English Correspondence (5 page)

He watched her go to the cupboard and get out a coat. She put it on and left without turning round.

The lane from the restaurant to the main road was too short. Sylvie knew from experience that she mustn't start thinking. If she started, she would never regain the concentration she needed to walk on the edge of the fast road, facing oncoming cars. George had taught her to do that, keep to the left when there wasn't a pavement. It was masculine, logical, but entirely terrifying approaching a bend. She would rather not see what was coming to hit her. At least at night she could see the beams from the headlights before the cars reached her and the time lag enabled her to press herself into the hedgerow, or straddle the ditch. She got to the junction. Two cars went past in different directions. For a second, one masked the
other. There was silence and dark; nothing was coming. She crossed over. She walked without thinking. It was a trick she had learned from driving, shutting everything out. One lapse would slide into an accident. She felt the impact, before the thought; it kept her alert in one way, moribund in another. She liked the air on her face; that was something.

She reached the first house and the pavement. She slowed down and tried to make her heels quiet. She should have changed her shoes, but the back view of Maude in the dining room, and her husband sitting there, telling her to pretend to be George, forced her forward and out. That stuff about the bath and the book. So bloody patronising. As if he cared about what she was reading. Her coat was to hand which was lucky. It covered her up and made her anonymous, hiding her bare arms, her give-away frock. If she met anyone now in the village, she could just say good evening as if everything were normal. They wouldn't guess where she'd come from. A woman out for a walk in the dark.

Dear Sylvie, Judith and I were only too glad to be of use. She remembered Don's letter verbatim. A flattening beginning. The might of the couple brought immediately to bear on her. The ‘e' of Sylvie half enclosed, edging towards Sylvia, safer. Her own name sounding too pally, although it was French and complete. And Judith. What had she got to do with it? She had seen her at the funeral and the tea. Then the day afterwards Don had called round and conveyed a brief, and rather coldly worded invitation to supper. She had said no. She knew how it would be. The table for three nicely laid, Judith's cooking, Don droning on, bossy and prissy. The silences blocked up, airless, not spaces for thinking or smiling. She would say no again.

The houses here were quite close together, their fronts straight onto the pavement. They were old and patched up, closed up, though there must be people inside. The shutters were final. She had never walked by at the transitional moment, actually seen anyone lean out and shut them, or wind down the type with interior pulleys.

They were off to Judith's sister's villa for a break before Christmas. She lent it to them when her brood didn't require it. Only a small window. They seemed to have so many friends. He and Judith were well down the pecking order! They, the sister and brother-in-law, had taken the plunge when the children were growing too old for the ‘usual family holiday'. It had proved a success. Congratulations, she thought. But it wasn't wholehearted. She was ashamed of the tone of the letter. Ashamed for herself. She knew what she'd done. She had beckoned. It wasn't much, but she had done it, and he had dismissed her. He and Judith joined together in sympathy over the recent death of her father. This came after the holiday and sounded as if he'd never known George in person, just had the misfortune to run into the daughter. She should, he suggested, dwell on the, no doubt, plentiful happy times they had all had together as a family. Crash came the door on her fingers. She felt as if she had actually stood there and propositioned him face to face. Tous nos meilleurs voeux. Christ. Where had he got that from? The rest of the letter had been in English. Anything to avoid being even fleetingly, formally, Yours.

She stopped at the end of the village; it was a natural place to turn round. There, or Maude's house. After that, the pavement ran out. She walked back slowly. She still hadn't seen or heard anyone. The dogs were asleep and the sound from televisions didn't seep through the thick walls and shutters. She walked as far as the main road. The restaurant was visible, standing on raised ground, the forest behind it. The windows were bright. There were glints on the tops of the cars in the car park. It was some form of life. The name of the place was in blue lights on the roof. It had been there when they bought it. She'd thought it was hideous. Paul agreed but said the sign must stay as a landmark. From here she couldn't make out individual letters, just bars and rounds and diagonals. They used to joke about it. She said it reminded her of a fly electrocutor, the sort you saw at the butcher's.

