IN DAYLIGHT, THE lane had an air of gentle decay as though everything – the wild ginger that exploded in enormous clumps around almost every house, the splintered timber on the walls and window frames, and even the rusty iron roofs – would soon crumble back into the earth.
As I approached Becky and Lawson’s place I heard a piping sound, and followed it into the back yard. The sound made fleeting dashes through the trees as though each note chased the one preceding it, then changed into coiling ribbons, and then again into staccato, breathy pulses. It was music that couldn’t be tied down.
Becky Sharp sat out under the trees, upright on a wooden stool with a music stand in front of her. Her feet were planted far apart and she wore an air of industry. She might have been in the act of peeling a load of potatoes into a bucket, or shucking oysters, but she was practising on her flute.
I didn’t interrupt her, but instead went up the rickety timber stairs at the back to the kitchen, where I found Lawson eating a bowl of muesli, though it was well past lunchtime. He waved a spoon to us in greeting, and then leaned down and put his beaky nose to Tess’s face. She licked him, and he righted himself to face me. ‘Hey!’ he said.
‘Hey!’ I echoed.
Without another word he got to his feet and put bread into the toaster. While he was rinsing a fat brown teapot under the tap, Becky Sharp came in and pulled out a chair.
What did we talk about that day? I can’t remember. Becky Sharp and Lawson were people who often seemed to eschew words. It was enough for them simply to be.
I helped myself to toast and butter, and when Hetty dropped her half slice on the floor, looking down at it with an expression of absolute dismay, Lawson’s eyes and mine met in amused complicity. He cut her another piece from his own toast, and retrieved the lost slice to feed to Tess.
But Hetty didn’t want the new slice of toast: she wanted the old one, the one that Tess had eaten. She pedalled her legs and became a veritable scold, screaming and flinging the new slice onto the floor to the dog in high dudgeon.
Lawson got up and went out, coming back with a camera slung round his neck. ‘D’you want to go for a walk, Tess?’ he asked; she wagged her tail. ‘I can take Hetty too, if you like,’ he said, and at the mention of her name Hetty stopped fussing and looked up at him.
Apart from the childcare centre, I had never left Hetty with anyone other than Kate or Lil, let alone allowed her out for a walk. But Lawson seemed to be in tune with her; he had also noticed her expression when she dropped her toast. We had been like two parents in our tender regard for her.
So I agreed, and he strapped her into her pram, and they set off. The camera round his neck had a sturdy cap covering its lens; it was blinkered like a horse, perhaps in case it saw something that startled it, and shied.
And Becky Sharp and I were left alone. The house was curiously devoid of people that day. Apart from Becky Sharp and Lawson, I wasn’t sure exactly who lived there.
We went to her room, and I inspected her books of poetry. One was by Rimbaud, but it was all in French. I opened it up and flicked through, regarding her with a raised eyebrow.
‘I did French at school,’ she told me casually, and I realised I knew hardly anything about Becky Sharp: where she’d grown up, her parents, siblings…nothing at all, actually, apart from that she played the flute.
I flicked through the book and found a poem that I thought I knew. Roman, it was called. It was the one that begins, On n’est pas sérieux, quand on a dix-sept ans.
‘Can you read this one for me?’ I said. ‘Translate it into English, I mean? I have a translation in a book at home, but I’d like to hear another version.’
‘Mine will be a very rough translation,’ she warned. ‘I mean loose, colloquial, literal.’ (She was so stern I found it thrilling.) ‘Which suits Rimbaud actually,’ she added, and I think I know what she meant, that he was the most colloquial of poets.
She took the book from me and surveyed the page for a while before beginning.
‘Okay. Roman. That translates as ‘Romance’, or ‘Novel’. I think ‘Romance’ is closer.’ She glanced up at me. How deliciously serious she was – her eyebrows were almost meeting with thought. They were lustrous and black, my favourite kind of eyebrows.
She continued, frowning, hesitating and stumbling every so often as she struggled to get the meaning right.
‘You’re not a serious person when you’re seventeen. On a fine evening, who gives a damn about beer or lemonade and rowdy cafés with shining chandeliers?
‘You go for a stroll under the green linden trees on the promenade.
‘Linden trees smell good on a fine June evening. Sometimes the air is so gentle that you close your eyes. The wind, laden with noise – the town isn’t far away – smells of vineyards and of beer.
‘Then you notice a tiny rag of dark blue, framed by a little branch, pricked by a single wretched star – which melts, sweetly shivering, small and white…June evening! Seventeen! You let yourself get drunk. The sap is like champagne, it goes to your head. You’re delirious: on your lips you feel a kiss, quivering there like a small animal…
‘Your crazy heart wanders like Robinson Crusoe through novels (I told you this would be literal! – it probably should go something like “Your crazy heart conjures up all the romantic stories you’ve ever read”) when, in the light of a pale street lamp, a charming young lady passes, overshadowed by her father’s fearsome stiff collar…
‘And since she finds you extremely…unsophisticated, as she rapidly walks past in her little boots she turns with a quick, lively movement…and on your lips cavatinas die away.
