Loving Sylvie

by Elizabeth Smither

  After she had gone, striding along the path between the beds, he resumed his seat and ordered another pot of tea. The waitress, he noticed, had been particularly attentive while Zsazsa was present. He walked more slowly towards the lift, pondering the pillows. At the last moment he retraced his footsteps and stood at the base of a huge sleigh bed. He chose the smallest pillow, black with a dusky pink rose, for Madeleine.

  Half an hour later—he had taken a taxi outside the store—Madeleine was unwrapping the cushion and holding it over her heart. The rose looked so much like a heart and was practically the same size. The stem which disappeared into the seam had three large thorns; some photographic method had been used, it looked so realistic. ‘Not the bed,’ she said firmly to Freddy. ‘I want to see it more often.’ She thought she might move it from place to place. After she had decided on the centre of a slipper chair she went to the mantelpiece and turned the page of the book that was on display there: a book of Southern plantation houses. It was one of her mother’s habits to display a large pictorial book on a stand, to contemplate a pair of plates, or a single divided one, for a day or a week, like an exercise in meditation. Today’s house had a slave cottage, diminutive, dull and weathered almost to an earthen colour in one corner, but it was so out of scale it could be ignored, as it would have been by those in the mansion. Giant pillars, chipped and mouldering, towered above steps that billowed like a crinoline at their base. Some of the shutters hung lopsided, but the mores of the period still hung in the air. It made Madeleine shudder.

  Freddy’s attention and the gift, she knew, were associated with guilt. He was such a planner, so attentive to detail and progress, that the smallest breach of the trust it was her role to maintain produced signs she had recognised from the earliest days. That night when she turned on her side to sleep she remembered Gigi. She had read the whole of Gigi because it was short, and then The Cat which was her favourite. Freddy had made love to her gently before he slept. He had laid his lips against her hair and run his hand down her side. Quite often she felt herself turning into an object with him: this time, as she lay on her side, her hip jutting and his hand stroking and measuring, she thought of a large amphora she had seen in an interior design shop where furniture and garden statuary mingled. Despite the rose cushion that was at this moment glowing downstairs in the green chair, her heart felt heavy. It was lucky that her natural lassitude gave her scope to merely seem to be enjoying something.

  Gigi had been read twice and The Cat three times. She could never be a Gigi, though there had been times when her clothes were too tight or a shoe pinched. Still there were different kinds of resistance, and Gigi was not the only one who could leap into the unknown with her bold conversion of Gaston, the sugar heir.

  Only once in her life had Isobel set out deliberately to defeat another human being. It was the third year of her marriage; they were part of a loose group of friends. They had all married around the same time, like lemmings, except instead of plunging over the cliff at the last moment they had joined hands with another lemming and put on a wedding ring. But there was nothing meek and lemming-like in their behaviour to one another.

  Already the signs were that she and Kit would be among the lucky ones and last. They were settling into a calm which they tried—Isobel especially tried—not to show. In the first years of love Isobel had let her impressions blur, her instincts slip. But there was a woman in the group, Livia, already aware that her own marriage would not last, who was beginning to have her claws into Kit. It took a while to see it, for a kind of group philosophy prevailed: they were a certain kind of people, liberal and free but honourable at the same time, morals carried lightly. Slowly and then more quickly Isobel caught the signs. She made the mistake of speaking, showing that she knew what was going on. ‘The Sleeping Prince will wake up one day,’ Livia had replied. ‘We’ll see about retraction then.’ She had developed a habit of resting a hand on Kit’s sleeve or bare arm. In front of the bedroom mirror Isobel practised a bland face, an open countenance. But she couldn’t bear a false laugh.

  She decided against enlightening Kit. She was determined there would be a time when Livia was defeated. Kit need not know he had been fought over; she could do without flattering him in that way. Some engagements could not be avoided, but dinner invitations could be limited. ‘We hardly see you,’ Livia said in front of Isobel, and the hand came out and settled on Kit’s wrist. Isobel noticed a slight flinch and smiled to herself. She felt her whole life was under scrutiny, as if she was being shadowed.

