The Tiger in the Tiger Pit (7 page)

“Sir?”

“I mean, you know … the bit about Canada?”

Adam was surprised. “But my mother told me that, sir.”

“I see. Your mother is … ah, quite a remarkable woman. I have been to some of her concerts, you know. Quite extraordinary.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I play clarinet myself. Passably, I think. I do hope you're going to introduce me to your mother, Carpenter.”

“Oh yes, sir. I will.”

“Quite pre-Raphaelite, isn't she?”

“Pardon, sir?”

“Sorry, Carpenter. Just rambling. Here comes your mother now.”

Emily was walking in her light unhurried way, her soft skirt lifting and floating gently around her. Her fair hair was shoulder length, a mane of soft and wayward curls that wisped about her forehead and cheeks, always looking just slightly and charmingly in disarray Her blue eyes, as always, were distant and abstracted, as though — like the sundial — she existed outside of the hurly-burly of time.

She reached them and touched Adam lightly on the shoulder and then moved her hand quickly away, remembering that he had asked her not to do that in public. Snelby would be merciless if he saw it. Her hand fluttered a little like a dove that wants desperately to perch on a forbidden tree.

“Mummy,” Adam said. “This is Mr Price.”

She gave him her hand and smiled.

“Adam thinks very highly of you, Mr Price. I've been looking forward to meeting you.”

Mr Price seemed to have some difficulty catching his breath.

“I've been to your concerts, Mrs Carpenter,” he said, stammering a little. “I'm an ardent admirer.”

“How kind of you. It's not
Mrs
, actually. Just Emily Carpenter.”

“Oh, pardon me, Mrs … ah … I wonder if we might talk a little, while Adam is in the museum. Could we walk through the forum perhaps?”

“Of course.”

Adam watched them go. He found that he did not want to move away from the sundial, did not want to disconnect himself from its bluff strength. He traced the engraved furrows of
Tempus fugit
with his index finger. Who had carved it? Who had stood here fifteen centuries ago? Who had stood here since?

There was just enough sunlight for him to see that the shadow of the marker had moved a little around the circular dial. Day after day, year after year, century after century, it had moved around the same circle and come back to where it had started from.

Time itself moves on, his mother had said, meaning he could never go back to Australia, never see Dave again. Time itself moves on, moves on, moves on.

Not
on
, he thought with sudden excitement. But
around and back!

The realisation came to him like an epiphany The past was not gone, not lost. The Roman roads, the Aboriginal cave paintings, they were all still with him.

And Dave.

Dave who phoned him on his birthdays and at Christmas, and from across time and space whispered into his ear: “Whatever happens, mate, we'll always have each other. Don't forget that. Always”

Tomorrow he would fly to New York. He could hardly wait. He had been so careful not to let Uncle Jason and his grandmother matter, not to let himself miss them. Now he would meet his Aunt Tory and his grandfather too. There was more past in his future, time and history rolling over and over on themselves, an acrobatic display for his special private pleasure.

He felt certain now that Dave would somersault into a London or a New York morning. It could happen any old time. They would slither through present and past and future like guppies through the creeks of New South Wales. And together they would weave a magic net for the Blue Wanderer — not to kidnap her; just to keep her still for a little while.

He hugged the sundial to himself and touched his lips against its cool bronze face in an ecstatic kiss.

Then he looked quickly back over his shoulder in case Snelby was anywhere about.

VI Elizabeth

Dear Dave,
she writes,
The problem is,
and then looks out across the lawn, forgetting what she was going to say, wondering: what does he see from his window in Sydney?

Coevality. The notion absorbs her. What is Emily doing at this instant, as my pen is poised above paper? From the moon, say, could one tell London from Ashville from Sydney? When I think of Emily and Dave in conjunction, does something happen in the ether where thought waves bounce around like ping-pong balls?

Napoleon materialises from the grab-bag of her mind. He wears a cocked hat and tight tights and a hand on his breast. He bows and pontificates: Allow me a suggestion. I understand this obsession with time and space and simultaneity I imposed my own grammar texts on an entire nation so that I could pull out my timepiece and say: Every twelve-year-old in France is doing exercise III on page forty.

Insane, Elizabeth tells him, but magnificent in its own way Not incomprehensible.

Thank you, he says. The passion for order.

For harmony, Elizabeth corrects, for wholeness.

She puts down her pen and crosses to the piano. She begins to play Handel's
Water Music.
She sees the River Thames and the Greenwich boat rocking gently at the Westminster pier. She and Adam find seats by the rail on the front deck. It matters to neither of them that everyone else is huddled inside against the rain and the bleakness.

Yesterday he was seven. She looks at him and holds his hand and knows that all things are possible. The way spring makes churlish old misanthropes smile at their neighbours in spite of themselves: that was how it was with a grandchild. She knows if she can just get Edward and Adam into the same room together …

She stops playing and leans on the keyboard. Frowns. What is the word she's trying to think of?
Catalysis
? She goes to the bookshelf and takes down a volume of the encyclopedia. But the Cs waylay her utterly.

