Loving Sylvie

by Elizabeth Smither

  Madeleine’s foray into motherliness, while not a success, still filled her with satisfaction. Satisfaction did not have to be shared, she realised, as the Boeing 777 had climbed into the sky and she settled into her business class seat. In a very short time the hostess, the veil of her scarlet hat unloosed, came by bearing a bottle of Veuve Cliquot. Madeleine raised the flute to her lips and looked through the glass at the sky. There was a society that watched clouds and identified them. Surely, she thought, it could not be as onerous as bird watching? Then she reflected that cloud superseded cloud and some were composite. She tried to think of a cloud name and eventually came up with cumulonimbus. Then she must have fallen into a doze, because when she woke a lap table had been pulled out and a white cloth spread. More champagne was poured and she drank it like water. It didn’t matter if she was tipsy because the car would be waiting.

  Madeleine slept again and, as if making a conscious effort in her dream, she tried to summon up the cobblestones in the rue du Dragon. Sometimes they glistened as shower after shower passed overhead. In summer, despite the efforts of the balayeur, they were dusty. In autumn dog turds were covered in leaves, something some elderly ladies took advantage of. Madeleine would dart from the bookshop to chastise a white-haired woman leaning on a cane while her grubby miniature poodle crouched in the gutter. ‘Disgusting animal, as disgusting as its owner,’ Madame Récamier shouted, but she had no weapon, only the latest Gore Vidal she had been in the process of arranging in the window. Brûle en enfer, the woman shouted back, and after the turd had fallen she kicked a few leaves over it with the toe of her shoe. Madeleine could see it clearly, more clearly than if she were awake. Two formidable women, young in spirit, holding their ground. They admired one another, she realised, and this was the message of the dream. The woman with the dog was thrilled when her bébé took longer than usual over his toilette simply to infuriate Madame.

  The plane landed and Madeleine wished she had a cane to lean on as she queued and then went to collect her luggage.

  ‘All well?’ Freddy said, taking her arm. She knew no answer beyond a nod of her head was required.

  They drove along the palm-bordered streets and she noticed the difference in the air, the demeanour of the people. Even the clouds had changed; the sky seemed wider. The great bowl of Port Phillip Bay stretched out with lake-like placidity. Once inside, and after a hasty kiss—another woman would have noticed a slight lessening of ardour, for Freddy was already embarking on an affair, making arrangements—Madeleine went to the bedroom window to gaze at the familiar layers of the view she was dependent on. The two roads on which traffic travelled in opposite directions, a favourite restaurant with a tiled roof, the strip of beach with its golden sand. The promenade, dawn, midday, evening, as regular as meal times, had not yet begun, but its rudiments were there. A quiet passage in music, she thought, not knowing how prophetic her words would be. Notes or human bodies that anticipated the movement of crowds or the crashing chords of a finale.

  She would write to Sylvie, she decided. That would be the best way to begin again. Short letters at first and then more expansive ones. Longer sentences, like Henry James, full of parentheses which would probably make Sylvie impatient. She would not talk of France, for surely there was something condescending about rapturous descriptions of a place the listener had not visited. With a rare insight she realised her little ‘tales’ extracted a good deal of detail, most of it unpleasant or boring. Days when Madame Récamier hardly spoke a civil word or she discovered a hole in her shoe so she could feel the cobblestones. Why must everything be lived first? she wanted to ask, but then Sylvie’s problems, over which she had no rights, came to her: a slight sadness in the eyes, the disastrous acceptance of the old man’s will involving the dog; the strain of turning her life in another direction. Now there is less love at her disposal, Madeleine thought, though she had met Ben only once, when they dined together. At Isobel’s she had gazed at the sepia-coloured photograph and wondered why she felt spooked.

