In Certain Circles (9 page)

‘Imagine sleeping away your weekends!' they said.

‘I like to lie down in the open air. I don't go to sleep.'

‘Is it the office that's troubling you?'

Anna had laughed. After three weeks in the office, she had known that no emergency was beyond her. The days were busy, but as though she were playing a game in the course of which it was essential to make a move every two seconds. The ease of it delighted her. Just how long she would be able to feel pleasure in a process so undemanding, she had not asked herself. That the game was far different for the two men, she could see: they had to brace themselves every day to go into the line of fire, at the mercy of others.

Still, it was a fact that she tired easily, and had no choice but to lie in the sun when she could. She lay with her face down, her forehead and cheeks and bare arms pricked by the short mown grass. She breathed the fresh earth odours and they fed her. She lay so heavily relaxed and weary that she seemed to sink and grow into the comfortable ground. And as though it were a person, she began to feel fond of the country, from being so close to it.

The Howards looked at Anna, taking a rapid interest before leaving for a theatre, and Anna looked back as though she were a china ornament. As they strolled past the windows on their way to the car, Mr Howard said, ‘She's a strange child. Probably only suffering from adolescence.'

Inside the house, selecting records, Zoe and Anna overheard and exchanged looks.

Anna continued to write.

Foreign men keep talking to you in the gardens. Dark foreign men most often, but some fair ones, too. They are all migrants, very polite and lonely. They practise their English. The main thing about them is loneliness.

Always willing to listen and talk, Anna also always went away. She would not waste anyone's small deposit of hope.

Keep imagining have lost money out of bag. Have decided to write down what get and what spend. Tom gave me old account book. I told Jim girls managed, but don't know how unless they earn more than I do. Stephen said would help with rent till income improves. Otherwise, would have had to stay with Charles and Nicole. How do girls manage? How do companies think girls manage? Next question.

Letter from Stephen. Hopes I am well. This science course he's been doing at night ever since he went to Melbourne keeps him planned out twenty-four hours a day, because the job is even busier than the one in Sydney.

Card from Russell. How do I spend my time?

It's about six weeks since I've seen any of the Howards. Zoe has a lot of friends, and studying, and photography, and parties. I used to see them often, so now I miss them very much.

On Sunday I went out to visit Charles and Nicole. I hardly ever go. It's always a mistake. Mrs Howard says, ‘You're a very nice young girl of high intelligence, but you will try to expand your experience into something bizarre. Young people often do, to make themselves more interesting.'

‘That's rough!' Zoe was searching through a bundle of negatives, and stopped, moving her eyes sideways to look at her mother.

‘Anna's a darling.' Mrs Howard kissed the top of my head. ‘I'm speaking to her as I speak to you, because we're friends.'

I thought of a word I came across in the dictionary recently:
experientialism
—the doctrine that all knowledge is derived from experience. Another word I found was:
reductive
. So, anyway, I did finally go back again to Charles and Nicole last Sunday. And since I knew what to expect, nothing should have surprised me and everything did. Mrs Howard believes the Aborigines' bone-pointing ceremony can kill, because she's read about it. She would never agree that words and thoughts kill people every day.

Anna frowned, thinking of those she knew best, from whom she had escaped. It was not only what they said and did that threatened her: in their presence, she saw with their eyes, felt with their disordered feelings, suffered their anger and panic. If she could have seen no more than their skin, she might have sustained her own life in their company. But she experienced the deadly movements of impulses that were not even conscious in them. It was as though some barrier other people possessed for their own protection was lacking in her.

Catching sight of herself in the bathroom mirror the morning after the visit, she saw a shocked stranger. In the night she had slept turbulently, dreaming and waking and falling again into heavy sleep. Now, the shape of her face and the size of her eyes were startling, anguished. She looked old. By opening and stretching her eyes and mouth, by washing and drying with great vigour, she succeeded in restoring her own look before she went to the office.

Stephen was here for a holiday a few weeks ago. He took me to two plays and to the pictures. The foyers in the theatres looked so big, I'd have liked to move in with my suitcase. All that space empty for hours every day and night! Stephen also took me out to dinner.

He is thin and hardly ever smiles. Since one night last year when the Howards invited me to dinner, I hadn't eaten in a restaurant. Crowds! Bright lights!

Looking back at this, I see how misleading diaries are. You never write about what you think about most.

