Audrey concentrated on economics: the wastefulness of eating out amplified by the extravagance of neighbourhood shopping. Did Iris realise the delicatessen was run by Jews? She possessed the despot’s talent for representing oppression as benevolence, and was herself entirely swayed by the performance. The pain she suffered at the prospect of Iris squandering her resources was genuine; but its source, the bid for independence she sensed in her sister-in-law’s plan, exceeded her diagnostic skills.
It was a pattern repeated in Audrey’s dealings with all she encountered. In the theatre of her mind, as in the classical drama, brutality occurred offstage. What was on view, above all to herself, was only the aftermath of invisible carnage. So Tom observed, with the cold-eyed scrutiny of adolescence. It left him resolved to be clear about motive. Which, admirable when directed inwards, strengthened his cynicism about motive in others.
That was the impress his aunt left on the minds around her. Audrey had the inquisitorial approach to innocence: subjected to enough stress, it was bound to crack.
Sixteen-year-old Tom, dazzled by Julie Vogel who had just started at the newsagent’s, discovered in himself the desire for new plumage. He bought a T-shirt: rich blue, trimmed with scarlet at the neck and sleeves. It was a garment pleasing in form and hue. It would in any case have drawn his aunt’s eye, for everything the Loxleys acquired was by definition not Audrey’s and therefore resented.
‘That’s a nice T-shirt, Tommy. Looks expensive.’
‘Four bucks.’ Tom’s thoughts were busy with the golden Vogel but he knew what was required, Audrey pricing every item that entered the Loxley household.
‘That’s good value for money. Where’d you get it?’
He told her.
‘I might get one for Shona. Did they have other colours?’
‘I think. Yeah.’
‘Do they come in girls’ sizes?’ Then, with a bright little peal, ‘Although you could hardly be called manly.’
The annexe was reached by a path that led past dwarf conifers and a yellow-flecked shrub before turning down the side of Audrey’s house. The next day, approaching an open window in soundless sneakers, Tom heard his name.
‘. . . conveniently vague. I could tell at once he was lying. So I took the bus up there this morning, and sure enough they were five dollars. Five, not four. He’s been out of the house, avoiding me, all day.’
The boy turned and went out again into the street. There was the summer evening smell of barbecued flesh. Minutes before, he had been joyful: for Julie had smiled at him when he bought a green biro from her; and again when the newsagent’s closed and she emerged to see him absorbed in a window where teddy bears and bootees were displayed. He had made up his mind to speak to her the next day. Now he was trembling. The gulf between his feelings for shining-haired Julie, the image to him of all that was pure and fine, and his aunt’s caricature of his soul was hideous. In that chasm he glimpsed the edge of his species’ capacity for needless harm.
Anger quivered up through his body, liquid rising to the boil. He raged at his mother in an undertone. ‘We’ve got to get out. I can’t stand it any longer. She’s such a bitch.’
‘Don’t use that language, child.’
‘It’s Audrey’s language you should worry about. Calling me a liar. Sneaking around, checking up on me. I don’t know why those T-shirts were five dollars today. I paid four. I’ve had it with her. I’m going to bloody tell her so.’
‘Don’t upset her, Tommy. What will happen if she gets angry with us?’
‘We’ll be rid of her and this dump for good.’
It ended the usual way, with Iris in tears.
Now and then Tom would stand before his aunt, his voice rising in denunciation. There would follow a period of intricate punishment for Iris. Before giving herself over to those slower pleasures, Audrey would observe, with mingled triumph and righteousness, that if, after everything she had done, matters were not to the Loxleys’ satisfaction, they were always free to leave. It was, she assured them, no skin off her nose.
But who voluntarily relinquishes a victim? In the wake of an argument, Audrey related stories of perverts who preyed on widows; circled reports of inflationary rents and extortionate landlords in the newspaper she passed on to the Loxleys.
After Iris was made redundant at the department store, Bill found her a job cleaning offices. She rose in black dawns and dressed before a single-bar radiator in a series of muffled clicks and taps, so as not to wake Tommy, a presence sensed rather than seen in musty darkness traversed on her way to the door. At the corner of the street it might occur to her to doubt whether she had switched off the radiator; there followed agonising indecision over returning to check or missing her tram.
