The Circle (7 page)

It was very strange to see him; his cold companions, sour, green-faced, longing for the time to be free. Their pinched faces. And the snow sticking now, as they got back to filling the hole; on their jackets, on their cart, sticking and winning as they wiped their eyes
desperately
, hating their day, their own cold bodies, whatever it was had reduced them to that place. But the Pole was happy. Singing as he pushed into the broken road,
getting down to check what had to be done. Even when the bus came she wondered at him, as she climbed into the front of the bus, tasting the ashy stink with no warmth in it, feeling for the fare; she puzzled at his singing.    And at his stamina.    As a condition of joy. If it could be willed.

So many kinds of infidelity. At the height of Lena’s love for Eli she was bothered by a peculiar dream. There she lay locked in the double bed she and Ben usually shared, with Eli in her arms, and suddenly she
wonddered
where Ben was: just where had he found to sleep? And it bothered her, it entered her dream with such desolation that she couldn’t bear it, she had to get up from whatever congress of legs and arms her mind had thrown up for her delight, and yes, in the dream go looking. All through the house. In every window was the white full moon and the beds were filled with children peacefully sleeping but there was no Ben, no Ben in the chair downstairs, he was nowhere, where, in the garden? The night was always white and cold, and she was frightened. Out of the house and into the moonlight shivering she went to look for him calling Ben, my darling, Ben where are you?
You
’
ll
catch
cold
.

And so woke many times at Ben’s side mumbling, and tried to tell it to him while she still remembered and he held her close saying he supposed yes, that would be the reason for fidelity if there was one. That the other should not be lonely.    As though the act of
lust were the only way.    To leave someone alone.    To leave them lonely.

As though treachery were so simple. When she and Eli walked chastely in the rain past black and shining trees, she supposed the light of every car passing them in the dark showed only a young boy and a middle-aged woman walking side by side untouching. But when she came back from such an evening and Ben looked in her face strangely, she found herself evasive under his questioning. She was ashamed because she did not want to be explicit. And yes, yes, the erotic twinge was there, she would not deny that if Ben pressed. But it made her angry to discuss it, it was so distant from any act or intention. And this was before Gertrud, so she had no pleasure in his curiosity.

In the dark, the cinema dark.    Watching.    Open lips meet on the screen, or.    The acted exchange of sexual desire in a glance. Their hands touched once. Accidentally, for a moment. Hesitated. And held. And the rest of the film was charged for her with that touch, their laughter coloured with it. But no more. They came out of the film, separate and laughing. Falling easily back into the group of the young people they had come with. And soon she was rushing off. To catch a train. Their eyes meeting innocently, as though nothing had happened of any moment. And their friendliness. Still as simple and indeterminate as before. As she wanted it.

How near was she in those days to a total, mad
withdrawal
from the world around her? It was hard to be sure. But certainly knowing Eli made the world more dreamlike. Once she was to meet him at Old Street Station and to get there she had to change that strange deserted way from Bank to Monument; and just that evening, the long escalator was stopped. There was
no-one
in the whole humming underworld to ask, and
was 
it Northern she wanted? She climbed anyway, past the bras, the new spring swim-suits, thinking how it was. All swim-suits looked so sexless. Chastity belts. You couldn’t get a hand in anywhere. And her feet made a mournful clanking noise on the unmoving edges of metal. Half way up she could see two girls walking slowly, and began to run, shouting: Hey, is this the way to Monument?

But the two girls went on walking slow and silent and unresponsive, and her voice fell back at her strangely small in the funnel shaft they were walking up.

Surely that must reach them. For she was up to them now, her heart banging, and still they had not turned either at her voice or the echoing sound of her feet.

As she drew level she put out a hand to them, staring into their round and pleasant faces, shouting the question again. And both girls smiling, with a gesture they must often have made, shook their heads, and covered their ears smiling.    Deaf.    And mute also.

Before she knew Eli at all, she had watched him covertly one early spring afternoon by the lake, with no desire to do more than that; just look. And perhaps place a peculiar and elusive resemblance which she could not at first fathom. It was hot and cloudless and her skin had the sun on it and gradually she could feel the pores in her face close and the muscles at the edge of her mouth soften. As she lay back and puzzled. Listening: the light movement of leaves over her, subtle as water, and the red triangles of the sun’s formation grew and spread on her lids, and the voices of the young people around her mixed and the heat did its work in her so that she fell into a golden doze, puzzling over it: his Renaissance beauty. At last sitting up to stare, with the sun still in her eyes, she recognised something in the
thin lips that was like Michael, and more closely then she saw, behind that resemblance another: the early child picture (pink-tinted and sepia framed) of Ben in his childhood; open-eyed and hopeful. As this young stranger she delighted to watch seemed open; talking to the group about him. Which she had no wish to join.

