In Certain Circles (16 page)

‘Why? They might be.' He looked along his shoulder at her.

‘Because I've had my life incidentally broken by the pity directed at the deserving; because I've maniacally pitied and know the holy satisfaction; because I've been abler and wiser and corrupted.'

‘In these few years?'

She smiled again with closed lips. ‘I started young.'

‘Corrupt and complex as you are, I appreciate you.' The humour had gone from his voice long before he finished speaking.

Almost inaudibly, she said, ‘Oh, don't.'

They listened painfully to their last remarks.

Anna said, ‘I've seen good people bleed themselves to death from pity. I've seen the pitied splash in their life's blood, like children playing with water.'

‘In other words,' Russell said, ‘you sometimes feel a deep pity for those who pity, and sometimes for the pitied, everything depending on the individual and the circumstance.'

After a second, she said, ‘Yes. So you seem to have proved.'

‘Where have you seen this?'

‘Here and there.'

In a less than natural voice, Russell went on, ‘No, in public we need more justice than the country thinks it can afford, and in private something more equal—like love.'

They both smiled perfunctorily in the hope of turning this into an ordinary conversation. Russell's hands on the steering wheel were brown, fine-boned. With him, Anna felt alive, real, relaxed, stimulated, at home, happy. She had genuinely liked a number of men she had known in recent years, and felt a genuine sympathy. But she could not fail to see that, against her will, the company of the withdrawn, the melancholic, the hysterical had begun to repel her.

Having found a bus ticket in her pocket, she now pleated, folded and re-pleated it as she spoke. ‘Even Stephen fills me with a frightful feeling of resistance when he's temperamental. (Though he's changed so much with Zo.) But sooner or later people have to take up their own lives, not disperse them out as though they were knitting wool that a clever knitter might handle better.' She paused in her important ticket folding. ‘Everyone who wants help can't come first in your life, because they'd have to remain first. And then, you'd have to become promiscuous at every level of existence to please everyone.'

‘Oh, Anna, Anna!' Russell turned out of the traffic down a side street. And they glanced simultaneously at each other, and exchanged in the split second during which their eyes met, a long uneasy look.

Her thoughts seemed to climb a steep staircase. They had frightened each other today, she and Russell. If someone said, ‘Boo!' through the car windows, they would both have heart attacks. What they had just indicated to each other—that there was nothing to be done—was not new. But it felt new. Anna thought: it's necessary. It's quite right. I think I can bear it.

Quickly they drove on, leaving the look behind. Russell was with her; she was brilliantly happy.

‘You can't stay locked up with those paintings forever,' he said.

‘No. I'll do something. There are so many things I should learn. Even at this advanced age, I ought to do something brain stretching.'

‘Ought. Ought.'

Looking straight ahead, they were both smiling. They started to talk again, glancing with admiration and curiosity at the shabby views of shops and apartment buildings: they might have been watching dolphins play. Russell told her about the press and, as always, startled her and made her laugh aloud. He was an inspired mimic.

When they stopped at her flat, Anna said rapidly, ‘That was good of you, Russell. I can't ask you in. I'm going out to dinner.'

‘Ah. You don't warn everybody off, then?' He watched intently.

‘Not instantly. I'm no recluse. The timing's important. Russell—for a few days I'll be staying late at the gallery. I'll catch a bus. I know you're busy too.'

After a pause, he said, ‘I'll ring you,' and was gone.

Anna shut the front door and went through the flat to the bedroom. Shoes off, bag and newspaper dropped beside them, she lay on the bed. After all those years separated—postcards, a few letters, snatches of news from letters to other people, now, quite often, quite often…The sun had jumped from the sky and taken up residence in her. She felt light stream from her hair and eyes, from the tips of her fingers. It would be all right. It was all for something.
Obviously
. It had to be.

