Loving Sylvie

by Elizabeth Smither

  She must have an independent life but somehow the initiative was moving away from her. Perhaps that was the meaning of her dream. Start again, shop again for a heart and lungs, choose the choicest entrails, glistening and shiny. Or say, This is just a sojourn. Get in supplies but don’t take anything too seriously.

  The light in the room was changing. At first it could hardly be perceived; it existed in imagination only, as an idea. Then, like snow, stroke by stroke building, the darkness thinned, became anaemic, the thick strokes were replaced by thin.

  For breakfast Sylvie ate a banana, a nectarine and a few green grapes. Before she left she made the bed and closed the windows that let such refreshing air into the flat at night. No one could climb onto the roof above the shops without being observed, but she did not care to take the risk. Cheung came and went during the day and often stood in the doorway in his green apron which usually had a few damp patches from spraying the vegetables. Sometimes, descending the stairs, Sylvie felt like Eurydice going down to the underworld with its earth walls and no windows. There were three jobs to be juggled: four hours of tutorials under the supervision of Professor Woolf; two evenings of waitressing at Living Food, a student hangout where the food was copious and cheap; and two hours of half-hour sessions of walking his Cairn terrier for Mr Arlington, an elderly man whose stratagems for keeping Sylvie talking were beginning to pall. The terrier, Lovejoy, was as delighted as Mr Arlington to see her. Each time she braced herself to utter a farewell speech, he pressed another banknote into her hand.

  At 10 a.m. she was sitting in a seminar room in the Anthropology Department furnished with a long narrow table that could be augmented to form two wings. Today that would be unnecessary: only five students, three female and two male, had showed up. Sylvie kept the door propped open for a further five minutes while she marked the attendance register. A few large textbooks and folders were on the table, but nothing could turn the room into The Royal Anthropological Institute where breathless discussions were had about the discovery of a new species or a primitive tribe. A few cabinets of butterflies would help, Sylvie thought, getting up to open a window and look down on the motley students passing in the quad. The students themselves seemed to have discovered nothing and were willing only to show they could regurgitate pre-digested food. A large number of coloured markers were sticking out of one of the set texts as if, by themselves, they were enough to warrant a grade.

  Nor, when the door was closed, was there any keenness to debate a point. Sylvie would begin something—a statement, a supposition, a quote from a famous anthropologist about his work in the field—and ten eyes looked back at her wonderingly, as if the room was a pen into which someone had thrown an unknown food. Which one would venture to pick it up or tear off a piece? Not curiosity but an awareness of traps seemed to be the dominant emotion. Yet surely even the great primates, between bed-making, grooming one another’s coats, feeding and sleeping, had time to gaze at a distant hill or to examine a flower?

  ‘How do you get to be a tutor?’ one of the girls asked when the quote from Claude Lévi-Strauss had fallen flat and been answered mainly by Sylvie.

  ‘You have to show initiative and a deep interest in the subject,’ she replied, knowing the reply was false. Ambition and toadying were better answers. ‘Tutorials can be a way of gauging that.’

  Instantly five bodies straightened themselves and the owner of the stickered book searched his mind for a question.

  The hour soon passed. The door was opened again and another, larger group of students hovered. I can hardly sail out with my nose in the air, Sylvie thought. Nonetheless that is what she did, as if she truly had status and was rising in the hierarchy. Then she clattered down the stairs and out into the sunlight. She skirted the building and walked through a shaded garden with the same low stone walls as the quad. Tired-looking hydrangeas and rhododendrons were growing there. She crossed the road and walked around one side of the floral clock. At the fountain her feet slowed and she sat on a green bench, easing her back against the slats. The mouths of the spouting fishes which seemed to hold little tin whistles reminded her of Isobel and her insistence, after Sylvie had gone to live with her, on water play and long baths. On summer weekends the garden hose had been left running and Isobel had applauded the holes Sylvie dug and filled with water, the dams she made with stones and pieces of wood. Isobel who was elegant had encouraged the hesitant and withdrawn Sylvie not only to muddy her hands and knees and have dirt oozing between her toes but also to wipe her hands on her dress or run her fingers through her hair. Sylvie could still remember her surprise when she first tried it: the long marks on the bodice and skirt of her cotton dress, her palm pressed against one cheek and then the other so later in the mirror she could see the drying warpaint. Isobel left her to her own devices but she came out to admire the terraces in which Sylvie had planted little twigs with their leaves on to make an avenue. Already the bath would have been run and the big jar of bath salts awaited.

