In Certain Circles (22 page)

Aware that reasonable and consolatory speeches would be avidly collected as further proof of the world's cruelty and heartlessness, Zoe said, with a greater show of energy and goodwill than she felt, ‘But all's not lost. You've got Russell. Your mother and the aunts are still next door. You can still take up your work.'

‘Russell! What does it matter to him? He's always been more interested in mankind. Strangers and causes have always meant more to him. The press works because he's got the best staff in Sydney, and he keeps them because of the co-operative thing. Stephen slaves, but it's almost a hobby for Russell. He's always at meetings. Oh, he's worked hard. God knows that's true! And he's influenced a lot of people to do fine things. But he's no time or interest to spare for his family.'

Zoe sighed audibly. ‘Oh, Lily. You can't expect me to agree with you. You don't even mean it. If you'd wanted to, you could have been part of everything he's done.'

But Lily's face was set in rigid lines. ‘I mean it, though it doesn't matter much—about Russell. The children are everything. I've always put them first. Some women are like that. You wouldn't understand.'

Zoe felt she understood too well. Lily had tried her for years to live through the girls, lived on their high spirits, emotions, the events of their lives. She had seen them fade under the intensity of their mother's attention. The difference between being idolised and plagued can be very small.

Moving to a comfortable chair opposite Lily, Zoe said, ‘What I do understand is that at any point in a woman's life she may come across something like a cement pyramid in the middle of the road. Another person. People. She's capable of sitting there, convinced that it would be impossible to forsake her position, till it becomes a private Thermopylae. This sort of block was probably designed for the survival of our species, but the cost's high. What makes men superior is that they don't—
on the whole
—stop functioning forever because of another person. They lack this built-in handicap, and are they lucky!' Half-laughing, she added, ‘I can't bear sweeping statements. Contradict me!'

With dulled censorious eyes, Lily waited for her to stop, then a startling malevolence brightened her face. ‘They're beginning to wonder about the shortage of letters. I've written once since they left.'

Russell had told Zoe this, and Vanessa had written to her, too, asking for unbiased news of her mother.

‘That's vindictive, Lily. Why spoil their first months and make yourself unhappy?'

‘Oh yes, I'm vindictive. I please myself for once. That's vindictive.'

Zoe went to the open door to gather some strength from the air and trees. Out on the bay, three speedboats were pursuing some purposeful course. The third seemed to be operating for the benefit of a camera crew, massively equipped, filming the other two.

Over her shoulder she said to Lily, ‘This looks like the birth of a television commercial.'

Lily came to watch the invasion of their peaceful bay with a sort of critical resignation. A gold-patterned butterfly wavered past close by.

‘Have you had any breakfast?…Neither have I. Come and let's eat something.'

‘When in doubt, produce food. I used to do that. What they could put away for dinner!'

Catching her rueful, reminiscent expression now that she had forgotten for the moment to extort commiseration Zoe did pity her at last, and thought it regrettable that everybody's happiness seemed to flourish best on someone else's murdered heart. Though, as she started to prepare and cook mushrooms and eggs, she told herself that that was an extreme, florid and probably untrue way of stating the case. Still, there did appear to be a sort of waste not, want not policy which everybody made use of. Like coral, she decided, stirring, leaning against the stove. They talked about nature's prodigality and lavish wastefulness, but—depending which eye you chose to close—it could seem there was thrift and husbandry everywhere.

Lily poured the orange juice. ‘I'm only interrupting your day's work, coming over like this. Russell felt I shouldn't stay home brooding. Easier to come than argue. Not that he would argue. Not that anyone would. Everyone makes allowances.' This came out viciously, and Zoe flinched, and frowned at the mushrooms as she served them.

‘It's not badly meant. You've had some sort of psychic shock. It's hard to get over it.'

As though a nerve had been touched, Lily's face moved. ‘How do you know that? Without children.'

‘You mothers
are
egotistical. There are other blows in life.' Zoe pulled out a stool and sat opposite Lily at the counter.

‘You haven't told me yet to pull myself together.' Lily started to eat.

‘I daresay you will, just the same.'

‘But you don't think it's justified—the way I am?'

‘I think it's a pity. You're the one who knows if it's justified. And I don't suppose even you know how far you're prepared to take it. It isn't a matter of conscious decisions. I mean—the decision to recover comes from a place not open to influence.'

Leaning to one side, Zoe slid two blue-and-white Swedish cups across the counter and switched off the percolator. ‘You just have to wait it out. It probably is important to make a few efforts in case they do get through to headquarters.' Her manner was tentative, but she did believe that everything everybody did mattered.

Lily greeted this with a satisfied, spiteful smile. ‘I've been delivering unwanted advice for years. If it lands back on my doorstep when I'm least able to put up with it, that's only fair. You think I'm unreasonable.'

Stephen had taught Zoe patience. She said, ‘The way you feel and anyone who wants you to be reasonable exist on different planets.'

Eating what was on her plate, Lily listened with unnatural intentness. ‘I'm like a politician waiting for the result of a referendum. Very sensitive to public opinion. And, I must say, you seem to understand. Why today?'

Alarmed to find herself under scrutiny, Zoe shifted on her stool. ‘I don't know. It's easy to talk to you. You're more like yourself.'

‘Ah,' Lily said, with comprehension. ‘Russell tells you I'm usually all doped up? Well, I did take stuff for a week or two, then I stopped. He didn't bother to notice the difference. None of you did.'

