The Circle (14 page)

Lena went to make some coffee.

When she came back from the kitchen Kari had fallen forward on the couch, the whole of the heavy top of her body forward, her black hair covering her face.

In a terrified pause, Lena’s fingers splashed hot coffee unfelt on to her open skin in the folds of her nightdress. Then a muffled sleep-ridden voice came from the distorted body.

Lena put down one cup; saw that she had dropped the other. Left it where it was spilling brown liquid. The skin of her left breast was scalding.

But Kari was deep in sleep. Long away and lost in it. And her child looked on, trying to stand. As Lena fumbled with the handbag clasp looking, wondering what? A doctor? Searching the deeply silent face. Listening to the breath that came so evenly in and out. Hesitated. And then suddenly with a great effort she pushed the heavy body backwards, and put a pillow under it. Then she took off Kari’s shoes, tucked up the legs, the long elegant legs, on to the couch. Listened again to her breathing.

From the big chair came a small croak of pleasure. Kari’s child had found the ashtray. Lena took it away her hands slipping with sweat. The child docile.
Shutting
the door, Lena went back to the kitchen to wash up.

When Kari woke about lunch-time, there was still no sign of Lisa. But Kari woke smiling, and
non-committal
: there was no conversation.

Was it a surprise to discover, not from anything precisely said, but from the changing cadences in Lisa’s voice, that after all: John belonged to Kari? And would for all the loveliness Lisa offered him?

When she put it to Ben as a question for the first time, he at least was unsurprised, because nothing surprised him about what people did. And yet she thought again and again of Kari, like an old many-sailed barge and muttered her bewilderment, thought of Kari’s
coarseness
, and the radiance of Lisa’s frailty; it was a puzzle
she needed to solve. She was still unable to phone Kari. She could not inquire, how things were going with her. Could not affect the ghoulish unknowing voice on the phone, could not allow herself the self-indulgence of curiosity. And so though she saw Kari often publicly. Collecting children. Confused, rushed as ever, she could only: look at her closely. At the broad face and the clear stare. The big-boned solidity of the woman. And she filled Lena with uneasy admiration.

Once, forced face to face with Kari in a shop, Lena had found herself saying: How’s your work going? And felt a little trickle of fear in the small of her back as she spoke.

But Kari had lowered her dark voice impishly, and replied

And then, about a month later. Kari and John threw a party; and the confusion was over. It was huge, garish, and meaningless party; or would have been. Except that Lena knew (and perhaps many more) that it was a true celebration. Of Victory. For Kari, who moved like a great coloured boat about the rooms of her house.

Lisa sat on a sofa in the midst of the noise. White as a tree in the wind looking: ill, beautiful, coughing a little, her hands clenched tight on the cord edge of the cushions. Her waiting was so absolute a state that when Ben, sitting beside her for a moment, spoke to her, she turned like a woman in a blind dream, as though it was an effort even to focus her eyes on him:

And he had to repeat it again, and perhaps again, Lena thought and watched him bend his head to catch her reply. If it ever came.

While John was expansively dealing with the drinks. And Lena stood at his side taking straight scotch in a large wine glass, studying him. Feeling how little he had changed, how little there was to change.

Now Kari appeared, dressed with great care in a long red trouser suit, cut down to her big breasts so that they seemed to make a bold and insolent announcement of her sexuality, and her black hair fell about her face so perfectly that it made another gesture of its own. Majestic, blank, powerful she moved about the room; began to dance with a young research student; a heavy deliberate dance. Never looking for John, not attending upon him.

And Lena admired her. And yet when she met the wide green eyes, she lowered her own, feeling again the strange treachery of her admiration. And resenting the equanimity, wondering. If it was assumed.

John saw, but did not watch her. Perhaps after all he was edgily conscious of Lisa’s white tormented face. Lena wanted to think that. But he too found another young girl to dance with. And Lena watched and watched, talking to the middleaged man at her own side, who said:

Lena put down her glass with great reluctance. Like anyone who has ever enjoyed dancing seriously, she hated to be fox-trotted about, and she could see from the way the man moved that he was going to do even that badly.

But she agreed; mainly as a way of entering the other room. Only at that moment the music changed totally.

They had come just before the couch on which Ben was still sitting with Lisa, and Lena hated being pulled about before them so clumsily. She drew away at arm’s length, but Ben made no move to join her; indeed his whole attention was given to the pale figure at his side.

On her own, therefore, Lena shook her shoulders and hips for a moment, for a moment of an old pleasure, meeting then, just at that second, Kari’s eyes
unexpectedly
, drunkenly, smiling. And in the middle of that euphoric moment she heard the scared, bloodless voice of Lisa.

