‘Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?’ Ben had asked, watching her preparations. The air shimmered as she savagely brushed her hair. Then she scooped the loose hairs from the brush, rolled them into a ball and threw them out the window.
That morning Cheung had brought the first white peach and bowed lower than ever.
‘What is knowledge if it is not applied?’ Sylvie had responded.
Then she had blown Ben a kiss and run down the stairs. Cheung turned and received her best professional smile.
Animals have a very good notion of space and the perils or implications of invading the space possessed by another. Humans are not so sensitive. They are far more likely to be cornered. The Dean moved away, and boldly Sylvie took the vacated space, which was too intimate, and therefore embarrassing for the professor, but admirable for her purpose.
‘This is not the first extension,’ Professor Woolf began firmly, but his neck had turned a promising red. And Sylvie had not backed away; if anything she was fractionally closer. One hand touched her hair.
‘I know,’ she said. ‘And it’s not a very good excuse. It’s just that he will keep bringing fruit and I will keep overeating. The consequences …’
He raised his hand to show that no elaboration was required.
‘I could bring you some,’ Sylvie offered. ‘This morning he brought a very exotic peach.’
Visions of a troop of apes feasting on ripe peaches hung between them.
‘Self-control. I wish you’d lecture on that,’ Sylvie said. ‘In the primate sense, naturally.’
The merest offering of flattery, a tiny branch held out with a single tender leaf at the end of it, and she knew she had won. The balled-up tissue was unnecessary.
Self-control, self-control, she thought to herself as she walked away along the corridor. Who needed self-control when there were such strategies?
Isobel was mistaken in thinking Madeleine had taken nothing from the Colettes. It was true she had closed Claudine and Claudine at School after a few chapters. But she had sensed the power of Monsieur Willy who had locked Colette in a room to write. Howard, after informing her of a fiancée in Connecticut, had returned to America. Madeleine was left with the age-old female balancing act: were lingering looks, embraces and lovemaking equal to the anguish of being removed from someone’s life? Madame Récamier, who had warned her about students, remarked on rings under her eyes and suggested a night cream.
Gradually weeks when Madeleine could barely summon up an interest in John Dos Passos or George Santayana passed and something stirred again. The plane trees, so brutal-looking in winter, like a comment on human behaviour, showed hints of green. Religiously she applied Madame’s under-eye cream. Soon she was clambering up the rolling ladder to fetch down a copy of William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity. She wiped dust from its top edge and ran her fingers down her skirt. By the time the trees were in full leaf and their clenched truncated knuckles invisible, Madeleine was herself again. But she had made a decision: in future she would love older men. There had been an imbalance between herself and Howard. Sometimes he had laughed at a gesture, even during lovemaking, and she had felt offended; she wanted her naïvety, if that was what it was, to be a charm.
The man into whose hands she pressed the Empson noted her trim ankles as she descended the ladder and the way her skirt lifted when she put her foot to the floor.
Madeleine had broken off her Alliance Française lessons when she was involved with Howard; now she resumed them. In the shop they spoke mostly English: it was where English and American novels were purchased and also a place to practise a few halting sentences after the traditional greetings. Madame Récamier could often be overheard discussing whether Joyce Carol Oates was too prolific or if Jack Kerouac was braver on paper than in real life.
Slowly, surrounded by novels and plays, poems and memoirs, and overlooked by serious-looking posters of Barthes and Hemingway, Bellow and Eudora Welty, Madeleine felt her confidence return. Madame Récamier protected her, though outwardly her manner was stern, even faintly disapproving. The next man Madeleine allowed to take her to dinner was scrutinised by both, and Madame gave a faint, barely perceptible nod as they set off.
‘You must always give the impression of a full life,’ Madame Récamier instructed her. ‘A woman or a young girl must always have an air of being engaged in many things. She should be faintly distracted, so when she looks at a man he sees her attention turn towards him and receives it as a reward.’ Privately she thought Madeleine’s life must be dreary, with little to entertain her outside the shop. She suggested visits to galleries and exhibitions. No matter if she was unaccompanied, she told Madeleine. An unaccompanied woman, if she walks confidently, will always attract notice. She should look as if she has just finished an entrancing novel whose mysteries continue long after the book is closed.
Madeleine attempted to carry out Madame’s instructions on the following Sunday. She sat, in one of the hard little chairs, through Mass at Notre Dame and watched bishops and priests and altar boys swinging thuribles. When she came out, doubting she looked engaged or mysterious, she glanced up and saw the gargoyles looking down, their expressions vicious and calculating in the grey air.
The next weekend she tackled the Louvre by herself. At first it was a struggle to keep her composure among the crowds, the queues that seemed to know where they were going; she had attached herself to the wrong one and was redirected. She felt herself blushing, and when her ticket was purchased she went to the sculpture court. Slowly a calm descended on her: the layout was spacious and the sculptures themselves with their super-human proportions, their stone or marble surfaces, made her think of time travel. Just that week she had had an interesting discussion about H.G. Wells with a strange bearded man who had informed her he read nothing written after 1946.
