Loving Sylvie

by Elizabeth Smither

  They were standing in front of a painting of a young girl in her bed. Her face had a greenish tinge. There was no School of Illness that he knew of, though there would have been enough adherents. An attendant stood by a small window; a jug and ewer was on a table, along with medicine bottles.

  ‘Let’s find something else,’ Madeleine said, pulling at his arm. ‘Landscapes, abstracts.’

  If Madeleine returned to Melbourne there would be the magnificent National Gallery of Victoria. She might become a Friend of the Gallery, a serious supporter. There would be lectures and meetings. He thought of Willem de Kooning’s Standing Figure in the sculpture garden where the grass was cut at different lengths and made a pattern. Nearby, Balzac had his nose in the air and his dressing gown wrapped around his body that Rodin had surely elongated.

  Now they were walking past watercolours. The frames were lighter and the works had an airy accomplishment; perhaps Madeleine could take a class. Kit suspected they required a good deal of thought, an examination of layers and the order in which they should be applied. One of his favourite words came into his head: water meadow. He doubted he would recognise one if he saw it: he imagined a surface that was lush and deceptive, waving grasses and reeds and, underfoot, water that rose through the soil at each step.

  He longed to ask Madeleine her thoughts. She was so quiet. But it was restful too, while he talked about frames which, privately, he thought most straitened artists would hock for food or wine. Of course the frames came later, centuries later in some cases; they were more a comment on patronage or the use of public funds than art itself.

  They sat outside and Kit suggested a glass of white wine.

  ‘Isn’t it too early?’ Madeleine asked.

  ‘What does too early mean? I think if I could start life again from the first breath I’d never stop running. I’d go without sleep …’

  ‘Don’t,’ she said, placing her hand over his. He looked down at it and then ran his thumb over the soft skin under her index finger. There were two little liver spots, nothing more.

  The wine came, a light riesling from Alsace.

  ‘You’ll be able to drive?’ Madeleine said.

  ‘Of course. But I think we should have a cake as well.’

  When two little friands were gone, and two coffees, they walked in the gardens for half an hour. I shall remember this always, Madeleine thought. Whatever happens. It was not just a fancy; she had selected this image as it was occurring: the tall figure beside her, the silence between them, the sound of small shifting stones their feet made in the gravel. ‘The world is nothing without images,’ one of the authors Madame Récamier had invited to the bookshop had said. A reverent crowd had stood in the aisles between the book tables. Apéritifs had been passed around, dishes of olives. Afterwards a passionate argument had taken place: the writer had been challenged to explain how those without images lived. Madame had been very pleased by the evening, though she had not repeated it for months.

  Remember, remember, remember, Madeleine said to herself as they came to the gates. It had been the best day in ages.

  Spring was arriving. For Isobel it had always been a game to detect the greening of the trees in the park, particularly the oaks. When the first signs appeared, though ‘appeared’ was too strong a word, ‘intimation’ came closer, she would walk each day to gaze at their swift yet almost imperceptible visibility, the unfurling of tiny wing-like leaves that would eventually become an imposing canopy. At first a hint of greenness hung about the tree like the lightest watercolour wash. A shower could obliterate it or sunlight bleach it out. Now it would have to be imagined. Strangely this did not make her sad. So many memories were surfacing and joining up: in the periods she was free from pain they came, insistently, clamouring to be re-examined. Isobel thought that, unknown to her, they had consolidated so all the weather in which she had watched the leaves, sun and storm, lashing or light winds, was combined in a triumphant flurry of green.

  Kit would find some consolation in art, Isobel thought, when her attempt at consolidating the oaks was over and other thoughts intruded. He would take Sylvie and Madeleine to look at paintings; he might ask them to choose a favourite. And which would he stand in front of to remember her? Not a portrait. Perhaps it would be his favourite Hitchens with its bold sweeps that needed no human presence to sing. A wide painting suggesting a continuum and also, though the strokes were light and bold, a solidity underneath. The Hitchens had a plain oak frame, refreshing after all the gilt.

