The Circle

Title Page
Dedication
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Copyright

As she sat at the table: one bulb gone, I must fix that. She was reading. Two o’clock. And drinking. Poor Ben, poor tired kind. And drinking. Last year his heavy rough voice. Let’s go, what does it matter? and his shrug. And now sitting about in a dressing-gown, farting and groaning, wet-faced slack-lipped alone.

On the table before her lay a debris of demands. She observed them remotely. The windows on to the street flashed again and again with the passing lorries.    New Year.    She puzzled at it, shivering, looking into the darkness.

The reality that was the darkness. As she thought of that. The silver candles burned again in their first house, their blueberry-painted slum flat in Panton street over the old girl; garrulous persistent deaf old bitch. They sat up half the night talking in those days.
But she remembered. 2 days home from hospital with her first child. Her beautiful son, first man, her red earth, face open as a peasant, the delicate lips smelling of milk, and her own tiny breasts plump and flowing for him. She was proud. Of her shape, of her perfectly formed son, of survival. She chirrupped on the telephone as she nursed him. Flew about the house, feeling pale and light while he slept.

Talking. Talking. Even now she could feel the blood and the heat rise in her together that evening, the sudden faint blackness the stream of blood released down her legs, the surprising wetness.

Darling    I’m bleeding.    I seem to be.    And lying on the bathroom floor the room she never tidied    strewn with books and old clothes. Looking up at the cistern. The blood in great slithering clots flowing out of her.    Don’t move.    Don’t move. The great bath towel between her legs and Ben phoning, phoning. My love    my lovely son    not frightened very still looking into the darkness.    And down the stairs and under the stars on a stretcher    looking barely turning her eyes    lying on the trolley    rubber pipes down her nose into her stomach    looking up at white mask and eyes.    Darkness    I don’t want to die I’m going to be happy. Praying. Into the darkness.

And the first day after, too weak even to talk, and the drip going into a bruised wrist where the board had been put on badly, her throat cracked and dry:    The baby at her side, the milk ready to come for him,    his eyes fringed with eyelashes red-brown and thick they closed as he sucked off to sleep    his nose
wrinkling
.    Ben said: I love you.    She remembered. As
he sat by the bed,    his forehead on her arm,    his eyes reddening.

It was like a point of light that he’d said that, he was not so sure of it then, what he thought of her. And it carried her through the bad days at the hospital, the bloodless days when she sank so easily into sleep, and he behaved badly, forgetting to visit her, bored to sit by the bed as she drowsed. The nurses twittered over it. But she lay there happy enough, sure of him, of the words, of the darkness she was out of.

Perhaps it was something you couldn’t carry into the world outside that certainty, it hadn’t lived anyway. Back in her parents’ home, where she’d gone to be looked after. Sleeping still half the day, and waiting for the phone which rang so rarely. Perhaps he preferred her gone and the child also so he could work. And her father hating him: ‘If it was my wife ill as that’, so she was torn to defend him, stupidly; so that she got up odd hours, when there was no-one in the flat to call his lab and whisper: please phone please.

All the light was gone out of her, she wept quietly into her bed at night hating him and her parents equally. Somehow she got the strength to leave. She had to go. Back to him, even with her temperature going up every night still: because that nightly weeping was too dangerous, her parents’ sympathy too hateful, too destructive. She had frightening lonely dreams being lost and looking for someone    whose name she had forgotten    being old and unloved and childless with a strange memory of how it had once been different. Until one morning she woke dry-eyed and cool and got fully dressed right away, made up her face with red lipstick and combed out her hair properly for the first time in days and rang him to say:    I’m coming
home.    She supposed he was pleased.    She went back anyway.

To a cold house in a taxi, filth everywhere and the baby crying. Ben had to go out and get shillings for the gas before she could put a kettle on. I’m free, she kept telling him: he was already lost in the world of the lab, she could see, but she couldn’t help saying it.     Free. In the glow of it she almost recovered her energy. A light.    One of your little lights, as he said it to her, objecting; there’s no continuity in you, your ideas come on and off.    She had to hold to it privately, her euphoria.    And he was right, it didn’t hold.    Not even to the next night, their first and bleakest quarrel, as they set those early bills on the table to look at them, baffled, at their joint incompetence.

