In Certain Circles (3 page)

His face looked suddenly very tired. His whole attitude was one of exhaustion. Yet twenty-three, though moderately old, was not old.

Turning abruptly, Zoe called to her mother, ‘Should I ask Mrs Perkins about lunch?'

Mrs Howard received the signal of distress. ‘Anna and I are going in. We'll call you in a minute.'

So Zoe laboured along with her brother's friend. ‘What were you and Russell talking about when he went away?

Stephen smiled. ‘Relativity. Have you done that?'

She gave him a glance full of aversion. She had never been baited, never been blamed for the state of the world, never been scorned like this. A flash of apricot fur caught her eye. ‘There's Marmalade digging up the garden. I'll have to go. Don't come into the sun unless you want to.'

From the scraping sound of his chair behind her as she ran down the steps, he wanted to. But the relief of escaping from him! Already Marmalade had vanished, but two of her mother's new plants, whatever they were, had been mangled. She pressed them back into the earth and spread out their wilting leaves. Well, she would keep this creature in the sun till he collapsed, if he followed her, even if it meant getting sunburnt herself. Hearing him approach over the grass, she turned reluctantly, and they watched each other till he reached her side.

‘I've seen you somewhere,' he said. ‘Or a photograph.'

Zoe thought dully, staring at him, trying to gauge the nature of this new attack. ‘A month ago I won a competition. There was a photograph in the
Herald
. Or at a party or something.' She trailed off. She couldn't imagine him scanning the social pages, and the winning of competitions clearly had no interest for the gallant Stephen.

‘Probably it.'

They sauntered back towards the house, breathing the moist, salty, scented air.

‘Your visitors, Zoe!' Russell came down to meet them, and she ran off ahead, saying, ‘I'd forgotten. I'm going out for lunch.'

Dinah and Tony and Philip stood about talking to Mr and Mrs Howard. Dinah was a friend from school. The young men were law students, and famous as football players. Zoe heard Russell explaining this to Stephen as she joined them again after a swift change of clothing. Certainly, their physical splendour needed some explanation. Inches over six feet, with heavy faces, heavy locks of hair—Zoe saw them as Greek warriors, or lovers, or athletes, on the frieze of some Ionian temple. Her esteem reached its peak when they were out on the field. Her eyes could never decide whether their running or their standing, poised to take a goal, thrilled her more.

Off
the field, well, off the field, they still looked like heroes, but were as complex as a comic strip. Conventional. Ordinary. In spite of their looks. (She had just realised it.) They had the usual predatory view of Zoe, and no very strong hold on her affections. She had never thought of them so coldly as today, yet today she would willingly have gone to live with both of them at the same time.

With a sort of spite, she put her right hand in Tony's hand, and her left arm about Philip's waist. This was noticed. Laughing, the four young ones ran down the path to the gate beyond which stood two scarlet MGs.

Pausing to look back where the house and her family and those disagreeable orphans were invisible now behind the trees, Zoe felt a pang in her chest that made her sigh. Philip looked down. ‘Out of breath,' she explained, smiling up at him.

Before either orphan reappeared at the Howards' house, Zoe had wrested the story of his meeting with them, and their life history, from Russell.

‘Lie on the beach with me. Talk to me. In a few weeks I'll be so busy. There'll be a thousand people all over the house today. You'd only be collared and bored.' She said carefully, ‘Your company means more to me than it does to anyone else,' then added for form's sake, ‘Except Lily, I suppose.'

‘
Yes
. Which I'd have said sooner, had that been humanly possible.'

They smiled.

‘But pack us some lovely grub, Zo, and we needn't come back.'

So they lay on the beach. Since his return from the camp, after obligatory sessions with the doctors, Russell had eaten and exercised with a kind of purposeful dedication that no one could comment on. Zoe looked at her brother. He was slim, athletic, of medium height. At this early age, his brown hair was greying. He had his mother's pleasantly irregular features—high cheekbones, a slightly aquiline nose, and a large mouth with very white even teeth. His legs were scarred, and the scars on his back were visible as he stretched out on the sand in black swimming shorts. ‘Ulcers,' he had said, once and for all. Zoe had learned to see these marks not only without appearing to, but really, without thinking or feeling.

She served out cold chicken and salad. ‘But how did you meet the Quayles?' she demanded. ‘Anna's nice, but he's so—weird.'

‘No. What did he say to you?' Russell considered his plate with interest.

‘It wasn't what he
said
…He asked if I'd done relativity.'

Russell opened his eyes at her, and she had to laugh, and scrutinise them as she often did. His eyes were luminous, a brilliant blue.

‘Relativity! That could be his idea of small talk. Meeting just happened.'

Going by train to a suburb an hour out of town, visiting the wife of a friend who had died in the camp, he travelled in a carriage with someone who later turned out to be Stephen Quayle. A mysterious halt between stations prolonged itself to the point where his companion was forced to look up from his book. Russell was seen twisting his neck to read the title, because no line of print offering itself in that vacuum could go unread.

‘Relativity?' Zoe bit without appetite at her chicken.

‘That's not the
only
thing he's interested in. This was Catholicism, existentialism.'

‘Is he one?'

‘Not Stephen.'

Parting finally at the station, they had met again for dinner in town at night, and adjourned to Stephen's room near the city to continue the talk.

About to object, ‘But you have so many friends. Why pick up this salesman for conversation?' Zoe stopped. None of this was true. Too many of his friends were dead. She should try to be pleased at this sign that he was willing to start again, she told herself.

‘Has he been away?'

‘He wasn't passed. Eyes.'

