In Certain Circles (7 page)

Casually, brushing her hand now against her long skirt, now against the hedge of leaves on her right, she said, ‘Down the hill at Lily's place they have three sick people. That's why the reception was held here, tonight. But they manage to scrape along in reasonable comfort.' She had the impression that this was not exactly what she had intended to say.

Their shoes sounded on the flagged path. Zoe's words repeated themselves in the living silence between them. She had a feeling that neither of them had chosen to speak the words that had emerged. It was as if two angular creatures made of metal and wire, invisible, standing outside, above and all round them, had spoken instead, mistranslating with malice. She felt helpless, and through the hardness of heart and the sense of grievance put on her by the invisible controller, she could feel Stephen's helplessness.

He said, ‘I think I'll look for Anna. It's time I took her home.'

‘Do we see you again?'

‘Annual holidays.' He said, ‘I don't suppose you would ever be in Melbourne?'

‘I don't suppose I would.'

Inflexibly held by their robot masters, they were guided down the path and into the house and Stephen found Anna and said good night and goodbye.

Mrs Howard put an arm round Zoe's waist and drew her into a circle of laughing, middle-aged faces. She knew them all. They gave her the customary hungry detailed looks. Everyone had drunk and eaten well. They appeared genial and satisfied. Zoe smiled and said their names, responded to their questions under the guidance of the automatic control. Dr Hope prescribed another glass of champagne. She drank it down. Her mother said in an aside, ‘Is something wrong?'

Her light eyes, with their curious silvery glaze, turned to the familiar face. ‘What?'

‘You're rather—'

‘What?'

‘Sharp. A little.'

‘What did I say?' Zoe's voice was like a voice in a dream.

‘You won't keep this one long, Alice.'

Eyes: two, four, six, eight, ten, twelve eyes. All knowing what they knew. Mrs Howard glanced amusedly across her shoulder at Zoe, who could be teased and sometimes had been.

And, ‘Biologists!' she would say then, while her mother smiled. ‘You're so scientific and enlightened. You make me think of animals. (I don't mean
you
remind me of animals.) But animals copulating. Like a butcher's shop.'

‘And you're not an animal, Zoe?'

Then she would always pause, her eyes unfocussed. ‘No, I don't think so. Not exactly. Not entirely.'

But tonight she only smiled in a way that was inexplicably different from the shining, eager-eyed smiles of other days and, while the watchers let themselves be stirred, murmured something about her friends and moved off.

‘She's quite a girl, Alice. Makes me feel my age to see her so sophisticated.'

‘That's mostly an act. Oh, she's too much of a good thing,' her mother said, depreciating her treasure. ‘But still very young.'

‘Hullo.' Noiselessly, she approached Philip, who appeared to be moping about by himself at the dark end of the verandah. ‘Are you moping, or do I only think you're moping?'

He turned from a prolonged staring into the garden behind the house. Taller than Stephen. Black hair, very level black brows and very level eyes like aquamarines.

‘You have what they call a striking glance,' Zoe told him, knowing how he had been made to wince for his beauty. He was cheered on during his victorious runs on the football field by a variety of ardent nicknames. ‘Literally, you could make people fall right over, looking at them like that.'

‘Not you.'

Silent, they leaned together out into the night over the broad stone wall of the verandah.

‘Why not me? Let's go somewhere.' Zoe was gazing down at the shadowed lawn.

‘Anywhere?' Slowly, mistrustfully, Philip came to life, staring at the side of her head.

‘Anywhere. You go up to the car. I'll get out of this drapery and be with you. Fifty seconds.'

At the gate five minutes later, with a scarf on her dark hair, breathing the clammy breath of the Pacific and a million flowers and trees, with her hand on the wide painted top of the gate, she paused before sliding back the bolt and lowered her head. She lowered her head instinctively, and thought: that is that.

Anna wrote in her journal:
I have been on my own for a week now
.

It was like having been dragged bleeding profusely, dangerously wounded, but alive, from the battlefield. She could not smile enough, marvel enough, at the words. She wrote another word, a fantastic understatement.

It is a great relief. Everything smells dusty, and the carpet has a hole that keeps tripping me. But I'm free. At first, I could smell the gas stove, which is next to the bed, but the window is always open. Other people have rooms here, but you never see them. You hear them throwing the furniture about, and running water, and know when they are cooking.

Mrs Howard told Uncle Charles that this was a respectable place, with no wild people. An old lady she knew stayed here once. Uncle Charles thinks I am mean, going away to live. He said I could go in by train to the office every day from Parramatta.
Her
idea. He only has
her
ideas.

Mrs Howard thought I should keep on with Charles and Nicole to cheer them up. She said I exaggerated. She warned me that I would be much worse off, trying to keep myself on a junior clerk's wage. You can't explain anything to a rich, lucky person. They don't know. They talk about ‘cases' and people who have ‘problems'. They read a lot about them, but don't know. Mrs Howard asked me why I was so ungrateful. I tried to tell her that they pressed lies on me every day, and tried to make me agree the lies were true, looking me in the eye. Charles's soft voice. It felt as if they wanted to murder me.

I can see it looks a bit dramatic. But if anyone sane had ever listened, they would not have disagreed with me. Mrs Howard opened her eyes very wide and pretended to be shocked. She said, ‘Dear, dear! Hidden fires!' She was quite jeering. I felt all wrong, even though I am aware of so much, really.

Anna chewed at the end of her pen and sighed, feeling the existence of some law that made all such claims ridiculous. And yet, she insisted to herself, I do know something they don't.

