The Circle (13 page)

Voyeurs
, she would now have said. And those mistakes at least could be avoided, that pursuit of some centre where they could join in the flow of happening; as though there could be any centre finally outside themselves; and what they made with one another.

In the cottage looking at Lisa she tried to understand; what could be learnt. From a woman whose hand shook over her cigarette, and was ill to the point of some terrible climax with a disease she had never named and yet could go on somehow. Planning and making a life.

Time.    Yes.    And Yes there were moments when a sense of that time at her disposal had a sensuous feel to
it. Uncommitted evenings, whole loose days of it. But she couldn’t count on the pleasure, it came and then it left her. Even in a library that great refuge of her past days; a great boredom would come over her. At the printed word. Just the other day she had gone into the big university library with a sense of quickened
anticipation
, and the sun made squares of light on the floor between the bookshelves. The dust flecks floated in the beams and she looked along the rows of books.    Books and books.

But which book?    Her heart descended even looking along the too familiar titles, those tributes, those hearts and rods and stones; And even.

Yes even poetry. That strong alcohol. That always in the past had brought her failing energy to a point; like a strong spirit one page of it would cure her blood. On that day it was no good, she could find nothing; nothing could reach her.

And later that day visiting Lisa, she found the kitchen walls were white. It was early April; and Lisa had put a bowl of sweet-smelling flowers. Jasmine, Lena guessed they were, or perhaps the scent came from the white flowers; a kind of hyacinth. And the bowl interested her. It was a deep blue, as deep a blue as one of the skies from the Duc de Berry.

It was curious how few things she had that she
liked
, thought Lena. Half-a-crown. It was absurd. And partly as a result of thinking that began for the first time in her life. Looking, in odd junk shop windows. For colours and shapes that took her fancy. To know what she liked. It was peculiar. She had never thought to ask
herself that. Or even to put herself, she supposed, so much into the world outside her. To identify her person, her spirit. With the objects that surrounded her. Hardly did she extend into her body sufficiently to identify herself with the image that met her unexpectedly in a mirror. And to project herself
outward
. To choose even the things around you as though they connected to some shape inside. It was very alien.

And with part of her it seemed a trivial exercise. Some days she thought of herself, peering in shop-windows and picking out pieces of junk with affection, and sneered at it;
House
and
Garden
, wasn’t it? Or some mornings, she woke with a white mind, as the name of another day came into her, and pondered over the triviality of her new amusement. When every day over the lovely earth men and women with no more courage would be out looking for grass and seed-grain for their swollen children. Was it not a hideous flippancy to be poring over the ornaments of living? And all the while, she knew that in Lisa’s hands it was not that: but a means of staying alive in the world.

In early April she sat with her in the garden, both their feet deep in the unmown grass, and admired the face of the reticent stone river god Lisa had dug up from the mud at the rim of the brook; and could not imagine who would expect Lisa to give up whatever sweetness it gave her there in the wilderness to give some worship to a pagan deity.

Dying we are all dying. And we swim out our seasons of grief in librium and mentholate nicotine and follow bodiless as the television swings over Africa, and all that was real finally was what lay about us; like the polished stone face of the river god. Dug up from what pot hole of neglect. Where it could have stayed under their feet, or hers at any rate, she corrected, a hundred years and undiscovered.

Oh, it went back far behind her marriage that: she was more than thirty years the creature of a bare world narrowly pointed along two or three lines of pleasure only. And in the queer pause of waiting, for Ben to come out. It seemed to her as though what she asked for now was as innocent of frivolity. As a prisoner’s search for something to name in the confines of his cell. A green and gold Irish circlet. A string of uneven brown stones. A blue biscuit-barrel. No avarice would bother with such things. And when she tried to explain this to Ben, he only nodded wearily; as though he recognised a truth he had to resign to. And grew impatient if she
claimed charges. No-one charges. That much. Or
suddenly
wakes up. And yet, she took care now of Michael’s shells, and cheap pieces of pot and pewter, and this caring at least was new. She brought him some of the things to see. And his face lit at some of them.