  What was Isobel attempting to wash off, Sylvie wondered as she gazed into the fountain, seeking for a centre or a focus. But the nature of fountains was circular, like something chasing its own tail: the source of the water, the mechanics, were lost like Sylvie’s almost-overflowing bath. As much time as had been spent in the mud was spent in the water and the ochre stripes on her cheeks were replaced by pink. Probably Isobel didn’t know what she was doing either, Sylvie decided. Yet like all primitive creatures she had sought order, a balance, and when one was required a counter-balance.

  Twenty minutes had passed by the fountain before Sylvie got up and turned her face towards the city. She hurried under the tall palms that gave an impression of a Victorian drawing room: elephants’ feet and embossed wallpaper and dried flowers under glass domes. And yet the sky above the palms was light and lively: little cumulus clouds were moving briskly; only the students, lolling on the grass, seemed sluggish. I must not imagine too much, Sylvie thought, as she ran swiftly down one of the flights of steps to the street below. Something was happening in her marriage but she couldn’t tell what it was.

  Madeleine’s final Englishman—Madame Récamier had been right, a failed English rose deserved an Englishman—had decided they might settle in Australia. He had Melbourne in mind: a city of manageable size that could be explored and the exploration would come to an end. He assured Madeleine that the bookshops were excellent; it was what she would miss most. Freddy Rice was ready to settle down, and he had chosen Madeleine, surmising, though she was twenty years his junior, that she too had reached that stage of failure that made settling desirable. Freddy had had his disappointments: a passionate first marriage that had collapsed as rapidly as the soaring attraction that had begun it; two more had failed in slower tempo; a long period of bachelorhood with a mistress.

  They were driving on the Périphérique, and Paris seemed to Freddy like a beautiful scarf pulled through a ring. The ring road kept everything undesirable, everything a tourist might not wish to see, out. He knew this was an oversimplification: there were graffiti-ridden arrondissements and groups of scowling youths even within the ring. Soon the Daimler was racing towards a turnpike and there was a curious sense of free-for-all. Only the disappointed should marry, he thought, looking sideways at Madeleine’s face. Her chin was softening and soon the sides of her jaw would have two extra columns of flesh.

  Two hours later they had arrived at Civray-de-Touraine where Freddy had converted a cluster of barns and outbuildings into a weekend retreat. A large outdoor table was overshadowed by an ancient mulberry tree. The outbuildings had long ago been let to local artists: a landscape painter who worked clumsily with a palette knife, and a potter whose pots and plates were glazed blue. The flag of Lorraine fluttered over the largest of the barns which was used as a sleepout.

  ‘Don’t cook anything,’ he said to Madeleine as he pulled the car in beside the garage which, despite his leaving instructions with the local builder, still hadn’t been fixed. ‘
A boiled egg will do.’

  ‘Toast soldiers?’ Madeleine said, turning her head.

  ‘How well you understand me,’ he said. ‘Though I could change the order to poached.’

  On this they were in perfect accord: a tiring or overwrought day did not require a stupendous culinary effort at the end of it.

  ‘The Empire will not fall,’ Freddy said as they came into the kitchen, in the dim light made by the shutters. ‘Neither the French nor the English, if three courses are not served on a white tablecloth.’

  That evening, under the spreading mulberry, Madeleine lit a citronella candle and they ate poached eggs (the order was countermanded) and drank a glass of cabernet franc. A grainy honey was spread on the thick slices of wholemeal toast before the eggs were placed there, wrapped in their cowls like monks. ‘The best of both worlds,’ Freddy said, raising his glass and with his other hand lightly touching her hair. He liked that in certain lights the fine lines on Madeleine’s skin were visible. The expanses of cheek were still smooth and the appearance of youthfulness would last for a few years yet. A great deal could be forgiven if the cheeks stayed smooth.

