Loving Sylvie

by Elizabeth Smither

  ‘Goya,’ Kit said. ‘You need a strong stomach for Goya.’ There had been a travelling exhibition of drawings housed in one of the side galleries. The pity and horror of it was still fresh in his memory. The viewer pitied the victims, then themselves, and then felt responsible. Perhaps this accounted for the gallery being nearly empty.

  ‘How did it end?’ he asked, sliding his hand across the leather and placing it on top of Sylvie’s. Isobel had told him about the fight.

  ‘I can’t tell,’ Sylvie said. ‘I can’t tell anything with her. I’m glad it is out in the open. What am I going to say to Ben?’

  ‘I’d say nothing,’ Kit said. ‘I’d strongly advise nothing.’

  ‘And if it’s like a venomous fang that refills with poison, what then?’

  ‘Then we’ll find a way of dealing with it. You and me together. Meanwhile I think you should come home with me and rest for a few hours.’

  But first they went in search of a Goya. The travelling exhibition had long flown but there was still Here Comes the Bogeyman. They stood in front of it and some of the pain in Sylvie’s heart melted away. She thought she saw enquiry in the look the young plump-cheeked woman was returning, and courage.

  ‘I’m not at my best, Kitcat,’ she said, slipping her arm through his and feeling the comforting soft tweed of his jacket with the leather patches. A supercilious portrait, she went on thinking, could only have reminded me of the perversity of human beings.

  Isobel was out, and Kit propelled Sylvie towards the spare room where the bed was always made up. She took off her shoes and crawled into it like a creature that has lost its outer skin. Three hours later she was still asleep. She woke and heard voices. Isobel, Kit and Ben were gathered in the dining room. Her place was set and she slid into it.

  The next week Isobel fished out an old wig from the attic. There were three: a redhead, a brunette and a blonde. The blonde was instantly useless; it wouldn’t have been out of place in the court of Charles II. For a moment Isobel was distracted by thoughts of itching, the hot feel of mesh on the back of the neck. The brunette was moderately short and nondescript and had a fringe. She tried it on and dusted an old dressmaker’s mirror to gauge her appearance. Kit looked up in surprise, hardly recognising her.

  ‘What are you intending to do?’ he asked. ‘Sell insurance? Apply for the position of a maid?’

  ‘Neither of those. I’m going to post a letter.’

  ‘Addressed to whom?’

  ‘Myself, naturally. A few words of self-praise, I think.’

  On a card in the drawer in which she kept supplies Isobel wrote: Boldness favours the brave and signed it An admirer. She stuck it in an envelope and sealed the flap. She had no idea what she was to be bold about, what the wig, itching and unpleasant to touch, was meant to protect her from.

  She parked her car by the nail clinic and walked, coat collar turned up. A soft rain landed on the brown hair and glazed the surface. She wore a preoccupied expression, as if deep in thought. A man coming out of his gate almost collided with her and murmured an apology. Here, on the other side of the road, was the house, carefully sealed as usual. She wondered what Cora did inside, which room she was in. Sylvie had told her there was home help and someone brought baking once a fortnight. Soon she was at the postbox, gleaming and fresh-painted, probably campaigned for by a little committee of women, since in most parts of the city they were disappearing. She slid the letter in and heard it strike the bottom of the box. Tomorrow or the day after it would appear in her letterbox. She might throw it straight into the trash. She turned at the pillar box and crossed the road, still preoccupied as if the letter she had posted had signalled the end of an affair, condolences for a death, a painful letter to a child.

  To her horror she saw that Cora had come to her gate and was checking her letterbox. Isobel fished in her pocket and pulled out a handkerchief and covered her mouth and nose. But their eyes met and for a second, though neither gave a sign, she wondered if she was recognised. Instinctively she altered her posture, stood taller, walked more quickly. The eyes are the windows of the soul, she said to herself, feeling for the edge of the fringe which came almost to her eyebrows. At the corner the humour of the situation came to her and she stopped for a moment to catch her breath. ‘I can report she is alive and well,’ she could tell Sylvie. Then, as she reached the car, she tore the wig from her head and stuffed it in a rubbish bin.

