English Correspondence (19 page)

Lucien was pale but otherwise perfect. The marks of hysterical crying had been smoothed from his face. He came in from the cold and dark, holding his grandmother's hand as if they had had a nice uneventful day together. He remembered what had happened and how he had behaved, and now he was here, back at home, making an unscheduled return. He had
an air of someone who made no connection between the two. Nothing personal, anyway.

‘He's all smiles now,' Yvette said, inclined to be spiteful. She liked to be known to cope in a crisis. And although she was relieved that the appalling noise had hiccupped to an end she felt absurd walking in with this obedient child. She kept glancing at Sylvie, wondering what was different about her. Sylvie wanted to say, my friend has made my face up, which is why, although tired, your daughter-in-law looks, somehow, more vivid.

‘I'm sorry you've had a rough time,' said Sylvie.

‘It didn't matter to me, darling,' said Yvette. ‘I just felt so sorry for him, getting himself into such a state for no good reason.'

‘Never mind,' said Sylvie.

She knew that Yvette supposed that if Lucien was able to be calm and happy now he could have been calm and happy an hour ago and remained at his grandparents'. Her mother-in-law probably supposed the same about her. If she was up now, why couldn't she have got up this morning like everyone else who wasn't ill or on shift work? It bothered her herself. She had lapsed and so had Lucien.

THE THREE OF
them sat round the table in the tiny dining room of their flat. It was half past five on Christmas morning and the only time they would be on their own together. Sylvie and Paul had both got to bed at two o'clock. They were tired with a tiredness that wouldn't shift but could be cajoled by hot coffee. The room was the same as it was in the evening; the curtains drawn, the lamp turned on, the furniture identically set out, but the light and the colours had a different quality, harsher and more sickly. Lucien had woken early but wasn't the cause of this inconvenient breakfast. He knew he wasn't and made the most of it.

‘Everyone in my class will be up now,' he said.

‘No they won't,' said Sylvie.

‘Yes they will,' said Lucien. ‘They'll make their parents get up.'

‘Bernard possibly will, but none of the others,' said Sylvie.

‘Bernard won't,' said Lucien. ‘He never wakes up.'

‘He won't have had such great presents, anyway,' said Paul.

‘He already got judo lessons for his birthday. He won't get anything else.'

It was too soon for conversation and Sylvie and Paul were joined together in adult resistance to it. Across the table she saw a man exposed by the time, the day, the energy of his son, the circumstances that had brought him to this point. She knew she was equally blighted. And beyond the intervening door was the narcosis of the restaurant. The sleeping clients, oblivious of their surroundings, but lying in wait for them.
They'd booked in advance and had expectations. They'd be dreaming of races and chases and water and falling and work and love, but they'd wake up thinking of breakfast laid on clean tablecloths and what there might be for lunch. The place would be in darkness apart from the dim corridor lighting and the red glow of the emergency connection on the hall telephone.

‘Are you all right?' said Paul, ignoring whatever Lucien was saying. ‘We were late last night.'

‘Not too bad,' said Sylvie. ‘Are you?'

She could still do it; begin days and get through them. She hadn't known whether she would be able to. It was Christmas and she'd reached it. When she had got up from her bed three weeks ago she had forced herself not to get back in and since then she had managed to stay in the daytime world. She had worked without stopping, confined to the building. At night she disappeared into a tunnel. She and Paul sheltered each other without being companionable. Sylvie thought how strange it was that their observances carried on. There were no days off so they hadn't eaten together but they talked to one another and synchronised arrangements. They had made love from time to time in a way that was neutral; not as a necessity, like drinking a glass of water from thirst, more as a reflex, like eating bread and butter that happened to be on the table. Their support of each other was partly professional, almost sophisticated. They were fully booked again this year. Saturday, Sunday, Monday. Both weeks either side. All the beds and all the tables. Her autumn advertising had paid off. She'd arranged that before George died. The weather was terrible; murky, typical northern French. The sky never changed from day to day.

