Chapter 2

A Chapter by Jocasta

After a day at work, Sylvie returns home to a disturbing phone message

Knowing that Oxford Street would be busy with late night shoppers, Sylvie walked down Seymour Street cutting across at the end and into Hyde Park at Marble Arch. From there she set out as the crow flies for the Exhibition Road Gate. Now that the rain had stopped and the skies had cleared, the park was performing its usual summer role as a back garden for London’s flat dwellers. Small groups of people sat together exchanging their news after a day in the office. Here and there M&S plastic wine glasses were filing with cold white wine as the cellophane was peeled off similarly sourced salads. Sylvie passed solitary readers, playful children and engrossed lovers; “All of human life” she thought.

Out of the park, turn right down High Street Ken, and into Princes Street. After nearly twenty years, Sylvie was still astounded by her own address. 23b Princes Gardens. She first moved in as a student, lodging with the then owner Oskar Baskov, concert flautist and bon viveur. By the time he died five years ago they had become friends

and she had not been at all surprised to learn that his name was actually Owen Baker and that he was born in Peterborough rather than St Petersburg. She had however been astonished to find that he had bequeathed his beautiful mansion flat to her, but even more concerned when she saw the size of the remaining mortgage that went with it. She contemplated selling it and releasing the small amount of equity as a deposit on something more sensible, but by then it was home and she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving. So, she restructured the mortgage, spreading it out over what seemed like a lifetime and took her own lodger. Simon was perfect, Monday to Thursday he worked as a management consultant in town and on Thursday evening, he took off to spend the long weekend with his pregnant wife and two pre-school kids in Devon. He was in fact living a Channel 4, property lifestyle dream, but the dark bags under his eyes on a Sunday night and the frequent phone calls spent placating his bored and lonely wife made Sylvie wonder if the dream was maybe losing its shine. But, Simon had made his choice and now with very little ability to rescind it, he continued his nomadic lifestyle, mortgaged to the hilt in Devon and reduced to the spare room in town (albeit a very nice spare room in a very nice flat).

As she turned her key in the lock and opened the front door, Sylvie thought that it was Simon she could see through the frosted glass of the kitchen door, which was odd for this time on a Thursday.

“That you love?”

“Dad! What are you doing here?”

The once tall, but now slightly stooping figure of her father appeared in the hallway.

“Oh, your mother wanted to see some exhibition or other at the V&A, depictions of menopausal women in twenty first century textiles or some such, not my cup of tea �" speaking of which, kettle’s just boiled, do you fancy a cup?”

“uh, yes, please, thanks. Really? Menopausal women in textile, are you sure?”

“Something like that, I wasn’t really listening truth be told. I just let myself in with my key �" you don’t mind do you? I’ve been watching a bit of day time telly, Real Housewives of New York, have you seen it? Odd women, very odd looking”

Sylvie grinned as she pulled a packet of biscuits from the cupboard, “I’d be lying if I said I’d never watched it. It’s the Botox that makes them look strange; they can’t move their faces much”

“Ahh, is that what it is? Very strange, anyway, whilst I was watching it, the phone rang and I couldn’t help overhearing the message”

Sylvie sat down and waited

“It was Greg”

“Yes?” she reached for her tea and dunked a biscuit. Her father looked pained but ploughed on, affecting a lightness of tone he wasn’t really feeling.

“So, what’s going on with you two? Everything OK? We never hear you talking about him these days; in fact I thought he’d disappeared off the scene, still in the picture is he?”

Still in the picture? Was he? Sylvie wasn’t sure she knew anymore.

“Its difficult Dad, he works over on Jersey, I work here and we just don’t see each other very often”

“But Jersey’s not so far away and it’s a lovely place, what would be so awful about you moving over there to be with him?”

“It’s not that simple, there are hardly any paid jobs there for me, and I couldn’t work in private practice - the population’s too small to earn a living, apart from the fact that I’d be bumping into clients all the time. And you know that you can’t just move there because you feel like it”

“But you could presumably…..”

“Yes?” said Sylvie sharply

Hearing the tone of his daughter’s voice, Brian examined the expression on her face and decided not to pursue that particular line of conversation. Fortunately he was saved by the door bell.

“That’ll be your mother” he said hastily and with some relief “you let her in and I’ll put some more water on the tea.”

