My Candlelight Novel (13 page)

Without thinking, I reached out and touched the side of her face, and it was most soft and lovely.

She looked at me, and away.

Then she got up. ‘Lawson ought to be back soon,' she said, making for the door. I followed her, though I wasn't at all anxious about Hetty.

I followed her out to the street, and we stood at the side of the road, rubbing our toes in the gravel and chatting. But I felt that I'd somehow spoiled something between us.

Then Lawson and Hetty rounded the corner. He stopped the pram in front of some canna lilies and pointed them out to her. He encouraged her to reach out and touch the leaves, and he picked a flower for her to hold. As they proceeded towards us, Hetty waved the flower about like a fan, and when she saw me, urged the pram forward like a horse. I ran up the street to meet her, my own little hoyden, my boisterous girl!

That night it was unbearably hot. Lil had long since gone to bed, and the whole house was silent. When I finally got Hetty to sleep, I went down to my place on the back steps. People walked past in the lane. It was one of those nights when it was too hot to sleep and everyone seemed to be wandering the streets. More than anything, I wanted to be one of them.

I heard someone come round the side of the house. It was Maggie Tulliver. As though she'd eavesdropped on my thoughts she stopped near me and said, ‘Why don't you go out for a walk? I can listen for the baby if you like.'

I pushed away my hair, which hung in heavy, damp hanks against my neck. I'd vowed not to have anything more to do with her, but this offer was hard to resist.

‘Could you?' I asked.

She came with me while I looked in on Hetty and put on some shoes. I tied Tess to the verandah rail, because I wanted to be absolutely alone. Maggie Tulliver leaned over the railing outside my room, watching as I ran down the front steps.

It was such a lovely long run down those two flights, such a feeling of release! Running under the darkened figs, my feet in old brown sandals fluttered like little flags of freedom. I must have hovered above the ground. Slowing down, and walking at a steady pace, I lifted the damp hair from the back of my neck and felt the air on my skin.

I saw Lismore in all its glory on that hot spring night, and was elated and ecstatic. Everything had a heightened sense of the real and yet an air of mystery: the immense, architectural old fig trees, the garish lights in the main street, the people wandering, like me, to divert themselves from the heat. I paused for a while to observe the secrecy of the river. On the other side of the bridge sat the shuttered and silent hotel, with only a few lights in the upper storeys shining out to show that it was inhabited. I was walking, through habit, on my usual circular route.

I came to Wotherspoon Street and turned down it. Voices floated on the night air. It was too hot to sleep, and there was a feeling of life going on all around me, despite the late hour. I wondered whether Lawson or Becky Sharp were still up, and stopped outside their house, but decided against going in. I was having a perfectly delightful time on my own.

I went up to the park and stood for a while looking at the river. It smelt muddy and rich, full of earth and vegetation. As I turned around to go back, I saw two people lying in the moonlight in the middle of a grassed area. I knew, more by their outline and general demeanour than anything else, that it was Lawson and Becky Sharp. Becky lay on her back, propped up by her elbows, and Lawson lay stretched out flat with his head resting on her tummy. They weren't speaking, or doing anything, just lying there with apparent contentment.

I didn't go to them. I didn't want to interrupt anything, to intrude where I might not be wanted. But mostly, I was perfectly happy on my own. I wanted to keep with me that feeling of self-contained solitude.

Walking back down the street, I saw that the one streetlight had a fuzzy golden aureole. And it seemed that above me hovered a mysterious brooding presence, with soft, curved black wings and calm, scented breath. Somewhere, I felt sure, lurked the poet of Wotherspoon Street, observing this small unimportant part of the world and not writing down a thing.

When I got back, Maggie Tulliver was lying on my bed reading a book. She got up as I came in, and departed, waving away my thanks. The bed was still warm from her body. Her perfume pervaded my pillow. Something about her still made me uncomfortable, and I felt that my lovely evening had been bought at a price.

