Alice Adams - Invincible Summer

I discovered once again at Tipasa that one needs to keep in oneself a freshness, a source of joy, to love the day that escapes injustice, and to return to battle having won the light. I found here an ancient beauty, a young sky, and I measured my luck, understanding, finally, that in the worst years of our madness the memory of this sky had never left me.

*

Late in the afternoon as the sun grew cooler, she would help Papi in the garden, learning how to tend the vegetable plot, before eating dinner and going to bed not long after dusk. She was surprised how easily she was thrown back into memories of childhood summers there, by the scent of her grandmother’s lavender talcum powder in the bathroom, or the way the light trickled through the panes of blue stained glass in the porch. The sky here had never left her.

By the end of August Sylvie felt strangely both older and younger than she had when she’d arrived. She had brought no art supplies with her, and was full of the sort of urgent creative energy that she hadn’t experienced in a long time. But she sensed, too, a stillness inside of her. She knew she couldn’t stay forever, but she felt like she had gathered enough strength to go back and start over.

On the morning she was due to leave, she rose early and, still in her nightie, stepped out through the door that led directly from her bedroom to the garden. Mamie was sitting in a deckchair under the apricot tree at the far end and, spotting her, waved her over. Sylvie picked her way barefoot across the patchy, dried-out grass and sat on the ground next to her. Mamie reached down a hand and touched her hair.

‘You look better than you did when you came, Sylvie. You can hardly see that mark on your forehead now. Do you feel better now?’

‘Yes, I do. Much better. I just really, really needed a break from London. Thanks for giving me somewhere to escape to.’

‘You know that London will be the same when you go back, don’t you? If you want things to be different then you will have to be different, because the city, the people, they won’t have changed.’

Her grandmother’s voice was quiet and whispery, and sounded to Sylvie like leaves falling through the air from the tree above them.

‘I know that. I know I’m going to have to work hard not to fall into the same traps again, but I feel strong enough to do that now.’

Mamie leant her head back and looked up into the branches and was quiet for a few minutes, so that when she spoke again it gave Sylvie a jolt. ‘Sometimes I wish we had done more for you and your brother. Virginie was never a happy person, and I don’t think she has been a very good mother to you. I don’t know why she was never satisfied. Some people are born that way, I think, and too much drink isn’t good for anyone. We thought that if we gave her money or took over and looked after you children then she wouldn’t bother to find her own way in the world, so we tried to encourage her to take responsibility. I wish we had let her send you and Lucien here after she left your father. But we did what we thought was best. I want you to know that.’

Sylvie blinked at her grandmother. They’d never had a conversation like this before and if she’d thought about it at all, she would have assumed that Mamie didn’t reflect on such things.

‘I know. Thanks.’ She reached up and took the dry old hand that was still resting on her hair and squeezed it.

Then, as suddenly as it had arrived, the moment passed. Mamie stretched her arms and looked away.

‘Now go and pack your things. Papi won’t want to be kept waiting to drive you to the station.’

It was just as her grandmother had said: London was the same, but she was different. Or rather, London was changing with the seasons, as even cities must. A chill was creeping into the air and the leaves formed sodden heaps on the pavement, giving off an earthy scent as Sylvie ploughed through them, smashing the bigger piles with her boots when she thought no one was looking.

She stayed with Lucien for the first few weeks after she arrived back, but it quickly became clear that wasn’t going to work out. On the weekends, which seemed to run from Thursday to Tuesday, the flat filled up with people drinking and smoking and snorting and groping. Even if it hadn’t been for the constant temptation, the noise was maddening and set her nerves jangling, calibrated as they now were to the peace of the Languedoc hills.

Sylvie made a plan. She would move a bit further out to a quieter area, somewhere more affordable. As always, she’d have to offset the cheaper rent against the cost of travelling to anywhere she’d be likely to find employment, but for the first time that seemed like a reasonable trade-off. It was going to take a while to sort out housing benefit, but Papi had handed her an envelope at the station containing enough cash for a deposit and a couple of months’ rent, and she found a basement flat in a Victorian house in Sydenham, little more than a studio really, but with its own tiny patio garden. It may have been the wilds of Zone 3, but it was a respectable twenty minutes on the train from London Bridge, so she could still apply for jobs in the centre. There was brown woodchip on the walls and the musty smell of the previous occupant’s dogs, but she picked up some cheap white paint at a discount store and once she’d thrown a few coats of that around it felt much brighter and more cheerful.

She filled in job application after job application with no luck, so she put an ad in the local shops for babysitting and dog walking and a bit of work started trickling in. Then her landlord, who’d given her permission to paint her flat and been pleased with the results, asked if she’d like to earn a few quid by painting the communal hallway and the larger upstairs flat that the tenants were moving out of, so she’d done that too. She made a good job of it, and he recommended her to a friend a few streets away and she’d ended up painting their house as well. They let her do a robot mural in the kid’s bedroom and he’d loved it, and loved her too, spending hours watching and asking questions as she painted, and so they’d started paying her for regular babysitting. Bit by bit, she built up a local client base of people who needed walls painted, or help with their pets and children, and eventually she found that if she didn’t spend money on booze and cigarettes and kept her expenses low, she didn’t need to go through the rigmarole of signing on anymore. Working like this suited her better than being a waitress or a shop assistant ever had, and without much of a social life she was left with plenty of time to paint, which she found herself doing with more passion and creativity than she’d had in years.

Outwardly her life was unglamorous, checking the price of bread and going to Tesco at the end of the day to buy food nearing its sell-by date that had the price marked down. She didn’t have a TV and to use the internet she had to go to the library. New clothes would have to come from Oxfam, she supposed, but it was funny how little this stuff actually bothered her now it came down to it. Her inner world fizzed with an energy and inspiration that she’d thought was gone forever, and that mattered more than any of the rest.

*

There was still one really big thing that needed sorting out: Eva. She had been waiting to see how long it took her supposed friend to get in touch, the days ticking by filled with hurt disbelief that Eva was willing to just let ten years of friendship end over one stupid argument. Where had Eva been when she had hit rock bottom and sat in that A&E alone? Okay, she didn’t know that had happened, but surely a friend should have been able to see that Sylvie hadn’t been doing well and was heading for a disaster? The ball of pain in Sylvie’s stomach disguised itself as anger, and every time she picked up the phone it bubbled up and said, you don’t need a friend who isn’t there when you need her, and then she would put the phone back down without dialling.