The Tiger in the Tiger Pit (4 page)

“Oh Jason. I don't know. Do we have to go?”

“Emily, really Yes, I would say we have to.”

“Here we go again,” she said with mock despair. “Your Edwardian sense of propriety. The oddest notions. And so contradictory”

“On the contrary. Quite logical.”

“Form is paramount, of course.” A sardonic barb.

“It is. The psyche requires imposed order.”

“Excuse me. Should I be taking notes?”

Order in Jason's life? Form, empty form. That sad marriage to Nina, and then this long strange thing with Ruth, whom Emily had never met. (Did Ruth really exist?) And who could keep count of the other women? But officially monogamous and filial always, that was the thing. Imposed order.

“You're very odd, Jason,” she sighed, remembering his visit to the London conference, the long talks, the rediscoveries and amazements.

Love and passion, he had claimed, were absolutely matters of illusion. They had to be played against a backdrop of danger and betrayal or they did not exist. As for the rest, for daily living, one imposed a form. As necessary and as peripheral to the brief bloom of love as mulch was to the rose.

“Oh you're so wrong, Jason,” Emily had protested. “So ludicrously wrong.” Love was voracious, it could swallow one's life whole. “Look at Mother.”

“Yes. Look at Mother.”

“A stupid permanent vegetable love for Father. Her life seeping into oblivion.”

“What utter rubbish, Emily. Father has very little to do with her life, really Just a frame for it.”

“A cage, more like.”

“No. She's indifferent to where she is. Unaware of it. That abstracted and absorbed way she plays the piano.”

“Exactly. She might have been a concert pianist.”

“That's not what's significant …”

“Hah! Is that so? You think I want to dispense with audiences and bouquets?”

“I'm saying they've never mattered to Mother.”

“Incredible! Incredible! Believe me, I know her better.”

“Emily,” he said quietly, suddenly turning to her and putting his hands on her shoulders. “Believe me, you don't. You don't know her as well as I do.”

They walked in silence beside the Thames. Emily remembered a long-gone summer evening when she had been sitting in the gazebo listening to the music drifting out from the living room — her mother playing Beethoven. Quite abruptly the music had stopped, the pianist apparently arrested by some thought in midphrase. She had appeared at the closed French windows, her arms spread in entreaty or despair, a crucified figure against the liv-ing-room lamps. A caged woman behind a barred window.

Watching her, Emily had held her breath in a kind of pain. I will never let myself be trapped like that, she had vowed.

Jason sighed heavily. “Do you know I was afraid to see you again? After your New York concert.”

“New York! Please!” Indicating an event too awful to be dragged into discussion.

“I have this necessary image of you. A frame of reference. My little sister in her first white concert dress.” He began picking up small stones, exploring them with his fingers, rejecting some. Classifying something in his mind. “It's to do with this sense of …of
murk
in the past — we both seem to have it — and the wish, the passion, for something pure, some unambiguous memory of childhood … Thank God, you're always even more beautiful than I remember.”

He began tossing his stones with a kind of violence into the river, not looking at her, and went on.

“It's because of Tory, I suppose. Because of everything … I require you — you'll have to forgive me — I absolutely require you to remain perfect and innocent and above reproach. And I was so afraid … I nearly didn't call you. But somehow in spite of… no, because of Adam … you still are.”

“Oh god, Jason, undeceive yourself, please. At Juilliard I was recklessly promiscuous.”

“Yes, well. For us that sort of thing was inevitable on first getting out from under Father's thumb. You seem … rather celibate at the moment.”

“It shows? It's for complicated reasons, all of them impure. The world is strewn with my lovers. I'm as consumed by guilt and abandoned loves as St Augustine.”

“St Augustine. Yes. Exactly”

“Jason,” she now complained sleepily via transatlantic satellite. “I think I have conflicting concert arrangements, I only just got the letter today. There isn't time to make changes.”

“You do not have conflicting concert arrangements. I called your booking agent.”

“How horrid of you. But anyway, Adam has a school field trip that we both have to go on.”

“When is it?”

“Is this an inquisition?”

“I'm trying to help. What day is the field trip?”

“Wednesday”

“Fine. You could get a Thursday flight. Or even Friday. We could still be in Ashville by Saturday.”

“That's crazy. To go so far for three or four days. Anyway, it's probably not possible at such short notice. Summer season, remember. Booked out months ahead.”

“On a cancellation or a standby it's always possible. Call me as soon as you have a flight number and time. And Emily: be there. You know, whatever else, certain milestones require tribute.”

“I cannot imagine how you preserve these shibboleths. I mean, especially someone who scrabbles around in other people's libidos for a profession.”

“That's exactly why. I
know
the importance of landmarks. And a golden wedding anniversary isn't something you can ignore. It's not just hugely significant for them. It's
our
lives too.”

“Jason, I'm terrified of going back. I know that's irrational, but I am. Quite terrified.”

“Listen,” he said in a low and conspiratorial whisper of excitement. “The honeysuckle will be in bloom. Remember our midnight picnics in the gazebo? Remember sliding down that rope from my window? Don't you want to show Adam that?”

A wave of nostalgia crested over her.

“Not Adam,” she said, resisting it. “Even if I come, I shouldn't bring Adam. Aren't you forgetting what Father said in New York?”

“I would discount that entirely. You announced it badly. His only grandchild. And Adam can wrap anyone around his little finger in five minutes. We just have to get Father to
see
him…”

“No. School's still in session here and it would be bad for Adam to miss any. Besides, he doesn't want to come.”

