She tried not to think of Isobel and Sylvie. Her failure, after Sylvie’s birth, had been so spectacular the doctor had suggested a private nursing home. Madeleine knew he meant counselling and therapy, possibly a regimen of drugs. She had begged Isobel to let her stay at home. In those strange weeks she had slept in her old room and Sylvie had been brought to her for feeding, which had also failed. Isobel had attempted to explain that she should not grieve over this, and Madeleine had tried not to show her mother that she did not grieve at all.
Isobel had discussed the meeting with Cora Taverner with Kit; then she decided to let it rest. She loved turning something around and becoming the other person, the other party. Inventing stories for strangers was like flavouring food. The moment she met someone she began to delve beneath what she imagined was the surface, however carefully it was contrived. In Cora Taverner’s case she could imagine the layers as clothing. The undergarments would be superior; she could imagine Cora sitting on the edge of her bed to pull on sheer stockings, easing them up over her thighs, perhaps tugging at the calves to release more fabric. There was something warlike in the way women dressed to face one another. Finally there was the face. Isobel thought there were familiar mirrors in which, because they were befriended, her face looked back at her almost flirtatiously, whereas mirrors in powder rooms and dressing cubicles seemed inimical because they were not yet conquered.
As the weeks passed and there was no further contact, Isobel constructed a kind of biography. Ben was an only boy: it was natural that his mother’s feelings should be intense. Possessiveness, jealousy, rivalry. Cora was not a woman to veil her character no matter how carefully she dressed. A woman who would check a colour against her skin, since it might no longer flatter. Isobel could imagine a great row of creams and lotions as Cora sat in front of her mirror. Isobel considered it the most important part of dressing and one that Kit, who had often watched her from his station on the bed, could not understand. Once her face was in place it didn’t matter if a tradesman called and she ran to the front door in her dressing gown. Without it, both sides would register shock as if the woman had taken on the appearance of a ghost.
Sylvie had said something about Cora, and Isobel tried to remember what it was. There had been a second attempt at a meeting, with Ben present. His mother had declared her enmity in the way her fingers dug into Sylvie’s shoulders as she kissed her cheek, in the spilling of a few hot drops of coffee onto her lap as she sat in an uncomfortable chair, in the dry little almond cakes that made her gag after the first mouthful. But mostly—‘tank-like’ had been the word—it had been in the steady and unvarying gaze by which Sylvie was examined. It began at her shoes, travelled inch by inch up her bare legs to her waist, her breasts, her neck, until it reached her face. Sylvie wore practically no makeup: a little lipstick and a dab of concealer. Now she wished she had underlined her eyes to draw attention to them, like the eyes of a lemur.
The hour the visit had lasted had seemed like three, but eventually Sylvie and Ben were on their feet again, they were at the door, the clawing of strong fingers with sharp nails was at her shoulders. This time the breath was faintly almond-scented, with an older scent behind it. Ben noticed nothing: he kept using the word ‘Mother’ as if it was a private joke. He and Sylvie went down the path together and the gaze was still on Sylvie’s back. For a moment she was an archer in battle, braced for the arrow that might at any second strike; she felt her muscles scoop towards her spine in anticipation. For protection she shot out her hand and grasped Ben’s so tightly he winced. Then they went back to Meier Olson and, since it was late Sunday afternoon and no one was there, made love in the drafting room.
The moon was shining in the window when Sylvie woke at 3 a.m. Two large figs, Cheung’s offering from the previous day, were resting on the windowsill. At first Sylvie couldn’t think what they were; then she remembered Cheung had offered to demonstrate how to peel one and she had taken them from his hands as if she ate figs every day. The moon was passing through clouds, its great disc moving like a coin being pushed forwards and the clouds representing hesitancy, a kind of celestial courtesy. The strangest thoughts came to Sylvie when she woke at night. She thought of the buildings in the city, bathed in moonlight, and later, before dawn, brushed by the rising wind. Then would come the calming consoling sun. The calm that came then, whatever the day held, turned her thoughts to Isobel. Her grandmother reminded her of a guard, high on battlements, scanning the horizon for the first sign of a threat. The hardest thing to ward off must be sleep, though Sylvie herself was now wide awake.