Before that before that.    In a boat lying in spring heat under yellow-green leaves the sunlight through them, the water silver and black in turns.    Damp smell of the boat wood and.    The acrid chemicals of his jacket, the skin of his neck.    His lips closing evenly, his eyes shut.    Was he happy then? Waiting.    His big soft kiss on her cheek his heavy hand on her neck.    She was sure of the salt on his lips, the sound of water, the wood creaking.    But the deserts in his head.    Empty, an empty day, he said to her, walking back through the fields.    To look for:    the paper, the cinema, the Radio Times, some
hold.
   On the shifting world.

Or he lay on the bed.    In his vest.    Torn aertex, his face expressionless.    On the unmade bed of their red attic room, and the electric light still needed at noon the cot in the shadows,    the baby still in her belly the head and buttocks moving under the skin. Nervous. Jittering.    Reasons.    Reasons.    And the baby rolling
slowly, his lovely head downwards into the cervix, butting, butting. She listened.    In the circle of her own thought, listening.

It wasn’t rescue for him only that she’d hoped for, that she had always talked of, pushing for some outlet in the drab walls he was caught in.    She loved his hunger for somewhere else, because it seemed to determine, that there was some way of living, some place that could answer.    That it could be made to open for them.

So long ago it was that first time, they lay on a mattress in his bare room.    Watched the first light over West Ken slate roofs through dirty glass.    Smiling. As the grey light found the corners, the Sunday
newspapers
, the scattered sheets of music.    Talking.    And the morning that ought to have taken her to work or at least to phone her landlady, found them hopelessly asleep together, as though in coming together the world outside had been put away with a desperate gesture and had simply dissolved.    Could now be discounted.    As though all the other possible definitions of how things ought to be could be ignored now.    She felt:    safe with him, as though their dreams had joined in a common stream.

And now she stood looking out into the garden, at the trees black and shining with the kitchen light on them and the town lights colouring the wetness in the sky.

There stood the rotten pots of the last year’s dried up tomato plants still, their long brown stems trailing over the pavement.    Must sweep that up, to one side. Listening to the hiss of the rain, feeling the coldness coming off the glass against her drunken face.

Last night she had walked the mountainside in a dream looking. For one of the children was it or Ben? She came on herself struggling her hair all caught up in some branches or was it her hair yes her hair and her coat caught in a tree    she was hanging swinging to and fro, like a tassel, she thought    and as she came up to the figure she could see the coat fell open—the bottom button was off, as it always was. Slut she thought,    even in dreams; just touched to laughter.

A sudden sharp cry from upstairs reached her.    It was Michael, the young one, eight years old, calling out for her.    At once she flew through the dark hall up the stairs guiltily to him, he called out so rarely. And now she remembered their supper-time quarrel, the stupid spite of it, the black sulk he had gone up in before she went to the hospital.

He lay his face wet    the sheet a narrow strip round his shoulders    deeply asleep when she reached him. He had got into bed without pyjamas and she could see how thin he was    the bones of his hips or the line of them.    Faintly she could smell urine, and she pulled tentatively at the blankets, thinking to change him. Darling. Darling. Wanting her love to enter his dreams.    I’m sorry    Mummy is sorry.    Thinking of him, his strange self-containment, his.    Bravery.
Wide-lipped
perky grinning. One foot on the washing bucket.    Holding the guitar, his clever fingers finding the chords, the thin wrist pausing and beating.    So simply he made it sing.    How had she come to? What was it, for saying what? That she came to hit him. Darling. She wanted her tenderness to reach him.

But his white face lay closed to her.    Even as she lifted his legs to take out the sheet, even as she covered his shoulders again, his face was closed, as all day she’d
been closed to him she supposed. Lost in her own
mind-wandering
, her waiting.

