English Correspondence Read Online Free PDF Page A

never knew what to say. She had memories of his coming into the hall from the kitchen and taking her by surprise. He asked if Lucien was there, and when she said he was, he asked if she could put him on – if she didn’t have anything else she wanted to say to him.
    She held out the telephone to Lucien. He listened and said, ‘Yes,’ then he put the receiver across to his other ear, then back again. ‘All right,’ he said, and put it down.
    â€˜I’ve got to go and make chocolate tart,’ he said. ‘I said I’d go as soon as I got back from school, but I forgot.’
    â€˜That’s a treat,’ she said. ‘You don’t often get asked.’
    â€˜He said it was to give you time by yourself.’
    She nodded. ‘I don’t know that that’s what I want.’
    Lucien looked worried.
    â€˜Enjoy it. You will,’ she said.
    â€˜Did you go to Grandad’s funeral?’
    â€˜Yes,’ she said.
    He looked hard at her for a second and ran into the dining room. She could hear him call out to Paul as he got nearer the kitchen.
    Sylvie walked round her desk. She brushed the cushion with her hand and sat down. She wondered if Lucien had asked Paul questions and what Paul had told him. He wouldn’t have said much about George. Bereavement without a body was how he seemed to see it. Yvette wouldn’t have mentioned him either. She liked everything to be nice.
    Sylvie had got through the funeral. It had been less peaceful than she had expected. The organ was robust, as was some of the hymn singing, once the small congregation had warmed up. The church was locked for most of the week and hadabsorbed the late autumn damp. There were flutterings of parish activity: the notice board cluttered with lists for signing and pieces of thin coloured paper bearing information, the children’s paintings pegged onto a line. Sunday, in either direction, was far off. Sylvie had chosen the flowers for their individual beauty and had seen that, from a distance, in the altar vases, they made little impact. She could remember the smell of the lilies and the sharp scent of the forced daffodils. Something about their colour had looked wrong against the altar carpet. She wished now she could do it again. Not just the flowers. She had been present but not present enough. Standing up, sitting down, kneeling. And although tradition and, in this case, the Church of England, did it for you and that had its advantages, there was a sense in which she hadn’t been present and, in a way, not George either. Of course not George himself, as he was dead, but not anything of him.
    She wondered, looking back, whether she shouldn’t have faked it. The engagement, that is. By concentrating properly, being in the moment, even if she didn’t exactly feel she was, she might have joined up the attempt with the experience, or, at least, narrowed the gap. She would have had to concentrate hard, and right from the beginning, from Graham saying, as he walked in, in a kindly sort of way and not too pompous, the sentences, I am the resurrection and the life, and one or two others, because it was over very, very quickly.
    She had been surprised to see people she recognised from a long time ago. They bothered her more than the coffin. It seemed to her a coincidence that they should be there. She hadn’t felt this kind of pervasive Englishness since she’d been a girl and gone visiting George’s relations. It overwhelmed her. The clumsy way the women carried and delved into their handbags, the men’s entanglements with their handkerchiefs, their non-committal eagerness to please, their worried smiles, reminded her of awkwardnesses she had forgotten. She wasn’t like them. She remembered being twelve or thirteen; the feeling of being on the wrong side of a door. She even remembered the particular door, the English four-panelledsort, covered in white gloss paint, that looked