In Certain Circles (2 page)

‘Oh!' Long chairs scattered about barricaded off one half of the verandah. Contrite, Zoe took the heavy tray over to the table, eyeing the glasses, ice, fruit juice and various bottles. ‘I was thinking about parents and orphans.' She flashed a smile across her shoulder: while in passivity her face, with its light grey eyes and fine bone structure, was more than pleasing, in animation it could be beautiful. Her smile was always astonishing, causing the recipient to pause and inwardly acknowledge that some boon or blessing had unexpectedly been granted. So her mother paused briefly now, never having grown used to these dazzlingly varied and unpremeditated glances.

‘You only think of orphans in fairy tales.' Zoe straightened the glasses on the tray. ‘Wandering in, hand in hand out of the woods, all misty and neglected and bedraggled. I've never met one before.'

‘That's not to say they don't exist,' her mother pointed out. ‘When I think of some of my students, I realise that you lead a very sheltered life.'

‘
I
do?' Zoe gave an incredulous laugh. The captain of the school, editor of the paper, with the staff leaning heavily on her. Did they suppose she was given those marks out of pure philanthropy? And what about sailing? Had she not won more races there on the harbour than any girl of her age? She was a concert-goer. She could handle a movie camera with some skill, and a car better than her father. She could cook. With the few boys who had an interest in politics she had attended meetings of every shade, and been introduced by print to the prophets and their disciples. She had read millions of books. Although she was fortunate and wanted nothing, of her own accord, from childhood, she had noticed poverty when she saw it in the streets. Mentally, she had dealt with it all. Abracadabra! Misery abolished! In her imagination, as something between a game and a duty, people and buildings were transformed. Now she was older and transformations were harder. But she had helped to raise money for charity, and with a church group she had visited old people in their own homes for a few weeks or months two or three years ago. Virtue on virtue! Then there was the loss of Russell for that long time, when he was everything, so important to her.

‘
I
lead a sheltered life?' she repeated on a vaguer note. ‘When I never stop doing things, and after all you say about your students.'

‘Call them, Zo, before the ice melts and everything's lukewarm.'

Zoe did, with some restraint.

‘I meant,' Mrs Howard sat down and brushed some loose hair away from her face, ‘compared with Russell or the orphans.'

‘Oh, well. Russell and that man, they're older. I'll be different then, too.' Though not in a war, not a prisoner, not knowing about tortures and starvation, she could but hope. Yet even while he was her age and younger, experience had touched Russell—a serious illness, and the death of his two closest friends. One autumn day, swimming from a deserted beach, the three boys were caught in a strong rip and swept out past the headland. A freak wave washed Russell unconscious on to the rocks, and a fisherman rescued him. The bodies of the other boys were never found. Zoe was told what had happened. All that was real was what she had witnessed: Russell's shock, Russell's grief.

‘Here they come.' Mrs Howard began to fill the glasses. When she felt ill, as lately she had, she saw the doctor and told no one. She was by nature imperturbable, and frowned on undue sensitivity as neurotic, in poor taste. She was resolute in preserving in all circumstances a smooth social surface, and saw no reason to change because she might be less than well. At this moment, she set about the business of making Russell's rather forbidding friend, Stephen Quayle, and Stephen's young sister, at home, watching them as they walked up out of the garden across the flagstones. Bright pink oleander petals lay in a semicircle under the trees as though reflected there. Strong winds had knocked the flowers about in the night.

Chairs and glasses were distributed. Borrowed sandshoes were removed. Mr Howard emptied his glass in one draught, then bared his exceptionally fine teeth in a smile. ‘The Marx brothers could have learned something watching that game. Ah, well. At least he's giving us a daughter-in-law who knows what's what. Lily's like a rocket. Do you know her?'

‘They'll meet soon. See that slate roof down through the trees?' From the verandah wall, Russell pointed. ‘That's Lily's house. She's seeing some students this afternoon, or she would have been here.'

Turning to Anna, who was seated next to her, and whose fair skin, Zoe noticed,
had
burned out on the court, Zoe explained, ‘Lily's a lecturer. German. Though she's so young. She's like a fireworks display.'