  Kit came and stopped in the doorway. Isobel looked at him in annoyance. Even now she was expected to provide signals. Then, in an access of pity, she recognised his fear. His longings were as complicated as hers: he needed an overview, he needed to hold her in his mind. She thought he was seeking similar images for himself: Isobel from the doorway, Isobel closer up, Isobel when we first met. And how could any of them hold against the flow of time—perhaps his reason for liking the Hitchens with its sweeping strokes like the movement of a pendulum. She knew he had been making arrangements for a nurse who would stay overnight. She put out her hand and patted the space beside her, and he bent and took off his shoes.

  ‘Dr Franklin has found someone,’ he said, taking her hand and stroking each of the fingers. ‘Someone quite old and experienced. I would have preferred someone young.’

  ‘Young and bustling,’ Isobel said. ‘In a uniform that is slightly too tight.’

  ‘How well you know me,’ he said, turning aside his head as if he was examining the books on the bedside table.

  ‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘It’s one of the best things.’

  Then, because their speech was beginning to resemble a child’s primer, they stopped talking. In her head Isobel’s questions went on: What had been her allotment of words? Had she used them up? Would—more frightening—they be winnowed for meaning and import? She remembered a woman, a stranger, coming up to her in the street and repeating to her something she had said and thanking her for it.

  ‘I’m sure it was nothing,’ Isobel had said, but the woman refused to be deflected. ‘It meant everything to me,’ she insisted, before hurrying away.

  Now, with Kit beside her, Isobel fell asleep. Her body ached but it ached more to move so she seemed to sink more deeply into the mattress. Sleep surrounded her, like Kit’s stroking of her fingers; it drew an outline like the outline of a body in one of the hundreds of thrillers she had read. Absurd thrillers where the furnishings of the room were described before the feet were sighted sticking out behind a desk or the body slumped in a chair with a dagger protruding from its chest. Far away she felt the touch of Kit’s hand—he was running his finger up and down her middle finger, which was glowing like the index finger of E.T.

  Kit was thinking about the nurse, wondering if he could ask for someone younger. He meant fresher. But the next morning when Rosemary Summers RN arrived for a visit he was reassured. She was thin and bony but her eyes were bright and, if it hadn’t been inappropriate, he would have said merry. He guessed she was experienced in many fields.

  After she was introduced to Isobel, he offered her coffee and they sat in the kitchen together. She did not discuss Isobel and he appreciated her tactfulness. Instead she asked questions about himself. His career, how he spent his retirement. It turned out they had been at university together; they might have passed on a path between lectures, though her subject had been biology. She had wanted to be a doctor but money was not available.

  When she had gone Kit bounded up the stairs again. He felt lighter than he had for weeks. Thin bony Nurse Rosemary would be more than a match for what was to come.

  Madeleine had not replied to Freddy’s letter, nor to a follow-up letter from his lawyer, suggesting negotiations be postponed until further instruction. For the first time in her life she was becoming aware of the power of not acting. It was what she had always done: with the Lévêques; the return home, followed by the return to France; the bookshop. Now she had the leisure to ex
amine her behaviour. She thought of love and the warnings her mother had perhaps intended the Colette novels to convey. Had Isobel wanted a Claudine who had the wit to surrender to an older man as if she was bestowing a favour? Or an Annie who carried a revolver? She thought the great disadvantage of being a woman was this need of love; in men, the ultimate disadvantage was to conceal it. For the first time, since Freddy had prevented the thought from arising, Madeleine clearly saw his dependency. Yet it had been his strategy to make her the grateful recipient, the one honoured by an attention measured out and punctuated by displays of reluctance on his part. He had concentrated on what he could offer: an apartment or a house, status, an occupation. Yet it was not an occupation as the bookshop had been. There it was necessary to dust the books, change the flowers when Madame had pruned the dead ones and rearranged the survivors. ‘The cheapest’ she always instructed Madeleine as she set off for the market behind Notre Dame.