She slid to the edge of the mattress and got up. Her hand reached out for one of the figs. But before she took it back to bed to peel and eat she looked out at the street. In the distance a neon sign was flashing. A few leaves were lifting in the rising breeze; the plane tree outside the window rustled as if it too had got out of bed and shivered. Its roots went down under a grille and then spread. Sylvie had read that roots could scent water and dive towards it. She held the fig in her hand and moved the pillow behind her back. Then she carefully peeled back its outer leaves to reveal the startling pink centre. By now her fingers were sticky so she wiped them on the edge of the sheet. A real feast required greediness and she felt she possessed that. And Isobel, sensing few friends at school, had sometimes prepared her a midnight feast. Tiny cubes of processed cheese and raisins. An iced biscuit and a small bottle of lemonade. If Sylvie woke in the night she reached out her hand for it, sat up and feasted in the dark.
‘You’re still a fool,’ Madame Récamier said to Madeleine when a burglary at Le Livre Bleu meant a thorough inventory for the insurers and Madeleine had offered to help. It had been five years since she had worked there as an assistant, trying her halting French on customers who all seemed to have read the same instruction: that a greeting must be made upon entering, otherwise good service could not be expected. Now that Madame was almost eighty, smaller and shorter of breath, she had dispensed with the careful manners she had rigorously maintained. Her opinions of writers had always been firm and freely shared; in return she mostly listened courteously to an alternative point of view.
Madeleine had walked past, almost as if her feet were leading her there, on a week when Hugo was in London and she could safely take a longer lunch hour. He trusted her and she would never take advantage but this week the management of her time was up to her. There was something different about Le Livre Bleu. The blue-black door was no longer propped open by a brick and the easel with the latest arrivals written in Madame’s distinctive spiky hand was not in its central place in the window. Vient d’arriver. Le nouveau Donald Barthelme. Nor was Madame in her customary elegant black, her hair pulled severely back and secured with a silver clasp in the shape of a quill, sighted through the bay window.
‘Alors,’ she said, giving Madeleine her quick severe look. ‘Your dress sense has improved.’
Madeleine said nothing. Madame’s ability to disconcert remained unchanged.
‘I don’t expect you’ve come back to gloat over the loss,’ Madame went on when the riposte she was hoping for—even a reference to her straggling hair would have been welcomed—was not forthcoming.
‘I heard about the burglary,’ Madeleine said, lowering her head. The bust of Sappho at the back of the shop had gone, along with the carved sandalwood box where poems were posted in her honour.
‘Stolen,’ said Madame, following her gaze. ‘Someone got in through the roof. The complete Larousse went as well.’
‘Can I help?’ Madeleine asked. She knew better than to commiserate. She imagined Sappho being rushed down the rue du Dragon in the early hours of the morning.
‘Do you have time? After attending that fatuous Englishman? Perhaps an hour or two in the evening.’
‘I can do better than that. I can give you all of Saturday.’
‘You always could, you poor fool. All of a day others put to better use. Well, the help of a fool is better than nothing.’
‘Is there a proverb for that?’ Madeleine asked, and there was an answering flicker in Madame’s eyes.
‘I might make something of you—endeavour to, it’s perilously late—while we count the rest of the American fiction.’
On Saturday Madeleine presented herself. The door was ajar, the brick in place, but there was no sign of Madame Récamier. Madeleine squeezed past the boxes that took up most of the floor space and the half-emptied shelves. Some sections—History, Biography, Atlases—were severely depleted and Le Livre Bleu looked like a person with a wasting disease. In places the bare walls showed through, flaking and dabbed with many colours. Then a small sound came from the back room with its faux Bayeux tapestry curtain, the section in which Harold receives the arrow in his eye. Gently Madeleine pulled the curtain aside. Madame Récamier was sitting with her head in her hands, a tisane faintly steaming in front of her.