Paul, Yvette and Gilles were being careful with her. They knew that Christmas was a difficult time for anyone who had had trouble during the course of the year, bereavement, divorce, that sort of thing, and that the later on in the year the event happened, the more difficult the festive season was likely to be. They remained themselves, of course, but Sylvie
was aware of their efforts. Paul himself was looking fragile having, temporarily, lost Maude. She seemed to be under curfew. And then there was Lucien.

Paul had had his talk with her about him. He had avoided bedtime, choosing a quiet moment in the hall when guests weren't obviously passing. He didn't say she hadn't been a fit mother and needed to pull herself together. He didn't complain of her absences. One thing got substituted for another and he said that it seemed a bit tough on Lucien living in a restaurant, having all those extra people around; that it wasn't like an ordinary family Christmas. Lucien was old enough to know that they weren't the same as other people. They needed to make sure he wasn't missing out. He had had wonderful Christmases, as a child. He wanted it to be the same for Lucien. Sylvie let Paul talk to her about it, realising he was worrying about something else. She said she didn't think Lucien had quite got to the stage of knowing his family wasn't typical. What his parents did had the status of the essential services. Of course, it was the case that, once the clients had arranged to come to them at Christmas, there was no going back. They had chosen to come to them, rather than book Nice or Martinique or do an enormous shop at the supermarket. They couldn't let them down. She agreed they weren't the same as other people. She didn't want to dismiss it. So, she and Paul were kind to each other, but the kindness was another layer of skin.

She talked to Lucien. She told him to pretend that they were on a boat, becalmed in monotonous seascape. The people who came to the restaurant couldn't go ashore, so he should try to make them feel at home. They couldn't escape to the kitchen, to cook or wash up, and they had to get on with strangers. He wasn't particularly impressed by the comparison. He'd never been on a boat, not even a cross Channel ferry. But Paul seemed satisfied that she was making an effort.

At six o'clock, Paul left to work in the kitchen. Sylvie poured herself some more coffee and counted the hours
ahead. After tidying up, she and Lucien shut the door to their apartment and walked down the corridor. She made him whisper but she let him rearrange the cards that were hanging on strings in the hall. They were mostly connected with the business; large and traditional, or large and fashionably untraditional. There was one from Don. The computer was switched off and the telephone was silent. She moved around the dining room making small adjustments, laying the tables that weren't going to be used for breakfast, with lunch-time cutlery and glasses. Apart from the rain, there were no sounds from outside. The farm vehicles stood idle. No cars or lorries went by on the main road. They would have to travel a long way to find any life. The nearby town would be deserted, shuttered up. The shops with their tills covered, fishmongers mopped dry, butchers bleached clean, the florist empty of all but silk flowers, Jacques' bar unlit. She thought, if I don't sit down, I shall get everything done.

At eight o'clock the hum of a guest's television reached the hall, the first of the day. Soon afterwards, a man came out of a ground-floor bedroom with a dog in his arms and wagged his finger at Lucien, before slipping out of the front door. It was just beginning to get light.

The older clients were the first down. Retired couples, in pairs, or with friends. They had dressed carefully from the limited supply of clothes in their suitcases, some rather smartly, so that they wouldn't have to change again later. There was always someone who felt she had made the wrong choice of Sunday best and whose stay was spoilt because of it. Last year it had been a woman in a knitted suit with fur trimming. Something about it had made her uncomfortable. She had complained about the chair she was sitting on and after Sylvie had changed it, she had asked for the heating to be turned down.

As they entered the dining room, they exchanged Christmas greetings tentatively, the English making an effort with their French, or simply smiling. Sylvie had time to talk to them as she filled up their cups with tea or coffee. They mentioned
their families. They didn't want other people to think they hadn't got any. Their children and grandchildren were, exceptionally, on winter sports' holidays. Or, they were all going to celebrate together at their daughter's fiftieth in February. Lucien survived until the first well-meaning question about his presents and then ran away.

