In Certain Circles (17 page)

‘Or in danger, or both.'

After a pause, Zoe changed the subject. ‘Did I stop you from going for a walk with Anna? It didn't matter, did it?'

‘Not a bit.'

‘After all, your mother-in-law had voted herself into the party, too.'

‘She's a good egg, Lily senior. All her wits about her.'

Russell shaved, showered and dressed. As he felt for the car keys, he remembered that he and Zoe were cleaning fish, leaning over a rock pool cleaning fish, while they talked. He had lifted a silvery bream by the tail.

Lily had organised one of her regular family gatherings; a holiday weekend, and fifteen assorted individuals were assembled in the house belonging to her mother near the deserted Ten Mile Beach on the south coast. Lily was preparing lunch. The girls were practising. He and Anna were going for a walk, but Zoe conspicuously claimed him as a fishing partner, so Anna and Stephen went for a walk with Lily's mother. It was grey, unseasonably cool; the air smelled of rain. Zoe had fished beside him on the rocks at one end of the empty beach, totally silent. Thinking of Anna, he remembered Lily's extraordinary insinuations about Ilsa Prescott, and mentioned her. Zoe became almost animated, as though she felt it a relief to think of something to say.

‘All right if we take the car?' Vanessa caught him as he came out into the hall. ‘We'll drop you off at work. We're not all that popular in other directions, if you know what I mean, so we'd better have yours.'

‘Don't worry about your popularity.' He put an arm round this straight-backed, frail-looking steely girl who was his daughter. For a moment Russell looked into her face. She and Caroline were beautiful girls, with high foreheads, rounded chins, large eyes, straight noses, long dark hair, and expressions that accurately pointed to dispositions intelligent, gay and unyielding.

‘You can have the car, but talk to your mother. She'll come round.'

‘She'd better. We'll be gone in three days.' Deep elation replaced the momentary qualm.

‘You couldn't manage to look forlorn when your mother's in your vicinity? Not that I'd want you to perjure yourself!'

‘God forbid!' She gave him an enraptured look. ‘Not possibly.'

‘Quite right! I have a daughter who's no hypocrite.'

‘Don't tease. Are you ready? Caroline's in the car.'

They went downstairs together. Vanessa admired her father's shirt and told him its blue exactly matched his eyes.

‘Such a command of flattery!' Russell said. ‘I'll never know why your mother thinks you're helpless.'

‘She has to protect us. She can go back to lecturing and protect hordes of students now. She'll like that. We've never been dependent enough.'

Russell listened in silence to this just appraisal. ‘Have you both said goodbye?…Then wait for me in the car.'

He went off to find Lily, who seemed to have abandoned the linen cupboard halfway through. The girls waited. He would not be able to see Anna. She had been home for four months after a year in Canada. He had scarcely seen her since the exhibition of her work at the gallery near the press.

‘I still wonder,' Lily turned from the beautiful pottery with admiration, ‘what there was left for Canada to teach you. And why Canada?'

‘Much it had to teach me. A master potter lives there.' Harder, more assured, Anna stood with her friends.

‘If the master contributed to this, it was worth it!' Lily generously declared.

‘Thank you, Lily! But it was no penance.' With the air of one choosing at last to tell the truth, Anna said, ‘I went really because the mountains are high, and the snow is white.'

Since then, every attempt to meet was frustrated by her work or his work, appointments, business, duties. He had no idea how much, or if, she minded. Even the walk in the country…And now another day would go by during which they would not meet.

Zoe sometimes thought of those laboratory animals that were the subjects of experiments. They were deliberately confused beyond the capacity of their powers of adjustment. Finally they lay in the bottom of the cage, taking no notice any more of the captors, the coaxing and cajolery that would persuade them to embark again on the routine torment. Political prisoners were often destroyed in the same way, on purpose; and vain people like me, Zoe thought, who think they can adjust and adjust indefinitely to another person's irrationality, in the mysterious hope of pleasing and somehow making well that same irrationality. Like Stephen's Uncle Charles with his wife, Nicole. Like a lot of people.

Be satisfied. Be satisfied. This is what you wanted. This is what you've got.

Addressing Stephen, who was some miles off, on his way home from work, Zoe touched the cutlery on the table, eyed the stark flower arrangements put about by Mrs Trent for the convalescent's first dinner sitting up, out of bed, for weeks.

Be satisfied. The injunction came from her heart, as though it literally had a voice.

In the course of carrying in hot drinks these days since Zoe had been out of hospital, Mrs Trent had told her of three women who were consulting a hypnotist for relief from ailments and miseries. Zoe let her imagination play over the idea as though it were a possibility. She would ask him to remove
Be satisfied
from her mind. She would say, ‘I have the impression that I died two or three years ago, and I don't know what to do about it.' So what did she want? Just to be resurrected.

Disguising his merriment and contempt, he would put his fingertips together. ‘My good lady, a very simple matter. Easily mended.' He would write on a card, like a doctor, ‘Dead, but won't lie down.'

‘But I'm the guilty party,' she would tell him. ‘I let it happen. Let the words be said, and listened. Agreed to be devalued to the point where I'm of less consequence than anyone in the world. Permanently in the wrong.'

The hypnotist would nod sagely.

