In Certain Circles (6 page)

His lion-coloured eyes. Her rounded chin. She was like a Roman girl, the statue of a Roman girl in the days of Imperial Rome. Sometimes, rather a plain one, if the aunt and uncle had been awful; at other times, there was something very pleasing to see. Her appearance reflected her feelings, her state of mind, as though what she contained was stronger than her flesh. On the plain days, Zoe occasionally wished she would go home. I am very sensitive to faces, she told herself. A visual person. That her own prepossessing exterior mirrored rather exactly her rare and beautiful self, she had never doubted.

‘Anna…Does Stephen mind about being best man? (Do sit down.) I mean, all the fuss. What does he say?' she asked lamely.

‘Nothing. But I suppose he knows why Russell asked him.'

‘Why did he?' Zoe was intent, leaning nervously forward.

‘Well. Because he wanted us to be official. He wanted us all to know each other when he's gone. Didn't he?' To see Zoe engrossed, dependent on her opinion, evidently caused Anna doubts.

‘Did he say so?'

‘No-o.' Anna spoke on two equivocal notes, and stared at the irregular pattern on the rug that covered part of the polished wooden floor. Without real attention, she eyed the photographs pinned on a panel of the wall facing the windows, the tiny hand-painted Mexican figures, the three glass snowstorms, records, the turquoise and green balloons, the typewriter on the desk, the many books stacked into shelves in the wall. Outside, there were leaves, clouds, blue space.

A broken fingernail. Zoe stared at her hands with displeasure. Then, quite having lost touch with that instinct she had intended to follow, she suddenly jumped from the bed and, sliding back the door of her wardrobe, dragged out a number of dresses.

Up off the chair, Anna shot, her eyes growing larger by the second. She backed away, saying, ‘I don't need anything.'

As if she had unwittingly fired a revolver point blank at someone she had never seen before, Zoe's own eyes and face opened with a sort of belated, reciprocal shock. ‘I know you don't
need
anything. You'd be doing me a favour. One of my ratty ideas. Stay here while I get us some coffee. We both missed out in all the turmoil down there.'

Escaped, dropping from stair to stair, she gave a series of low groans, not having to imagine self-indulgently what it might be like to be Anna. This small blow was
in addition to
the rest of her life. Suffering, endurance, were things Zoe herself knew nothing about, except through art, and because of Russell. And even that, what she had seen and read that pushed beyond her own experience, had the very muted impact, she realised now, of watching an experiment in chemistry, never having studied the subject.

In the kitchen, she waited for the coffee while Mrs Perkins, washing dishes, talked about illness.

And Stephen, too. Those looks he gave as if from another country; perhaps they were justified. After all, she thought, the orphans and Russell are like each other, different from me. She pondered while the coffee heated and Mrs Perkins maundered on about hearts and livers. Even Russell was fatiguing, she thought with self-pity. How careful you had to be with people like that! Her mother was right. She had no time for melancholy egoists, shrinking violets. The golden mean. Nothing too much. Moderation in all things, her mother said. Nervous breakdowns, her mother said. I could have a nervous breakdown any day I liked. But she did
not
like. She was too strong to consider falling over when life was strenuous.

‘Coffee boiled is coffee spoiled,' Mrs Perkins said.

‘We won't mind.' Zoe assembled mugs, sugar and milk, and took four cream cakes as an afterthought.

Or
would
Anna mind? How could she tell? Zoe started back upstairs, avoiding what sounded like a scene from
Macbeth
in the sitting room. The idea that she might have to proceed through life without ever knowing what anyone would mind and, if she decided to care, having to take quite supernatural precautions not to cause any damage, appalled her.

She remembered a party given for some of her father's students. A supposedly quick-witted girl called Ruth had contributed an anecdote about someone hailing her at the Quay, calling ‘Ruth' in the middle of the afternoon so that everybody heard. Responding to Zoe's blank gaze, the girl only repeated, still irate at the memory, ‘—called my name and everybody looked.'

Like a primitive, Zoe had thought. Stone-age men guarded their names like that. How could mere forethought warn anyone that a frothy blonde girl of nineteen felt the same?

Balancing the tray on her raised thigh, Zoe opened the door. Anna sat in one of the deep corduroy chairs, holding a balloon lightly on her lap. Her face expected nothing good. Inwardly, Zoe reeled with dismay. Had
she
done this? To
his
sister?

‘Could you move those big books off the table? Now let's ruin our statistics with these cakes.'

Looking forward across her eyebrows as she leaned over the table, she glanced apprehensively at Anna, who stood turning the pages of a book she had shifted to the desk. Zoe recognised a flash of colour as a page fell, and started to talk about the painting. Standing together with mugs and cakes, flipping through a history of western art, the girls were stilted.

In her mind, Zoe felt the pressure of Russell and Stephen and Anna in her life, and their peculiar demands—and worse, the limit of their demands. She was too young to be thoughtful, or interested in someone else's problems. She felt a huge impatience at this unwarranted check to her self-absorption and happy conceit and ambition. So they had all had more troubles than she. Did that really make them superior? If two men were walking along the street and a brick fell on one, missing the other, did that make the injured one a better person? All he had learned was what it was like to have a brick fall on his head. It had happened to him. Why make a virtue of it?