‘Oh.' Eyes down, Zoe crunched rather sullenly through a piece of toast and pushed her plate away. It was worse than she had imagined, if Lily had lost touch to this extent; if she could lie about something so obvious. Though Zoe had come a long way since the days when she believed the truth was always best; though she was persuaded now that sometimes, unhappily, it had to take second place to another person's vital illusions; though cleverer people could make an addiction to it seem all that was boring; nevertheless, she had a passion for it, and if the roof fell and the city fell, she could not suppress it. So she munched gloomily and looked down.

Lily put some sugar in her coffee. ‘He thinks I'm lying about it.'

Again, Zoe felt herself sinking almost physically. ‘How could he, if it weren't so?' she asked faintly. ‘How could he make a mistake like that?'

‘How could I? Assuming I'm in my right mind.'

Zoe moved a hand expressively. ‘That's different. You're under stress. He would never disbelieve you without reason.'

‘You idealise everyone, Zo.'

She met Lily's eyes. Anna had said that, too.

‘We tell each other small lies from time to time,' Lily said. ‘He just happens to be wrong now. You look surprised. Nothing enormous. Conspiracies with the girls.'

Sitting there, with her heels hooked over the brass-bound spar of the stool, Zoe believed her, but felt disenchanted. She believed everyone she liked. She never expected lies. They always bowled her over, and she never expected them next time, in spite of her conviction that Stephen was right to suspect and denigrate everything human when the mood took him, in spite of her willingness sometimes to agree with him.

‘If they're such small lies, are they worth the trouble?' she asked now, thoroughly put out.

‘You idealise everyone,' Lily repeated censoriously.

‘You've seemed—unfamiliar. I suppose that's what made Russell think—all of us…'

‘He couldn't believe it was “only the girls”. Only the girls!'

‘No.' Zoe began to feel worn down. ‘But when weeks went by without any sign that you were—accepting the way things were, and so
different
, we thought you must be still taking stuff.'

‘Everyone believed Russell, that's all.'

‘We've all got eyes. The thought that you were drugged to insensibility was no more impossible than that you were…I can see now the effect the girls have had, and I'm sorry. But it isn't the end of the world.' Zoe had no idea how wise it was to talk like this to Lily, but you could tiptoe round for just so long.

Resting her elbows on the counter, Lily clasped her hands and leaned her chin on the tangle of fingers. She half-laughed. ‘In my palmier days, I was always making people count their blessings, reminding them about starving Indians, and girls dying of abortions, and people being burned alive in wars. High-minded when nothing was wrong with my life.'

It was a fact that as a lecturer she had analysed her students, and as a mother her daughters, right out of her life. And self-righteously she used the tragedies of others as if she had invented them herself as moral tales.

Zoe said, ‘My unscientific mind thinks, “What would I want if I were Lily, apart from what's not possible?”'

‘And what does it answer?'

‘It might say, “I'd want someone to
realise
…” I'd want the girls—and since that's impossible, I'd want Russell to realise. I'd want to be understood, I suppose.'

Lily said flatly, ‘That's what I must learn to do without.'

In the following silence, Zoe scraped plates and ran hot water and thought of Russell. He seemed to have adjusted easily to Lily's altered state. Was he as unaccountable as everyone else? Was he like Lily—with theory and practice running parallel but never meeting? Even yesterday it would have been inconceivable that she should doubt him. But now…Unexpectedly, it had started to rain. Zoe liked rain. It reminded her of Europe, the razor's edge, life lived to the hilt.

‘But that's wrong,' she said suddenly. ‘What I was just saying. What would being understood do for you, if
still
you didn't have your way? It only matters that
you
should work out how to accept changes you don't like.'

Drying and stacking plates, Lily looked mulish. ‘Easy to say. Why should I?'

Zoe refrained from swearing. ‘Because you must. You haven't been singled out. I must. Russell must. Everyone has to, sooner or later. We all misjudge things, all make mistakes. And if you aren't understood, you're not unique in that!' The awareness that she was trying to argue Lily into an attitude she had failed to achieve herself was not helpful. ‘You could only have had your way at the expense of Vanessa and Caroline, and that wouldn't have pleased you. So don't try to spread the punishment round by destroying yourself. Because that's what you're doing.'

In a chastened voice, Lily said, ‘It was so unexpected.'

For a minute or so, they both attended fiercely to unimportant tasks with taps, crumbs and tea towels, then they went inside to Zoe's work room and she flung her arms up as though to cast off physically so much preoccupation and unhappiness. ‘Anyway, it isn't the end of you. Nothing's been taken away from you. You've probably been added unto.' She spoke with a sort of mesmerising conviction to cover what might be a large piece of misinformation. ‘Experience! That's what you're here for.'

Laughing, Lily sank back into the sofa. ‘Thanks for the news! I've often wondered.' Her expression had undergone a subtle change. She began to look relaxed, as though the obsession that was her illness had started to retreat. Catching the sound of its withdrawal, she declared, ‘I might survive yet.'

‘Please do! Because look at all this work!' Zoe gave the desk and its deep papers an anxious glance. ‘Oh,
let's
sell the Bureau, Lily.' They exchanged a hopeful look, and within three minutes had worked out the campaign for its disposal, and Lily agreed that she would go back to university to teach, learn, or sweep, if necessary.

‘We can announce all this at your birthday dinner,' Zoe said when they parted. ‘With everyone assembled—Stephen back from Melbourne, and Anna home, too.'

On the bus, a dark-haired girl opposite Zoe nursed a plump and beautiful baby boy. Now and then she would snatch his right hand in hers and give it a smacking kiss. Sometimes she kissed the top of his head—another explosive sound. Magnanimously, the baby sat on her lap permitting these tributes while he watched everything in front of him with the intelligent detachment of a well-fed king.