George never spent Christmas with Sylvie. He stayed in London. He spoke to them all on the telephone on Christmas morning and she didn't get in touch with him or hear from him again until they exchanged letters early in January. English post always seized up for a week or more. And in the years after she had left home and before her mother died, Eve and George spent the holiday on their own together. So she didn't associate him with Christmas. She and Paul worked.

She remembered the letter she had written to him last year. Maybe not the exact words, but the gist of it. She had read it, along with the others, as she knelt on the sitting room floor in his flat. Apart from topical details, such as the knitted suit, it could have been describing any year in the previous five, though Lucien grew bigger, the business became more successful, they all got older. She had given George the flavour of it. His letters, back to her, were the same; true, but partial. His painstaking descriptions of what he'd cooked for himself, his assumed laboriousness and incompetence, his accounts of Boxing Day with Don and Judith, his subsequent escapes to fresh air and the pub, were exaggerated for her benefit. He missed out his bravery in doing any of it without Eve and the distortions he had had to accommodate; not just the emptiness of his wife not being there, but the deformed shape that had taken her place. He and Sylvie had told each other what was acceptable and bearable. This year she had no one to tell.

IN ENGLAND IT
didn't stop raining. It eased off on the afternoon of December 25 without giving up altogether and English families set out to stretch their legs or get a breath of fresh air, letting the brain contract out and the day itself take them for a walk as though they were dogs.

Jerry set off down the lane with Gillian at three o'clock. No one else would come out with them. It was probably the third year they had been unaccompanied. In previous years either Nicholas or Alice would agree to go, as long as the other didn't. This was also the period when his aunt would have been able to make it limb-wise, but stayed indoors to keep his mother company. There were years before that, when both his mother and aunt could still make it, but Alice wouldn't go because the grown-ups outnumbered the children and occasionally talked among themselves. These were blocks of time and were broken up by particular years when individual family members dropped out through illness, and sometimes, depending who they were, needed someone, usually Gillian, to attend to them. There must have been a time when all six of them went on the walk together but Jerry couldn't recall it. He didn't think of Christmas from one December to the next and then the sense of dozens of them came to him at once, as if they all happened in an eternal present and overlay each other, like strips of negative in old photograph packets. If he had had time to get to the bottom of the pile he'd have found the Holy Family.

‘If we got there well in advance, say three or four days before, we could warm the house up.' Gillian paused. ‘We'd
take the food but we'd have to keep an eye on the sell-by dates.'

‘What did you buy it for then?' Jerry said.

‘Sorry, Jerry?'

‘Don't worry. They err on the side of caution. We'll have eaten it all in a few hours' time. The kids'll keep it down. And the old dears. They're more robust than they look. They never throw up at Christmas. Flu, yes. Heavy colds, yes. Nothing gastric.'

‘You're wrong, actually. Don't you remember Alice?' Gillian said.

‘When was that?'

‘I don't know. She was younger. Yes, I do. Exactly. It was the year we decided to cut out presents between the adults.'

‘How did that work?' he said.

‘It didn't. Everyone gave to everyone else, the same as usual. I suppose the presents were a bit smaller. But no, no they weren't. I remember thinking it would be cheaper, but it wasn't. Not at all. And Nicholas didn't give anything to anyone.'

‘That wouldn't have worried him.'

‘It didn't. He said I'd told him the wrong thing.'

‘Just out of interest, why did you buy stuff that was going off? I mean, it doesn't matter. But no doubt you had a reason,' he said.

‘Nothing important. You weren't listening to what I was saying, actually.'

A puddle stretched across the lane, large enough to ripple as the wind caught it.

‘Shall we risk it? The gravelly bit in the middle's disappeared. You didn't change your shoes,' said Gillian.

‘It's always bad here. There's a bit to the left which is usually safe. There, by that clump.'

‘That black bit? I don't think so.'