The Tiger in the Tiger Pit (3 page)

III Emily

Emily had intense relationships with a number of men — Vivaldi, Bach, Beethoven, Sibelius. She remained faithful to them to atone for earlier mistakes. When in the course of the past three years she had felt too sharp a need for lesser men, she had expended her passion on the more turbulent movements of violin concertos or soothed herself with Bach's austerity.

Or perhaps, if she were away on concert tour, she would spend a poignant but chaste evening with some member of the local orchestra or with one of the attendant music critics or academics who frequented the parties preceding or following engagements. These men were invariably married. They were gentle and sad and searching for some indefinable flicker of happiness which they seemed to believe Emily could provide.

She would be insouciant and compassionate but would excuse herself, when the drift of innuendo eddied toward the flesh, with the gentlest of regrets.

I have a little boy, she would say. His name is Adam and he's eight years old. I find it better to avoid involvements. You understand.

She thought of love as a kind of refugee act, akin to handling a live grenade, something to be engaged in while poised for flight. Always claustrophobia and imminent bloodiness waited in the wings like hobgoblins in a morality play while the euphoric pull of sensual comfort had its foolish little moment on stage. An old gazebo choked with honeysuckle would rear into her dreams, a shadowy portent, her lover's eyes in every leaf, his breath heavy in the creamy blossoms, his limbs in its throttling branches. She would have to break out, escape, flee the country.

England was her fourth country of residence.

And now already there were signs in the air, vibrations and patterns she recognised, temptations to warmth, indications that it might become necessary to move on. Or, more frightening, to move back. To Australia. To Dave. Her importunate physical yearnings kept up a whisper, raspily and obscenely like ill-mannered concert goers during a performance. She drowned them with music. Through insomniac nights she played Vivaldi and Bach. Eventually the prick of deprivation would mute itself and everything would return to normal.

She hoped.

Otherwise …

She knew that if she were ever to “settle down” somewhere,
belong
somewhere, for Adam's sake, she would have to cultivate impermanence; she would have to learn the knack of fragmentary affairs that went nowhere, that did not disrupt. But as old churches attract antiquarians, so men with a sempiternal itch burgeoned into her life. This was what she had against casual sex: that a lover could not be counted on to leave the next morning; that he might break the rules; that he might take root and expand into her days like a bewitched beanstalk, declaring his addiction to continuity and to her.

She thought wistfully that she would like to become the sort of person who would grow old in this little house in Harrow. She liked the sound of
London.
Of
Harrow-on-the-Hill
and
the Metropolitan line.
Of
near the little fifteenth-century stone church.
Tranquil and dignified identity labels. Perhaps if she made her performance schedule more demanding? It seemed to her that she would be able to tolerate a constant postal address if she were at it infrequently. Or if she never received any mail.

When her mother's letter arrived, London was pouting with summer rain and Emily was trying to open the French windows on to her garden. Not a simple task, everything wooden sulking from the damp. She applied her shoulder as a battering ram and went spinning suddenly on to the brick paving under the cherry tree.

For these she had bought the house — for the French windows and the cherry tree. House! Box, her father would call it. Because of just such cramped tenements his forefathers had crossed the ocean to win for themselves the large Georgian houses and gazebo-enhanced grounds of western Massachusetts.

It was true that in the sliver of town house to which she held title she could barely turn around in the kitchen, that the bathroom was primitive by transatlantic standards, that the water heater had to be coddled as one might an eccentric wealthy relative, and that an insatiable gas meter gorged itself on coins all winter, blackmailing her with the absence of heat. Nevertheless she had fallen in love — with a bay window in the living room, a trellis of roses, the French windows, the cherry tree, and a garrulous upstairs neighbour who called her “luv” and was a marvellous nanny to Adam.

To see the cherry hung with snow,
she murmured, reciting talismanic words (a prayer, perhaps, of appeasement), sitting under a drizzle of the last few wet petals and the finest powdering of rain, inhaling tranquillity, holding unease at bay for a few more minutes. She thought of Massachusetts. The gazebo would be riotous with honeysuckle now, and what would Mother be doing? She sighed, braced herself, opened the letter and read it.