‘You’re in love. Your heart’s taken (literally “hired out”) until August. You’re in love. Your sonnets make her laugh. All your friends flee. You’re really boring to be with. Then one evening the adored one actually condescends to write to you!
‘That evening…you go back to the shining cafés, you ask for beer or lemonade. You’re not a serious person when you’re seventeen and when there are green linden trees on the promenade.’
She fell back onto the bed, as though exhausted by the effort of translating. ‘There!’ she said. ‘I’d forgotten how lovely it was. That was my favourite poem when I was sixteen.’
Becky Sharp struck me as extremely…sophisticated, and I liked that. And she wasn’t at all boring to be with. I liked everything about her – those amazing ears that I’d have liked to reach out and touch, the fullness of her bottom lip, and her air of self-sufficiency and mystery that promised many happy hours of getting to know her. I could tell that she was a solitary sort of person like myself; I could have spent hours lying there with her not even speaking, because, as I think I may have said, being with her was like being at the centre of the universe.
Without thinking, I reached out and touched the side of her face, and it was most soft and lovely.
She looked at me, and away.
Then she got up. ‘Lawson ought to be back soon,’ she said, making for the door. I followed her, though I wasn’t at all anxious about Hetty.
I followed her out to the street, and we stood at the side of the road, rubbing our toes in the gravel and chatting. But I felt that I’d somehow spoiled something between us.
Then Lawson and Hetty rounded the corner. He stopped the pram in front of some canna lilies and pointed them out to her. He encouraged her to reach out and touch the leaves, and he picked a flower for her to hold. As they proceeded towards us, Hetty waved the flower about like a fan, and when she saw me, urged the pram forward like a horse. I ran up the street to meet her, my own little hoyden, my boisterous girl!
That night it was unbearably hot. Lil had long since gone to bed, and the whole house was silent. When I finally got Hetty to sleep, I went down to my place on the back steps. People walked past in the lane. It was one of those nights when it was too hot to sleep and everyone seemed to be wandering the streets. More than anything, I wanted to be one of them.
I heard someone come round the side of the house. It was Maggie Tulliver. As though she’d eavesdropped on my thoughts she stopped near me and said, ‘Why don’t you go out for a walk? I can listen for the baby if you like.’
I pushed away my hair, which hung in heavy, damp hanks against my neck. I’d vowed not to have anything more to do with her, but this offer was hard to resist.
‘Could you?’ I asked.
She came with me while I looked in on Hetty and put on some shoes. I tied Tess to the verandah rail, because I wanted to be absolutely alone. Maggie Tulliver leaned over the railing outside my room, watching as I ran down the front steps.
It was such a lovely long run down those two flights, such a feeling of release! Running under the darkened figs, my feet in old brown sandals fluttered like little flags of freedom. I must have hovered above the ground. Slowing down, and walking at a steady pace, I lifted the damp hair from the back of my neck and felt the air on my skin.
I saw Lismore in all its glory on that hot spring night, and was elated and ecstatic. Everything had a heightened sense of the real and yet an air of mystery: the immense, architectural old fig trees, the garish lights in the main street, the people wandering, like me, to divert themselves from the heat. I paused for a while to observe the secrecy of the river. On the other side of the bridge sat the shuttered and silent hotel, with only a few lights in the upper storeys shining out to show that it was inhabited. I was walking, through habit, on my usual circular route.
I came to Wotherspoon Street and turned down it. Voices floated on the night air. It was too hot to sleep, and there was a feeling of life going on all around me, despite the late hour. I wondered whether Lawson or Becky Sharp were still up, and stopped outside their house, but decided against going in. I was having a perfectly delightful time on my own.
I went up to the park and stood for a while looking at the river. It smelt muddy and rich, full of earth and vegetation. As I turned around to go back, I saw two people lying in the moonlight in the middle of a grassed area. I knew, more by their outline and general demeanour than anything else, that it was Lawson and Becky Sharp. Becky lay on her back, propped up by her elbows, and Lawson lay stretched out flat with his head resting on her tummy. They weren’t speaking, or doing anything, just lying there with apparent contentment.
I didn’t go to them. I didn’t want to interrupt anything, to intrude where I might not be wanted. But mostly, I was perfectly happy on my own. I wanted to keep with me that feeling of self-contained solitude.
Walking back down the street, I saw that the one streetlight had a fuzzy golden aureole. And it seemed that above me hovered a mysterious brooding presence, with soft, curved black wings and calm, scented breath. Somewhere, I felt sure, lurked the poet of Wotherspoon Street, observing this small unimportant part of the world and not writing down a thing.
When I got back, Maggie Tulliver was lying on my bed reading a book. She got up as I came in, and departed, waving away my thanks. The bed was still warm from her body. Her perfume pervaded my pillow. Something about her still made me uncomfortable, and I felt that my lovely evening had been bought at a price.