English Correspondence (24 page)

‘We booked, I can assure you.'

‘Of course,' Sylvie said.

‘My mother's still in the car. At least she didn't go to the trouble of getting out. We won't be able to stay now.'

She didn't move. She stared at the bare tables.

‘We're sorry,' Sylvie said, ‘but, of course, it's your choice.'

The woman seemed to her to be rootless and homeless in spite of her demands. Arriving from nowhere and with nowhere to go. The loneliness of this moment could go on for ever. Sylvie had to make herself think of a house full of furniture, televisions, pot plants, cats; anything to provide this stranger with the usual comforts.

‘I shall be contacting the brochure,' the woman said. ‘You couldn't tell me which number room we would have had, could you?'

‘Certainly,' Sylvie said. ‘Seven.'

‘Seven,' the woman said. ‘I collect numbers.'

‘It's lucky,' Sylvie said.

The woman took one last look round and walked back through the hall and out of the main door. They heard her footsteps going across the gravel.

‘Thank you, Sylvie. You saved me a lot of hassle,' Paul said. ‘New Year's Eve too. What a joke.'

‘It wasn't me,' Sylvie said. ‘It was one of those situations that sorts itself out.'

‘Was it seven?'

‘I've no idea.'

Paul smiled. They heard the car engine start and the car moving away.

‘Do you want me to do anything for you?' he said.

‘I don't think so.'

‘I'll go and get on, then.'

‘Tell Lucien I'll be along in a minute.'

Sylvie saw that Paul was relieved that the woman had intervened and that she had been capable of talking rationally to her. Not rationally, effectively. It was the way she talked to the clients. He appreciated what she did, while thinking it could have been less peculiar. She brought out the strangeness in them. But they had never had any trouble with clients in all the years they'd been here.

There was nothing Sylvie wanted from him. She could make him put his hand in the bottom of the clock case or behind the mirror over the mantelpiece. She could make him feel the emptiness. What the living shared with the dead was nothing; not absolute nothing, which she couldn't comprehend, but the emptiness through which life flowed.

People talked of extracting apologies as though they were teeth and what they were left with was a mouth full of blood and a sore jaw. So she would forget it, as Paul had asked her to, but it wouldn't mean the same thing as he meant by it. Whatever guilt had been visible in his face had been cleaned off since Maude had slipped out of the conversation.

The woman and her mother would be back on the main road. Everywhere would be booked up for tonight. Sylvie imagined them driving home without discussion, retracing their steps, thinking that the route looked nearly identical the other way on, like a sock turned inside out.

She went to the bookshelf in the hall where they kept guide books for the use of the guests. She changed them every year. In their business there was nothing worse than old dates on
display. She took one out and ran her finger down a page and, holding the book open, dialled a telephone number. Then, after she'd finished the call and put the receiver down she went to see if Lucien had finished his lunch.

SYLVIE DIDN'T GET
further than Calais on the evening of January 1. The hotel she checked into was tall and thin, with metal windows and a lift like the inside of a cheese grater. Lucien was interested in it and in the signed notice of its annual check. He wasn't any trouble. He had sat, with his seat belt on, in the back of her car, asking her questions about the flares from the oil refinery and the bikers lined up in the service station. He hadn't been on many long journeys. They had gone to a café, in the centre of town, for a late-night snack and had chosen a table by the window. Across the road was a doorway framed in multi-coloured lights. It must have been the entrance to a bar or a club, but it didn't have a name. Lucien wanted to know who would come out of it. Sylvie said he would have to keep looking. Eventually a man came out. He turned into the alley between that building and the next and punched someone who was crouching on the bottom step of some stone stairs. Then he went back through the doorway again. ‘They'll put those Christmas lights away in a box soon; they'll do it when we take the Christmas tree down,' Lucien told her. She said she thought they wouldn't. They looked permanent. Then, a minute later, he said, ‘The police will come and get that man. Why didn't he run away?' but she had no explanation. Two men came out of another door and bent over the victim. The ambulance turned up about ten minutes later and the crew bundled him in and drove off.

