All this was odd because Isobel and Kit had slept together on their third date. Isobel had acted like Claudine and given herself before she could be seduced. She had taken the initiative from which no lover could recoil. The little piles of clothes then had been undistinguished—cotton bra and knickers, a sweatshirt with the university crest and a straight denim skirt. She had thought of everything except getting back into them, turning her back and hoping Kit was still wrapped in the sheet. And Kit, as she had intended, had been amazed by the fierceness with which she had given herself. He still remembered it. Hiding her innocence, staking a claim on all the unexpressed passion that, through the years they were together, would be available as from an inexhaustible well.
He had seen the passion parcelled into many things: the attentive way she read and made lists of further reading from footnotes; the way she cooked with her recipe book balanced on a stand as though the assembly of eggs, flour, butter, spice was a kind of music. There had been an old book from a Benedictine monastery in Connecticut from which she had cooked casseroles and crumbles using cheap cuts of meat and windfall apples, and lectured him as long as her interest lasted. Things were perfected and then left, but not before the essence was extracted and stored. Only a week before her diagnosis the monks’ cookbook had come out again and she had made oatcakes.
‘As dry as accidie,’ Kit had said, and she had looked at him with a flash of understanding.
‘When have you ever experienced accidie?’ she asked.
‘At work, often,’ he said. ‘With you, never.’
‘Liar.’ But she was amused and the oatcakes had had to be served with berries and whipped cream. There was a limit, even to monks.
Her passion, apart from bed, turned out to be colour. It had evolved over the years and was always changing, adding touches and juxtapositions, finding new theories. It might be something as small as four books on a footstool. Kit could swear she arranged the colours there, though two were from a second-hand bookshop and two bore library markings. It was unconscious and yet something she checked on, adjusted. An awareness that a painting was in the wrong place or the bookcase looked better with some titles sloping like fainting guardsmen. She was a follower of ‘the liquefaction of Julia’s clothes’, for curtains trailed over the edges of carpets, shawls embraced the backs of chairs, and petals at the base of flower vases were to be regarded in their falling.
Kit thought he had been guarded by instructions, now that Isobel lay pale and confined, her movements limited, her breathing light. The thought that he would have to continue to carry them out filled his heart with a pain that almost caused him to stagger. He thought he might tear down great swags of curtaining and bury his face in them, smearing them with tears and snot. Quickly he left the room and went outside. He sat on a garden seat with a distant view of the sea. Far out, on the horizon, a ship was passing. He tried to imagine the lives of the men on board, their longing, now the port was in sight, to be on land, passing the hours in time-honoured ways with cards and betting. In all the years Kit and John Cook had worked together at Beca Carter Hollings they had invented ways of being together. After days spent poring over plans and negotiating with clients, some of them almost certainly mad, he and John had been able to pass hours in near-silence. ‘Drink?’ Kit would say and John would nod. ‘Another?’ A glance at a watch and a shake of the head. It might have prepared him, Kit thought. But first would come a pain he felt he could hardly bear, a madness that he must take pains, with whatever energy he possessed, to conceal. He must let it out in very small measures so, if the relief was tiny, the edifice held. The body has wisdom, he told himself, as he turned his attention back to the sea as if observation on his part could decipher that endless, futile-seeming motion. Already he was embracing his daughter and granddaughter more. I’m in it for myself, he thought. I’m preparing a path.
Sylvie came up to him when he went inside again, stiff-limbed. He pulled her against him and stroked her hair.
Isobel was glad to be back in her room. Gladdest for the presence of Nurse Rosemary. So much seemed to have happened to Nurse Rosemary’s body already. The thinning of flesh, the wrinkles that took up some of the slack, the deep lines where the skin might be expected to be smooth. A deep line across her forehead was like the cut of an axe. But Nurse Rosemary evidently did not see herself in this way. Isobel imagined a tease and a competitor with boys, her long legs carrying her over the playground or up into the branches of a tree. Now she moved soundlessly around the room, doing things not in a cringing tactful way that would have driven Isobel mad but with swift darts as if Isobel was being attacked by a thousand small irritants it was her responsibility to repel. Isobel was amused. The bed sheet was tightened by a swift tug of skinny fingers; a glass of water, half drunk, replaced. Expressions chased themselves over the worn face as Nurse Rosemary arranged the day’s pills in a pattern. Isobel wondered who she would go to next.
