The Tiger in the Tiger Pit (8 page)

“You should know this, Jason. It may help to explain. You've tended, I think, to blame your father but you are wrong. You cannot know the struggle he has had. I knew him from the first, you know, I miss nothing. He was raw when he first came here, of course. Quite raw.”

(Yes, admit it, she would have thought that.)

“Born, as we say, on the wrong side of the tracks. But a man cannot be held responsible for his birth, Jason, and it was given to your father to recognise pearls when they were cast before him. You are too hard on him.”

Mrs Weatherby walked to one end of the terrace where the lilacs tossed their cones of blossom lighdy against the cement balustrade every time a breeze caught them. She buried her lined but still imposing face in the scented boughs as though conferring with the forces of delicacy.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes. I will tell you. Though you must keep it in the strictest confidence. A temptation of the cruder sort was thrown in your father's way. Oh I know, Jason, you do not think your father capable of passion — the young never expect it of their parents — but I can assure you … They were kin in a way — both out of place and lost — base blood calling out to base blood, I suppose you might say.”

(Oh, this is the relentless courage of old age
.
She must have seen Marta that way.)

“She was educated and ambitious and so was he, and I can assure you, Jason, that the air around them was charged, positively charged.

“But he knew it would never do, you see. He knew what there was to lose. His will power was extraordinary, his sacrifice magnificent. And he did it for you, Jason. For you. You must look at him through different eyes.”

Oh such waste, such waste. To have opted for the good opinion of Mrs Weatherby. To have chosen for Jason's respectability. I shall go mad.

But somebody should explain to Jason. I deserve that somebody should explain. And to Emily Surely she will not be so heartless as to leave Adam behind? Somebody should explain to her.

VIII Victoria

On the ward they were making apple people. First the fruit was peeled, then the faces carved — any sort of crude holes for eyes, nose, and mouth would do — then the entire apple-head was dunked in lemon juice. After a few days on a sunny windowsill, the heads would wither into a genuine and miraculous old age with pinched cheeks and sunken grin and wrinkled brow. The women on the ward would begin to recognise people they knew — their grandparents, their parents, other patients, themselves.

“This one is my father,” Victoria said.

“Why do you say that, Miss Carpenter?” asked the young arts-and-crafts volunteer.

“The prying nose, see? Long and sharp as an eagle's beak. And these X-ray eyes, a bird of prey. Quoth the raven, nevermore.”

“So.” The volunteer skewered the apple-head to a stuffed doll's body. “What sort of clothes do we need for your father? How about these denim coveralls? And a pipe for his mouth.”

“No, no! Don't put those coveralls on him. He'll be very angry. We have to have a grey suit”

Together they began to rummage through the carton of dolls' clothing.

“Miss Carpenter, dear,” called a nurse from the doorway. “Time for you to see Dr Blackburn.”

“Oh, what a shame. We'll have to finish your father tomorrow. I'll find a suit while you're gone and put it in your workbox.”

The volunteer handed the undressed doll to Victoria who dropped it, agitated.

“Cover him, cover him!” she begged.

She spread her hands over her face and huddled herself into a small bundle that began rocking itself back and forth.

“Come on, Miss Carpenter, I'll take you to Dr Blackburn.”

Victoria, rocking and whimpering like a child, ignored her. The volunteer put her hands under the patient's armpits from behind, and raised her to a standing position. Ballasted with flesh — a side effect of medication — Miss Carpenter was half guided, half propelled, like a galleon tacking against the wind, toward Dr Blackburn's office.

Sometimes Victoria swam, sometimes she flew. In either case, the motion was a tranquil swaying one which she could sustain by minimal muscular contractions in arms and legs. Consequently her movements were invisible to an observer. She could circle him with the languid gracefulness of a porpoise in its aquarium, and he would never realise. Or she could glide around and over him, coasting on banks of air.

On some days the air would cloud quite abruptly with a smog of minute glass splinters. It would rake across her tongue and through her nostrils and into her lungs ripping and tearing at her as it went. She would spit blood, although the nurses never believed her. It was wilful of them, of course. Ignore the mess and you won't have to clean it up. She knew their little game. She had written letters to Jason and Emily, complaining, but no one answered.

