Perhaps she is ill, Sylvie was thinking. In which case she would feel no grief. But she would need to control her tongue. She could see it was a supreme advantage. Yet almost instantly she plunged.
‘From the beginning you were determined to dislike me,’ she began, looking into her rival’s face.
‘And why shouldn’t I? My son makes a disastrous mistake and I’m expected to be all sweetness and light …’
‘You don’t know what you are saying, Mother,’ Ben interrupted, and his voice was low. He observed his own hand as he refilled cups. It was commendably steady. Suddenly he longed for the autumn air outside, for leaves in the gutters and others on the pavement to kick his way through. And perhaps tomorrow a call to his mother’s doctor. Or the offer of a holiday.
The bill was paid, his mother was handed into a taxi. He slipped his arm through Sylvie’s and they walked. It was miles, block after block, before the residential street began, but by then they were in stride. A stamina built on opera cake and chocolate marquise. He thought he could walk with her forever, that darkness would never come. Something would happen to the world and twilight would be the default position. A shift in the heavens. Like the year he worked in London, stunned by the first afternoon when it was dark at 3 p.m. And Sylvie, concentrating on matching him stride for stride, only strove, as she rationed her breath, to remain silent; anything else was too dangerous to contemplate.
Madeleine too was surrounded by danger but it was a danger she could not see and this lack of visibility protected her. Freddy was unaware, since he had been successful in the past, that an arrangement might not always work; there might come a faltering or demands or, what he most dreaded, a breakthrough in which all control was gone.
He was interested to learn about bushfires; he questioned people at the club and read eyewitness accounts. He thought he might drive out and visit one of the stricken towns, view the flapping corrugated iron, the concrete foundation slabs and the blackened trees. A photo of a fireman holding a water bottle for a wombat with a scorched face to drink from was on the front page of the Age. Madeleine looked at it for a long time, moved by the fireman’s gesture, for the wombat seemed to be accepting the gift and holding the bottle with its paws.
One evening when they were dining with another couple the conversation turned to philanthropy and how it could crown a life spent in business. ‘A late satisfaction,’ the man said, and Freddy agreed. So they mean to give a bottle of water, Madeleine thought to herself. Only it must be Perrier water and it must be seen, though a photograph was not necessary to the action. The woman opposite, in a dress suitable for the opera, smiled discreetly as the forms of philanthropy were discussed, and Madeleine smiled back. Both knew they were the necessary accompaniments; they could hardly have been acceptable in curlers and slippers.
All the way home Madeleine was silent. She was thinking of the shape of the wombat’s nose, its no-nonsense curve as if it could never act dishonourably, as if every gesture would be unclouded. So unlike humans, for even at the pleasant and innocuous dinner, which they all agreed was a success and must be repeated, there had been undercurrents. The director of the gallery had approached and spoken a few words, and Freddy had instantly become more animated.
‘I have a headache,’ she said when the front door was closed.
In bed she lay on her side—the wombat’s face was burnt on one side—and tried to imagine its life after the fireman and the photographer were gone. Did it survive the night in the blackened forest? There were no living trees for it to climb into. Then she remembered there were animal hospitals and it might have been taken to one of those.
Freddy sat on in the lounge, nursing a drink. He was amazed, not for the first time, at what could undo a woman. A burnt armadillo—though there were none in Australia—would not have elicited the same sympathy, or any creature with scales or a protective shell. He foresaw his new life—he meant his new complication—would need careful handling, perhaps even a pause. Women’s imaginations, even the most prosaic of them, leapt so blindingly far ahead. The woman he was seeing wanted companionship, but the price for living separately would be enacted in a regular routine. This, a compromise on his part, could be useful when he wanted a retreat. Still a disturbed routine sent a signal without any words being spoken.
Madeleine was sleeping when he came into the room. Her body felt hot, though she wore a fine cotton nightdress edged with lace. It was twisted under her. He pulled the sheet taut on his side and eased himself in. Sleep took a long time to come; he lay on his back thinking of the need both sexes had for a partner. His arrangement with the new woman was promising, but that was only the beginning. Neither sex presented the real self at the first encounters. Appearance counted but speech, he thought, hardly at all. Underneath what was being gauged were the accommodations that would be required and whether these were acceptable. Just before he slept he thought—and the thought brought a frisson of surprise—that this was the part he enjoyed most. It was like embarking on a voyage, stowing trunks below deck and then coming up on deck to look at a disappearing land.
