On the day of the funeral, which occurs exactly a month after the hair cutting—so little time to feel the air on her neck—at least twenty rows in the nave are filled with writers and poets, patrons of Le Livre Bleu. People bob up and down and greet one another; some cross the aisle to lay a hand on a shoulder in a dark suit. There are more hats than Madeleine has seen in one place: hats with veils and yards of tulle, lifted from ancient dusty hat boxes. The heavy perfumes worn by the women rise and compete with incense and waxed parquet.
Afterwards Madeleine stops and reads some of the inscriptions on the wreaths. To Héloïse Gabrielle Récamier. An inestimable loss. To Madame, in memory of our long friendship. On a card attached to a simple posy someone has scrawled Vive le livre! Later, at the wake, someone mentions that it was Madame Récamier who had introduced him to Proust in an English translation and had supervised him, when she feared his revolve might weaken, through the entire twelve volumes.
Le Livre Bleu is filled to bursting. Bodies are squeezed together on the narrow stairs and under them; they lean against shelves and ascend the book ladder. As Madeleine watches, a man lowers his face towards a woman who is stretched out with her feet braced against the wall, and they kiss. The lawyer, a woman almost as formidable as Madame, stands up to make an announcement. ‘It is Madame Récamier’s wish, before the will is read, that each person at her wake should take a book as a keepsake. But I will need an inventory and your names.’ Champagne is passed around and before anyone can choose a book there is a toast. Swiftly some move towards a favourite book, one partially read as they stood thumbing its pages and wearing a pensive look as if calculating the week’s budget.
But Madeleine will choose nothing. When Le Livre Bleu is empty except for one very drunk poet and a few hangers-on she asks the lawyer if she can take the jar of yellow pencils, the jar that is red and black with the drawing of a bull.
Only once in her long marriage to Kit had Isobel to deal with infidelity. That it was she who had been unfaithful still shocked her. Since she had read about the faithfulness of swans as a child, she had appropriated that character for herself: it went without saying that she would be faithful to Kit. And Kit would be faithful to her. Years after it was over—and it was over within days—Isobel regretted the word could no longer be claimed by her. A blond word, like pale straight hair brushed until each strand glowed, a straight-spined word, a word without guile. She knew Kit was faithful by his occasional attempts at flirting with her friends, his admitting he ogled young women, his needing her to know that he loved risqué jokes.
‘If I hadn’t married you,’ he would say, with just a hint of aggression, ‘I might have been attracted to Naomi.’
‘I think Naomi might have been attracted to you too,’ Isobel replied, and her security ruffled him further.
At the next dinner party—a few of the group were having babies and Isobel was having fertility tests—she observed Naomi and thought if she was tempted to press a thigh or lay her hand on a trouser leg it would not be Kit’s. Still she would encourage him in his illusion, for no man likes to be considered safe.
How strange then that she should fall for Paul Esser in the months after Madeleine was born, when her figure was soft and she was dazed by sleeplessness. Madeleine hardly slept at all and the family doctor recommended a clinic for a month. At Cecchetti House the babies were housed in a separate wing; the ratio of nurses to babies was high. At first the mothers saw their babies only at feeding times, with a nurse in attendance. One of Isobel’s friends had been the first to insist on keeping her baby with her at a public hospital: she was regarded as a great oddity. But in the large Edwardian house with its lush lawns and flowerbeds, gravel walks and strategically placed green benches, an earlier period was evoked. First the mothers were to be rested and restored with a sound diet. Isobel found the ideas archaic. Part of her longed to be in the chaos again and have Kit hire someone, though they could hardly afford it. The face that confronted her in the mirror each morning had the wild look of Lady Macbeth in the scene just before the hand-washing. She liked the idea of near-collapse and the slow birth of coping. She would have been rewarded by that. Madeleine would sleep a quarter hour longer; Isobel’s thoughts would quieten; and between them a thin thread would be woven and would hold.