Wandering about this room, once so pleasing to her in its lack of fashionable starkness at one extreme, and of fashionable clutter at the other, she caught sight of her reflection in the french windows. Forty.
Forty
. So many years, leading to this disaster that could be told to no one.

When Stephen came in, Zoe was pulling the plastic bags from some dry-cleaning delivered earlier in the afternoon.

He said, ‘You're not supposed to be up. Why are you doing that?'

She lifted her face to be kissed, but he averted his head so that her lips touched his cheek. As always now, she had the sensation, when their eyes met, of sustaining a physical injury. A speechless, difficult resentment went out from them both. Frequently, like very tall people conversing over the heads of a crowd, they spoke across their grievances about the local scene, the world situation, the arts. There was a time when this had been safe, but now there was danger everywhere. These conversations were farcical. What was a fine point of principle to her any more? His principles were weapons used to beat her down. So high-minded about the distant injustices of the world! Men were marvellous. Perhaps it was marvellous to rise above the personal. There was a story about to that effect. She had never believed it, told by influential persuaders though it was.

She said, ‘The doctor thinks I should start getting up soon. Did you have any word today about the contract?'

‘We've got it. We're printing the whole series.' He was impassive, weary.

‘What are they—history texts?'

Sliding his coat off, Stephen loosened his tie. ‘History, then maths. We'll have more work than we can handle.'

‘Are you pleased?' With closed lips she smiled in appeal, wishing him hope and encouragement.

‘I suppose so. Russell's pleased,' he said pointedly, meeting her eyes with a curious boldness.

Assuming indifference, Zoe turned away. Long ago, she had ceased to mention Russell's name. ‘Would you like a drink? Or do you want a shower before dinner?'

Nervousness, enmity, went out from both of them. They were like spies working for hostile governments. The game was up; all was known, but nothing had been said out loud. They continued to do their little calculations, carefully adding and subtracting, laying false trails, collecting evidence for their reports.

‘I'll just have a wash. I'll have something to drink with dinner.' Coat in one hand, briefcase in the other, he went upstairs.

Zoe pressed the soft plastic bags in her hands into a ball.

At dinner, Stephen suddenly put down his glass. ‘Your hair. It's not right for your face like that.'

‘Oh, you don't think so?'

‘It's too old, or young. Doesn't suit you.' He seemed to be under the impression that her hair was irritating him dreadfully.

‘Easy.' With the removal of a few invisible clips it fell, dark and shining, into the shape it had had last week before Stephen had desired a change in that arrangement. Zoe forbore to mention this. She knew well enough what her crime was. She could see him trying to feel appeased. Since he was not in close touch with himself, he might even for a moment have succeeded. He had asserted himself; she had submitted.

Mysteriously, he seemed not to notice that they ran through this sort of performance quite regularly. Any excuse served for criticism: the way she spoke on the telephone, the way she cut the bread, the shrubs she ordered from the nursery, the books she chose to read, any belief, feeling or action. He could not be pleased. Quite often it was some idle statement, some lightly held opinion, that he pounced on with a ferocity out of all proportion to the depth of her involvement.

There were times when she felt like someone who had chosen to pander to the whims of a despotic interior decorator. The propriety of taking part in the performance struck her as dubious. Minds operate on so many levels at once: there was a limit beyond which he might not go without destroying her feelings for him. Since she had somehow placed her life in him, the danger was great indeed. He approached her at night, but the essential grievance, he himself, remained under lock and key. She might have been a handsome woman whose geography he had grown used to in a brothel.

Across the table she glanced at him. Where had he gone, that lover, that loved one? She sat with Stephen's effigy. He was the tomb of them both. Like a wraith, she visited the stone images. Eating, they continued to skirmish, silently sustaining thorny scratches, haemorrhages, and blows of extreme subtlety and variety. Last night—reconciliation, now these calculating looks, and in each chest Zoe saw the grinding stones turn again, and the sharpening-up proceed. The stakes were so high, although occasionally they both forgot what they were, as generals in the midst of battles must have trouble recalling the philosophy on which the carnage rests.

‘What are you going to do now?' he asked, when dinner ended. ‘Leave the dishes for Mrs Trent. You should go back to bed.'

Touched by his concern, Zoe agreed almost timidly, ‘Perhaps I'd better.'

Elaborately casual, Stephen asked, ‘Who do you suppose does the dishes for Mrs Trent when she's ill?'

‘I should think her husband or her daughter.'

He gave a small, foolish smile. ‘I hadn't thought of that. Zo…' Now that he had lost the round and she seemed cold, he searched for a reason to delay her. ‘Anna's coming over this week, you said?'

‘Yes.' She pulled the sash of her dressing gown tighter round her waist.

‘See how she is. There could be something wrong.'

From habit, Zoe wondered what he meant, apart from what he said. She saw that he wanted to establish contact now, having broken it, and was willing to throw Anna in as an offering. Zoe had tossed him many a morsel of this kind with reckless shame.

‘I don't seem to be getting much of a response to my no-doubt boring remarks.'

‘I was waiting for you to go on.' The conversation had a quite peculiar familiarity to Zoe. Usually,
she
struggled to rouse life and interest in Stephen with the very same words. Now it had all turned dizzily round. A sensation of the circularity of things came to her. She marvelled at the efforts, the responsibilities, at the memory of what had been destroyed. What a pity that this, all the time, was what he had wanted!