In Certain Circles (5 page)

‘No, I don't think so.' Zoe returned Ellen's scrutiny. ‘I'm interested in what I'm doing, and they're interested in me. There's the doorbell. Excuse me.'

Well, the morning hadn't been wasted, she reflected, skimming downstairs. One, she had done some useful work; two, she had appalled Ellen by her vanity. She had discovered this high-handed, high-spirited manner of seeming tremendously well pleased with herself. No one took any notice but people like Stephen and poor Ellen, who reacted like nineteenth-century Church of Scotland clergy. Hell, devils, pitchforks, smoke and flames all laid on, and one immortal soul—hers—damned forever because she might appreciate herself above her true worth. Nice of them to be so concerned, she thought with some coldness. Having opened the front door in time to see one of the marquee men disappearing with another marquee man, she went back upstairs and changed her clothes.

Hunting through the house shortly afterwards for someone she could recognise, she came on her mother and Anna in the kitchen making coffee and sandwiches. Poor Ellen had gone. She and Anna greeted each other with enthusiasm and started to shout the day's news, laughing more or less continuously.

Mrs Howard said, ‘You're incredible. Everybody keep quiet instead of egging everybody on. What was I going to say? Hand me those chives please, Anna. Stephen's gone down to warn the others they're not getting much for lunch. Where's Mrs Perkins, in the name of all that's holy? What do I pay her for? She should be doing this.'

‘You sent her up the street to get some messages. She can't be everywhere.'

‘Just don't develop a social conscience here and now, Zo. You've been without one long enough.'

All of the Howards except Russell claimed rather than admitted to a bad temper, and regarded a certain fiery display as the sign of a lively and unrepressed personality. Zoe and her mother exchanged telling shots; Anna went out through the open door so quietly that no one noticed. Suddenly, Zoe sighed and stopped in mid-sentence, her interest in Mrs Perkins's rights, her mother's faults, evaporating totally. Staring into the nickel-plated surface of the percolator, she failed to see her own distorted reflection; to breathe in the delicious coffee scent puffing into the air.

On a ferry, coming home from town, she was questioning Russell.

‘He's working, Zo. At night he writes out reports for his company and analyses sales. Then he reads.'

‘He seems to live like a hermit, working and sleeping. Does he like women? Doesn't he like girls? You have just as much to do, getting everything cleared up to go away, but you see Lily.'

‘Isn't she wonderful?'

‘Yes. But what about Stephen? Doesn't he see any girls?'

‘He doesn't see anyone much. During the day he has to talk sales talk hour after hour.'

‘Someone like that!'

‘That's why solitude's welcome. I don't think he knows many people. He isn't easy to know.'

‘Is that natural? Is it natural?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘I don't know,' she said. ‘I only wondered. To be satisfied. To accept it. Not to want to see people.'

Mrs Howard raised her voice. ‘
Zoe
. Turn off the percolator, and would you take this plate outside for me?'

Obediently, she glided out, glided back, glancing at her mother in abstraction. Mrs Howard saw this, and intending subtlety, began, ‘I relented and made them a salad. Zoe…What did you think of the rehearsal last night? How did the orphan perform as best man?'

With a shiver, Zoe looked down. ‘Don't call him that. That's so patronising. He stood about. I stood about. It doesn't take much of an IQ , after all.'

‘Do you think Lily's reconciled?'

She shrugged indifferently. ‘It's settled.'

‘Well, I do think it's cantankerous of Russell to insist on having him. He's a stranger. Russell knows Lily's very attached to the family and all it stands for.'

‘Family. That's just a word.'

Mrs Howard took a deep breath. ‘Only because you've got one, Zo. Lily wanted that second cousin or whatever he is. And then she's landed with someone she hardly knows.'

‘Russell
likes
him,' Zoe said, with quiet savagery. ‘They can talk about things the second cousin couldn't even pronounce.'

Unconvinced, standing by the table ready to carry out her salad, Mrs Howard said, ‘You know we'd have welcomed any of Russell's friends with open arms. Stephen could be a sort of foster son, but he makes it impossible.'

