English Correspondence (10 page)

He stayed a couple more nights in the house. A cloud settled on the mountain; there was no variation in the weather and not much in the level of light. He had trouble distinguishing one hour from another. He was tired, even after so much sleeping. It was only after he was back on the road that he started to come to. He got off the spiralling mountain track and onto the wider route with cars flicking past on the other
carriageway. The air from the vents cleared his head and the cloud turned to rain. He couldn't remember much about the past few days. He listened to opera as he drove; nothing too heavy, or early or recent. Then a burst of something from the sixties. It was good to be moving. He liked the sensation of putting miles under the wheels, checking the distances against the clock. The mental arithmetic, speed-time-distance thing, sharpened him up. If he kept going, got on the motorway, whipped past the slag-heaps, industrial towns and brief views of cathedrals, he'd be in Calais in no time, and in England by early evening. Scratch supper with Gillian, or, if he got stuck in traffic, take-away, in West London. He noticed the sign on the roof of the restaurant, off the main road, clear of the trees, loopy letters outlined in metal. He wouldn't, at that time of day, have known they were blue. They weren't lit up, but it was Paul and Sylvie's restaurant.

A woman found a key from the board behind the desk and showed him upstairs. She went ahead and turned down the passage when she got to the top. The stairs were at one end, so there was no choice as to which way to go. She didn't waste a gesture on it. The level of lighting was low; economical, not sexy. There were prints on the walls, some sort of series of fruit. They broke up the surface. She opened a door. The curtains inside the room were half drawn. She had gone out quietly. He had called his wife and stretched out on the bed, dozed for a while.

Downstairs, at dinner, the dining room was livelier than he'd expected. He had had a foaming bath and washed his hair and felt a bit brighter. He took in the glint in the wine glasses and the clean white linen. No local artists' oil paintings or stuffed magpies. These places could be dire, unless you had a taste for noting minute degrees of deadness. His Aunt Lou had gone in for that, describing in detail the visiting ministers who came to preach in the month of August, or the skirts in Marks and Spencer. She got a lot out of life, relishing the dreary. She used to say that the bridge with the station and the shops on,
over the railway lines at West Hampstead, reminded her of the Ponte Vecchio. He took a book to the table, though not with any intention of reading. It was protection. You never knew who might not try to strike up conversation. Some fellow telling you his weekly sales or recounting First World War history, having had a fascinating time visiting battlefields and war graves. What a waste. He agreed. And if the other person said that he couldn't help thinking the best had perished, he agreed with that too. You only had to look around you.

On the other side of the room was a long table laid for a party. Next to him, a couple who seemed to be talking to each other. They wouldn't bother him. He found himself staring at the objects in front of him. Knife, fork, glass, big and small of each, an overlarge plate they'd whip away again, a napkin, a vase with a flower in that his wife would have been able to identify. One of everything. He hadn't been particular, on his own in the Vosges. He'd washed up before he'd left, though, and checked there was nothing left in the fridge.

It hadn't been the cold, or the damp, or the loneliness that had done for him, it had been being there. He recognised the condition. When he got to wherever he was going, arriving at any of his three houses, the buoyancy left him. Parking, stopping, turning off the engine, the sudden quiet inside the car, whatever the noise outside; each stage left him lower. It had happened enough times; a kind of agoraphobia at getting out of the car and a kind of claustrophobia at going indoors. He couldn't explain it. They weren't houses bearing weight from the past, passing on family defects. Each had been bought in the usual way with borrowed money and a certain amount of arm-twisting from other people. It was true that they all had something pretty serious wrong with them. None was reliably saleable, which worried him whenever he set in foot in them, though in between, particularly in transit, he could contemplate them calmly, think of them as assets. Driving fast, he had been able to picture them, as if they were odd roadside buildings that he passed and discounted.

There was the London flat in a house, with a front, ugly and chaotic enough to be the back; brick, not stucco and with too many drainpipes slithering down the walls. It was on a main road; that's how you knew which way round it was. Then there was the one with its feet in some tributary of the Thames, that his wife saw as solid. Then there was the Vosges. They had flashed by, his houses, interruptions in long stretches of forest, bare winter fields, patches of vineyard.