  They slept in modest single beds that reminded him of his childhood furniture. The room had nothing else except a circular rag rug, a dresser, a chair and a trunk. Freddy folded his hands over his stomach and thought he could feel the goodness of the eggs laid by contented hens.

  The following evening they walked by the placid river. Occasionally a skiff passed and there were waves and shouted greetings. They took a glass of wine with the artist who brought out his latest canvases—the palette knife still in evidence—and Madeleine wondered at the brutality of the technique. In the dark they strolled through the garden. A new flower bed had been dug by the gardener who would be coming the next morning to consult. There would be elaborate enquiries about family and health, the journey, ending with an inspection in which Freddy trailed behind, cursing that he knew the names of so few plants and knowing that the wily Raoul knew this and was concealing it under extreme politeness. ‘Just plant whatever you please,’ he wanted to say, but the rift his impatience would cause would mean a session twice as long as an apology. As for meals, why should he not eat when he pleased, gorge himself with an animal appetite one day and a mouse’s (highly unlikely) the next. In Madeleine he had recognised a similar indolence. He would wake when he pleased and wear his dressing gown to breakfast.

  In the morning Freddy decided he could not face Raoul and told Madeleine to say he was indisposed. Sympathetic noises were made; Raoul preferred Madame, as he privately called her, for he had guessed which way the wind was blowing.

  Now she walked beside him, agreeing that the herb bed needed refreshing or that the lime planted by Monsieur was in the wrong place. Raoul considered plants were connected to the person who planted them, indicating their character which might otherwise be hidden. He suspected Freddy had no sense of proportion and would prefer an English sweep despite the smallness of the section. Instead everything must be in scale: drifts of dried leaves against a wall before a bonfire was set; a single yew planted on the boundary to suggest a solemn avenue. A leaf landed in Madeleine’s hair as they stood admiring an espaliered apple tree.

  Isobel, who had embarked on a thorough house clean—though she doubted it would be either complete or thorough, her spirit was bound to fail—opened one of the long drawers in her writing desk and pulled out the Stanley knife with which she had once futilely slashed at the tyres of a car. A feeling of shame almost overcame her. It was a miracle no one had seen her, bending over, supposedly fumbling with the lace of her shoe. It had been winter and raining; she wore a hood. An umbrella would have offered better protection but been hard to hold. There was an old tyre in the garage, stacked against the wall, and she had practised on that, surprised at the hardness of the rubber, the strength it took. The tyre had been put out a few months later in the skip Kit had hired, hidden under branches and broken furniture.

  Of course her act had been futile. Her heart had been beating so heavily and her hand on the knife was shaking. But she had called up some kind of buried rage—the loss of her father, the death of her childhood pet dog—for she had read that acts of violence required an increase of adrenalin, which meant that those on the receiving end were at a disadvantage: she thought she had made one successful gash.

  Then, hearing footsteps or it might have been the drumming of the rain, she had straightened up, thrusting the knife deep into her pocket. She had forced herself to walk away slowly, to avoid drawing attention to herself.

  The memory forced Isobel to open another window and a connecting door. The aim of spring cleaning was to let the air flood a house closed for the winter, to let dampness and mould receive the sun, for stale odours to dissipate. But her half-hearted cleaning was over for the morning. She went to the kitchen and made herself a cup of coffee. She drank it at the bench, looking out into the garden where there was a gnarled lemon tree. She could remember when it had been planted, shiny-leaved and bearing a single flawless fruit. Now its crown was like an umbrella; the trunk was twisted and misshapen and the lemons themselves covered in some kind of scaly growth.

  Kit had known nothing of her behaviour, of course. She told him she was testing her ability to walk in all weathers in case they got a dog.

  ‘Why do we need a dog?’ he asked. ‘Isn’t Sylvie enough?’

  Sylvie had taken to escaping the house at night, and neither lectures nor locked doors had prevailed. Kit’s admonishments had been gentle and Isobel’s more strident but the effect was the same. Isobel could pick the exact moment when Sylvie stopped listening by a slight involuntary movement of her head or the clenching of a fist. Anecdotes from her own past, recast in a language Sylvie might understand, though Isobel had a great longing to speak in the language of her own girlhood, as if she was seeking comfort—all this was to no avail. Something in a Sylvie cell had ignited, and the desire spread along her nerves, engaging her mind and limbs. She could no more stop escaping than a sleepwalker can resist rising from her bed.