In a second Madame was on her feet, straightening her black dress.
‘Lock the door,’ she snapped.
For the first hour they worked in silence. There were still boxes to unpack, since deliveries had not ceased. When Madame’s back was turned Madeleine lifted some of the new books to her nose and sniffed the pages. At midday Madame disappeared into the back room and the smell of coffee drifted over the scents of dust and old plaster, the anguish of stolen words.
‘Well,’ began Madame, setting her cup down on a chair on which elderly gentlemen had sat fingering the pages of Proust or Thoreau or Conrad. ‘What do you imagine is to become of you? Haven’t you learnt anything from working in a bookshop, from me?’
Madame had sent many such questions towards Madeleine in the years they had worked together. Madeleine had been goaded and chided but her character had remained placid, Anglo-Saxon dull. The block-headed English. To defend herself Madeleine had thought of women working in fields or washing clothes in streams, kneading bread. Their French equivalents would have been very different. No stodgy food or brutish tumbles in ditches with bits of straw sticking to clothes or hair. Yet she could see that books, carefully and lovingly chosen, as if each single book was a companion to another, and an equal, was Madame’s equivalent to the treasure box that had set her dreaming as a child.
‘I should have taken you in hand,’ Madame Récamier was saying. Madeleine had missed part of her speech. ‘A creature so naïve, so willing to receive someone else’s opinion as a judgement from on high, a creature of so little spirit. And stubborn, that’s the worst of it. What good is literature if the heart is not open? If the heart cannot learn.’
By mid-afternoon Madame had analysed and dismissed the type of Englishman represented by Hugo Brudenell-Bruce—perverse, indolent, like a fat white mushroom growing in the dark—and Madeleine’s attraction for working for one: more naïvety, inertia. Another cup of coffee was produced and Madeleine’s headache increased. Luckily Madame caught the pain behind the eyes, the way Madeleine’s forehead wrinkled, and the lecture on men and how to behave towards them was curtailed. Madeleine must visit her once a week for lessons. Madeleine had just enough perception left to realise it was an honour and she had never been inside Madame’s home.
The shutters were closed and a taxi ordered. At the last moment a slim novel was pressed into her hands. The Optimist’s Daughter by Eudora Welty, one of the few American novelists of whom Madame Récamier genuinely approved.
Sylvie and Ben lay side by side, listening to the sounds of Cheung unpacking boxes. The shop was closed and the Sorry, We are Closed sign swung on the door handle while to Cheung Yes, We are Open acted like a goad. His grandparents had instilled in him that every cent was worth having. His grandfather had been serving in the shop the day he died; a tight pain had gripped his chest and there was just time to push himself through the bead curtain and fall down, still clutching the coins he was about to return to the customer. Cheung would not follow his grandparents in their desire for money. He polished a Pacific Rose apple slowly and held its shiny skin against his cheek. In the mirror he could see his face, the apple glowing alongside. And he listened for the sounds of Sylvie and Ben.
They must be lying down, he thought. Sometimes they went to bed at 8 p.m. to catch up for all the nights they were out, the nights when Sylvie drank too many cocktails and Ben too many whiskies and chasers. When they climbed the stairs giggling, almost falling against the walls. Once they had stopped halfway up and made love, propped against the wall. ‘Where’s Cheung?’ Sylvie had whispered. He had turned out the light in the shop barely a second before he heard their key at the door and he, too, was pressed against the wall between the eggplant and the bok choy. ‘They make love in China,’ Ben had replied, and in the dark Cheung grinned. A little groan—she was curiously silent, this Sylvie—drifted down the stairs and a long groaning sigh from Ben. Then they must have climbed the remaining stairs, dishevelled and out of breath, and fallen through the door. Cheung stayed silently in the shop for quarter of an hour before he let himself out. The bell tinkled softly but Sylvie was filling the jug for tea and Ben was sitting on the toilet, wondering if he would have to put his head in it. He contemplated sticking two fingers down his throat, something he had never tried. Then he remembered the pleasure they had taken on the stairs and thought being sick would be an insult to Sylvie. He kept very still for ten minutes and the clammy sweat dried on his brow.
