English Correspondence (22 page)

‘He shouldn't have done it,' said Maude.

‘Sorry? What shouldn't he have done?' said Sylvie.

‘Got rid of it,' said Maude. ‘I told him he shouldn't have. I was quite shocked.'

‘Your Dad's letter,' said Maude, as Sylvie said nothing. ‘I said he had no right to. It wasn't his, after all.'

Sylvie still said nothing.

‘He told you, didn't he? Paul? I told him to tell you. He thought you were upset enough. He hates you to be upset, but I said he should do it. I mean, I know it was too late to do anything about it, but then at least you knew.'

‘Yes,' said Sylvie. ‘He did tell me.'

She said it, because she didn't want Maude to know that he hadn't done; it was as simple as that. But she went cold inside and her heart knocked higher and higher in her chest until she couldn't swallow.

And the small amount of air that was left, she pushed to her brain, where it could only throw out shallow logic in a random manner. She thought, she's been honest with me and now I haven't been honest with her. And coming close behind, but not quite synchronised, she thought, why should I let her think that Paul does exactly what she tells him? Which brought her to the same point, but contradicted it in spirit. And all the time her mind slithered over the surface of
the conversation she was having with Maude. She set aside the letter; the real letter which had existed and which she'd almost given up on, and the imagined one, which might have provided the solution. She set Paul aside too.

‘Are you all right?' said Maude.

Sylvie saw her, wrapped in her vivid winter coat, self contained and pampered in front of the practical pines. She sounded concerned but unaffected; she couldn't keep that out of her voice. What they were talking about was on the very edge of Maude's own life. Sylvie thought, she doesn't know what she's saying, she's like a child playing with a knife. But she also thought, her dealings with me in general haven't been honest, why should I tell her the truth? She let it stand.

‘Yes,' said Sylvie. ‘I don't like thinking about it. Still.'

‘I'm not surprised,' said Maude.

And having lied, Sylvie couldn't now ask, as she might have done, whether Paul had read the letter and what it had said.

THE ARCHITECTURE WAS
incongruous, with its outcrops of turrets and wrought iron and fancy brickwork. A bright blue sky would have browbeaten it, but against the grey clouds and the out-of-season sea, it looked moderately dashing, and there were plenty of places for seagulls to perch.

‘I like it here,' Sylvie said. She had to raise her voice to be heard above the wind. They had parked on a side street that led down to the front. The street was respectable and temperamentally closed in, but it ended in the North Sea. She locked the car and walked round onto the pavement. A brass plaque with a dentist's name and qualifications was embedded in the dark hedge next to her. The gate through to the garden was taller than a person and padlocked. A dog ran out and yapped and snapped at the bars.

‘I've been stuck inland all my life apart from holidays and there haven't been many of them. Oh, and trips to London,' she said.

‘London,' he said. ‘I didn't realise that was on the sea.'

‘More so than where we come from. It's tidal.'

‘It's all right here, once we get on the front,' he said. ‘A bit concrete.'

‘I can overlook that. It smells of fish and frying. Nearly English.'

‘We could try and find some,' he said. ‘Have to be careful not to break a tooth. We wouldn't want to disturb Dr Diploma.'

They walked down the road past other hedges. He walked on the outer side of the pavement, in the old fashioned way,
as George used to, and, when they crossed over and turned right, he took up the same position. Outside in the daylight and open air he was different from how she remembered him. He seemed to know where he was going. They passed half a dozen shops shuttered for the winter, then he stopped by a door with a lace curtain hanging on the inside of the glass and opened it for her.

‘Let's go in here,' he said. ‘Get out of the wind.'

There were a few tables to the side of the bar. Sylvie took off her coat and hung it on the clothes stand near the door. He put his on the back of a chair, waited for her to join him. They both sat down. There was no one else there, just a man drying up behind the bar. It was quiet; nothing but an occasional car passing and the chink of the glass. After a few minutes the man came over to them.

