The Tiger in the Tiger Pit (2 page)

Bessie came into the room, shuffle shuffle in her tireless slippers, blundering intruder in life aud memories.

“So much to do,” she sighed as mildly and maddeningly as she had done on that long-gone unforgotten evening, that other infringement. “Getting the rooms ready for everyone. And Jason might come a day early with Victoria”

Damned celebration. He wished he had put his foot down. He wished he had forbidden her to issue invitations. He was terrified of finding out who would not come.

“I don't want any of you badgering me. Get your hands off me, you interfering old woman.”

“Do be calm, Edward.” She tied a towel around his neck and put his shaving kit and a bowl of water on the table beside his chair. Insults, insults. The indignity of age! He gestured angrily with his arm and the bowl went spinning into the air, the hot water leaving it and rising intact, a crystal bird. Sounds: of shattering, of splashing, of a cry of pain.

“I didn't want to shave.” Exonerating himself “I don't intend to shave again.”

“Does that include Sunday?” For a second, phosphorescence leaped from her eyes like marsh fire. Perhaps he imagined it. She was wrapping a towel around her hand, picking up pieces of the bowl, her eyes lowered. “You wish to be seen with stubble?”

It was not natural, her calm. It was perverse. It suggested a dimming of intelligence.

“Sunday,” he mumbled, ambiguously.

“Fifty years,” she said, enticing him. “It's a milestone nobody ignores. The whole family coming home. It's a ritual event. Like marriages and christenings and funerals.”

Privately he thought: funerals indeed. I should be struck dead for choosing fifty years of this.

But he did at least deserve an award for staying power.

“At the very least,Edward, we should celebrate our endurance.”

He looked at her in surprise. What cause had she to complain? Had he not stayed to honour and protect when he might have been blown away on a hurricane of passion? But of course she had never known that.

“Remember when the Pritchards had theirs? Three generations, all those grandchildren …?” She faltered.

“Hah!” he said savagely. “Something peculiar about
our
golden years, isn't there? Not a marriage in sight. Not a single grandchild — unless you count Emily's bastard.”

He did not know why he was doomed to say these things lately, he who had never let an improper word pass his lips in all his years of public office, he who would consent to walk peaceably into the valley of the shadow if only his grandson came. Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen …

Bessie said quietly: “Marriage is neither here nor there these days, Edward.”

Surely the woman could tell he yearned to see Adam. She had lived with him fifty years, she ought to know what too many years of being a school principal required of him. They had all behaved abominably, hiding from him for all those years the birth of his only grandchild. When they finally told him, after Emily's concert in New York, he had been trapped into ultimatums. Bessie had flown to England for the boy's seventh birthday. He had not been invited. He would not ask. He would not give in.

“You should think of Jason's Ruth as a daughter-in-law” Bessie said. “They've been together a number of years.”

“No hope of a grandchild there. That colourless woman is drying up faster than a pumpkin seed.”

“Edward,” she said, warning him.

They never could discuss Jason.

Or Victoria.

Or Emily

Or anything.

Does the boy look like me? he longed to ask but could not. He could not ask whether Emily would bring him with her.

Bessie said nothing.

But he knew what would happen. They would keep Adam from him, knowing he was desperate to see the child. They were punishing him because life had required him to be unbending, a bastion of the moral code and the old verities. They would let him die with an unbearable ache in the gut, a petered out line, a dead name.

The old man pushed his splayed hands against the screen like a prisoner in agony.

The tiger in the tiger pit, he snarled to himself, is not more irritable than I.

II Elizabeth

What a mess! she thought. Though I suppose I've always had blood on my hands and been bloody-minded.

Perhaps the composition she was working on, final movement of a family symphony, was the bloodiest work of all.

She did not really believe this, though heaven knew all the evidence pointed to disaster. With a pair of tweezers, she picked needles of shaving bowl out of the gash in her hand, then held it under running water in the kitchen sink. The ending would be harmonious because she willed it so, she would write it that way, in the face of all the dissonance that had gone before. She sometimes thought she was infected with hope the way other seventy-year-old women suffered from perpetual chills.

