The Tiger in the Tiger Pit (24 page)

There had always been safe places and safe people. Her bedroom had been a secure island, even Father would never come in without permission. There were those rare moments when Father had held her and pledged protection. And Mother — Mother's love was like an umbrella, a safe cloak, it was always there — except that it was also likely to spring holes when rain began. When Emily was little … and when Jason held her hand she had always been safe … and when Adam did.

And there had been the other best time, the golden time, when her young man held her in his arms. She could not remember his name. She had to swim through many caves to find him because she kept that picture in the furthest one, in a locked chest smothered with crustacean growth. Sometimes, not very often, she swam there and unlocked the chest and took it out and looked at it, her icon.

In the picture he was visible only as a radiance that enveloped her, but she could feel again the silk of his skin. She called him Gabriel because of the brush of wings, light as eyelashes or angel's feathers, on her breasts and thighs. Gentleness came from him like an aura, and absolute peace and safety. But always, as soon as she felt him like a swollen arrow filling up her emptiness, the cave water would churn with predators: bloodied shark jaws and octopi squirting foulness over his beautiful golden body.

She was always afraid she would not get him back into the locked chest, that even this glimpse of him would be taken from her for ever. She would vow never to disturb the memory again. Just to know it was there, not looked at, would be sufficient.

But today, as she sat with Jason on the third top step, Gabriel swam unbidden from his cave, he glided around her, he would not consent to being locked up again. His presence filled the house, she could hear the beat of his wings. Danger, she signalled. Danger! You must fold yourself up and become invisible.

He did not seem to care, his vulnerable golden skin exposed all over again to whatever might happen out there.

“Shall we go outside now, Tory?”

“I can't, Jason. I can't.”

“Just for a few minutes. To say hello to everyone. I'll hold your hand. No one will hurt you, I promise”

Emily ladled punch. She made small talk. Yes, she did remember the school play in 1957. And now Maureen was living in Houston, married to a NASA expert, and had three daughters! How time flies! Oh yes, she expected there would be more concerts in New York. And Boston too. No, for the time being England was the most suitable … Yes, it was a shame his grandparents saw so little of him … the price of a concert career … Actually no, she was living alone at present … Oh of course, one always dreamed of Ashville, the old home, the old friends, but one can't, as they say, go home again … Yes, Tory would be down presently; a strain for her, yes, of course … but as well as could be expected … yes, how kind of you …

She looked up at the house and saw her family entire, in one glance. The French windows reflecting the gazebo and herself; in front of them her son and her father on the porch swing. Her mother's face was pressed against the windows from the inside (as always remembered), a disembodied head superimposed on Emily's own shadowy image. They were all contained — her parents, her son, and herself — by the mirrored gazebo, raffish under its dishevelled strands of honeysuckle, an oddly
décoiffé
Medusa-like frame for a family portrait. And above its reflected finial, at an upstairs window, like the eye of God in illuminated manuscripts: Tory Behind her, Jason.

All present, real and surreal, merging and swaying apart. If Magritte were to depict The Family, its symbiotic layers and floating detachments and arbitrary disjunctions …? Or perhaps Escher …? The Family in ceaseless mutation?

She leaned over the punch bowl of cut crystal and saw the underside of the chestnut leaves and her own face rising and falling on a slow swell of rum-laced juice. Ice cubes floated across her cheeks.

Someone, that pompous Mrs Fitzsimon, leaned over, importunate, crowding her reflective space. “Just a drop more, Emily dear.” Like those irritating people who whisper during a concert. Emily stirred with the ladle, once, twice, a savage momentum, and Mrs Fitzsimon's face disappeared with a gurgle down the vortex of mint leaves and rum-sodden strawberries.

“Oh, you've damaged it!”Mrs Fitzsimon said, and Emily started as though caught in malice aforethought. But Mrs Fitzsimon was referring to the pattern of leaves and fruit, in disarray.

“I'm sorry,” Emily said stupidly. “I'm terribly sorry about everything. I just don't see what can be done.”

Mrs Fitzsimon looked at her sharply. You could see the thought: They're all a bit strange, it runs in the family.

