In Certain Circles (26 page)

Upstairs, in her old bedroom, Zoe faced her husband. The two policemen had returned for further details about the supposed suicide; had been assured that she was now alive; had given up the letters (copies of which were held at their station); and declared that the missing person must appear before them within twenty-four hours so that it could be ascertained officially that she was not, in fact, dead by her own hand.

Tom had barged in, harassed and laden with his miscellaneous items of shopping, overheard the dialogue at the door between Stephen and the policemen, and now sat downstairs drinking steadily and eyeing an emerald ring he had bought on the off chance.

‘All that time they've loved each other,' Zoe said. ‘What a waste! The news that Anna isn't lying dead in the bush somewhere hasn't got through to me properly. I don't know how you feel. I could hardly feel worse if she
were
dead.'

‘I don't feel so hot, either. In fact, I'm bloody freezing. And in the train I thought I'd never be cool again.'

‘Have that shower. Warm you up.'

Stephen had read Anna's letter and, almost with disbelief, Zoe had seen him tremble. Since then they had spoken little, existing in a state of torpor. Opening his suitcase, he pulled out from a melange of clothing a clean shirt and socks and pants. ‘For years I've thought she was all right,' he muttered angrily. ‘She's wasted her whole life on this obsession. When David was alive she had plans to do something with her life. Rotting away in that flat.'

Now, Zoe gave a humourless smile. ‘That goes for all of us. But women are peculiar—like men—so their plans don't work out. Anyway, she's not twenty, but she's not dead, either. Aren't you sorry about them?' she asked carefully.

‘I'm sorry for all three. But what was the matter with Russell? You only had to look at him! I'm going to have a shower.'

‘Yes. He loves her.' Something old-fashioned like honour or duty had ruined their lives. What they had in common created love and also frustrated it. Still, Zoe thought cynically, if one thing didn't ruin your life, something else did. So perhaps it didn't matter. Leaning on her elbow across the bed, she watched Stephen, her heart beating slowly.

Downstairs, Tom could be heard—awake, but not sober, which was possibly a merciful thing, too.

‘You're a very unusual woman, if I may say so. I admire the way you've taken this thing. I've always admired—
women
—with trained minds. And I've heard from certain people—not mentioning any names—but certain people have told me you're a remarkable woman.'

Interrupting, sitting on the arm of Lily's chair, Zoe asked, ‘Am I interrupting?'

Lily turned up her eyes expressively. ‘Do.'

‘Back in a minute.' Tom unsteadily juggled his glass down on the table and left the room.

‘Get a taxi and have him removed, for God's sake!' Lily begged her. ‘I've had enough.'

Zoe came back from the telephone. ‘Here in a second.'

‘I was upstairs wandering about, then I came down to move the dishes and woke him. Alas! Don't
you
go. I don't want to be alone when they come back. If they come back.'

‘No, we'll stay. Stephen's having a shower.' Zoe stacked cups and saucers on the tray and collected discarded sandwiches with small scallops eaten out of them. Comfort, common sense, sympathy, alliances were impossible; pretending that nothing had happened, noisy distractions, equally so. You could only be present and not add to the general distress by being unreal; only perform practical chores; only care.

‘What a mess! What a mess!' Lily said sickly, as Tom came back into the room, looking damp about the face and hair.

A taxi tooted its horn at the gate.

‘That's for you, Tom. We knew you wouldn't want to take your own car.'

Bemused, Tom nodded his small Chinese-looking head.

‘We'll talk to you tomorrow. Thank you for all you've done. Ring before you come for the car, in case we're out.' Lily guided him up the steps. Zoe gave his address to the driver.

‘You shunted him off home?' Stephen eyed them with interest a few minutes later. ‘That was a bit rough.'

Censured, the women looked at each other.
Was
it rough? Neither of them felt able to tell. They returned Stephen's gaze as though he still possessed some faculty lost to them.

‘It isn't appropriate to have semi-strangers around,' Lily explained.

‘He was drunk,' Zoe added. ‘Lily's under enough strain. Everyone's tattered. Why should all this be paraded for his benefit? It's none of his business.'

Stephen pulled an unpleasant face. ‘He only wanted to marry her.'

‘He's surely had his answer?'

Holding her head, Lily said, ‘Stop quarrelling, you two!'

There was instantaneous silence. Zoe closed her eyes in compunction. Stephen ate some olives from a dish near his hand, and from under their eyebrows, heads lowered a little as if pressed down by too-dazzling sunlight, he and Zoe looked into each other deeply. They both said, ‘Sorry, Lily,' and Stephen asked, ‘Would you like a drink?'

So they sat in silence, drinking and waiting, till the absent ones returned.

‘What did Lily mean,' Stephen asked as they entered their own house, switching on lights, ‘when she said we had troubles of our own?'

‘Don't you know?' Zoe looked at him at chest level, studying the small flowers on his imported tie.

‘Should I?' Bags and briefcases seemed to be hanging all over him. His glasses had slipped down his nose. They had come home in Anna's car: Anna was to be driven over later to stay with them.

‘You look like a walking luggage rack. You must be famished.'

‘Lily kept promising food, then forgetting. Is she sorry for you?'

‘Both of us, I suppose. While you're getting rid of that stuff, I'll organise some dinner.'

Before they sat down to eat, Stephen appeared silently beside her in the kitchen, complaining of his enforced absence in Melbourne and Canberra. Zoe leaned against him with a sad, divided pleasure. Whatever the textbooks said, lovers who shared beds and each other with considerable satisfaction frequently parted forever in the morning. Because, because, she thought. Because they were human. And more complicated even than that.

