The Circle (4 page)

She kissed his chest. It was a warm night. She
wriggled
back the covers from her shoulders, kissed him lower just above his navel, felt for the first time a jerk of interest in his penis. Now she lay her head upon his stomach and her tongue licked where the hairs went down in the groin and felt the hard rising penis at her throat. Her fingers ran at his buttocks, and her own body streamed deliciously. Christ she would come too
soon. She broke away. And then as he pressed into her, her legs tensing, too soon too soon the first wave of orgasm shook her.

And he slipped from her.

She misunderstood.

–Its all right, she encouraged him; meaning the cap was in her. But he only kissed her briefly. Into her dazed head it gradually became plain that the exercise had been for her only, that he had no desire to go on.

–Ssh, go to sleep, he whispered. And was so himself almost immediately. And then she lay in the darkness sadly and realised that it would not be so simple to have things right again. Wondering and wondering back over the long five years of their marriage. As the car lights moved round the room.

The next day he woke up with heavy flu. And simply sat in the chair downstairs unable to move, falling asleep even as she tried to listen to his virus-ridden sentences. There it was, comic and sad, as she tried to rouse him, remembering all those other years of finding him asleep downstairs at night, and rescuing him from the cramped discomfort of his chair.

And the bath, she remembered. One night early in their marriage. Let’s have an early night they’d said and that was somehow a signal for a bath. And she’d sat at his bath side listening while he talked: about sex mainly and the difficulties they had together while she sat holding the big pink towel in her lap waiting for him to get out … And yes it was true they had
difficulties
even then, their conjunctions were distorted by this funny tensing trick she had, he didn’t like it. The woman he’d slept with before didn’t do that. And the thing was she stretched out her legs so hard he couldn’t stay in her he explained, and she sat there agreeing she would bend up as he wanted or would try, the
tautness of her own desire went off as she sat, and he still lay in the bath his eyes shutting. Not that his passivity was the problem; she knew that his penis would rise hard and strong as he needed it.    No.    As he lay there    it was her desire that would die, and she would look at the softness of his body and remember hungrily the ease of adolescent sex, when just to come whether together in/out was no matter.

Yes she remembered how when he woke in his bath and went upstairs with her it was truly a bad time, she was close to tears before they began; and coldly, coldly she made the tickling gestures then and bent up her knees for him though her passages were dry and when he rolled off her at last, resentful, she knew the
conversation
would begin again into the first light, until she pretended sleep. And the shame of it reached into her that she was not woman enough, though she could bear children, and feed them out of her own body, still she was not woman enough where it counted. In the soft wet cunt.

As it turned out, Gertrud did not leave for some time. Absurdly she refused to go, she went on doing the chores, and Lena under pressure of first one thing and then another permitted it, puzzling. They had decided she should go, yet somehow to arrange it was not so easy. And for the first day or two Lena was free of any taint of spite. In a month or so, she suggested to Gertrud. And gradually, with more desperation, she insisted. She must go to anywhere, back to Germany, to her old mother in Wales, anywhere.

But Gertrud stayed. She stayed. She was immobile. She would not look for another job. Politely, Lena bought her a copy of the evening newspaper and showed
her the many jobs she could get. She would not look into it.

–Now look, Lena was at last reduced to saying. You must go somewhere, you must see that surely? And she opened her own fear to the girl, she said: Don’t you see? With you here I no longer feel I have a home.

–That’s silly, said the girl. She was very confident. There’s nothing going on now. I don’t want to go away. You need someone. I need a job. For that moment, Lena believed it might be possible.

But it was not so easy.

The following Sunday Ben and Lena had arranged to go and look for fossils on the downs. It was an overcast, grey day, and both of them were in any event irritable and full of a terrible heavy sloth. Ben sat about all morning in a vest while Lena prepared lunch, and then suddenly becoming aware of some children they were to collect, he began to fly around the house looking for the phone book to explain why they were late.

–The book, where’s the phone book, he called
impatiently
down the stairs. Lena joined the search and couldn’t find it. A moment later, Gertrud found the thing as soon as she was asked.

And at the last moment Ben looked at the children’s shoes and her own and saw they were unsuitable for the trip. They went through the gloomy business of sorting out better ones, and at last dismissed the search. And set out bleakly on what should have been a jaunt. Lena couldn’t help it, her bleakness, her loneliness. Gertrud stayed behind. Ben commented on it, said it was ungenerous.

On the Downs the grass was dry and springy and the
hill leading to the chalk pit rose like a soft breast into the grey sky, the groves of ash on it not yet in bud, and the dull day like a cloud’s shadow in their delicate branches. The children ran on ahead calling happily.

And then Lena and Ben sat on the edge of the white pit while the children hammered at the chalk hopefully. Lena was smoking desperately, sucking at the stupid metholated stick that was her own death, sucking in death, in the midst of fresh rich life, with tears somewhere in her throat. The soft lumps of white chalk fell down the steep slope as the children tried it with their hammers and then suddenly:

–Look, here’s one, Michael cried excitedly. Together they all examined the ambiguously marked white stone.

–It’s like in that book, it is one, its eighty million years old, said Michael.

–Here’s some marquisate, said Alan which Michael opened at once with a hammer blow, and there they all were looking into the centre where the gold threads were.

