In Certain Circles (14 page)

‘Oh, don't worry about that.' Lily moved in her chair so violently that combs and hairpins dropped out of her hair. Stephen leaned over to pick them up. ‘Thanks. He doesn't care. He announces himself to me on the phone as a representative of the Great Earth Mother. You can laugh.'

Stephen gave a small envious smile. ‘It isn't easy to get him down.'

But, clearly, all lightness in Lily today was superimposed on a deep-rooted grievance. It was difficult to know how seriously angry she was, except by the fact that she had scarcely been known to mention Russell's name in his absence, much less to complain of him like this.

‘Have some more before all the ice melts. It's Sunday. We're allowed to be lazy. The children are asleep with their temperatures, poor lambs. They can have Zo's nice pudding that you brought over when they wake up.'

Handing over the replenished glasses, she sat down again on the long wooden chair and put her feet up. She was wearing Roman sandals, white trousers and a blue shirt. With her elbows on the arms of the chair, she held her drink firmly in both hands, and stared over it unsmiling.

‘I hate the printery,' she said again. ‘“But why that?” I say to Russell. “Why not a tobacco kiosk, or a cake shop?” If he wants to turn a penny and doesn't care how.'

Stephen was beginning to glower. Not meeting her eye, he said, ‘There's a slight difference. You can reach people through a press. When the newsletter starts, you might change your mind.'

More than most, he resented criticism. Though it was crystal clear that Lily's attacks were directed at her husband, Anna could see from the repressive, warning blankness of his expression that Stephen had managed to feel himself the object of abuse. She sympathised with him, but hoped they could escape before he said something unforgettably disagreeable.

‘I've heard that one. “The press that changed the world.” Well, it won't happen.' Lily fell silent. With a fingernail she scratched at a thread on the padded chair cover. ‘He's wasting his life deliberately. I don't know why.'

Anna appraised the smooth old tiles paving the verandah, then looked out over the many fresh and sumptuous greens of the garden, silent, silent. Her head rang and echoed with statements. Of all people, she had most right to speak! Watching the trees, she felt in the pocket of her dress and, fetching out her sunglasses, covered her eyes.

With his arched fingers meeting just under his mouth, Stephen said stiffly, ‘We're under the impression it's doing well.'

‘Oh, you'll do
well
,' Lily said violently. ‘You're rapid learners. But that's not exactly the point. The point is you should both be doing the work you're equipped to do. (I'm not really speaking about you, Stephen: what you do is your own affair.) But Russell has special knowledge, special training, like you. And he was very well thought of.'

Anna dared to say, ‘Perhaps the feeling and noticing aren't such a handicap, then? I've worked in less salubrious places than you, Lily—I'm not boasting!' she protested, half-laughing. ‘Not from choice! But I came to know quite different people, and—so, I can't think of these qualities of Russell's as defects.'

‘They aren't,' Stephen said decisively.

Their unanimity pulled her up. She waved away some small insect cruising in front of her face, and almost apologetically grimaced. ‘I never discuss him. Pretty contemptible. Especially in front of you, Anna,' she added, somehow keenly, as though she had found a reason to apologise twice over. ‘Because you're not even a member of the family.'

‘
No
,' Anna agreed, with polite enthusiasm.

Lily went on, ‘Anyway, having gone so far, I might as well tell you what led to the press. I was persuading him to come home, but
not
to give up his…' She sighed. ‘In London, he was one of a team working with a supposedly great man. They were studying odd pockets of the population. It was all rather hush-hush. You know what these special projects are like. In due course there was going to be a great book about these unfortunate specimens.'

‘What sort of ?' Anna asked.

With a pretence of smoothing her forehead and hair, Lily put both hands to her head. ‘Oh, Lord! Let's just say a grievous cross-section. The idea was that good would come of it all in the end, and it might have. But two members of the team were—I don't know what you'd call them. They tried to crash Russell's key group, using—almost strong-arm methods.

‘He had to see what was going on. So they all talked in a civilised way, then the two went right on as before. Then Russell spoke to the great man, and he havered and hovered, knowing he was obliged to call them off, but delaying because he was interested in their experiment. Which was sadistic. Morally cruel. Fanatics crop up everywhere.

‘Then while Russell and the rest of the team were trying to get him to make a decision, there was a suicide. A girl of about twenty-two. Russell knew her very well, and knew, as they all did, that she'd been hounded to it.
Unwittingly
, he always says, and in the interests of science, but hounded. So the project ended, and the team scattered, and Russell walked away from the only work he was trained to do. So did one of the others. He won't even discuss it.'

The words had fallen on Anna's heart and mind like poison, causing physical pain in her body and head. All this had happened. All this had happened. She knew nothing about it. Almost a stranger.

‘I knew some of this,' Stephen said. ‘He told me at the beginning of the press. Not the sort of thing you expect to crop up in that atmosphere.'

‘It's no secret. There's nothing secret about it. He prefers not to discuss it with me because
I
say: Do something about it. Don't stay out and criticise, you with your superior understanding.'

‘What's the response to that?' Stephen asked, unconsciously pulling a face that made his chin longer.

‘Oh, well.' Lily stood up. ‘There are my cherubs waking up, I think. I gather it's a pretty crass reaction. Being involved, he received some revelation that must remain obscure to me, about the way he ought not to live.'

Stephen said pacifically, ‘It is possible.'

‘If we're going to be very precious. But I don't like it, and I can think of numerous people—my own family, for instance—who agree with me. It's juvenile behaviour in someone like him.' Mechanically, she gathered the three empty glasses onto the tray. ‘But I'm not proud of myself this morning, either. We'd said a few words on the subject before he went out, that's why I've been so vocal. I'll tell him. Confess. Weaken my position.' She smiled wryly. ‘I must go to those poor children. Not that there's much wrong with them from the uproar.'