At Cecchetti House, after Madeleine had been fed and returned to the nursery, Isobel walked in the grounds. Walking was suggested but not mandatory; there was also a library and a conservatory. Sometimes she tried to imagine the founder. Perhaps a frustrated Florence Nightingale with an interest in paediatrics. Someone who believed in clear colours and light and air. A rationalist, Isobel decided, as she walked towards the bench she had marked for her particular use. There was a man sitting on it and as she came closer she realised it was one of the staff, the resident specialist, Dr Esser. She herself felt far from rational and she was determined to reclaim her place. The garden sloped away—that too had been attended to, and was possibly an imitation of one of the great gardens, of someone like Gertrude Jekyll, though on a smaller scale. Dr Esser turned his head and gave her a mock grin. Husbands were allowed only on weekends: she and Kit had managed just a few long kisses.
‘You’re on my seat,’ Isobel said. She felt there was nothing to be lost by bluntness.
‘Do you want me to move?’ he asked. He was edging along, anticipating her.
‘Sorry,’ Isobel said. There was no institution in the world, no academy with white-uniformed nurses, that could prevent women from saying sorry. Skin grafts would be required, sessions of hypnotism, possibly some kind of deep immersion bathing. And then, when the lid was raised, wouldn’t that still be the first word?
Now she sat on her half of the bench, regretting it was only half, regretting that the view must be shared and that Dr Esser very likely had his own interpretation of everything, honed over years of being in residence.
‘How long have you been at Cecchetti?’ she asked.
‘Two years,’ he said. ‘But it won’t be forever.’
‘I imagine it’s well paid,’ she said. Where had this strange bluntness come from? Something to do with giving birth? Everything she said sounded not only blunt but bitter. Then she looked at his face and realised he knew that young mothers, despite husbands who kissed them in the shrubbery or laid a proprietorial hand on a hip, were rudderless. That morning Kit had lifted Madeleine from her cot with the rubber castors and Isobel had thought the little figure in its gown was rising from water, and expected to see drops falling on the floor.
Already, in the last weeks before her daughter was born, Isobel had bought the Colette novels. She imagined her child turning her eyes towards them while she was still in her crib. Literature instead of floating shapes or a little carousel that turned in the breeze. If the child had been a boy, Isobel would simply have moved them to the bookcase in the hall. But the old gynaecologist she had gone to had thrown a coin into the air, caught it on his palm, and said, triumphantly, ‘Heads for a girl.’ She had lain on her back on the carpet with a long hair from her head looped through her wedding band and watched it swing in a circle. She had stood in front of the long hall mirror and gazed at her belly. Was she carrying high or low? She thought she was egg-shaped; the illustrations in the magazine she was consulting were unclear. And now, at Cecchetti House, something clear and controlled was opening in front of her, even if her walks were interrupted by Dr Esser who seemed to have decided one half of the bench was his.
Their following conversations were gentler. ‘It’s harder,’ he said, ‘when women are successful in another field.’ He looked sideways at Isobel as he spoke, as if gauging her independence.
She had been advised by her supervisor to study for an MA in Art History. The same week she had known she was pregnant. Kit was pleased: she had the advantage of him and could observe his reaction. He had wrapped his arms around her and lifted her off her feet. Then he had set her down gently and apologised, and she had laughed. Whatever was happenin
g inside her body was so protected nothing could disturb it, not gin, not hot baths nor falling downstairs. She thought of the first grain of sand working its way under the shell of the unsuspecting oyster. At dinner that night Kit had watched what she ate. And now this man beside her was talking of independence as if it was something women plucked off a shelf.
She got up from the seat and walked. If he wanted an example of independence he could have it. In two hours it would be time for another feed. Already Madeleine was sleeping better; a routine was being established. It’s all to do with high ceilings, she thought, as she reached the bottom of the slope and took a path that skirted a lake. Perhaps she could mention that tomorrow if Dr Esser came again. The height of a ceiling was a determinant of mood. Of happiness and clear thinking, of the love of music, of grace.
