In Certain Circles (23 page)

Leaving this Arcadian scene reluctantly, Zoe pushed her way up the crowded street to the restaurant where she was meeting Russell for lunch. The placards of competing newspapers tried to startle and shock with headlines that changed from one street corner to the next.
WAR EXPANDS. MINING
SHARES—WHOOPEE! WALL STREET DEPRESSED. DRUGS—PARENTS
IN TEARS.

Buildings Zoe had known all her life had disappeared since the previous week. The wreckers were out; cranes hung over the city. Scaffolding that had come to seem a permanent hazard to pedestrians had been whisked away to reveal skyscrapers, fountains, minatory sculpture. Naming the restaurant where he had booked a table, Russell had added the qualification, ‘If it's still there.'

Now they had eaten in this comfortable and quiet basement, and Zoe had heard of the events of the printery, to describe which, Russell had ostensibly arranged today's appointment. She was glad to see him, but thought the reason for their meeting unconvincing.

There had been a near-tragedy. Two weeks earlier, at the request of a welfare officer, he had employed a boy named Frank as a packer. Russell had promised to inspire the boy to stay on the rocky narrow path by providing vaudeville and dancing girls, and already he gave signs of settling down to collect a gold watch on his retirement. In the course of giving some attention to Frank, Russell had inadvertently withdrawn some from a similar castaway known as Bob, famous for his talent for wrecking public telephones. Bob had been at the press for three months, had had his hair cut, started a technical college course, and appeared to have seen a great light in regard to his future.

Disagreeably surprised by Russell's interest in the newly arrived Frank, he waited for ten days in vain for his restoration to centre stage, then wrecked the most expensive machine he could approach, swallowed or injected some enlivening poison, climbed into his car and knocked down a child on a pedestrian crossing. The girl's arm was broken, and Bob was charged. Traffic and even drug offences took decades to reach the courts, Russell said. Meantime, Bob had said enough in his vocabulary of a hundred words to show whose the fault really was. Translated, his complaint against Russell said: hesitate to do this to someone else. The withdrawal is worse than never having had the attention. All but the lamest dogs feel singled out for their unique qualities. The turning away is recognised as:
what could such as you give me
?

‘Russell!' Zoe gazed at him in wonderment. Piqued and out to make him sorry, like anyone thwarted, the boy had certainly been. ‘But you're elevating irresponsibility and peevishness and wounded vanity into high drama! All this remorse! What's wrong? Something else must be wrong. What is it?' She spoke rapidly, then regretted it. Russell said nothing, filled her glass with wine.

To plaster over the conspicuous crack of his silence, she reminded him that the press had always had its delinquents. Incidents like this were commonplace. If you made efforts on behalf of other people, you also took risks, but that was generous.

Denying this with a shake of his head, Russell drank some wine and watched his sister.

Zoe found his crime difficult to believe in. ‘You puzzle me. I can't understand you. This must be one of the least sensational events of your whole life.' No one succeeds everywhere. It was one of Russell's strengths that defeat did not defeat him. He seemed sustained in a way that other people were not. Yet this fact—what they could observe in him—sustained others. An eager and undefended responsiveness to individuals, new moments, gave his attention its high value. It was positively alluring, Zoe thought, to anyone on the side of life. Staring deep in his eyes, Zoe was suddenly made so happy by the very fact of his existence, that she felt a wholly unreasonable surge of optimism.

‘You look very sunny for someone so puzzled.' Russell smiled at her smile. ‘Have a peppermint.' He said, ‘About Lily,' and Zoe thought:
this
is why we met, not the other.

‘That was another large error of judgment, giving you the idea that she was an addict. My attention was somewhere else.
Not
with the boys at the press, either. You're right about that.'

None of this was easy to refute. Zoe said resolutely, touching an earring, ‘Anyway, she'll be happy when she gets back to work.'

‘What about you, Zo? Any way of returning to—the cinema?' He was gently comic, not to pin her down.

‘Oh, I should think so,' she said airily, inspecting her empty cup and his and pouring more coffee. Her future was in the past. However, it seemed best to disguise this from Russell.

‘Are you still interested?'