Outside it was April, and Ben would be out soon. It was a late spring the green was just touching the hedges. On the thin brown twigs appeared the first separate white growths of spring. And they stood out like white wool against the purple sky.

And Lena conceived a piece of complex action. She was determined to change, utterly. She tried her ideas on Ben.

But he was indifferent to it, one way or the other. Even as it became an obsession with her, so that she polished it up for the possible purchasers with true passion. And spent her days now looking and looking. For something on a small scale she could handle. Something they could make together, as Lisa was making her new life on her own.

The only time in her visits to Ben that she surprised in him any animation was when some colleague from the lab would come with problems and results; and then he would have out a pencil in a moment and talk fast and happily. And his face looked as it used to look before he was ill, and his smile was back. That now so
rarely moved in her presence. So that she was moved to say to him:

When she came to collect him from the hospital she took enormous pains in packing his suitcase with everything he would need. And she could hardly repress her excitement. Because the house was sold and she had found another and she wanted him to see it.

But he had seemed wholly
remote.
She didn’t mean to, but she couldn’t help it; she challenged him with the word.

And then there were prolonged farewells to be said everywhere. To the doctors, and the staff nurse, and the jolly night nurse who had to take messages to the others. And then there was the deranged Indian who was also nearly back to normal.

And after that he took her into the children’s ward (in the last weeks he’d been able to get around quite a lot) and said a very affectionate goodbye to one of the sick children. About three, he must have been; a stick-legged pathetic little thing, with a wide-eyed beautiful smile. Ben made friends with him. And even on that day spent nearly quarter of an hour (explaining that the poor child had no relatives to visit) so that she had to fight. To put down her own selfish impatience, to get him home.

Outside. It was sunny. He stood and snuffed at that for a bit and she felt a certain quickening of hope.

And there was water glinting in the gutter, and a few blossoms floating in it. The water was moving slowly downhill. Moving.

They walked along the pavement to the car.

She burst out laughing.

Late one night in November. Under a sky as black as the space round the moon. Lena walked home along the canal near Kari’s house, seeing every tree shining and silent with a strange treacherous beauty. The surface of the water was like black glass, with slashes of orange street lighting across it. It was late, cold, lonely. And Lena paused as she came level with the windows of Kari’s house. A bit surprised to see them alight, because she’d thought the whole family was away. And rang the bell.

It was John who answered the door. Looking
ruffle-haired
in his dressing gown. Just at the edge of her mind, as she apologised, was the strangeness of seeing his hair fluffy and uncombed. Even as she observed someone else; bright hair, white-gown, long bare legs. Lisa. On the stairs behind him.

And: come in, come in, said John, as Lena stood there, stunning the muscles of her face into neutrality, her mind racing with ignoble excitement as she
hesitated
. And then followed him. Into the familiar hall, past piled-up boxes of children’s toys. Into the kitchen. And there she sat, at the table, and let her cold lips and tongue burn themselves on a bitter liquid she had not
bothered to sugar. As their two voices mingled warmly, and they touched without self-consciousness in her presence. And gradually as she sat there it all seemed warm and natural, and she relaxed. As though her old love for Kari was at a great distance from what was happening before her. Or even, she thought, walking out again into the black rain shine of the night. As though in some ruthless way their happiness had annihilated her memory of Kari altogether. As though Kari herself had gone off the map of her mind.

And so Lena entered a month of strange alternations; lived it in a private fever, talking to no-one. A month of brilliant sunshine and leaf-smells during the days, hot tar rising from the road repairs which seemed to be everywhere. And the canal by Kari’s house was charged with her guilty knowledge. She walked by the
waterside
where children and old men hung their strings fishing, walked by lost and drooping willows, dusty old copper beech and flame, the flame of the true Autumn tree, the red chestnut. And turned formally before she came to Kari’s house, to cut another way into town. She wanted her mind to be blank and still, she wanted no part of what she had seen. And yet every grain of her flesh was shaken with it.