Now they were side by side on their mattress on the floor, their cups beside them. Hot sugary tea, what couldn’t it solve? Or if not exactly solve, ease with its wonderful syrupy sweetness. The back of Ben’s throat was warm and he ran his tongue over his top teeth to taste the sugar again. Under the cover his hand reached for Sylvie’s but it was tucked into her armpit. She had turned on her side, her knees pulled up. So he placed it on her hip instead, marvelling at flesh and bone and how they were entwined. The flesh held the bone and would have no shape without it. Something to do with purpose. He imagined the hip bone rose and fell under his hand. But the thought was too complicated; he concentrated on the sugar taste instead and fell asleep.
Isobel, lying beside Kit, was also awake but it was a wakefulness that would last at least another hour. Something—a sound, a thought from the day that was over—had woken her and now each passing moment would wake her further as she examined it. The light in the bedroom was dark and heavy, velvety. Moving through it would be like swimming in a cold lake. The difference between sea water and lake water had impressed itself on her mind when she was a child. She and her brother had swum in a lake on a private property in the early morning or late afternoon. Once her brother had strapped a candle onto a wide-brimmed stockman’s hat and swum ahead of her. The flame had flickered and at the lake’s edge candlelight had run up the blades of flax. But that was not what had woken Isobel: siblings often try to provide light for one another, however misguided. She was thinking of a quality, an attitude, so deeply embedded in herself it could no longer be lifted out, surgically or by any other method. And it was to do with a book.
Kit, beside her, stirred and flung out an arm towards the edge of the mattress. She knew his palm would be open, like a cup. The palm that was most prized by cannibals because it shrivelled up when cooked, like crackling. Once she had picked this palm up while he slept on, and kissed it.
The book. Think of the book. And then, out of the dark, it came to her. It was one of the Milly-Molly-Mandy stories. How Isobel had disliked Milly-Molly-Mandy and her family. How stifling, even though she was very young—not more than five—when it had been given to her. She had bridled and shivered at the perfect complacent family with their beady self-satisfied eyes. And at Milly-Molly-Mandy’s straight black hair. How ominous then that one of the stories, about a birthday party, had struck as surely into her heart as a surgically aimed dagger. Milly-Molly-Mandy had wanted something no one else at the party had wanted: a rabbit with a crooked eye, a lop ear. She had wanted it so much she had won the fairy doll. But because she had been carefully raised she had been able to exchange it
: the spoilt child who cried over the doll got first prize and Milly-Molly-Mandy got her ruined, peculiar, underloved one. And ever after …
But here Isobel turned on her side and pressed her spine against Kit. Their two spines moved closer, as if bone was the instigator and not flesh.
That wretched book, she thought. But it was the attitude she blamed, and something that was receptive in her. For surely, for some kind of wound, we are prepared? There is something hollowed out and waiting? She could not have been so receptive for no reason.
She loved what others didn’t. Things aslant and odd, glimpsed from the corner of her eye. A design on the verge of failing, a beauty plucked from ugliness. The story had sunk in, into soil as rich as a well-mulched garden; her chest must have been hollowed out like her brother’s catcher’s mitt. And there had been another book as well. Isobel could feel her eyes closing and she pulled herself up a little in the bed. Kit had turned too and was now lying on his back: his closed eyelids gave his face the appearance of a stone effigy. The other book had no title: it was a comic, a small compact comic of adventures in a girls’ school. It involved secret societies and crypts, figures in capes and hoods that were thrown back as they sat around a long table lit by candles. And a solitary girl, the head girl, who rescued a girl from a pond. A mysterious silent girl whose background was unknown. Isobel had fallen for her too, far more than for the aslant thing, the damaged toy.
Loving Sylvie Page 6