In Certain Circles (27 page)

All of Stephen's senses listened as though to the voice of an oracle. What Zoe so dispassionately said, without reflection or hesitation, had the authority of absolute truth. At the french windows, hands in pockets, he stared out at the black space that was the harbour, at the scattered lights of houses across the bay. Church bells were pealing in the distance. Zoe looked at his back. She cared about him, but she felt his so-familiar silence, his satisfaction with their prison, his waiting on her initiative, the silent presentation of himself as a challenge, as so many crimes. The obsessiveness with which he worked, the pervasiveness of his pessimism, were crimes. She thought: I cannot solve you. You must solve yourself.

Outside, there were footsteps along the verandah and Anna appeared in the open doorway, still dressed for the party, made-up, scented, breathing.

‘Just in time for dinner!' Stephen said.

‘Come inside, Anna.' Zoe looked at her, at the brother and sister together, temperamentally so dissimilar, sharing nothing but their parents and the colour of their eyes.

‘Russell drove me over. I promised to stay here tonight, but let's not talk. There's been so much of it.' She sighed, dropped her bag, put a hand to her head, and fainted for the first time in her life.

As she cooked breakfast and set out plates, Zoe glanced through the open door to Anna and Stephen on the verandah. Anna had washed her hair in the shower before coming down. The wet strands dampening the seaweed green of her cotton sweater, borrowed from Zoe, made her look like a mermaid. She had volunteered nothing. Stephen had valiantly tried five or six subjects of an impersonal nature, but each had proved unsafe in its turn. Anna looked through him. Sympathetically, Zoe caught his eye. He said to his sister, ‘Zo thinks you won't be interested.'

‘I am,' she insisted courteously, then added honestly, ‘and I'm not. My mind's a bit foggy this morning.'

At a sign from Zoe, they came in to eat breakfast.

Holding her glass of orange juice, Anna said, ‘What do I say? “I'm sorry I accidentally posted suicide notes written years ago”? That's what happened. Then—it's too complicated to say how—having realised it was necessary to kill myself, I realised it was necessary not to. I kept those letters as a—because too much was invested in them of someone worth more than I am, to throw them away. They were in a drawer. I wrote my Christmas cards and stamped them and put them in the same place, till it was time to post them. When I was leaving on my travels I stuffed them all in a basket, intending to post them somewhere along the way.' She said, ‘I'm very sorry.'

‘Eat up,' Zoe said after a brief pause, so the three of them began to, with considerable appetite.

Anna finished her slice of toast and honey, and drank some coffee. ‘That was the easy way out last night—fainting. But it's impossible to convey how—thinking you'd learned to live with what was given—how so unexpectedly you turn into a suicidal person. It's as surprising as waking up and finding you'd turned into an African or a Chinese. And you can never quite be what you were before. You do forget, though,' she added with more animation, ‘but now I've made it public property forgetting's going to be harder.'

Stephen said, ‘I suppose everyone thinks about it at some time.'

‘Do they?' She was surprised. ‘I never did.'

‘Not when we were young, when we lived with them?'

‘
No
,' she said strongly. ‘Why should people like that make me want to die? I wanted to live more than ever when I saw them.
They
couldn't influence me out of existence.' In the indignant glance, a younger Anna was visible and Stephen smiled.

‘
I
thought of it.'

Her eyes opened wider, moved thoughtfully over the sunny breakfast table. ‘No, I've always been convinced that if you're of sound mind you have no real right to—lower the confidence of the world. Something like that. By deserting it. Letting it be known that you reject what makes everyone else cling to life. Yet one morning I woke up and my mind was still sound but suicide had chosen me. And none of my previous convictions had any weight at all. It had seductive arguments. I argued back as if only the promise that death was instantly available made it possible—as if my arguments had to be completed before I could go. I know it sounds confused.'

The refrigerator hummed. Outside, there were distant sounds of traffic and close at hand a peewit warbled loudly.

‘And in the end?' Zoe ventured to ask.

‘Oh, in the end'—Anna propped an elbow on the table and shaded her eyes from the sun—‘a different thought came into my mind. A new idea occurred to me. I made a choice. I ate a very stale piece of apple pie—about the only food I had in the house. When I picked it up, after having thought the great thought, I saw that I was going to stay alive. By that time, it almost felt as if I'd gone already, leaving my body to follow with the luggage. So it was all—rather complex—at the time,' she finished obscurely.

‘Did anybody know?' Stephen asked.

She shook her head. ‘Nobody said. I had insisted to the point of death. Like a battle between myself and something so large that you'd have to call it God or Necessity. The will of the world.'

She paused again, supporting her forehead against the fingers of both hands. ‘I did say “Help!” to a few people, because I resisted the idea of killing myself. But it was an experience that would confirm your belief that there's still a great deal to be discovered about—not only human nature, but—I don't know how to describe it—psychic phenomena, extrasensory perception. I'd heard of sick animals being hunted and killed by others, but I hadn't realised what it meant till then. I was frightened. I saw that it was a very risky thing ever to let it be known that you were weak and close to death. It was like pressing against a wall as deep as eternity, with your loved ones turned to murderous enemies, or at best indifferent acquaintances.'

Stephen and Zoe exchanged glances. ‘Us, too?' she asked.

