Loving Sylvie

by Elizabeth Smither

  Still she looked boldly enough when she was back in the room. Her mother was sitting at the small table used for breakfast. Her skin seemed to have been preserved as if someone had applied layer upon layer of creams and lotions. The skin of a slapper, Sylvie thought, for she was still discomposed and the question about the sheets had offended her. They made much—her grandparents and others—of her having tried to haunt her mother’s house and scare off buyers, but her mother could walk dreamily along a street as if sorrow was the arrangement of a window or the fineness of old linen someone had probably given at least part of their sight for.

  Then she looked more closely and she could see that no creams, even French ones, could hold back a creeping frailty, no night cream stroked in with the fingers could prevent a neck becoming like crepe. At least the sheets, as heavy and pure as a hard windfall apple or the scent of bread wafting over cobblestones, were true in the way centuries were true.

  ‘We should begin again,’ Madeleine said. ‘I could go to the door and come in again.’

  At this moment the knocker was struck and Isobel was standing on the porch, flustered a little, hiding the anxiety in her eyes, her hand reaching down for Lovejoy as if an animal was a talisman and whoever held the leash was protected.

  They moved to sit at a long island with stools which brought their faces close. Twenty years earlier the kitchen had been modified and the island put in. Someone could work at it, chopping and dicing, running water into a saucepan, while those on the other side leaned on their elbows and talked or nibbled nuts or slices of cheese. Sylvie stayed on the side with the taps and Lovejoy sat at her feet. She fought to stay silent. ‘He looks as if he has done great harm to someone,’ Kit had said in the portrait gallery when they were standing in front of a cruel-eyed man in a wig. She had lifted her eyes and stared back. At ten she had small stores of venom. The eyes in the portrait, narrowed and bitter, suggested the stores would increase. Dimly, with a child’s perception, she noticed the rich robe cascading from his shoulders, the chain of office, the gloves. She missed her grandfather suddenly. She would have preferred him to what was assembling: three generations of women, each with a stake in the lives of the others, each with a role they had elected to play. She turned the tap on—it overhung the sink like a lily—and the sound of water calmed her.

  ‘Is there somewhere more comfortable we could sit?’ Isobel asked. ‘Since you are imprisoned in this house. Surely there are chairs?’

  ‘I feel like a drink,’ Madeleine said suddenly. ‘Is there a drinks cabinet?’

  ‘There’s a bottle of brandy,’ Sylvie said. ‘Mr Arlington was drinking his way through it.’

  ‘Let’s have the balloons,’ Isobel said. She could see them through the glass doors of a cabinet. She could think of nothing better than to stick her nose into one and sniff the rising fumes.

  They leaned back on an old two-seater sofa, Sylvie in a wing chair. Everything had seen better days. And what were the better days of those who sat in them? Sylvie would have said it was her wedding, rowing with Kit across the lake, dipping her hand in the grey-green water. Isobel had too much to choose from: it might be the period she felt herself to be a spy, her felt hat pulled low, her ineptitude which oddly made her feel warm. For Madeleine, who had drunk half her brandy in a gulp, it was a memory of Madame Récamier on late opening nights when they closed the shutters and she handed over two thimblefuls of Calvados in two dusty glasses. Madame had believed in chaos: that her clients should be introduced to the creeping passage of dust as well as the smell of newly cut pages.

  Kit, at home, was unaware of the conference taking place. Otherwise he would have offered to take the little dog. The dog was the problem. If Sylvie had not answered the notice in the ‘Personal’ column on a morning when she was sitting in the fruit-shop window, eating a new variety of peach squashed like a pug dog. And if the old man had not given in to caprice. But perhaps it was the living breathing creature, the animal snuggling into his side when he slept or, more likely, woke during the night. The young woman who took him out and returned him, each in a state of excitement, must be retained.