Eva Whtimore’s presence was announced by several V&A Museum Shop bags which preceded her through the door, followed by an effusive hug for her daughter.

“Sylvie, sweetheart, how are you darling? Come here”

Despite standing 5 inches taller than her mother, Sylvie always experienced her as an inescapable force, particularly when it came to physical affection. She understood why a few hours in her empty flat would be so appealing for her father who had to put up with this level of energy on a full time basis.

“Where’s your father? He hasn’t been asleep has he? If he sleeps in the afternoon he doesn’t sleep at night and then he keeps me awake. Honestly he’s such an old man, I can’t tell you how boring he’s become since he retired”

“I heard that”

“You were supposed to”

The three of them settled themselves into the kitchen, drinking tea and eating biscuits, with sound of her parents gentle bickering as welcome and familiar as a pair of childhood slippers. Some time later Sylvie rang for a take away and it wasn’t until her parents left much later, that she remembered the phone message.

“Hi Sylv, um, I know we talked about getting together this weekend but something’s come up at work and I can’t leave. It’s a pisser because I need to talk to you. Um, look, can we make it next weekend? Let me know if you’re free and I’ll sort out a flight. OK? Call me”

Sylvie played it again and waited to see how she felt. She knew they’d talked vaguely about Greg coming over, but she hadn’t realised it was a firm arrangement; they just didn’t have that kind of relationship. She had thought at one point that they might be moving that way, a relationship that included firm plans and expectations on each other’s time, a longer look forward than next weekend, but then a job came up managing the five year build of a de-salination plant on Jersey. Career defining opportunity said Greg, not to be turned own. There had been half hearted talks about Sylvie joining him on the Island, but once Greg understood the reasons why she wouldn’t be able to work there, the discussions seemed to peter out. The spectre of putting their relationship on a different footing hung between them for a while, unarticulated but then seemed to evaporate. Her mother and various friends had been keen to point out that a 5 year project was the perfect time period in which to have a career break and pop out a couple of babies, arguing that she could take up client work again wherever Greg’s job took them in year 6.

But the idea of children didn’t fit into whatever kind of relationship they had formed for themselves. Greg was older than her and not interested in kids; he had always been clear about that. Sylvie also found it easy to dismiss the idea of motherhood; she saw everyday the adult result of poorly mothered children. The damage wrought by mothers who, with the best will in the world, were just not good enough, they were rarely cruel and the damage nearly always unintentional and often unrecognised, but none the less, still hurting the grown man or woman on Sylvie’s couch. “Who am I to assume I would do a better job?” was a question that rattled around her brain whenever the subject came up.

And so she and Greg had pursued an unregulated, slightly haphazard relationship built around last minute and often hastily arranged weekends in London, St Helier or some other European city. At some point the frequency of weekends began to diminish and as departure lounge fatigue crept in Sylvie knew deep down that they had arrived at a relationship cul-de-sac; it was time to move forward or say goodbye. The reason she hadn’t pursued the feeling was that she suspected Greg would choose the latter option and she wasn’t sure she was ready for that. So she felt confused by the message he had left, Greg’s general panacea for life’s problems was a long walk, preferably in the rain, he generally had to be manoeuvred into “talking”, so to hear him asking to do just that was unusual, she wished she’d been there to take the call.

Sylvie pottered around getting ready for bed but as she brushed her teeth a thought hit her. Was this it? Did Greg want to move forward? She couldn’t imagine the wanted to formally end things, petering out would be a much more comfortable solution for him, to carry on in the way they had been going until nothing remained, non directive and no blame to be apportioned. No, if he actively wanted to talk, it was because he had something big to say……..

She climbed into bed and lay there wide awake with the possibility that Greg had decided he wanted to move forward, to make something more permanent out of their relationship, careering around her head. She let these thoughts play out, trying to find a clue as to her response. But, no clarity emerged and mostly what she felt was agitated and jumpy, arrows of energy shooting up and down her body from an archer deep inside her stomach. Eventually she gave up and turned the light on, feeling around under the bed she pulled out a dog eared copy of Crime and Punishment, her usual insomnia cure. Focusing on Raskolnikov’s misery her brain began to quieten and she finally fell asleep, light on, book in hand.

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