Russell. Lying on her bed, Anna let memories, always ready to swamp and overwhelm her, take over. About themselves, their situation, they both knew everything. Words were redundant. All that was needed was very great care. Anna sucked in her upper lip and held it between her teeth. It provided, temporarily, some sort of balance for her mind, this soft lip firmly held. To hold the balance, to be able to bear her life without Russell, not to fall into despair, would require extreme carefulness, constant caution. Silently, with the conscious effort of one scaling mountains, she breathed in, filling her lungs. In obedience to nothing deliberately thought, her mind moved on, shifting those only just bearable pictures.

That's right. She was so lucky, so lucky when you looked at it in the right way. Russell. Russell's absence. Then there was David, who could be married because it was what he wanted, and nothing mattered. Well, she liked to please and he had been pleased and mattered more than she expected. But it was too late. He appeared too late ever to seem much more than a kind second-best. ‘I'm sorry. Nobody's fault,' she whispered aloud. A pity. But nobody's fault. It was only that she knew what she liked. She liked Russell.

A sudden screeching of traffic outside, downstairs, woke her to the present. Dragging herself up like a swimmer drugged with saltwater and air from a pool, she tried to concentrate on the night ahead, and shook her head to shake Russell out of it. She jumped over a low stool and started to pull off her clothes for the shower. Alive and still young and hopeful, after all. So happy. It was enough that he existed.

While she was having a shower, the telephone rang. She ran to it, grabbing a towel, leaving wet footprints on the way.

Zoe said with a kind of determined calm, ‘Anna. Did Stephen leave a silver pencil when we were over the other night?'

‘I don't think so. It isn't the one that belonged to my father? To our father?' (She never know how to refer to the parents who died without leaving memories.) With her free hand, Anna wrapped the towel round herself and sat on the arm of the easy chair.

‘Exactly.' There was a hard silence from Zoe, then she said in a hard voice, ‘You knew about it? I thought it was just a silver pencil. He suspected someone from work had stolen it, or that Mrs Trent might have taken a fancy to it. To begin with I didn't even know what was wrong, only that something cataclysmic had happened.'

‘Well, the pencil,' Anna said, feeling the hopelessness of trying to describe its importance in Stephen's scheme of things. ‘It was all he had belonging to them. Charles got rid of everything.'

In a strained voice, Zoe said, ‘I've always been so stifled by family possessions that it wouldn't matter to me if they disintegrated this minute.'

Anna said nothing, found an end of the towel and dabbed at her face, feeling her heart beat with consternation.

‘It's been gone for three days. He wouldn't say what was wrong. Then I was told about the pencil, but not that it had any special…Being helpful, I unfortunately bought him a new one.'

‘Oh!'

‘Yes, oh!'

‘I'll search around. It might have fallen down the side of a chair.' But she understood from Zoe's voice that the restoration of the hallowed object would in no way atone for its disappearance.

Anna returned to the shower, cold and shivering. She dressed and applied make-up carefully to her face. For a time, she did think of Stephen and Zoe. Then she found herself back in the sitting room with blessed minutes to spare before Andrew was due to arrive. All of her, her spirit, went to Russell as though he were her home. As if a voice had called as she was closing a door, she heard and considered with a sort of numb disquiet, the question:
What are you going to do
?
Initiative and efforts were expected because she was alone. People did like you to appear to have some purpose in life.

Back from four months in Europe after the wedding, settled into David's flat crammed with paintings, records, books, the question was asked seriously for the first time. David said, prophetically, ‘If I died young, what would happen to you? Apart from another husband.'

‘Why would you do a thing like that? Ghoul! (That's the first time I've ever said “ghoul”.)'

And then, it seemed in retrospect, events tumbling over one another—David less than well, David consulting the local doctor and perhaps seeming better for days and then definitely worse; then specialists, hospital, treatment, twice-daily visits, the first thoughts of danger. Straws in the wind, they said, and the first thoughts were just like that. Then there were giant steps taken moment by moment, steadily, into the heart of an enormous phantasmagoria. David, doctors, nurses, friends. Then there was nothing. It was all over and she was left in that enormous space. Life was a dream. People were smoke. Day-to-day events were unreal. Time and pretence went on.

Then everyone came home from Europe, and Stephen from Melbourne, and more time sped past. She and Russell saw each other frequently, in crowded situations. But now…At the beginning of the year, probably, she would take hold of her life again. Obviously she couldn't lie on her bed thinking about him forever.