Madeleine stayed in the sculpture court for nearly an hour, until she almost felt she lived there, slept on one of the benches, bathed in a small pool and was surrounded by stone guardians whose blank eyes were kindly. She saw the beauty in clumsy heavy limbs and erotic embraces that became gentle when they were carved from stone.
When, with aching feet, she climbed the stairs to her room, Madeleine felt pleased with herself. She had visited not only the sculptures but the Mona Lisa. She had stood back as the crowd pressed forward, straining to see the mysterious smile. Then, in her new swing coat, Madeleine had turned away and threaded her way back against the tide of bodies. She drank an espresso in one of the cafés. No one had accosted her, though she had been noticed. In her handbag she had the notebook in which she had written the names of the sculptors she had particularly liked.
Two months later—even the Mona Lisa could not have predicted this—Madeleine was pregnant. Her period was late but she thought little of it. In Le Livre Bleu they were stocktaking and one afternoon she slipped from the rolling ladder and banged her hip against the desk. That evening a large black bruise was developing and her side ached. Still she could not be spared: there was hardly an inch of uncovered floor in the shop, and despite the Fermée sign on the door faces were pressed against the glass almost every hour of the day while the phone rang incessantly. But Madame Récamier was adamant. In three days the work was done and Madeleine climbed up the ladder, replacing the stock. When Le Livre Bleu reopened there would be canapés and glasses of champagne for the regular patrons.
Another month passed and Madeleine grew listless and dreamy; she felt she would go to sleep on her feet. She had forgotten the party she had gone to with Alain, one of the visiting book salesmen. He introduced each new season’s title with an amusing anecdote, usually something scandalous about the author. They had gone out for supper and then to a bar where Madeleine had tried absinthe for the first time. She leaned over the glass, watching the milky colour rise. In the street Alain took her arm. Soon they were climbing stairs, five flights. On each landing Madeleine leaned against him. She laughed and hiccupped. She put her hand over her mouth and
apologised. Then she laughed again. After that—there were other people in the apartment, it was not his—she remembered only a velvet eiderdown on an enormous bed and sinking into it as if she had found a nest.
Ben knew about some of Sylvie’s exploits before they were married. Cora, starting later, soon discovered more. Isobel’s role was known to a small circle; the absent mother, subject of wilder speculation, remained mysterious. The difference between son and mother was that Ben expected to find light in the unrevealed corners, Cora only an increase of darkness. It was like chiaroscuro: which was the more important, light under a chin revealing tender flesh or shade deepening where a candle flame could not reach? All the advantages lay with the light. Cora found her carefully aimed barbs thwarted by Ben’s determination to be charitable, and the charity included herself.
Isobel, in an earlier time and place, had attempted to hold the world, as it affected Sylvie, at arm’s length. She considered it the worst feature of grandmothering. That everything should be under her command: dangers foreseen and warded off, from the largest to the most minute, from kidnapping to a fall on steps. The years when Sylvie was a child and these dangers were small and manageable, spreading out from her child’s bed, were replaced by something resembling vistas and howling winds. An added burden was that her care must be hidden; her warnings, if she dared issue one, oblique. How simple childhood now seemed. Isobel’s own grandmother had talked of heartache replacing aching arms as the child grew. At the very time when Isobel’s mind wanted to relax, an intense concentration was required. Wasn’t physical tiredness better, even broken nights?
Sylvie was four when her mother returned to France to stay with the Lévêques. Isobel was forewarned about the tantrums that could occur at four-and-a-half, but Sylvie was remarkably subdued. The house her mother had rented had been sold the week before the decision was taken, almost as if the world was sending a message.
Isobel thought she might be able to relax now that Sylvie was in Ben’s care; she could not know the role Cora Taverner had taken up. And if she had, would she have intervened? If they found a common subject it could have been how they overlapped like intersecting circles or the sunlit and shadowed portions of the moon.
But Cora Taverner would not approach Isobel Lehmann. It had begun badly. She had not been invited to ride on the lake. Perhaps she had been expected to skulk in the trees. The very idea of a second boat and perhaps the oars colliding was ridiculous; she shuddered at the idea of polluted lake water on her shantung suit. Her daughter’s illness had arrived just in time.
Sylvie, oblivious, had handed in her overdue primate essay and, lightened by what she felt was her exposure of the weaknesses of the rigid patriarchal society, was walking through the park that bordered the university. It was Isobel who had propelled her there and it was the anthropologists, one dressed in a gorilla suit, others wearing bone necklaces, who had snagged her on Open Day as she walked from stall to stall. Some disciplines, like philosophy or English, threatened by falling rolls, had set nets to catch the unwary. The third-year male student in the gorilla suit had grabbed her arm, then knelt and bestowed a kiss on her palm. The memory still made her laugh. Doubts she had chosen the right subject had lasted for a week—the lecturers, too, wore primitive necklaces or amulets, but by then she had convinced herself that beginning at the beginning, like Alice in Wonderland, was a prerequisite to understanding anything. Her own emotions, no matter how much Isobel delved and dug into them, were primitive too and if she had been abandoned in a forest she would have had to make a nest from tree fronds or a palisade fort like the one in a glass case in Professor Woolf’s office. Now, walking easily through the park with its fountain and palm trees, she felt how far behind she had left the apes with their repressive society. The tedium of it must increase the importance of power: a fight over females or food would break up the day. She put aside images of allogrooming, the delicate sifting through fur with those surprising fingers, moments when even power was forgotten in the simple pleasure of being alive.
