In Certain Circles (19 page)

‘Later, when I'd got over envy and admiration enough to focus straight, I thought they were rather cruel to you. Because I was younger, but knew so much more about what I used to call “real life” and people.'

‘Retarded by prosperity and love. They had to keep their little girl.'

‘I'm not recommending
my
experience as the ideal preparation for life, heaven knows. Maybe something between yours and mine would be best. Some life of great variety—I don't mean the experimental school sort—with some rigour and real encounters. Whatever they might be. More connection with the varieties of reality.' Shrugging, she smiled at Zoe with lively self-derision.

‘But still,' Zoe said. ‘I know what you mean. Gilded youth always has to learn the hard way.'

With no expression, Anna looked at her. ‘So does the other sort.'

The varying degrees of good humour and intelligence Zoe had encountered in her family and friends had appeared to encompass the full range of human nature. Like most people, she naturally believed that what she had not experienced was either non-existent or of no importance. Who ever heard an egoist admit to ignorance? And the Howard circle that she took to be the norm was cosily hedged in, a Garden of Eden in its innocence. Zoe had carelessly thought that everyone belonged there, more or less. A self-contained, undiscovered tribe imagining themselves to be the whole of mankind. How should they not think so, filling as they did a complete floor of the building? Since those days, Zoe had moved to other floors of existence and other tribes.
Now
, she easily recognised those who had never shifted from the place where they started.

They were incapable of believing in the reality of other people and ways, utterly rejected the proposition that there were lives lived out where there was only cruelty, that there were areas inspired by a genius for personal relations, that there were areas of wickedness, of learning and effort, of love, of aggression, of bad temper and malice, where each particular principle ruled and the indigenous subjects praised that one god. There were as many tribes as human types, but the populations varied greatly. It was sad, Zoe thought, to know there were gentle souls marooned amongst the brutal, unable to conceive of a place where gentleness was native to all. The misery of a sour misanthropist among the generous-hearted was also noteworthy.

Stephen had wandered into Howard country, where Zoe too was a foreigner without knowing it. And that was that. She thought: people can be misfits without having anything in common. This isn't always realised. Of course, we did have complementary needs to practise our talents. She had forgotten that.

Anna was saying, ‘In offices, places like that, the number of frustrated Machiavellis and Oliviers would stun you. Any larger-than-life figure you can think of has his millions of awful copies. Characters without a stage (except home and work), all having to practise their personalities under the constriction of having to work at something uncongenial in order to eat.'

She stroked Zoe's new grey kitten, rolled a green rubber ball away for it to chase.

‘Are women the same?' Zoe wanted to know. In the background, the plumbers' transistor had launched into
Don
Giovanni
.

‘Oh, women are still in their early days. There isn't very much for them to be like without upsetting preconceptions. Some of them are warriors, too, but mostly they're belly dancers or capable little Victorian mothers. On the other hand,' she said, suddenly penitent, ‘I know heroic types of both sexes, who were not only in their imaginations worthy of a better fate, but were really worthy, and really did suffer from great qualities that had no outlet, and it certainly wasn't their fault. Unless you can call it a fault to be born too soon to be caught up in the general affluence, which younger people think has always been here.'

‘Let's not pretend education makes perfect,' Zoe protested, ‘if that's what you're thinking of. It's useful or enthralling even, but it doesn't alter the real person. It's interesting. Something your heroic ones ought to have, since they have what counts most in the first place.'

‘Not only that I was thinking of. Well-meaning but ignorant families, world wars, moderate poverty, broke their lives.'

Zoe smiled. ‘But not their characters?'

‘Never their characters, or they wouldn't be my heroic ones.'

‘You love the people you love, Anna.'

‘I love the people I love. They do tend to be wonderful,' she admitted. ‘But I don't change my mind about them. They tend to stay wonderful.'

One of the plumbers arrived, a cheerful ginger young man of twenty-two or -three. ‘Could y'give us an idea where the fuse box'd be?' he asked confidingly.

‘I'll show you.' Anna jumped up. ‘You're supposed to recline, Zo.'

