English Correspondence (21 page)

‘Sorry?'

‘I said, I've got on to the continuous tone. I was dialling our house in France.' He was speaking away from the mouthpiece. A voice nearby was interrupting. ‘If you hang on long enough, the ringing turns into a continuous tone. That must have happened to you, Al, when you call one of your friends and they don't answer. Never? You're all so bloody impatient. I got onto it with all my girlfriends. Shut the bloody door if you don't like it.'

‘Jerry?'

‘God, there's a lot to put up with at this end.'

‘It sounds as if you need to put the phone down.'

‘Maybe. Not yet.'

‘I'd better go, I think.'

‘Tell me everything you've done since you left.'

‘Sorry, I'm not concentrating. There's a car revving outside.'

‘Keep talking. Tell me about France. I like France. Talk to me in French.'

‘Paul's parents are leaving. They've turned on their headlights and are sitting there outside the entrance. They're waiting for me to say goodbye to them.'

‘What else is happening? It sounds like a party.'

‘I'll have to go now. Paul's coming in from outside.'

‘I thought you were front of house and he stayed in the kitchen.'

‘I've got to go.' She put the telephone down.

Paul came back in and got stuck for the next ten minutes, saying good night and holding the door for the clients. His words were affable but his actions and his smile became automatic with the opening and the shutting of the door. Outside it was cold and still. The entrance hall emptied.

‘They were sorry not to say goodbye to you,' he said to Sylvie.

‘Yvette and Gilles?'

She had known whom he meant but she couldn't summon up guilt.

‘It doesn't matter,' he said.

‘No,' she said. It didn't. The formula got repeated. Goodbye. And then when it was final, a real goodbye, she had missed saying it.

‘You sounded weary,' he said. ‘What were you thinking?'

‘Nothing,' she said.

THE DAYS BETWEEN
December 25 and 31 were always odd. They lacked potential. The decorations were still up, looking less glossy; the resinous smell fading. People ignored them, as they would do confetti on church steps after a wedding. They were glad to sink back into habit, recovering from Christmas but absolved from making resolutions. In the restaurant, Paul cooked food that propitiated the appetite and Sylvie asked the clients who hadn't been with them if they had had a good Christmas.

Felix had run into an open car door, in the village, and come off his bike. The owner of the car had been on his hands and knees hoovering the inside. He had laid out his rubber mats and pieces of detachable carpet and set up an arrangement with an extension lead. He wasn't pleased with the nosebleed. Felix said that the black eye, that spread from his eyebrow to below his cheekbone, and the bandaged left hand, looked worse than they were and wouldn't stop him from working. He was skint after Christmas and owed his mum money. Sylvie was glad to make a fuss of him. His eye was rather beautiful. Paul was nursing his emotions and this was less appealing. He seemed to want Sylvie's sympathy but she knew he wouldn't ask for it. He couldn't legitimately resent her either, as it was Alain who was keeping Maude at home; nothing to do with her. It left him with a limited range of demonstrable feelings. Alain's intervention was guesswork but Sylvie preferred to believe in it. It explained Paul's self pity. She experimented with the idea of mentioning Jerry. It wouldn't be a revelation, or a story, just a few airy sentences
of fact, to show she was adult. Lucien, though, was always present, as Natalie wasn't there to take him off their hands. She was visiting her mother in Thionville and wouldn't be returning until the New Year and the start of the school term. Sylvie didn't want to summon up trouble and then not have the privacy to deal with it. She and Paul avoided trouble. Equilibrium would be a fancy word for where they'd got to, suggesting achievement, a fine balancing. It wasn't that.

On the afternoon of December 29 Sylvie took Lucien for a walk in the forest. The restaurant was stuffy and smelled of venison stew. The food itself had looked delicate, with carrot thinnings and thumb-nail size dumplings arranged round the edge of the plates like exclamation marks, but the smell was that of a hunters' feast, trapped in a genteel room. Four elderly Englishmen had eaten it and sped off on motorbikes to a First World War monument on the top of a shallow hill. Visibility wasn't good but the panoramic plan, at the top of the steps, would help them to reconstruct the various stages of the offensive. They were optimistic and liked the idea of blotting out the contemporary detail with a mist. A couple had eaten the stew and set off for Luxembourg. The car park was empty.

