Loving Sylvie

by Elizabeth Smither

  ‘What commitments do you have with Lovejoy?’ Ben asked when they were home again, crouching beside the small animal which seemed powered by electricity. The biscuits were wolfed down, the water lapped, the muzzle shaken, the small beady eyes alert.

  ‘He can sleep at the foot of our bed. That’s what he’s used to. Tomorrow I’ll try to find if there are relatives.’

  ‘We might have to put him in a boarding kennel,’ Ben said.

  ‘Not without someone’s say-so. Otherwise we could be accused of dognapping.’

  Then she thought of Isobel.

  Lovejoy settled at the foot of the bed on a pile of blankets and apart from a few sighing noises was quiet. Ben turned on his side. Even his back seemed unwelcoming as if Sylvie had added another problem. Only Sylvie stayed awake for hours, careful not to toss and turn, thinking of Mr Arlington’s face with its blueish lips. She saw now she should have touched his flesh. Felt for a pulse or held a mirror to his mouth. There was no one to relive her experience with or give it Godspeed.

  Finally Sylvie tracked down which hospital Mr Arlington was in—she phoned from the seminar room as the first students were arriving, bumping their books onto the tables. She held up a hand for silence and then, as more students arrived, went out into the corridor. She leaned against the wall and answered questions about her relationship to Mr Arlington. ‘Dog walker,’ she said. ‘I have his dog with me. I need to contact someone.’

  ‘Mr Arlington passed away last night. I suggest you contact his lawyer.’

  ‘And who might that be?’ Sylvie asked. A fresh wave of students was passing.

  ‘I’m sorry I can’t help you with that.’

  The call was terminated and Sylvie went into the tutorial room. She was fiercer than usual to the students who sat there. One who was lolling sat up, another abandoned an excuse that would have taken a dog-like expression to be convincing. She began to talk about language and the care that was necessary. It angered her to think that the sentences laboured over by Henry James at Lamb House and which so resembled the sentences of anthropologists could be lightly dismissed. Then, since they were studying death customs, she digressed to The Wings of the Dove. ‘The Wings of the Dove is backed with death as surely as the death customs of a primitive tribe.’ For a moment Sylvie had surprised herself. Every sage knew that death threw life into relief, but had it occurred to her students?

  Later, walking through Albert Park, Sylvie reflected that not only was she now the possible owner of Lovejoy but her income had been greatly reduced. She would miss the banknotes Mr Arlington used to press into her hand. He had liked her to hold her hand out flat so he could lay the notes on her palm. Then he would close her fingers over them and give her a sly smile. Sometimes she found an extra twenty dollars. Once she had reproached him for overpaying but he had simply said, ‘Mine to give.’

  After the civil ceremony at the mairie in the rue Bonaparte, Freddy Rice lost no time in calling in the packers. He continued to be courteous, even tender to Madeleine but his mind was elsewhere. While she existed in a daze—he thought this was one of the least attractive aspects of women: that legitimacy was their true desire and everything light that preceded it was simply a game—he attended to his affairs with a ruthlessness that might have surprised her. Had she noticed, she would have seen it as protectiveness, designed for herself, whereas he had selected her after the other avenues of his life had been thoroughly explored and he was willing to settle.

  In Melbourne they would stay first in a hotel—he had no desire to set up housekeeping arrangements—and in the weeks before the furniture arrived they could buy a house.

  What unsettled him most were the screeching birds. They were everywhere, even in the heart of the city. In the business district, on his way to see his lawyer, a mocking caw sounded above his head. ‘Who do you think you are?’ it seemed to be saying. He looked up and located a black and white bird with a sharp beak and a beady eye regarding him. He thought of the pope who had had the birds in his garden shot. Other birds, sometimes in a line, laughed like women at a party. He was in a bad mood by the time he was shown into the offices of Straus, Mahon & Hollister. Coming out, after a lengthy meeting, he half-expected the bird to be waiting.

  But Madeleine found the birds delightful. She took their harsh calls for wolf whistles, crude compliments.

  ‘Aren’t there some that dive on your head?’ he asked, taking her arm.