It had been on New Year's Day, a year ago, that she first knew about Maude and her husband. Lunch was over. A culinary hangover cure, light and nourishing, and soon despatched. Sylvie had had the windows open all morning to air the place. The excess alcohol had seeped through the clients' skin. The smell stayed in a room, redolent of an earlier, cruder stage of vinification. Paul wasn't in the kitchen. Maude wasn't anywhere. Suddenly, for Sylvie, their absence had density. It was like a large unknown object, draped in a cloth, that she couldn't ignore. She had waited in the dining room long after the last clients had got up and left. At first she'd had things to do, so she had an excuse to hang around. Then it became clear to her that she was just waiting. She had given up at that point, as waiting was humiliating. When she got into the hall, Maude was on the bottom step of the staircase, her feet poised in descent. Her face was made up and her hair had had a good brushing. She smiled at Sylvie with confidence, as if she always crossed the hall in a way that landed her in that oblique, side-stepping position. There were two unoccupied rooms upstairs. Nine and seven. Both were spotless when Sylvie checked them. That would have been Maude. She paid attention. Even then Sylvie didn't know for certain. But she did.

The lights of the restaurant were still at a distance. Sylvie waited. She wasn't ready to stop thinking and there was the main road to deal with. She thought: in the beginning Paul and I matched each other in an understated way. Two overlapping circles. It took time to find out we had only touched at an edge that threw off a few sparks. She had kept hoping. She was sad that in the last ten months she had given George hardly any attention. She had written to him in a daze. She had collected things up – words, gestures, looks – Paul's and Maude's – put them by. Then they closed in on her. She glanced at her wrist. Dinner might be over. She had no way of telling. She had left her watch in the bathroom. She never wore one
in the evening, just a pearl and gold bracelet. Her side of the swing doors didn't need precision, only efficient response.

THE NEXT MORNING,
Sylvie threw Don's letter away in the municipal bin. She couldn't afford distractions. Since George died, she had avoided tackling anything beyond the day-to-day running of the restaurant, but there were events in the diary that wouldn't wait. The most pressing of these was a big retirement party that she had known about since September. The client wanted five courses and bits in between. The ‘five' was exact, as was the number of guests, but Christian, the man who rang her up, in the middle of the guests' breakfast, was hazy about things that couldn't be counted. Sylvie suggested he should come over to talk to her later in the day and make the final arrangements. Discussing food and drink over the telephone didn't work. People couldn't imagine themselves eating elaborate dinners out of context, unless they were properly greedy.

She needed the extra time to prepare herself. She had slept for an hour after getting back from her walk the night before. The cold air had done that much for her. But then it wore off. Her thoughts had re-formed like moisture on the inside of a window. She had woken and not slept again.

She found she had to exaggerate to get anything done. She'd lost the knack of carelessness, which is why, instead of chucking Don's letter in the waste paper basket at the side of her desk, she had walked down the lane to the huge blue container on the main road. It was the time of the week when it wasn't overflowing, its top at an angle and the village cats balanced on the edge, tails up. She had raised the lid and dropped the letter in, then rubbed her
hand on her coat. Don's platitudes had disappeared with the ends of bread and the cinders. She'd waited for a container truck, with a British number-plate, to pass, before crossing back to the lane. She told herself it had been a question of language. All kinds of things could go wrong if it wasn't your mother tongue; wrong emphases, misinterpretations, unintentional innuendo. She knew none of this applied to her. Her English was excellent. Because of George and the books, better than most. But it was a comfort to have an excuse even if she didn't believe it. It helped her to lay the matter to rest.

