My Candlelight Novel (12 page)

Two shelves of the cupboard became hers. They were neat and organised. It seemed she ate things called
amaranth
and
quinoa
. There were packets of thin brown buckwheat noodles with Japanese labels; she had a small exclusive-looking bottle of soy sauce. There was miso paste, and organic brown rice, and Tim Tams. Blocks of tofu sitting in containers of water started appearing in the fridge, along with Asian greens.

Now that she had the status of official helper I no longer had to do her room, but earlier on I'd taken the opportunity to look over her things.

Her clothes looked to be carefully chosen from op or vintage shops. She had a short black velvet coat, and a thin green cotton frock that smelt of oranges. A skirt with red and black squares caught my eye, and I held it up in front of the mirror. It would have suited me as much as my skin, but I resisted trying it on. It was tempting to fling one of her scarves round my neck, or slip my feet into a pair of her shoes (we were the same size!), but I didn't.

Everything was old, but all her underwear looked new. Her drawers contained neat piles of lacy knickers and bras. I touched nothing there, but I thought of my own underwear, which over time had attained a greyish tinge and flabby disposition.

She appeared to have no photographs or any other personal possessions at all. There were no books, save a few university texts sitting on the little table that served as a desk. Maggie Tulliver kept mostly to herself, and we saw little of her.

Hetty had a special friend at child care, a boy named Tom, who was three. He was the boy I'd seen her happily with on the day I'd run from the lecture, certain that she was miserable and alone and wanting me. Despite their difference in ages, Hetty and Tom clearly thought each other hilarious and interesting and charming.

I'd made a friend, as well. Phoebe, the girl I'd met at the first tutorial, always sat with me in class, and we studied in a carrel next to each other in the library. When I arrived she was nearly always there. I became familiar with the sight of the tender curve of her neck, smooth and pale, her black hair pulled back tight in a ponytail, the way her fingers incessantly rotated her pen as she read. My books made a whispering sound as I slid them onto the timber desk to stake my place.

I loved the library: the hushed, businesslike atmosphere, the occasional ‘Thank God I've finished that!' sound of a pen being flung down onto a desk, the shy coughs, the giggled exchanges between friends.

The library was a good place to sleep, as well, and sometimes I'd snuggle down into one of the easy chairs for a quick nap. I also discovered a secluded nook with a long window that let in warm, dappled light. I'd curl up there on the carpet for short, dreamless sleeps.

It was in that nook that I managed to read the whole of
Ulysses
. It was not on the official reading list, but I read it anyway. I had my own copy, which I'd bought second-hand for five dollars. Like the copy that Kate had described, it had had a hard life. The back cover had been ripped off, but the front contained an enchanting photograph of a street in Dublin. Each day I was in the library I managed to steal a bit of time to lie on the floor in that secluded space, and was transported to Dublin on the sixteenth of June, 1904, the single day in which the book is set.

I could see why it had been banned on publication. I lay there in the library and squeezed and squeezed my thighs together when I read Molly Bloom's soliloquy at the end. I don't think that is quite what librarians mean when they expound the pleasures of reading. Or perhaps they do.

But most of my time in the library was spent sitting in the carrel next to Phoebe, with piles of books and journals open around me. When I got sick of studying, I'd lean back in my chair and touch her on the elbow, and we'd go downstairs for a break, sitting with our coffee in the shade of a vine outside the library.

Both of us had become mildly obsessed with our work.

The possibility that writing can be female in style.
That was the idea I was puzzling over, and I thought I'd never solve it. What, after all, was ‘style'? Was it the words chosen, the way of putting them together, or the particular cast of mind behind the piece of writing? All these things, Phoebe told me decisively. And more. Style was inseparable from the writer's personality; it was inevitable.

Then if so, were there particular male and female styles? Were women meant to be more emotional, more sensual, or what? Or was every style different, because every person was different?

