The Cost of Living (34 page)

Patrick had been pushed to the very bottom of my thoughts. But I knew that Sylvie was talking. I could imagine her excited voice saying, “Patrick was an actor, although he hardly ever had a part, and she was good and clever, nothing of a man-eater…” I could imagine her saying it to the young men, the casual drifters, who stood on the pavement and gossiped and fingered coins, wondering if they dared go inside a café and sit down—wondering if they had enough money for a cup of coffee or a glass of beer. Sylvie knew everybody in Paris. She knew no one of any consequence, but she knew everyone, and her indiscretions spread like the track of a snail.

Patrick was behind a wall. I knew that something was living and stirring behind the wall, but it was impossible for me to dislodge the bricks. Louise never mentioned him. Once she spoke of her lost young husband, but Collie would never reveal his face again. He had been more thoroughly forgotten than anyone deserves to be. Patrick and Collie merged into one occasion, where someone had failed. The failure was Louise's; the infidelity of memory, the easy defeat were hers. It had nothing to do with me.

The tenants of the house in Melbourne wrote about rotten beams, and asked Louise to find a new gardener. She instantly wrote letters and a gardener was found. It was April, and the ripped fabric of her life mended. One could no longer see the way she had come. There had been one letter from Patrick, addressed to all three.

A letter to Patrick that Sylvie never finished was among the papers I found in Sylvie's room after she had left the hotel. “I have been painting pictures in a friend's studio,” it said. “Perhaps art is what I shall take up after all. My paintings are very violent but also very tender. Some of them are large but others are small. Now I am playing Mozart on your old record-player. Now I am eating chocolate. Alas.”

Patrick wrote to Sylvie. I found his letter on Monsieur Rablis' desk one day. I put my hand across the desk to reach for my key, which hung on a board on the wall behind the desk, and I saw the letter in a basket of mail. I saw the postmark and I recognized his hand. I put the letter in my purse and carried it upstairs. I sat down at the table in my room before opening it. I slit the envelope carefully and spread the letter flat. I began to read it. The first words were “
Mon amour
.”

The new tenant of his room was a Brazilian student who played the guitar. The sun falling on the carpet brought the promise of summer and memories of home. Paris was like a dragonfly. The Seine, the houses, the trees, the wind, and the sky were like a dragonfly's wing. Patrick belonged to another season—to winter, and museums, and water running off the shoes, and steamy cafés. I held the letter under my palms. What if I went to find him now? I stepped into a toy plane that went any direction I chose. I arrived where he was, and walked toward him. I saw, on a winter's day (the only season in which we could meet), Patrick in sweaters. I saw his astonishment, and, in a likeness as vivid as a dream, I saw his dismay.

I sat until the room grew dark. Sylvie banged on the door and came in like a young tiger. She said gaily, “Where's Louise? I think I've got a job. It's a funny job—I want to tell her. Why are you sitting in the dark?” She switched on a light. The spring evening came in through the open window. The room trembled with the passage of cars down the street. She looked at the letter and the envelope with her name upon it but made no effort to touch them.

She said, “Everything is so easy for people like Louise and you. You go on the assumption that no one will ever dare hurt you, and so nobody ever dares. Nobody dares because you don't expect it. It isn't fair.”

I realized I had opened a letter. I had done it simply and naturally, as a fact of the day. I wondered if one could steal or kill with the same indifference—if one might actually do harm.

“Tell Louise not to do anything more for me,” she said. “Not even if I ask.”

That night she vanished. She took a few belongings and left the rest of her things behind. She owed much rent. The hotel was full of strangers, for with the spring the tourists came. Monsieur Rablis had no difficulty in letting her room. Louise pushed her bicycle out to the street, and studied the history of music, and visited the people to whom she had introductions, and ate biscuits in her room. She stopped giving things away. Everything in her accounts was under “Necessary,” and only necessary things were bought. One day, looking at the Seine from the Tuileries terrace, she said there was no place like home, was there? A week later, I put her on the boat train. After that, I had winter ghosts: Louise making tea, Sylvie singing, Patrick reading aloud.