Emily leaned unsteadily against the trunk of the chestnut tree. In the same way that she sensed within seconds if an audience was with her, she felt now that she was in some kind of peril. She could scarcely breathe. She knew all the signs of another attack; had been through them before: the flight from Montreal, the flight from Sydney.

Perhaps it was the heat. She had a swooning sensation of surf and white sand, smelled eucalypts, was conscious of the presence of Dave as enveloping and ineluctable, like a weather system. She felt weak with desire, had to slide down the tree, lean on grass and trunk because of the heaviness between her legs — a throbbing inflammation surely audible as drumbeats and rampant now throughout her body so that even her arms, when she crossed them to protect herself, felt tender to her own touch, bruised with want.

There was no help for it, she saw. Years of fortifications slumping like ashes in a grate, the whole zoo of predators — risk, love, pain, vulnerability — barrelling into the breach, the long battle lost.

Adam waved to her. Tory was coming through the door, clinging to Jason s hand, frightened as a child on the first day at a new school. And on the porch swing: her father, so pathetically pleased by all this brouhaha. His frailty was a taste in her throat, unbearable. He was the last translucent sliver of rind around the kernel of his death. Oh, she thought weakly, love is visceral and vicious. Love has steel jaws, the grip of a bear trap.

She began moving like a sleepwalker toward the porch, instructing herself, rehearsing: Sit on the step. Casually. Lean back as though stretching. Make contact, head against his knee.

The porch step.

She sits, casually.

No registering, in the old man's eyes, of her presence. Something else obsesses him. Emily thinks of young musicians waiting in the wings of performances that will make or break their careers. She clears her throat, leans back, a contact violent as a wound. The old man is shocked. His interior meditation has been violated. Without thought he prods at Emily with his cane as though rebuffing a scavenger dog.

This was the thing, she had known it all along. Once you stepped down off the stage and into the pit there were no guarantees. You became crazy as a gladiator, there was no limit to the number of times you could be gored. She wanted to beat on his chest with her hands and accuse: Bloody old tyrant! You demand our love but make the giving so impossible. Like Sisyphus rolling the rock uphill, an unachievable goal.

Perhaps she said it, perhaps she pummelled him. Emily, Emily, he was saying, just as distracted as when he jabbed at her with his cane. He was stroking her hair roughly, in agitated rhythm to his words: to be young, to be young, to be young. His hand was all knuckles and loose papery skin. She caught hold of it and pressed it against her cheek.

“The gazebo,” he said, like a child begging for a treat. “Can you, Emily? I want to sit in the gazebo again.”

Jason was nearby with Tory and she called to him. Adam helped. By concerted effort they hefted him along on his canes, careless of indignity. His throne room, verdant and rotting, received him, his guests paid court.

Elizabeth, concert master, watched from the porch. In her eyes, there glowed a secret and pleasurable knowledge: a composed ending, I have done it well. Only a few stray phrases to be drawn into the final chords: she was waiting for Edward to grow gentle with his eldest child, for Victoria to ripen into peace. Her eyes lingered on Tory, circling the gazebo in a twitch of nerves. Certainly there was still some anxiety, Elizabeth acknowledged, but also the calm expectation of promise. In exactly this way she had watched the first steps of all of them: heart in mouth, because of course they would fall, they would cry, they would suffer and lose hope; but then they would learn to walk. She waited, she believed. Life was mysterious and awful and senseless, a chaos of pain and celebration, so what could one do but have faith and make music of it all?

She congratulated herself. She was like a gardener who could coax trees into espaliered symmetry against a wall. She lured random notes into harmony. Prospero, she thought, was actually a woman, a white witch, benign.

A taxi pulled into the circular drive and a stranger got out, someone elderly who was small and vital as a hummingbird. A grandmother, one somehow suspected, to a number of small boisterous children. Elizabeth glanced at her fleetingly, then away, then back again, her line of vision jerked taut. Astonishment. And in the other woman's eyes: first caution, then a sort of proffered neutrality (I won't fire if you don't) and finally an ironically amused smile.