They sat across the table from each other, Stephen pouring the wine, and Zoe serving a casserole she had prepared the previous evening. ‘We should be celebrating Lily's birthday now.' She was still wearing the dark-blue shirt and slacks she had put on years ago, in the morning. ‘Tell me something different. Not about all this.'

‘Does it have to be cheerful?'

‘It would help.'

But sooner or later, every attempt to exchange the details of their separation—meetings with common friends—led back to today, to the three in the old Howard house along the beach. The cats came in from the verandah providing light relief, displaying composure, attending with grape-green eyes. They strolled about like feted courtesans.

Stephen said, with mixed venom and amusement, eating vigorously, and glancing up at her over his plate, ‘Lily's not in much of a position to be sorry for us, is she?'

With an effort of will, Zoe met his eyes. ‘Would you like more of this, or some salad?' He could deride Lily in this situation without surprising her. He felt free to say anything. Because of this, he could always end discussions and win arguments.

An extraordinary nausea swept over Zoe at the thought of their life. And everything her eye touched was part of the nausea. Like a traitor whose ways had on an instant become abhorrent to her, she glanced about, opening her hands wide with revulsion to drop secrets, weapons.

‘Salad, thanks. What's the matter?'

Supplicating, Zoe said, ‘I know you hate melodrama. Everything ought to be neat and manageable, especially the way we all feel, but it isn't. You've read Anna's letter. You've noticed that Lily feels sorry for us.' She pleaded, ‘If there's something in particular you don't like about the way we live, we can change it. We're free, in a way. We're here in a temporarily peaceful, prosperous place. But nothing's certain. People die every day. We haven't got time to brood our lives away. And we don't have to.

‘If there's something about me that's killing you off, say so. I'll go away. We seem to exist for the purpose of concealing ourselves from each other. It's as if you only lived to suppress me—as if I were a fire out of control. It doesn't seem very constructive. If this is the only satisfaction I can give you apart from sex, it isn't enough. And it isn't the sort of satisfaction I feel allowed to go on giving. What do you hold against me, apart from the fact that I've loved you?'

Under the power of this involuntary cry, with its compelling force, they stared at each other, each appearing magnified and infinitely strange in the other's sight.

‘Or is that it?' she said slowly.

‘It could be that,' Stephen answered, with a fixed listening look.

Like someone kidnapped and dragged across a frontier into a place where the language and the laws were wholly unknown, he glanced about with a mixture of desperation and bafflement. They both sat in active, anguished silence, like accident victims retracing events that led always to the same crash and destruction. As though they could not escape from the accident, the physical suffering continued. They were bodies tossed over and over on a highway. Their faces were haggard.

At last Stephen found something to offer. ‘That time I'd been ill and you had to go to the office for a couple of days, I went up to the attic to see if there were any leaks in the roof. I saw your press-cutting books. I read your letters from Joseph.'

‘You read the letters? Did you,
really
?' So at odds with her knowledge of him! An angry, intimidating man, but a man crammed with rigid, erratic ideas of ‘the right thing'. Zoe shook her head, trying to believe him.

‘If I was inquisitive enough to do that, I should remember what I thought, but I don't. Do you think I was jealous?'

They gazed at each other, not moving their eyes more than fractionally to explore another part of the eyes opposite. These long looks nourished their hearts, as if their eyes knew everything that mattered.

‘Jealous? Why should you be? How could you be?'

In his eyes there was a change. Zoe now saw resentment, dislike, violent hatred. ‘Don't look at me like that. It doesn't matter about the letters. Why be like this?'

‘Because I'm difficult?' he suggested. ‘I have trouble with myself. I don't always know what I feel. You can't understand that.'

‘No, but I believe that you often don't. Once, I couldn't.' That it might be in a way less exacting to be like Stephen occurred to Zoe. Jealous in her turn, she thought: what a lot you can get away with when you don't know what you're doing! ‘Is it my fault?'

‘I'd never have married anyone else.'

‘It hasn't been a raving success.'

A total and exact reciprocation of feeling happened occasionally in real life, and often in children's tales, but more often still the exalted expectation led straight to unhappiness and death. What choice was there but to give what you had without bargaining? Her early attachment to justice had done her a disservice: a kind of justice did exist, but there were times when one or two things mattered more.

‘Is it so bad if I'd like your life to please you? A blind man could see that it doesn't. You make me feel it. Then I'm unpleasant to someone else. It's kinder to the entire world to take some notice of your own preferences. Unless'—she looked up suddenly—‘this life
is
your preference?'

Amazing her, he said, ‘I've been satisfied. I thought you were satisfied. We make out better than most, I thought. And no shortage of work or play.'

‘But if none of it was giving you any pleasure. If everything was a sort of duty to you. This grudge…' Her, the world, himself ? His eyes were uncomprehending. Cold, at an astronomical distance, his eyes made her feel. Grudge? Grudge?

‘You seem to
bear
your life instead of living it.' From the beginning he had sworn he would never willingly share her attention with children. Later, the prospect of children being used as restoratives for an ailing partnership was abhorrent to her. Journeys abroad, alone or together, had been rejected. There was too much work; he was too busy, he always said.

Pressing her eyes shut with her fingers, Zoe saw a myriad geometrical shapes symmetrical as snowflakes magnified. ‘I've cried so much today…I think you've wanted circumstances always to confirm your reasons for melancholy. Because you've been used all your life to thinking of yourself as ill-treated. Maligned. Neglected. With reason, till I appeared. I threatened you. Threatened to lose that person who's never been lucky, the one you knew best. You're afraid of me. Because you might have loved me and had to change your ideas. And the funny thing is—if it strikes you as funny—I'm afraid of you.'