English Correspondence (16 page)

‘How old is your son, did you say?'

‘Five,' she said.

‘Do you want to order something to eat?' he said. ‘We can't just carry on drinking all evening. Well, we could do. You seem to be up for it, though I remember reading somewhere that French women aren't.'

‘I'm half English. I'm not George's daughter for nothing. But let's eat.'

‘How do they manage without you? At the restaurant.'

‘Maude comes in. She was there that evening you were, because of the party. She's rather striking. Vivacious.'

‘I don't think I remember her.'

‘No?'

‘No.'

‘My husband likes her.'

‘And?'

‘I don't know. Yes, I suppose I do.'

‘The man died, didn't he?'

Sylvie nodded. She noticed she didn't mind his asking. She didn't recoil inside as she had done when anyone else had mentioned it.

‘They made enough noise afterwards,' he said. ‘It was still pissing with rain but they wound down their windows and carried on talking and beeping and yelling goodnight to each other.'

‘I thought you said you slept through it?'

‘Did I? When did I say that?'

‘I asked you the next morning and you said you hadn't heard anything.'

‘I can't remember saying that, but that doesn't mean anything. Did you look worried?'

‘Possibly.'

‘I wouldn't have wanted you to be worried.'

‘I had to send flowers,' Sylvie said. ‘Everyone said I should. It seemed a bit sick really.'

‘Do you always do what everyone wants?'

‘No.' She paused. ‘It might look as if I do. It doesn't feel like that. My husband thought it might occur to me to send the ones that Maurice's wife left behind in the general chaos. They were her share of the retirement present. That shows how unaccommodating he thinks I am. Perverse, anyway. Maude went to the funeral. She called in on the way back and told us about it. She was carrying a missal. It looked rather well thumbed. I think it must have been her grandmother's. It had the order of service tucked in it. She got it out to show Paul. They had this pious conversation about the numbers of celebrants and mourners, and the glossiness of the coffin. They talk like that about the menu plans. Serious.'

‘Sanctimonious.'

They finished their supper without hurrying. There were only a few people left and they were all at far away tables; no one at the bar, just the disconsolate pair behind it who had been there the evening before. There were fewer lights on in the nearby buildings, so the water was blacker, shimmering patchily. Sylvie knew she could choose between taking Jerry and leaving him. It wasn't indifference. She had a clear sense of his assurance and vulnerability, the precise amounts and mixture of which are crucial to sexual attraction. She also knew that this knowledge came as much from her as from him and was not transferable. Another woman would arrive at a different calibration. The clear sightedness felt dangerous, more like the strange wellbeing that precedes illness than matter-of-fact health. The music was loud, but it didn't bind anyone together. It was an extra, insular presence. Sylvie and Jerry got up, walked across to the bar to pay. He didn't touch her, but they stood near each other, almost touching, aware of the exact distance between them. They had to wait while the girl put stoppers in bottles and pumped the air out.

He said he would take her home. They went in his car and he probably shouldn't have been driving. They set off from an underground car park. The streets they passed through were unimportant and the moon was caught on the edge of the
roofs. It was a bit of reality, something to look at. He knew where he was going, until the last half mile, then he needed Sylvie's help. He asked her for help and she told him where to turn off the main road. Then she had to keep telling him. She told him where to stop. There was the door to George's flat, the window to the left, the curtains left open so she could make out the forms of the furniture inside, the mirror over the mantelpiece catching the street light, and the silhouette of the dark jug with the round handle deflecting it. Incongruous to see it. The stopping was final. She felt lost – missing telling him what to do and his doing it. He leaned over and kissed her. She shifted until they fitted into the space available, as if it were a third party they were kind enough to accommodate. They could have stayed in the car, but this was a residential street in a genteel part of London.

