In Certain Circles (12 page)

With tremendous speed she reviewed everyone she had ever known—the lucky, invulnerable. Even Russell, who should know better, was a light-minded man. Even this month, with so much sadness, he sang to her on the telephone, told terrible jokes against himself, bought presents for no special reason and behaved, generally, in a foolish way. And in Paris, Joseph, who had so little judgment that he considered himself in the midst of some deathless love affair. For a man of that age to be so romantic! Hard-working, accomplished, perhaps even an artist, but basically weak, she decided harshly. To love more than you were loved in return—how little character that showed!

Stephen. All the careful compliments from the family that fell short of accuracy. They could not admit the significance of his life because it would show them at such a disadvantage. Too bad, she thought grimly, welcoming an excuse to take up arms against the old life, returning like a warrior from the first death she had known. Well, they
would
respond to him if she had to apply thumb screws.

If they wanted to throw down challenges, she would pick them up though her life was at stake. If she had to battle colossal disapproval, they need not think she would hesitate. When she had said this yesterday to Anna, Anna had only replied, ‘Don't you ever find the people you're reacting against are paying less attention than you think? If you look decisive, people think you know what you're doing, and they're always relieved.'

‘That sounds like a wise observation, Anna.' The only thing was, she had blocked out the sense of it, absolutely knowing it was nothing to her purpose. Her purpose was to feel opposed.

Yet some very small sensation that perhaps no one was daring her to fall in love with Stephen and marry him, that her defiance was directed at no one, caused her to hesitate this Sunday morning. Almost, she could feel herself checked on the brink, pricking her ears, scanning the horizon for comments and signs, testing the air for danger or promise, breasting the challenge scented everywhere.

Three sickening gulps of saltwater woke her. She heard a cry and turned. A heavy crack on the skull blacked out even the deepest spell. There was underground singing. Everything moved and heaved under her. Half-drowned, she saw Stephen and some strange man leaning over her.

So be it.

Stephen was shouting. She said, ‘I wanted to think. What's this—a ferry?' Then she was sick. ‘Is Gavin's boat all right?' And she was sick again. Stephen held her as she leaned over the tossing sea.

Dried and warmed and fed and combed, three hours later she was sitting up in bed receiving visitors.

‘Stephen saved my life, and we're getting married practically tomorrow. Or did I say that before?'

Lily gave the entranced face a severe look. ‘You've said it ten times. Considering that your life needn't have
been
in danger…We were down at the beach. Do you think Russell would let you drown?'

Zoe turned away. ‘It was a sign,' she said childishly, into the pillow, and two childish tears came to her eyes. She felt irrational, and right. It was not the first time she had accepted what was thrown in her path as a sign from the universe, but this most momentous acceptance erased all the others.

Russell came to the door. ‘Dr Todd said he's given her an injection. She'll be out to it in five minutes.'

Lying very still to hear what else might be imparted, she heard Lily say in a low voice, ‘I hope she's back to normal in the morning.'

‘Knowing Zo's normal…'

She smiled, and slept.

Dear Joseph,
Darling Joseph,
My dear Joseph,

Dear God! If she couldn't even decide what to call him!

Dear Joseph,

Thank you for your letters, and thank you for arranging to have everything packed and shipped over. I'm sorry not to have written sooner. How much did it cost?

Or, how I won golden opinions for tact, charm and graciousness. Thank you, like a business letter, then money, as if she'd hired him to do a job. If you can take the trouble to remember someone deeply, you can write human letters, otherwise you write form letters that could go to anyone, and read like a draught from a refrigerator.

Dear Joseph,

You ask for news. We've been married for five months, as you know from my other note. We're living in the house I inherited from my mother, at the end of that little beach I've described to you. Russell and Lily (whom you'll remember after that famous visit) and their two small daughters have the old house. My father went to South Africa some time ago, and is giving lectures there. He is so outspoken he'll end up in prison.

Russell has turned renegade now that they're back here—that is, Lily wanted him to winkle himself into one of the universities here, after winkling him out of the university there to bring the children home to her parents. He was working on some project in London, but has developed anti-sociological scruples for reasons I haven't been able to plumb. Lily is having seizures. When I tell Russell he is too vain to look at people in the light of other men's theories, he agrees with me.

So, after the sadness and turmoil of my mother's illness and death, and after they had moved into our old place, he was prevailed on by a friend who wanted to sell a Dickensian printery. (The machines are the best, but the building has little wooden staircases running all over it.) He (and I) then persuaded Stephen to resign from his uncongenial work, and they are now partners in this eccentric printery-cum-publishing thing that they know very little about.

Because Lily couldn't face leaving the children with a housekeeper, she has been translating various pieces at home—German. She asked me to help her, then we had to ask other friends if they could take on extra work, and now we have an office in town. We have a woman there to answer the phone. Most of the time, Lily and I work at home.

Apart from this, Stephen and I had the house brought nearer the heart's desire, by a team of Italian builders and painters, then furnished it, and I'm marvellously happy. It should be illegal to be so happy, and possibly is.

What piffle! Zoe thought, looking back at the letter. What a very false tone! Because he wouldn't want to hear all this about Russell and Stephen and domestic details. And it all amounted to an elaborate padding in which she could insert the vital news, the only news,
I am marvellously happy
. She felt a tremendous need to say it, and an equally deep, quite opposite need to be secret and private.