The two men had met three times before the Quayles visited Russell at home and met his family. Anna had been brought along because it happened to be a Saturday when Stephen was due to take her out: she still lived with the uncle and aunt who were her legal guardians, and Stephen saw her once a fortnight.

Their father had come to Australia from England to negotiate a contract and to establish a new branch for the engineering company that employed him. He met a girl—Stephanie Boyd—at a dinner party in Sydney and married her a month later. When Stephen was seven or eight, and Anna a few months old, their parents were killed in a level-crossing accident.

‘Their car hit by a train? They must have been so young,' Zoe argued in dismay, looking at Russell, wanting him to change his story.

He raised his shoulders and lowered them. He leaned across to the basket and threw some chicken bones into an empty container.

‘Were the children in the car?'

‘I think so. I don't know. I didn't ask for a diagram. You don't ask people to go into detail, Zo.'

She peeled a banana and ate a bite slowly. ‘Were they nice—his mother and father?' She inspected his face. ‘He showed you photographs of them. What were they like?'

Clambering up, rubbing his chest and shoulders free of sand, Russell said, ‘You and Lily. You can both exercise second sight. You don't need me around. I'll just—have a swim, while you…'

‘Ha ha!' But she had gone too far, tramped about, guessing so accurately. They knew each other well. He was going away, pounding down to the water, receding, receding, like a moving exercise in perspective.

You're good, she declared in her mind, as she looked stony-faced at the place where he had disappeared into the flat green water. Though she realised that that, like the scars and so much else, was not to be thought of, either. Rolling over, she picked herself up and ran down to the water.

Fifteen minutes later, they returned together to their basket, umbrella, books and sandals, shining, dripping, gasping for breath.

‘Best swim for years,' Russell said, drying himself off, spreading his towel out and lying down again.

‘You say that every time. I wish they'd put up a shark net. Finish off about your awful friend.' Zoe achieved a tone of exceeding neutrality.

Russell turned and looked at where she sat leaning forward over her outstretched legs appraising her knees as though they were valuable merchandise. She said, ‘Go on. I'm all ears.'

‘He's a funny cove. I like him. One of these days we might go into business together.'

‘Business? What sort of business? You'd give everything away.'

‘Wait and see.' He fixed his gaze on her. ‘Do you want to hear more or not?'

‘Please.' She sat meek and still, imitating a very good girl.

After the accident, the Quayle children were taken in by their mother's brother, a middle-aged solicitor, and his wife. Their father's brother, a London bachelor, wrote and sent money, and it was agreed that the children should stay where they were. But in spite of the contribution from England, they were in no way well provided for. The Quayles had lived to the limit of their income, in the knowledge of substantial prosperity to come. The company was an international one, and Quayle was highly regarded; anyone would have said his expectations were well-founded. He had laid no plans for something as unlikely as his own early death.

The uncle at Parramatta, Charles Boyd, was as concerned for his two wards as any childless man with a neurasthenic wife could be expected to be. He hoped the children would be an interest for Nicole, and improve her state of mind. She had been so shorn of tasks and responsibilities when it had occurred to him that social life was perhaps the cause of her many deep but indefinable troubles that her life was left utterly idle but no less beset by misery.

There was always some helper in the house—housekeeper, nurse—but none stayed long. It was to this chain of strangers that the children had to look for company and comfort. Their uncle was preoccupied with work and with his wife. Her melancholy and her moods had cowed him. He longed for peace, gave her her way, and had no peace.

Sometimes there would be an economy campaign: electricity would be saved, food and hot water and cleaning materials watched with a frenzied vigilance. Then there would be wild demented spending on clothes that were never worn; on clocks, rugs, cutlery, for a house already over-supplied with such items. Sometimes the children were bought hand-stitched garments, while necessities were not recognised as such by the hysterical and increasingly despotic Nicole. The rights and preferences of other adults, of two children who belonged to no one, vanished behind the doors of the handsome old brick house. Nicole was so very strange, if thwarted.

At first a nurse was hired to look after Anna. Then when she was old enough, she was sent to a nursery. Stephen went to a local school. He and his sister learned to be silent within miles of their aunt. They were obliged to think about her constantly, because it seemed that their survival depended on it.

Zoe said, ‘Parramatta. That dull, dry, flat, hot place,
and
an aunt who's insane. Even I feel sorry for them.'

‘Though he did ask you awkward questions?'

Impatiently, Zoe rattled her hands at him. ‘What then? Anna's still there? Is it still the same?'

‘So I gather.'

‘And when did Stephen go? As soon as the legal age, I suppose. But why to this ghastly dead-end thing? If his uncle's a solicitor, couldn't he have arranged something better? He's probably good at everything.'

‘He's bright enough,' Russell agreed. ‘But there wasn't any money.'

Zoe looked as if she had never heard of it.

‘Economics,' Russell continued. ‘His uncle was no help. He's addled his wits by trying to think like
her
for years.'

‘What? Is he mad, too?'

Eyeing her, Russell saw that she sounded more flippant than she was. ‘He's wiped out. Exhausted. You can't humour someone out of a psychosis.'

Grabbing her dark wet hair fiercely in two hands, Zoe twisted it round, held the end on top of her head with her left hand while she searched for and found a tortoiseshell clip in her bag. She fixed it in place. ‘I asked Stephen about scholarships, but he passed it off.'

‘There weren't many even a few years ago. Different days. And nowhere to study.'

‘But if the house was so quiet?'

Russell sat up. ‘You must have got left over from the Spanish Inquisition. Throw me an apple.'