In Certain Circles (18 page)

‘Why do you think there's something wrong with Anna?' she asked, playing straight man.

‘That weekend at Ten Mile Beach just after she came home. We all went in different directions that Sunday morning. Mary and Ian went to church, and Lily was getting lunch. You insisted Russell had to go fishing with you, and Anna and I went for a walk with Mrs Irving.'

‘Yes. It was a lovely morning, then it rained, and everyone enjoyed our fish.'

Stephen nodded. ‘It started to rain while we were out, so Lily's mother decided to go back and help with lunch. I took her to the path near the house, and Anna went on by herself. I was looking for her for about ten minutes, and got myself stuck in a thick patch of thorny stuff. Then I pushed through to the edge of a clearing—'

‘Well, what happened?' Zoe asked awkwardly, infected by his sudden awkwardness.

‘She didn't know I was there. She was in a bad way.'

Over their empty cups and glasses, they exchanged dismayed looks.

‘What?…Crying?'

He nodded and offered her a cigarette. ‘She was sitting on a big fallen tree. I went away.'

‘I've never known Anna to cry. No, thanks. Against orders.'

‘That's right. You're not allowed to.' Lighting one for himself, holding it in his mouth for a moment, Stephen shut the packet.

‘Well. That's horrible.' Zoe looked at him, confused. ‘You couldn't have gone over to her?'

He shook his head.

Zoe checked an impulse to speak. Once so impulsive, she was now very, very skilled at checking impulses.

‘I went home to the house. She came in about three-quarters of an hour later. She'd been caught in the storm. She called through the kitchen window to Lily that she was going to dry her hair and change her clothes.'

‘She doesn't know you saw her?'

‘No. When she came out of her room, I thought the other must have been a mirage. Because if someone had died…'

Despair. Zoe shook her head, realising that she could think of no one whose death, supposing anyone had died, would cause Anna such overwhelming grief. Yet someone had that power. More and more she could remember the weekend. Highly disagreeable it had been. Lily's fierce and alarming reaction to her daughters' scholarships showed itself for the first time. Mrs Irving took Zoe aside, and explained that it was Lily's age that was affecting her so. The girls objected to being called monsters of selfishness, and said that that sort of abuse and attitude were dated. Placated by their father, they devoted the remainder of the short holiday to practice. Nothing broke their discipline. Everyone kept disappearing stealthily and returning to an apprehensive circle of eyes.

‘Maybe it's something to do with Tom. He's lingered around for years, though I'd thought with very little encouragement. No. It must be something in Canada, someone there.'

‘What do you suggest, then?'

Again Zoe refrained from suggesting that it might have been easier to speak to Anna then, than to approach her with questions now.

‘I don't know what to think. Years ago this might have been less amazing. But after she got so involved in her classes, and when she was so good at it…She had the studio for ages. Then Canada was obviously terrific for her. Her work's really something! I thought she was happy. She's changed…There must have been bad years after David died.'

There was no doubt that Anna had had amorous adventures with a number of men. Living alone near the city, disinclined to discuss lovers and friends, she had preserved tracts of private life to herself. Was it possible that sheer persistence, his dogged way of hanging about for years through the arrival and departure of others, had worn Anna down to the point of marrying Tom?

Play the field. Anna liked to play the field
. Possibly only Zoe, of all her friends, knew. She had found out by accident, and was curiously shocked because Anna hadn't cared. There had been enigmatic years before this, when heaven only knew what her preoccupations were beyond what was visible. Intent on Stephen, on her own life, on scrawling across blank diary pages the secret words ‘Happy days' that she found undecipherable now, Zoe hadn't even wondered. Perhaps there had been some crucial break after which came the casual affairs, with Anna acting like anyone with a taste for sleeping about. She could hardly have been in love with them all. But if not, it seemed out of character.

Now, Zoe pressed her hands down on the table and stood up. ‘Anyway. I'm going to bed.'

‘Is that all you have to say?'

Lifting some plates, Zoe trailed out to the kitchen, Stephen following. ‘I think so.'

She understood, without feeling it, that there was a sadness in her failure to respond. He had tried to interest her by exhibiting Anna; now something was expected in return. It was a quandary. She returned the milk and butter to the fridge, and shook a tin of grapefruit juice to see how much remained. Meanwhile, she rummaged in her mind for some way of amusing and enlivening Stephen. Once upon a time, nothing he said or did could discourage her. Her fiery temper might never have existed. The lively and cajoling woman he sometimes liked and sometimes loathed appeared and disappeared according to his unpredictable preferences or years. Then one day when no one was noticing, she simply failed to come back on demand. They both felt inclined to disbelieve the change in her. But her eyes told him bitterly: you can play games for just so long. This is what you wanted. The enthusiasm that gave him happiness and repelled him no longer existed.

Sliding his arms around her, Stephen waited for her to move. When she merely stood quiet and obedient, head averted, trying to feel in her dressing-gown pocket for a handkerchief, he said, ‘You're not very forthcoming.'

Numerous reasonable but inflammatory replies came to mind. Everything was bait. She said with stoic good humour, ‘Officially, I'm not out of bed yet. I might do some work for an hour, when I go up.'

‘Must you?' He kissed the side of her throat.

‘I promised this paper,' she said, seeming apologetic, but experiencing the faint self-satisfaction of a tightrope walker so without fear that she hardly knew how to gauge her own fearlessness.

In a rather formal tone, Stephen said, ‘When you're better, see if you can talk to Anna, will you?'

‘Of course.' They exchanged a look. And in the three or four seconds of its duration, with shutters flung wide, the blood was, the oxygen was, the flashing colours and violence of their true life.

