Ouf. The woman shrugs. So expensive. They’re very very heavy. Five hundred francs perhaps, more. Why don’t you take them with you?
Well, because they’re so heavy.
I could make a parcel. Give you a plastic bag. She pulls out one of those big red and blue striped zippered bags.
I’ll get the measurements checked, said Clare. She went back to the hotel and climbed under the covers again.
This went on for two days. She went out, came back, got into bed and slid down into the pit again. It was very strange, but not uncomfortable, she liked being there, swirled around in its dark supporting fluid, you could even see it as nourishing; salty, elemental. Amniotic, even. And she disporting in it. She has time and space and solitude to take pleasure in these words: disporting, amniotic. Words will save her.
When she floated up to the surface and climbed out she brought with her immensely important things, that she held on to, placed carefully along the edge, but when she looked at them she couldn’t see what it was they had meant, she held them in her mind as her hands would have held stones and examined them, but their beautiful meaningful patterns could no longer be discerned; like stones they needed their native wetness for their patterns to be seen. She peered at them, and tried to remember, but all she could recall was how important their inscriptions had been, not what they said.
On the morning after her third night in Paris she lay in bed and thought she might be all right. Still with a cold, but the fever gone. She was meeting Helen at the church of St Germain at ten o’clock. Helen has been in England visiting the husband she was divorced from more than a decade ago. She remains on good terms with him in a way her friends think is heroic. Not just for the sake of her children, though that matters; for the integrity of that part of her life, the number of years when she was married to him, and believed she loved him. Now she’s spending four days in Paris, staying with colleagues at the embassy.
Helen was late and by the time she came Clare was feeling very strange; she couldn’t see, the light had gone out of what she looked at, it was dark, blind. Helen sat with her and after a bit Clare said she thought she could make it back to the hotel but then she fell fainting in the porch. There was a christening forming, she’d watched the verger lighting candles before the dark came, and wondered what for, it was too early for mass, she’d checked at the door. It ought to have been shameful, fainting in the porch of the church of St Germain des Prés with a handsome bourgeois christening gathering on the steps, but it wasn’t. It was a huge and difficult thing that was happening and she had to concentrate on getting through it.
What did you have for breakfast, asked Helen.
Clementine. Her voice came in a croak.
And for dinner?
Clementine.
It’s lack of food that’s the problem, said Helen. Probably. Though you should get checked out by a doctor. Strokes, you know. That sort of thing.
Eventually in a cafe she had a grand crème and some bread and butter and felt better. They walked about a bit. She showed Helen the sheets in the antique shop. Helen said they were beautiful, but what about the symbolic meanings.
What.
The trousseaus. Never used.
Oh, said Clare. She was too tired to think of that.
They went to a cafe and had lunch. She ate andouillettes which she always did at least once each visit so she knew she really was in Paris, and bought them half a litre of Côtes du Rhône, because she was grateful to Helen for being there, for being company, a friend.
Later, people commiserated. Poor you, how terrible, being sick in Paris. Oh no, she said, it was good. It was a kind of marvellous experience. To herself she said, mystical, even. Looking back she saw it as one of the most significant parts of her trip away. It was like her grief. It was important to her, it mattered. Like the grief, not something you’d say, when offered, oh how wonderful, yes please. But when you had to have it, then it belonged to you. It made you what you were. You would keep it, jealously, as a prized possession.
And though all her precious salvaged stones with their now undecipherable messages were themselves meaningless and she’d thrown them away (or back, perhaps) that didn’t mean that the whole experience lacked meaning. She didn’t entirely understand it, yet, but she felt it. It was about love. It was about loving people. It was about her being good at that. It was about the loss of her loves, that was why it was a pit, but it was also full of nourishing amniotic fluid because love wasn’t lost; there was bleakness, and terror, but buoyancy, and safety. Loves are lost, but love isn’t. It’s a hard idea, and whether it drowns you or saves you is by no means sure. Or which is which.
So it was probably just as well that Helen had come along and pulled her back into the real world of tripe sausage and mustard and rough red wine. That world of sickness and lost love and love found, you couldn’t stay in it very long, any more than you could a womb.
There was a Proust exhibition at the new Bibliothèque de France, Mittérand’s building this, as Beaubourg is Pompidou’s, and she went on the new metro that served it, from Madeleine to Bibliothèque. All the platforms have transparent walls, so nobody can jump or be pushed or fall on the line, with doors that open to match the doors of the train when it comes in. The train is all one long articulated body, silver black and gleaming, you can see it curling round, climbing up, plunging down. At one stage it goes down deep, under the river. Moreover, it doesn’t have a driver; Geoffrey always said the metro didn’t need drivers, they were only there to keep the passengers happy, and maybe to notice if they were caught in the doors. She so badly wants to tell Geoffrey about this new one—not even needing him to see it in person, just having him somewhere she can tell him, hear the lift of interest in his voice, so he will know that this technical thing that had always fascinated him had come about—that sadness overwhelms her, and she is nearly undone again.