Gillian took their properties and finances for granted. She didn't question him. She never had done. That's why he'd chosen her. The others up till then had wanted clarification. He remembered the word because they'd used it. He had supposed, then, that they knew what they meant by it. Not, do you love me, or will you always love me, but, I think we should clarify our relationship. Leaning against a door, or against him, looking straight at him or looking away, bold down the telephone, or hesitant. Something about him had made them ask for it. And later, once he was married, the ones who from time to time participated in his expense account, had been even more insistent, not even bothering to lean. What a word. Clarification. He hadn't liked it. Different again from clarity or shedding light. Not that he had come up with those, nor had Gillian. The fluidity that he'd seen as promising, had been more like absence or absentmindedness, and in bed the same; she hadn't been adaptable, just not quite with it. They had started buying. Houses and what went inside them. The flurry of getting and spending warmed them up for a time, every time. But the feeling went and wasn't replaced by another. Just a lack. At least the money built up again slowly. They had the things though. Three sets of everything. If you piled up all the plates they'd hit the ceiling. No, scrape against it: nothing dramatic.

Jerry said he would have what was on offer for dinner. The choice of the chef. And a decent bottle. He let the woman choose. He didn't even open the wine list. It wasn't so
much that he couldn't make a decision, as that the process of decision-making had dissolved. He began to see that it had always been a put-up job; a check list written on one of those magic note pads children used to play with. You pulled back the filmy top sheet and it all disappeared. Take the purchase of the house in the Vosges he'd just been to. A few years before he had been in Basle on one of his regular trips. Someone in the office was passing round photographs of the cottage he wanted to sell. Jerry thought there would be no harm in looking, so he and the colleague went to see it, after an Alsatian lunch. The colleague had driven fairly fast, considering the lunch and the gradient. They arrived at this dead end, silent and green, smelling of forest. The difference between the picture and the real place was compelling, more so than usual. He had thought, for some reason, of Norwegian Wood, though Gillian didn't and never had resembled the girl in that song. He had never slept in the bath either. Falling asleep in it, as he had done last night and the night before, didn't count.

It's very isolated. It's very dark. His wife's voice had sounded, although the sentences were short, as if she were exploring difficult concepts. It was the first time he had taken her there. She walked round the rooms, looking as she looked when she walked round rooms at home in England, or National Trust houses. She was too tall for the place, too resistant, physically inappropriate. He couldn't help feeling it, though he knew it was unreasonable. She was as she was. Transformation was out of the question. She was the same out of doors, in the plot that surrounded the house. It wasn't a garden, though you wouldn't have known from the way she paced about; her feet labouring through the wet thick-stemmed grass, as if Barry, who came every Thursday from April to October to the house in the Thames valley, had failed to give it a proper mow. She glanced up at the fir trees, surprised to see them there.

In a sense she rose to the occasion. She didn't say much,
but she sorted things out with a cloth in her hand, mopping up excess moisture wherever she found it. They made up the bed in silence.

She talked more at dinner. She talked about their daughter, how she got on the wrong side of the teachers, or one particular one. And their son's homework. And Aunt Lou, how much longer she could cope on her own, what strange things she'd said when she last came to stay. These topics evolved over time, without changing. They might just as well have been at home in England. He could see them now. The bulb over the table casting a circle of light. Within the circle, an open bottle, half a loaf, wine glasses and the far rim of their plates; outside it, the rest of the table and the two of them in near darkness. He remembered someone telling him that the bit of Omar Khayyam, that everybody knew, included a leg of lamb in the original. He couldn't really see his wife's face, but she carried on talking. He didn't mention Omar Khayyam. It had been one of those pointlessly long summer evenings. Twilight indoors.

The next day they'd gone shopping. He had driven into Strasbourg and parked in an underground car park. They had bought the house furnished, from the colleague in Basle, but they still needed to buy things. They had gone round together to find them. It had been quite an agreeable day, with lunch in the middle. Whenever he stayed he was aware that there were objects that didn't fit in; the bread bin and the bedside lamps. There were others. They never stopped looking imported, which was funny given they had been bought locally. That was their last house purchase. It hadn't done anything for them.