It was not as though she were a trashy or frivolous person. Or not
only
trashy and frivolous. She was almost certain her heart was in the right place. It was simply that circumstances had not called on her to produce it very often. If Stephen drifted away when Russell left for Europe, if he could be as boorish and uninterested as that, Zoe had half-supposed till this moment that she would let Anna drift off, too. Why not? She had enough friends. It was awkward to know people who had less money and no proper home.

Depressed, she swallowed the last of her cake. Like a speeded-up film, she ran through her mind the picture of Anna's life—school, the creepy aunt falling into hallucinations and delusions, the extinguished uncle, the inhuman Stephen. Subtract
us
, Zoe thought, and that's what's left. This was what they meant by wrestling with your conscience. She said, ‘Promise you'll come over when Russell's gone. You and Stephen. We'll ask you, and you'll come, won't you? Otherwise, we'll think you only wanted to see Russell.'

Anna was evasive. ‘Stephen's been transferred to Melbourne.'

As though a searchlight had flooded her, and then been switched off, Zoe said, ‘Oh…No one told me. Let's join the throng downstairs. Hysteria seems to be setting in, from the sound of things.'

Mrs Howard switched on the lights and opened the french windows: several moths shot past her into the room like bargain hunters after prey. She flapped at them.

‘No, but you're so personal, Zo.' There were times when her children daunted her. Her husband had churchmen, farmers, craftsmen, minor artists, a few black-sheep labourers in his background. Fortunately, there had always been some money.
Her
side was blameless: academics, solicitors, reliable men and women of one sort and another, all getting on with the business of the world. Yet somehow out of this mixter-maxter she was landed with strange offspring. Russell went beyond her and Zoe was not like her in a way she would have resented greatly had not they and all their attributes in a sense belonged to her.

‘Yes, you're too personal,' she repeated to Zoe.

‘What should I be? Mechanical?'

‘Personal relations are not all there is to life, Zo. That's sloppy thinking. I have a full life, husband, children, but where I would be without work as well, I don't know. You're too intense lately about your likes and dislikes. So extreme about everything. You'll come to grief, if you invest your life in individuals. I've seen it happen.' She felt in the pocket of her dress, then cast an eye anxiously over the room's surfaces in search of the last of a hundred lists concerning the wedding.

‘Well, you can't want me to invest it in worms and flies the way you do. And if this is what I'm like…'

‘There's no need to pretend to be more ignorant than you are. This might only be a phase. Heaven knows, we've had a few.'

‘How do you recognise one?' Zoe tore the wrapping from some things she had bought earlier in the day—a black cashmere sweater, a silk scarf.

‘By its passing. And by its excesses while present. Have you seen my list, Zo?'

‘No. Where did you have it last? But mightn't it be that the way you look at things is a phase that hasn't ended? Isn't this a delicious red?' She held up the scarf.

‘Lovely. But there are moments, when I'm talking to you and Russell, when I wish I'd never married. Go to bed now and take that reading list and some books with you. Your history's very shaky.'

‘Go to bed! In Africa, I'd be a grandmother by now!' Still, it was infantile to be so irritating, and she had many choices and could choose not to be. Smiling with a sort of reciprocal indulgence, she and her mother embraced.

Not infantile at all, she thought about Stephen and went upstairs.

‘How many came to this…?' Stephen indicated the illuminated garden, the house lit up like an ocean liner.

Russell and Lily had driven off. By a resurgence of the luck that had only recently deserted her, not by design at all, Zoe and Stephen were the last to saunter back down the path from the waving and kissing. It was a mild, glamorous night with stars but no moon.

‘Scores. Hundreds. I don't know.' Zoe kicked her long dress out in front as they slowly walked. ‘I didn't know you were going to Melbourne,' she said, in a strained voice. ‘Anna told me a couple of days ago. When do you leave?'

‘On Tuesday.'

‘Almost at once! They didn't give you much time.'

‘Just a few weeks.'

‘I see. You didn't mention it.'

‘I told Russell.'

They avoided the house and meandered down a path between high rhododendrons, both looking at the ground.

‘Did you have any say in it? Did you have to go?' Zoe asked.

‘I could have resigned. But companies don't like you to refuse promotion.'

‘I thought popularity'—Zoe twisted off a leaf and dropped it—‘was the last thing that bothered you.'

Just then she half-thought she heard a voice in the distance call, ‘Help!' Occasionally, at night, it seemed to her she heard someone far off call out, ‘Help!'

‘The salary increase won't keep anyone in luxury, but Anna won't have to go without school books.'

He was so familiar to her that she was tempted to say, ‘Spare me! Why the lies?' Because school books! Who lived today in a world where supplying one girl with school equipment was any sort of problem? He ought to think up a more convincing story. Who wanted for anything? (Except pensioners, she added scrupulously. Having seen old people shopping for food, having watched surreptitiously the careful examination of small coins, she was included to believe
they
might want.) But for Stephen to tell this weak story!

‘I thought Anna was your
uncle's
problem.' At her side, she heard a deep breath.

Out of the darkness, Stephen said, ‘He's had an invalid wife for years. Doctors and hospitals cost money. Nurses. All the rest of it.'

Zoe's mind was arctic, her attention so fine, that she understood everything.