Lying again in bed, hemmed in by dictionaries and notebooks, Zoe felt a moment's compunction recalling Stephen's insincere request. She was mortified but not surprised to realise how easily they had both forgotten Anna and her astonishing grief, except in so far as her plight could be used to gain some personal advantage.

Drowning men can't be expected to save other drowning men, she assured herself: then she remembered that it was always a potentially drowning man who went to the rescue, and sometimes he was the one to be lost.

‘You didn't go to the ship?' Zoe asked, glancing up at her sister-in-law. She and Anna were wandering through the garden, chased from the house by the banging of plumbers in the kitchen.

‘No, I didn't want to.'

Zoe raised her brows. ‘There were stacks of people there, Russell said. It sounded quite gay, in spite of Lily's taking it so hard.'

‘It must have been harrowing for her—the streamers, and “Auld Lang Syne” and “Till We Meet Again”. They do pile it on. I took Vanessa and Caroline to lunch the other day and said goodbye then.'

Summer again, but a cold wind was blowing up from the South Pole. Zoe felt it go through the thin wool of her jacket. ‘The girls showed me the silver bracelets you gave them. They were thrilled.'

Anna gave an almost querulous shake of one hand.

‘The most dedicated, one-track-minded girls I've ever come across.'

‘Enviably talented.' Anna smiled faintly. ‘Sit down, Zo. They're still using a road drill in your kitchen.' She sat on the low stone wall and Zoe joined her.

‘They say their mother is only wounded in her academic ambitions. They've got it all worked out. They giggle away.

They're absolutely right, and absolutely heartless, because when the chips were down, all she really wanted was their presence in Sydney.'

‘Quite a big all!' Anna commented. ‘She wants her way. They want their lives. Everyone's said for years that they'd have to go abroad to dance. I've always understood Lily couldn't wait to get back to work.'

Zoe gave a keening sound. ‘It's not as simple as that. They were frail babies. But she hired a nurse and went back to work quite soon after they were born. Then it looked as if they weren't going to live. I think she must have bargained with fate and sworn never to put work before them again. She had every chance of reaching dizzy academic heights, and that was what she wanted.'

A look of scepticism in her eye, Anna listened. ‘So what are you saying? That they should have been sorry for her, and sacrificed their chances?'

‘Of course not. Children will go away, and they should. I don't disagree with you. I don't know. I haven't given it all that much thought.'

For some seconds the two sat silent, watching the stirring of grass blades, stems and leaves. A cluster of daisies bent before the wind. Since Anna's arrival earlier this morning—relaxed, detached, ready to laugh—Zoe had tried to penetrate her own diffidence in the face of her friend's self-possession. In other days she would have barged straight in, never feeling the invasion of Anna's privacy as a hurdle. Now, try though she would to ask, ‘Is anything wrong?' her intention lapsed when she glanced into Anna's eyes. She had forgotten how to muster toughness and self-assertion. Feeling pusillanimous, she referred again to Lily.

‘I know she's sometimes too forceful for comfort. Everyone says she's a born teacher, and it carries over into private life. Like having a Test cricketer bat and bowl during dinner.'

‘Shop talk's fun if it's your shop. But talents meant for public use are lethal in private.'

‘Lily, you mean?'

‘All of us.' Anna stared about at the garden. ‘Unless you're lucky enough to use them up in the proper work, they run over the edge into family life and'—she paused and said lightly—‘muck up everything. The worst thing is, it often takes such a long time to recognise what the chief strength is. You might only deduce it at forty or fifty by looking back on what you've done wrong.' She laughed. ‘Think how much less damage I do—moulding and cracking clay instead of people.'

As though the highly selective attention inside her which languished through days and nights that provided no sustenance for its deepest wants—to understand what had happened to her life, to understand natures different from her own—as though this attention had at last been riveted, Zoe said, ‘It happened to me, I think. Public talents wrecking private life. Not,' she added, turning to Anna with a vague inward look, ‘that I realised that clearly till this moment. I liked—to make things better, to contribute myself, somehow. Potentially, I was a psychotherapist. A creative worker. I liked to discover things. That's it really. Most of all that disappeared into my work in Paris.'

As she spoke, her mind added that sadly, unkindly, unwisely, destructively, she had given all of this attention, like a ray of too great intensity, to one person, to the general detriment and waste.

I married his neurosis, she thought dispassionately. I was attracted by the strangeness of his mind as a psychiatrist might have been drawn to an interesting case. He wanted a resident analyst. Neither of us understood.

At the time, the facts had scarcely presented themselves in this light. Having fallen from the feather bed of her life at home into other feather beds in Paris, it happened that she had only read about but never met a real neurotic. But what
she
failed to recognise in Stephen, her instinct did.

Anna nodded, recognising Zoe's description of herself, and the correctness of the past tense.

Hastily, with an unreal laugh, Zoe went on, ‘Let's blame my doting parents and be in fashion. Nothing was expected of me except that I should please myself. I can see now that I needed and yearned for a person and a task that would make extreme demands so that I could know who I was. But there were no pressures. A few examinations were made much of. I was praised till self and wants came out of my ears. The self-dramatising amused the family and they encouraged it. Self-indulgence on their part.'

‘Yes, I thought that.'

‘Did you notice?'

‘Of course. This stone's getting hard, Zo. What about going up on to the verandah? No, at first you seemed tremendously lucky. You were so treasured. You could do absolutely no wrong.'

‘Oh, I was an idol.'

They climbed the steps and sat down. Several books lay on the floor near Zoe's chair. Inside, the plumbers were shouting above the sound of their transistor as they replaced some copper piping.