It was true. Zoe knew that Russell praised him constantly and defended him so that his family would not be affronted by Stephen's lack of grace, lack of warmth, by his erratic moodiness and prickliness.

Now, she asked excitedly, staring at her mother with sparkling eyes, ‘But why all this? Why all this now? Why ask me? It's nothing to do with me. He isn't
my
friend.'

Mrs Howard studied the table carefully, picked up the salad bowl. ‘No. But you never come out of that darkroom. You're invited out every night, and you won't go. You let Philip and Tony and the boys carry your gear about and then show them the door.'

‘Why not? What's this? Trying to marry me off ?' Zoe gave her mother a hostile look. ‘They're too young.'

‘And others are too old,' Mrs Howard commented.

Outside, there were footsteps and voices. Zoe picked up the platter of cheese and went out to join the group at the table. Over the pouring of coffee, her father and Lily were teasing each other. Talking, Mr Howard showed the perfect, strong white teeth that he had always taken so much interest in. His eyes were ingenuous. At least hundreds of people thought him very clever.

Russell was eating a sandwich and joking with a telegram boy who had come round to the side entrance and found his way into the party. Lily was helping to serve the salad. She turned, smiling, to give plates to Anna and Stephen, who were standing by the verandah wall, excluding themselves from the activity until they were made part of it. Moving cups forward for her father, Zoe covertly watched the others.

Lily was throwing off quips with such extraordinary rapidity that it was never possible to catch all she said. Now, as the plates were received, Zoe saw her give the Quayles a fixed stare of hauteur as her eyes met theirs. And Zoe realised that it was not only a sort of pity that Lily felt for anyone unrelated to her, but involuntary antagonism. Not much, almost invisible, but there. Lily resumed her story as though no vein of ice had been inserted in its midst: ‘—crashed headlong down the stairs knocking the vice-chancellor to the ground and came to rest on his substantial middle.'

‘I'm being paid to remove her,' Russell said, walking over to them, finishing off his sandwich. ‘Telegram. It says: Be happy.'

Coming up behind him, his mother confiscated it. ‘You're not supposed to read them now.'

‘Forget that message,' he said to Lily, and they both laughed, and Russell looked with delight at this tall girl with the tangle of rough blonde hair, the vital, angular face, at this strong girl whose voice had such thrilling qualities that her most ordinary utterance sounded significant.

With a shout of amusement, Mr Howard suddenly passed his open hand before Zoe's face. ‘Woebegone! Russell's always been the great favourite with Zoe. She'd go to the dentist for him while we were still looking up the experts to see how to handle her. I don't think I've ever heard them exchange a cross word, and that's a pretty good record for someone with a temper like Zo's. What do you think?'

As visitors and the only people present who could be expected not to know these facts, Stephen and Anna, called on to respond, were momentarily silent. They had almost no idea how acquaintances in a group were supposed to talk to each other.

Anna said, ‘We didn't see so much of each other.'

‘Weren't you in the same house?' Lily asked, with that same slightly cold curiosity.

‘Oh, yes. But—it was different.'

Mrs Howard interposed, ‘No one can quarrel with Russell.'

‘Not really a unanimous decision,' Russell assured his friends. ‘I'd be inclined to say no one could quarrel with Anna.'

She smiled.

‘That's the reason for the gloom,' Mr Howard concluded on a falling note. ‘The last lunch.'

There were loud groans, a clattering of cutlery and a sudden discarding of plates.

With uneasy joviality, Mr Howard looked about at the rejected remnants. ‘I've taken away their appetites,' he told his wife.

‘They'll recover,' she said blandly. She had flower-like eyes, but was shrewd, and did value a light touch—something Clive singularly lacked. ‘The telegram boy could have helped.'

‘He was provided for,' Russell told her, and they looked affectionately at each other.

The telephone rang; the doorbell rang. Mrs Perkins answered one, Mrs Howard the other. There were new voices in the hall. Mr Howard went inside to go over some proofs, and shut himself in his work room with a faint air of having taken a vow of silence. Lily rose up from her chair and everyone looked at her, automatically comparing the colour of her skin with the colour of her hair.

