The Circle (16 page)

And along the water under the bridge came a group
of black swans, their beaks red as child’s paint. Slow and silent, like dream creatures, they passed in a flotilla before them.

The sun surrounded them. The food filled them; saltily, substantially. But there was more to see and they got up to see it. And all standing up together suddenly, they must have startled the peacock who had walked back towards them, and its tail went up. Not in
delight
, but in anger.

And perhaps the heat was going out of the sun. They visited the monkey house. And looked at the otters, their tiny sleek heads, reminding Lena of the seals in the Aquarium; only they seemed so much happier. To be swinging about, and sliding into the water. Play.
Playing
. It came to her, as a great fact about whole reaches
of the animal kingdom: that play was part of the
experience
.

And the day passed; part of the holiday. The holiday in which they were enclosed. And all the same she knew it must end, that the peaceful outgoing they shared was only a moment of calm, could only be that. In the nature of things.

That it would end. Perhaps with the school holidays. Or perhaps. She did not want to think of how it might break but to move in it. As a swimmer moves in an unexpected current of warmer water. Letting it flow about her and moving her whole spirit in it, for it was tangibly and solidly about her, and she gave herself wholly to that. As the passing
now
has to be taken; as the fact of the weather in this climate teaches.

It was after a night of peculiarly sensuous abandon. A hot night when they made love with the windows wide open, at about three in the morning, with the lorries just starting up again below them and the milk bottles, always the milk bottles from the depot across the road marking the time. And Ben woke up very early, seized with a sudden intellectual alertness. He began to try and tell her what he had thought, because the habit of talking was at that time still upon them as a matter of necessity. And she sat up sleepily, and tried her best. To follow the lines on the paper as he set it out for her. The unfolding of this and that chain, with their Greek names; and she was not stupid. She could hear his excitement and knew it was founded, that if what could be done were so done it would be; not an achievement, that was not how he presented it; but for him a sort of revelation. An opening of a mystery whose ingenuity she
grasped at and lost, and shared only the sketchiest sense of.

And it took her several days to see what would be the necessary result of that excitement; just how it meant the end of holiday; and might easily begin the end of more. Because now when she phoned him at the lab to tell him what was on, here or there, he was interested; but not vitally; his passion was directed elsewhere again. Had to be, she supposed. And even when they went out together, he always went back to the lab. Until one, two or three in the morning.

At first she went with him. Wasn’t it part of their new relationship that she should? And enjoyed the car ride at any rate, through the warm night air. And they talked as he turned through his tubes, or shook out the freeze-dried sera in their round flasks, or looked together into the orange eyes of the radioactive counter, to see if it was counting as it should.

But it was very tiring. She could do nothing herself the next day. And he who had always known his stamina so much greater than hers was quick to notice her new sleepiness. Soon began to suggest he dropped her off home. And so began again. That getting into bed alone and waiting, that she had thought was gone for ever. True, they sometimes phoned one another at 1 p.m. to see how things were going; and he would say: Half-
an-hour
. Even, sometimes, he was back in that time. Because he understood what was at stake for her. In the bed alone waiting. And once she drove over at about 1.30 to pick him up. (She’d had the car during the day.) He was alone in a completely silent building, in the very hum of the cold room, silently absorbed with his jellies, holding up his plates to the light to see if the lines were developing, cursing some fault in the preparation that was delaying his result. And that night
she was not tired. Yet she knew as she stood in the doorway of his lab, looking: brown, smooth-skinned, and rounded; relaxed, with a sense of a leisurely day, as he muttered: They haven’t come up yet: that he hadn’t even seen her.

On the table at home she had set out the oval table with red table mats in advance.

But he was not. First there was thirty-six small metal circlets to be slid down the open tube of the radioactive counter. He explained it to her, the peculiar elegance of the method; and she tried to understand, indeed he explained it carefully. She could have reported the whole thing in conversation, and no-one would guess how little it had entered her waiting soul.

She was not miserly. She was not in any boring sense
jealous
of those jellies, that ship of a cold room into which his spirit sailed. It was
only
as she watched the eagerness of his face that she realised that this was once again an isolate eagerness. That he could share the
facts
with her and that yet she could not enter them. That for the moment this was the state in which he was most alive, and could not be invaded. There was no question, of sharing; simply by wishing him well, or by standing physically at his side. Because to the whole process she was non-contributing; she was not necessary to it.

They drove back quietly, roof open, stars numerous beyond counting. She thought of nothing at all, and he was humming to himself lightly.

And when they got in he was ravenous; indeed he had eaten nothing all day; and as he noticed an unexpected radish, or a bottle of pickle, he would mumble: Thanks, love. Thank you. And she watched him indeed with
love. With a serious, lonely love, that had nothing to do with her growing fatigue. Because now she could see the pattern shaping again, she could see it must be like this. As it would be with sex. (He fell asleep that night like a man felled by a tree.)

And she knew then, what should have been obvious a long time ago, that she would have to take it up again. Her separate life. Her lonely life, the music of words to be played with, the books; yes, those long enemies of his, the books; they would be her refuge; her private world. As his was this of the laboratory. And she must now move as securely into that as he into his cold room, and find magic. Which every human being must have if his life is not utterly dead with dependence.

It seemed to her, she could see now that all men and women all over the earth at least were as lonely as this; and some much more so; as she had been more in so her most tormented days. And it also seemed to her that in the end for all our bawdy we are thrown: on the lonely resources of the spirit for our sanity. From whatever source we draw those mystical things.

But she knew that now she could turn inward safely; never wholly again into madness, into the alcoholic dreamworld, or the deep and self-indulged isolation of misery. Never again, to the point of madness as she had in the past. It was simply there: that internal world. At need.

And yes, as she watched him sleep like a tired child, she knew that for all men this was always their refuge, and that most women were cruelly denied it.     And she was grateful that at least she was not wholly thrown on him. For all pleasure and certainty. Though she would always be so in part.    She too could turn inward into her own world, and would have to.     Whenever he was at his most creative; for he would draw back from her
then and she would have to expect and allow it.    The loneliness:    that was part of his self-respect.

As it must be part of hers.    Or every living creature, that should when the need comes, be able to turn aside. And find the circles of interest.    That lie there.