‘Lunch?' he said patting out a white paper cloth in front of them and banging down two upside down glasses and two clutches of cutlery. He went away again.

The windows were steamed up.

‘Home from home, isn't it?' said Sylvie, looking at her companion across the table. She put both her hands on the ornate radiator beside her. It was giving out heat but the cast iron was thick. Her hands looked thin and pale, almost creamy at the tips.

‘I don't do lunches,' he said.

‘No, I remember that now,' she said. ‘Not even boiled eggs. You've been here before though?'

‘I drop by two or three times a year. My sister's down here. I don't want to spend the whole day with her. I just call in and say hullo to her and the kids. We could go round later. See if she's in.'

It would be difficult to make this man non-plussed, but Sylvie wondered whether he wasn't. His name was Jacques and he kept the Bar des Sports in the nearby town. They were more than three hundred kilometres from home.

‘So you're in those books are you, saying it's safe to go in and eat?' he said.

‘One or two of them.'

‘What do they say about you? . . . Nestling between a volcano and a reservoir.'

‘Perched on slightly raised ground. Yes, that sort of thing. You've got the idea.'

‘I can see you in that “Calm and Silence” book. You seem calm and silent. Maybe not calm. I don't know you well enough to judge. Silent, certainly.'

‘I thought I was being quite chatty.'

‘No,' he said. ‘I found it pretty hard going coming down in the car with you. But don't worry about it.'

‘I'm not,' she said and thought, that's put me in my place.

‘What are you escaping from, then?'

‘I thought I was just having a day out.'

He took a packet of cigarettes out of his shirt pocket, shook it, and offered it to her. She shook her head. He took one out and lit it, turned round and stretched out for the ashtray on the next table.

‘Go on. Try,' he said. ‘Nothing terrible will happen.'

‘I don't want to talk about it,' she said. ‘But it's not for the reasons you think.'

‘What might they be?'

‘Isn't there such a thing as just having a day out?'

‘No such thing,' he said. ‘You've got to earn it.'

‘I wouldn't have associated you with a strong work ethic.'

‘Associated.' He seemed to savour it. ‘You like words like that, don't you?'

‘I can't use words
and
be silent, can I?'

‘Make your mind up. Is that what you're trying to say. Well, fair enough. I don't mind if you talk to me like that. No, what I meant was, you've got to earn it
with me
.'

The man at the bar came round their side again and put a basket of bread in between them. He said he could offer them a steak or fish. Sylvie said fish.

‘You walk in, unannounced, as you'd say. Make that two please, and we'll have some wine. White, whatever you've got.'

‘No,' she interrupted. ‘I wouldn't say that.'

‘Well, anyway, you walk in and say, you woke up and thought a trip to the Belgian seaside seemed a nice idea.'

‘You make me sound about ten years old.'

‘Something like that. Appealing with it. Really.'

‘I don't have that dreadful voice, though.'

‘No? Try listening to yourself. No, I'm being unfair. You weren't that bad. Do you make a habit of this sort of thing?'

‘No.'

‘But you've done something like this before?'

Sylvie was going to say no, again, but she changed her mind.

‘Yes,' she said. ‘I have done.'

‘How often?'

‘Once.'

‘So what did you do? Did you phone first or just show up, like you did with me?'

Sylvie thought, I wrote a letter, but I can't say that.

‘I wrote a letter,' she said.

‘You
are
straight out of the past, aren't you? How did it turn out?'

‘Fine.'

‘Fine,' he imitated her, then carried on in his own voice. ‘What was he called? No, on second thoughts I don't want to know. You were lucky, that's all.'

‘You mean I might have met a murderer. That's a bit over dramatic isn't it?'

‘He might have told you you were a silly bitch.'

‘As you're doing.'

‘No, I wouldn't do that. He'd be worse than me. I've got your best interests at heart. And I like your face.'

‘Thanks.'

‘No, I mean it,' he said.

She had been going to say, he didn't insult me. He was another human being, nothing complicated. I didn't think I was in love with him, and I didn't lose my nerve.