At the edge of the park where there were various routes around tree trunks and gnarled roots, steps or paths, Sylvie sat for a quarter of an hour on the grass. In front of her passed groups of students. Others also came to a halt and put down their satchels and backpacks. For some it was a chance to embrace or lie, full-length, pressed together. One couple nearby, of equal height, could have been mistaken for a fallen tree.
She was thinking of Ben. Even in the ape community there was a sub-set of males that did not conform. They were dreamier, content to be lieutenants. But such is ape and human nature, they took compensation elsewhere. Without threatening the hierarchy they offered prospects of peace and negotiation. Sylvie smiled to herself, thinking of apes responsible for town halls, opera houses and libraries. They would be good comforters.
She had met Ben Taverner on a day when she was sitting on a low stone wall that separated the university from the street. She was eating a chicken sandwich, half-inside and half-outside a brown paper bag. Behind her, in the driveway leading to the Biological Sciences Department, was a trailer piled high with dead white chickens. The breeze was fluttering some of the feathers. The way the carcasses were flung down caught her eye. Suddenly the connection was too much; she felt she might vomit. Hastily she shoved the half-sandwich back into the bag and crushed the top. Now she felt she really was going to be sick. She pressed one hand to her mouth and dropped the bag at her feet. She fumbled for a tissue. There were rhododendron bushes in the driveway; she might put her head in one of those. But from there she would be able to see the chickens.
Ben stopped in front of her and picked up the sandwich.
‘No,’ she cried. ‘Not that.’
Then she had turned her head, preparing to run, and she had bumped his shoulder. He put out his arm to steady her and the bile rose in her throat. She told herself it was nothing, it was clear as water, it was not green, there was no chicken in it. Somehow she choked it down, though the next heave could not be far off.
He should be back at the office. She simply looked too sick to leave. There were people passing by and roaring buses; someone in a white coat came and wheeled away the chickens. In a little recess he found a seat and a handy rubbish bin. He could see that she was suggestible: he hoped the bin seemed tactful, not an omen. Her eyes were running with tears.
‘Call me and tell me you’re all right,’ he said when the last minute he could spare arrived. He gave her his card.
How strange these encounters are. That afternoon as Ben Taverner bent over his drafting board and later worked on costings he felt something significant had happened. Normally he would have been on the other side of the street but someone had recommended a new place that sold Turkish kebabs. He had pressed two buzzers to get across, waiting at a traffic island for the lights to change. The man who had recommended the Turkish place had heavy garlic breath; he was half-tempted to turn back. And then there was the girl with the bag. He wondered what was in it and why she had suddenly, with panicked eyes, convulsively screwed it up. Her hair, not quite shoulder length, was lightly curled and tendrils from the centre parting floated away from her forehead. If she had not been agitated and her mouth covered by the bag he would have guessed she was normally serene.
Then she dropped the bag and her hand went up to her mouth. He guessed what was happening. A few quickened steps would take him past. Instead he bent and picked up the bag. Mustering the last of her strength, she had stopped herself. It was a kind of heroism, he thought, though anyone with medical knowledge—a friend who was a house surgeon had told him the body was basically a simple mechanism—would have disagreed.
The afternoon wore on and there was no phone call. On his way home he walked past the wall and down into the little sunken garden but there was nobody there. He even lifted the lid of the bin to see if there was a brown paper bag with a half-eaten chicken sandwich inside.
A week passed. Then on Friday as Ben came down the steps to th
e street—Meier Olson was on the first floor, most of its view blocked by a spreading alder tree—he noticed Sylvie standing beside the entrance. She was looking straight ahead, but as he came level she turned her head. In her hand she held a book, wrapped and tied with a red ribbon.
‘I thought you might like this,’ she said.
He smiled as he thought of the method in it: he could lean against the building and open it, but the ribbon suggested something more ceremonious. A wind was blowing and the paper and ribbon might fly off. All this without a direction being given: his respect for books increased. There was a workman’s café nearby, as neutral and downtrodden as the book might be special: he felt he was setting it a challenge.
They looked at one another over a Formica table scarred with cigarette burns. Sylvie sipped a glass of water, Ben stirred two twists of raw sugar into the unspeakable coffee. For some odd reason he felt angry. In an hour or two his stomach would ache.
Quickly he untied the ribbon and pushed it towards her, then he tore at the paper. He couldn’t imagine why he was so tense. What expression should he wear? The paper parted and he was looking at The Professor’s House by Willa Cather.
‘The professor’s house,’ he said aloud. He couldn’t think of anything to say.
‘It’s about a professor who doesn’t want to move house.’
Loving Sylvie Page 4