And because she saw she should have played instead of this fifteen-year-old orphan with the grave eyes suitable to her fabled position in life, and because Anna would probably have liked sitting up on the shady verandah with Mrs Howard getting some sort of mother fixation (which her mother, Zoe felt certain, would have been only too happy to induce), she smiled with particular attention at the younger girl, before perceiving that her mixed intentions were observed. Although Anna was shy, and nervous, and silent, her look was none of those things. Her eyes reminded Zoe of someone. Her dress and shoes were cheap-looking and worn: she had no idea what suited her. These signs of want were repellent to Zoe. I lead a sheltered life, she thought, and then on impulse said, ‘Come and see us again. We'll go out in the boat, or go to the pictures.'

With another slight shock, Zoe saw that the girl was inclined, without reproach, to disbelieve this invitation. And why shouldn't she? Zoe wondered, sipping icy pineapple juice. I've often said things without meaning them. Often I don't mean what I say. For a moment she felt chastened by she hardly knew what. Then she resisted the sinking and doubt. After all, when she said these spontaneous charming things it was rather in the nature of practice, as someone might work at a language, or diving, as if there were no limit to the excellence he might achieve. Everything she said was experimental in that way. There was the sense of being an explorer, travelling out, extending herself again and again, finding no obstacle to stand in her way. These shapeless, exciting impressions sped through her mind, and the great sense of her own never-ending possibilities brought a sudden joy. No, she was not just superficial! She did mean what she said. She would be nice, would be kind to this younger girl whose life was obviously so much less privileged than her own.

Zoe's parents had been talking to Stephen and finding him unforthcoming. Marginally aware of this, Zoe now felt her mother and father on the brink of deciding that Anna might be a more responsive subject. Chairs were hitched closer to hers. With professional ease, they moved in, questioning her about her school. Marmalade, the cat, arrived and was a momentary diversion from the strain of receiving so much adult attention—a new and exhausting experience, it was clear. Zoe listened inattentively, bored by any education but her own. The telephone rang and Mr Howard disappeared till lunch time.

Russell and his friend were talking vehemently at the far end of the verandah. The friend looked like an anarchist, or a music student, Zoe decided. A bush of tightly waving, light-brown, uncontrollable-looking hair was mostly responsible for this impression, but his tallness and thinness and fairness, the spectacles he put on and took off with long thin fingers contributed. And his eyes, the glance they gave, were positively frightening. Where did Russell pick these people up?

So far, she had noticed, this Stephen seemed—when her parents tried to talk to him—nervous, edgy, with reserves of anger, like someone too full of pressing thought to have time for conversation. Those striking golden-coloured eyes would rarely meet anyone else's. In fact, had he looked directly at anyone but Russell? Once or twice he had actually answered her father with quite alarming impatience and irritability. He was like a weird, irascible character out of some dense Russian novel.

Unexpectedly, he had laughed while Zoe observed from a distance, half-burying her face in her slippery cold glass, and she had received an impression of a gong having been sounded on a note both loud and flat. Unused to anything so discordant, she found it oddly stimulating. Uneasy, but curious, but interested, she studied this other orphan. Poor boy, she thought, accustomed to hearing her mother talk of poor boys. Privation. That was what they made you think of, he and Anna. But he was scruffy, not so entirely to-the-last-atom clean as Anna was. Her mother would put his privation look down to sex starvation, but then she put everything down to that. If you knew so surely that that was the answer to all human problems, Zoe thought, it certainly left loads of time for solving the rest. Jarred by the patness and predictability of this diagnosis, Zoe had learned to remark, ‘How happy prostitutes must be! And how well balanced!'

‘How many prostitutes have you ever seen?' her mother asked.

‘I'm not blind.'

Now, clicking her fingernails against the empty glass she still held, with Mrs Howard's voice in the background enslaving Anna, she continued to watch Stephen. She looked at his halo of hair, at the neat shape of his ears; one was transparent in the sun and she saw his flowing blood.

Another ringing inside the house, then her father's call: ‘Russell! Lily wants you.'