  She had walked with Isobel down suburban streets with overhanging trees and humps to slow traffic and, side by side, which was the best position for confidences, a few tentative things had been said. Nothing as profound as an apology or an explanation, for both would have been useless, but words that brought about a sort of ease. Both, as they trod in the leaves and watched others fall, were absorbed in the present. The present is what she would write about to Sylvie, nothing more. There would be visits which might become regular. Perhaps four times a year, coinciding with the seasons. Winter for sorrow and introspection, spring for wilder words because the wildness would be recompensed by blossom. Then the thought ran out. By summer a healing might have been accomplished.

  ‘What will you do today?’ Freddy asked.

  ‘Nothing much. Unpack,’ Madeleine replied.

  ‘I have a few appointments. I’ll be here for dinner.’

  ‘The Turkish restaurant?’

  But he thought he would rather stay in, gauge the comfort he was expanding, evaluate how he could consolidate and preserve it. For a time he was watching every word.

  Suddenly Madeleine remembered there was a glass ornament in her luggage, wrapped in layers of bubble wrap and rolled in her silk nightdress. It was in the shape of a fern, the curled frond. She needed to find somewhere where the light could shine through it.

  Isobel lay in bed, disinclined to rise. Kit brought her a cup of tea and she noticed he was slightly stooped, accentuating the care with which he placed it on the bedside table. Automatically her hand reached out for it; automatically she turned her face so his lips fell on her forehead. Once, when she was in hospital sharing a ward with five other women, she had bent over one of the beds—the occupant had called out in a mild insistent voice and Isobel was nearest—and a horrid stench had issued from the woman’s mouth. It had filled her with fear and a resolve to brush her teeth as soon as she woke. Now she ran her tongue over her teeth and noted they felt smooth and slippery. The body’s wakening she had taken for granted when she was young; now it seemed like a factory in which someone switched on the lights over a cold concrete floor, or a nightclub seen in the unforgiving light of day, all tawdry drained colours that needed human breath and anticipation to animate them. A tiny quantity of matter had settled in the corner of her eye, and she touched her finger to it and then ran it under the lid and under the lashes that had never been luxuriant and were now thinning. During that stay in hospital she had resolved to regard her body in a different light. So many procedures, so many tubes and catheters, the nightly turning when she was aware of white figures on either side of her bed. She no longer cared what words she spoke or in what tone, though consciously she tried to thank everyone for the smallest service. Over the long days and nights her body had resumed its activities; its systems which were connected and yet separate entities, started up again.

  Kit came back and took the cup. It was a hint. His hair was damp from his shower. Isobel felt a stab of envy at the neatness of his appearance, though she knew he too made an effort. Why should it not cost him as much as hers? Yet hers felt greater. There was something about the male body, she thought, as she got up and put on her dressing gown. She did not allow that procedures for the male body might be equally feared, equally intrusive. Feared more, she conceded, as the hot water streamed down her back and she turned her shoulders into the torrent, one at a time, to ease out the aches. How many absurd conversations had she had with her gynaecologist, another neat man, buffed to his fingernails. They had conversed for years over an unmentionable expanse of her body which he handled discreetly, telling her when the speculum was to be introduced or warming his fingers under the tap.

  By the time she was dry and dressed Isobel was ready to do her face. But this morning, sober or tired of her thoughts, she looked back firmly at the face in the glass and gave it only cursory attention. It was easier that way. Besides she wanted to carry—and apply, for that was always Isobel’s wish, even if i
t lasted for only five minutes—the lesson of those weeks in the ward. She wanted, as she went about her privileged tasks and her possibly privileged worries, to remember a woman she had become fond of and kept in touch with after they were both discharged. Honora’s body had been hacked about by operations that were bound to fail, but her family had not been able to let her go. Great wounds crisscrossed her body as if she had been in a fight with Cossacks—Honora’s words—to no avail. ‘I never appreciated my body until now,’ she said to Isobel the day before she died.

  Now it was time for Isobel to get her body downstairs and do something useful with it.

  Today she would start the annual cleaning of the bookshelves, one set of shelves at a time. It was essential to begin ‘while her courage was high’. The words of Elizabeth Bennet propelled her into the study and lasted as long as it took to draw the curtains and raise the blinds. She fetched dusters and a bowl of tepid water to which she added a few drops of disinfectant, and began to take down the books and lay them out in long lines.