Four weeks and Isobel and Madeleine were home. Outwardly Cecchetti House had worked its spell—there were determined people behind it, for whom young women with babies were no match. Madeleine slept in a pattern that had emerged out of the broken nights: that at least held. But Isobel herself came home with a shame that would never leave her. She had slept with Dr Esser. She sat in the window seat and clenched her fists and cried. By the time Kit returned from his office everything was normal again. Each day she began again: Madeleine slept, not because of Isobel’s attentive following of rules, not because of her competence, which Kit congratulated her on, but because Madeleine likely saw it as indifference and hence crying would be useless. Later Isobel would learn she was not the only woman seduced at Cecchetti House.
She thought back to their first exchange, ‘You’re on my seat,’ ‘Do you want me to move?’ as if the challenge was in those few words and it had been issued by her. She was too inexperienced to see the range of emotion he could exhibit, but she remembered how he looked at her face, and eventually she had been emboldened to look back at him. One day, when the corridor was empty, he had seized her hand and pulled her into the linen store. ‘These have just arrived,’ he said, pulling down a tiny lambskin in a cellophane wrapper. ‘You should take one and try it.’ Then, before she knew it, he was kissing her, drawing her closer and closer. Her body was not fully healed after the birth: was that something he understood, that her resistance would be low? She had walked back along the corridor clutching the little lambskin underlay, trying to control her face. She met no one, which seemed a great mercy. She combed her hair and splashed her face in the hand basin. A bed vacated that morning was tightly made and a suitcase sat beside it. Under the shower Isobel scrubbed herself pink. She allowed herself to cry while the water poured over her head and shoulders. If she could have taken out her eyes she would have washed them too, and her tongue.
In half an hour a discreet chime would sound to summon anyone who might be in the garden. Madeleine would be brought to her in the arms of a nurse, lightly swaddled, tiny hands reaching for the neck of her gown or tentatively touching her cheek. Isobel looked into her daughter’s eyes for a long time, trying to read an expression or even a judgement. But the surface was clear, unclouded, and the iris simply expanded to the light.
‘I see you have one of the lambskins,’ the nurse remarked, and Isobel tried to read something into that.
Madame Récamier’s will was read and Madeleine received a jet necklace and matching earrings. In the lawyer’s office she noticed a disapproving glance from one of Madame’s cousins. She wondered if she should offer the necklace to her, then decided against it. The firmness of Madame’s judgements was legendary. Besides, the will was recent, dated from the previous month. There was also a letter, written in English, in case the subtleties of French should be lost on her, as they frequently were in Le Livre Bleu. Madeleine put it in her handbag and as she walked along the rue de Seine she removed the little veil she had pinned in her hair. She shook the pins free from the French twist and rubbed the back of her neck with her fingers. A few people turned their heads to look, for her skin was very fair and sunlight fell on her hair, which was the colour of bleached grass. She expected the letter to be one last lecture or a distilled warning. Maybe Madame Récamier had reached a final summary.
The letter, when she had made a cup of tea and sat down at her table by the window, contained a good many French phrases, as if Madame’s last reading had been the great Russians. Though she had worked for Madame for years, Madeleine had no idea whether she was truly a great reader or not. The impression was so firmly established it was unthinkable to question it. Once Madame had swooped on the latest Thomas Pynchon, overturning Madeleine’s newly decorated window to make a tower of Gravity’s Rainbow. Madeleine had simply bowed to her judgement, allowed herself to be guided. Now, with the letter in front of her, Madeleine entertained the idea of not opening it at all, of allowing it to become lost. Then she turned it over and saw that Madame had written on the flap, in a hand that still strove to be firm, a tiny Adieu.
Chère Madeleine, it began. Though I did not often call you that over the years I became fond of you and your resistance to my lectures. We were different races, different temperaments. I was too busy training you to admire. You will go on being soft and I hope that will bring you rewards for in many quarters it is admired.