I won't go, she thought immediately. I can't. Not even for Mother.

She wrapped her arms around the cherry tree and tapped her forehead softly and rhythmically against its trunk as though exorcising a constant pain. Family, family. One could never escape. There were no pockets in the world distant enough. One was hooked at birth and no matter how far the line was played out one could always be hauled in again. Because of course one always consented.

I don't want to apply unfair pressure, Emily and I'll understand if you feel you can't. But your father is frail and unhappy. I am having some trouble with stairs myself lately. We can't last for ever.

I know, I know. That's unfair pressure. I confess: I'll stoop to almost anything to see the whole family together for this occasion.

Frail and unhappy. Your father is. Still is.

A guilty ache in the gut. A swooning sense of hurtling toward the death of a parent. Daddy! (Something she could rarely say to him; usually “Father” in his presence.) An acute desire to put her arms around his wasted body knowing that in his presence it would probably be impossible, that she would probably become incapable of making, and he of receiving, such a gesture.

Irritation, a merciful painkiller, coated her grief. Rage to the rescue. Why such short notice? Six days, for god's sake. It was impossible. Had Mother waited, hoping against hope that Emily would think of it herself? Would just drop in for a spontaneous visit, crossing the Atlantic, parachuting from the bosom of Pan Am? Happy golden wedding anniversary, Mom and Dad!

Absurd. I wasn't around for the original occasion. Can I be expected to keep score for fifty years?

But perhaps it was a way of providing her with an excuse for not going? (She had always thought of her mother as a co-con-spirator.) No.
I'll stoop to almost anything
… More likely a device to give her no time to think of subterfuge.

She wondered if Jason would go. I must phone him tonight, she thought, suddenly wanting to. Wanting quite intensely to see him again. Protector against bullies, binder of wounds. A year ago, when he came to London for that conference (The New Face of Freud? Psychoanalysis — Junger Than Ever? something like that; they had joked about it), how delightful it had been. A kind of intimate abandon as sometimes occurs after a few drinks between strangers who meet at a party, strangers who stumble into an agreeably vibrant comfort, happening upon esoteric but shared past experiences. And they were like strangers, new to each other after so many years. Foraging through childhood. Two archeologists unearthing long-forgotten clues to time past. Do you remember …? No, no that's not how it happened … Don't correct me, Emily, I'm five years older than you. But not necessarily wiser, Jason.

Perhaps after all, Emily reflected, she should go.

It would mean seeing Victoria again. Of course she
should
see Victoria again. It was quite appalling … how much time had gone by? Eight, nine years since she had seen her sister. Montreal, that frightful scene at the airport. Oh god. The trouble with memory: pick up a pebble and an avalanche comes thundering about your head. Poor Tory spinning her own sticky webs for the family, holding all of them in thrall, her poems fluttering around the mail routes of the globe like lost souls:

under dead honysuckle leaves

there are eyes that glitter like quartz.

The bones are neatly arranged, all the bodies

folded and put away. Wherever you move

the eyes follow …

Wild and whirling words. Mentally, Emily crossed herself every day before she opened her mailbox. So far England was safe. Tory did not have her London address.

I can't, I can't, she told herself. I can't go back. I might never get out again.

She was smeared with Ashville and the family as with birdlime. She would never allow Adam to be tainted.

And please bring Adam. Yes, yes, I know what your father said. But your father's rages have to be taken with a grain of salt. They are a reflex action with him. He spent too many years with a switch in his hand. Besides, Emily you cannot deny me Adam, surely you cannot. With your father so ill, I cannot travel to London again.

Bring Adam. You must give your father a chance.

A chance.

That was what Juilliard had been. New York and freedom.