‘Oh,' she said again.

Abruptly, he asked, ‘Have you heard from Stephen?'

‘Every evening. Hasn't he spoken to the office? Do you want me to give him a message?'

‘No, we've talked several times. He says everyone in Melbourne is busy playing the stock market and making money on real estate. Lily's said something about going abroad. I suppose Stephen wouldn't like it if you went, too? What does he think about the Bureau sale?'

In the dim light of the restaurant, seated as they were at right angles to each other, it had been easy to avoid meeting eyes. Now Zoe turned to face him. ‘He doesn't mind.' She looked into Russell's eyes with dread: the status quo was unbearable, and the thought of change was unbearable. Her store of hope had been used up; Old Mother Hubbard's cupboard was bare. It was beyond her powers to imagine a good change.

‘
I
wouldn't like it if I went abroad, too. I wouldn't want to go without him. Perhaps our only trouble'—she smiled and deepened her voice—‘if you could call it trouble, is my defective time sense. I'm sure the cat and I feel the same way about time. If Stephen's relaxed and happy and we're enjoying life, it's forever as far as I'm concerned. Then, if he's disagreeable, that's forever, too. I can't see past it. So I fall into that well-known Slough of Despond.'

Elbow on table, she tapped her forehead lightly with the inside of her wrist. ‘What's wrong with the way my mind functions? I can
see
this, but I can't do anything about it.'

Russell looked at her lowered head. ‘I think we'd have to diagnose it as love.'

‘Ah, doctor!' Half-laughing, then sighing, Zoe brushed a hand over her skirt. ‘Is that what it is? After all this time. It feels more like dementia. No, we're all right. It's only—I've expected some state of permanent perfection in life, which isn't reasonable. But why are the expectations built in?' She glanced up into Russell's blue eyes.

‘At a guess—and if you don't like it, I'll refer you to a specialist—I'd say, so that you would do some striving.'

Zoe fell back against the seat. ‘Strive! Let that be my epitaph: She strove. You could also put on my tombstone: Pride goes before a fall. Look before you leap. And, above all, Don't put all your eggs in one basket. The wisdom of the prophets. We should study them more.'

‘Doctor of Proverbs. The idea opens up, as they say, a whole new world. They're all true. The contradictions don't matter.'

‘It's only—when you hear anyone rave on about the problems of youth, you want to say: wait till they're adults! As if “growing up” finished when you were twenty-one. Or forty. It shakes you to find you could have been so wrong about the most important thing in your life. It must happen to a lot of people. They probably don't make such a fuss.'

‘If they don't make a commotion about the most important thing, they might as well be dead,' Russell said. ‘Not that I see any sign of one now. Stephen…We've worked together all these years. He doesn't always approve of me, but we've got on well. I know he has these black moods. I've sometimes wondered if the press isn't a restricted sort of field for him. A good half of my time goes on other work. If he feels he's been left to carry the baby, he's right. We've even tried to even it up financially. He's never complained. In all the other work, he's been indispensable. We've had a lot of fun.'

Silent, large-eyed, Zoe listened wistfully. After a second's time lag, she quickly returned his smile.

Russell said, ‘But there you are. He's my closest friend, and your husband, and we both know he's difficult. You knew that before you married him.'

Like flame along a fuse wire, indignation ran through Zoe's mind and heart. Could he dare to criticise Stephen? Moving slightly away from him, she asked somehow punctiliously, ‘What does that mean?'

For a moment Russell regarded her—not the shadowed eyes, the painted face, the lovely, expensive-looking woman there for all to see, but the person she was and would be whatever her circumstances or age. ‘Difficult means difficult. How old was he when you married? Thirty-one? Thirty-two? What went before did too much damage ever to be reversed completely—his parents, that poor destructive woman the house revolved around. He experienced evil at an age when you probably couldn't spell it. Then the sweating away at night for years to get his degree, and the isolation. It wouldn't have affected everyone the same way, but it harmed him. It's a cliché, and it's a fact.'

‘Anna said something like that once—about evil. But she's not difficult, and she had longer there.'

‘No.' Russell hesitated. He closed his eyes and rubbed them with his fingers. ‘No. But that's not the point.'