Sylvie sat with Christian, the firm's number two, and his secretary, to discuss the party. She was light headed from sleeplessness and might have been sitting an exam in a dream. But, having got rid of Don's letter, part of her felt cleaner, able to act rationally. They talked in the dining room round a table stripped of knives and forks, the white damask empty between them. It helped to focus attention and they could look round to conjure up the occasion and work out the details. Paul didn't offer fixed party menus for special occasions. He liked the clients to feel they had made the choices themselves. So it was up to Sylvie to make suggestions and steer them towards food that Paul enjoyed making. In the early days he had joined in, pleased and a bit nervous. But as his reputation grew, the occasions increased; corporate events and birthdays ending in nought, as well as the traditional weddings, anniversaries and baptisms. The clients who were doing the choosing usually showed some form of neurotic behaviour, believing there was a perfect solution, but not quite trusting themselves to reach it. Others were just glad to waste time away from the office. Since Sylvie had come to learn Paul's preferences, the chef absented himself.

Sylvie watched Christian's eyes as they travelled the room. She could tell he could only see what was there. The simplest visual transformation was beyond him; evening for afternoon, presence for absence. They argued, he and the secretary,
Verena, about what Maurice would want. There was a useful alliance between the modesty of the principal character – he wouldn't want anything too lavish, Christian said – and cash constraints. These had already been established at an earlier date. Christian justified himself with some serious nodding. The secretary was more astute, seemed to know Maurice would like a good send-off. Jacqueline,
his
secretary, had suggested as much. She was often invoked. There would have been less divination had she been there. Verena spoke for her. It was only once, after all, she said and Maurice had been fifty years in the firm. She was intrigued by the number, kept repeating it; her whole life could fit in it twice. Maurice would be lost without work, would try to drift back. She leant forward when she said this, looking compassionate. The more resounding the finale, the less likely he'd be to return for an encore. She sang in a choir and knew all about it. Sylvie asked about speeches. They caused problems for Paul, who worked to deadlines. The rule was to take the time people said and double or treble it. Sometimes she would have to send a message back to the kitchen: hold everything indefinitely. The speaker, it was always a man, would reproduce the years thus far so thoroughly, at such pedestrian pace, that everyone present feared their own would pass by attending to his. What a waste. This was often the moment when eyes met past the candles. Take it or leave it. It was life reasserting itself and often ended clumsily.

When they had left, Sylvie went back to her desk to write down what they'd decided. She was relieved they had gone. The afternoons were usually uninterrupted. She depended on that. The telephone might ring, or an early guest might demand keys, but they fitted into a pattern she understood. The hum of the computer and the clatter of the fax machine soothed her. She balanced her feet on the cross bar of her desk, kicked off her shoes, if no one was about. The pile of brochures showing regional excursions, the smooth stack of paper and envelopes, the pot of pens, the brass bell, the visiting cat, were all equal and equally benign. From the beginning she
had felt more at home here than in the rooms where she and Paul slept and spent their non-working hours and minutes. Yes, there was the obligatory vase, but she stuck flowers in it that looked as if they might once have had roots. As she picked them from the garden herself, she knew they did.

They had bought the restaurant in the Meuse twelve years ago with money lent by Paul's parents. They hadn't been married long then. Paul, having come out of chef school, was working in a hotel outside Toul. Sylvie had finished university and was helping out a family friend with the paperwork side of his wine business. She liked their tiny rented flat, its impermanence. The rooms were shadowy, overlooking a courtyard. The sounds of voices and the clatter of knives and forks were funnelled up the building and in through their windows. Paul was often back late, but she enjoyed the evenings waiting for him, co-existing with her neighbours. He was always pleased to see her and told her stories about the kitchen, in between their making love and sleeping. She was never lonely. It was the first time she'd lived away from home.

The previous owners of the restaurant had retired a decade after they should have done, relinquishing the business by degrees while still in possession of it. As life became difficult, they, the elderly brother and sister, dropped off bits they couldn't cope with. For instance, when chopping wood was beyond them (a technique they had perfected where she balanced the log against an iron bed head and he struck the blow) they found a felt pig, childhood relic, and stuck it in the grate. Or, when the fishmonger in the nearby town closed down, they simply dropped fish from the menu. One year, they put up a blue lighted sign on top of the restaurant. It was their last act of assurance. After that everything was a falling away. They cherished the sign for that reason, always looking forward to the autumn and the nights drawing in, so that they could switch it on earlier.