  So Isobel had taken to stationing herself in the garden at night and waiting. She thought Sylvie knew this, but when she appeared she gave no impression of searching or even regarding her surroundings. The sash window was eased up—it might have been oiled because it creaked less—and the figure in jeans, sneakers, jersey and anorak appeared, and Isobel in her own anorak waited in the shadow of the elm. The windows could not be locked, Kit had said, because of fire. The gate clicked open, and then Sylvie was gone.

  The first night she kept guard Isobel was in time to see Sylvie’s shadow pass close to the hedge that overhung the pavement. The houses in the street were large and they all had high walls. Isobel got only as far as the first corner, and watched the figure turn sharply and disappear down a lane. She hung up her anorak, undressed, and crawled into bed, pressing her spine against Kit as if by sheer will she would weld them into one entity: his sensibility, her absurd effort at shadowing. The next morning she went to the lane and walked down it. It was a shortcut, used by the local children. It came out on a broad thoroughfare. It was a perfect pickup place: either a car could pull up by the lights or there was the park with its stone walls and its great avenue of oaks whose branches were entwined in the manner of a Gothic nave.

  What premonitions of defeat rushed along Isobel’s nerves as she lay sleepless, a dread equal to and arising at the exact moment these night trysts began. Sometimes she tried to lighten her mood by imagining a Resistance fighter, in a trench coat and beret, blowing up railway lines and bridges. Soon she would be intercepting mail and sending coded messages. Even as she attempted to smile—not a convincing thing to do in the dark—her heart sank. She was entering a world she was totally unfamiliar with, a world the thick hedges and high walls in the street were meant to keep out.

  Towards morning she heard a slight movement and sat up. She took her dressing gown from the bedpost and quietly opened the bedroom door. She woul
d pretend she was sleepless and was going to make a cup of tea. Already the stratagems she was forced to adopt were bringing distress, self-dislike. Outside Sylvie’s door she paused, not daring to turn the handle. Then she walked boldly along the corridor, hoping to salvage her dignity, hoping that her footfalls at least were heard, that Sylvie knew she was on guard. All the longing in her heart that had been reawakened, the agonies that she thought—and deserved to think—had died down. What she was intending to replace them with she did not know. She only knew it should be something calm.

  Just recently she had turned down an invitation to lunch and a hint had been given—wasted but nonetheless there—that she might not be asked again or there would be some penance before she was reinstated. Her failing had been that her excuse—‘I don’t feel like going out at present’—was badly thought out. There was an insult in it: ‘You are not worth the effort.’ But when her apologies had failed Isobel had had a good day. She had sat in a bergère chair in the room she and Kit called the den, and for the first time she had seen a harmony she had not realised was there. There was a glimpse of the hall and a niche where the library ladder reclined against the shelves, its topmost rung resting against a set of Dickens that the afternoon light had turned a rosy pink. The hours that might have been spent in the preliminaries to gossip—for that is what they were—were passed instead in reading a review and then searching the shelves for a book while the points were fresh in her mind. She tried to decide if the critic had a clear palate, like a wine taster, for enmity was often disguised and obscured by initial praise. She felt sure, as she read a few paragraphs—a description of the island of Capri—that she too was being discussed, perhaps even at that very moment. And she understood why she had declined: she dreaded that the conversation might lead to Sylvie.

  Sometimes when Cheung’s dual offerings overflowed—pomegranate and green banana, grapefruit and pear, rock melon and six plump dates—Sylvie took fruit to her grandmother. The sun streaming through the window speeded up ripening, and Sylvie and Ben helped themselves morning and evening. Still somehow, like a treadmill that has developed a wobble, the supply had outstripped their consumption. Sometimes Sylvie ate squares of chocolate instead and Ben, who was an avid movie fan, made popcorn. Their consumption of wine was increasing: two glasses was becoming a whole bottle.