In the study, the shelves dusted, washed and dried, the books replaced, Isobel spread her fingers on the old brown globe and gave it a spin. Instantly it rolled away and the proportions of ocean and land changed. How absurd to think there was a missing continent to match the vastness of Europe or Asia. Or that huge serpents or whirlpools could furnish a boundless ocean. Anything to remove the idea of emptiness, whether it was a dresser decorated with plates or the rising shelves of books from which she had removed at least thirty to give to the hospice shop.
If the globe had been smaller Isobel might have lifted it from its stand and held it in her arms, pressed close to her heart. She would have uttered old-fashioned words over it, words that were half spells, half invocations. She would have held Sylvie’s life close to her, and Madeleine’s. Lives that were composed of plains and mountains and surrounded by sea. She closed her eyes for a moment, her hand still on the globe, and imagined sea monsters, giant squid that seized wooden ships and dragged them beneath the waves. And most perilous, like Niagara Falls which she and Kit had visited, a great falling away of water that signalled the end of the world. When the globe was still again, stopped at South America and the Pacific, Isobel drew the curtains and lit two lamps, one on a stand, the other on a low table. Sylvie had arrived, fuming about the disastrous supper.
‘Should I refuse to see her again?’ she asked Isobel. ‘Make it a condition of staying with Ben?’
‘Draw up a treaty?’ Isobel asked. A few famous names flitted through her head: Versailles, Dumbarton Oaks, Maastricht, Vienna.
She had embraced Sylvie on the doorstep and now, in the study, she embraced her again, pulling the slender body close to her larger one, not caring about etiquette or the peculiar way men and women now embraced, their hips leaning well out with a triangle of light between them. She felt Sylvie’s breasts pressing and flattening against hers and guessed Sylvie felt a similar pressing. If there was some way of convincing her that the world did not end in a great plughole and the ship sailed on, taking on fresh fruit and vegetables, and the sailors recovered from scurvy.
Sylvie flung herself back into the old reading chair with its velvet cover and matching footstool. She kicked the footstool viciously and it fell over. But when Isobel came back into the room with the tea things on a tray it was righted again and Sylvie was looking at the bookcase. In front of the books were spaced small ornaments, nothing of value. A cheap Madonna with hinged wooden wings, some tiny tea cups and saucers, too small for dolls, a row of black elephants lined up in order of height. The largest elephant had tusks, the rest were mothers and babies.
‘What’s the best thing to do with an enemy?’ Sylvie asked when her hands were wrapped around a mug. She thought it was Isobel’s thoughtfulness; she had brought a cup for herself.
‘Perhaps there’s some information in the bookcase,’ Isobel said, sipping from her cup. She
thought of Eliza Bennet and Lady Catherine de Bourgh exchanging fire as if they were armed with muskets. There was far more fighting in that little scene than in the barracks at Meryton. Then there were the great battlefields in War and Peace across which Pierre wandered among fallen cannonry and torn bodies. The battlefield resembled a sea, too vast in its sweep and horror to comprehend. But she saw that Sylvie needed comfort, not literature. Something practical like a spell. A voodoo doll into which pins could be inserted. Sylvie could engineer another meeting and see if Cora clutched her side or rushed to the bathroom. Isobel’s own mother had had a saying which had puzzled her as a child. ‘Treat with ignore.’ It usually meant one of the ladies who sat around the afternoon tea table had offended her and would be denied an invitation. But sometimes it was used differently. It was a withdrawal containing a rebuke, practically a weapon: one of those fearsome weapons that were multi-purpose, like a can opener that could take off bottle tops. A rifle with a bayonet.
‘I wish you would pay attention,’ Sylvie was saying, and Isobel apologised. She was so frequently giving advice in her head—usually long soliloquies which were raptly listened to—but when it was solicited she was at a loss.