John was not dancing, he was near the couch, she could see the white hands going out to him. John was busy at his own cheerful, untalented gyrations:

Dimly she was aware of Lisa getting up, hurrying to the garden was it, out there in the cold and wet
through the white windows? As a sort of crowd
collected
and Lena danced and shook with a crazed and guilty animation. It was for Ben, it was for Ben, that performance: and yet when she looked for his eye, he too was disappearing. Into the garden after Lisa. So that suddenly Lena felt her dancing fall into a
mechanical
shaking. And her mind woke up again. To Lisa’s pain, yes; but also to a sort of question about Ben’s departure. Not worry
for
him, going into the cold as he was. On his first permitted outing. But another anxiety, about the nature of his compassion.

When the record ended she excused herself. She could not follow into the blackness of the garden, that was absurd. And yet their departure together filled her with a shameful anxiety. She could do nothing but imagine the beauty of Lisa’s tears and jealously imagine Ben, in his huge benevolent dumsiness, attending to her delicacy. Oh how much at that moment she longed to be more fragile, more supernatural, less wholly
earth
than she was. She went back to the drink on the table. With the unforgiveable inevitability of such occasions, the same man (for what reasons of his own she knew not) was there before her. In cold and gloomy self-discipline she brought herself to talk to him.

How long was it, half an hour later? Lisa came in, smiled briefly at her and went looking for her coat. A moment later Ben appeared also. Bringing John, who looked reluctant, but wore the same smile. Lena thought
villain.
Only he was no villain. There were no villains. He was folding his hands, almost rubbing them with embarrassment. And Lena turned her eyes away ashamed to be spying on Lisa’s ravaged face as he bent over her. Looked anywhere else. And suddenly saw. A slow-moving and purposeful Kari, a monolith she fancied her. A huge maternal and protective figure
bearing down upon the two half-hidden whispering creatures.

At her approach, even before Kari had put out a hand towards them (and her face was blank and
beautiful
and casual) Lisa broke away. Left through the front door just holding her mack. Out into the cold like a frightened animal into the night. And Lena was suddenly unselfishly frightened. Because she knew she had just witnessed the kind of total defeat that no-one should be allowed to see. And having seen it, she knew it could not be turned from. And this time she did follow.

Out into the black lane. To the bridge. The river. In the darkness she could see nothing. All the streetlights were out and the only sound was the movement of the leaves on the ground. Hedge noises. The moon was a great white circle above her. The air cold on her face. What was she afraid of? She went on walking. At the side of the water. Black. Black water. Following the turn of it until as she came up to the second bridge, she saw her.

She was there at the edge of the water, her old mack pulled high about her, not crying, looking into the water, just looking.

Resigned, rather than querulous, Ben sat in bed each morning while she got the children ready for school. Waiting. For tea, for the papers, for something to eat. Anything. Because he wasn’t allowed out of bed until the nurse came. To take his blood pressure and survey him generally. Sometimes to give him an injection.

And because the nurse was coming: an eye from the outside world, Lena tidied and shoved away everything in cupboards and made the bed up round him so that he looked like a patient as much as ever. Except
lonelier
. A single patient in a cell. No idyll, his return;

When he could get up and the weather was fine he went and sat in the garden on the rusty iron seat in the sun; just sitting and blinking in the sun as it seemed to her. And she went out to him and said: why don’t you read something?

The fact that they were leaving the house which she had hoped would be some source of pleasure to him was no longer so; insanely as it seemed to her, be began to talk of the trees and the garden for the first time with affection. Moving to a town cottage. He simply could not predict, he said. How it would be. Or how life would ever be any different for them.

And yet it was sweet to lie side by side again, in the same bed, their bodies fitting easily into their
accustomed
places, gently turning with one another at night, and waking together: that was good. Though their dreams interlocked strangely, in some weird and inconclusive patterns like the inner worlds they moved in, that the touch of their bodies could not bring together. He for instance dreamt one night of a tender vulnerable child, whose many hands and feet were at first only remotely human: it was like some monstrous but tender science fiction creature. Which fell sick, and suddenly became a pathetic child. Still many legged. That had to go to hospital. And there the nightmare was, that the doctors neglected it, because of its
strangeness
, its many limbs. He was so sorry for the creature, which became more and more clearly human and
innocent
as it got iller. And the doctors were disgusted with it. He could see that. They weren’t doing enough, they were casual under his frantic questioning. And the last time he went to visit this thing he now loved, he was told: it’s dead. They were sorry. They had done all they could, but it was dead. And he was furious. Told them:

He told her the dream, bewildered by it, as they held one another close, as he dozed off again. She said

And her dreams were stranger; lovely dreams for the most part And one in particular; she was swimming down a dark river. The water warm and buoyant, like a strange salt sea of blackness. Except through the trees around, occasional lights of houses made their
reflections
on the water. That was a glinting blackness. And she swam strongly, easily. One arm and then the other, arching and beautiful (as she felt it), out of the water. Loving the feel of the water, the blackness of it, the shine of the blackness.