‘I never nurse children,’ Nurse Rosemary said, as if reading her thought. ‘Too many wrinkles. I come into my own at Halloween.’
‘The kindest witch in the West,’ Isobel said, smiling.
‘Only the West? The North and South and East, I was hoping.’
‘I’m very grateful to know you,’ Isobel said.
‘It doesn’t take much,’ the witch replied, striking her fist into a pillow that had dared deflate. ‘Not for you or me.’
A harsh wind was shaking the garden. Petals were falling, and leaves and twigs. Kit wished Isobel, propped up on pillows, could be spared the sight, but she found it exhilarating. Wan-looking clouds as if at the back of the wind something like an old half-washed-out watercolour had been discovered. Isobel had always meant to paint watercolours when she was old. The pots of water, the cleanness of them, and the deliberation she imagined it took: all these appealed to her. Her subject would be flowers, giant carelessly observed flowers: a Christmas lily, hellebore, a dying rose. None would be observed in botanical detail or accuracy: as the water ran over the precious paper she would attempt to convey the emotions she felt when she looked into the petals of a camellia—like the dome of the Chrysler building—or the tenacity hidden in a frail viola. Kit would come in and she would set the brushes down or add a last swathe of water to take the flower back to its origins. Her grandmother had painted on panels of wood: English primrose, shasta daisy, bleeding heart. Isobel thought there was a Japanese influence in the way the flowers stretched from one side of the wood to the other. How, with her twelve children, had her grandmother found the time? There was a notebook of comments, written in a fine nib, showing a page could be arranged as well as a panel. Kit thought the panels might have come from an old wardrobe, the varnish too hardened to remove.
How many days, Isobel was thinking. What she meant was how many days before disintegration set in, before Nurse Rosemary’s sparkling and mocking eyes hid a trace of strain, before Madeleine and Sylvie, still carefully avoiding one another as if one was holding a whip and the other doing a penance, found relief in a great quarrel. And after that would Kit have the strength to apply balm, to assure her that all would end well? No one would believe it, least of all herself, and she might be surrounded by one of those weeping Victorian scenes with everyone gathered and the bed in the centre, a wide nave filled with what in a few days would shrink to a casket. Her own control, too, was slipping.
‘How much of me is left?’ she said to Nurse Rosemary during the early morning’s bed-straightening, before the tea was brought in a flowered cup.
‘What do you mean?’ Nurse Rosemary said, bending over, perhaps to conceal her face.
‘My blood is awash with drugs, none of my organs is functioning naturally. I can still breathe and speak but that’s all.’
On the sheet Isobel clenched her fist and then loosened it. It was the equivalent of preparing her face.
‘I don’t see how you can ask,’ Nurse Rosemary said, pushing her fingers into the small of her back to show she was mortal. Isobe
l thought of uttering a small groan. ‘Nothing is lost, don’t you think? We don’t own it but we don’t lose it either.’
‘You think there is still a child inside, a newborn baby still sleeping? The first and best sleep of all.’
But that was as far as Isobel got that morning, for it was time for an injection and then Kit came to check if she was up for visitors.
‘Does anyone check with the Queen?’ she asked rather tartly. ‘Doesn’t she have to stand for hours?’ The injection was taking effect.