  A pile of coats and wraps lay at the base of the hostess’s bed at a party. Livia lay in them, calling feebly that she felt unwell. Kit who happened to be passing pushed the half-open door and leaned over the bed. (There was a convention of closed doors, and the coats made a delightful nest.) Isobel came into the room and offered to fetch a glass of water. She chose the largest tumbler she could find and filled it to the brim. Some of it slopped on the carpet. Just before she reached the bed she stumbled on a coat sleeve and the water poured over her enemy’s neck and cleavage.

  ‘I forgot the ice,’ she said after someone else had gone for a towel.

  ‘What was that about?’ Kit asked when they were walking home.

  ‘Heaven knows,’ Isobel replied. Hell knows, was what she wanted to say, but boldness and restraint went hand in hand.

  In the darkness between streetlights Kit smiled to himself. A woman could not know how delightful it was to a man to be fought over.

  ‘Shall we stop going to these things?’ he offered. He was thinking they had served their purpose. They had courted and coupled, the hunt was over. Unless someone was dissatisfied, wanted another round.

  ‘Slowly,’ Isobel said. ‘Perhaps we could do it slowly.’

  She took his arm and matched her stride to his as if they were conquerors.

  The hooks, the hand on the wrist, the sleeve, were not so easily removed. When Isobel and Kit’s absence was noticed there were phone calls. The phone was put down when Isobel answered. It was unavoidable that Kit should sometimes pick up. Once Isobel heard him say he was no handyman, and guessed a task had been set. She backed softly out of the room. Sometimes there was a car parked opposite. That was when Isobel read up about sugar in the tank and how to slash a tyre. The climax came one winter’s night. The phone rang, startling them awake. Both turned on their bed lamps. Was it Sylvie? A sobbing voice poured from the phone and Isobel knew it was Livia. ‘No,’ Kit was saying. ‘Phone an ambulance.’ The sobs continued, broken by incoherent words.

  ‘We should go,’ Kit said, when the phone suddenly went silent.

  Isobel was already pulling on clothes. In the car she brushed her hair with the miniature brush she always carried in her handbag. She rubbed her cheeks.

  Livia was lying on a sofa, her feet on a footstool. A negligée and robe showed her figure to advantage; her tear-stained face was lightly made up. Isobel sniffed for onions, wondering if she had poked herself in the eye. Finally she pushed Livia into a sitting position. The emergency was a demand for a divorce. In the bedroom Kit, searching for a thicker robe, noticed rows of empty hangers.

  Isobel had taken command like a general. Kit was ordered to make coffee. He never knew what words were exchanged but he did not doubt they were cold and sharp. No false affection lingered, just cold facts as imperceptibly the night gave way to dawn.

  Isobel’s desire to act was so much a part of her character, she could no more eradicate it than she could stop brushing her hair the moment she rose in the morning, or cleaning her teeth five times a day. The times in her life when she had not taken action were the times of greatest suffering. What intervention she could have taken on behalf of Madeleine she was never sure, for their natures were so different. Sylvie and her problems with her mother-in-law was a different matter.

  Sylvie’s account of her meeting with Cora had convinced Isobel that Cora was intractable. Yet she must be treated as Ben’s mother. She tried to imagine Ben a
s a small boy, drawn into a web of motherly love. A stifling web that no child could see. Cora’s excuse for not attending the wedding might have been a fantasy, Isobel thought. She had presumed, in time, they might have visited one another’s houses. Then she noticed the dust that had already descended on the shelves she had washed the month before. The old globe was shedding paper flakes on the carpet. Still she did not care if her own sporadic housework was the source of another’s sense of superiority. She touched the globe with her hand and it flew over palaces and mud huts, houses where children were crooned to sleep and others where they wailed themselves into unconsciousness, wracked by hunger pains. In between were the oceans, full of fish, into which wastes were poured. The globe was a great worry bead which she should turn each evening, letting the worries of the day go.

  It occurred she might look for a friend or an acquaintance who knew Cora too. Someone who could ensure that she and Isobel were at the same gathering. An event at the art gallery where it was easy to avoid another person simply by staring intently at a painting while sipping a glass of wine. It was not always easy to avoid someone even so; they might be standing alongside when the speeches began, wishing they had secured one of the few seats. Nonetheless, she knew she was going to pursue Cora Taverner. It would be an active kind of enmity. The thought of spying again brought a return of energy. More walks at night, peering at lighted windows. More socialising when she had become rather lax.