Every day for fairly short periods—because they are out, driving all over the city and suburbs, calling on customers—I see Jim or Tom in the office. Tom brought me roses once, when he took a big order. Most times, I make them coffee, but sometimes they make it for me. To each other, they never speak about their families or what-might-have-been. They talk about their company cars, carpentering jobs at home, mortgages, garages, fishing, the buyers they visit, and the new general manager in Melbourne, who has manifested himself once in our Sydney office, coming up in the lift like Lucifer and blowing smoke from a big cigar. He was insulting to the men, enough to make anyone cry. But when they went out, he leaned against my desk with tears in
his
eyes. His name is Mr Fleming.

Jim and Tom had met him before this in Melbourne. They were summoned down for an emergency conference. Terrific speculation in Sydney! They told mad jokes and we stared at each other with great colossal eyes, as if we were having a wondering competition. But they chew themselves up with worry. When they arrived home after the conference they raced each other in to tell me the news. All our communications from Melbourne are by mail, and one by one, for weeks and months, the familiar signatures on letters had been disappearing. Why? We wasted a lot of time pondering over all this.

So I said, ‘Well, what?'

Tom just drew a finger across his throat. Every time I mentioned a name, there went the finger across his throat again. Then a deep staring silence. Well, what about the new general manager?

Tom said seriously, ‘Oh, he's just a little guy. He's got this big desk, and he practically never stands up. See him sitting there, he looks normal, then he stands up and he's level with my belt!'

‘No!'

‘Yes, truly.' Jim joins him in a judicious shaking of heads.

‘He couldn't be!'

‘No. Honestly. He's a little guy like Napoleon.'

Then they laughed and laughed, and hopped and danced over the linoleum, and made more fun of him, telling incredible stories, exorcising him. In a way, because of families and mortgages, they are in his power. After his letters began to arrive for all of us, marked
Secret and Confidential
, which we read and exchanged, I understood better why black magic might be needed.

‘Yes,' they nodded. ‘He's a little guy like Hitler.'

Zoe used to say, ‘Salesmen. I don't know how you can put up with them. Expense-account types. You see them buying each other lunches and dinners. Hear them, I should say! I don't know why you just don't expire, having to listen to them.'

‘But they're not like that. I must have told you all wrong.'

‘Believe me,' Zoe said, seeming very worldly wise, ‘they would be, if they could.'

‘
No
. They haven't even been
given
expense accounts. They're not ordinary. Stephen's a salesman, and you liked his conversation. If that's how you see everyone. But they're no more salesmen than I am whatever title Mr Fleming gives me on the taxation return.'

Zoe combed and plaited her long black hair. She looked like Pocahontas. ‘I'll concede that,' she said, which I thought rather a grand way of putting it. ‘But it's a tame routine for you.'

It would be dull for Zo, and it will get dull for me. But I am not bullied. No one unconsciously wishes me harm. We never quarrel. Every day we smile at each other with real liking, the two men and I, and because good-natured people are new to me, the day is well spent.

But this is not my life.

Anna paused and stared at the wall, at the square yellow weave of the curtains and, outside the window, at a rather feeble acacia full of uncritical sparrows.

She wrote:

Russell and Lily have twin daughters—Vanessa and Caroline. Though Lily wanted dozens of children, she isn't supposed to have any more. She has gone back to work already. The babies are still very small. Stephen and Russell write to each other, but it was Zoe who told me this in a letter from Paris. She has graduated and gone away now. Why do all the people you like have to be somewhere else? But Paris! The postcards and photographs Zoe has sent home! They make me feel I have never seen a building or a street. Who wouldn't be there? You could admire any one of them for months on end. Zoe belongs there. She says she is deliriously busy, deliriously happy. And I am jealous—or would be, if I could want to be Zoe. All that has happened feels necessary. I can't picture it different. I would not want to be someone else.

The other tenants in this house are two middle-aged married couples, two men like grandfathers, four single women—or women who live alone—and who all seem to be about forty. We say little bits to each other.

Mr Howard came in to see me one evening. He misses Zoe. In a few weeks' time, they are having a party for some students and young people to keep the house warmed up. I'm invited, but have nothing to wear. Though I write everything down in the account book, I can't save up. By the time you put down rent, fares, food, shoe repairs, soap and toothpaste, haircuts and some dry-cleaning, there isn't anything over. The dentist. New shoes. Harder than physics. Tom says financially he is going out backwards. I know what he means. However, other people talk so much about money, especially when they have it, that I have decided not to.