  ‘Why now? Why today?’ Kit asked, appearing in the doorway.

  ‘Why not today? Have you forgotten your Primo Levi? If not now, when?’

  Levi was several shelves down; it would be an hour before she reached him. Maybe she should attempt a new order: her most-loved books on a single shelf. But if she stopped to think of this, half the morning would be wasted while she read paragraphs or peered at inscriptions. Then there was the dilemma of what to do about books that belonged to others, some with Ex Libris stickers neatly inscribed and dated. She told herself she was simply here to clean, to shift the dust where it lay on the top edges and the spaces between. So many of the pages were yellowing where the sunlight had reached.

  ‘Better you than me,’ Kit said, retreating.

  After two hours Isobel felt demoralised enough to sink to the floor and stretch herself out beside a line of books whose authors began with G. She lay alongside Jane Gardam and Helen Garner, Amitav Ghosh and Adam Gopnik. She had imagined the task would refresh her but the opposite was true because each author had brought back memories of herself. The naïve enthusiasm with which her sixteen-year-old-self had read André Gide, feeling if she saw him in a coffee shop she would be propelled to his side. She saw now that she had recognised her innocence and wanted to despoil it, not in the real world but through the safety of a book.

  When her thoughts turned to Sylvie she recognised she had tried to influence her through books. Many had been unopened and politely returned. The Colettes had really been for herself; she had wanted to understand the sensualist whom Gide had called ‘a great bee’.

  Isobel sat up and rubbed a smudged finger across her forehead. She thought of Colette digging in the soil with her bare hands, with her dog and cat in attendance. Gloves and dusters were not for her, only the sturdy fingers, digging and probing. She doubted Colette ever undertook spring cleaning.

  By evening one bookcase was complete: the books, dusted, were replaced. No decision had been taken about reforming their order: it was enough they sat on cleaned and wiped shelves that had been allowed to dry in the air from the open window. Isobel’s back ached from lifting armful after armful of novels, biographies and autobiographies. She knew it would be at least a week or longer before she would tackle a second bookcase which contained history and travel, diaries of voyages and plant-hunting expeditions.

  When Kit rubbed her shoulders and suggested an unpretentious Italian restaurant and something simple, like spaghetti carbonara, she could have wept.

  Over the gingham tablecloth she tried to explain the despair that had come over her. She moved the miniature vase with its single carnation—scentless but long-lasting—closer to the window so it was reflected in the glass. It was the labour of the writers that had overcome her, which was odd for it should have been the contents of the books themselves. She had read a good many of them though she could not remember a single sentence—a few ripostes from Oscar Wilde, a pert remark or two of Elizabeth Bennet as she perambulated with Lady Catherine de Bourgh in the little copse.

  ‘They wrote just to fill in time,’ Isobel said when the steaming plates and two glasses of pinot bianco were in front of them.

  Kit looked into her tired eyes, the lines radiating from them, the weariness that she could not conceal. She looked as though she had been herding the authors themselves, in their wigs and pantaloons, smoking jackets festooned with ash, hair standing on end as if in fright. He thought, as he lightly touched the back of her hand, that she took things too seriously.

  ‘And now they are back in their places,’ he said gently. ‘Just as well …’

  Sylvie and Ben had moved into a flat. It was half a house: their half had the bay window, the other the French door, recently added and incongruous-looking. It was hardly soundproof: sometimes softly quarrelling voices rose from the other side. They were saving for a deposit, or Ben was, since Sylvie’s earnings covered essentials. The will of Mr Arlington was still being settled: there might be a lump sum and there might not. Twice a week Sylvie supervised a tutorial. A new intake of students seemed to need her more. At least they looked up expectantly as she came into the room. A few had prepared work; a few made comments that were almost perceptive. The seminar room was usually required straight after: in the last five minutes footsteps were heard in the corridor and bags piled up against the wall. But if she had the room to herself Sylvie sometimes sat on for a few minutes, enjoying the sun on her face—the room was always warm—and thought about apes and her mother-in-law.