Her hand was clear for a moment, white. Then the cut reappeared like a tracing on a map, diagonally across her palm, right in the crease of the life line. When she moved her thumb it opened like a mouth and drooled blood. Irritating. One of those surface slashes that take for ever to stop bleeding.

In a copper pan hanging on the wall she caught sight of her face, out of focus, elongated by the dimples of beaten metal.

Ah Grandma, she sighed theatrically. What hollow cheeks you have!

All the better to remind you, Elizabeth dear, that we're into the final movement, she made her reflection reply. And it had better be good. You had better make it work.

Easy to say, old copperface. But there's risk involved. We both know there's just as likely to be carnage.

It would start with Edward and Jason, words crossing like daggers. Then Tory would become so agitated that Edward would spit thunder. Which would cause Emily to flee in panic with Adam.

None of this would help. It would render no one's years golden. It would do nothing for the children; would be an appalling thing for Adam to witness. Exactly what Emily would be thinking, of course. (Without question the major difficulty: getting Emily and Adam to come. Her letter, a guerrilla tactic on whose content and timing she had expended weeks of thought, might still not be enough. She would need Jason's help.)

Her reflection stared at her with the sombre authority of a copper funeral mask, its eye sockets black and shadowy: Are you sure you know what you're doing, Elizabeth? Do we really need this? Shouldn't we drift on in the more or less comfortable present, puttering in the garden in the morning, reading to him after lunch, playing the piano in the evenings? Coaxing him into serenity, tempting him with the little pleasures of each day, maundering toward death like two indolent after-dinner drowsers.

Not sure, never sure I know what I'm doing, copperface, but it has to be done. Not for me, but for them. She pointed an accusing finger at her shadow-self: You conceived this family gone so badly out of tune. Fix it.

Her finger made a red smear on the bottom of the pan. She had forgotten about her hand which was sloppy with blood again. Lifting it to her face, she drew rouge-apples on her cheeks. Like a clown. She grimaced. Leered. Stuck her tongue out at herself. Dipped her finger in the palette of her palm and painted a banana grin around her lips. Laughed.

Frowned with disapproval.

She said sternly: I find you guilty of appalling frivolity, clownface. Copper, copper, on the wall, who is the guiltiest bitch of all?

She struck the metal with her knuckles and it answered her like a gong: Ask not for whom the frying pan tolls. You are guilty, Elizabeth, guilty. You have committed levity and wilful presentness.

She knew it; always subject to the moment. Anything could waylay her — the texture of blood; the shape of spilled water; patterns in shaving foam; an earthworm in the garden; a Mozart sonata she might play for hours, forgetting Edward's dinner. He lived, had always lived, somewhere other than the present. Once it had been in the future; now it was in the past. And for fifty years she had tried to beguile him with
today
— which inhabited her like an army of occupation. The inexhaustible variety of living, the sights, sounds, smells, chance encounters, the letters from England and New York and Australia, the bizarre cavalcade of human activity spilling out of newspapers: cornucopias of amazing event.

But it was more than this. She veered away from the past the way moths at the penultimate moment glance off the lamp that obsesses them. For fear of scorching. For fear that if she looked at it with the naked eye, she would be blinded. She feasted her eyes and stuffed her ears with the now in order to shut out the wolf howl of yesterday's griefs. As for the future, she had always been so impossibly sanguine about it, no thought in that direction seemed necessary.

Blood was dribbling down her wrist and absent-mindedly she wiped it with a kitchen towel and wrapped the towel loosely around her hand. She wandered into the living room and sat on the stool in front of the grand piano, dreaming out through the French windows: the gazebo, the greenery, the lilacs waited as always, composing themselves for her as though for a photographer's coffee-table book. It was difficult, with such a daily view, to believe that the drift of things would be other than benign. Without being conscious of her movements, she put the crumpled towel on top of the piano and began to play.