My god, Elizabeth thought. And it was like being young again, full of euphoric uncertainty, like the galvanic crackle of one's first concert, one's first love affair. Edward has done this. So
he's
Prospero after all. He has known all along. Is this an accusation? Or a seal of forgiveness with full knowledge? Is it peace or war?

God knew what the ending would be now.

She moved toward Marta, unprepared, defenceless, winded with agitation, exuberant. There was always this about life: some random note, winging away from the presumptive last phrase, would sing in ones head, would mock and entice, and one would chase it into another whole movement. She saw Marta's eyes rove, take in the house, the paper lanterns, the gathering. A dynasty. Elizabeth drew level, wondering: will she strike me, or take my hands?

They stood facing each other like warrior queens.

“So, Elizabeth.” Marta's voice was still husky and low, only a little aged around the edges, her tone sardonic. “So you won. All the prizes.”

Elizabeth said dryly: “There've been one or two losses over the years.”

“Oh, losses.” Who, Marta implied, should know more about losses than she herself did?

“You've won some glittering prizes yourself, Marta. Your career, your books, your son distinguishing himself in medicine, so I hear. And grandchildren?”

“Five of them.”

“Well. You seem to have come out well ahead of me.”

“If you only knew, Elizabeth. If you only knew.” Her eyes had the wildness of damaged birds. They fluttered about brokenly and then fastened on something. Someone. There was a quiver of fascination, a sorting out of information and memory. Elizabeth followed her gaze.

Marta whispered: “Is that…?”

“Yes.” Elizabeth seemed both reluctant and amused, as though a concession were being made to a tax auditor deceived for so long that the statute of limitations had run out. “That's Jason.”

“He's
Edward's
!”

“Unmistakably.”

“And all my life I've believed …” Marta's hands bridled, they rubbed her eyebrows in bewildered pleasure, brushing away the folly of years. “When I got your telegram, I thought: that ruthless bitch. Before it's all over, she insists I see Joseph's other son. And then I decided, why not? I came to spit in your eye.”

“He could have been Joseph's. He was born the day after I got word of his death.”

“Joseph Junior was born a week later.”

Marta was agitated, her hands twisting over old angers and griefs. Elizabeth looked at her own hands, makers of music and mayhem. She might have been Lady Macbeth, turning them vaguely over and back, over and back, bemused by the savagery of which she seemed capable.

“Do you hate me, Marta?”

“I survived on my hate. I fed on it. No husband, no money. Not even a funeral: no ritual for public grieving. And you” — Elizabeth winced from the energy of Marta's rage — “you filched even the possibility of private grieving. To have to assume he died thinking of you. I spent my nights crying and my days raging. That was my fuel — the determination to climb higher than you. I won't be modest, I earned my prizes, and I hope they made you envious.”

“You're magnificent, Marta. You always were.”

“For stooping to the indignity of scrabbling, you mean. Since not all of us were born to affluence.”

Elizabeth thought: They never forgive you for that. Neither she nor Edward. “We were all mismatched,” she sighed. “It should have been you and Edward, fighting together, tooth and nail, success before sex. Why do you think Joseph and I came together like …?”

Marta's face went white with betrayal, she swayed slightly.

Elizabeth thought she was going to fall and reached out. “That was unpardonable. I'm sorry.”

“What a bloody-minded bitch you are, Elizabeth.” Marta spoke quietly, almost with a kind of relief, as though she were absolved for the disgrace of losing; as though Elizabeth were the kind of opponent who, hitting below the belt, did not ultimately count. “Did you never feel a twinge of compunction? Why did you do it?”

Do it? Elizabeth looked into the past as through the wrong end of a telescope. Had there ever been that much control, a consciousness of
doing
something? She remembers it as being hurtled along in floodwaters. She remembers guilt and compunction as something that one drowning person feels for other victims of a cloudburst.

But Marta had not expected her to answer. As though still pondering Elizabeth's malice, still considering the crudely flippant suggestion of switched partners, she said: “There was a night, you know, the last night … when Edward and I might have turned to each other. We were both miserable. We both knew we were about to be deserted.”