Poetry helped:

the glass shards,

the razor blades, are full of eyes.

My life crammed with eyes, surfeited

with calibrating eyes, every tic

of thought watched and charted; yet blind

every one of them unseeing

when the bleeding starts

The nurses — Philistines — ignored her poetry and the spits of blood. On such days there was nothing for it but to escape from air altogether, to flow into her other medium of water. And today was a swimming day.

She trod water, breathing by her other system, her secret gills. The water was green and murky and restful. No one could be seen too clearly, an added benefit. There were other days when the water was too clear for privacy and she would have to hide behind seaweed, but today was satisfactorily opaque. She relaxed within the greenness, buoyant and at peace.

Aqueous eyes peered at her like floating moons and she let herself ride motionless on the swell, curious. It was Dr Blackburn's face, a kind one. She saw his gills working, his mouth opening and closing. He did not realise that the waves distorted all sound, that it was futile to speak.

She circled him, rubbing scales, to show that only touch communicated — or certain vibratory patterns set up by fin rhythms and telegraphed direct to receptive minds. He understood. Together they swam through caverns to a large concourse of waters where the waves were crystal clear and full of bodies and she wanted to dart back to murkier rock crevices when she saw suddenly someone she had lost a lifetime ago — her little brother, ludicrously magnified by the crazy lens of ocean.

She surfaced gasping and the air was soft and clean as childhood. She ran and stumbled up the beach, laughing, and gathered him into her arms.

“Oh Jason,” she sobbed. “Oh Jason,Jason! How you've grown!”

Dr Blackburn said, “Your brother has come to take you home for a few days.”

“Don't you remember?” Jason asked. “We're going to see Mother and Emily.”

He was never prepared for Tory. Never. Every time the shock was greater. There did not seem to be any way to protect himself from it.

Submitting to the soft swallowing pillows of flesh, he felt the past shambling over him like a drunken elephant, ponderous, random.

IX Elizabeth

The nice thing about a power mower, she thinks, is the illusion of strength it gives to these old arms and legs.

Also she loves the tang of the cut grass and the knowledge that it is still growing even as she is cutting it. In three days it will have to be mown all over again. And again. And again. Such pleasing confirmation that living things need never be daunted, that hope is instinctual. She always feels like saying: Good for you, grass!

She has to be careful not to let Edward see her from the window. For the swath of lawn in his view she has to pay the neighbour's son — if she remembers to stop mowing in time, and if she remembers to ask the boy. As far as Edward knows, the neighbour's son mows it all. And it is, really, wickedly self-indulgent of her to sin in secret like this, but she cannot bear to give it up.

Edward is enraged by evidence of the agility of others. How he hates aging, she sighs. And wonders: if my heart wavers, if my sight (which is deteriorating) blinks out, if my body is shackled to a chair, will I be as splenetic as he is?

She truly does not think so. She thinks she will continue to shake the marrow from each day, that she will say to her body: Try to defeat me, old bag-of-bones. She thinks the thrill of outwitting the daily diminishments will continue to absorb her. She expects she will do what she does now, on impossibly arthritic mornings. First the testing and flexing of wrists, shoulder blades, ankles. Can she get out of bed? Will her ankles hold up on the steps? On a day when the answer is no, she starts with rubbing and moves on to her own brand of isometric exercises. Just enough to coax rudimentary life into the joints. And then the experimentation: how many ways to get a bathrobe on, to get to the bathroom, when the limbs are as uncooperative as chair legs?

It's a serious game, demanding more concentration than chess or bridge. So far she holds a trump (playable after the first skirmishes of pain and gritted teeth). Her body cannot resist the pummelling of a hot shower. It softens. It yields.

She rewards it by mowing the lawn, a sensuous business. Now she is roiling like a skiff between delphiniums and poppies, grass flying like spume, settling on her hair and arms and legs. (She never uses the grass-catcher, she likes raking too much.)

By the back fence, matted with blackberry runners and Virginia creeper and assorted flowering and fruit-bearing vines, she accidentally shears off a trailer of honeysuckle and the air is heavy with chopped fragrance. The vine is caught in the blades like a piece of string and she turns off the motor to pull it out.