Lucien ran ahead into the forest, off the main path, leaving Sylvie behind. He wouldn't go far out of sight. He felt life with his feet; dead leaves and pine needles, felled trees and boggy puddles. It wasn't enough to look at them, he had to walk in or over them and it took twice as long. Sylvie kept to the track. The pines were dense on either side and deep beyond; tough and spiky, grown for use, slivers of brightness between the trunks. There seemed to be a change for the better in the level of light, now that Christmas was out of the way. It felt good to be out of doors, for its own sake, not just as escape. In the distance, where the trees almost met, were three figures, too far away to distinguish. Their coats showed up against the greens and browns. Then, as Sylvie approached, a fourth appeared, running across them,
followed by a small white dog. Lucien had his eyes on the ground, he hadn't seen them.

‘There's Maude,' said Sylvie when he swerved over in her direction. She was glad to have him there to say it to. There was something unnerving about approaching Maude head on. It would be several minutes before they reached one another, longer if their children dawdled. She didn't feel like waving. And if she had done, she would have to stop. She couldn't wave indefinitely. And then choosing the moment to begin smiling was awkward. She hadn't seen Maude for over three weeks. Not since she arrived back from London.

‘Are those her children?' said Lucien.

Since he'd seen them he'd stuck next to her.

‘Yes,' said Sylvie. ‘You know them.'

‘No I don't,' he said.

There was no point in arguing with him.

She had no idea whether Paul had spoken to Maude, or what they might have said to each other; presumably they had spoken. She thought of them like that, almost breezily; prepared to tell herself the outward form of their story, but not to home in on the details. It wasn't so much that she stopped at the bedroom door, she wasn't afraid of that, as that she saw them as the naïve, speeded up characters in a silent movie. Round and round the kitchen they went, in and out of car seats, up and down the stairs, upright, prone. What had taken months for them, with gaps in between, she saw in minutes. She could even contemplate their future, now that the rapid, head-banging kisses had stopped. The most likely outcome was that they wouldn't see each other for a certain length of time, anything between a few months and a couple of years, long enough for Alain to ease off the vigilance, or find himself a mistress, and then they would again. They lived near each other and the area was depopulated. They wouldn't have reached this conclusion themselves. Lovers could thrive on uncertainty, but not mundane likelihoods.

She realised that she hadn't tried at all hard to imagine what Paul saw in Maude. She had stuck to the obvious:
Maude's looks and the confidence that went with admiration – her stunning ability to be ingratiating. She hadn't looked any further. Maude waved. Sylvie thought, that's one thing about Maude, she's the sort to do things first. She waved back. It felt wrong to think about her as she approached. She tried, mentally, to change the subject.

‘Why is Maude here?' said Lucien.

‘For the same reason we are, I suppose. To go for a walk.'

‘I don't want to play with those children.'

‘You don't have to.'

‘I might have to. You don't know.'

‘Don't be unfriendly.'

Sylvie glanced back over her shoulder. They had passed the first foresters' track that cut across the main path. She hadn't noticed it. Between the trees she could see a narrow line of bonfire smoke rising from somewhere in the fields. But the line was getting finer. They'd come further than she'd thought.

‘Hi,' said Maude, from a few paces away. ‘You're bored with the Christmas presents too, are you? The novelty has definitely worn off. We're collecting pine-cones, aren't we troops? Hi Lucien.'

The white dog snuffled round their feet.

‘We just wanted some fresh air,' said Sylvie. It was a prissy thing to say, but Maude looked and sounded as if they had met in a department store. She seemed, in spite of talking of the pine-cones, not to recognise that they were out of doors.

‘Tell Sylvie what we've got.' As no one spoke, she carried on. ‘We've got two lovely kittens, haven't we? I've been trying to bond them with the dog. It's not going swimmingly. Give Lucien some of yours, Max.'