Madeleine put the letter down and got up to fetch her Larousse. She was not quite sure of the meaning of douce. All the afternoons she had worked for Madame seemed to have come back and were pressing into the room. Particularly the late summer afternoons when the rue du Dragon was bathed in a last stinging light and Madame was at her most snappish. Usually it was occasioned by someone leaving a pile of books on the floor and purchasing nothing. Then Madeleine, without being asked, would make tea and bring it on a tray: the teapot, Madame’s cup with the gold rim and full-blown roses on the sides, a Marie biscuit.
Now, with the dictionary in front of her and the various meanings of douce investigated, she read on. Each word felt like lead because Madame’s conversation was often leavened by spite.
I have no one to leave my last words to … the letter continued, and Madeleine knew she was expected to imagine Madame Récamier on her sickbed, heroically writing, husbanding her energy, which was to be felt as a compliment. She would have gone on writing if someone was visiting, forcing them to sit by her bed, fiddling while her pen was poised over a word. She was cruel, Madeleine thought, but I could never admit it. That was my English stupidity, wanting to see the best. My bland skin, my expression that infuriated and in which she saw traces of pleading. But then I would bring her tea which she would grudgingly accept and the mood would pass. I loved her, Madeleine realised, but she was careful to push me away … and they are not very fine words, the letter continued. No one can know another person though there will be insights, glimpses, what artists call ‘epiphanies’, though they will never be enough. Do not trust them, little English rose. There are odd protections in being naïve but you must not depend on them. My lawyer is sitting beside the bed as I write this. How she squirms and then resumes her proper expression. I simply send you love and my black jet necklace as a safeguard.
The signature was spiky and scrawled—perhaps the lawyer had sighed or risen to her feet. Madeleine got up and put the Larousse back on its bookshelf. Then she took it down again and inserted Madame’s letter at the word she had looked up: sweet.
Sylvie opened the door of the flat and two peaches were nestled in a box of straw. Something must be said to Cheung. Yesterday’s two green bananas were still on the windowsill. One day Sylvie expected an itemised bill. Or perhaps they would quarrel and insults like blood oranges would be flung. But not today: today she cradled the two peaches that had rested in the shade of the closed door behind which Cheung might have heard two breathing bodies, twisting in the sheets, turning towards one another and then away, for there was a subconscious text in the way the body made its feelings known.
Sylvie was discovering that marriage had a way of revealing the body that she had not anticipated. The nights were hot but the open window brought some re
lief as well as early morning traffic. Ben slept on his back, hardly moving once sleep claimed him. If he went through the cycles of sleep he gave no sign; there was no tossing, no rising through the shallows after a disturbing dream. A strange dream had come to Sylvie the night before. She was bodiless, a shape like Edvard Munch’s The Scream except the shape was ectoplasm and no agony was involved. In her dream she thought it was a soul. The soul was rushing through a great warehouse, gathering up organs: a heart, lungs, spleen, kidneys. Soon it had the supplies it needed. It chose a rope of intestines which it looped over an arm. As it flew it inserted the organs into their proper places. Sylvie woke in a sweat and reached out her right hand to touch Ben’s side where his left kidney would be.
Then she lay looking at the ceiling, at the plasterwork and a cobweb attached to the light fitting. The noises of the street were beginning: footsteps, weaving and unsteady, a few bars of a song and then a crash as someone collided with a rubbish bin. Soon the sanitation truck would come and all the street’s detritus, like sweat on human skin, would be harried into the drains.
To avoid thinking of the dream which had something maniacal and gleeful about it, Sylvie thought of Léa, the courtesan in Chéri. Léa had kept a powder puff under the pillow to restore her morning appearance for a lover. Sylvie slid her hand under her pillow and found a toffee wrapping. Then she slipped out of bed and went to the window to look out. A few lights were burning; in the flat opposite a woman was cradling a baby, rocking backwards and forwards like a boxer. Sylvie picked up a plum and began to eat it. She thought she might keep a supply of soft-centred peppermints under her pillow: the whole point of Léa was secrecy.
Loving Sylvie Page 8