There was fear, and its twin, safety; their relationship was mirrored, fluid. Iris looked out of the window of the tram and saw the compartment in which she sat hovering golden and unfinished in the dark street, inhabited briefly by towers or trees. She shifted on her seat, giving a little expert kick at a nylon or trousered shin in the process. The ensuing interlude of apology and forgiveness confirmed her anchorage in the world.
Her knees held up until the day after Tom was awarded a university scholarship. At least now he was off her hands, as Audrey said, reducing Tom to a stubborn stain.
Iris had been taught to darn by French nuns, but that was scarcely a marketable asset in an economy where the notion of mending rather than replacing was already as quaint as madrigals.
In India, finding herself in need, she would have had recourse to a web of human relationships. Here goodwill, or at least obligation, was impersonal and administrative, though no less grudged. She was grateful for sickness benefits; later, for the pension. A savings account hoarded every spare cent. She did not wish to be a burden. It was one of Audrey’s mantras: I wouldn’t want to be a burden. Love was represented as a load; one saw tiny figures broken-backed under monstrous cargos.
Iris took comfort in having a roof over her head. It was a phrase she liked; it brought to mind the plump-thighed cherubim on her father’s vaulted ceilings. Beyond it lay
Australia: boundless, open to the sky. ‘As long as we stay with Audrey, we have a roof over our heads.’ ‘What can go wrong if you have a roof over your head?’
‘It can fall in and crush you,’ said Tom.
Towards the end of her son’s last year at school, Iris spoke now and then of renting a flat with him after his exams. The idea was vague and constituted nothing like a plan; it was also what Tom had urged on her in the past, seeing in his mind a bare space that was his alone. A compact, neat teenager, he had blundered, again and again, into the clutter of the annexe, his shins encountering varnished wood, his knuckles grazing a long-necked, stoppered bottle of warty yellow glass, an object both ugly and useless. At night, when he lay swaddled before the TV’s grey eye with the metal underpinnings of his sofa bed ridging his spine, a room—lofty, pale-walled, floored with grooved boards—formed in his mind.
In those years all his unadulterated energy was spent on the captive’s instinctive lunge towards light and air. Books furnished him with a daily, spacious refuge. Later, looking back, he would see swift water widening; his mother a diminished figure on the shore.
By the time Tom’s university offer came through, Iris had become part of what he was intent on leaving. Of this small, cataclysmic shift in his thinking he was unaware. All the same, a lie slid polished from his tongue. He told Iris that his scholarship was conditional on his moving into student housing; ‘a university regulation’. When he had lifted the last carton of books into a friend’s car and kissed his mother—‘So long, Ma!’—he was light-headed with the sense of having got away with something.
On the day before he moved out, Tom waited until he was alone in the annexe. Then he carried the hated yellow bottle into the kitchen. There he broke its neck. When Iris returned, he told her he had accidentally smashed the bottle when packing. The pieces of thick glass, wrapped in newspaper, were already in the pedal bin. But he had removed the leaf-shaped stopper before hitting the bottle against the sink, and had somehow failed to dispose of it. Thereafter, whenever he opened a certain drawer in his mother’s kitchen he would see a malicious amber eye lolling among place mats and paper napkins.
In the last weeks of their shared life, Iris suddenly said, ‘When you were small you used to follow me everywhere. In and out of rooms all day.’ She must have been to the hairdresser that morning because Tom could still remember the brownish smears of dye on the tops of her ears. He had refrained from remarking on them, pleased with this proof of his restraint.
I
NFORMED AT
last that the dog was lost, Iris said, ‘I’m very sorry to hear that.’ She spoke formally; the calamity might have befallen an Australian.
Tom, having dreaded a storm, was goaded by calm.
The contrary arithmetic of his relations with Iris converted it at once into lack of feeling, and added up to the need for brutishness. So that he paused, in the act of serving out his mother’s lunch, and said, ‘He’s probably dead, you realise. Choked to death on his lead. Or run over.’
‘Ah,’ said Iris. And with quickened interest, ‘Don’t serve so much.’
‘Christ! Can’t you think of anything but yourself for a minute? And what does it matter if there’s too much? Just leave what you don’t want.’