The three children were each carrying a plastic bag. Max's looked the heaviest. Lucien put out his hands and Max poured pine-cones into them. Most of them fell on the ground, but neither of them bothered. All four children ran off in the
direction Sylvie and Lucien had been going in. The two women followed them.

‘You were on your way back home,' said Sylvie.

‘It doesn't matter,' said Maude. ‘As long as we're not complaining or fighting, I don't care. I can't get anything done while they're under my feet. How was Christmas?'

She had got in first with that too.

‘Busy,' said Sylvie. ‘It all seemed to go all right.'

Lucien and Max were weaving in and out of the trees calling out to each other. The little girls were running after them.

‘We had my brother over. It was our turn. Two of his kids went down with flu. Only mild. They carried on eating.'

‘Room service,' said Sylvie. ‘That must have been tiring.'

‘My brother's very good. He kept whipping up and down stairs. I just hope none of the grandparents caught it.'

‘They've gone now, have they?'

‘Alain's parents have. Mine are staying over New Year to baby-sit for us.'

‘Are you doing something nice?'

‘A colleague of Alain's is giving a party. It'll make a change.'

Sylvie admired the way she went boldly to the edge. Maude had done New Year's Eve with them last year. It had been livelier than usual. Gingered up by adultery, as she'd realised afterwards. The sort of people who came to the Meuse for the occasion believed that, barring accidents, one year was much like another. Sylvie could see it in their faces when the clock struck. They raised their glasses and some exchanged kisses. Dinner began at nine. Sylvie concentrated all her efforts on prolonging the day, which would have been easy to do in June, but needed contrivance in mid winter. Clients coming down the stairs at six o'clock, in need of a drink, were surprised to see Natalie going round with the hoover. Sylvie, wearing a cardigan and skirt that couldn't be interpreted as smart for evening, asked them if they were looking for a cup of tea. She changed later. The English sometimes accepted
the tea, but the others retreated upstairs to the mini bar and the conservative comfort of the bedrooms. Last year Maude's enthusiasm had made it seem more like a party. Then, on New Year's Day, Sylvie had found out why.

‘I've been thinking about you,' Maude said. ‘It must have been difficult for you.'

‘I suppose so,' said Sylvie.

‘Missing your Dad,' said Maude.

So that was what she was talking about, Sylvie thought.

‘I never really saw him at Christmas.' It was a frosty response.

‘It's not just that, though, is it?' said Maude. ‘It's a funny time of year. Everything sort of gets stirred up. The whole family thing. It must have felt awful going back to London on your own to sort things out.'

‘I didn't really sort anything.'

‘Why should you? You need to take your time. Don't take any notice of what anyone else is telling you. Yvette and people,' said Maude. ‘What's the point in rushing things? You only end up doing stuff that doesn't feel right and then having to re-do it.'

Sylvie thought, this woman's got a nerve, but listening to her wasn't as grating as it might have been. Part of her felt like responding guardedly. Maybe not even guardedly. In the circumstances, what could they be talking about?

‘I miss getting his letters,' she said. ‘Usually I'd be getting one in the next few days telling me about his Christmas. He always dressed it up. Made it sound all right. He has these neighbours, well, friends, I suppose, who ask him in for one of the days. They're kind but dull. And he cooked for himself on the other day. His own mother's sort of food it seemed to be, austerity, make do and mend, not Eve's, certainly not Paul's. But he must have been lonely.'

‘I was sorry about his last letter.'

‘What about it?'

‘Paul told me.'

‘What did he tell you?'

‘The day after you got back from George's funeral. You asked me what I'd done with the post while you'd been away. I knew you were expecting something in particular. I asked Paul about it. Nosy, I know. I'm sorry.'

‘I probably made too much of it. I kept asking people. The postman clearly thought I was loopy.' In attempting lightness, Sylvie's voice sounded tinny inside her head, thin in the outdoor air.

‘Why shouldn't you make a fuss about it? He was your Dad. I'd have done the same.'

Sylvie glanced sideways at Maude. She looked entirely sincere. This is her famous empathy, she thought. But she felt how it worked.