  In the room that he and Isobel had no name for—study, library, den, its name had changed during the years—Kit ran his hand over the large globe that stood beside a club chair in the position of a lamp. He stroked the coast of Morocco and ran his fingers over Gabon and Botswana until his hand fell away into the Atlantic Ocean. He always thought of this globe as a face and most often as Sylvie’s face. She had become his world, and the pits into which she fell resembled the great oceans. Not as oceans were when they lapped the shores of small islands or vast continents but as the Ancient Mariner experienced them, in their unknowable deeps. As a boy Kit had wondered—now he set the globe spinning and it rocked as if it was emitting a groan, which meant the stand needed lubricating—whether seas and oceans had some presentiment of a shore. Did the great volume of water sense a braking ahead or did it come as a trauma? He was ignoring the moon, of course, as humans always ignored something. The globe slowed and he patted it with his palm to make it settle. He thought he could talk to his own lawyer to see if Sylvie and Ben could leave the house and provision still be made for the dog.

  At the house in question, Kit, if he could have seen through one of the long windows, would have changed his mind about the dog. Sylvie had gone upstairs to change. She had flung her jeans on the floor, pulled her T-shirt over her head and even put on new underwear. Then she put on a skirt, black with small flowers, and a black scoop-necked top. She ran a brush through her hair and applied concealer to her cheeks which were hot. She outlined her lips in the darkest lipstick she had, and sprayed perfume on her throat. Now her mother, who still looked oddly calm, should not daunt her. It seemed her mother was composed of layers, frail enough in themselves, that over the years had produced a surface that held her together. Her attraction for men, Sylvie thought, marvelling that what remained was composed of layers of adapting and pleasing.

  Madeleine would have been very surprised at this diagnosis. She found a little downstairs toilet tucked under the stairs, and in its confined space she too was attempting repairs.

  If there was a long sofa we could sit in a row like the three monkeys, Isobel thought, but there was only the wing chair which should be Sylvie’s as guardian of the house. She rose and tried a slipper chair that had seen better days. How she longed to slip her shoes off and curl her feet under her. But other people’s furniture brought a certain restraint. Looking around the room she could see it followed a reduced aristocratic style that might have been taken from Country Life. The furniture was arranged in nests: nothing touched the walls; there were no chairs like wallflowers. She thought of maids trailing vacuum cleaners with long cords.

  ‘The house is a problem,’ Isobel said to Sylvie when she returned and, avoiding the wing chair, sat beside her. Isobel eased a cushion behind her back. ‘Kit is going to consult his lawyer.’

  Sylvie said nothing: the subject had been exhausted. She suspected her mother, resuming her seat, was going to talk about the dogs of Paris. And on cue Madeleine started describing a woman kicking a pile of leaves over a yellow turd with the toe of her shoe in such a disdainful manner she obviously regarded herself as invisible.

  ‘That’s not the problem,’ Sylvie said.

  ‘How long do dogs live?’ Madeleine asked.

  ‘How long do any of us live?’ Isobel said. Now they really were the three monkeys. Under conversation, under the most superficial enquiry from which all meaning had been bleached, like a drop of blood diluted and rediluted until it was little more than a stain, lay inchoate meaning. Words there were thin; looks, a gesture, took up the slack. If she offered to make a cup of tea, would it be seen as some kind of foreclosure? But she was too tired to get to her feet. It was easier to talk about dogs in Paris while Lovejoy circled the room, unaware that by giving Sylvie and Ben a lodging he was bringing grief.

  ‘We should dine together,’ Isobe
l said. ‘Not tonight.’ She was too weary for anything but toast.

  ‘What about Lovejoy?’ Madeleine asked.

  ‘Baby comes too,’ Sylvie said.

  ‘I saw a dog coat in the rue du Four,’ Madeleine remarked. ‘It was like the suit of an astronaut.’

  In two days Madeleine had flown. The morning after the dinner, Sylvie rubbed blusher into her cheeks and stayed in bed. ‘You look ridiculous,’ Ben said from the doorway. To Isobel she sent a message that she was unwell, possibly infectious. She cancelled her tutorials and imagined what a great ape might do. A fall in status was especially threatening for a female, though males, too, could slope away, defeated. At midday a bunch of flowers arrived from Madeleine but she did not appear. Had she done so, Sylvie might have added lipstick spots. She had tried the spots on Isobel when she was six and been sent to school with a scrubbed face.