He’d brought her his tin    of insects, fat worms and sloe beetles gathered from under the stones. They were his friends he told her; each of them had a name and he pulled grass from the winter mud for them to eat. (What
did
they eat, she wondered ignorantly.) All day long he followed her about to show her his tin,    how these creatures would do what he said, that they knew their names.    Or he crouched over them carefully dropping dirt into the tin, gently preventing the squiggly ones from escaping.    By late afternoon they were all beginning to die from.    Was it water they needed? She didn’t know. But he was so saddened, so sure they liked their new home.    Even when the fattest beetle lay on his back, legs in the air, he insisted on that. She’d shrieked at him suddenly: seeing the silly feeble legs move and stop.    You’re running some kind of torture chamber.    But no, they were his friends.    If it was water they needed, what could he put it in. Could he use a doll’s saucer or. But she hadn’t listened, her mind had closed to him.

Now the older child woke, and turned to her, lifting his neater head, his long cheeks placid, his mouth open.

Mummy I’ve just thought, it’s football.    Where’s my shirt?    She said:    Don’t worry.    We’ll find it.

–How’s Daddy? he remembered. 

She swallowed. Fine. Go to sleep. And tucked in the top blanket, as well as she could, his feet stuck out at the bottom. How tall he was getting, how handsome she thought. And his eyes. Eager to know.

Through sepia    the false pink of the tints she thought of Ben’s childhood face in his mother’s photograph album, delicate lips, and serious eyes: the expression. As though his whole being looked out with hopeful
curiosity.    What field near the slums streets he came from was he in. Or was it some convalescent trip after childhood illness. Illness that took him away so often, so happily as he remembered it.    Into that sweet world of snuffling    woodsmoke smells and enclosed country lushness    he’d never found again.    Or was it together only they had failed to find it, the joyous world those young eyes looked for?    Was it there for no-one? Or only the young. Did the senses turn off somehow unnoticed so that it was. All about them even now and unvalued, unreachable.

How to. Begin again, to begin again. Up, under the wire the grass heads high as armpits, stinging the bare skin, knowing the ground the dips in it    the burrows    the sour berries    bits of wood that stick in the tongue and the smell of brown paper soaked with red juice. Down there through the leaves, powder hurting the eyes and.    The trees: each one its own route up and the lovely pear tree.    Twelve year old arms
reaching
up for the lowest branch, fondling the smooth wood, swinging up.    The tendons stretched under the skin.

Fiercely she thought what he would say, Ben, how there was nothing of
that
in her, or
left
in her, he knew that, even if she looked in cold puddles and the black trees in them and the pale new stone of the re-built Boots building, it was not his meaning. The shape of their present landscape precluded it. And back he went, back where she could not follow him, into that world 3 months long in his own childhood country he still looked for, snuffling for it, even in the Fen country, never finding it.

Her sons slept deeply.

But the shirt. That was a problem. She hesitated at the top of the stairs, wondering where. It could be
washed if only she knew
where.
The alcohol was going out of her blood. She was cold and weary. Down the stairs she looked at the empty hall. Were they villains at the hospital, saying.
All
may
yet
be
well?
She felt. A ripple of superstition. Steadied herself on the stairs. Ben. And she went down them, her head aching. The laundry basket, was it, the cupboard under the stairs? And Michael’s pathetic tin in the way of her feet.

The cold came from under the door, ice-breath of a slow January morning. She thought: how often Ben stayed up all night, working, writing, liking the tension of it. Or not caring. What damage he did himself. As he would not notice the cut in his toe, or the fungus that grew once over the skin of his shoulders. Or the pains of travelling. South across Europe, one pound in his pocket, desperately: looking.

In the Dordogne through green valleys, hot feet aching, she remembered: long rolls and cheap tomatoes that got crushed in their bag leaving stains on the seats of friendly cars, eating the sand that gritted on the surface of their unwrapped cheeses. Waiting for lifts, talking, the second child not yet stirring in her but making her fretful, peevish, sick.