  If the beautiful house that had been Lovejoy’s home had been a mistake, so too was the latest move. Now they were closer, Ben’s visits to his mother became regular again. Sometimes, to make matters worse, he came home with leftovers, which Sylvie refused to eat though she might only have opened a can of beans. Ben felt her resistance and took the treats for his next day’s lunch. He felt his mother’s warmth enveloping him as it had when he was a child and his father had died and she had become both overprotective and severe. He could never tell when one regime would change into another, for the warm protecting moods involved stories and hugs, hair stroking, especially after his bath, and goodnight kisses behind which he sensed, though only one kiss was given, an unrationed love.

  Now, it seemed, he was linked to this again: the present and a residue from the past. When he was older and at school his mother had cut items from the newspaper and left them on his bedside table for him to read. Items about kidnapped children, boys lured by sweets or money, cars mounting the kerb as innocent children walked home from school. ‘Did you read them?’ she would ask, because there were normally two or three saved up. He would nod and say nothing and there would be no further comment. An extra fond kiss would be given that night, or a story whose hopeful outcome seemed to countermand the pieces of newspaper whose ink came off on his fingers.

  Even as a grown man, a successful architect, he found it impossible to tell his mother what the effect of these missives had been. As a young boy he had read them carefully, sometimes puzzling over a word or something said by a policeman. He didn’t dare use the dictionary but at the same time he was terrified his mother would question him. When his confidence grew he began to skim. There were familiar themes. The problem was the warnings were issued in the midst of comfort, ordered meals, attention to his childish complaints. If there was a difficulty with a teacher or a misunderstanding with a friend his mother would listen with an attention that had something spellbinding about it. Sometimes he forgot what he was going to say, sure that her attention would solve everything. The child who was snatched from the street or enticed into a house with the promise of seeing something—the real ‘something’ was not mentioned—was likewise surrounded by parental love and could not sum up the situation in time.

  But his mother could not see the effect her efforts had on him. When he had deposited his schoolbag on the floor and flung off his cap he would go to his room and pause at the door. His eyes, however
hard he tried to look elsewhere, would go to his bedside table where his present reading was piled, and under the lowest book there would be a piece of newsprint poking out. The only thing to do was read it straight away so it could be screwed into a ball. Then he would face his mother and lower his eyes.

  Over the years—at thirteen he had cried Halt and flung a pile of screwed-up cuttings back at her—the effect had been both suffuse and incalculable. Only one story stuck: a small girl rescued by a dog and carried out from under a house where she’d been chained to a post, her body grey with dust and her hair as grey as an old woman’s. The dog, in a later cutting—his mother had relented for once—was presented with a certificate, but Ben had nightmares about the little girl lying on a bed in the hospital and being carefully washed so her childish features were restored. For six months he entertained the idea of becoming a doctor. Then his best friend caught his leg in the spokes of his bike and a great flap of skin was torn off and it was all he could do to stay and support him.

  Now, sitting opposite his mother, allowing her to bring his coffee and some small cake that must have taken hours to produce, Ben felt the unease that she had laid the foundation for resurface. She was talking of Sylvie, of his choice, but talking so obliquely, with such discreet pauses, as she rose for a napkin or passed a teaspoon, that he was almost fooled. Was the point of this unease that it could be reused? Was it a ‘ground’, a term he liked in music? Greensleeves to a Ground. He looked towards the window and watched a light shower stroke the glass. When his mother’s back was turned for an instant, he pushed back his cuff and read his watch. He estimated he could bear another quarter hour.

  At the door he allowed his cheek to be kissed and resisted rubbing his hand against it. He walked quickly along the street, ignoring the waving figure, and heard the door close. Sylvie’s mother had insisted on kissing both cheeks. ‘Faire la bise,’ she would murmur. The powdery smell of her skin and the cloying perfume made him cough. Still she was an innocent …