‘You could negotiate with Ben,’ Isobel said, putting her cup back on the tray and deciding against a refill. ‘His feelings need considering.’
‘I know that,’ Sylvie said. She could barely keep her voice under control. ‘I know it is hard for him.’
‘Will he continue the weekly dinners?’ Isobel asked.
‘He hasn’t said he won’t. Perhaps he is talking to her. He can’t make a clean break.’
‘But you can. You can make a decision. Retreat can be a good thing. Kit could give you a few pointers.’ Isobel took the mug from her hands, refilled it and gave it back. She wished they were sitting side by side; she could have touched her arm or shoulder. Soon Sylvie would have to get up and use the bathroom.
‘Excuse me,’ Sylvie said, rising and going out of the room.
I must say something more, Isobel thought while she was gone. It’s useless talking in abstracts. I should say an enemy is a good thing, a salutary thing. And if one ever becomes a friend it is the securest friendship there is. But all this was irrelevant.
Sylvie came back and Isobel had moved to the sofa. She patted the seat to indicate Sylvie should sit beside her. She touched a hand to the fair hair that fell forward, indicator of an interior state. Then she curled an arm around her farthest shoulder and pulled her granddaughter towards her.
‘You are strong, Sylvie,’ she said. ‘This will pass and you will come through it.’ She felt the resistance in the tense body return. Being told you are strong is not helpful. ‘Come to me whenever Ben goes to his mother. At the same hour, for the same length of time. You can coordinate your watches. You can come to the tent of the enemy general.’ Those tents were usually on a hill, she thought, when they had both risen from the sofa and stood in the middle of the old Turkey carpet. Now they embraced warmly and there was a feeling of love. Isobel felt her bones soften as she tried to transfer her warmth to the smaller, more compact body of her granddaughter.
Kit had taken to asking Isobel what she was feeling. Usually it was at night, when they were in bed together. Like two figures on a tomb. But sometimes it was when he brought her a cup of tea or poured a glass of wine. Gradually they had both come to feel that they could not get through the day without an early evening drink. It allowed Kit to admit he preferred a small—two fingers—whisky and water while she drank red wine in the winter and white in the summer. The fire in the grate consumed its ingredients in order: old papers that Isobel was burning, fresh-faced kindling and cones, and then small logs which Kit sawed meticulously into the correct length. Isobel could remember fires where logs were pushed in by brute force and sometimes, glowing like crocodiles, fell out onto the hearth. How she had wanted Kit to enquire about her feelings when they were courting. Now she realised her own attention at that time had been on him: her dress, her look, the trouble she took with her hair, even her perfume had been designed for his feelings, his confidences. He had a man’s natural diffidence; that she listened with wide eyes—she had practised opening them in an expression of surprise and delight in front of the mirror—was enough. And if her attention strayed he could bring it back by a caress.
‘I hardly know what I feel,’ she said one evening when she had helped herself to a second glass of pinot noir. A shepherd’s pie was heating in the oven and an apple crumble alongside: twin dishes. For a moment, as she had set them together on the rack, she had thought of twin martyrs, perhaps exchanging quips, as they were turned in the fire.
The best days were those in which she hardly thought at all. Days when she drove or walked and her mind simply observed or her thoughts were simple, one dimensional. Thoughts that could not have offended an Inquisitor; thoughts a child might have, that Sylvie might have had when she was young, leaping from her bed and running the moment her feet touched the floor. Then she recollected that this part of Sylvie’s life was closed to her; Sylvie had been with Madeleine and possibly already feeling unhappy. Then Madeleine had gone to France, with Isobel and Kit’s help, and Isobel had attempted to mend the fractures.
‘I’ve been thinking of the time Sylvie broke her arm,’ Isobel said. She was not thinking that at all but she needed to say something and her eye had caught the old apple tree outside the window.
‘The deliberate break,’ Kit said. ‘How she worked at it.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She was determined to break a leg or arm. When I tried to stop her leaping from the tree she tried the roof of the garage. Usually she just winded herself and rolled.’
‘Poor child,’ Isobel said. ‘Something else I didn’t know.’
