In Certain Circles (11 page)

After embraces, Zoe sat down expecting her mother to come in swiftly and switch off half the lights, making the room habitable and intimate and like itself. Everyone murmured apologetically about her death. Minute after minute, she failed to appear. Zoe's head continued to swoon. Her heart fell into hallucinated regions while the gathering, intent on cheering up, questioned her about the wide world.

Almost for the first time in her life, Zoe felt herself at the mercy of circumstances. She was
never
overborne, yet she was overborne, letting herself be talked to, meek, unable to assert her will, or even to be certain what that was. All the things ever said about death were true. Like a light going out. If her mother came in the door now, turning off all the lamps, still the glow from her presence would make the room visible.

‘We were always seeing pictures of you taking pictures.' Tony Merson eyed her intensely, giving the impression that his glance was taking a hundred tiny photographs for future reference. ‘You know, the parachute one, and in the refugee camps with the kids. Living dangerously,' he said, taking further pictures with his eyes.

Still
her mother waited outside the door, refrained from smiling, from saying, ‘It's like the Hotel Australia!' and banishing the remorseless, shadowless glare of a public place.

Zoe said, ‘From here it doesn't seem worth much.' Across the room, Russell and Anna were standing together.

Then Stephen was in front of her. ‘You should look older than you do,' she told him soberly.

‘How so?' He sat next to her on the sofa. Tony Merson gave her hand a valedictory squeeze and moved off from his confidential perch beside her.

‘So much has happened, so far away. Like science fiction. You return from outer space unchanged and find your contemporaries ancient.'

Again she looked in the direction of the door. Someone had left it open, exposing among the bright angles of copper, flower arrangements, paintings, no person. No one. Zoe studied the distant hall for a few seconds. She said without expression, ‘I feel she's in another room. I keep wanting to look through the house to see what she's doing…And you, Stephen, still the boyish anarchist, still young, upsetting all my notions. Are you as wrapped up in brown paper and string?' She felt her head jerk involuntarily away from him.

‘More than ever. But in Sydney now, with a secretary and access to the top-secret files. All that's lacking is a hotline to Washington and Moscow. A success story.' Tallish, spare of frame, as he was years ago. His clothes were better, and his barber knew how to cut hair. But he had altered at less superficial levels, too; had an ease of manner distinctly absent when they first met. Most noticeably, he looked directly at the person he was talking to.

Zoe forced herself to converse as though she had merely come home for a visit. ‘I've heard of other things…Science. Your degree…Yes, you went away to Melbourne. I remember thinking you did that on purpose.'

‘There wasn't much choice, but I thought I'd better get out.'

She stated, ‘Because of me,' and he nodded. When he began to speak again, Zoe found herself watching his teeth, small and well-shaped, as familiar as her own. ‘That was a pity,' she said, not noticing that she interrupted him. ‘But you've changed.'

From time to time Zoe continued to glance at the open door, expecting a doctor to appear, saying, ‘Everything is going to be all right. In a few days she'll be up and about.' When no one made any such announcement, when her mother chose to stay away, and stay away, she turned with untiring patience back to Stephen, her expression curiously fixed. To be seen by
them
, the powers of the world, to have limitless patience to spend on her mother's survival was essential.

Stephen said, ‘You aren't the same, either.'

Zoe looked into his eyes coldly for a second or two. ‘Well, I'm not like this, if that's what you think. However I seem now, it's not what I'm like.'

His interest, once so desired, now so unsurprisingly given, made him no less alien to her. By allowing her eyes to pass deliberately over the quiet groups of actors standing in clusters or turning chairs to form islands, she reminded him of the occasion. Death. Her mother. But how inept he was, after all! Tactful, instructive movements of the eyes were wasted on him.

Self-conscious but unconscious, discontented but apparently passive in his discontent, since he was still involved in the sale of packaging. A faulty man, sensitive and obtuse. He had taken off his glasses. Her eyes focussed on his hands as in a gigantic close-up—thin, long-fingered. The contents of her head swooped and zoomed as though the house rocked on its foundations. Feeling sick, she glanced away from Stephen to the room and its quiet inhabitants. And frail, and in fearful danger, they looked to her.

‘Could you get me something to drink? Who's taking care of all these people? Didn't Russell and Lily move in to help? Nothing very hospitable seems to be happening. It's not like our house.'

‘They've all eaten hours ago. You have a drink there.' He nodded at the low table in front of them.

But now there was a stirring in the room as though the star or the producer had been spotted approaching from behind the scenes. There were voices in the hall. Mrs Perkins came in abruptly, eyes in mottled face hunting out Mr Howard, who stood with Lily's father. Zoe and Stephen held each other's gaze to listen more attentively to her message.

‘Mr Proctor's here about the funeral.'

‘You're a pest, Zo,' Russell shouted after her.

‘Same to you.'

‘If you just want to drown yourself, why sink Gavin's tub?'

‘It's insured.'

‘For God's sake!'

‘What did you say?'

‘I said bugger off,' Russell muttered, watching her shoot out into the harbour. It was a month after the funeral, midwinter, the sailing season well and truly over. The sky was violet and charcoal and half past eleven in the morning. Finding that Russell and her father had long ago sold their boats, Zoe demanded that Russell borrow one for her. After a telephone call, they charged down the hill, arguing into the wind.

‘
Don't do it
.'

‘I shall. I will. I'm going to. I want to.'

‘Everyone knows you're intrepid, Zo. No need to prove anything.'

‘I never knew anyone with less talent for irony.'

‘Satire. With just as little success, of course.'

‘I'm taking that leaky-looking thing out.' She lowered her chin slightly, and looked up at him with a defiant expression that had nothing to do with sailing. It was Stephen. It was Stephen. They all suddenly tried to make nothing of him, silently resisted him, opposed her. Without speaking, they pressed opinions on her.