  The restaurants were good, however, and in inexhaustible supply. The fashion of sitting in traffic fumes was well established, though the crowds were thinner. Freddy thought he might buy a few pieces of primitive art: an exhibition of Aboriginal art was showing at the National Gallery; he found the resemblance to the Pointillists striking.

  Madeleine thought sometimes of Sylvie and the contact that must be coming closer. She wondered if it could be arranged without recriminations. There would be a house and the elegance it would provide. Freddy was bound to apply his theory about civilised discourse being dependent on a certain height of ceiling. Sometimes he carried it to ridiculous lengths. At one of their dinner parties he had dragged the library ladder into the dining room and drawn lines on the wall and written Sophisticates, Intellectuals, People of Worth and at a lower level Peasants.

  The next morning Madeleine had climbed the ladder and scrubbed at the wall. Freddy had come into the room and seized her around the waist and nuzzled her neck. Then they had danced a slow foxtrot. Now, whenever the theory of ceilings was mentioned, she knew to look animated.

  She saw too that Freddy’s European sophistication was an advantage in this city with its preponderance of brick, trams and screeching birds. While they waited for the furniture they took rides to various suburbs. In one called Middle Park the tram teetered like an old dowager down the middle of a tree-lined street with gentrified cottages.

  ‘Here,’ Madeleine said, though she knew the decision would not be hers.

  In the end they settled on St Kilda. The tall apartments, the street with fabled cake shops, the trams climbing up the Esplanade, even the gaping mouth of Luna Park—it reminded Freddy of a death’s head—but mostly it was the view of the great bay that made the decision for them. A narrow stuccoed house with steps leading from the street, a small but cleverly planted garden with a flowering dogwood whose topmost branches reached the window that would be their bedroom. Already Madeleine felt bolder. It was as though she had been allocated more air. Here people were spaced out, unless they were pressed into a nightclub or queuing for theatre tickets. Across the street was a bench facing the sea on which she foresaw she would like to sit. Below two roads carried a steady stream of traffic, and beyond, where the grassy edges of the beach began, there were walking paths with people crossing in different directions. Finally a strip of golden sand was just visible and the unthreatening waters of the bay.

  ‘Will you be happy here?’ Freddy asked when, after a day spent with lawyers, the purchase was finalised and they were dining at a restaurant whose French doors opened on to dune grass and patches of yellow sand.

  ‘Very,’ she replied, placing her hand over his. She knew it was the expected response, but this time it felt heartfelt. She would walk down to the street of cakes and examine the windows like a connoisseur. The cake shops were in a line, as if they expected this, and were in competition. Somehow she did not see Freddy with her on these excursions. She did not think he would like to climb the hill on the way home burdened by an apfelstrudel or a baba au rhum.

  Sylvie, Isobel and the meeting they would undoubtedly have, Madeleine pushed to the back of her mind. There was furniture to unpack, rooms to dress in the way food is ‘plated’. There was an upstairs room that could serve as Freddy’s study. Shelves would need to be measured and made, and the desk, with banker’s lamps at either end, arranged under the window. Rarely had Madeleine felt so excited, so focused. While Freddy was at another meeting—the accountant—she sat in the upstairs room, her back against the wall, feet st
retched out on the polished wood, watching the movements of the dogwood. The swaying and retraction of its soft leaves made shadows on the white walls.

  Something is given and something is taken back, she thought. It was not something she would have listened to from a human being, but from the graceful swaying of a tree it seemed both profound and right.

  Isobel was displeased to find an excitable Cairn terrier had bounded into her kitchen in the wake of Sylvie. Now it turned in a circle, claws clacking, uncertain whether to leap up or lie on its belly on the linoleum.

  ‘Could Lovejoy have a bowl of water?’ Sylvie asked.

  As Isobel bent to place an old enamel bowl on the floor she noticed the deep rings under her granddaughter’s eyes. Her annoyance at the ruse—mentioning the dog by name then asking for water—deserted her and she looked at Sylvie in concern. Meanwhile the dog seemed to sense something was required of him: he slurped less noisily and became watchful.