She played the family. An adagio for Victoria, a dark piece, haunted and mad. Broadening into long tranquil cadences, sweet with melancholy. (She loved to sit with her daughter in the gardens of her various institutions; they would thread flowers together while Tory ranted poetry or sang nursery rhymes.) This was one of her sins: the pleasure she took in Tory as Tory was, when no doubt anguish and guilt were more appropriate. Except that those goads — in which the others all wallowed — afflicted Tory like arrows. If Tory could come home and be at peace … They would sit in the gazebo together, she would hold Tory's hand and read her stories.

If Tory could come home. Possible only if the furies in Edward could be lulled. She played the taming of furies, the casting out of demons. She circled him with Adam, an intrusion of grace notes.

An allegro for Jason, the phrases restless, full of syncopation and discord. (Jason her well-beloved, who wore life like a hair shirt.) There were double pianissimo sections, fractured, but whispering of old intimacies. (Perhaps she had damaged him with closeness, with too much responsibility.) She wound the discordant strands into harmony, a soft coda. This was what she yearned for.

Emily: a scherzo life. (The one who escaped, but who, like the dove from the ark, fluttered across the breast of the waters finding nowhere to rest.) She played runs and arpeggios and the melody seemed scattered beyond the recognising, a keyboard hide-and-seek. But sneaking up from the left hand came a persistent theme and it infiltrated the flighty right-hand phrases, subsuming them into its orbit. She played the homecoming of Emily and Adam, a stasis of chords.

In the final movement, a slow rich one, a resolution of all themes, they were all present and at peace, old and young in one another's arms. It will happen that way she thought, her hands still resting on the keyboard. I'll write it that way.

She wondered idly why there were smudges of red ink on some of the keys and rubbed at them with a towel that had been left on the piano. Perhaps it was time to see if Edward wanted morning tea. She passed the hallway mirror where a garish clown's face startled her. She widened her eyes at it for a moment, shook her head at it.

Really, Elizabeth, she sighed. You're crowding the stage. You'll blow your cover. It's Bessie he's expecting. You want to precipitate another heart attack?

In the bathroom she washed her face and bandaged her hand. There was a watch on the side of the basin. Hers. Must have left it there earlier in the morning. According to the watch, it was a few minutes after one. In the afternoon presumably. Surely not? Had she forgotten his lunch?

He was drowsing in his chair, a hand on the windowsill, the head sagging on one shoulder. Like a skeleton daubed with clothes. Or perhaps a small tangle of barbed wire, braced against the marauder happiness in whatever stray guises it might stalk him in sleep.

She stood watching. If she could just bundle up his spikiness in her arms and croon away the jagged edges. It was this conspiracy that absorbed her, to sabotage him with contentment before the end. She remembered that it was essential to put a call through to Jason. Now. Before she forgot again, or dreamed that she had done it. She went downstairs and called him at his New York office.

“How is he?” Jason asked,

“Grumbling about it. But not actually refusing to let it take place. I haven't heard from Emily yet. I'm counting on you, Jason.”

“I'll call her tonight. And you, Mother, how
are
you?”

“I'm fine, of course, darling. I'm excited really”

“I hope you won't be disappointed”

“You think I'm bound to be. But you're wrong. I sense it somehow.”

“It would be nice if you were right”

“Bye, darling.”

“Bye, Mother”

Yes, she thought, climbing the stairs again. It would indeed be nice. And she would be right.

He was still drowsing.

From the awkward set of his shoulder, she knew he would wake with pain. She crossed the room in slippered feet and eased a cushion behind his neck. He stirred, whimpered
Bessie
in his sleep, groped vaguely and made contact with her arm, the trusting gesture of a child. Half woke then, grumbled, threw the cushion on the floor, slithered back into his nap.

Elizabeth smiled. Wryly. Affectionately. A mother acknowledging bratty behaviour and indulging it. For a moment she laid her cheek against his. Then she eased herself on to the windowsill, leaning lightly against the moulding and crossing her arms. Still smiling, she observed him calmly: the air of a magician with an ace up her sleeve.