English Correspondence (13 page)

The telephone rang again. She left it. It was good to leave things. She knew who it was. It stopped.

She thought, when you go there, however long it takes,
between knowing it will happen and getting there, what do you think of? Her mother had taken a long time, Maurice, seconds. Her father, perhaps half an hour. The doctor she had spoken to, at the hospital where he'd been taken, had said shorter, but she hadn't trusted him. He hadn't liked the question. He had been studiedly patient and made eye contact that, though accurate, managed to miss her. He hadn't wanted her to think that they should have done more with the time, used it for rushing through procedures. But that wasn't what she'd meant, not at all. Sylvie thought, sometimes when you can't bear it, something else takes over, a sort of chemical that circulates and holds you still; an antidote to adrenalin. It doesn't numb you, or comfort you, or exempt you. If there's no one there to do that for you, no one who loves you, it takes over.

George had collapsed in the street, not far from home. People in the dry cleaners and the wine bar had both called an ambulance. Only one had turned up, luckily. Sylvie had gone round to thank them.

Sylvie got up and sat on the edge of the bed. She would have to call Paul. He would start to worry where she was. She went into the kitchen without putting her shoes on. The floor was cold under her feet. She dialled the number. It was dinnertime there. She got Felix. He asked her how she was and whether she had had a good journey. He said the restaurant was fairly busy, not bad for a Tuesday. It was freezing, he was only just warming up from his bike ride and the clients were stuffing their faces. He went to fetch Paul. Sylvie waited. There was a muffled thud, then Paul's voice. He said she sounded far away. Felix hadn't said that. He seemed less real than Felix. He said he'd called her twice, where had she been? She said, getting here. Driving into London from Dover, the skyline had changed even in the short time since she'd last done it, more cranes, more incomplete towers to the east of the city. She didn't know why she said it; he wouldn't have been interested. But she could see them now; tall blocks and grilles
of scaffolding with the dull light behind. Paul said he hoped she got on well with the estate agent tomorrow; she must be firm about the price. She said thank you and asked if Lucien was all right. He said he was. He had collected him from school and he seemed fine. Natalie had got him to bed. He said she must remember to eat and hoped she would sleep all right. She couldn't wish him the same, not the sleep, it was too early. Here it was even earlier, a whole hour earlier. That made a difference in the evening. Eight and nine felt entirely different. She sent Lucien a kiss and said to tell him she'd speak to him tomorrow. She was sorry when she put the receiver down. It was as if there had been an echo on the line. She wished Paul had picked up the telephone, not Felix; then he would have got the benefit of being the first voice she spoke to, of sounding human.

Paul had mentioned eating. She looked at the blank cupboards, knowing there was food inside them; packets of rice and pasta, jars of pickles, tins of peas and tuna. George hadn't been one for stocking up, because he liked to go out every day, but there would be something. She had seen to the fridge last time. The unopened stuff was no different from what was in the supermarket; things sold for profit and consumption. Dealing with the rest, the pitiful half used things, had been like picking out stones from hard soil with her finger nails. She had kept closing her eyes.

She closed them again now, then re-opened them and put the memory to one side. She told herself what to do, as though she was addressing someone dense. Shut the bedroom window; this was the ground floor. Walk past the mirror. Shoes, coat, bag. Leave lights. Nothing else on. Door keys. Sylvie left George's flat.