“I don't believe it. You've presented it badly. As usual You've carted him around the world like a chattel and he's scared of moving. But he'll love the old house. He has a desperate need for roots.”

“What rubbish. He's as footloose as I am. He just doesn't want to miss out on the final weeks of school right now.”

“When I talked to him last year he asked incessant questions about his grandparents. And he was also pining quite acutely for a house with a blue door in Sydney and for someone named Dave whom you declined to talk about. Other than to tell me that Dave was not his father.”

“What a sneak you are.”

“Let me talk to Adam.”

“For heaven's sake, Jason, it's the middle of the night. Adam's asleep.”

“No I'm not, Mummy. Can I talk to Uncle Jason?”

Emily raised her eyebrows in mock anger and handed him the receiver, bending over to kiss the top of his tousled head.

Yes, she heard him say. Oh yes, that would be super, Uncle Jason. Just for a little visit, yes. Okay, here's Mummy.

“Boston or New York?” Jason asked.

“What?”

“Where do you want to be met?”

“What did you say to Adam?”

“I knew he'd want to come. Where will I meet you?”

“Oh, Boston, I suppose. If I can get a direct flight.”

“If you can get a Thursday flight, come to New York. That way we can all spend Friday at my place and then drive up to Ashville on Saturday afternoon. Tory will be with us from the middle of this week. I figure she needs a debriefing period — as it were — before Father is sprung upon her. We felt we could cope for a few days.”

“We?”

“Ruth and myself.”

“Oh.” Emily, had almost come to believe that Ruth did not exist, that she was a necessary fictional background to make affairs illicit and possible. “You really live with her?”

“Quite happily.”

“She's coming to Ashville?”

“Probably not. It would be pointless, I think. The family has nothing to do with her.”

“Hmm. I would have thought…”

“New York then? Thursday. Call me with the flight number.”

“Oh Adam,” Emily said as she hung up. “We seem to be committed to it. You capitulated.”

She often spoke to him as though he were an adult and a co-planner of their lives. He waited for her to translate.

“I thought you didn't want to go,” she said.

“I didn't want to miss Verulamium. And I thought, I was afraid … we'd never come back here. But Uncle Jason said it was only for a few days.”

“Aha. You do like living in London.”

“I like my school,” he conceded uncertainly, afraid of entrapment. “But I wish we could go back to Australia.”

He said it the way a child says: I wish I could fly to the moon. I wish I had a million dollars. Intense, but aware of powerlessness.

And Emily, against her will, was back there. Refugee from Montreal and Sergei. Foreigner. Drifter in the sun. Awaiting the birth of Adam.

Sydney in the early 1970s was hardly what she expected — a city dignified as an Empire dowager with secret slatternly ways. On mornings when she should have been practising, Emily spent hours on the harbour ferries, travelling through blueness, letting the child ripen in the warmth. The sun fondled her like a lover. And this was supposed to be winter!

At the Taronga Park dock she would leave the ferry and simply walk a quarter of a mile and back along the road, filling in time until the boat returned.

Perhaps it was the pregnancy, perhaps the eucalypt-sharp air, perhaps the sun. Contentment was everywhere, a profound physical fact. She walked with one hand on her belly and was able to think of Sergei with gratitude, with affection, without anguish. Almost.

I will not need men any more, she decided. She had leaned into the very flume of obsession (a siren song, deadly) and had careened on as unscathed as Ulysses.

Not like Mother.

Unbidden that image arose (it had floated up in dreams recently, because of the baby, she supposed): the delicate figure, intense with otherness, caged behind the French windows of the old house. She thought also of Anna in Montreal.

But she, Emily had escaped.

When the ferry slapped softly against the dock timbers she would commit herself again to the harbour, tranquil cradle, and glide back toward the skyscrapers and Circular Quay. The Opera House arches, white and glistering as Fabergé eggshells, soared into lapis lazuli.

When they finish building it, she thought, I will be playing there. People on the ferry boats will hear the applause drifting out over the water. This is the lucky country; no entanglement in wars, no civil strife, no dark side; a country still in the innocence of childhood.

“Utter rubbish, I'm afraid,” Ian said, handing her a beer under the shade of his trees in Mosman. To the assembled company strewn about his lawn he announced: “Emily thinks we're an innocent country.”

A breeze of tolerant derision wisped through two dozen people, turning heads, stirring languid limbs. Such an extravagance of golden flesh and sun-bleached hair, Emily thought. How casually Australians take their bodies. As they take their sun. With an easy gluttonous indifference.

“Innocent!” Someone laughed. “Wishful bloody thinking, sweetheart.”

“Once upon a time,” Ian said, “some Chinamen were strung up in these trees like flypapers for living too cheaply when the gold gave out and doing the Aussie worker in. I could point to many contemporary blots.”

“However, since he likes his view of the harbour and his ever escalating equity in this piece of real estate,” a woman said sardonically, “he'll refrain, for decency's sake. Besides, we all have hope that Whitlam will save our national soul, and Ian'll vote Labor with the rest of us. But that's as far as it goes, right, Ian?”

“Denny, darling, since you're making so free with my booze and my steaks, why don't you go jump in the harbour and leave me to dazzle Emily with my jaded innocence?”

“Subtle, aren't they?” Denny demanded. “You'll find the men are a decade behind North America. Especially the intellectuals. Don't contradict them, whatever you do.”

“Try to ignore her,” Ian said sagely. “She writes strident poetry but we love her because she has such gorgeous breasts. She spent a semester at Iowa (as feminist in residence, I think) which is why she's an authority on the American male.”