Her filmy eyes rose to his face. She had the familiar sensation of striving to decipher a riddle in a foreign language; failure meant Tommy would be angry. The small hillock of saffron rice surmounted by curries and surrounded by pickles had brought to mind a white-haired skull protruding from mud-coloured rags on a pavement, an image glimpsed and only half understood in childhood. It had floated to the surface of her thoughts buoyed by the word
waste
.
Tom found his tongue stuck to his palate. Lowering it unclenched his jaw. He set his mother’s laden plate before her, having thwarted the impulse to do so with force. ‘I’m just worried about what might have happened,’ he said. He was accustomed to knowing better than his mother, so apology was not a coin readily available to their commerce.
Iris picked up her spoon and fork and began to eat. Some minutes later, halfway through a mouthful, ‘I have my unfailing prayer to Saint Anthony,’ she said.
The Meg Ryan video in front of which his mother was dozing after lunch penetrated Tom’s study in irritating little swells. He opened and shut drawers, at last finding the earplugs in a hollow glass cube that held paperclips and stamps.
The familiar contention that modernity is concerned with
the differentiation and autonomisation of the aesthetic sphere
. . . Tom switched on a lamp, as the afternoon darkened. Light lay obliquely on a page, highlighting dull prose with gold.
He was reading the lectureship application sent in by a recent DPhil from Bristol, who had appended a strenuous article on Edith Wharton to her CV. She had only one refereed publication and minimal teaching experience. But she was the student of a famous James scholar, a woman who wielded academic power. Tom thought of his book; of the weight the Englishwoman’s endorsement would carry with publishers.
After a while he realised he had stopped reading and was constructing a tale. ‘Nelly and I go looking for him whenever we go up there. Oh, I know it’s hopeless now. Not knowing what happened is the worst thing. But I tell myself he was doing what he loved best, following a scent.’
This fiction, queasy with the play of desire and disloyalty, was interrupted by a specific memory: the dog, plumed tail held high, absorbed in tracking a moth around the room, breathing on it.
Internal windows in Tom’s study gave onto a narrow sunroom, where a long, gridded window overlooked the yard. The effect, when he looked up from his desk, was of a bright, pictorial glow ruled with black; a Mondrian fashioned from iron and light. The impression of clean modernity carried through to his study, a geometric, dustless space. Here books were ranked like soldiers on dark metal shelving that rose against pale walls. Lamps leaned at acute angles. Surfaces gleamed. There was a rug from Isfahan on the boarded floor, its pink and slaty blues smudged with white, for naturally the dog was in the habit of singling out its sumptuousness, and Tom could not at present bring himself to rid the room of that animal residue.
He was, in any case, habitually tolerant of traces of the dog’s passing, of grit, earth, fur, a warm, sweetish reek. His forbearance had called forth the light mockery of his wife; for the streak of dried sauce Karen left on a kitchen counter or the pink-stained toothpaste she neglected to swill from the washbasin were tiny barbs on which Tom’s temper quickly unravelled.
His disgust was disproportionate, its blossoming rooted in childhood. In scrubbed Australia children know the causal chain that links dirt and disease as a cautionary tale. In India, the word was made flesh. Skin peeled, or flared with ominous pigmentations; burst to reveal its satiny red lining shot through with gold. Distended or racked bodies were everywhere on public view. Even a child’s eye could perceive the fatal, webbed relation between the flies sipping at a sore and the black crust that crawled over sweetmeats on a stall.
Therefore years later Tom recoiled from dishes accumulating in the sink; from the clotted handkerchief his fingers encountered under a pillow.
Around the time of his thirtieth birthday, he grew conscious that the narrowing of his life had begun. Karen and he still took pleasure in each other’s company, sought it in each other’s flesh. They were working hard, starting to make money. But from time to time there would swim into Tom’s mind a page from a book he had owned when very young. Within the book, paper tabs could be pulled or rotated to bring illustrations to life. One of them had stirred the child’s imagination with special pungency. It showed a cottage with two front doors set in a garden filled with flowers and birds. A tab on the left flipped open the corresponding door and pushed out an apple-cheeked boy in blue breeches; the right-hand tab produced a girl in a gingham pinafore.