‘What is the point, then?'

‘That you're always going to have to make allowances. By which I only mean—to remember all this.'

She frowned. ‘You're preaching. I do remember. Most of the time.' Then she sighed with a sort of despairing irritability, and looked at the white tablecloth, the silver sugar bowl. Her mind surged. Unreasonably, she said, ‘Wouldn't it have been helpful if you'd told me this before we were married?'

‘Ask yourself.'

Reluctantly she granted his point. ‘But I might have acted differently at some stage,' she added with an uprush of resentment.

Russell said nothing.

She said naïvely, ‘I thought I knew what he was like. I thought I could make him happy, and that he would be like himself.'

Now she realised that she had shared the common illusion that if someone were only ‘himself ', instead of an imitation of what he could be, he would be fulfilled, more likeable, cleverer, happier, good, better, best. That the mask might sometimes be superior to what lay beneath was an idea that had only recently occurred to her.

‘He thought so, too, for a long time. He
was
happy, but something went wrong. Probably my fault.' Clearly, she had been excessive in so many ways—giving too much attention, noticing too much, caring too much. ‘I overdo things,' she confessed glumly.

She had waited for him to declare the emergency ended, to announce the beginning of a new regime, to promise that some weight of whose crushing nature she gradually became aware, would be equally shared. Perhaps he was never conscious that she had made any special efforts on his behalf. There was something unnamed, but felt, that she had never expected to have to give up forever. Permanent nurse, analyst, leader and guide, she had never intended to be. Mistaking neurosis for strength, suppressing anything in herself that might damage his self-esteem, she had expected an equal partnership.

‘I've been unwise. So be it.'

‘I did warn you that you were taking on someone a little more complex than the boy next door. It was presumptuous, and you told me so in a loud voice. But I wondered if two quite different people mightn't have made you both happier.'

‘Strangely enough,' she said, in a hard voice, ‘that thought has crossed my mind, too. We'll never know,' she said flatly. ‘What sort of person—for Stephen?'

Russell glanced at her sideways, and then looked straight ahead into the spacious gloom of the low-ceilinged restaurant. ‘Your opposite. Someone more like himself. Someone unluckier, less intense, less passionate, with less enthusiasm. Or someone impervious. I don't know.'

As he spoke, Zoe slid the side of her forefinger across her parted teeth, nervously. She felt pale, as if her blood had gone away. ‘Well. It doesn't sound gay. But I know what you mean. My happy youth's always been like a colour bar between us. I was the negro. As you say, if we were more alike, it mightn't have mattered so much. But if you instinctively see from such different angles, and you've had such different experiences, it certainly makes a gulf. He thought me juvenile, and I thought his sense of the ridiculous must have atrophied in childhood.'

‘You say he
thought
…'

Zoe gave a half-smile. ‘I've graduated. We made our own misfortunes and had those to share. A bond. Like the Konrad Lorenz triumph ceremony. But the funny thing is he doesn't like the sad version now that he's got it.'

‘You're his life.'

She looked at him. ‘Am I? He's mine. But is that a good thing? He's sometimes so shut away, or so deliberately cruel, that I can't always believe it, much as I want to. I'm sometimes terrified.' It frightened her even to say it.

Russell said, ‘Not everyone can bear to be loved, Zo.'

And Zoe, who had thought so much, had never thought of this. It struck her as blasphemy and a denial of faith might have struck an innocent and devout religious.

‘This isn't news.'

‘No.' But she was stupefied, sat really as though he had clubbed her about the head.

It was true, what he said. Being able to love, able to feel strongly, were given capacities on which the most favourable circumstances could make a strictly limited difference. Stephen could think scientifically, and she had a feeling and discriminating capacity. They could both throw off their clothes and make love. It didn't seem to be enough.

She said, ‘He doesn't want a change of company. It isn't that he wants other women. It might be better if he did. I don't mean that. I'd hate it…When I was living in Paris,' she said in a conversational tone, ‘Joseph was perfect to me. Without any reservations at all. And I wasn't especially agreeable. Not that there's any way of being agreeable, if you can't give back in equal measure.'