Vacantly she gazed out over the garden at the sea through its screen of leaves, its fringe of sand, grass and boatsheds. It was hard to remember Joseph. He was so far away. He had asked for a letter. That was how it had turned out, with all these busy details leading to her happiness. She had camouflaged and protected and made light of it all the way through, only to expose it entirely at the very end, like a magician, pattering on about trifles then whipping off the sheet under which birds and flowers had come to life.

She was using Joseph. He would notice, but he would make allowances. He always had. But the propriety of mentioning her happiness…

Briefly, she fell to considering her extraordinary good fortune, something so far above anything that had ever been conceived, that she lived always now at two levels—the practical, visible one, where she performed deeds in the world, swiftly, without effort, and the other real level, where she lived with Stephen in a state she could not describe even to herself, only experience, a flawless
now
.

Suddenly angry, as though the absent Joseph had debated all this with her, she turned back to the page. How could
he
understand? He had only known her before.

Stephen is a very complex person, and although superficially we might seem quite different, we are very much alike.

She continued to write rapidly about herself and Stephen, then turned her head at a sound. ‘Anna! Read this. I'm going to fix the sprinkler. What you never realise about owning property is the way someone has to look after it.'

They kissed, and Anna took the letter. ‘I'm early. I thought you'd be out here.'

‘Lovely. Gives us time before the others get here.' With a bright glance, she ran down the steps to the garden and disappeared round the side of the house.

‘Are you going to send this?' Anna asked, holding the letter up as Zoe returned.

‘Why? Yes. When it's finished.' But Zoe looked at the other girl, startled. ‘What's wrong with it?'

Anna's eyes moved about, unconcentrated. ‘Well. It's
chatty
. But you haven't mentioned him, or his work, or anyone you both knew.' She looked at her friend. ‘Would he want to hear Stephen's praises sung?'

‘Why shouldn't he? Why not?' Zoe frowned her hostility.

‘If he loved you?'

‘Oh—' She hesitated impatiently, looking into the past over Anna's head. ‘He only thought he did. I mean—I suppose he did. It was good while it lasted. But he's too busy to go on being an unrequited lover.'

Anna laughed. ‘Oh, Zo!'

‘You and David didn't meet him in Paris, did you? He was away. Why all the concern, then? You think I'm callous.'

‘Yes. I think you're callous. I like his expression. He looks interesting. I've read interviews.'

Nodding, Zoe sat opposite Anna at the small wooden table where she had done her composing. She admitted, ‘He is nice. You'd like him. But, Anna, you can't consider everyone simultaneously.'

‘That's so. Oh well, then.' Anna propped an elbow on the table and cupped her face in the palm of her hand. ‘I suppose he'll survive. You're right that not everyone feels so much.'

‘Did I say that?' Looking puzzled, Zoe questioned a puzzled Anna, then they both laughed.

‘Everything's wonderful with Stephen? I haven't seen you for ages.'

‘Don't sound so sceptical. You're never very friendly towards him.' To her own amazement, Zoe's eyes filled with tears. She had become infinitely sensitive on his account, as she had never had reason to be on her own.

Anna said gently, looking at the white-painted tabletop, ‘I
would
be. But he holds people off. We get on each other's nerves a bit. He's not really—'

‘What?'

‘Very fond of people. Except you, of course, which is all that matters.'

‘No, it isn't all that matters. Don't say that.' Anxiously, Zoe rubbed her scalp with a shampooing motion for a few seconds. Abruptly, she stopped. ‘Everyone'll be arriving, and I'm not even dressed. But Mrs Trent's in the kitchen. But, Anna,' she said, in a pleading lover's tone that the very thought of Stephen evoked, ‘already he's changed so much. I don't want him to be anyone but himself, but he
wasn't
.' She added, looking away, eyes unfocussed, ‘He's a very complex person. Nobody really understands.'

Anna let this pass in a silence also rather complex.

‘But when you think of it,' Zoe went on eagerly, ‘who else would go to the slavery of getting a degree part-time at night, and then not use it? He says a first degree in science only qualifies you to teach, and he'd never do that. And he couldn't see himself going on, year after year, at night, for the next one. Now he's with Russell and everything's different, but before this—all those years as a salesman! I do understand it, but it baffles me. Why should he have settled for so long, for something so—incongruous?'

Anna had given her brother thought for years, but nothing about him was new to her as it was to Zoe. She attended while Stephen's wife mused aloud.

‘If he didn't intend to free himself when he
was
qualified, what did he think he was doing? Why did he think he was making that effort?'

Every day the evidence of Stephen's unparalleled disposition accumulated: it was clear in his least glance, in his every statement. Making love, eating, walking, swimming, attending dinners, parties, theatres, meetings, were all, in different degrees, ways of coming to know him. No one had the faintest comprehension! They acted as if this were just any marriage, and Stephen just anyone. Zoe now recognised, through him, that he had somehow been an emergency all his life, and that the understanding of him, and making happy of him, and finding himself for him, had to take precedence over all else.

There was nothing easy about it. Whatever he said was true, but his true statements had begun to seem like pieces of a jigsaw whose subject was a secret. They had to be recorded, then carefully held in suspense, till their place emerged. She might have asked for explanations, but why should he try to explain more than he readily could? The last desire she had was to question and grind him up into some dull reasonable thing where all could be understood by a child of five. She took it for granted that there were excellent reasons for everything he had ever done, even if she didn't know what they were.

‘He had that interview with the drug company,' Anna said.