Tricky stuff, the grief-striking possibilities of the metro.
But the Proust exhibition takes her mind off loss. It’s showing the things Proust would have read, seen, heard. She is aware she has a tendency to believe that great artists sprang fully formed, and needs to keep reminding herself of what she knows but forgets, that they began in doubt and uncertainty and the fear of hope unrealised, just like everyone else. There are wonderful things, like lifeless muddy copies by Ruskin of Italian paintings
, and bicycling posters, Fortuny gowns, photographs of actresses the family knew, and actors, and the theatre phone, a direct line from the theatre, so in bed in his cork-lined room he could listen to plays; when Clare picks it up she can hear Sarah Bernhardt’s harsh melodramatic voice, and almost capture the enchantment of her classical French. Best of all are his handwritten manuscripts, displayed in tall flat cabinets, the notebooks with pasted-in extensions hanging down a metre or more. And wonderful typescripts entirely rewritten, with more fold-down pastings. Even the proof sheets put out sheaves of interleavings.
She copies out Proust’s own words referring to this:
. . . car, épinglant ici un feuillet supplémentaire, je bâtirais mon livre, je n’ose pas dire ambitieusement comme une cathédrale, mais tout simplement comme une robe.
Her own interest in cathedrals as metaphors draws her attention to this, and bowerbird that she is, she starts looking for a way of plaiting it into her own nest of words.
For, pinning on here an extra page, I would build my book, I don’t dare be so ambitious as to say like a cathedral, but quite simply like a dress.
She wonders if she could see herself as building her book like a dress, if dress is the word, maybe for Proust it ought to be something like garment, but that’s clumsy, why not dress. It’s good to think about Proust, to remind yourself that the best thing life can offer a writer is the chance to write. Nothing else matters. However dull or tragic or messy the life, it is still a life to write in.
She rang up her daughter and got her to measure the dining room windows, and when she went back to the shop it turned out that the coarse creamy sheets were too short, they were only two metres and she needed two and a half.
Ah, said the woman. I do have some others. She brought out a pair of much finer linen, handkerchief weight (a good heavy handkerchief), very plain, with one narrow hem and the other finished in wonderfully long and tiny-stitched drawn-thread work. They were three metres long. Also unused.
How do you know they haven’t been used, Helen had asked, and Clare had replied, Because she says so, but anyway you can tell, and when she saw them Helen agreed.
These are more bourgeois, less peasanty than the creamy ones. They feel cool to the touch, almost polished. They are like the sheets in Séverac, that she’s written a whole novel about, except that these aren’t embroidered white on white with flowers, ribbons, ears of wheat, just hem-stitched in that long elegant way. You imagine a woman sitting bent over her work and forming her minutely skilled stitches and thinking . . . of her future, the marriage they are meant for, not necessarily with any one in mind. Wondering. Or a fiancé, perhaps, and sewing her sheets she dreams of what it will be like to lie in them with him. Or perhaps there’s a bunch of girls, gossiping, passing the time giggling, being malicious, rude, silly, having enormous fun, free for this small space of time. Before they become wives, or spinsters.
She doesn’t ask why they are unused, she knows the possible answers as well as the shop woman, and no more than she will she ever find out which is true.
When her friend Maggie got engaged her mother told her she wouldn’t be properly married until she had six pairs of good double-bed sheets. I’ll just have to live in sin then, said Maggie, but in fact by the time the wedding happened she’d got her six pairs. Clare and her sisters have sheets of their mother’s, never used, not trousseau sheets but bought thriftily and saved and never used. These sheets may be of such a provenance, kept in a linen press for use one day but never needed. Especially as French housewives used to have a lot of sheets, they only washed them about twice a year, perhaps a fine day in late spring, then again late in summer, all the women of the family doing a huge boil up and spreading the linen on the meadows to dry. There’s a story by Colette, with all the servants out in the paddock, that’s the word used, spreading the sheets to dry on this rare washing day. A chandelier falls on a young man, and there are no servants to help, but it turns out brilliantly well because he and the young lady of the house are able to find out that each is in love with the other. He pretends to be unconscious and lets her kiss him in despair that he is dying.