Russell was at the door. ‘Zoe, come and talk to Stephen. Keep him company instead of posing there.'

Smiling because he knew her, knew what she was like, even to the extent of penetrating her extremely natural-looking poses that she was hardly conscious of herself, Zoe went over to sit beside Stephen Quayle.

‘What do you do?' she asked, almost laughing, radiant. It never mattered what she said to men: they liked her to say anything.

‘I'm a salesman.'

‘Oh!' She was disliked. She was disapproved of. He had not looked at her surface at all. She was a rude child who had addressed a visiting bishop by his Christian name. ‘What do you sell?' she persisted.

‘Packing materials. Packing tape. Brown paper. Corrugated cardboard.'

Her fault, apparently! Avoiding the space where his face was, her glance darted about. ‘Probably that's very interesting, meeting different people all the time.'

As she spoke, she had an impression of something not pleasant happening to her, something irreversible and magical and inevitable. An enchanted padlock was being fitted to her mind, and there was no key. She had met the first man ever to judge her. That he chose to do it gave him the authority, made him unquestionably her superior. She felt at some level that an essential element, necessary to her very life, had been given to her just in time. If he had not looked at that instant, said those particular words, she might not have survived another hour.

‘Extremely interesting,' he agreed. ‘I walk about the city and suburbs with a briefcase full of advertising samples, and wait in smelly offices for head clerks. An hour's nothing. Then he'll tell one of the juniors: “Get rid of him. I don't want anything this month.”'

His anger! Zoe could think of nothing to say.

‘You're looking at my shoes,' he said.

‘I am not looking at your shoes.' Zoe suddenly stared at them.

‘Ordinary soles wear out too fast. I get a bootmaker to fix that extra leather.' He turned his right foot sideways, and frowned. ‘I didn't wear them on the court.'

Zoe dared to glance at his face, though his look acted on her nerves like an electric shock. ‘I don't care if you wear them in the bath,' she said indignantly. As if she had nothing better to do than worry about his shoes! He must think I'm a fetishist, she thought. Or was it only men who were?

He was looking out at the massed trees, the glimpses of water, the dense shadows and blazing greens, under the enormous empty sky. ‘Like the Botanic Gardens. You're lucky.' Stretching in the cushioned chair and staring away from so much brilliant colour to the white-painted ceiling, he said, ‘Human beings were never born to be salesmen or clerks.'

‘What were they born to be?' Zoe asked, bemused. None of the boys she knew ever made remarks like that. ‘What are you going to do afterwards? I mean—when you stop this?'

‘This is what I do.'

Zoe said nothing. He was superior to her, quite possibly the only person in the world who was, since he was the only person who had so far claimed to be, therefore, what he said was impossible. Someone superior to Zoe could not conceivably spend his life as a salesman. She remembered her lessons. Somehow, he had been denied a fair chance. Men like this were ripe for communism. ‘Ripe' was the word always used. She asked him.

The angry golden eyes flickered. ‘How old are you?'

She told him, adding, ‘We did
Utopia
last year.'

‘Did you like it?'

‘If you haven't read it recently, there's no point in discussing it.' Having shown that she, too, knew how to be crushing, she said, ‘Why do you do this then, if you hate it so much?'

He sighed, forgetting her, and rubbed a thin hand up and down his chest, then stopped to feel the buttons on his shirt, in some private despair, the witnessing of which pierced Zoe's mind.

‘I do it'—still he held a shirt button between forefinger and thumb—‘I suppose I do it to exist. For this shirt. For a roof and food. To have hair cut and teeth filled. To pay bus fares to go to the office to make money to exist.'

Zoe felt stunned and persecuted meeting someone like this in real life. ‘What about Anna?'

‘Anna. I suppose she'll turn into one of those clerks, working to eat. She'll meet other clerks, and might marry one.'

Noticing her bare legs stretched out in front of her, feeling them looked at, Zoe tugged at her short shorts. ‘You probably make it sound much drearier than it is.' Maybe this was his sort of joke, like British understatement in reverse. It was so feeble to be in a weak position and complain. ‘Couldn't either of you get scholarships? Can't your relations and friends do something?'