Syl would have gone into a bar or bought herself a cheese and pork brochette. She hadn’t eaten anything that day. She’d had to leave for Baritone Bay before the ferryman had had a chance to bring the coffee and the cake he’d promised her for breakfast. And she was cold. Still just a shirt. No coat or jumper. A warm indoors, some food, a beer, some company were what she needed. Even the fall-short, underreaching comforts of a brazier would do. Or a speedy taxi ride back home. But she had not brought any money from the house, and hadn’t had the nerve to borrow any from Geo. She’d have to starve. She’d have to walk. And she’d have to shiver all the way. A lively and romantic prospect, actually. It matched the way she felt about herself — an orphaned, independent woman, with empty pockets, empty stomach, cold and young, and passing through the bright and filling streets without a friend.
It wasn’t long before Syl had left the Sunday carnival of crowds and lights. She crossed the river by the cycle bridge and followed the main boulevard out of the centre towards the hilltop houses where the artists, the academics and her parents lived. First there were the civic buildings, the pinkstone barracks and the regimental offices, the hotels of the Bankside district, the Geometric Gardens to hurry past. But then the streets were livelier again and Syl could peer down cul-de-sacs and into wayward tenements where students, conscripts, single men were dodging motorbikes and hesitating outside brothels, narrow bars and curtained doors, pretending to belong.
It was completely dark when Syl approached the railings of Deliverance Park. She had either to undertake the long walk round to reach the stretch of unmetalled side roads and the family house, or break a rule her parents had imposed since she was young and risk the night-time trespass and the trees. ‘There isn’t anything beyond me now,’ she’d told herself, that afternoon, outside the Mission Church. ‘There isn’t anything I cannot do or say.’ So she climbed the railings, dropped down on to the sodden plant beds and sprinted off into the dark, sprinted off as she had always wanted to, euphoric and untouchable. She let out great whoops of liberation and defeat as she progressed, as she was bound to, across safe lawns on to a pine-shielded path, blacker and more feverish than night, owl-eyed and loveless. Heading for the house that had to let her in.
The front door stuck even worse than usual. The opening was snagged by letters, cards, condolences, all hand-delivered during the day. Word had already got around. The murder was made public. Syl took them to the kitchen, put on the cooking-duty cardigan, which was left hanging, as ever, on the larder hook, and started hunting for her supper. There was — Sod’s law — no food at home, except the breakfast cake, still lying on its plate and dried out by its hours of neglect. Nor was there any alcohol. Syl searched the kitchen cupboards again and her father’s room, but all she found were a set of spirit glasses and the lees of some gleewater in a square bottle, half hidden on a high shelf, out of harm’s way. Not worth the reach. The cake would have to do. She broke it into four dry pieces and started on the mail. Cards first, from neighbours mostly who hardly knew her parents. Photographs of clouds and aquatints of flowers with ornate fine lines from poets and the scriptures, being brave at the expense of death. ‘Life is the Desert,’ Syl was told in gold and silver italics. ‘Death is the Rendezvous of Friends.’ Or ‘Death’s a shadow, always at our heels.’ Or, It’s ‘our second home. The feast is spread upon its table. The Host is waiting at its door.’ Or ‘Death’s the veil which those who live call Life: They sleep and it is lifted.’ Or (from the sepulchre in Milan where Claudio Busi, the architect, is buried) ‘Death is nothing at all. I have slipped away into another room. All is well.’ Except, thought Syl, that there’s no slipping back.
The letters were all handwritten, from her parents’ colleagues and the secretaries at the Institute and the university. For Syl, For Sil, With love to Sylvia, For Celice and Joseph’s daughter (‘Sorry, but we do not know your name’), To Cyl. All of them seemed fonder now of their two doctors of zoology than they had ever been in life. ‘Your parents were admired by all of us,’ they wrote. ‘They were devoted. Anyone could tell. They will be missed. It’s such a blessing, in a way, that they should have died in each other’s arms.’ And ‘They are irreplaceable.’
It was as if Syl’s parents’ lives, which had seemed hidden and pale, illuminated by so few surface lights, at best a silhouette, only needed death’s bright torch to bring the passion and the colour out. Its beam had caught and fixed them now. Their histories were certain. No more to come. No more to add. Their dates were written down indelibly. Nothing could be changed or mended, except by the sentiment and myth of those who were not dead. That’s the only Judgement Day there is. The benefits of hindsight. The dead themselves are robbed of retrospect. They’re not required to make sense of their deaths.
Syl dropped the letters and the cards in the waste-bin. She’d not reply. Life was too short. They’d understand. She gleaned the few cake crumbs off the table top with a wet finger. She stared out of the kitchen window at the dark and empty deck. She turned the taps on and off to check that the world was functioning. She was tired and hungry still and bored with home. It was not yet ten o’clock, but she would have to go to bed. What else was there to do?
She started in her mother’s bed. She liked its space and the heavy coverlet. But it was unnerving to sink into the hollows of the mattress where the springs had been weakened by Celice and rest her head on pillows impacted by her mother’s thousand nights and one. So she moved into her own room for the first time since that Friday night with Geo, and only for the second time in two years. These hollows were her own. It was like the simple legend on the condolence card, ‘I have slipped away into another room. All is well.’ Indeed. All would be well. She’d stay until the funeral, that day of chores and crowds, of false handshakes and noise. Then her parents could be dead in silence. And she could sell the house. She’d take the money and herself abroad, to all the places that she’d underlined in atlases when she was young, to Goa, Sydney, Rio, Rome, Berlin.
She was soon fast asleep. But not for long. Before eleven, she was woken by the same sound that she’d been half expecting on the previous night in this bed, the brakes and engine of her parents’ car, their headlights flaring on her bedroom walls, their hurried steps up to the front door, the key, the tumbling of the locks, the cold reunions. All there that night. Except there was no tumbling of the locks. Someone had left the headlights of a car on full beam, shining at the front of the house. Someone was tapping on the door with the metal of a key. Syl pulled two slices of the window screen apart and looked down at the porch. It was the ferryman.
She went back to her bed and listened to him calling for her through the letterbox. A pretty sound, she thought. Syl, Syl. Syl, Syl. The sort of sound you’d make if you were stroking a cat. But she was never tempted to go down. She didn’t want to be his cat. She’d slept with him three times already and she had more than paid her fare. She waited for his tapping to become less tentative, and then a hammering. His anger shook the house, but she was all the more unreachable. He would be certain she was there, inside and listening. He had, she knew, a right to be annoyed. She half expected pebbles at her window, a note wrapped round a stone; or to see his looming, rueful face pressed up against the window-glass. But he gave up quite quickly and drove away.