English Correspondence by Janet Davey Read Free Book Online

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 onein the evening, just a pearl and gold bracelet. Her side of the swing doors didn’t need precision, only efficient response.

5
    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 herhand 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