SYLVIA
Heat draped itself across her shoulders. It whispered hot breath on her neck, ran clammy fingers between her breasts, dribbled down her forehead. Strands of hair stuck to her temples and sweat trickled under her arms beneath the light cream shirt that today felt as heavy as sheepskin. It was only ten in the morning and yet they were all simmering like rabbits in stew.
‘Don’t these fans work?’ Sylvia shook a cold carton of chocolate milk she’d picked up on the way in after an unbearable tube journey. She punched in the straw and sucked down the cool sweet liquid in greedy gulps.
Max shrugged. ‘Too hot for them to work properly, according to maintenance.’
Sylvia sighed. ‘Well, I know the feeling.’
‘D’you know what?’ Max grinned. ‘Yesterday the umpires at Wimbledon were actually allowed to take their bloody jackets off.’
She laughed. ‘I know, I saw it on the news. First time ever, apparently.’ She loved Wimbledon, with its sense of history, its manicured lawns and its quirky traditions. Despite everything else that was happening – the drought, the economy in meltdown, scandals rocking the political establishment – Wimbledon would carry on, upholding Britishness for two weeks in a small pocket of SW19.
Jim always laughed at her obsession with it. ‘You pride yourself on striving to be different, and yet you’re addicted to this British institution that’s allergic to change.’
He was right, of course. It should have riled her, this fusty institution that was refusing to give women equal prize money despite a threatened boycott, but there was something about the bright white outfits, the almost-whisper of the commentator’s voice and the silence between points that calmed her. It was a hiatus from real life, a pocket of serenity in a tumultuous world.
‘They’re talking about fucking weeks of this ahead, apparently,’ Max said.
‘Surely not?’
‘We’re leading with “Hotter than Honolulu” in tonight’s edition.’
Sylvia rolled her eyes. ‘Only in Britain is the weather news.’
But she had to admit, this felt newsworthy. At first it had been a novelty, the papers full of photos of swimmers in the Serpentine, city workers cooling their feet in Trafalgar Square’s fountains and Brighton’s beaches packed with weekenders escaping the city. But as the heatwave continued, day after day, touching ninety degrees, it was as though London was caught in a pressure cooker. She saw its effects in the office workers flaked out in St Paul’s churchyard every lunchtime, in the sluggish steps of pedestrians on Fleet Street, walking as though carrying the heat on their backs, and in the general irritation that seemed to have infected the office. Sharp voices down the telephone, arguments in the corridors, more expletives than usual, a constant hum of exasperation. It was surely the heat that had Roger stalking the newsroom like an injured bear, the heat that changed his demeanour from merely wearily gruff to downright angry, the heat that made him dismiss any feature idea she proposed in the weekly meetings without a hint of discussion. The progress she felt she’d made with her Switzerland feature had melted away like an ice lolly in the sun.
But of course it wasn’t just the heat. She was being punished, she knew, not only for letting the side down by being such a stereotypical woman as to put babies before career, but for losing the paper the Warburton interview. It turned out that Britain’s first female ambassador hadn’t taken kindly to being told the journalist who was gifted the UK media’s only interview with her wouldn’t be taking up the opportunity after all. Initially, after first Max and then Roger got off the phone to Warburton’s secretary, clearly bruised by the experience, Sylvia had allowed herself just the briefest moment of self-satisfaction.
See! she wanted to say, Warburton wanted me, not Max, so you should have let me go.
She even wondered, for a minute, if Roger would change his mind and send her after all, but he didn’t, and the opportunity was lost. It felt as if he’d been taking it out on her ever since.
Sylvia chucked the empty carton of chocolate milk in the bin and turned back to the blank piece of paper in her typewriter. She had an hour to write some scintillating lifestyle tips for the ‘at home’ feature. How to keep the flowers in your garden hydrated during a hosepipe ban. A recipe for potato salad to go with barbecued meats. Tips on how to keep cool making love during a heatwave (Valerie’s idea). A tried-and-tested way of giving dry, brittle fingernails a DIY moisture boost. Twice a week for two months, soak your fingers in a bowl of warm olive oil for five minutes… Frankly, her heart wasn’t in it. She wanted to just get up and leave. She yearned to escape London’s suffocating grip and head for the mountain air of Switzerland; away from the heat, from Roger, from her unwanted future. Thankfully, in a few days that’s exactly what she would do.
He rang, as he had every day, in the early afternoon.
‘If you come back, I’ll get rid of that armchair you hate.’
Sylvia smiled down the line despite herself. ‘That’s hardly the point, Jim.’
‘I know, I know. But I don’t know what else to do, Syl. I’ve said I’m sorry for not… understanding. I’m trying, okay? I’m trying to understand why you’re so mad about having our baby. But I need you here. You’re my wife, my pregnant wife, we should be living together.’
‘I can’t talk about this now.’ She stared down the room, watched Valerie standing behind Ellis’s shoulder, leaning over him as she looked at something on his desk. She laughed, put a hand lightly on his arm.
Sylvia knew Jim had nothing to do with Roger finding out about the baby. Take care of yourselves, Valerie had said.
Of course it could only be a woman, a woman with two of her own, who would recognise the signs. And Sylvia couldn’t help but think that Valerie had not only told Roger about her pregnancy, but also encouraged him to take the Warburton interview off her. You’ll be having my job if I’m not careful…
‘You always say that. So when, then?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Meet me after work?’
‘No. I have to pack.’
She could picture him shaking his head, biting his tongue. She knew he wouldn’t dare try and stop her going.
‘My parents are meant to be coming down on Saturday. What do I say?’
‘Just tell the truth. I had to go to Switzerland.’