  When Ben got home Sylvie was out of bed, making macaroni cheese. The bench had pools of milk and flakes of cheese. She poured him a glass of merlot and held it out.

  ‘How’s your temperature?’ he asked.

  ‘Non-existent, as you well know.’

  ‘Don’t you think you’re being cruel?’

  ‘Sickness is always cruel.’

  But he had no patience for banter.

  ‘No crueller than my unthinking mother. She is more interested in Parisian poodles than me.’

  ‘Lovejoy, the ice-breaker.’

  Hearing his name, Lovejoy jumped up and Ben bent to fondle his ears. Conveniently, it hid his face on which he was afraid his thoughts might show. How much more of this, how much longer can I bear it?

  But Sylvie was racing ahead: ‘… so smug when she was leaving, as if it had been a triumph. I almost think I prefer your mother, the pit-digging troll.’

  ‘A good buss when you get home,’ Russell had advised him. It was how he dealt with his frazzled wife and squalling twins. All afternoon Ben had been anticipating a harridan with carmine cheeks. He moved towards Sylvie and she raised a wooden spoon. An ambrosial gust of melted cheese issued from the oven.

  He ground his face into hers so that her head felt hollowed out like a piece of fruit. He pulled her spine so hard he could finger the bones.

  ‘It works,’ he would tell Russell in the morning. But there was something Russell didn’t know. It left Ben unaccountably sad.

  Autumn came again, and with it the shape of Mr Arlington’s garden was revealed. Some days, after she had toiled through Albert Park, braced against the wind and hurrying around the fountain which flung water in wind-directed swathes, Sylvie resented walking Lovejoy at all. A strange fear of authority had seized her and caused Ben to quarrel with her.

  ‘I feel as if I am spied on all the time,’ she complained when she was wearily winding a scarf around her neck and attaching the plastic bag to Lovejoy’s leash.

  Ben had been looking forward to eating, which was clearly not imminent. The front door slammed behind Sylvie—he thought it was the wind—and Lovejoy yelped as they went up the path. Never again, Ben decided, would he allow himself to be seduced by riches. They should simply have declined the offer—he could have said he was allergic to dander and the matter would have ended there. There were some at the office who were envious of his good fortune. He was advised to hang on and stake a claim. One wag suggested a team of vets or a dog whisperer if the dog looked bored.

  He went into the kitchen—how he longed to be back in the poky flat with its gas rings with baked-on stains and the offerings of fruit on the windowsill. He always went to stand there when he got home, his hand feeling blindly and trying to identify the piece of fruit his fingers touched. And afterwards he would touch Sylvie’s face in the dark, feeling her cheekbones and then the sharper bone of her chin. He loved the way one touch led to another, or he was unconsciously led.

  He took down a can of pumpkin soup from the cupboard and heated it in a saucepan. Then he made a plunger of coffee. He lifted the soup off the heat and, carrying his coffee, walked through the rooms. For the first time in his life he felt insubstantial. Even Sylvie’s boldness seemed to have gone. On the path a mound of leaves had piled up, almost like an artificial step.

  He was not hungry: the warmed-over soup would do. Memories of the evening at Isobel and Kit’s came back. Everyone had overindulged; he thought it had been deliberate. Something for the hands to do: raising glasses, lifting the lids of serving dishes and letting the steam escape—butter melted on beans and sprouts. There was a casserole that in his dazed state had looked like a tapestry. Sylvie’s absurd mother had prattled on. She had talked about Paris and bookshops and restaurants. Kit had winked at him. Late in the evening they had tried to remember the words of the ‘Marseillaise’. One line each, they had gone around the table. Ils viennent jusque dans nos bras had been one of his. He had acquitted himself well. Sylvie’s mother had come to his aid when his turn came around again. Of course the deeper meanings were never translated. But the wine glowed red and then the brandy came, and he stuck his nose in the balloon and rocked it from side to side as if he was at sea.