‘Like different shades of toast, you are, Lily,' Zoe told her. ‘In Europe, you'll be pale.'

‘What I'll be is ostracised, if I don't go home. My mother says I haven't taken enough part in the grisly discussions about something borrowed, something blue. No, I'll have to go. The house is full of aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins who've winged their way over land and sea—'

‘—for a last glimpse of our Lily.' Russell smiled at her.

‘It
might
be a last glimpse. They're old, and we'll be gone for years.' She sounded genuinely regretful.

‘I'll walk home with you.'

At once, Stephen turned to Anna. ‘It's time we were off.'

‘
Stay
. I'll be ten minutes. Keep them, Zo, or I'll blame you. We've got things to discuss, and this is the last chance.'

Zoe crossed her arms firmly to control the inner shaking that set up in her whenever she was face to face with Stephen. They had not exchanged a word this morning, which was not to say that they had been unaware of each other. It was one of many long expressionless glances that her father had intercepted and with his usual aplomb misinterpreted a short time earlier. If their eyes had nothing agreeable to convey, only some sort of resistance and resentment, they nevertheless had the greatest trouble in parting. And when they looked elsewhere that, too, was difficult. Because, somehow, he must know her well to disapprove of her so. His criticism mattered dreadfully.

Russell brought home from his meetings with Stephen an air of having spent his time with someone valuable. Giving a harsh opinion for the pleasure of having it contradicted, she would demand, ‘Where's his initiative? Why is he so lethargic?'

‘Zo,' was all he answered.

But that was no answer. Stephen. Perhaps Russell saw him as a fellow prisoner? Everything about him was puzzling. She wanted to assure him of so much, although what he so urgently needed to hear, she could not always remember. There were times when she would have picked up any unknown man of any age from any park, and vowed to do this very thing at the next convenient moment. This, however, did not seem to be that same straightforward urge.

She said, ‘You must stay, or I'll be in strife. Russell wants to discuss…Are
you
going away? Are you going overseas, too?' This possibility turned certainty as she spoke, simultaneously flashing from her eyes to his, and sending new shock waves through her body.

‘No. Why?' For once, Stephen seemed interested.

She withdrew hastily. ‘I just wondered—what there could be to discuss when he'll be away.' Left with her half-question, she looked at him in despair. Something in him took her from the pink marshmallow castle of her life to a high cliff over the ocean in the real world. Before this, only Russell was real. Now, Stephen pretended not to know, was scarcely even civil. In a moment, with one word, she could give him—what he had always wanted. Himself. Happiness. She thought. Perhaps. Something. A vital message.

Through black eyelashes meshed against the sun, through his spectacles, he stared at her.

‘You could read the paper, if you haven't seen it.' Zoe jumped up. ‘I want to show Anna something in my room.'

Without comment he lifted the paper by his chair, beginning to open the wide pages. Zoe walked away. Everything they said was true. You could feel physically torn from someone you weren't even touching.

‘Leaving Stephen to himself ?' Mrs Howard asked, as they went towards the stairs. ‘Oh, you're taking Anna up.' Because this had been prearranged. She had said, earlier in the day, ‘Why not give Anna some of those dresses you never wear?'

Zoe was doubtful. ‘Could you offer her second-hand clothes?'

‘Why not? She'd be grateful, if she has any sense.'

‘It looks like charity.
I
wouldn't like it.'

‘She's only a child.' If anything irritated Mrs Howard it was this sort of shrinking sensibility: there were, after all, larger issues at stake everywhere. ‘Just as you please, darling, but you'd be doing her a kindness.'

A kindness! With a sort of jaundiced shudder, Zoe turned away. On the one hand, the voice of her mother's experience, which naturally could not be very extensive; on the other, her own instinct. And what a lot of it she had!

Now, however, having left Stephen downstairs, she could think of nothing else. He despised her. An invisible hand dragged a steel rake through her body. Zoe threw herself on her bed, turning her head restlessly and breathing with a physical distress that was almost inconceivable to her. ‘Oh, Anna! Oh, Anna! It's so hot. Or is it cold?' She gave a fretful laugh and sat up to study Stephen's sister.