He was a student. Of Russian poetry. So much she knew. And she would never have made a move to know him further.

The weather behaved oddly that year. After the early false Spring came snow, and then when the snow went the river rose right across the meadow to the edge of their garden, and the river birds took over the land, floating between thin trees without fear. One day she saw a swan, its strong neck visible behind the flimsy weeds at the garden end: yellow beak, black eye
glinting
. And the sun was hot again. Yet the children’s snow boulders had not yet melted.

She and Ben balanced precariously. When he
rummaged
in the bills drawer her mouth would tighten with fear; and he too was afraid. Of what he would find there that would be a mirror image of their condition. Of what they had failed to do and control. The black pieces of their neglect that showed themselves in stacked and unsorted clothes, the stuck lashes of a neglected eye, the sugar gone or the butter; stale bread. The whole
unsalted
food of their lives. On days like those the
brightness
of the day was irrelevant, the birdsong fell on waxed-up ears. And she understood so little. Or had forgotten. That they shared the same need for joy, that he wanted as little as she did the quarrels that silted up the natural flow of their response. They played so closely on one another.

On one such day she had a phone call from Danny
Field. Danny taught Russian at one of the London colleges: How are you? he asked her.

And Ben didn’t want to go. It seemed irrelevant to him. But it seemed to her, desperately, that she
needed
a bit of irrelevance. She needed to get drunk, to talk pointlessly, to be cheerfully out of the reality that pressed on them. Not to be always walking at the edge of boring disasters, that were there always because neither of them were interested in putting in the slightest preventive effort. And in her case it was worse, and sicker: she grudged even the pain of knowing. Which he insisted on. To keep himself sane.

She had not seen Danny since his marriage; she had not met his wife; she had not seen his new house. It was set up on the hill near the heath, larger than she could quite understand; and out of all proportion to all the places she had met him in before: beautiful. Georgian. Door set in the middle of white painted windows. And the foliage that grew up the walls, just beginning to flower, was winter jasmine; trained and carefully trimmed.    The hot heavy scent filled the air as she stood at the door, marvelling. And through the curtains, which were open, she could see a bright pink and white room, in which two people were dancing. From somewhere behind the door she could hear a child crying.

A woman of about thirty-five, broad boned but rounded, answered the door.

And now the bell going again announced the first party guests; Lena was aware of a generalised, profane, excitement. Which she welcomed: why not? All these months she had watched the moons change; it seemed so pointless, the flow of blood; wondering at the indifference of her body. At her dutiful body. What were her joys? Poofing hot air up her arse over open books or sitting outside in the grass with the sun on it. Worrying. In her yellow wrinkled soul.

She went upstairs to make up her face. And the blood swelled in her veins and she thought: how meaningless was the euphoria that was spreading through her. As she stood for a while looking down at the strangely painted lavatory, the black lines of a woman’s body painted down the wall and on to the seat.

Coming down the hall she saw there were at least five bedrooms. And through the open door of one she
saw a woman of astonishing beauty; one leg up in a slip in front of a wall mirror. She had her leg on a chair and she was bent over it examining her stocking. In the mirror her eyes met Lena’s without
embarassment
. And Lena smiled. This was Lisa. As Danny had described her. Her lips narrow, but tenderly fleshed; her teeth small; her face as delicate as a Garbo; and yet there was something strange too in the face that for a second ran miserably across the rising current of Lena’s sexuality; a white sadness that reminded her of the young child in the high chair. That prevented Lena pausing to talk, to introduce herself. And she passed on down the stairs. Into a room now crowded with bright and shining people, the noise rising, her feelings merging into that noise. As she looked for another drink. And recognised across the room; with a little shock, not quite of surprise; the young boy from the
lakeside
. Eli. Dressed casually in some muted brown and green, between two young girls. She turned away quickly.

There it was now: localised. The sexual
excitement
. But she refused it.    She refused it completely. Because he was too young and beautiful, and she was afraid. Of making her feelings known by some drunken accident … That would betray her.   
Middle-aged
lechery.    That might expose her.   To some kind of snub. So she kept away, she kept entirely away; she even denied herself the pleasure of watching him, in case some facial sign gave away that she found him beautiful to look at.

And she was interested too; in something else that was going on; that she did not understand, and caught another kind of attention. As Lisa appeared fleetingly and white-faced at a door at her side, unconscious of Lena, signalling to Danny. Who crossed the room
towards her angrily: What have I told you Lisa? And the young girl’s lovely mouth twitched, and she drew a coat over her shoulders.    Danny’s eyes followed the movement excitedly.

Lena moved through the groups of people, ghostlike, catching; pieces of the conversation of people she barely knew;

And she drank and moved among them happily; talking occasionally to a remembered face, but always in a kind of dream conscious of that figure at the other side of the room: the golden unaggressive quiet of his seated figure; the silence of his unassertive presence.