When Maurice slumped in his chair, Jerry Dorney knew it could have been him. Because that was how it would probably happen. He would be thinking of something quite different, not even present in his surroundings. Taken not from life but from a place in his head. Was that nearer or further?

He did remember something of Sylvie. She seemed to him like those arrangements of poplars that you see when you're driving through France. Very formal, on the diagonal, but something about the formality making you see the oddness of trees, their particular strangeness. As a person, she wasn't clearly defined, but then neither was he at that moment.

HE WASN'T SORRY
to have lost his copy of
The Egoist.
His daughter had given it to him for his fifty-first birthday because she said she thought it was something to do with that magazine he read all weekend. He said that that was
The Spectator.
He was pretty sure she knew this and that someone had drawn her attention to the title, a teacher who'd read more than
Animal Farm,
if there were such a person. She had probably told whoever was on the till at the book shop that she was buying it for her father. Alice was like that. Sylvie, yes he called her that, not Sylvie Delacour or Madame Delacour, should, therefore, keep it for as long as she wanted. Actually, as it was a reproach to him, he would be glad if she kept it for ever. He wasn't much of a fiction reader, not of that kind of thing, anyway. He liked to imagine it living a blameless existence in the valley of the Meuse. He signed himself Jerry. And Yours.

That was all, really. But, Sylvie thought, it was quite a lot as a reply to a woman who had poured his wine, swiped his credit card and written him one short letter. Otherwise, the asymmetry was still all the other way. He knew more about her than she knew about him. Like all the clients he would have a view of her, a view contained in a fixed frame; nothing arbitrary about where it began and ended.

She was sitting in a bar in the nearby town, the only customer at a table, the only woman in the place. Jerry's letter was open in front of her. It didn't fit with the man in her mind. She tried to piece him together, Jerry, her
correspondent, the bits of his face. It took some doing. She remembered remembering people complete, developing them in her mind's eye, like photographs from Instamatic cameras. This man came in parts and the more she concentrated the less she saw. She got glimpses of his eyes, more than one expression in them, and something of the width of his face and the contours of his chin, but his mouth not at all. What she'd liked about him straight away was his look of mild dismay, as if life wasn't turning out as expected.

The postman had turned up as usual about an hour before and put the bundle of envelopes on her desk without looking at her. It had been like that since they'd misunderstood each other. A clean decision to throw them on the mat would have been better. Half measures made both of them uncomfortable. She had known it was from him. She had opened it and read it quickly. Everything about it was astonishing. She remembered his voice as if he were there. She had liked his voice. The handwriting and the voice didn't fit together straight away. Then they did. She hadn't imagined his reply; that would have been madness. She might never have got a reply at all. Yet, she must have imagined something, or how could these words in front of her seem so different? She had put the letter in her bag, gone out to the car, put the bag on the seat next to her. She glanced at it from time to time as she was driving, as if it were someone she had impetuously offered a lift to and was now nervous of.

She had parked easily. There weren't many people about. She had avoided the short stretch of shops licked by prosperity, the florist, the hairdresser and the salon de the she sometimes went to afterwards, to recover from spending too long in front of a mirror. She had walked in the opposite direction, past premises boarded up, or struggling to keep going. The Bar des Sports was in a wedge between two streets, with windows facing both sides. It was narrow at the entrance and broadened towards the bar and the half-curtained-off stairs that went down to the telephones and toilets. The
arrangement was the opposite of perspective and seemed to remove the choice of forward motion. It suited her to be here. Compared with the café near George's flat, where she had gone for breakfast in the week of his funeral, this place was stuck in the past, unimproved. No one fussed about cigarette ash and rings left by red wine and coffee. The windows were bleary with old condensation. Looking in, or looking out through them, shapes were hazy, blocks of smudged colour, occasionally moving. Sylvie was glad to have found somewhere that preserved life at a time she felt nostalgia for. The bars she had hung around in with her school friends had been like this. Walls like scorched ironing board covers, the pattern breaking through in patches, and darkening towards the ceiling. The fan hanging from the middle, coated in greasy dust. The lighting over-yellowed and unflattering. She recognised the music, and – in general terms – the owner, who had that profound pissed-off look that was to do with the decade he was young in, nothing to do with his age.