‘Seriously,' he said, ‘You need to be careful. What were you about to say just then? Your expression changed.'

He looked at her, as he had done when she was sitting at a separate table in the Bar des Sports, but here he was closer, noticing, it seemed, every shadow that passed. She thought, I'll get back in one piece from this. There was no reason why she shouldn't.

‘You go about with some in-built security system, don't you? It's in your face, you never stop thinking. Yet you do these things. You slip the bolt. Dangerous.'

He carried on, ‘I'll tell you a story. The first time I came here, I thought, what a lot of pretty waitresses, they can't all be his daughters.' He had put on a self-mocking voice. ‘There were three of them. Slips of things. It was fairly busy. They took the orders. Nothing happened, which was funny, as this is basically a fast food sort of place. Well, you can see that for yourself. It's not fancy. Then the penny dropped that one by one the girls had gone upstairs and not come back down again. I was sitting here, waiting for my dinner, with my feet under the table and the boss creeping about looking after me.'

He hadn't lowered his voice and Sylvie looked at the man behind the bar. He was reading a newspaper leaning on his elbows.

‘Don't worry about him,' he said. ‘You can get it wrong, is what I'm trying to tell you. You think you live in the real world, and then you find out you're missing a slice, or three.'

‘I know exactly what I'm missing,' said Sylvie and, before he had time to pick up on that, she looked away from him and scanned the room. ‘I can't see the stairs. Where are they?'

He looked over his shoulder. She looked in the same direction. At the end of the bar there was a half-glazed door. The paint was badly scratched. Almost immediately beyond it, she could see what looked like an outhouse with
a tin roof and an empty bird cage hanging from a hook. He turned back.

‘They were in that corner. He must have got rid of them in the clean up. Made upstairs self contained.'

‘That door looks as if it's always been there.'

‘That's to fool you. Roughed up with wire wool and a blunt pair of scissors to make it look as if an Alsatian's been jumping up at it for the last ten years. It's all in the mind. What's past and what isn't.'

The boss came across with a jug of wine. He turned their glasses right side up and filled them. He banged the jug on the table. Then he went away through a gap in the shelves of bottles behind the bar. It was only just man sized, draped on both sides with fat curtains pulled tight at their waists. He reappeared with their food on two plates.

‘Here's to better days,' Sylvie's companion said. ‘I'm sorry I had a go at you.'

‘That's all right,' Sylvie said.

‘So, are you going to tell me?'

‘No,' said Sylvie. ‘I'm not.'

She thought, something happened yesterday which made me feel my life weighed a feather. I wanted to do something that matched that feeling. Even if it only lasted a day.

She said, ‘I shouldn't have involved anyone else. I was stupid. I'm sorry.'

‘Lucky it was me,' he said. ‘I didn't even remember you when you walked in this morning, do you know that?'

She might have said, ‘I don't believe you,' but she didn't because the conversation would have ended differently, and the day as well. She didn't know, now, if that had been what she wanted. Jacques had shut the bar for her. Waited until an old fellow had finished his drink, then locked up and left a note on the door saying, Back later, Works outing. Immediately she had felt lighter, having more leverage. She could picture Jacques now, as he was when she turned up at nine o'clock that morning. He was keeping his eye on the television, placed high on brackets, in a corner of the room.
A woman was on her haunches, shouting into the face of a man lying on a beach towel. Jacques had glanced at Sylvie but carried on pouring a bottle of beer for a customer, as much as would fill the glass without it overflowing.

‘What was that woman going on about this morning? The one on the beach,' she said.

‘Don't ask me. It's been going on for weeks. Twice a week. Every now and then one of them stands up.'

‘Talking of the past.'

‘Were we?' he said.

‘You keep the Bar des Sports looking as it would have done twenty years ago. It has the same atmosphere. I felt it as soon as I walked in.'

‘I don't tinker around with it,' he said. ‘I dislike it in the same way that I dislike myself. We're all of a piece.'