‘Syl…’
She sighed, twirled the phone cord around her finger, studied Max mumbling to himself as he jabbed at his typewriter, trying to conjure the right words. She wondered if Jim did that too. She’d never seen him at work, nor had he her – apart from those early days on their student paper. They each had their own daytime world when they existed outside of coupledom, and she loved that. If she didn’t have her job, what would she have to tell him at the end of each day? She couldn’t imagine hearing about his day at work and only being able to offer up talk of children’s parties and nappies in return. But Maggie was right, this couldn’t go on.
‘I’m not punishing him,’ she’d said to Maggie, repeatedly, after one post-argument night back at her old flat turned into a few days, and then a few weeks.
‘You just need some space, yes, I know.’ Maggie rolled her eyes. ‘Well, you haven’t exactly got it here.’
That was certainly true. Maggie’s bedroom seemed so much smaller and more cluttered than Sylvia had ever noticed when she actually lived in the flat. She’d never quite realised what a hoarder Maggie was. Every surface in her room was covered with trinkets from her travels, stuffed toys, funny postcards sent by friends years ago, pictures in dusty old frames. And then there were the sketches, and paint swatches on paper with scribbled notes next to them – one of these colours for the emperor’s palace walls? Ask John which he prefers – and the cardboard models of sets, evidence of Maggie’s job, of her future, marching on, exactly in the way she’d worked so hard to have it.
As Sylvia lay in the single bed that first morning – ‘You’re pregnant, I can hardly make you sleep on the floor,’ Maggie had said, forming the sofa cushions into a makeshift mattress on the bedroom carpet for herself – she heard Maggie’s new flatmate Rose come out of her old room and head for the shower, and a pang of regret socked her in the stomach like a physical blow. Things were moving on without her, continuing in their intended direction as she moved off on a tangent.
This wasn’t how it was meant to be.
‘Life isn’t a straight line, Syl darling. Haven’t you figured that out by now?’ Maggie had said.
‘I want it to be.’
Maggie laughed. ‘What, and give up spontaneity, the excitement of the unknown? Don’t be silly.’
Sylvia propped herself up on her elbow and looked at her friend. ‘I’ve fought hard to be on this path and I want to stay on it.’
‘I know you have. So have I. But things happen – or don’t happen – that aren’t always of your making and you just have to deal with them. I didn’t want to be a bank teller, but I dealt with it. And I’m sure there’ll be more things thrown at me in the future that I don’t necessarily want. But that’s what life is about. It happens to everyone.’ Maggie flopped down on her pillow. ‘Plenty of women would kill to be in your situation, you know.’ Her voice was soft. ‘It may not be where you imagined you’d be right now, but that doesn’t make it bad. You’ve just got to accept it and do your best to make it a success. And I know you can, because you’re you, and that’s what you do.’
Maybe she could. But that wasn’t the point. Her argument with Jim had wounded something deep inside her. It was the first time she had truly recognised that the man she loved, the man who had always supported her career ambitions as much as his own, didn’t really understand the gulf that existed between their respective experiences. Because the barriers she faced – barriers created and sustained by members of his own sex – weren’t real for him, they were only abstract. Of course he thought it unfair she was paid less than Max despite the existence of the Equal Pay Act; of course he applauded the progress when, last year, it was finally made illegal to discriminate against women. He would say these things and he would mean them. But he’d never had to actually fight those battles himself. He’d never had a tutor who marked him up or down depending on the length of his skirt. He’d never been told he shouldn’t be ambitious because it’s not attractive. He’d never had an editor refuse to sign off his expenses because he’d turned down his sexual advances, as she knew had happened to Marnie in her previous job. He’d never found out that a fellow journalist with the same level of experience earned more because they pissed standing up. She wanted him to know how it felt. She needed him to feel how she did, or she didn’t know where they could go from here.
‘When I’m back,’ she said to him now, over the phone. ‘We’ll talk when I’m back.’
Though she hadn’t needed a reminder of how quickly time was passing, she was given one as the train rattled along the shore of Lake Geneva. It was nearly four months since she’d last taken this journey and she was struck by how different the landscape looked now. The mountains were no longer dip-dyed in white – only slivers of snow remained on their summits, topping green and brown and black. The sky was a hazy blue, and the train rushed past sailboats and rowers, their blades slicing through the calm surface like knives through warm butter.
At Lausanne station she boarded a bus up the hill to St François, the cobbled square with the church and the cafe where she’d had a coffee and a croissant before leaving last time. As she stepped off into the square, her brain skidded momentarily into déjà vu, except it felt more like a snippet of another time, another life – a future life, perhaps. The sensation of having lived here, of sitting in that cafe every day, of knowing this town like it were her own. She stood still for a minute trying to hang onto the feeling, but it slipped away as quickly as it had arrived.
She remembered the way to Rue Haldimand. Down the steep cobbled street with its intricate wrought-iron signs, across Rue Centrale and up into Place de la Palud, where the mechanical clock whirred into life every hour. Past the fountain and right into Rue Haldimand, number eight on the left.
She pressed the intercom and waited.
‘Oui?’
‘Evelyne, it’s Sylvia.’
‘Oh mon Dieu!’
She pressed herself on the door when it buzzed open and made her way up the four flights of stairs, feeling considerably more breathless than she had the last time she was here. The door to flat four was ajar and she knocked and pushed it open. ‘Allô?’
The door opened wide and Evelyne stood in front of her in shorts and a loose white blouse, a pink patterned scarf barely keeping her hair in check. As Sylvia kissed her and was welcomed in, she saw Evelyne wasn’t alone. Behind her, standing on the tatty old rug in the centre of the room was another girl, a very young-looking girl, with straight brown hair that fell below her shoulders, arms like matchsticks and a vulnerability that made Sylvia want to reach out and pull her into a protective hug.
‘Sylvia, this is Anna,’ Evelyne said. ‘We’re going to have a full house.’