Then, one summer morning, Sylvie passed me on the stairs. She climbed a few steps above me and stopped and turned. “Why, Puss!” she cried. “Are you still here?” She hung on the banister and smiled and said, “I've come back for my clothes. I've got the money to pay for them now. I've had a job.” She was sunburned, and thinner than she had seemed in her clumsy winter garments. She wore a cotton dress, and sandals, and the necklace of seals. Her feet were filthy. While we were talking she casually picked up her skirt and scratched an insect bite inside her thigh. “I've been in a Christian cooperative community,” she said. Her eyes shone. “It was wonderful! We are all young and we all believe in God. Have you read Maritain?” She fixed her black eyes on my face and I knew that my prestige hung on the reply.

“Not one word,” I said.

“You could start with him,” said Sylvie earnestly. “He is very materialistic, but so are you. I could guide you, but I haven't time. You must first dissolve your personality—are you listening to me?—and build it up again, only better. You must get rid of everything material. You must.”

“Aren't you interested in the stage anymore?” I said.

“That was just theatre,” said Sylvie, and I was too puzzled to say anything more. I was not sure whether she meant that her interest had been a pose or that it was a worldly ambition with no place in her new life.

“Oh,” said Sylvie, as if suddenly remembering. “Did you ever hear from him?”

Everything was still, as still as snow, as still as a tracked mouse.

“Yes, of course,” I said.

“I'm so glad,” said Sylvie, with some of her old overplaying. She made motions as though perishing with relief, hand on her heart. “I was so silly, you know. I minded about the letter. Now I'm beyond all that. A person in love will do anything.”

“I was never in love,” I said.

She looked at me, searching for something, but gave me up. “I've left the community now,” she said. “I've met a boy...oh, I wish you knew him! A saint. A modern saint. He belongs to a different group and I'm going off with them. They want to reclaim the lost villages in the South of France. You know? The villages that have been abandoned because there's no water or no electricity. Isn't that a good idea? We are all people for whom the theatre…[gesture]…and art…[gesture]…and music and all that have failed. We're trying something else. I don't know what the others will say when they see him arriving with me, because they don't want unattached women. They don't mind wives, but unattached women cause trouble, they say.
He
was against
all
women until he met
me
.” Sylvie was beaming. “There won't be any trouble with me. All I want to do is work. I don't want anything…” She frowned. What was the word? “…anything material.”

“In that case,” I said, “you won't need the necklace.”

She placed her hand flat against it, but there was nothing she could do. All the while she was lifting it off over her head and handing it down to me I saw she was regretting it, and for two pins would have taken back all she had said about God and materialism. I ought to have let her keep it, I suppose. But I thought of Louise, and everything spent with so little return. She had merged “Necessary” and “Unnecessary” into a single column, and when I added what she had paid out it came to a great deal. She must be living thinly now.

“I don't need it,” said Sylvie, backing away. “I'd have been as well off without it. Everything I've done I've had to do. It never brought me
bonheur
.”

I am sorry to use a French word here, but “
bonheur
” is ambiguous. It means what you think it does, but sometimes it just stands for luck; the meaning depends on the sense of things. If the necklace had done nothing for Sylvie, what would it do for me? I went on down the stairs with the necklace in my pocket, and I thought, Selfish child. After everything that was given her, she might have been more grateful. She might have bitten back the last word.

1962

S
ITTING
next to the driver, who was certainly his father, he saw the fine rain through the beam of the headlights, and the eyes of small animals at the edge of the road. They were driving from Shekomeko to Pulver's Corners, taking the route of the school bus. He felt a slight bump, nothing more, and sprawled on his face in an open field. Somebody, running, kicked him in the back. “Run,” he heard a voice say. “Get up and run.” They turned him over. “Be careful of my back,” he said. “I've hurt my spine.”