Their contact was broken by moving from the comfortable darkness, into the lighted hall, and by standing up and walking. Jerry followed her into her father's flat and it was less disconcerting than it might have been. She thought for a second, when she turned to him and his face was close, but not so close that she could no longer see him, he's going to make excuses. The momentary dismay in his eyes, and the way his fingers flexed against her back made her think, suddenly, he's going to say he has sexual difficulties. She thought, do men ever admit to it, and why would he have come back with me? All at the same moment, he pulled her closer against him. She knew that the resistance had come from her and transferred to him and that he'd overcome it. And, having been nearly disappointed, even though it had been fleeting and imaginary and quickly reversed, she felt relief undo her, and she could be undone, because it had only been a moment, not half a lifetime. He would have felt her relief, without knowing the cause. He wouldn't have mistaken it for passion, though the feeling was the same, and the letting go.

‘What are you doing today, then?' he asked her, once they'd woken up thoroughly. They lay side by side, touching,
conscious of the daylight, but not bothered by it. Sylvie had slept peacefully in George's bed. She assumed Jerry had too. He hadn't disturbed her.

‘I'll drive back this afternoon or tomorrow. I haven't decided. Probably today. They'll get worried, start checking up on me. Not that sort of checking up. Paul bothers about my state of mind, not my faithfulness.'

‘I can't see much wrong with your state of mind. I ought to try to be home for lunch,' Jerry said.

They stayed prosaic until they parted. They didn't mind what they said to each other but neither of them needed to say anything memorable.

IT WAS LATE
when Sylvie got back to the restaurant on Saturday evening. She walked in to the smell of the end of dinner. She felt slightly sickened by it but didn't trust her judgement. It might have been real or merely a sensory association with the sight of used plates and dishes. There was no opportunity for a controlled experiment, the beginning and end never happened at once. Then there was the coffee, dark and tarnished. That gave away chronology. She might have been feeling sick anyway. The motorway traffic had moved in waves, through grey mist. She took a few steps into the dining room, carrying her car keys and conscious of wearing the ordinary clothes she'd travelled in. She recognised, from the tables, the slight dishevelment of later evening; clouded wine glasses, scrunched up napkins, random pieces of unused cutlery, spectacle cases. And in the clients, the slackening of posture and of facial muscles, the moisture at the hairline from heat and mild exertion. The nearest they get to post coital, she thought; they stop chewing. A man with an empty brandy glass, and a woman with a dog asleep on her feet, both stared at her. After a few seconds the woman nodded at her, realising who she was. The man caught his wife's gesture out of the corner of his eye and imitated her. His face stayed aloof. They were regulars. Maude was standing by the corner table where Jerry had sat. She nodded and tipped her head to one side as she talked. She had a perfect row of buttons down the back of her dress, at least one of which would have been impossible for her to do up herself. Sylvie smiled at the couple with the dog, then walked out again.

She didn't meet anyone in the hall. The guests were all in the dining room. The wood-burning stove was alight, safe behind its thick glass doors. Sylvie could smell it now. She went along the downstairs corridor and turned the odd double corner that separated them from the rest of the building. Their flat felt warm, as she went in, and someone had left lights on. Lucien's door was shut. Natalie always closed it once he'd fallen asleep. Sylvie sensed him there in his dark room, but she didn't go in. Sometimes she could look at him without waking him, but at others, he seemed, in his unconsciousness, to be expecting her. Then he would sit straight up and want to know exactly which bit of the evening they'd got to. He would know Paul was in the kitchen, but she wasn't as conveniently confined. She ended up sitting on the bed and mapping her movements for him. If she rushed, it all took longer. Then she had to promise to come back in half an hour.

She went into their bedroom and switched off the lamp. The window was cut off from the winter, by the curtains, lined and interlined and pelmetted. Sylvie went across and opened them. The leaves had gone. And where, before she had left for England, the view had been baffled by them, now it was visible through bare branches, broken by their patterns, but plainer for that. Beyond the first line of trees, she could see the farm track, marked by wooden posts and amateurish loops of telephone wires, and the water-filled furrow at the corner of the field, where the tractor turned. Further on, beyond the second line of trees, the sky was concentrated in the spaces between the branches, a colour between black and the weak sulphurous yellow that came off the village lamps, made of both equally and therefore without a name. The disappearance of the leaves was a surprise, but Sylvie remembered that she had had the surprise before. It happened every year, in the last week of November or the first one of December.