  ‘He can sit,’ Sylvie offered and, on cue, Lovejoy sat on his haunches. It was his sole trick, besides deciphering words beginning with W.

  ‘Two untrained creatures,’ Isobel said, relenting even more. She hardly dared think what her role was to be.

  ‘He would have been useful once,’ she began and then stopped.

  ‘When you were following me,’ Sylvie said. ‘He would have made you even more conspicuous.’

  ‘I often wondered if you knew,’ Isobel said. ‘I’m afraid I wasn’t very good at it.’

  ‘It meant a lot to me. In the end, I mean.’

  She had seen her grandmother’s figure receding in the car’s back window. Sometimes the engine was deliberately revved, flinging her forwards then back against the seat so Isobel’s last view must have been of a head disappearing. Why had she not seen the malice in it? But everything was danger, danger. Now she shivered at the immaturity it had covered with such bold strokes.

  They sat at the kitchen table with Lovejoy’s lead looped over a chair. No more banknotes pressed into her hands. No more conspiratorial looks over Lovejoy’s deplorable lack of training. They both admired wildness was what the look said.

  ‘When is the funeral?’ Isobel asked.

  Sylvie had not thought to look.

  There it was, in the column with a black border.

  She would have to leave straight after to be at the university. But Isobel had not yet agreed to anything. One of the things she always insisted on was equivalent effort: spring cleaning the bookshelves together when Sylvie’s hands were almost too small to lift the heavy dictionaries and the atlases. But Isobel had not relented: when Isobel’s back was turned Sylvie had rubbed her wrists down the side of her skirt and tried not to sniff. And later she had been rewarded with a hug. They had looked up together at the top shelf. The smallest books were there and Sylvie had stood on the second step of the ladder to pass them up. Besides handing them up she had been responsible for dusting each top edge where the dust had fallen for a year. Still, that night she had sensed the power of an adult over a child, even when a lesson was at stake, and she had taken her mohair gloves out of her drawer and put them on. Halfway through the night she must have pulled them off again because in the morning they were at the bottom of the bed.

  If Sylvie had expected Lovejoy, stationed between herself and Isobel in the front pew, to show any sign of loss or grief she was mistaken. Only twelve people were present; Lovejoy made thirteen. Sylvie thought she detected the priest in a sigh, the way someone might glance at a watch. He seemed to spread his arms wider in his white alb as if to encompass distant relatives unable to attend. In the porch, after the Mass was over, they gathered around the hearse and Sylvie tugged at Lovejoy’s leash as the little dog attempted to stand on his back paws. Perhaps Lovejoy associated her with walks and not even death could take away an anticipated pleasure.

  ‘I’ll walk him,’ Isobel said when they were moving towards the car. One of the mourners who had introduced himself as a business associate of Mr Arlington had given Sylvie his card.

  After a bowl of water for Lovejoy and a change of clothing for Isobel, they set out. Instantly Lovejoy’s spirits revived. He dived after scents and was almost swallowed by a hedge. If another dog approached he bounded forward, barking madly. An Alsatian went past on the other side of the road, plastic bag neatly knotted to his lead which was tied to a child’s stroller. The young woman in charge of the convoy wore tights and a windbreaker, track shoes with fluorescent strips on the heels.

  ‘You look exhausted,’ Kit remarked when they returned and Lovejoy had gulped another bowl of water and a small handful of biscuits. He turned in circles and collapsed on the old yellow blanket that had been found for him. A basket would have to be bought and even toys. What mental age was he? A ball or the equivalent of Lego? Isobel was too weary to think. And Sylvie, walking along Symonds Street where Isobel had dropped her, was disillusioned as well. She had expected something like Lassie. If you couldn’t get lifelong devotion from a human, a dog could show you how to do it. As she passed the security booth, she thought of Lassie’s long golden coat, flecked with snow.