It was not that the Howards called black white, like Charles and Nicole. They knew what was what. They gave little lectures all the time, and since they were lecturers, this did not impress Anna as unnatural. At their house, she had listened to talks on youth, wine, education, painting, the Liberal Party, the Labor Party, birth control, the First World War, the Second World War, the Third World War, fashion, newspapers, society, travel, opera, theatre, music, cooking, sculpture, the Art Gallery, town planning, universities, traffic, mental illness, Aborigines, foreign countries, restaurants, dancing and sailing.

In fact, there was no particular topic she could recall not having been lectured on by Zoe's parents. And yet there
was
one, even if she could not remember what it was. And it was this subject that mysteriously mattered more than all the others together.

Anna wrote:

Mrs Howard asked me for an example of what I meant when it was everything. I told her that because Nicole was ill, she had always to be right. We were supposed to be like Polonius, changing course to agree with Hamlet, no matter what. And since Charles had decided that Nicole had to be right, someone had to be wrong.

Mrs Howard said, ‘You're young and healthy. You can stand it.'

I said, ‘Not every day. She would accuse me of anything that came into her head. However bad it was, Charles always pretended to believe her, or did believe her, which means he is ill now, too.'

This made Mrs Howard quite angry. She said you shouldn't take things personally when people were ill, and that the things I'd told her were puerile, or petty, or something.

I said nothing. People ask to hear unpleasant things from curiosity, then feel outraged when they do. Besides, perhaps the things I told her did sound puerile. Perhaps they were the wrong incidents. There were so many.

It was like expecting three grains of sand to illustrate a ten-mile beach. But even multiplied they might have sounded nothing. Anna only knew that what they intended, and what she felt, were strong as life and death.

‘Nobody likes self-pity, Anna,' Mrs Howard said.

‘Not everyone has equal reason to feel it, Mrs Howard. Some things are sad, even if they happen to you yourself. But self-pity would mean I'd have to think about them, and I never do.'

Again, Anna stopped writing. It was easy to say that. But already, at this age, she had used more energy merely staying alive and holding on to herself in the tornado than Mrs Howard had yet had to call on in her fifty or whatever years. Now, like someone released from prison by the miraculous intervention of unknown friends, with spikes, clamps, thorns and a suit of nettles removed, she felt tired to the soul. She could have slept for a long time, into another life.

Anna continued:

Then Zoe came home and Mrs Howard went in to another room and came back with an eggbeater for me. She is kind, but has strict ideas about what ought to be.

It was a fact, and Anna admitted it to herself, that she would not have liked
Russell
ever to hear a word of complaint fall from her. But then she had not, strictly speaking, complained to Mrs Howard. She had simply answered questions truthfully. There was no way of making that truth jolly. And then, as for Russell, he knew all that mattered by looking at you and talking about other things.

She wrote:

One thing I'll remember about the Howards forever—walking into the house one summer evening with Russell and Stephen. Out in the laundry, we found Russell's mother and father home from work, each with a whisky glass in one hand and a piece of the family washing in the other. Mrs Perkins was ill, so they set to, to sort the washing out and get it into the machine.

They were talking and laughing about something at work, not concentrating on the washing a bit. In a little while, it was all hung out. More like a festival than hard labour. I had no idea that dull jobs could be done like that. I loved them for it.

She had thought their good nature almost supernatural. In memory, the laundry lights shone down on the Howards' heads like light from another world.

Zoe came in on her way home last night. She thought the room was small, but convenient. Next year, when she graduates, she is going to Paris. I told her I had read in a paper at work that she has a brilliant future. Zoe laughed. ‘How would they know?' she said. She has told me before about two different opportunities. One is with a man who takes still photographs, a Frenchman; the other is with a film man whose headquarters are in Paris. They have seen her work, or heard of her somehow. She will be an assistant. One of them is famous. What I still can't understand is how they all knew about each other in the first place. Paris is so far away, and so many people must want these jobs. Zoe said they know about each other through friends. ‘Everyone seems to be your family's friend.'

When I said this once before, years ago, to Zoe, she looked taken aback. ‘But it's the same for you,' she said. ‘We all know each other. The world really is quite a small place.'

‘Oh, no. Most of us don't know anyone.'

Anna could still remember the way they batted startled looks to and fro.

Stephen says, ‘These women, Zoe and her mother, they have a brutal confidence. Steer clear of them. They'd trample you to death. You're not as tough as they are. Don't think they're like Russell because they're related to him.'

Anna gloomed at the paper, recalling how she had reproached him. She had felt abused by these harsh words about her friends. After uttering cries of outrage, she argued with Stephen closely, following him about like a duellist in some Hollywood film of cardboard palaces.

‘Zo's mother is older, and she
is
confident because of knowing more about biology than other people. She gives us lessons in a way, but I like it. People of my age bore me. They don't know anything. She's used to moulding students. I'm not very malleable. But all Zo is is happy.'

‘Is she?' he asked, with a sudden, moody interest. ‘Why should she be happy?'

Speechless, Anna turned his judgments over in her mind. ‘Why?' she repeated, limp with astonishment. ‘I
like
to see someone happy. The Howards are the first happy people I've ever known. They're wonderful.' How could she explain clearly enough to him? Why could he not feel it, too?

‘You're a generous girl,' her brother said.

‘No,' she said, exasperated. ‘They're generous. They've been good to me.'

Stephen gave an angry, bitter exclamation. ‘Grateful and adoring. Just what they want you to be.'

‘I'm not! I'm not! You couldn't be more wrong.'