And then from somewhere behind her she could hear a sort of fluttering and pathetic noise. Like a splashing animal. And over her shoulder she could see she was being pursued. But clumsily. By a woman swimming an oldfashioned dogpaddle; and she wondered who it was. Somewhere, with the prescience of dreams, she imagined it her mother, or perhaps her aunt; and yet was not going to stop for them. As she swam in the dark river, carried on by the soft currents, carried on, down stream, past the houses, past the deep trees on either side of them, loving the feel of the water on her
glistening
flesh. On into darkness. Woke in darkness at Ben’s side curiously happy; to tell the strangeness of it in his sleeping ear.

But the days were not close; they were charged
with the pressure of her own daily round; and his bored inaction. Fretting really for a return to the world. And so it was a relief in a way at the end of the first week to hear that Danny was coming to stay with them. Though she felt muddled about him; of course Ben was right not to feel any change in
friendship
for him. All the same she was glad he came alone.

There were long periods, she was just emerging from one, when Lena fell into a state of complete indifference to clothes; Never, of course, fastidious, her underclothing would begin to disappear entirely, and she would wear huge men’s sweaters which barely showed the low curve of her breast at all.

To make a transition from such an extreme state of dereliction was always a kind of comedy; but she had got the worst of it over before Ben came out of hospital. The absurd part. Moving through a department store, and gradually transforming herself from a crow that the salesgirls could giggle at, into a reasonably personable woman.

Underclothes first, because otherwise you couldn’t
even get into a cubicle to try on a dress. Frilled knickers and a good bra. Then she could enter a shop with a certain aplomb. Still wearing the same peculiar jumper and jeans certainly, but moving along the rail of good dresses, under the eye of the sales girls, without fear, taking what she wanted.

And it was so ridiculous, it was so amusing to her. That at the next department of the same shop where she went to buy shoes, she was received so differently. So respectfully. Damn it, it was the
clothes
that were seen and respected; not the body or the spirit inside them; it was a crazy world, she was moving in. And she bought the shoes reflecting how strange it was; that salesgirls should have such respect for the commodities they sold. It was like: a grocer feeling reverence for cans of beans.

But all that over; the real fit of spring buying was on her; she did not quite understand it. It was a seasonal lust. Nearly May, she thought. The suicide season. When everyone who was not entirely dead felt the possibility move in them again of life in the body. And either admitted that, or threw it aside for ever.

So that while Ben sat in the living room, with Danny, she went round the shops. Buying meanly. Cheaply and well, because they would still be short of money even when they’d sold the house, and she didn’t want, she
would
NOT
go on, hiding the bank statements from Ben when they came in. And she spent time cutting and washing her hair.

So that on the second day of Danny’s visit; he, at least, remarked the change; a bit nastily: Got a new boy-friend, Lena? You look a new woman.

Lena was breathless with indignation.

After the party, Lena had not been to see Lisa at the cottage for nearly a month. And when she did go she was embarrassed. Partly because of what Danny had said, and partly because she could see an enormous change in
Lisa’s health. And did not know how to ask about it without causing pain.

But she drove back towards town close to tears at the disarray she had just witnessed. At the breakdown of spirit, the shaky clumsiness of the lovely limbs, the inturned blankness of the cool grey eyes. What had happened. Was it the loss of John or. Was it Danny’s spite that had triggered off so terrible a dissolution? Or was Danny right, was this some periodic fit of madness that took her? Cruel even so, as pitiable, but somehow harder to bear the knowledge of? She supposed that was the truth of it. It was silly to be so depressed. And she knew it was not just pity for Lisa that brought tears to her eyes. It was something nastier. A sense that her own
hold on any possible beauty of living was weakened by the discovery of Lisa’s deep sickness.

But Ben laughed when she described it to him.

And he kept the rules very well. At least at first. Not more than a few hours in the lab. Not more than half a day. No late hours. Just a slow start, back slowly to normal pressure; but his whole face was changed with it. He no longer talked of the hospital. When she teased him about that; he said soberly, it was like living death. It was like suicide. Or madness. Now he was alert to the world around him.

Which had of course certain disadvantages; he began to take a new and critical interest in the house they were buying; walked gloomily round the square looking up at others that were not for sale and
preferring
them; for the first time he was quite certain they were paying too much money for such a tiny place; voiced serious doubts about the main road they
were close to; and so on; his old self. She didn’t mind.

And soon he got back into his own peculiar rhythm of working; into the night, when it was quiet. Sleeping late in the day. And about this time an absurd incident occurred which curiously cemented a new relation. Yet it was alarming too, in its way.

Ben’s labs were outside the town, on a hill, very much newly planned and landscaped; and the architect,
wishing
to disguise the largely functional architecture of the place had put in the only courtyard, a small ornamental pond, oblong in shape, with stones at the bottom that picked up the glint of the sun and sky and refracted that glitter during the day. On wet nights, the wet shine of the pond’s surface appeared continuous with the slabs of paving about it. One evening about eleven she was dozing over a book waiting for Ben to come back, when the phone went and Ben’s subdued voice said: Do you think you could get a taxi and come and get me?