‘You had your own problems,' Anna said, lifting her head so that her face was visible, amazing them by her tranquillity. ‘You could feel it was a natural law. The hostility, and fault-finding. I was drowning and wanted to help to live; everyone seemed bent on giving me help to drown. The experience, which I can't describe, of picking yourself up while you're under attack is like a long, ghastly course in self-reliance, like trying to survive a civil war with everyone you care about on the opposite side. Bitter animosity. All so out of proportion. I realised after numerous rather agonising shocks that we were all on strange ground, if I make myself clear, and I'm sure I don't.' She sat back in her chair answering the serious looks of her listeners with an air of repose.

Stephen could not refrain from saying, ‘It was all your own state of mind.'

‘Well,' Anna said, then paused. ‘Even at the time, I knew that would be an accusation. It's only—that when you're close to death, everything wears a look of eternity. Ephemeral expressions of bad feeling felt to me'—she clapped a hand to her chest—‘like a last message from the human race. The terrible urgency, and the way no one could hear. You're like a wireless receiver tuned to finer and finer degrees of receptivity, so that you receive messages other people aren't really aware of sending.'

Zoe stared through the window at the pattern of branches against some puffy white clouds, newly arrived. ‘I can imagine what you mean.'

Anna said, ‘But it was so long ago. Years ago. I'm another person. I'm telling you this because I owe it to you, after yesterday. But it's ancient history. It's a story about someone else.'

‘Was it after this,' Zoe asked suddenly, remembering, ‘that you left the gallery and took up your work?'

‘Twenty-four hours a day. No wonder I made progress! I learned to live in the moment.' Looking back, she half-laughed.

‘But is it truly like a story about someone else, Anna? Stephen saw you at Ten Mile Beach. He said you were very unhappy, and that's since Canada.'

‘Oh.' Gravely, she appeared to think about that day. She looked at them both with unsmiling eyes for a time. ‘No, it wasn't like that. I hadn't been home very long. Russell and I were going for a walk. You confiscated him, Zo, and he had to go or refuse noticeably. But being deprived of his company meant so much less than it would have once, that I was—sad. And then (I know it sounds contradictory), I had forgotten what his presence was like. And although the walk didn't matter, Russell did. More or less eternally. So there you are. All told, if not explained.'

‘Why should it be?' Zoe looked at her with a sombre shame. ‘You needn't have felt…It wasn't necessary…'

Abruptly, frowning at her, Stephen asked, ‘What's happening about you and Russell?'

From the front of the house, Russell called, ‘Hullo! Anyone out of bed?' Anna was stared at. As though by choice, she left her face undefended, and her trustfulness was felt by the others as a gift of purest generosity, as a sort of honour. Expectant, they met her eyes, watched her rise and go from the room.

Stephen went outside to contemplate the view. Left alone in the kitchen, Zoe cleared away the dishes. It occurred to her that there might be nothing braver in the world than to allow yourself to be understood.

Russell and Anna were in the sitting room.

Mrs Trent had arrived and was ironing and listening to the transistor.

At Stephen's invitation, Zoe had gone to join him outside. They walked down to the wall near the track and sat there.

‘Zo…' Stephen cleared his throat. Hands pressed to the stone on either side of him, he stared at the lawn. ‘I wanted to say—don't talk about leaving me. You wouldn't, would you? Even if you hated me. You'd be so sorry for me for having lost what I'd lost that you'd never let me guess.'

Abstractedly, she pulled a weed from the garden beside her. ‘I'm so bad at hating.'

‘You won't leave me, then?'

‘I don't know. I might have to.'

‘Because I'm an impossible task, and don't always treat you—as I should.'

Heavy-eyed, she gazed at him, and laid the frail weed on his thigh. She was tired of avowing love to scepticism, disbelief and fear. ‘I've heard better reasons for living with someone.'

‘You couldn't think I mightn't have been worth the effort, or you'd have wasted your life.'

She gave a short, incredulous laugh. ‘When did you think of all this?'

‘Last night.' Intent on his private agenda, Stephen went on, ‘And at the beginning, there were good years.'

‘Oh, yes,' she agreed, without belief, unable to remember. ‘But perhaps it was never right.'

Picking up the weed and twirling it between his fingers, he said, ‘Well, it went wrong. I helped it. One thing—as you discovered for me last night—I couldn't part with the past. And I'd never loved anyone before. I'm not good at it. It isn't easy to change. I thought you regretted what you'd given up. And then, when we got married, I'd stayed on in that job and saved with the idea of going back to university full-time.'

‘For God's sake!' Zoe looked at him with stupefaction. ‘You wouldn't have thought of telling me?'

‘I hadn't told anyone.'

‘I'm not
anyone
.' She stared at him furiously. ‘What were you going to do?'

‘Research.'

‘What? In chemistry? Medicine?'

He nodded, and they were silent. Zoe saw this was exactly the sort of work he would have excelled in. ‘Just tell me why,' she said hopelessly, at length. ‘Was it so that you could blame me? So that you'd have something to resent from the beginning? You were able to blame me without having to make the effort to take the initiative for your own life, weren't you?'

With a bleak look of self-knowledge, a new expression on Stephen's face, he turned to Zoe and said, ‘Yes.' He paused. ‘It isn't reasonable, but later—I blamed you for not having forced something better on me than the press. If you want admissions, there's one for you. Russell's political. He's never had to be interested in the press as a business. It's had another purpose altogether for him—printing stuff cheaply, the paper, holding meetings, finding jobs. How the country works or doesn't work, having an influence—that's Russell's life.