Her hands were damp from the window sill. She rubbed them dry on her jeans. She was sustained by the view, though
troubled that it went with the windows on this side of the hotel, as surely as if it had been painted on behind them, changing with the weather and seasons and time of day or night, in a way that indicated a tricksy artist, rather than a life of their own. She liked the dull reflections in the water and imagined herself setting off into them without shoes, to glide or sink. She was kept afloat by Jerry. She felt him still with her, physically present. Amazing how long you could make it last. Though not for ever, obviously. If their desire for each other had been wine in two glasses, not bacchanalian in quantity, she had found that the amount didn't matter. Because the levels matched and there had been no falseness, the glasses had miraculously filled to the brim. She could see him, as he was, a man in middle age; without the gloss of having seen him in his youth and allowing that to add shine. She thought of him in the house in the Thames valley. She saw him walking about in a room, one hand in a back pocket. She saw the fireplace and the rug in front of it and the sofa and chairs and the view from that window across the garden. It was all explicit and recognisable, though she knew it would disappear, if she tried to express the detail in words to herself, just as the look of dreams disappeared once she was out of them. She was thankful for having the picture at all, realising that not knowing meant at least as much as knowing, to her, and that the not knowing part was real, without being factually accurate. He hadn't said anything about seeing her again.

Sylvie heard a car coming up the road towards the restaurant taking the slight incline at speed. Whoever was driving made a noisy extempore stop as though he had met a deer or was pretending to be young. Maude's husband got out and leant with one arm on the polished roof. He couldn't see Sylvie at the unlit window. The kids usually sat in the back, three of them, all strapped in, but the back was dark and empty. She waited. Maude walked over the gravel, her head uncovered, smart shoes moving briskly, an air of being insulated from the cold by her own body heat. She opened the opposite door, sat down in the passenger seat, her legs
tastefully arranged and her feet resting on the ground. Her husband stayed where he was and began to talk to someone over the top of the car. It was Paul he was talking to. Their breath condensed in the air. Maude smiled up. The roof overlay her, keeping her safe and in place, and Alain, her husband, was in charge of the roof. Paul glanced down at Maude, but ignored her. Her head was level with his slightly curving stomach, not that far from it, and their feet nearly touching.

Sylvie wasn't part of the spectacle, though she wondered whether she might not have caused it. She had gone away again. Perhaps there had been some irregularity in Maude's timekeeping or behaviour. As far as she could remember Alain had never escorted Maude home from the restaurant before. The dialogue between the two men continued, the words didn't matter. She couldn't hear them anyway through the glass. She saw their speech, as if it were scattered on a page. Chopped up bits of the local newspaper, or the football results; nothing controversial. Their shoulders talked. Neither could see each other below chest level. Sylvie put her hands in the opposite sleeves of her jacket for comfort and warmth, as if she were actually there outside in the cold. The walls gave her no protection. She could use being inside as an excuse, but it wasn't one. She looked away and wished it was daytime and summer. It was easier to be a spare part in the heat. You could settle yourself on the steps or a wall, close your eyes; just you and the sun.

She didn't see Paul until he came to their room to get ready for bed. He must have known she was back. He would have seen her car. He pretended he hadn't noticed and that he was surprised to see her. This must have been the decision he had come to and she understood that it was easier for both of them. When she saw the made up surprise in his eyes she went and kissed him so that she shouldn't see it any longer and because she was grateful to him for sparing her. He felt solid and familiar against her and the dishonesty
was part of the feeling. He slackened his hold, without quite letting her go, and asked her how she'd got on in London and what the weather had been like and if there had been much traffic on the motorway. None of the questions was difficult to answer. She thought, this is how people talk to each other most of the time and she relaxed into it, as if it were a pillow full of inexhaustible feathers, that you could choose not to feel as interminable. Paul moved away from her and sat on the edge of the bed to undo his shoes.