Over the next few days, as unconsciousness made itself felt, Isobel felt herself being colonised as surely as explorers in a new land raised flags and issued proclamations. No matter if the natives did not understand the language or a treaty was cobbled together by lamplight with a skinful of whisky. But she clung consciously to the idea of her first sleep in the world, to the little prepared bed a nurse had carried her to after she had left her mother’s body and been washed and clothed. Later, she thought, as if it were a project, she might select other memories, separated from one another by the passage of years, and cling to them for the comfort they contained. Now she was hardly herself, despite Nurse Rosemary’s confidence, she would look for the best she had been. How she had been that best remained a mystery; her part in it might have been small. And in the things she regretted and now had no time to examine the same tolerance might apply.
Kit was bending over her, stroking her hair back from her forehead. Nurse Rosemary had a towel in her hand. ‘Don’t,’ she wanted to say to Kit, for it was no longer soothing. Then sleep came and she was back in her crib with its calico sides and baseboard and the mattress her mother had aired so religiously for months it smelled of the sun.
Isobel woke and there was a figure sitting in the visitor’s chair beside the bed. How quickly the eye knew a shape was unfamiliar, a posture foreign. Sylvie was in the doorway, a guard waiting for her to wake.
It was Cora Taverner, her hands folded in her lap. Isobel saw she had taken pains, that her face was powdered; a scent drifted towards her like a chemical intimation of spring.
Isobel had the advantage of opening her eyes first. An enemy is a complete package, she thought, for she was refreshed by sleep, her injection had not yet worn off. And she had the advantage of being able to close her eyes at any time, severing the contact by a blink. At the same time she felt something more than pity: that this proud self-important delusional woman should have come to her for a last passage of arms. Under the sheets Isobel felt her weapons: her arms, pinioned by her side, might deflect an embrace. She might command more pillows, which Nurse Rosemary could bring. Any imperious gesture she would apologise for later. Surreptitiously—but Sylvie noticed—she stretched her legs and moved her toes. Wasted, she thought. How many they might have kicked or tripped, how salutary that might have been. Seat Isobel at a table again with a cascading white cloth and how many stumbles there might have been from a slender shod-foot shot forward. But only one talent had been perfected and employed: her intimate but faintly distant glance as she raised her wine glass to her lips to absolve herself of guilt.
Now Sylvie came forward and Isobel could see the relationship with her mother-in-law had changed. There was a pact between them, new minted, a novelty to both. This was to be concealed from her until the little scene was over. Swiftly Isobel closed her eyes to overcome a moment of panic and hurt. She bent over the child, Sylvie, again, and pressed against her not her own failing body but some kind of essence stronger even than the stiff watchful figure on the chair. It must be enough, she told herself before, after the deepest breaths she could manage, she opened her eyes for the scene.
‘You’re awake,’ Sylvie said.
‘Yes, darling. I’m awake.’
She seemed suddenly to be aware of everything, as if a shaft of light had appeared, like the criss-crossing searchlights of Twentieth Century Fox or Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s roaring lion that had enchanted her and her brother when they sat, swinging their legs, in the worn-down seats in the cinema where mice scuttled across the stage.
Then there was a great deal of rustling; she drew her foot back under the table while behind her back chaos had broken out and a waiter was running; someone had gone down and a circle was forming which perfectly matched the round table. But Isobel, while the voices floated overhead, remained calm.
‘Do you think she saw me?’ came a voice.
‘I’m sure you were recognised,’ came another.
‘There’ll be another opportunity. Now the ice is broken.’
It wasn’t icy at all where Isobel was, which was odd because she was closing down. It was warm. So was Kit’s hand when finally, like a heavy bird, it landed on hers.
Madeleine was found in a coffee shop, the morning paper open in front of her. When Kit appeared in the doorway her hand brushed her cup and the dregs fell on the face of a politician. She rose to her feet and followed her father into the street.
‘Am I too late?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘But only if you think it is the end.’
She ran to keep up with him, attempted to draw him back by linking her arm through his. The arm that had supported hers was loose; she could feel the bone inside the sleeve.
‘What painting will do for this?’ she asked. ‘What sculpture?’ The tears began to run down her face. A few puzzled looks were directed at them.
It’s the least I can do, Madeleine thought. The very least.