She thinks of Victoria. The honeysuckle always reminds her of Victoria. Just a little short of breath, she sits on the grass and rests, her back against the mower. Twisting the ravaged cord of honeysuckle in figure eights around her thumb and fingers. Why should it smell of Tory?

The bruising perhaps. The damaging.

At Tory's birth …

There is, Elizabeth supposes, nothing quite like the birth cry of a first-born. One of those moments when the meaning of life shimmers clear as a dewdrop in the mind.

She remembers Edward standing at the bedside watching Tory sucking at her breast. She remembers that she thought of tales of mythical transformation: beautiful young men turning into fauns, children into unicorns. There was about him some quality of awe that made one think of wild deer. Or of stranger creatures, fey and otherworldly.

The hush of his features: could I have set this in motion? Could I have stirred in the night and cast this life upon the waters? Tory's black curls still sticky with birth fluid, her fingers and nails — the work of an incomparable miniaturist — the fine whorl of her ear, the little slurping animal sounds, the blind and voracious sucking, the mad energy of her lips and cheek muscles — he watched it all in a trance, his being vibrating like a drumskin. His right hand, his knotted mill-town fingers, advanced in worship. He stroked Tory's head, her ear, the line of the cheek-bone, her lips, the pink-brown circle around Elizabeth's nipple, her breast.

She remembers that. She can feel it still, the touch of almost fifty years ago. She had murmured to him, mother and seducer, newborn love merging with old. And his hand had clenched and taken refuge behind his coat lapels, a guilty thing. It was as though he had been caught fingering his own mother's private parts.

Oh Edward, she sighed, she grieved. If she could have taken him in her arms and given him her other breast to suck.

Elizabeth sighs and runs her fingers over her sun-warm arms. Tissue over bone. ' hour, is coming, she thinks. The bone hibernates from birth, biding its time, rearing its implacable form closer and closer to the surface, awaiting the last great spring of death. She buries her fingers in the cut grass, massaging earth, and rubs the tang of summer into her arms; reaches under her cotton top and anoints her breasts. There is juice in her yet.

Poor Edward, she sighs, so afraid of the flesh. His great shame: in the beginning, now, and world without end, amen. How she had mistaken the ragged energy spilling from him in her parents' drawing room. And perhaps Tory confirmed something for him: the hugger-mugger of copulation and begetting.

They had watched her, their first-born, grow into imperfection.

But Elizabeth cherishes flawed things. It seems to her that their beauty is somehow ethereal because more vulnerable. She has given succour to cats without tails and dogs without cars. Her window ledges are cluttered with relics from antique auctions: blood-red crystal pitchers with chipped lips, milk-glass with hairline cracks, porcelain cups without handles. Anthropomorphic things. She endows them with tragic histories and grieving memories and present contentment.

She thinks: When Tory comes, we'll sit here in the crushed grass and thread flowers and sing songs.

But the shredded length of honeysuckle disturbs her. Her mind veers away from the act of injury itself. The moment of damage cannot be redeemed into art. There are two black holes in the past, two different nights of harm.

Elizabeth is agitated now, brushing two images from her eyes with nervous hands. Tory as a sleepy child, Tory on her seventeenth birthday. Elizabeth is on her feet now, pulling at the cord of the mower. Tory in a white nightgown, a frightened child, is sliding down the banister of the handle. Elizabeth pulls the cord sharply, the motor growls and stops. She pulls again, swearing at it softly, beseeching it for its roar of white noise. She pulls again. Perverse, the motor hunches like a sulky cat and ignores her. She looks across the lawn and the gazebo is flail of Japanese lanterns and party revelry, and in the doorway, Tory at seventeen …

Elizabeth is crying now, and digging with her bare hands in the nearest patch of garden. Tending things. Removing weeds. Binding up.

It is not enough.

She rubs her hands jerkily in the grass to clean them and runs across the lawn into the house. She needs the piano.

She plays for a long time and when she lifts her head and looks out through the French windows, the gazebo is softly blurred like a pagoda in a Monet painting of the gardens at Giverny.

She plays a dance. In the dance Tory, today's Tory, large and graceful, circles the gazebo with languid and delicate steps, and honeysuckle is braided through her hair.