True, her poor father had been too busy making arrangements to go overseas to throw in his weight on their side, but everyone else, down to the remotest connection, had gone about just not shuddering at the sound of Stephen's name. She had seen him almost every evening. Her return booking to Paris had been cancelled, and although the ticket had not yet been cashed, it seemed to be fearfully assumed that she would stay. There had been two telephone calls from Joseph, and letters and cables about work. Most of her belongings were on the other side of the world. But none of this was the point. While she and Russell inspected the atoms of each other's eyes, her compressed and coded thoughts, banked tighter every day, exploded between them.

‘I've always had the impression that he was your great friend. We could have recited his virtues off by heart from the day you met. And all the time you were away you exchanged letters, and now you're back there's this printing press and you might be partners. And
yet
when you see whatever it is you see—about
us
—there's all this dubiousness. And I think, “What is it that makes Stephen acceptable as a lifelong friend and partner, and impossible as—” Or perhaps it's something about me? But anyway, I don't care what you think. And, God knows how, he hasn't noticed the absence of enthusiasm. Even Anna—' she broke off bitterly, and turned to stare at the heaving water. The boatshed beside which they stood, banged and rattled as though working up to take off.

‘Zo…' Russell pulled at her waterproof sleeve consolingly. ‘It's nothing. We worry about you. I don't know what it is. He's not easy. You're so different from each other. You don't seem to have much in common.'

‘What on earth do you mean? You can't know either of us, if you think that.'

Hands shoved in his pockets, Russell poked at a few stones with the toe of his shoe. ‘Your life in Paris was
right
. It was your line. You were slaving at something that was important to you—'

‘—Joseph slaved and so did everyone near him. What he does
is
important. I'm not the only one who thinks so.'

‘That's all I'm saying—good work, good company. Your letters made me envious.'

They both laughed. Then Zoe scoffed, ‘Envious? You? Tone it down a little. But I was in good company,' she agreed, momentarily sombre. Her spirit revived. ‘There are people I'll hate not seeing again. Didn't even say a proper goodbye. But the fact that I may choose to let all this go should convince you I'm serious.'

Russell's blue eyes contemplated her. ‘You couldn't sit at home here—a suburban lady on charity committees, having fashionable lunches with other ladies, and spending your talents on your clothes.'

She side-stepped and attacked. ‘You talk about not having much in common! Who could be less alike than you and Lily? Lily should have married a professor. If you're not an academic, she thinks you might as well cut your throat. You liked it in London in the thick of things: she likes it here with her family, and the prospect of being a big fish in her department when she stops being a mother. But the reason you give is, quote, that this is the best place in the world to bring up children, unquote. What a cliché!'

There was a brief pause.

‘Leaving aside my non-existent problems, there's only one thing in everyone's mind—could you settle down here again? That's all. I like it. It suits me. But it's the far side of the moon.'

Zoe was watching him with a sort of dreamy, abstracted interest. He never seemed to get angry. Anger was something he could do without. A gust of wind blew her hair up and over her face. Roughly she smoothed it down and plaited it. ‘Look at that sky. Set for the Second Coming. All those portentous rays. Any minute—trumpets!' There was something enchanting and winning and touching about her, and she knew it, and Russell knew it, though exactly what it was at that moment he would have been hard put to say. A sweetness at the core. Something irritating and undeserved like that.

He said, ‘You're more likely to hear the Last Post on a bugle if you take that boat out. Come on. Let's go back.'

‘I've got things to think about,' she said, searching her pockets. ‘You wouldn't have any rubber bands?' She showed him the unravelled ends of her plaits.

Sighing, he patted himself over. ‘No. No ribbons either.'

‘Then push off, darling. But give us a hand with this first. And if anything happens—remember, I love you all.'

Five minutes later, she shot out into the bay, shouting, ‘Airborne!'

Russell trudged up the hill. ‘I couldn't watch,' he said to Lily, who was in the kitchen preparing for a dinner party. She looked up and smiled and licked some sauce from the side of a forefinger. She nodded at the table where Vanessa and Caroline, like miniature replicas of their Aunt Zoe, were rolling out scraps of pastry, moulding them into balls, then pounding them flat with baby fists. ‘Jesus says—Je-sus says—you have to share that rolling pin, Vanessa.'

‘What happened to yours?' her mother asked.

‘Lost. All gone.'

Russell found it under the table and restored it to the owner.

‘Stephen rang. I told him what was happening, and he said he was going after her. There's some boat he can take, better than Gavin's.'

With a groan, Russell sat down at the end of the table. ‘Where's my aqua-lung? Don't tell me any more. It's like Madame Butterfly—all rushing to the water's edge.'

‘Well, not quite.'

‘They're insane. It's only the filthiest day of the year. They'll have everything from water spouts to tidal waves out there. I wonder if someone else would like to go for a sail?'

‘Oh yes, Daddy! Yes, yes.' The twins slipped off their chairs and ran to him, rubbing pastry into his trousers and sweater and hair as they swarmed over him. ‘Go for a sail. Take us, Daddy.'

‘Well,' Lily said, reasonably, when he opened his eyes at her.

Zoe clung to the tiller like someone riding a steer in a rodeo. The light was now peculiarly sulphurous and the wind was noisy as an opera with all the principals assembled, shrieking over the death of the hero. How close to the water she was! And yet she seemed to be thinking of something else while she fumbled with soaking rope and wood and hair. Some shipping, foreign cargo freighters, lay at anchor, deserted; otherwise, the harbour was stripped of life. It occurred to Zoe that she might be in danger, yet she had an impression of being locked away safe and secure with all eternity in which to reach conclusions.