He knew without opening his eyes that he had been brought to a farmhouse. “I've been hurt,” he tried to explain. They had placed him on a kitchen table, and now they stood round him and talked about him. They discussed his past, his character, and his destiny—and he powerless to reply! Then they all went out, and left him to die.

I must be careful, he said to himself. I don't know who these people are, or what they intend to do. He knew they were on the other side of the door, whispering, listening, waiting for him to die. He opened his eyes and saw the reflection of an oil lamp on the ceiling. The lamp had been placed out of his reach, on the kitchen floor.

Without moving his head, he sensed the weight, or the presence, of a large piece of furniture, such as a Welsh dresser, somewhere behind. A window had been left open; he could smell the snow, and he was rigid with cold.

“You poor devil,” said the woman they had left in the room with him.

She got up from her chair and stood by the table. She bent over him; he could not see her face. “It's a drink you want,” she said, “but I can't give you anything to drink. I can just give you something to wet your lips. Wait.” She went outside to the yard and filled a cup with water at the pump. She poured the water from the cup onto his dry lips, but the water splashed to one side. None of it got to his tongue.

“I was in England twenty years,” the woman said, close to his ear. “My husband was a schoolmaster. That is why my English is so fluent. They thought you would want to hear English when you came round.”

They had placed his hands across his breast in preparation for his death, with the fingers of his right hand curled slackly on a worn piece of wood. In the dark—she had turned the lamp down, or else he had closed his eyes—he explored it, barely moving the muscles of his hand. His thumb came to the end of the piece of wood and pressed in.

“You don't need to ring for me,” said the woman. “I am here. I shall be here until morning.”

She was crouched on the floor, down beside the lamp. He knew she had his examination papers. He heard her rustling them, tearing them perhaps. He moved his jaw; his glued lips parted. His tongue was swollen and dry. He said, “What are you doing?,” but all he heard of his words was “Aaah.”

“You poor devil,” she said. “It's a bad night for you. A week from now you won't remember it.” She got to her feet, towered over him, and vanished. The room was rosy, then gray. The Welsh dresser dissolved. “Try to sleep,” said the woman's voice, lingering after her person.

In his sleep they placed him upon a bed as hard to his back as the table had been. Someone at the foot of the bed asked him questions, tormenting him. He made no attempt to reply. He was troubled now only because he could not imagine his parents' faces, or think of their name. The people at the foot of his bed knew everything, but they did not know the name of his parents, or how they could be reached. “Do you feel that?” they said to him, grasping both his feet. They had tied electric wires between his feet and his spine. He said, “Yes, I can feel it,” and they all went out once again and left him alone.

It occurred to him that he had been brought here for an important reason, dragged unwillingly, and had been injured when he fought. He spread his hands on his chest, and touched the turnback of the sheet, and then the blanket. He moved his hands slowly, exploring.

The first thing he must remember was the name of the language these people spoke. He understood everything that was said but had forgotten what the language was called. The room was white and too bright, and the brightness was part of his pain. He lay in pain, but presently he found small discomforts just as serious. He was thirsty. The blanket covering him was heavy and coarse. “Yes,” he heard in answer to something he must have said aloud, and a woman slipped her hand beneath his pillow and gradually lifted the pillow and his head. She pushed a glass tube between his lips and he drank orange juice and went to sleep. Waking, he tested his fingers, then his wrists. He tried to change the position of his legs but gave it up. He moved his hands cautiously and discovered the wooden bell. It had been pinned to the garment he wore. There was a safety pin around the wire. He ran his fingers along the pin and the wire, and then rang the bell. He dreamed for a time of swimming. He felt the bedclothes drawn away and his hand gently lifted from the bell. He had lost the sensation of swimming and all that accompanied it—youth and pleasure—yet an indifference to his fate and future made him joyous and pure, as a saint might feel. “I have no past and no memories,” he thought he said. “This is what it means to be free.” A light shone on his face; he addressed the darkness around him.