And she was irritable. Because she had thought of John as someone she knew well, and now she had to question that certainty. He was no longer simply Kari’s prosaic husband. Could not be. When she listened to Lisa’s tender voice, a voice which always seemed gentle to the point of self-destruction. Continually she wanted to face Lisa with what she thought she knew. Her own anecdotal knowledge of John; her sense of the totally even tenor of his mind. And was stopped because she could not be quite sure of her own vision. She had seen him so long through Kari: as staid, bad-tempered,
pernickety. And now Lisa had him locked into her own dream. When they talked, Lena felt they were
discussing
two different men.

In late November she met John at a market stall, picking up books, and looking cheerful. A simple, middle-aged man, wasn’t he? Standing with his jacket open, in a roll-top jumper, smiling. A peculiarly open smile. Untouched. Friendly.

Reluctantly she put her gaze down on the page again, took in the sweet strangeness of child’s bottom, the anal crack just slightly distended.

Yes, he seemed so innocent, so wholly innocent that Lena could not understand him. Was it stupidity or what? Or was she missing altogether what was
searching
and lame in him, the tentative spirit Lisa spoke of, found and held to?

That same afternoon, talking to Lisa she tried again to say hesitatingly: Why, why John? And found only surprise in the grey eyes that met her own so that she had to accept it. They were discussing a stranger. Some new person who only inhabited John’s body in Lisa’s presence.

It was a bad day. Cold, wet and dark. Leaves in heaps in the black puddles of rain. Thin twigs shining with rain and sudden flashes of white that caught the only light of the day into themselves and deepened the darkness so that it seemed to Lena that the very sight of her eyes was failing.

Lisa was standing in a grey mackintosh outside the coffee shop, transfigured with her own radiance, a light under her skin, her eyes laughing, her long hair vibrant. As though a current of electricity ran through her.

The child nodded. Now the fingers gripping her hand were more confident.

Alan and Michael were outside the swimming pool swinging on the wet green rails, over and under them.

She could feel a buried and nervous friction in every tissue, which made the heat in the swimming pool oppresive to the point of nightmare. Deep green chloride smells came off the water, and filled the back of her throat. In her effort to put away the dizziness, the small child became an intolerable awkwardness, a sudden wriggly creature, crawling down between the seats, buffing himself on the dirty floor with the
cigarette
butts.

And outside through the glass walls of the pool she could see the tall trees waving in lovely cold wetness. But about her was neither air nor breath. And the child, in his own uncertainty, began kicking the woman in front of her. She knew he was enforcing her attention, so that there should be no room in her mind for any thought or life. And she was close to hating him.

Now she could see her own children in their red trunks come out on to the wet pool side waving. Demanding her look, her approval. Signalling. Through the voiceless rising noise.

It did not satisfy them. They waved, explaining, gesturing. They were going to have a race, she was to understand.

At the steps they shivered. And she watched that, the intimation of cold, enviously, because perspiration was starting to prickle the entire surface of her skin. And then they were swimming. Michael urgent, and furious to win. Like a little frog doing the breast stroke. Alan doing a heavy, dogged crawl. But a girl blocked
Michael’s
way half-way across, and Alan reached the bar first. Lena waved desperately from her remote perch to where Michael was standing; still where he was stopped, looking up to her; both of them demanding her adjudication. With one hand holding the crossed straps of the baby’s jeans she gesticulated at them.

When she got the children home she put the meat in the oven and sat them all in front of the television in a state of febrile resentment. Luckily, Michael at anyrate was tender, treating the strange child like a dainty plaything. Lena was tired. And since there was no word from Lisa she had to go upstairs and find sheets and the third leg of the camp-bed to sleep him in. And the phone went when she was on the top landing, but it wasn’t Lisa, it was Kari, and Lena couldn’t get her voice right, so that Kari said:

Later she made a napkin from an old towel, but the little boy cried when she put it on and would not lie down in his bed. He cried very silently. Salt drops very simply falling down from grey eyes, tender lips shaking. Lena cuddled the little rounded body against her, ashamed that she hadn’t managed to generate much warmth, said.

There was no word from Lisa that night. At ten the next morning Lena was sitting blearily in a dressing gown watching the small pale figure of Lisa’s child climbing in and out, in and out, of a torn cardboard box. When the bell went.