And they began to walk together up the steep hill, up against the wind which was so directionally south-west that the bent hawthorns were deformed from its
blowing
. On the path they found a dead fox, smelling and maggoty but still amber-furred and pretty-faced like a small dog. Michael pulled at the tail, and it came away. Which frightened him. But they went on climbing, higher, not talking much, but taking a fierce pleasure in the strength it needed to push into the wind, and the clean coldness of it, all the fields stretching deeply under them, and in their pauses, resting, with their backs into the wind, they conjectured ignorantly about the long ridges in the grass, signs of what old stone age activity they wondered, and the question was loaded
with an outward and loving interest. When they reached the hill-top, the children untouched by the cold, or the height, set about climbing the peculiar distorted trees, shrieking with excitement as they balanced on the hard bent branches, and she and Ben looked down a long way off at the remote grey sea, and enjoyed the distance they had come from the village house tops and sloping grey slates of Brighton, and whole township of what she supposed was the real life they must go back into: for which this windy cold offered some respite.

–I want to go down the dangerous way, said Alan.

And so they climbed down steeply over the ridges laughing as the slope forced them to go faster than they intended, looking down at the valley below, and breathing in the cold wind.

–There’s a wild violet.

And in the March cold there was a scatter of blue points in the grass to distract them, tired now, all their limbs aching, they stood to look. At the blue points in the fatigue she stood in, brief moments of outwardness, of which she had need. On the way back in the car, the glow of the physical exertion still in her, Ben began to complain about the meanness they were showing Gertrud.    Who would have enjoyed it all so much.

–Yes, said the children, she would, we should have taken her.

Now it had been her only stipulation in that peculiar interim period; that she should not have to absorb the presences of the girl into their weekend life together. And yet it was true, when they returned and found her sitting disconsolately at the window like a lost
red-haired
dog, it seemed to Lena, irritatedly, she too shared a twinge of guilt.

But she could not forget, how could she, when Ben
seemed so unaware of the difficulty; she could not even kill the ignoblest uncertainty of all, was their affair finished? And certainly she could not control the chemistry of her own blood. She could not. Though she fought against it.

And Gertrud would not go. She would not
look
for another job. She became a red monster in Lena’s life, a white creature, light to her darkness, her flesh bodying all the softness and innocence that was missing in Lena’s own black passion. And Gertrud continued to find things for them, to know where the car keys were, to find the important letters, the cuff-links. (But didn’t she keep them in her room?)

She was indispensable, Ben often said, to the
continuance
of their life together, possibly they were not viable without her. And at the same time there was that lift of her chin, and the open flower smile she gave men only.

Bitterly, bitterly Lena wanted her to go. And yet every morning she let her dress the younger child and gather the pieces of broken toys together and knew her self defeated. And Ben keeping his own way lost in another kind of desperation altogether, the letters he ought to be writing, the choices he ought to be taking. Work. Work. Always the hard centre of his life.

And she told no-one. Her nerves grew tighter. She began to question her own sanity, to despise herself as she listened basely, ignobly, for the footfalls, and hesitations from room to room, wondering, her own heart shaking with self-hatred and suspicion.

While Gertrud worked quietly, her hands gentle    her flesh unshaken her blue eyes open and friendly in seeming. She sat with them again in the evenings. Her legs hung over the chair showing her slip like the teenage girl she still was physically, and mentally always
would be. Asking what the English spelling was for German words.

And Lena drank.    Fast and hard every evening until the pure gin had gone into her blood like a blessing. Still, she felt like a fish on a hook, on a three-angled hook she had made for herself, and the other point was a red and white parody of all she was not. And yet she was ashamed to move around in such a daze of hatred for the gentle white creature in her house who smiled and kissed her children. Lena confided in no-one. Only the poison of her self-contempt filled more and more of her soul with every passing day.

One day Lena and Ben went to the Aquarium
together
, he to find a fish he needed for the lab, she still in a half shameful companionship which was more like the trailing of a wounded creature in its trap. They entered, the blue dinge of a long room evilly lit as an underground passage between railway stations. It was wet underfoot from the people who had come in from the rain to peer into the tanks of fish, and it sounded with the peculiar bark of the sea lion, which was like a grunt just short of vomiting.

She drifted as he left her to look for an attendant, and she too peered. In the largest tank two seals with tender brown eyes swam up to the glass and turned under themselves, their strange feet parting for the action, their neat heads moving over symmetrically. She watched them make exactly the same motion many times: it came to her that it was because their space was too small, that they had no room for manœuvre; but she couldn’t be sure.

In the blue water of the next tank was a single pike, moveless floating. And she let herself be drawn into the
whole float of that underwater suspension; his greater fortune as it seemed to her;    erotic    stunned held like a weightless creature. How was it? In a mildness lovely calm that must have taken every ounce of his flesh to hold. How she preferred that stasis, as she followed the tanks back up to the sea-lions, great wet creatures slithering absurdly up the green slope to be fed and falling back with such a splashing and turmoil; how she preferred the blue lit fish that held themselves still and lovely in their cruelly short piece of sea.

There were tanks she could see now filled with golden light and she followed these now hopefully to marvel at the translucent glass bodies and the strange dartings, the wasted unconscious loveliness of the world they made for one another, and the stupor of their eyes and mouth.

–Do you want to see me catch a dog-fish?

She nodded, but look    he had to show him, and he too looked into the fish world with her    and she took his arm.

The dog-fish was brought out of the tank in a black dustbin for him, into a smelly back room, like a dirty changing room at a swimming bath. The fish was jumping and snapping its great shark jaws out of the water at its invisible aggressor. To take it out of the bin it had to be grasped behind those jaws once, and then held again by the tail. It was not a very large fish. In relation to the opening of the jaws. But even out of the water, held by the hands of the fifteen year old boy who had it purposefully enough, it could twitch with the power of its own murderousness.

Ben took a small syringe and jabbed just under the pectoral fin, and the fish lay still now.

–How long can they live, she asked, out of the tank?

–Good twenty minutes, said the boy.

And Ben was having difficulty making the blood come out of the vein; and she remembered all those nurses prodding and pointing and apologising, oh, it didn’t hurt she knew that    still. She felt suffocated with the fish.