  Isobel climbed on the first rung of the library ladder and brought down a life of Lucrezia Borgia. Somewhere there was a history of the Medici family but Lucrezia would do to begin with. Isobel gave the globe one last shove before she left the room, wondering how many of the billions of people on it were at this moment using their wits.

  Two days later Isobel was seated at a French café drinking a flat white. The café opened early and the aromas of coffee and pastries drifted out into the street which was still wet from cleaning. She planned to devote half a day to sleuthing. She was wearing walking shoes, and in her bag was a fold-up umbrella and a light waterproof jacket. Her first stop would be the library, to read the habitation index which listed streets under numbers and occupants. Though she could not see any immediate use, it might be helpful to know the names of the neighbours on either side. She might be forced to take shelter or even sanctuary. The café was filling up with its regular clientele, jovial after their first coffees were served. Soon Isobel was joined by a dark-suited businessman who held his briefcase between his knees and a young woman wearing a cap with tassels.

  ‘Do either of you know a family by the name of Taverner?’ Isobel asked.

  They both looked at her blankly. The businessman thought he had heard the name. Isobel finished her coffee, thanked them, and left. She felt, if they met again, she could continue her enquiry or report progress. The businessman had murmured ‘Good luck’ as a fragrant omelette aux fines herbes was set in front of him and he placed his briefcase on Isobel’s vacated seat.

  Isobel wrote down the neighbours on both sides and opposite and, for good measure, added the householders next to the neighbours. In a nearby street there were a number of gentrified houses serving as small businesses: a manicurist, which could be useful, a shop that made cushions and bedcovers, and a tea shop. A few streets away was a doctor’s surgery, a laboratory and a cooking school. She could be walking to any of these places to order a cake or have her nails attended to, or, more ominously, to sit in a cubicle while blood was drawn from a vein. Armed with her knowledge of the neighbours she could approach one with confidence.

  Nonetheless she was pleased a light shower gave her the excuse to pull up the hood on her rain jacket as she passed Cora’s gate. The windows were rather close to the street but they were dressed in such a way that various drapes and blinds made an almost impenetrable privacy. The owner could be overseas, Isobel thought, and it would be impossible to tell whether the house was occupied. There were two guest rooms furnished as exquisitely as a boutique hotel, Sylvie had told her.

  Though she was no further ahead with her investigations than when she started, Isobel was pleased with her walk. She showered and made a cup of coffee. In a few weeks she and Kit would travel to Melbourne. They would visit Madeleine and resume the relationship, as much as could be salvaged. But first they would fly to Sydney so Kit could drive the coast road. It would be Isobel’s seventieth birthday while they were away. For three nights before they decamped to a modest apartment they would stay at The Windsor.

  Sylvie stopped outside Prospero’s Emporium and peered in the window. The glass was grimy as usual and most of the exhibits seemed to be made of metal. Old canisters that had once held biscuits, ancient egg beaters and fish slices, a blackened kettle. A tin bath was filled with preserving jars. It was oddly restful, she decided. In the halcyon years—a word she had used in her seminar, unpicking its sounds, orotund sounds as if someone had a toffee parked in one cheek—when she and Ben had lived above Ma’s Best Fruit & Veg, Prospero’s had offered an alternative vision. It was all dust; all things are reduced to dust. Nothing could be less like fruit with its gleaming glowing skins. Reluctantly she moved away from the door as someone came out carrying a lawnmower with golden wheels. She took a few steps to the left and peered inside the old fruit shop. A row of sewing machines with heads bent over them and a dressmaker’s dummy in a cheongsam. Ben was at a conference in Adelaide. It was a day when her own seminar had not gone well: the projector had broken down while she was showing slides of the Toda people, and one of the secretaries had had to come and fix it. As she ambled through the park Sylvie thought of the work that, for once, she had put into it. Of course if the missing students turned up she could repeat some of it, fix someone with her beady eye like the Ancient Mariner on the church steps. He must have had charisma, Sylvie thought, as she began to descend one of the steep paths which were covered with chestnut burrs.