C
HAPTER
S
IXTEEN

A
SECRET LETTER
arrived from Kate, in the bottom of the envelope that contained a birthday card for Hetty. It arrived the day before her birthday, which was in the early hours of the next morning. The letter was written on a single sheet of extra-flimsy paper, folded into a long narrow strip.

It said:

Dear Sophie,

I know I'll be up on the weekend for Hetty's party, but I needed to tell someone this right now. I'd rather you didn't let Lil see it.

It's very early in the morning and I don't feel quite myself. But who else I might be I can't think. It's just after sunrise and I've had so little sleep I feel almost ill.

Do you remember me telling you about that boy, Myles? Well, I ran into him at a party last night and ended up going back to his place. He lives in an old terrace with a couple of people, who didn't happen to be at home.

We listened for hours to some very obscure blues records (yes, actually
records
) and it got to be very late.

I fended off his attempt to read me some Sylvia Plath, but ended up staying the night there.

In his bed.

We just kissed for a while in a very uninterested way.

Nothing much happened for a long time, but we didn't sleep. Nor did we talk. I felt very hot and furry in that bed (the household had about four cats who seemed to have shed fur everywhere). I should have just got up and gone home, but I was too lazy, and it was too late and dark, and I felt it would have been more embarrassing to go than to stay.

I hadn't been drinking.

Anyway, just before dawn, after a lot of tossing around and not sleeping something did happen. What do I mean by
something
? In the end, it was just a lot of inept and rather embarrassing fumbling. And then I went home.

But I don't think that, technically, I am still a virgin.

The thing is, I don't think either of us was really attracted to the other.

That's all. Burn this, if you like.

Anyway, I hope the card got there in time for Hetty's birthday. Tell her I have found her a lovely present.

Kate

Of course I wasn't going to burn it; it's the sort of letter that should be kept for posterity and discovered one day in an old box and read by Kate's descendants. I read it again late that night after Hetty was asleep, gulping it down as greedily as I had the first time, but thinking about Marcus all the time. I had thought that I was over him, but in just a few hours it would be the first anniversary of Hetty's birth. I'd told him the date she was born, but felt sure he would not remember it. I expected that we'd never hear from him again.

So much the worse for him!
I thought, sticking Kate's letter down the front of my dress and setting off for the kitchen. Anger and anxiety always makes me hungry.

That night Maggie Tulliver was there, which was annoying because I felt like being alone. She had finished eating one of her late dinners; a bowl sat pushed back in the middle of the table. A few string-like threads of brown noodle were draped over the edge. The sink contained a colander and frypan.

She had a bottle of red wine in front of her, and a glass, and looked as though she was working her way through it while reading a small, slim book. I sneaked a peek at the cover. It was haiku by Basho--.

I pretended not to notice she was there, and rummaged in the fridge for my secret stash of chocolate.

‘D'you fancy a drink?' she asked.

I thought
Why not?
and fetched a wine glass. Despite my wanting to be alone, her presence that night made our kitchen seem rather exotic; she looked so worldly sitting with her bottle and glass. She wore a pretty felt hat in shades of brown, pulled closely over her head, and had on a pale blue shirt with red Japanese cranes on it.

Wine trickled into my glass as I pulled up a chair. Her hand had beautifully painted nails. They were bright red, of course, the nails of a witch, or an enchantress. When I offered her some chocolate she declined with a weary gesture of her hand. Before I knew it, I had glugged down my wine and she was refilling my glass. We weren't looking at each other. She kept her eyes on her book; every so often she'd snicker to herself.

I sipped wine and crunched chocolate fiercely, sipped and crunched, until I'd eaten almost an entire family-sized block. Scraps of thin silver foil littered the table in front of me.

‘Listen to this,' she said, and read out:

Clouds –

a chance to dodge

moon-viewing.

‘Can you
imagine
the pain of feeling compelled to admire the moon on
every bloody single clear night
?' said Maggie Tulliver.