She noticed the dryness of the cold in the street. Going out was like stepping into an unheated room, so her mood didn't alter. She could breathe in the same way as she had done indoors, not needing to take the gasp that registered the shock of damp country air. They had it easy here. She pulled her coat
round her and tucked her hair into her collar just the same. It was a habit. The light was pervasive, though it had various sources; bright paned front doors, lighted rooms, street lamps, car lamps, retreating red tail lights. These were insignificant, without poignancy, in the city. Once they disappeared over the hill at home, there was complete darkness. She got to the row of shops, all shut, apart from the late night one and the wine bar. She wasn't paying attention and went in through the shop exit because it was the first door she came to and was then confronted with the man at the till, half hidden behind the pile of Evening Standards and the bucket of colourless carnations in cellophane, last ditch peace offerings. This was where George used to come, when he ran out of basics in between his supermarket trips. He complained about the prices. Sylvie picked up a basket and walked round the wrong way. The man didn't say anything, he wasn't officious, just glanced at her. She couldn't see any obvious science in the arrangement of goods, but was conscious of being back to front and didn't see anything she wanted. Packets of plastic razors, washing powder, disposable nappies, shiny packages of pig-based material welded together, expensive fruit juice, hard looking oranges and a handful of passed over, atrophied vegetables. The shop smelled different from its French equivalent. She started from the beginning again and picked up a packet of coffee and a bottle of Italian wine that would never be allowed in the valley of the Meuse. The bread was tough under its wrappings so it stayed on the shelf. She paid at the till and left.

WHEN SYLVIE GOT
back to the flat she went straight to the kitchen, opened the wine with a type of corkscrew she wasn't used to and took out a glass. They were an odd collection. George must have kept breaking them and replacing them piecemeal. She carried the glass and the bottle into the sitting room and put them on the top of a bookcase. She realised she still had her coat on. She took it off, also her shoes, her rings, her watch and left them in a neat pile on the floor. She poured herself some wine and drank it straight off. She poured more and left the full glass on a bookshelf. She walked over to a cupboard in the corner of the room, bent down and opened its doors, caught the stale pepper smell of stored paper. Sylvie knelt down in front of it. Here was old-fashioned stationery guarding old-fashioned methods of organisation. She didn't want to disturb the arrangements, or be the person about to disturb them. She remembered these things now she saw them: the shoe boxes and buff coloured folders held together with thin brown elastic bands, some single, some put on crossways to stop what was inside from bulging out, the pale grey paper and tissue lined envelopes, yellowing at the corners – untouched since Eve used them. George must have brought them with him to London. Packets of French blotting paper. Newspaper cuttings. Last year's English Christmas stamps held together with a paper clip. Old gas bills, the hot water long run out of the bath. She looked inside without touching, like a child mesmerised by another child's dolls' house. Then she saw what she wanted. A stack of thick white envelopes, loose, not bundled together, their tops neatly sliced by a sharp paper
knife. She put her hand in and took them out, reconstituted the pile so that what had been at the bottom was on top. Her handwriting hadn't changed much.

In some ways, she felt as if she were reading someone else's letters that she had no business to read. These contained no secrets though: the opposite. Her imagination had nowhere to run to. Anecdotes, observations, snatches of conversation. It was like going on a journey with the landscape filling the inside of the car; nothing on the outside, nothing unknown. She read about twenty of her letters compulsively, one after another, flicking the sheets over, but otherwise not moving. Then she stopped. She sat back on her heels and swallowed, coming up for air. She picked up another batch from the pile and held them on her lap.

She had thought of her life as life size, whatever else it was or it wasn't. These letters showed it reduced and, by this, she didn't mean scaled down. She hadn't produced miniatures, tiny representations on ovals of copper, with a one-haired paintbrush, that satisfied with their completeness. What she'd written about – the restaurant, the clients, Lucien, Paul and his family, Felix, Maude, and what she hadn't necessarily referred to, but was conscious of, the length of the days, the length of the nights, the size of the trees in the forest, the distance between the restaurant and the village, between the village and the town – all of it was less than life size. Petty, dwarfish, as flat as the country she lived in. The proportions, in relation to the number of years, were hardly bearable. There was so much lacking, and, in another way, so much missing. What remained were her own demarcated phrases like tidy hedging.

She remembered, not exactly telling her father everything, she wouldn't have done that, but being expansive, not skimping. She remembered the feeling of writing, as if there were no boundaries between living and disclosing. And George had replied as if he'd known that to be the case. She couldn't understand it. She carried on reading.