A chance to get away from a town where every boy had had your father as his high school principal, every boy had heard rumours of what old Carpenter did to anyone who messed with his daughters, every boy kept a wide and nervous distance. (Yet in later years, when she had met some of those boys in New York or Boston or wherever, they were always awash in nostalgia, sighing for Ashville High, sentimentalising her father beyond recognition.)

In New York there had not been a soul to ask discreet prying questions about Victoria. At Juilliard, no one had heard of her father.

New York was chance itself— city of the random encounter, of the unexpected event, of the indiscretion without repercussions, of blissful anonymity. To be forever unknown and unmonitored seemed to Emily the most desirable of goods. To be free.

And now her mother was cajoling her back to the cage.

It had taken her until the age of nineteen to escape. She was now thirty-four. She had not been home in between.

Perhaps at last she could go back with head held high. The heroine's return. Even into the columns of the
Ashville Daily Chronicle
the news must have dropped like carbon datings: Juilliard; Montreal Philharmonic; Sydney Symphony; Harrow Chamber Orchestra; concert violinist.

She imagined wandering casually into Berring's corner store:

— Why Emily Carpenter! You haven't changed a bit.

— Back with your husband and child?

— Not married …? Ahh …

— Still traipsing around with your violin? Why yes, I believe now you mention it, I did read something …

— And how is your sister Tory, poor dear?

Even after fifteen years, not a chance.

No, she thought again, decisively. I can't do it. I'll plead concert engagements. I'll offer to meet them again in New York in a few weeks' time. I'll take them out to dinner. I'll bring them both over here for Adam's next birthday. I'll send masses of flowers.

No sense in calling Jason, no sense in stickying the web any further. It was hard enough to remain free as things were. She hugged the cherry tree and began murmuring to herself as though reciting an essential catechism: Stay detached. Do not capitulate. Do not be done in by sentimentality.

I know you think this is equivalent to throwing a party for the passing of the dinosaurs. I know you think it foolish of me to have stayed for fifty years. But for my generation, my dear, marriage is so much more complex and painful and satisfying than for yours.

Please come. And bring Adam with you.

Above all, stop thinking about Mother before guilt itself decides the issue.

Run.

And through the French windows came Adam, for whom she would indeed run through fire.

“Oh Adam!” Hugging him, wanting to hold him longer, remembering Father's stifling embraces and letting him go. “How would you like to see Grandma again? And Uncle Jason? How would you like to fly to New York?”

Adam stared at her with wide uneasy eyes. He had reason to fear sudden departures.

Emily, glancing restively at the soggy dreariness of grey sky, warmed recklessly and involuntarily to the mad idea, to the thought of sun on Cape Cod beaches.

“We could leave tomorrow. An adventure!”

“We can't, Mummy” Adam's voice was overly precise, as though he spoke a meticulously learned second language, the chiselled diction of a boys' school. (He had suffered greatly from arriving with an Australian accent.) “What about Verulamium?”

“Verulamium?”

“You remember” On a faltering note. “Our field trip.”

“Field trip? Oh! Those Roman ruins near St Albans. ”

“Mr Price said to remind you that the parents have to be at the school at eight sharp on Wednesday morning.”

“I have to go too?”

“Mummy, you promised. You signed it on the permission letter.”

“Oh dear. I'd forgotten. Well then, that settles it. We can't go to New York this week.”

Pass to freedom. A legitimate excuse.

Somewhere close to midnight the phone rang. Surfacing from sleep, Emily thought the sound came from the flat above.

“Mummy!” Adam stood in her doorway, ghostly in white pyjamas. “Is it Dave?”

Because of the hour. One thought of overseas where time played games. Also, Dave called on Adam's birthday each year. And occasionally at other times.

“No, no, darling. It won't be Dave. Go back to bed.”

She stumbled into the hallway, feeling for the receiver.

“Emily. Did I wake you? What time is it there?”

“Jason! Don't do this to me. It's somewhere around midnight, I think.”

“Sorry. It's cheaper after six our time. This is to find out what day you're flying in and whether you want to be met in Boston or New York.”