She began to giggle, and I joined her, though in fact I found moon-viewing to be a delightful occupation, and had been taking Hetty onto the verandah almost every night to point out the moon to her. Lil had told me that ‘moon' was often the first word babies said, and I thought it might encourage her to start talking.

That night Maggie Tulliver and I couldn't stop laughing. We were laughing at nothing; we would have laughed at anything. When one stopped, the other started her up again.

I finished my third glass of wine, and tipped it up and tried to lick the last of it out with my tongue,
à la
Madame Bovary. But my tongue wasn't long enough, and the wine didn't budge, so I dipped my finger into the bottom where the glass was stained red. I love the colour of red wine more than the taste, which makes your mouth pucker. I enjoyed imbibing that luscious colour more than anything.

A drop had fallen onto the table near the bottle, and I watched as Maggie Tulliver put her index finger into it and smeared it thinly over the surface, like a drop of blood on a laboratory slide. She looked up at me flirtatiously and said, ‘Do tell me that's a billet-doux I can see next to your bosom.'

‘Not at all!' I said briskly. ‘It's a letter from my sister.' I fetched it up and threw it onto the table. ‘You can read it if you like.' I felt that Maggie Tulliver's worldliness had transferred itself to me. I was so weary and utterly sophisticated I should have been shot.

Maggie Tulliver took the letter and read it without saying a word. When she'd finished, she placed it carefully on the table and said, ‘Sometimes I think the most memorable moments with men aren't about sex at all, which can be pretty disappointing.'

And she told me the story of a trip she'd made to Ireland when she was twenty. While she was sitting at the edge of a lake at sunset, a man had come along and sung a song to her, and then just as unaccountably departed. It seemed to me to be one of those magical and poetic episodes that I had always longed to happen to me.

She told the story very simply, without embellishment. It was myself who, in my imagination, filled in the gaps. I saw the last of the daylight on the water, and a single heron flapping its way soundlessly around the shore, its feet occasionally breaking through the glassy surface of the lake.

‘That was when I knew that I wanted to learn to sing,' she said. ‘But I haven't got round to doing anything about it until now – almost twenty years later.'

I think I fell a little bit in love with her then. At least, I fell under her spell. I'd have liked to reciprocate with a story of my own, but I had none to match it (for where had I been except Lismore, and long ago an ordinary stuccoed block of flats somewhere or other? The mythical land of my birth in my grandfather's house was something I thought was best kept to myself ).

Then Lil hobbled into the kitchen. She had started wearing thick elastic stockings to restrain the veins that stood out in her legs and hurt so much. How mottled those legs were, and so old, when I glimpsed them in bed in the mornings. They had become less like legs and more like ancient textured stone, weathered with age.

That night as I sat at the table with Maggie Tulliver, the bottle of red wine in front of us, I was callous. Neither of us thought to ask her to sit down, or offer her a glass (and Lil loved wine).

As she'd come into the room I'd remembered in time about Kate's letter and hastily picked it up and sat on it. Maggie Tulliver laughed when I did that, a single guffaw. I giggled drunkenly as well. Lil looked at us both sharply as though we were excluding her from a private joke, and we were. It felt as though we were conspiring against her, not just because of Kate's secret letter, but simply because she was old and we were young, and we had been drinking and laughing together. At that moment we were two and she was one. She made herself a cup of tea and went out with it.

In one night I had betrayed Kate and Lil, in one fell swoop.

And because I felt so wonderfully warm and companionable with her, I told Maggie Tulliver about the book I'd just finished for the third time:
Shirley
, by Charlotte Brontë. I got up and ran and fetched the book from my room, and read her bits of it, but not my favourite part, where Caroline Helstone finds out that Mrs Pryor is actually her mother. That part was far too sentimental for the likes of Maggie Tulliver. Instead, I read her the witty bits poking fun at the curates, because Maggie Tulliver seemed to be a poking-the-fun-at kind of person.

There is something you must never do: press a book upon someone simply because you love it yourself and you've been drinking a bit too much wine. But that night I put it into her hands and said that she
must
read it.