‘You like Mozart,' Zoe heard her remark, and the plumber, Mr Horton, replied joyfully. ‘You been listening? I got everything on record.'

‘You've made a friend.' Over the top of her sunglasses, Zoe peered at her when she returned. ‘Another friend. You're like my mother, so sympathetic, and such a good listener.'

‘So they tell me. I must take my ears and sympathy away soon.'

‘
No
. Lunch is ready in the oven. I thought you might carry it through for us? Anna…' She had no idea how she meant to proceed.

‘Yes?' Anna was watching the kitten play with a long thread of wool.

‘How's Tom?' Even to herself this sounded abrupt. Zoe felt a slight warmth in her face and ears.

‘Tom's all right. Why?'

‘I wondered, that's all. What's he doing?'

‘Good. Doing good. And most unnatural to him it is, too!'

Zoe laughed.

A number of young men and women derisively known to Lily as ‘the disciples' had, over a period of years, been spurred to change their ways by observing Russell's ways. Most of them were perplexed to find that a change of occupation was more easily achieved than a change of heart. Like those who choose their clothes with an eye to being taken for someone ‘interesting', they were disappointed to find themselves unaltered in the fancy dress of Russell's gestures and concerns. Hills peeped o'er hills, and alps on alps arose. Some turned into friends and associates; others cultivated a rancorous animosity towards him for having unintentionally shown them limitations displeasing to their vanity. Well,
he
was not infallible.
He
was far from perfect. They loathed him.

Tom Hamilton, Anna's Tom, had gone so far as to resign from a prosperous career in advertising, submit himself to a new training in social work, and to work daily now amongst the aged and hard-pressed.

Anna's fair hair was short with loose curls, beautifully cut in the fashion of the time to make her resemble some romantic Victorian poet. She now pulled at these trained and tended locks in troubled reflection.

‘It's the worst possible work for a depressive. He's like Stephen. He hates it. He's sentimental, and there's no room for that sort of feeling in disaster areas.'

Pretending to adjust her sunglasses, Zoe said, ‘What do you mean—he's a depressive, like Stephen?'

‘Well, only loosely like Stephen. Stephen's brighter, but his moods are more violent.'

‘Oh.' Antagonism came surging forth. To cover it, biding for time, Zoe was inspired to listen to her watch. ‘Depressive. I never think of anyone close to me in terms like that.' For seconds she prided herself on her self-control, then burst out, ‘If anyone could measure what he's had to overcome, it should be you.'

Anna looked into eyes that were angry and defenceless. After a pause, she said, ‘He had a hard beginning and never recovered from it. You can admire the way someone meets hard circumstances, but you can't admire him
because
of them.'

‘Would compassion be beyond you?'

‘I can bully my will, but not my feelings. They're not biddable. If you think yours are, you're kidding yourself.'

‘How hard you are.' She sighed. ‘You're ghastly. All this fearful truthfulness.' Her mind wandered these fields of truthfulness spread round her by Anna, and suddenly she was in despair. ‘I know. People have to get over things. But what if they don't?'

After another pause, Anna said, ‘But about Tom—I hope they'll move him into administration. He'd do very well.'

Not to be diverted, Zoe asked, ‘How would you classify me?'

‘I wouldn't classify you at all! Don't be offended!'

‘No, but what am I?'

Turning her face slightly to one side and smiling, Anna said, ‘You're an idealist.'

‘And you?'

‘A sort of realist.'

‘And Lily?'

‘An illusionist.'

‘And Russell?'

Like someone caught off-guard in a word-association test, Anna halted. ‘Oh, Russell…He's someone you need never feel sorry for. And in a sense that's the highest praise you could give.'

Zoe saw what she meant, but in her mind chastised herself for being no closer to the matter urged on her by Stephen—discovering the reason for Anna's alleged sorrow.

‘What's Tom, then?' Surely, in spite of the absence of evidence, he must be part of it?

‘I've told you—a lost soul. Money's the only thing that rouses the natural man in Tom. Unfortunately, he's been seduced by the company he keeps—by which I mean us—into feeling that there might be
something else in life
. Money chasing seems unworthy, and he's ashamed of it, and it's what he cares about. In advertising, after he met Russell, he worried about his integrity. Now that he's a social worker, he broods about his income.'