And the other possibility is that they were sewn by one of that great number of women who were made widows before they ever were wives by the First World War. All those names on all those memorials in all the tiny towns and villages of France, and for so many of them a woman would never marry. Would live out her life in her parents’ house. Her brothers killed too, often, and she the dutiful daughter. Like la Cousine, who died aged eighty or so in 1970, and left the family home to the grandson of her cousin, who is Clare’s old friend whom she dined with on Wednesday, which is how she came to live in the Séverac house and grow so fond of it. To write a novel about the town and its grim and glamorous stories, and la Cousine’s embroidered sheets, the millions of tiny stitches, white on white, a novel where a woman of another country and another generation can look and marvel at the skill, and the beauty. Reading these other lives like a primer from which she might learn. And who knows if la Cousine knocked back numerous proposals of marriage, or once had a fiancé who died, or lived her life unmarried because whoever he might have been was killed in the carnage of that war. The fact is that she didn’t ever marry, and never used her copious trousseau linen. But her heirs do, and value it. They’re not selling it to antique shops.
Clare is going to Biarritz tomorrow. She calls in at the linen shop again and tells madame who greets her like an old acquaintance and admires her French and asks her what she thinks of the country, what critical things does she have to say, she is sure that there must be many, she tells madame that indeed she will buy the sheets and when she gets back from Biarritz on Saturday at 5pm she will come and pick them up, in their parcel in a cheap red white and blue plastic zippered bag, ready to fly home to Australia on Sunday. Ready for Clare to choose her own symbolic meanings for them.
Already going into the shop full of the belongings of dead people and trying to decide whether or not it is a good idea to buy the sheets is part of that miraculous feverish time, one of its rituals. That will be one of their meanings.
Did you buy any clothes in Paris, people ask.
No. She bought old never-used linen sheets to make dining room curtains. And in London in a market in the churchyard of St James in Piccadilly, she bought Georgian silver teaspoons.
When she comes home after nearly two days of travelling she marvels at the light in her house. Of course it is summer, not deepest winter, though sometimes there the sun did shine with a fierce feeble wintry brilliance. But here: her house is surrounded by trees, a golden elm, a liquidambar, oaks, a mulberry, a catalpa, big solid northern hemisphere trees, and they don’t so much filter this bright high mistless antipodean sun as absorb it and give it back with a faintly green tremulous luminosity, so you perceive as you walk through the house that you are walking through palpable light. She gets out her sewing machine unused for years and sews her linen sheets into curtains. The drawn thread hem is along the bottom, the top folded over because it is too long, and when she sits at her sewing machine pinning this fold she sees that the top hem on one of the sheets is done with cream thread that looks a bit grubby and faintly frayed and part has been unpicked where it wasn’t straight and done again and you can see the line of holes where the stitches were, and it looks exactly like her own bad primary school sewing, the unpicking, the grubbiness, and this fills her with affection for the long dead Frenchwoman, or perhaps girl, who made them, and who could never have imagined what fate would be theirs. She sits in her dining room admiring the fall of the fine linen; she eats yoghurt from a silver spoon and feels its pitted thinned-out surface on her tongue.
Things are the sons of heaven . . .
The hands that used the 1828 spoon are generations over and over turned into dust. The green light gleams through sheets that have spent the better part of a century in lavender drawers, unused, and whether because of tragedy or plenty no one will ever know
. And here they are, the spoons, the sheets, alive and well on the other side of the world, being seen. Being gazed on and delighted in. There’s a woman looking at the frail blazing brilliance of the Georgian silver, at the sheeny polished coolness of the old linen, and she is thinking, these are beautiful. Thinking, Geoffrey would have enjoyed them.
And the words that are the daughters of earth, she has them too.
She is happy. For now. She knows about love.
The robust little rose bush called Love Potion has bloomed again. She picks several of its small crimson flowers and breathes in their dark scent, this scent that perfumes the blood. And fills it with desire. Smell the desire. And she does.
About the Author
Marion Halligan is an award-winning novelist, essayist and short-story writer. Her 1998 novel, The Golden Dress, was shortlisted in Australia for the Dublin IMPAC Prize, the Miles Franklin Award and the Nita B. Kibble Award. Her other novels are Self Possession, Spider Cup, Wishbone, and Lovers’ Knots which won the Age Book of the Year Award, the ACT Book of the Year Award, the 3M Talking Book of the Year Award and the inaugural Nita B. Kibble Award.
Halligan’s work has been widely anthologised and she has published four collections of shorts stories: The Living Hothouse, which won the Steele Rudd Award and the Braille Book of the Year, The Hanged Man in the Garden, The Worry Box and Collected Short Stories, as well as a book of stories and essays, Out of the Picture. Eat My Words and Cockles of the Heart are autobiographical narratives of travel and food. She has also written a children’s book, The Midwife’s Daughters, and Those Women Who Go To Hotels, a collaboration with Lucy Frost.
Halligan won the inaugural Geraldine Pascall Prize for critical writing in 1990, and has received a number of fellowships from the Literature Board of the Australia Council. In 1994 she won the Newton John Award, given to a graduate of Newcastle University, for creative and innovative work.
The Fog Garden Page 24