In Certain Circles (20 page)

‘I've known better days,' Russell admitted, at his end of the line.

‘What else is wrong?' Zoe wanted to know—meaning, in addition to Lily. In the eight weeks since the girls had gone, Lily had become the chief concern of her family.

‘Just a few dramas here at work. I suppose Stephen's told you?…He will.'

Drawing flowers and squares on a scribbler, Zoe sat at home at her desk, listening to Russell's voice.

‘He'll have to go to Melbourne in my place because of this. Have lunch with me in town then, and we'll swap news. But look in on Lily this evening, won't you?'

Lily, heavily tranquilised, correctly suspected her husband and everyone close to her of conspiring to wrest from her what they saw as the first stage of a destructive illness. Supplied with drugs by a doctor who had known her all her life, she seldom left her bed.

Now that she was released from the restrictions following her own illness, Zoe jogged along to the other end of the beach daily, ostensibly to discuss work from the office. Her alarm and depression increased with every visit. Too many people had changed. I know no one, she thought. I'm close to no one. No one knows me. Stephen's moods jerked unpredictably from tenderness to abuse, exhausting her capacity to feel surprise. All she felt was buffeted, battered, cold, apprehensive. Her heart beat heavily day after day. Pity was openly placed on her by those who saw them together. When he tormented her, she had begun to be disagreeable to other people in retaliation. She saw that he was only rarely, rather slyly, aware of his strangeness, as though catching sight of himself out of the corner of his eye, not displeased to find himself so disconcerting yet immune from censure. Could he be held responsible for behaviour stemming from his unconscious? He seemed to delight in the certainty that he could not.

In need of reliability, she had rung Russell one night. Home from a meeting, sitting solitary amongst the furniture, his wife in a drugged sleep upstairs, he told her, ‘I've settled down with a whisky bottle. Forgetting it all.' She supposed he meant Lily. He sounded bleak, unrecognisable. As she replaced the receiver Zoe had an image of a black earth in a blackened universe. For some time, pictures like this had been falling on her mind like shadows.

Stephen was lost to her.

Russell's harmless, recuperative evening with the whisky bottle meant nothing, but for the moment, he too had
seemed
lost to her.

Anna had visited David's parents in Canberra for a week, and had then gone on to Melbourne to stay with friends. Now she was in the country at the house of some acquaintance. The odd thing was that she had gone two days after visiting Zoe, without mentioning the possibility beforehand to anyone. The first news of her absence came in a brief note giving details of her holiday itinerary. Since then, not a word.

And Lily, another stranger, a stranger with glazed, unfocussed eyes. The real one, that vibrant, egoistic, entertaining, hectoring, child-fixated, education-worshipping victim of ‘psych' lectures, would never have fallen into this disrepair because of plans or persons, however dear, going astray. It was as if a human version of something like a mountain or a cathedral had chosen to destroy itself. Zoe felt the shock renewed every day when she climbed her childhood's stairs to face this alien person. Sleepy, amenable, Lily lay in bed while her mother and Zoe and the housekeeper took turns to sit by her, offering food and drink and attempting light conversation.

Outwardly confident and reassuring, in truth, Zoe shrank from those she knew best. There had been too many changes, and none of them for the better. Her judgment in all things, in all she had known most intimately, on which she had spent her life's best efforts, was wrong. Stephen had tried tenaciously and had at last succeeded in breaking her best beliefs.

And poor Russell! She hated to think how this weird reversal of personality in Lily affected him. Perhaps this was part of growing older, to undergo hideous alterations in the deepest certainties, in love, in lovers, finally in one's self. People should be warned, Zoe thought. Of course, they
were
warned. She had been warned. But some natural law preserved ignorance till the firing squad arrived.

‘Where's Stephen?' she asked Russell now, holding the receiver cautiously.

‘Lunching with some paper manufacturers. How are you managing without Lily doing her share of the work?'

‘We can farm out the actual translating, but the correspondence runs wild unless one of us lives in the office. It should expand or fold up. We've had offers.' Zoe eyed the files on her desk.

‘Why not sell it? You've both wanted to for months.'

Zoe gave a sigh. ‘Years. I'd really like to. I'll see if I can persuade her to give it some thought. How was she last night?'

‘Much the same. Our disastrous daughters. She says she's being punished for having been attached to them beyond reason. She threatens to jump out of the window if I bring a doctor in.'

A silence fell.

‘She's half-promised me to come for a swim in the pool tomorrow,' Zoe said.

‘I wish she would. When I hear her talking about the way the girls betrayed her…'

Lily was like someone whose entire fortune—money, jewels, landed estates—had been swallowed overnight by a rapacious invader. Too much of herself had been invested in these belongings to allow for any real recovery. It occurred to Zoe that if we lived forever, there would be time to recover from mistakes of twenty years' duration. As it is, we're caught both ways: it's fatal to prune off too large an area of the past, but not bearable to live with large tracts of error, either.

‘Yes, there was bad organisation somewhere,' Russell commented, and they both laughed because there was nothing else to do. ‘Have you heard from Anna?'

‘Only that note.' Zoe hesitated to say more, searching for the generosity to spare him her troubled thoughts. ‘I'd better let you go…'

But Russell went on, ‘Stephen said Alan Falkland called round last night to show you those dummy jackets.'

‘Yes. They weren't much good. Just as well you didn't commission him.'

‘The lack of appreciation isn't mutual. You're always being dragged into the conversation when he comes here.'

Zoe gave a groan. When Stephen had said something to this effect the previous evening after Alan left, their eyes had endured a brief meeting. While she cleaned make-up from her face, Stephen stood behind her, watching her mirrored reflection.