She had accompanied Sylvie to the hospital, sat beside her as the plaster was applied. She remembered a white face and had taken it for bravery. Sylvie had not counted on the pain to be undergone before the plaster was covered with signatures and drawings. Horses and fairies: decorum, since the teachers could see, had prevailed.
A desire to injure yourself. How common it must be, Isobel decided. Followed by the desire to have something firmly applied—plaster or chastisement, a punishment self-willed. None of it seemed to exist in Madeleine, who drifted through her life, oblivious of trouble, content to present a surface the way the two elderly harpies in Gigi had trained their protégée in arcane rituals, like eating ortolons.
‘Ortolons,’ Isobel said suddenly. ‘Do you know what they are?’
‘Some kind of bird?’
‘Served whole. The important thing was to use a certain number of strokes to cut them through.’
‘Ghastly,’ Kit agreed.
‘Still, if you wanted to move in certain circles,’ Isobel said, trying to think what the modern equivalent might be. Knowing your single malts or cigars? Perhaps that was the problem with Cora: Sylvie did not match her idea of propriety, though Isobel and Kit had trained her in manners, courtesy to others, being kind to animals. Animals had been no problem. Kit had taken her to the art gallery or museum on Sundays to give Isobel time alone and they had peered at glass cases or free-standing displays while Kit tried, vainly, to connect an Edwardian dress or a piece of porcelain to a bygone age. He never told Isobel how deflated each visit left him. Still sometimes when they were walking down the broad steps, under the lamps which emphasised the building’s grandeur, a faint hope resurfaced of some future effect. The wide lawn stretched almost as far as the eye could see. ‘They must have driven up here in carriages,’ he said to Sylvie, wondering if she would remember the Edwardian dress.
‘Poor horses,’ was all Sylvie said.
Isobel’s imagining that Madeleine’s life was easier because she was protected from introspection, or self-awareness, was wrong. Her passivity did not always protect her from shocks or shocking discoveries. Nor could Freddy always control events. His own comfort had always come first and this was now
revealed to be a blind spot, for at the moment when his senses should have been most alert there was a failure of signals. The woman at Myer who had served him and brought tie after tie for him to inspect—he bought none but, charmed by her ease in a men’s department, he had lingered. Zsazsa Szabó was the only woman on the floor, chosen for her personality which ranged from flirtatious to motherly. For Freddy she adopted, automatically, the air of a slightly world-weary, sophisticated woman whose interest could be revived by a bit of sparkling conversation. Freddy too rose to the occasion, forgetting the pain in one knee. He took his hand from the counter and stood straighter. She took his name, after he had looked through several catalogues, and promised to notify him the moment the new Boston Brothers ties arrived. Paris was mentioned. It was her dream to live abroad. She could easily have said Berlin or New York, because a few images came instantly to each one. Eventually someone else came to the counter and the conversation, regretfully, was at an end. Though he didn’t intend to, Freddy turned back before he reached the lift, and a manicured hand—he could see the polished nails from a distance—wiggled in a little wave.
When the message came and he paid a second visit, she was not there. He concealed his disappointment and left a message expressing his thanks. He wondered what else he could buy. He had always admired the neckwear affected by Byron which protected and warmed the throat, concealing the Adam’s apple which in older men became more prominent. Remembering a portrait of Byron working at his desk, his shirt rumpled and full-sleeved, he wished something other than the tailored shirt would come back into fashion. Perhaps he could weave that into a conversation.
A few weeks later he was having coffee with Zsazsa in an alcove on the third floor. Zsazsa had led the way, briskly, past displays of curtaining and beds, each made up, each in a little room like a stage set. The beds were smothered in cushions of all shapes and sizes; some seemed to have rolled from an eminence. Whose responsibility would it be to remove them, Freddy wondered. What was the etiquette? Or did each attend to the cushions on their side of the bed? Zsazsa, now she was not behind her counter, wearing a tape measure over her shoulder, retained her air of unassailable confidence. Freddy found this oddly restful. With Madeleine he played the role of overseer; it might be pleasant to hand over the reins. As he rose to hold her chair at the end of her short lunch break, he knew he could leave whatever arrangement there was to be in her hands. Even his role would be explained to him: it would make a change.
Loving Sylvie Page 16