  ‘What was your mother doing walking along Cavendish Street in a wig?’ Ben asked after his next dinner with his mother. Everything was going on as before.

  ‘A wig? I don’t think she owns one,’ Sylvie said. She arched her eyebrows and opened her eyes wide, remembering a school play in which she had played a flapper.

  Nothing more was said. Ben’s mood had improved since the conference. He had presented her with a bouquet of snapdragons and, always a sign between them, an offering of fruit. She received it as solemnly as a great ape holding up a twig for inspection or examining a leaf.

  Isobel was summoned to Dr Franklin’s surgery late one winter afternoon.

  ‘Come after 6 p.m.,’ she said. ‘That will give me time to clear the waiting room.’

  Isobel thought nothing of it; there was no change in the voice, except a hint of tiredness. Often she suffered a low-level virus, a gift from her patients, all through the winter.

  The familiar room was more bedraggled than ever. Dr Margot had never gone in for the minimalist look. Once there had been a full-size plastic skeleton until its metacarpals and phalanges were removed by children’s hands. More appealing was a series of miniatures done by a medical student. Organs of the body made the formal acquaintance of other organs. The vermiform appendix bowed to a kidney and asked for a dance; the heart waltzed with the gall bladder. Isobel never tired of looking at the paintings with their soft colours, for apart from the organs and their strange behaviours the backgrounds were perfectly domestic. She was looking at a pancreas lying on a chaise longue when Dr Franklin came in.

  Tired, thought Isobel. How tired she looks. She could do with a tonic.

  Then she reflected that Dr Franklin had told her years ago that tonics and cough syrups were useless.

  ‘Isobel,’ she said, and instead of sitting behind her desk she came and sat beside her. They looked across the desk together. She had shrugged off her stethoscope and it was lying on the blotter.

  ‘You look …’ Isobel began.

  ‘Isobel …’

  They were talking over one another. A smile spread across Isobel’s face but there was no answering smile.

  ‘Tests,’ she said. ‘Do you remember having them? You didn’t ring the surgery to get the results.’

  Isobel remembered how she had peered at the blood welling into the tube. Five tubes while she sat holding a piece of cotton wool over the punctured vein and the technician wrote her name and date of birth five times on the labels. The attention to the puncture point struck her as excessive. Once in the car she had torn the plaster and the wadding off.

  ‘It’s serious, Isobel,’ Dr Franklin was saying. ‘Very serious.’

  Then the purpose of the later appointment was revealed: not fitted in at the end of a long day but deliberately chosen because it might take longer and be unpredictable. So many times they had walked to the door together, Dr Franklin’s hand lightly touching Isobel’s back or Isobel lightly touching Dr Franklin’s arm. Part of the consultation included enquiries about family members; the doctor had twin boys.

  Dr Franklin got up to fetch a file and when she was seated again Isobel felt the news might be about her sight. The desk, the wingback chair in which Dr Franklin usually sat—she saw that the wings of the chair offered refuge, the doctor could sink back against them and imagine she had disappeared—everything in the room was fuzzy.

  ‘Am I losing my sight?’ Isobel asked.

  ‘What gives you that idea?’ Dr Franklin replied. ‘Your sight is fine.’

  Then as the room reassembled a
nd Isobel could see, in compensatory clarity, everything that had threatened to fade, the real news was imparted. Her overriding feeling was of sorrow for Dr Franklin who must be longing for the protection of her chair.

  But Dr Franklin was drawing her back with details: tests, new drugs, university research. Despite the five phials of blood, she was talking about the vagaries of medicine, how one philosophy succeeded another and none was certain.

  ‘Will you call Kit?’ she asked, looking at Isobel with concern. That too went with the late consultation: naked expressions. But Isobel could not let her naked expression show, because she did not yet know what it was.