  A bitter wind was blowing through the garden and over the grave of the little dog which, like some human ones in old cemeteries, was covered with a tiny concrete slab and a headstone. Human graves of this kind felt a need to press themselves to the earth, to secure, in death, all that might have evaded them in life. The funeral had been conducted following the terms of the will: that the garden, though Lovejoy had used it only as a means to get out to the street, be the resting place, and that the body be buried three feet deep. Sylvie had been questioned extensively by the lawyer and had signed an affidavit that the death had been unavoidable.

  A black Labrador carrying a bone in its mouth from the butcher—the butcher had been questioned and admitted that occasionally a mutton flap or a knuckle bone was given to the dog that seemed homeless. Such was the young lawyer’s tone that the next time the Labrador visited the butcher took the precaution of taking him home for safekeeping. Lovejoy had been walking on the opposite side of the road with Sylvie, the leash in her hand as it always was when they left the park. Neither firmer nor less firm, she told Ethan Simpson, who regarded her aggressively as if he was longing for a charge to stick. Lovejoy had simply been overcome by life: the bone, the big black dog, all the suppressed instincts of living with Mr Arlington had been overthrown in a rapturous tug on the leash, which had torn it from Sylvie’s hand and propelled him under the wheels of a car.

  ‘You couldn’t hold a small dog?’ the lawyer asked, looking coldly into her eyes.

  With an effort Sylvie returned his stare.

  ‘Do you know anything about instincts, Mr Simpson?’ she asked. Do you have any? she meant. Then she reflected he probably did. Cold ones, clinical in their execution. The Labrador, not relinquishing his bone, had darted onto the road as well, so perhaps there had been a meeting of spirits. The woman in the car, with the traffic banking up and honking behind, had stayed at the wheel, head in her hands, until a policeman arrived.

  Mr Arlington’s vet had prepared Lovejoy for burial and the funeral director had supplied a casket. There was no shortage of funds: thousands remained in the account for veterinary bills and food, the yearly registration. If Sylvie had wanted to employ a professional walker or groomer that would have been allowed. A professional walker, one who would have held the leash or plunged into the traffic herself. A professional walker with a pack of dogs of various sizes that would have become entangled had they attempted to cross the road.

  ‘Now you are no longer needed,’ Simpson was saying, and obviously it gave him pleasure, ‘I presume you are not about to make an offer on the house?’

  Future owners would be bound to ensure that the grave, level with the grass so the mower could pass over it, and its marker, were not disturbed. The old man had thought of everything, Sylvie told herself as she plunged down the stairs, carelessly as if she was imitating Lovejoy.

  23 Gramercy Street had a slightly
neglected air, though its paint gleamed and the gardener had done his work. Only a few leaves marred the path between the pruned roses. She would need to start collecting boxes for their possessions. She might find another Chinese fruiterer and ask for banana boxes with holes in their sides for ventilation. Ben had been cheerful that morning, seizing her in a rough hug in the hallway and turning her around, nearly knocking over the umbrella stand. He knew his mother was displeased, as if Sylvie’s carelessness with the dog had robbed them of an inheritance. But now it seemed as if his reserve, new to him and puzzling to her, was being removed and things would be fine again between them.

  Sylvie took her mug of tea to which she had added two heaped teaspoons of sugar into the garden and stood under the weeping cherry where the plaque was. The inscription was simplicity itself. Lovejoy and the date of the accident. Spooling back behind it were the years of companionship, romping and sleeping on beds, and all the imaginings that must have possessed Mr Arlington. The warmth as Lovejoy’s body, sealed in its warm coarse fur, pressed against his crumbling bones. That warmth and the painful pressure as Lovejoy wriggled and settled had been worth having.

  I knew neither of you, Sylvie thought, when the tea was drunk and a layer of sugar crystals remained at the bottom of the mug. She inserted two fingers and scooped the sticky sweetness out. Then she changed her mind and flicked the sugary drops over the grave. No one could fully understand the life of an animal, certainly not a self-centred human like Mr Arlington, but each had given something. She thought the black Labrador dog had whined when the car struck Lovejoy’s body and, with horns sounding in her ears, she had bent over to see the light depart from his eyes.