‘What's wrong with money?' Zoe asked, to be perverse. ‘Russell's no pauper. That's why he's free to spend so much time—trying to humanise what's inhuman around the place.'

Anna only looked up into the windy sky. ‘Tom isn't Russell.'

‘Do you sometimes think it's odd that Russell's stayed outside politics? One of nature's non-joiners. He's probably freer this way. That paper he turns out has quite a list of subscribers! And I don't only mean the numbers.'

‘I know.'

‘And the things he's done for old people, and the help he's rallied for those poverty-stricken preschool places—none of it's negligible. Yet sometimes I feel he's wasted his life. Do you?…I suppose the people involved wouldn't think so. Does he ever seem lonely to you?'

‘Russell?…' Anna let so long a silence accumulate that it was a kind of answer. Still, she stared at the clouds.

Zoe stated, ‘Then you'll never marry Tom.'

‘Oh, no.'

‘You judge him,' Zoe said, like a judge.

‘No. I notice. If I see a tiled floor I notice it, but that's not to make a judgment.'

‘Wouldn't it be generous to let him go?' In recent years, Zoe had come to identify herself with unrequited and mistaken lovers to such an extent that the idea of what it was permissible to say even to a close friend had temporarily passed her by. She no longer cared very much what she said. Ordinary restraints had less and less meaning for her. Social behaviour was just another way of telling lies.

Without surprise, Anna said, ‘He's free. I was gone for a year. He sees other women. I see other men. We've wasted some time together, that's all.'

Giving her a puzzled look, Zoe said, ‘Still. When he's with us, I feel sorry for him. If you cared for someone and your feeling wasn't returned, I imagine it would be—anguish—to watch that person with others who mattered more. Crumbs from a banquet to a starving man. Mattered more or with more rights.'

There was a moderately long silence during which Anna pulled on a woollen blazer. ‘Getting cold…No one has to bear the sight of me wrapped in the arms of my true love, after all.'

The tone of this statement was rejected by Zoe's mind as beyond analysis. ‘No,' she said cautiously, as though she meant the opposite. ‘But you're more present when you speak—say, to Russell—than when you talk to Tom.'

‘Do you think so?' Anna's tone was abstracted. ‘Russell and I never have much to say to each other.' Idly, she lifted one of Zoe's books from the floor and began running a thumbnail across the spine. It made a rasping sound.

Having listened to this phrase a few times, Zoe went on, ‘Not Russell in particular. Any of your real friends. Relaxed. Familiar.' Nothing she said was quite right; she felt ill at ease. They both seemed to listen to silent voices.

Then Anna laid the book down again. ‘I think you're attributing your own superior feelings to Tom, so that you can feel sorry for him.'

Through narrowed eyes, Zoe considered each of her ten long fingernails. ‘When you don't care for someone, it's easy to dismiss his feelings. It's easy to be contemptuous. It's impossible to take seriously any feeling you don't return.'

‘Yes. Agreed. 'Twas ever thus. What's to be done about it?' Anna said almost impatiently. Then as if the voices she had heard beneath Zoe's voice suddenly ceased, Anna looked at her with total attention. ‘What's made you think of all this? What are you thinking of ?'

Glancing away, Zoe said, ‘Nothing. A cup of tea. Food. See those clouds! The sky does look exactly like a dome. Was Canada so beautiful with its high mountains and white snow? Your work shot ahead. I thought it could hardly be better, but it is.'

‘All this concern for Tom!'

Zoe laughed weakly, guiltily. She felt nothing for Tom, nothing for Stephen, nothing for Anna or anyone. It was only that unrequited love seemed such a waste. Like seeing a whole summer's harvest dumped in the ocean, with so many starving. ‘No, but it is sad when things don't work out, isn't it?'

Standing up, Anna looked out over the garden, saw the glitter of water, then went to the door to go inside. ‘If you're thinking of food, it's lunch time.' Then she nodded two or three times, ‘Yes, it is sad.'