  At the time when Isobel thought her own walking might have to be curtailed, Madeleine had decided to walk a little every day. Her plumpness, never excessive, a couple of kilos at most, did not seem to displease Freddy who, himself, was growing plumper. Some of his suits had been taken out and new shirts had been bought. It was while she was delivering some shirts to a charity shop that Madeleine found she enjoyed walking the length of Fitzroy Street. The charity shop had moved and she had walked a further two blocks. On the way back she had stopped for coffee at a café with tables on the street. A group of students had joined her, sharing the bench she was sitting on. She felt pleased to be considered unthreatening—none of the students looked at her—and a little saddened too. After the students had rushed off like a flock of birds, she sat on, watching the activity of the street.

  Shutters were rolling up; a woman swept the patch of pavement outside a dress shop; someone chalked a menu on a blackboard and lifted the chalk with a flourish. It had been Madeleine’s task to sweep the pavement outside Le Livre Bleu, occasionally to clean the big front window, though clean windows were low on Madame Récamier’s priorities. ‘A smudged window,’ she had informed Madeleine, ‘adds mystery.’ More important were fresh flowers which Madeleine bought at the market. Always the cheapest, except in early spring when extravagance was allowed. Few who stopped to admire the bright yellow daffodils near the cash register escaped without buying a book. Madeleine, resuming her walk, thought she admired people who were as cunning as Madame Récamier. Temperaments such as hers saw the connectedness of things, like raindrops driving people indoors—how often had she watched with amusement as Madame darted into the street with the huge umbrella she kept to snare a victim. New stock was a golden opportunity. ‘Hold this,’ Madame would say to someone browsing and hoping Madame’s eyes did not alight on him. And then, once half a dozen copies of the latest Truman Capote were in his arms, would come the next move. ‘Smell the pages.’

  Isobel had told her that Sylvie had had a similar relationship with the owner of a fruit shop. So they had that in common, Madeleine thought, as she got up and walked back along the Esplanade. The palm trees were rustling and a tram was climbing the rise. Freddy had told her he would be out that evening. She began counting the steps between lampposts. Another tram rattled past and gave her an idea. The café on the station at Middle Park served dinner; she could eat there.

  That evening Madeleine decided to travel the whole route to the terminus before turning back. Freddy would presume she was at home reading a book or watching television. She realised his imagining of her life stopped when he was not present. Sitting on the tram—one of the ones she thought of as middle aged: neither a dowager nor the newest bright yellow—Madeleine pressed her face against the window and marvelled at the dark squares of lawn, fountains and palms outside the towering offices in St Kilda Road. So many lights burning and only occasionally a figure passing behind the glass. The tram raced and sang on its tracks; cars with headlights on pulled up alongside, and passengers dropped down into the dark streets. Soon they were passing the museum where a crowd was gathered in front of the doors; further on a white dog lifted his leg against a spotlit tree. Now came the part that stirred Madeleine’s heart: little shabby houses with screen doors and broken-down sofas under the windows so the owners could survey the street. Tidy gardens jostled untidy; skips and bins hinted at some futile activity. Yet Madeleine thought she might do something with one of these houses if she had a free hand and plentiful funds. The tram paused before it began its return journey; the conductor came through and looked at her curiously. ‘It’s my favourite route,’ she said when he stopped beside her. ‘Mine too,’ he said. ‘You see everything on this run.’

  After that she felt slightly deflated. Soon she was back in Bourke Street and changing trams. Everything looked different in the dark and she must concentrate. Middle Park came quicker than she realised and she just pressed the bell in time. And here was the station, lit with fairy lights, and Xavier coming out onto the platform with a coffee in one hand and a folded blanket in the other. She got out—her legs felt shaky—and walked quickly up the ramp.

  Afterwards Isobel wondered how long she had spent with Dr Franklin. Was it time that could be calculated, like the seven minutes for an ordinary consultation, taking in time for pleasantries and the writing of a new prescription? Was there an average? Dr Franklin had been insistent that Kit be called, but Isobel had resisted with equal force. She could feel the power of her resistance in the room which suddenly grew close. Then Dr Franklin relented, on the promise that Isobel would walk to the nearby taxi stand. She had no intention of obeying: that imperative had vanished along with the effort to please. A strange freedom was being offered her.

  When the allotted time for such visits had passed, though she did not glance at her watch, Isobel and the doctor embraced. And the doctor walked her not just to the door of her surgery but along the passage and to the door of the clinic where the night air was pouring in, dampened by a light shower that must have been falling while they talked. It was one of Isobel’s favourite scents, especially in autumn when the air carried base notes of domestic fires.