The room was adequate and the bed shallow. Lucien's head on the pillow was a beautiful curve; his neck, little but sturdy. Sylvie left the main light on. There wasn't a bedside
lamp. He wouldn't wake up. He was deeply asleep. She had already drawn the curtains and shut out the street. The fabric was familiar; a safe hotel pattern that was dated before it went up but would last fifteen years. She would always notice that sort of thing. It was part of what she knew. She cleaned off her make-up, brushed her teeth and had a shower. Nothing took long. She allowed the bathroom and the bedroom to merge, wandered between them. She needed to walk, though the distance was short, just up and down. She saw her face in two mirrors; the one in the bathroom more exacting, but the looks shared between them. Tired French, tired English, troubled, untroubled, astonished at what she was doing.

Sylvie lay down next to Lucien, found the light switch and put it off. She had done New Year's Eve. Hospitality and impeccable service. Every guest got to bed, or out to a car. Every table stripped down and relaid. The dining room aired. The night had been short, but she had managed to sleep. She had been surprised to find that she had. First a dream, and then the morning.

There was noise outside here. Bursts of shouting. Irregular footsteps. Car tyres. It was all subdued and over quickly. Tonight's boozing just a top up. Someone further down the street must have had a window open, letting in the weather, because she could hear a female vocalist, perfect, relayed electronically, then, afterwards, a real woman singing. Internal doors in the hotel banged shut; thin doors with noisy fastenings. Water knocked in the pipes. In the next room, a man and a woman carried on talking.

She hadn't given Paul reason to panic. She had told him that she was taking Lucien to London before school started again. School was a reassuring word as long as you weren't in it. He would hang on to the safety of it. She would call him when she got to George's flat. She had told him after breakfast. She said she'd be leaving in an hour, or so, and would take her time to get there. They would stay a night by the sea, one side or the other. That sounded more contingent than saying Calais or Dover. They would go on the boat. She
had had enough of the Tunnel and Lucien would prefer it. Paul thought it was about Maude, some delayed resentment. She'd allowed him to think it. He had kissed them both goodbye and waved as they drove away. No one else knew. He would have to tell Yvette. Without Maude, or Sylvie, he'd need her to help him. Sylvie didn't know what he would say. Yvette would ask a lot of questions and, as the days went by, would ask more, developing a sense of unease and intense curiosity, simultaneously. She would strain her imagination to get it right, seeing Sylvie in a distant room, probably uncomfortable, as it was George's, hardly space to turn round. A good daughter, all those letters she used to write to him, but not doing her best by Lucien, taking him away from his home, like that, to an old man's flat without any toys. Not doing her best by her own son either. Putting the dead before the living. Yvette would have imagined her lying beside Paul for ever. For a short time she would find it painful to think of Sylvie outside the familiar limits. Then the words would return. Sylvie was acting out of character, she'd come back home. Or, there was always something odd about Sylvie, that didn't quite fit; she wasn't surprised at this turn of events. They were two sides of the same thought. It was harder to conceive of the narrow space that was truly someone else and unpredictable to other people. Because, to get at it, whoever was doing the thinking, had to concentrate in a way that went through and beyond what looked fixed, through and beyond the faces and gestures, ways of walking and talking, and the forms that were known off by heart.

Sylvie closed her eyes. It was already the second day of January. Dark for the moment but light again in a few hours. She didn't have a ticket or know the times of the crossings. They would follow the signs to the docks and join a queue. The morning would be damp and dull. It wouldn't feel like the beginning of a holiday, or a year; not the beginning of anything.

George wouldn't have gone to Don's for New Year. Don was kind enough, and Judith. George appreciated what they did for him, but he wouldn't have wanted to be there. He would have walked to the row of shops nearby, past the wine bar and the dry cleaners. Both shut. He would have bought some milk and a loaf for toast from the perpetual grocer; eight until ten. Long hours. But the man never exerted himself. No one had ever seen him away from the chair. George would have taken a different route back, adding in side streets to get a bit of exercise. He would have had a book waiting for him at home and a bottle, a couple of pounds dearer than usual, to mark the change in the date. Eve would have been there in spirit, lovely to look at and almost too much for him.

Everything on the cross Channel ferry would be lightweight, capable of floating – paper cups, plastic spoons, newsprint, empty packaging – the boat itself smelling of sea water and cheap coffee, just solid enough to contain them. Sylvie would be with Lucien, who was a child, and strangers who wouldn't know that this was the state of things.

When they reached the other side, they would drive through Kent, then through the London suburbs from east to west. She knew the route, and although, in one way, she was glad of this, in another, she was sorry that she wouldn't have to worry about finding the way.

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Copyright © Janet Davey, 2003

Janet Davey has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

First published in Great Britain in 2003 by
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ISBN 9780099440796