The résumé of well-known events flashed through Anna's mind like a falling star, and with the same inevitability, her mind plunged back to him.

When the metallic hammering of the door knocker sounded in the flat, Anna started slightly with shock, and a tiny chill went out from her heart to her skin, and her spirit reluctantly closed down. Andrew. How unfair to everyone that the knowing of one person, the separation, should so poison and diminish every other association. She thought: I mustn't let it. I must try.

PART THREE

‘It was mean of Zo not to take any pictures of the girls.' Lily's daughters had been awarded ballet scholarships and were on the point of leaving for London. Since the announcement, the house had been spring-cleaned twice with Lily, who never did housework, working like a demon beside Mrs Glad. She was up at daybreak. Now she was tidying the linen cupboard, building towers of white and coloured oblongs.

Passing her, Russell was offered this criticism of his sister. ‘It's been a long time since she's touched a camera.'

‘So she said. But she could hardly have forgotten how.'

‘People lose their confidence. It's years since she's handled one.'

‘Confidence!' Lily doubled a folded sheet with a blow from the side of her hand. ‘She's never lacked that. You heard Stephen. He agreed with me. He said professionals were too snobbish to take pictures of relations.'

Russell scraped at a callous on the palm of his hand. That a fineness of intelligence in one area could be allied with emotional or moral insanity in others was proved, he felt, more often than necessary. Lily, now fiercely tidying the cupboard because of the girls' imminent departure, had never noticed in all these years that Zoe was no longer a confident person. And other things.

He said, ‘Yes, I heard him. I heard you talking to her while I was getting the drinks. She
was
ill,' he pointed out. ‘She
was
in hospital with pneumonia a few hours later.'

Over her shoulder, clasping a pile of sheets to her breast, Lily gave him a malign look and said nothing.

‘Roy took photographs. I thought you liked them.'

‘You always defend her. Zo's champion. If Stephen's jealous, no one could blame him.' Abruptly, she stuffed the linen into the cupboard. Keeping her back turned to him, she said, ‘No need to stand watching me. I'm capable of managing without supervision.'

In the bathroom, Russell started to shave.

Lily had convinced herself that her daughters should be doctors. Medicine enthralled her. What worthier career existed? Ballet was only for posture, a pastime. To the surprise of no one but Lily, having practised to the point of martyrdom, proved their excellence, won coveted awards and the praise of persons competent to praise, Caroline and Vanessa were leaving home and country. Now that she was forced to hear, Lily was outraged and grieved as though their plans had been secret. She endured the breaking-in of this fended-off truth, as people must, as though it were a serious illness and, like an illness, it was locked in her, impossible to share. She denied its existence. It could not be mentioned. She thought of nothing else.

In other days, Lily's talent for misjudging other persons' natures had culminated in her belief that Russell was attached to Ilsa Prescott, the local doctor's wife. Understanding that a sound judgment of her fellows was not one of Lily's strengths, Russell was startled nonetheless that she could think him susceptible to Ilsa Prescott's acid attractions. Like everyone, he was still learning.

Hearing of Lily's innuendoes, Zoe had laughed. ‘Ilsa's a decorative cookie, but you'd shatter a tooth if you took a bite. What's wrong with Lily's head? You haven't got time to lead anything but a blameless life. And if you led the other sort with Ilsa, I'd wonder what was wrong with
your
head.'

‘Give Lily a break, there's a good girl.'

‘You were the one to complain about being misjudged.'

Russell hissed air through clenched teeth. ‘My feeble attempt at light humour. Idle chat.'

‘But how could she?'

‘Seemed quite easy. I know you think Lily's no judge of character. But it isn't the only capacity worth anything in life.'

But Zoe looked down dully. ‘She's not alone in that. But it is the only capacity worth anything.' Almost desperately, she looked up. ‘It is. It is. It's sanity. It's being sane. There may be better things than seeing dead straight, but not many from where I stand. Because if you don't, you're dangerous.'