  It was on one of her return trips with a bunch of alstroemerias that Madeleine had gone inside the church. It was midday and a Mass was in progress in one of the side chapels. Around the edges tourists were passing, reading plaques, taking photos of the rose window. Madeleine was close to the little group of the faithful when a middle-aged woman knelt with outstretched arms and then placed her forehead against the stone floor. Behind her two women stepped forward, ready to raise her to her feet.

  Madeleine walked through the nave and out through one of the great doors into the courtyard. It did not matter if she lingered because it was part of her lunch break. (Madame Récamier had suggested, since she was Anglo-Saxon, she might need only an hour while Madame took the customary two.) What was the woman praying for? she wondered as she navigated the cobblestones and tried to avoid a young gypsy girl with a handwritten sign. There had been such offering in the obeisance, such an emptying of something—was it the heart?—as if nothing could be received except in a vessel emptied and scoured. She was thinking of the old coffee pot behind the curtain, its base almost worn away by the heat from the gas ring. The face of the woman had been emptied as well, and as the hands of her supporters raised her up she seemed oblivious of the drama of her gesture.

  Now Freddy had made a gesture, but it was of a different sort. Already he was sketching for her his way out, the changes he would require. And how long would the terms last? She rather thought there might be an element of revenge which would be released very slowly so she would hardly feel it, except in a prickling sense that she was failing.

  Sylvie had found a bach by the sea. It sat on a little hill, a child’s drawing of a hill. Behind it a gravel track ran through the grass; in front, beyond a small square of lawn, mowed a few times a year by its owner or a local schoolboy who sometimes forgot, diminishing ledges, increasingly invaded by sand, led to a narrow beach. An old sign, on which wind and salt had worked to obscure the lettering, warned against swimming. At high tide it was still possible to walk on the strip of sand; low tide meant five or six could walk side by side and only one had their feet in the water.

  A track led down, steep in a few places, but posts had been placed at strategic spots; children ignored the track altogether and rolled down over the ridges. At the bottom a seat of hard burnished wood, iron legs and ornate scrollwork on the arms, surprisingly comfortable because its back sloped, had been bolted onto a railway sleeper. It was the one chore the owner insisted on every summer. No sooner had he arrived than a pot of varnish and a brush were produced, the seat was given a wipe-down and a new coat of shiny varnish.

  Inside there was sand on the windowsills and the mantelpiece above the swept-out fireplace. The floor felt delicious under Sylvie’s bare toes, as if she had opened a box of Turkish delight and blown on the icing sugar. Everything inside was secondhand: the beds from someone’s childhood, one with a rabbit on the white headboard. The dresser had a frilled edge and part of a Willow Pattern set stacked in piles, for the wind would have set a display plate tumbling. Green-rimmed saucepans with worn enamel gouges rested upside down on newspaper under the sink. It was perfect. A cupboard held supplies of sheets, towels, pillows. Everything was comforting and soft as if the sea, without any visible touching, had produced a symbiotic wearing away. Blankets like clouds.

  Kit had been doubtful about the project from the beginning but Sylvie, with all the fire and determination that Madeleine lacked, had convinced him of the holiness of last wishes. That Isobel asked for it less now was not a factor: it had been stated in advance as a request, at a time when requests could be made; it was nothing more than tact. Then there was Nurse Rosemary who was giving him confidence. A sort of Mary Poppins, despite appearances.

  The owner was located and a flexible arrangement made. Two days, Kit thought, or a single night. A few hours’ notification and instructions about the key. (In a tin buried under a hydrangea bush, marked by a stone.) A few feet away, as if someone had been interrupted at weeding, was a trowel. A thief, Kit thought, when the trowel struck the stained lid of the tin, would have lifted only the stone. It was important to him that there be no frantic searches for keys, no need to phone the owner again. If Isobel was to come there must be ease and grace, as much as was humanly possible. Nurse Rosemary stood beside him, in the wind that rushed up the slope, her thin figure braced.

  Inside they opened the windows and the front and back doors which made a funnel. The stale air dispersed and the scent of the sea flew in. Nurse Rosemary removed a bird’s skeleton from behind the dresser. The idea, she thought, was foolish but must be humoured.