After nearly two hours Sylvie got up from the floor.
Straightening her legs was uncomfortable; she wasn't used to kneeling. She stood still for a minute and stared at the pile of clothes and jewellery on the floor. She couldn't remember putting them there. They might have been left on a shore, by water, and the owner gone for a swim. She picked up her rings and the watch and slipped them back on. She found her glass of wine, finished it and poured another. She left her letters where they were, in a lopsided heap on the carpet. They didn't belong in the cupboard. She went to the drawer of George's desk and took out some writing paper and an envelope. It was the sort he used, not what she used, but that didn't matter. Jerry Dorney wouldn't care. She had bothered too long about that sort of thing. The right kind of stationery, properly black ink. What did the look of a letter matter? She wrote a short note. She thought of it as homeopathic medicine. A minute dose of the old poison to cure her of the disease.

The following day, Wednesday, she looked for her father's last letter. It might be there somewhere in some state or other; begun, half written, written but not in an envelope, unstamped, ready to post. She searched methodically, almost lazily. She was able to do this because she hadn't lost it. Part of the frenzy of looking was knowing you were responsible. Lost objects represented lost moments. How many more would there be? She went through the flat, opening drawers and cupboards, smoothing the contents if she disarranged them. George's clothes were carefully folded, smelling old and wholesome. He kept the odds and ends – shoe laces, sticking plaster, out of date ear drops – with the light bulbs in a box in the kitchen. She left everything as she found it. It was a kind of faithfulness. That's how she saw it. The flat was quiet, with a daytime quiet. She felt calm, like a child safely occupied and the morning stretching ahead. In the end she wasn't looking for anything. It was more like slow spring cleaning without the bucket of soapy water.

Paul called in the afternoon and put Lucien on. He
answered yes and no to Sylvie's questions and left gaps when he smiled in reply and expected her to see. She carried on, until he told her a complete story about Bernard swapping his watch for two batteries that didn't work. He and Bernard knew they didn't work because they tested them. She said it sounded clever and rather complicated. They blew each other kisses. Paul came back on the line. He wanted to know how she had got on with instructing an estate agent and she told him she hadn't done that yet. He asked her what she had been doing, then, and she'd said sorting stuff out, going through George's things. He was silent for a few seconds, then he said he hoped that wasn't too painful. Sylvie was conscious of misleading him. He would see her emptying cupboards, gathering stuff into bags for the charity shop, putting essential documents into files. Had he known what she was really doing, he would have been puzzled. Her resentment at this potential reaction got into her voice when she replied. She said it wasn't painful, as long as she knew she could take her time over it, if she had to hurry it would be. He said he wasn't hassling her, he wished he could help, that was all. He loved her. Then she felt sorry and guilty, and, before she thought, she found herself saying that she was worried that one of George's papers was missing. He said she should ask the solicitor and she said it wasn't like that. He asked what it was and she said she wasn't sure, so he said, if she didn't know what it was, how could she know it was missing. She said she sensed something had gone. He said, sarcastic, perhaps she should inform the police. She said they wouldn't be able to help. He said, let's go back a bit, was this thing official or personal? She couldn't say personal, he'd be on to it, so she said she really didn't know. Who does know, he asked. Sylvie said she supposed George did. He said you'd better try a fucking medium then. She didn't reply to that, so he took a deep breath in an exasperated way, and said, look, he was sorry, it was hard talking to her on the telephone, it made him feel useless. And she said, that was all right, she didn't mean to make him feel like that. And he said he wasn't blaming her,
then they said goodbye. She hadn't finished talking to Lucien, but she couldn't ask for him back after all that. She hoped he'd already run away and wasn't hanging around listening.

The next day, Thursday, she heard from Jerry at about the time that she gave up expecting to. They arranged to meet in a bar near his office.

At five o'clock she had a bath, got dressed, travelled east to meet him. It was a fixed point to look forward to. It had been her second complete day in George's flat and she hadn't done anything useful.