‘And we've got to get back to Zo. She wanted to get rid of us with that pudding so that she could concoct some surprise. She's capable of having the house painted purple.'

Lily looked with approval at her brother-in-law as he stood at the top of the steps in the sun, actually showing his teeth in a smile at the prospect of returning to Zoe. She said, ‘I can see what Zo means about that anarchist look of yours. It's only partly the hair. You're handsomer these days.'

There was an increase in the clamour from the children's room upstairs. ‘I'd better give up. See you soon.' Lily ran inside.

When she and Stephen arrived at the beach, Anna took off her sandals and walked on the sand in her bare feet. ‘I suppose she meant all that,' she said, with the slight but habitual feeling of risk that addressing Stephen involved.

He gave a dry laugh. ‘She had to, to talk to a non-union member like you.'

‘Oh, the family!' They looked at each other and laughed. ‘I always knew she regarded me as an outsider, but I was a bit crushed to have it so explicit.'

‘Wait till Zo hears.'

They wove round the rock-like bodies lying in the sun.

‘Look at the gulls!' Stephen pointed to a slope of sand going down to the water's edge that was used as a runway by the birds. Over and over, they watched the amateurish waddle transmuted to purest curves of flight.

From the other end of the beach, Zoe came to meet them. A few strangers turned to watch her as though a mesmerising hand had touched them. A special person and not for them.

While they tramped across the sand, Stephen told her what they had heard from Lily.

‘Then I was all wrong.' Zoe looked up at him with big eyes. ‘I thought she'd put pressure on Russell to come back because of her family. What?' She intercepted a glance between the others.

‘Yes, she
did
, even before the project shattered, but expecting him to become a leading light out here. Of the right sort. His career was important to Lily.' Stephen tightened his grip round her waist and she leaned against him.

‘What was that joke about Lily's family?' She swung forward a little to see Anna, who walked on Stephen's left side. Told, she gave great ‘Oh, oh, oh's of indignation.

Anna concluded, ‘It's as if only the assurance of relationships laid down by blood and the law prevents her from being quite alone. Our family against all strangers. Close ranks, put up the barricades. She hardly knows what you're like as individuals, only that you're her family. This gives you a kind of otherworldly glamour. She's in love with an idea.'

Hearing all this, Zoe looked solemn and impressed. Half-enquiringly, she said, ‘You've given it a lot of thought.'

Stephen squeezed her waist again. ‘Anna's aggrieved, aren't you? Because you can't mean you think we have any faults.'

Zoe laughed. ‘Oh, no! But, in a way, isn't it natural enough if she prefers her own family? No, it's a bit infatuated. My mother was devoted to us, but less fervid.'

‘Well, it may be
natural
—' Anna delivered this with emphasis. ‘It's only that it seems strange to me. If you know that but for the relationship you wouldn't exist for someone, it seems—odd. You're not known. Lily says she couldn't imagine having a friend who wasn't related to her. It looks like an inbuilt absence of discrimination, a missing instinct, as if she doesn't know what she likes in people, what really pleases her.'

Her listeners accepted this in silence, with raised brows. Why did Anna mind so much? Kicking up the sand as she walked along, Zoe watched it spume out ahead.

‘Anna's right, really. Russell and Lily are very different from each other. I hope it works out. The well-known attraction of opposites. Like us.'

Only yesterday Zoe had been writing in that letter to Joseph about how much alike she and Stephen were. Now they represented the attraction of opposites! Stopping to pick up a small pink shell, Anna noted the contradiction.

‘Yes, it's true,' Zoe was saying stoutly. ‘All of Lily's attachments are fortuitous. Like a morality play, except that instead of wearing the masks of virtues and vices, you're anonymous behind Daughter, Mother, Father and so on. Anyone might be behind the mask. It would make no difference. The name and the mask tell people how they
ought
to feel, and behave. Outside this framework—chaos. If there's no natural instinct for—'

‘Loving,' Anna said.

‘Exactly.'

Stephen said, ‘Poor Lily,' and opened the garden gate and they trooped through.

‘Trip me up, someone.' Anna gave her head a thump with her wrist. ‘I have a prejudice against closed systems. Nobody knows how orphans watch families, and nobody knows how an orphan as audience can stimulate family feeling.'

‘Except other orphans, presumably,' Stephen said. Then turning to Zoe, he added, ‘And Zo knows. Zoe knows everything.'

‘I wish,' Stephen slashed at his breakfast egg, ‘these fools would stop asking you what you're going to do with yourself.'

Startled, Zoe glanced up from unwrapping the morning paper. ‘Who? Oh, John! Yes, it is tactless.'

‘Tactless?'

‘
Stupid
. But they're only making conversation. It doesn't mean anything.'

He tackled his egg again. ‘All that pretentious technical stuff about films.'

‘That was just because Anna told him I knew Joseph.' Zoe put the paper aside and buttered a slice of toast.

‘Why doesn't he ask Anna what she's going to do?'

Anna worked now, since David's death, in a small gallery. She sat at a desk. Occasionally, someone wandered in to look at the paintings. It was often quiet. She read or wrote letters when the place was deserted.

Zoe agreed. ‘Well, yes! A widow. Sometimes she still looks about fifteen. I only saw them for those few days in Paris, on their honeymoon. What a shame that had to happen! But she can't spend the next forty years mourning him and sitting in that place.'

‘She'll probably marry. But I hope not that Trenchard. Calling himself a movie buff.'

Zoe laughed and gave him a sparkling glance. ‘He's quite charming, in his way. Like a charming—cream puff,' she concluded, with a flourish of her knife.