They were caught in a machine. Why not draw the curtains and seal the doors? Sylvie drew up a timetable—all the tutorials she had organised made her surprisingly adept—and while Isobel stayed, and when she returned, no hour was passed alone in the room that was soon crowded with vases. A procession of vases filled the hall, the kitchen table and benches. Reaching up, Madeleine, still not meeting Sylvie’s eyes or making a gesture, placed a wreath on top of the refrigerator.
Sylvie, with downcast eyes in case they thought she had done the baking, delivered food to a night shelter. She pressed a box of lamingtons on a bearded man. Kit thought the library should be a retiring room, and sobs were occasionally heard coming from it and once a crash as if books were being thrown.
Kit’s biggest resentment was that others touched Isobel’s forehead with their lips, that their stale or scented breath floated over a surface that was cleared, winnowed of all motion. Or that her makeup was commented on, her hair.
In her house Cora Taverner waited like a spider for the day of the funeral. She bought a new black hat, drycleaned her black woollen suit. Then she expected she would be drawn, like the last-minute arrival of an aristocrat, to the pew reserved for the family. This gesture would fall to Madeleine whose air of vagueness would prove useful.
A little army, Kit thought, looking across the row they made. Sylvie defiantly in red, everyone else in black. A line of archers could dispatch them; he saw the arrows rising and quivering in the dust-strobed light of the ancient church. And then Isobel’s hand seemed to slip into his and they were walking again around the outdoor stage on the university lawn, on their first date when his hand had taken advantage of the darkness. Titania and Oberon and the ludicrous Bottom: all present and at the same time lost under the night sky. He would watch the funeral like a play, for Isobel had arranged it, in the same way she had arranged letters to each of them in thick creamy envelopes. There was even one for Nurse Rosemary. None of the contents were to be shared. His was still unopened.
Isobel had chosen the baroque music she loved, the music she had tried to explain to him: its bareness, like a visible heart pumping, unadorned, naked, as true as expression could be. If a string broke you would hear it; you would see it fluttering in the air while the music went on.
Among the tombstones Freddy was walking. He would appear on the steps as the coffin was borne down. The music floated towards him as he read a few inscriptions, compared the lifespan of a husband to a wife. The wife was usually at the bottom, the children crammed into the space tha
t remained.
Madeleine, coming out into the sudden sunlight, blinking, fighting the urge to regard the light as an omen, was alarmed by the bulky figure that appeared at her side. Then she realised it was a customary gesture: he liked to appear silently in a doorway or disturb a dinner party with a provocative remark.
Some people have no sense of timing, Isobel had said to her once. Their lives are short of music.
Still she took the fool’s lines from Twelfth Night, ‘Come away, come away, death’, and walked with him between the tilting headstones. They must have stood straight once; the rearing came later. Isobel had insisted on a tombstone, so singly or together there was a place to visit.
Sylvie’s red and Cora’s black made a painterly contrast in the dining room. Cora’s manner was restrained, deferential. Side by side they poured cups of strong tea after whisky, brandy and port had been passed. A black forest of bodies.
‘Are you Red Riding Hood?’ someone, inebriated, asked. A little red lipstick was smeared on Sylvie’s eye tooth where she had bitten her lip.
When the last visitor had gone Sylvie, Madeleine and Cora stood at the sink, washing glasses. Someone had poured too much detergent in and Sylvie scooped the foam in her hands like a votive offering. Then she plunged her hands back into the clear water and brought out a gold-rimmed shot glass. When they were finished, Madeleine reached out and untied the knot in Sylvie’s apron.
Freddy, lying back in the bergère chair in the den, his feet on an embroidered ottoman, tipped the last golden drops of a Bushmills single malt down his throat. He had already been informed he was useless, but he knew it was simply a warning. He thought of all that might be required of him before the day ended. The reconciliatory lovemaking, in which, if it were permitted, he must hold back the slightest sign of his own need for comfort. He would remember Isobel who had looked at him like a judge.
Loving Sylvie Page 26