Virginia Woolf had said that one shouldn't write as a man
or
a woman, but be woman-manly. I think that would be very difficult. In any case, I thought that James Joyce had come very close to this when he wrote
Ulysses
. His obsession with the body, his wondering whether goddesses had arseholes and the same bodily functions as humans – I had thought these things myself. And that lovely scene where he burns the kidney and cuts away the burnt bits and slings it to the cat – here is the poetry of kitchens indeed. So I hereby proclaim James Joyce to be an honorary woman!

Phoebe was most fascinated by
Jane Eyre
. ‘
The madwoman in the attic!
' she leaned across to whisper one day, as we sprawled in two easy chairs on the top floor of the library, reading. She tapped the front of her head. ‘We all have one. Don't you think that's part of the fascination of that character? And Jane – she's so
angry
– it's what's inside her – the madwoman. It's what's inside all of us – us women, I mean.'

I didn't think that Phoebe, so ordered and beautiful, so sensible and studious, could have a madwoman dwelling in her attic or anywhere else. Though my own madwoman had been well and truly loose on various occasions, and I told her so.

‘You? '
she said, wrinkling her brow. ‘But Sophie, you're so considerate and thoughtful. Such a good mother.' She picked a stray hair from my shoulder and examined it before throwing it away. ‘But I suppose all of us have things about us that no one could ever guess.'

I disliked reading theory, and avoided it as much as possible. I struggled to make meaning of the peculiar convoluted sentences.

They left me cold. I wondered how anyone could ever have a theoretical idea for a novel, because it seemed to me that a novel was all immediacy and thrived on the real.

I turned, as I always had, to novels themselves, and the intimacy of the worlds they described, worlds that I could live in for a while, and which somehow, by some alchemy, enriched my own. I used to love the novels of the nineteenth century best, but now I discovered the women writers of the early twentieth century, those decades of war and anxiety. Jean Rhys, Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf became my new companions.

But I needed live companions as well, and that is why, soon after the party, I returned to Wotherspoon Street.

C
HAPTER
F
IFTEEN

I
N DAYLIGHT, THE
lane had an air of gentle decay as though everything – the wild ginger that exploded in enormous clumps around almost every house, the splintered timber on the walls and window frames, and even the rusty iron roofs – would soon crumble back into the earth.

As I approached Becky and Lawson's place I heard a piping sound, and followed it into the back yard. The sound made fleeting dashes through the trees as though each note chased the one preceding it, then changed into coiling ribbons, and then again into staccato, breathy pulses. It was music that couldn't be tied down.

Becky Sharp sat out under the trees, upright on a wooden stool with a music stand in front of her. Her feet were planted far apart and she wore an air of industry. She might have been in the act of peeling a load of potatoes into a bucket, or shucking oysters, but she was practising on her flute.

I didn't interrupt her, but instead went up the rickety timber stairs at the back to the kitchen, where I found Lawson eating a bowl of muesli, though it was well past lunchtime. He waved a spoon to us in greeting, and then leaned down and put his beaky nose to Tess's face. She licked him, and he righted himself to face me. ‘Hey!' he said.

‘Hey!' I echoed.

Without another word he got to his feet and put bread into the toaster. While he was rinsing a fat brown teapot under the tap, Becky Sharp came in and pulled out a chair.

What did we talk about that day? I can't remember. Becky Sharp and Lawson were people who often seemed to eschew words. It was enough for them simply to be.

I helped myself to toast and butter, and when Hetty dropped her half slice on the floor, looking down at it with an expression of absolute dismay, Lawson's eyes and mine met in amused complicity. He cut her another piece from his own toast, and retrieved the lost slice to feed to Tess.

But Hetty didn't
want
the new slice of toast: she wanted the old one, the one that Tess had eaten. She pedalled her legs and became a veritable scold, screaming and flinging the new slice onto the floor to the dog in high dudgeon.

Lawson got up and went out, coming back with a camera slung round his neck. ‘D'you want to go for a walk, Tess?' he asked; she wagged her tail. ‘I can take Hetty too, if you like,' he said, and at the mention of her name Hetty stopped fussing and looked up at him.