‘At least you used not to be so self-important.'

She felt frightened. ‘What do you mean?'

‘You usedn't to be so self-important. That tone of voice, the voice of the expert, when Alan was asking you about the so-called film festival. You can swallow any amount of flattery, I'll say that for you. You're not too fussy about the source. You wallow in it, don't you?'

‘My tone of voice?' Zoe tried to remember. Somewhere in her chest a tiny trickle of fear ran. Long ago, she had learned to discount these verbal assaults, but his motive in uttering them touched her mind like a nightmare. Was he right? She felt herself so demoralised that she had no way of knowing.

‘You jumped at the chance when he wanted to interview you about the famous Joseph coming out for the festival, didn't you? It's lovely to see your name in the paper.'

Her hands moved stiffly and slowly over her face. His rightness or wrongness were not in question: he had laid a charge against her, and had found a legitimate reason for his detestation. She felt he had no such justification. They were agreed in detesting the person she had become. She had laid too great a burden on someone not strong enough to bear it. She had expected too much of his nature. Also, it was so much harder for him to hurt her now: when he needed so much to disparage and destroy, it seemed cruel to grudge him whatever reason he could find.

She said lightly, ‘No one will blame you for my self-importance. Be sure of that.'

‘Pontificating as if the fate of nations hung on your judicious words, or your presence at some parochial film festival.'

She had said Joseph was original. Pretty inflammable stuff! Still talking, Stephen walked up and down behind her where she sat at the dressing table; and she listened with a sort of scientific accuracy, trying to breathe so as not to disturb the cold, hard, angular thing that had been inserted behind her ribs.

‘All of you Howards fancy yourselves as public figures. Your mother and father did. Russell's always on some platform crusading. And you last night, talking to Falkland. These ponderous pauses. These weighty deliveries. I hope you don't think he was interested in what you were saying? We know where his interests lie, don't we?'

Zoe said nothing. Chill, narrow knives had been skilfully slid into her mind. There was no thought without pain.

‘It was one of the things I noticed about you when you came back from Paris—that a little local publicity left you untouched. I admired that. Because you do know, don't you, that you only have to be a horse or a footballer to rate space in the press. You only need a rich daddy. You should watch it,' he said sharply. ‘You've changed.'

Zoe laughed.

‘If I've noticed, you can be sure other people have.' Then he felt he had said enough and, still breathing rather heavily with excitement, began to get ready for bed.

On her way to the shower, Zoe paused and looked back. ‘You're not conceivably jealous, so what is it really?'

‘You'd like to know, wouldn't you?' He took off his shoes.

The confusion of his mind confused her. She said nothing. In the shower her hands were useless and frail, the fingers pale, their grip feeble. The cake of soap slipped from them again and again. They grew daily paler and weaker like the hands of a sick person.

What next? He might prolong the joust. He might remonstrate with her gently and wisely about her character. Always surprising, he might act as if they were the truest of true lovers. She had given him such confidence in his power over her, a flattering confidence in the resilience of her feeling for him.

Now, on the telephone, she said to Russell, ‘I hope Alan doesn't come round again. He and Stephen bring out the worst in each other. Refereeing isn't my idea of a good time. And if he comes when I'm alone, he criticises Stephen.'

How she had come to give time to Alan Falkland, she could scarcely recall. He was about thirty-five, married; he had rough curly brown hair and sleepy eyes. He was relaxed. She saw that they could like each other, so she fended him off. (Besides, ultimately, everyone was like Stephen, however they covered it up.
He
thought so, and she believed him.) But when, risking a few steps on quicksand, Alan uttered slanted words against Stephen, her passivity surprised them both. She had not the energy to dispute his words. Once, she might have been awarded a Nobel Prize for loyalty. Now, this immutable quality had melted like ice in the sun. She had lost heart. Hard words, silent hatred, had caused it to vanish, taking a large part of her intelligence. This was why she could behave so strangely and dangerously, why she was acquiescent when Alan Falkland disparaged her husband.

Russell said now, ‘I think you're hard on Alan. I like him.'

Disingenuously, she answered, ‘You can have him.' It was unlike Russell to ring to gossip away the time.

‘Tom Hamilton raced in this morning. He'd just been to the family solicitor, and his uncle's estate's cleared up at last. Tom comes into a whacking great sum, and on the strength of it, he's writing to ask Anna to marry him.'

‘He
told
you?'

‘Yes.'

‘He never gives up. I don't think much of his chances. What did you say?'

‘I wished him luck.'

‘Oh,
did
you?' she asked, in surprise.

Then Russell was called downstairs to adjudicate in the packing department, and they said goodbye. And Zoe sat where she was, not moving, encircled by a moving film of fallen forests, of the ruins of blackened smoking cities. She saw a figure drowning, one arm outstretched. She saw a closed door. There was no going back through the door and, most horribly, no desire to go back. And there again was the blackened, reeking, devastated plain that was once a city. Like an addict who languished for the drug that ate her up, she could not have too much of these sights. They were the most real things of all. When, arduously, she was obliged to tear herself from them, she decided vaguely that they must be symbols. She had never been good at symbols. Other people saw them everywhere. Now of their own accord these compelling visions had come to teach her something. And exhausting as they were in a way, they were also a last goodbye from innocence and other beautiful and eternal states.

At her desk in her work room in her comfortable house on the harbour of the world's twenty-eighth largest city, with a population more or less equal to that of Rome, Zoe sat amongst the wreckage and held tightly to the images her mind produced in its efforts to help her survive.