  Isobel set off towards the taxi stand, aware that Dr Franklin was watching. She passed by one cab and then quickly turned the corner. No running feet came after her; the doctor would be inside now, tidying her desk for the morning. She had promised not to phone Kit.

  Isobel had had to work hard to extract that promise, and a feeling of self-pity had almost undone her. She must concentrate only on the moment, bring all her force to bear on it, since there was nothing else. And Dr Franklin, recognising something of this, something in Isobel’s eyes or her expression, had capitulated though her own face bore a grimace. Never before had Isobel seen so clearly how one person moves away from another, how separate lives are, despite propinquity. If someone had come out from the alley she was passing and struck her on the back of the neck, she thought she would have been grateful. For the knowledge to be taken out of her hands, for the roles that she and others must instantly assume. At this very moment Kit was probably drinking a dry sherry and worrying about putting the casserole in the oven.

  Down one long straight avenue Isobel kept walking. Then when she realised she was lost she turned back and reached the taxi stand again. A single cab with a turbaned driver was waiting. He switched on the interior light as she opened the rear door, and she shivered a little as he turned to greet her. His appearance was neutral, friendly, his eyes kind but tired.

  ‘I saw you go past,’ he said, after she had given him the address.

  ‘I needed to walk for a few minutes,’ Isobel said, hoping silence would prevail.

  The cab was decorated with a great many ornaments: the dashboard was practically a shrine. It was oddly warm and comforting, sharing the space with a little luminous god. Isobel sank back against the shabby seat cover, the ancient springs. Tears, unbidden, ran down her cheeks and she stroked them away with her fingertips. A tissue was passed from the front seat, the turbaned head looked straight ahead. Only once, just before the cab pulled into the kerb, did their eyes meet in the mirror.

  ‘No charge,’ he said when she was opening her purse.

  ‘But I insist,’ Isobel said.

  ‘No, Madame. No.’

  ‘Surely it is too cold to sit outsid
e?’ Xavier asked Madeleine when she was seated at the small table at the end of the platform, the one likeliest to receive gusts of wind and rain. But Madeleine left the blanket guarding her seat and went inside to consult the menu. She chose corn fritters with bacon and a glass of merlot. She could tell the staff thought she was an oddity, despite the ring on her finger when she laid her hand flat by the till. She thought how her father disliked rings and what they symbolised. ‘Married but unhappy,’ he would say. That could mean another ring. Or one on each finger: I can’t make up my mind. The day Freddy had dragged her into the mairie in the rue Bonaparte—no special dress, no bouquet, just a rose from a street seller—she had convinced herself it was romantic, forceful in the way men expressed emotion. Her hand was imprisoned in his; if she had tried to free it, it might have attracted attention. Somehow he had had the measurement of her finger. Later she remembered trying on a ring in a backstreet jeweller’s, an antique ring with a carnelian. The witnesses had been two cleaning ladies who were grateful to put down their buckets and mops. ‘Done,’ he had said as they came down the steps and out into the sunlight again.

  Now, as she waited for her meal to be brought, she moved the ring up and down on her finger. Already it was tight; one day the band might sink into her skin and need to be cut off. If she had an operation it would be covered by tape.

  A tram was approaching, its interior lit up. She wondered, as she dug her knife into a fritter, if she appeared a mystery woman, eating alone, a blanket with red stitching slipping from her shoulders. Someone like Lara in Dr Zhivago, a novel Madame Récamier had a low opinion of even though she had placed a new translation in the window.

  Months later she had wondered if economics had been behind Freddy’s impulse, and even his pressure on her hand, the sudden drawing of her towards him, the kiss in front of the charladies when permission had been granted, had all been taken into account. A gesture not only cost nothing but the violence of it could be an entry on the right side of the ledger. She knew that profit and loss was pleasing to Freddy. He would frown at stinting where it showed: the table, her clothes. He would have calculated that impulsiveness made a good story. For months their circle had been regaled by it and women had looked at him admiringly.