Apart from the childcare centre, I had never left Hetty with anyone other than Kate or Lil, let alone allowed her out for a walk. But Lawson seemed to be in tune with her; he had also noticed her expression when she dropped her toast. We had been like two parents in our tender regard for her.

So I agreed, and he strapped her into her pram, and they set off. The camera round his neck had a sturdy cap covering its lens; it was blinkered like a horse, perhaps in case it saw something that startled it, and shied.

And Becky Sharp and I were left alone. The house was curiously devoid of people that day. Apart from Becky Sharp and Lawson, I wasn't sure exactly who lived there.

We went to her room, and I inspected her books of poetry. One was by Rimbaud, but it was all in French. I opened it up and flicked through, regarding her with a raised eyebrow.

‘I did French at school,' she told me casually, and I realised I knew hardly anything about Becky Sharp: where she'd grown up, her parents, siblings…nothing at all, actually, apart from that she played the flute.

I flicked through the book and found a poem that I thought I knew.
Roman
, it was called. It was the one that begins,
On n'est pas sérieux, quand on a dix-sept ans.

‘Can you read this one for me?' I said. ‘Translate it into English, I mean? I have a translation in a book at home, but I'd like to hear another version.'

‘Mine will be a very
rough
translation,' she warned. ‘I mean loose, colloquial, literal.' (She was so stern I found it thrilling.) ‘Which suits Rimbaud actually,' she added, and I think I know what she meant, that he was the most colloquial of poets.

She took the book from me and surveyed the page for a while before beginning.

‘Okay.
Roman
. That translates as ‘Romance', or ‘Novel'. I think ‘Romance' is closer.' She glanced up at me. How deliciously serious she was – her eyebrows were almost meeting with thought. They were lustrous and black, my favourite kind of eyebrows.

She continued, frowning, hesitating and stumbling every so often as she struggled to get the meaning right.

‘You're not a serious person when you're seventeen. On a fine evening, who gives a damn about beer or lemonade and rowdy cafés with shining chandeliers?

‘You go for a stroll under the green linden trees on the promenade.

‘Linden trees smell good on a fine June evening. Sometimes the air is so gentle that you close your eyes. The wind, laden with noise – the town isn't far away – smells of vineyards and of beer.

‘Then you notice a tiny rag of dark blue, framed by a little branch, pricked by a single wretched star – which melts, sweetly shivering, small and white…June evening! Seventeen! You let yourself get drunk. The sap is like champagne, it goes to your head. You're delirious: on your lips you feel a kiss, quivering there like a small animal…

‘Your crazy heart wanders like Robinson Crusoe through novels (I told you this would be literal! – it probably should go something like “Your crazy heart conjures up all the romantic stories you've ever read”) when, in the light of a pale street lamp, a charming young lady passes, overshadowed by her father's fearsome stiff collar…

‘And since she finds you extremely…unsophisticated, as she rapidly walks past in her little boots she turns with a quick, lively movement…and on your lips cavatinas die away.

‘You're in love. Your heart's taken (literally “hired out”) until August. You're in love. Your sonnets make her laugh. All your friends flee. You're
really boring to be with
. Then one evening the adored one actually condescends to write to you!

‘That evening…you go back to the shining cafés, you ask for beer or lemonade. You're not a serious person when you're seventeen and when there are green linden trees on the promenade.'

She fell back onto the bed, as though exhausted by the effort of translating. ‘There!' she said. ‘I'd forgotten how lovely it was. That was my favourite poem when I was sixteen.'

Becky Sharp struck me as extremely…sophisticated, and I liked that. And she wasn't at all boring to be with. I liked everything about her – those amazing ears that I'd have liked to reach out and touch, the fullness of her bottom lip, and her air of self-sufficiency and mystery that promised many happy hours of getting to know her. I could tell that she was a solitary sort of person like myself; I could have spent hours lying there with her not even speaking, because, as I think I may have said, being with her was like being at the centre of the universe.