  Isobel had thought Cora Taverner’s antagonism would fade, but she was wrong. There must have been occasions when minor Capulets and Montagues or Guelphs and Ghibellines did not cross to the other side of the street. Perhaps in the future there would be the birth of a child: a great-grandchild for herself, for her rival a grandchild. They might stand around a christening font together, careful to take up the farthest position from each other where their enmity would not be observed.

  At her bridge club Cora Taverner met a woman who spoke slightingly of Isobel. Isobel had once taken bridge lessons given by the club president and been overheard to remark it was a game for those who wanted to waste their abilities. ‘Time,’ she had said, ‘that could be used for organising a field hospital or rescuing orphans.’ Isobel had only sat at the tables a few times before the appeal of being outdoors became irresistible. She had not resigned, simply never reappeared. Letters from the secretary went unanswered. Rena Schnackenberg, the woman who had partnered Isobel, felt let down not by amateurish play, because Isobel had made a few credible bids, but by an attitude which felt like disdain.

  ‘I’m sorry Ben has married into that family,’ Rena remarked to Cora.

  ‘I think he was bewitched,’ Cora replied. ‘I’m biding my time.’ There the subject was left, both knowing it could be reopened at any time. But, once opened, information seemed to fly in. Sylvie had been sighted sitting under a tree in the park, her head in her hands and a vacant look on her face. She had been seen weeping outside Meier Olson. And once in the art gallery with an elderly man, strolling between paintings, not looking very animated, though if the informant had lingered and followed Sylvie and Kit into the next room, they might have witnessed an attempt to imitate the expressions of two young foxy Regency bucks.

  Ben knew his mother’s prying, her need to get to the bottom of everything, came from motives of which she was unaware. At her husband’s funeral she had straightened her shoulders and stretched her neck when the vicar, prone to address the bereaved, and particularly widows, personally, had talked of her new role as the head and guardian of her little family. For Anne and himself it meant a scrutiny their father, in his blandness, might have protected them from. Instinctively Ben began to keep his own counsel, to confide in his mother only in ways that would win her approval. The result was that his mother searched harder, looked for diaries, read letters, engaged women friends in her spying. Sylvie would have been amused to know how much of her life had been pieced together by a woman she was determined not to see and whom she would tolerate only at Christmas and on Ben’s birthday.

  She had gone with Ben to the cemetery on his father’s anniversary. A white bouquet was already in place, and a card signed by his mother. For a moment Sylvie imagined the woman standing there in her winter coat, head bowed. Yet if Cora had materialised a brittle manner would have been instantly in place. ‘How
is your research going?’ Sylvie wanted to ask. She knew questions were being asked; one or two old school friends were still in touch. ‘Why the curiosity? What is there about me that you find so provocative?’

  But Sylvie did not want to investigate this either. Now the first year of marriage was over, a new kind of alertness was required. Just what it was she couldn’t say. It felt as subtle as the change in the light as autumn approached and the clocks were put back. Ben’s career was advancing and yet she could foresee a time when it might stall and its sameness become a problem. She walked past Mr Arlington’s house and noticed a land agent’s sign dug into the lawn. She missed walking Lovejoy and yet, now the little dog was with Isobel and would remain there until a new owner was found, she hardly saw him. It was Isobel who took him for a walk at dusk so fresh and familiar scents could lull him to sleep.

  Two Bartlett pears were just outside the door to the flat, along with a note from Cheung. May have to vacate premises, it read.

  That evening when Ma’s Best Fruit & Veg was closed, Sylvie and Ben sat at the back of the shop, drinking green tea from glass cups. The warmth of the day and the scent of the fruit seemed to concentrate behind the curtain that Cheung pulled to hide the sink. A bin of vegetable stalks and spoiled leaves awaited collection for a pig farm. It was no different from a dress shop, Sylvie was thinking nervously—anything to keep her mind off what a move would involve. No one wanted to see the unpacking and sorting and labelling: in the case of vegetables, the cutting and trimming; in dresses, the security tags and the spot cleaning gun. Cheung would not be hurried and they drank the tea companionably.

  Sylvie was wondering if she should ask for a fortune cookie. Perhaps after the bad news was imparted. Though the messages were incomprehensible and often sinister.