  Madeleine, sitting beside her mother, wondered if she should talk to her. So often now Isobel seemed to be half-asleep. Should she introduce herself in case Isobel thought she was Sylvie or the nurse? Was a kind of confession required? A recital of regrets, sincere and brief, so any vanity was expunged. Then gratitude, then love. She thought of the concerts she had attended with Freddy, the sung Masses, the programme in her hands and glancing down at Kyrie, Gloria, Agnus Dei. Neither she nor Freddy was religious; she held his arm as they walked down the aisle of St Paul’s Cathedral and Freddy nodded his head at acquaintances. Afterwards the programme went into a drawer with the programmes for musicals, cabarets, The Rolling Stones.

  The one word Madeleine longed to say was ‘Mother’ but she could not think of the tone to say it in. Dying men said it on battlefields, young men who before they died and their bodies slipped underground reverted to childhood and the mother who would appear in answer to a call with a glass of water in her hand and a promise to leave the night light on.

  The front door opened softly and there were voices. Nurse Rosemary appeared in the doorway, wearing her expression of calm. Despite the deep lines there was no overriding expression, no sourness or cynicism; the lines could have been a pattern like stripes on a tiger. Madeleine, getting to her feet, smiled, and Nurse Rosemary smiled back. An open face with distinguishing marks.

  Before she left Madeleine bent over and kissed her mother’s brow. Isobel’s eyes fluttered open and for a second Madeleine thought she was not recognised, then a calm expression spread over Isobel’s face and there was a word that sounded like ‘Darling’.

  All the way to the bus stop—she had turned down her father’s offer of a ride—Madeleine said the word to herself. Dar-ling. Dar-ling. She felt she could have torn it to pieces, for it was a word her mother had never used until now. She rested her back against the bus seat and tears leaked down her cheeks. Every house the bus passed, every shop, every factory seemed to be saying Darling. And above them the clouds, the clear-washed blue of the sky. She half-expected a small aeroplane to appear, trailing a banner. Madeleine clenched her fists, but she had herself under control when the bus stopped.

  The great irony was that when the visit was accomplished and Isobel was settled in her bed with its special mattress near the window, and the window open, the sea glinting in, the invigorating air filling the room and Sylvie walking about with bare toes, the irony was that Isobel was thinking of a lake
. She was in a rowboat with Kit. She had swapped places with Sylvie, who stood patiently on the shore. She was wearing the wedding dress her mother’s dressmaker had sewn for her, and the long veil that was tucked under her. The dress was a long sheath with leg-of-mutton sleeves and the material was ivory satin. There was a cushion under her, and the veil was trapped between the cushion and her buttocks. Beneath the satin was the pristine underwear bought from the shop that sold ready-made gowns. Her stomach was clenched, not just from fear of motion sickness—something she had not taken into account—but from a slight elastic pressure of the fabric. She expected, when she undressed, her stomach would be quite swollen. It was swollen now, when she reached a hand down to touch it.

  ‘Derrière,’ Isobel said, and Sylvie leaned over to catch the word. ‘They used to always say “derrière”.’

  ‘Where?’ Sylvie asked.

  ‘The dying say strange things,’ Nurse Rosemary had warned her. ‘It’s best not to take them as last words.’

  But Sylvie’s attention was acute.

  ‘Where?’ she asked again. Her mother should have been here to hear. But Madeleine thought she had a cold coming and had begged off.

  ‘In the best shops,’ Isobel said. She closed her eyes and was perched on a high stool, so high she would twist her ankle if she slipped.

  ‘Derrière and bosom.’

  Those were the two areas to be controlled. Before they were offered to a man. That evening it was Kit who had hung the dress on a hanger while she disappeared into the bathroom. She had looked down at her stomach, pink and striped where the panty girdle had left a mark. She took a towel from the railing and rubbed furiously at the stripe. Then she sat on the toilet seat for a while, running her hands through her hair which was flattened too and lacklustre.