  Ben had left a note on the kitchen table. It was a quote from Dante:

  Do not be afraid; our fate

  Cannot be taken from us; it is a gift

  Dante Alighieri x

  Her hand shook a little as she held it; in her heart she had been expecting something worse, a more stringent quote, even a farewell letter. When she felt calm, or this is how she came to it, she smiled at the careful spacing and the punctuation that he had been at pains to copy. He was not an architect for nothing. In the early days of their marriage they had taken pleasure in concealing notes from one another; it had become a treasure hunt. There might be one in the tea caddy or under her pillow. Once, trying to unpeel one stuck to the underside of a cake of soap, Ben had slipped in the shower and bumped his head.

  The night before they had argued in a desultory fashion about his trip. Why must it be compulsory? Sylvie had demanded. Only the PA would be left in the office; the rest would be cloistered in a lodge. Some kind of superior deal had been negotiated. Buffet meals, platters of fruit, drinks in the evening. Perhaps that was the cause of the bitterness: that Ben should be in luxury, drinking and socialising into the night, while she heated something from a tin. But Dante made her feel cheerful again. She took a Pacific Rose apple from the fruit bowl and cut it into thin slices; then she arranged a circle of nuts and dried fruit and two squares of dark chocolate on a square white plate. What would Dante Alighieri have eaten? Wine, naturally. She opened a bottle of merlot and filled a glass to the brim. The quote, on second thoughts, seemed less comforting, but the unspoken text was they would face it together. When Ben returned she would ask neutral questions but not superficial ones. Something along the lines of ‘What was it like in the dark wood?’

  Isobel had asked not to be met and she was relieved when she and Kit came out onto the concourse at Tullamarine, pushing their trolleys, knowing that no one in the crowd lining the barriers would cheer or wave. A basketball team was ahead of them and a great shout went up and banners were unfurled. Then she thought of Madeleine, possibly alone in her house, possibly lonely, and wond
ered if she had deprived her of a pleasure.

  Outside they took a taxi and Kit instructed, ‘The Windsor.’

  Her birthday treat was beginning. ‘A taxi or a horse and carriage?’ he murmured, taking her hand. ‘Bread and water for the last week.’

  ‘There might be a soup kitchen,’ she said.

  She thought she could volunteer. At the end of the evening she might be rewarded with a bowl of soup.

  The taxi door was opened by a doorman in a top hat. He had a kindly face; it might have been part of the job description, Isobel thought, lifting her face towards him and smiling. The great doors, brass shining where the sun caught it, were flung open and they were in a world where gesture counted. A huge floral arrangement on a circular table with ornate legs rose towards a chandelier.

  Instantly Isobel felt warmed. She told herself it was all pretence: the bread and water that would come later—not literally, but she would curb her spending until the money was recouped—were equally fine. Somehow, though, her heart wasn’t in it. She could feel herself sinking into the luxury of it all, as if she was the owner of one of the designer suitcases on the luggage cart a bellboy was pushing over the thick soft carpet.

  The room, when they were alone in it, was over-chintzy, over-heavy and yet strangely restful. They lay on the high bed together and Kit held her hand. There was a writing desk against one wall and a telephone to summon … Isobel wondered what she could ask for: the water in the vases to be changed, another half dozen towels? At dinner a little gift was slipped beside her plate. Inside was a wombat brooch. Its eyes, glowing against the tablecloth, were garnets: night eyes for hunting and feeding. The body, silver, was scratched to resemble fur. Tears came to Isobel’s eyes at the continuity the gift expressed, for Kit had given her The Secret Life of Wombats many years ago. She had avoided reading it, knowing nothing of wombats and thinking she would not be interested. As a teenager the author had crawled into a burrow and almost become jammed. The great pressure of the earth above him, which might at any moment collapse, the great dome of the starry sky above. No one at the boarding school knew where he was, and he knew this too. And there was something else: the wombat’s enviably strong back like a plank which could be used against an enemy as effectively as a studded shield. A wombat could run on its four paws and then suddenly stand upright, catching its pursuer a knockout blow.