Carthage.
A city founded in the ninth century BC by Dido of passionate memory. And what has Elizabeth ever suspected of the glories, the rises and falls of that fabled place? Defeat at the hands of Gelon of Syracuse in 480 BC. But then Hannibal, great general, with his convoys of elephants and troops, soars with victory in his wings. Elizabeth closes her eyes and sees the elephants humping over the Alps, their bewildered trunks groping delicately, inquiringly, sensuously in the snow, causing astonished Swiss dairy maids to have lascivious thoughts.

She reads of
Casimir
, duke of Cracow, 1177—1194, and of
Castor and Pollux
and of
Castruccio Castracani
, leader of the Ghibellines in thirteenth-century Italy. Dante gave him a spot in the
Inferno
, she has not read Dante for years, she makes a mental note to do so again. There are glowing pages of
Catalan
art (fifteenth century) and the history of
catalepsy
to be absorbed before she reaches
catalysis,
remembering.

Yes. She was right. It was the word. If she brings them together, Adam and Edward, the chemical reaction will take care of itself She won't need to do anything else.

She goes back to Handel's
Water Music.
She is on the Thames again. Adam has made this trip before, with his school. See, he points out for her, as they glide past the graceful Norman towers. That's the Traitor's Gate. And Sir Walter Raleigh was in that tower there.

But it was in Greenwich, in the old Royal Observatory, as they dallied among astrolabes, that he said: “Dave would love this. I wish Dave could be here.”

“Who is Dave?” she asked him.

“Daves my father. Sort of. He's not really my father, but he's my real father.”

Elizabeth loves the illicit and the passionate as much as Adam does. She seduces him. He tells her everything. About the shearing and the wool sales and the law office and the Blue Wanderer and the time Dave didn't come to the airport to say goodbye. But Dave calls on his birthdays and at Christmas, and yes he does have Dave's address.

She wrote her first letter as soon as she got back to Ashville, He replied, she wrote again. She kept all his letters in a drawer in Emily's old room. About some things, she felt superstition couldn't hurt.

She was still playing the
Water Music
. If she were a better planner, she might have been able to orchestrate Dave's presence at the reunion. Yet what could she have done when she still didn't know for certain if Emily would come? Nevertheless, there would probably have been a way. And then: catalysis again. Simply bring them together, she is certain, and these senseless barriers Emily has erected against her own happiness will crumble.

Is Elizabeth a meddler? Does she have the right? She considers the question seriously.

She is in Emily's minuscule kitchen again, saying with careful lightness: “Adam seems to miss Dave a lot.”

It was as though she had injected agitation. She sees want in the tremor of Emily's hand and the quaver of a facial muscle. Elizabeth thinks of childhood anxieties and school heartaches. Of one of the earliest music competitions, when Emily, still just a child, faltered in the difficult second movement of a sonata, missed a phrase, came to a dead stop. Elizabeth, accompanying, marked time, sidling around the problem passage, giving Emily cues, waiting for her to pick up and go on. But Emily was rigid with stage fright. There were little stirrings and rustlings of sympathy from audience and judges.

“Emily,” Elizabeth called softly. And woodenly the child turned, her white face streaked with tears. “We'll start the movement again,” Elizabeth whispered. “Face me as you play.”

Profile to the judges, Emily began again, a perfect performance.

The trouble one has with one's youngest, Elizabeth thinks, is the difficulty of accepting she has outgrown one's power to protect. She wanted to take her daughter in her arms, to say: “There, there, let me fix it.”

“Why,” she began to ask, “when Dave seems to both you and Adam …”

But Emily cut her off. “One wasted musician in the family is enough. I don't want nooses around my neck.”

Elizabeth does not consider her life a wasted one. She tries to absorb the idea that she has somehow imposed solitude on Emily, and wilful unhappiness. She is unable to say anything. She goes home and writes to Australia.

Dear Dave:

It is possibly quite improper of me to send this letter; I am, however; moved to do so by the enthusiasm of my grandson, Adam.

I wish simply to thank you for the way in which you were and are, his father. He thinks of you constantly. It is clear that you have given him a rich store of love on which to draw. I cannot thank you sufficiently.

I have reason to believe that Emily misses you as much as Adam does. I cannot know, of course, how events have affected you. But if, as I suspect from your phone calls to Adam, these connections still matter; I wish you would consider visiting them in England.

Dave answered promptly. He was ovetjoyed to receive her letter, to meet her as it were. He had, in fact, felt connected to the family for years. He was especially grateful for news of Adam whom he missed more than he could say. As for Emily, he would never get over her. And yet he had feared from the start that she would never stay anywhere long. Besides, she had told him that she was involved with someone else. There was nothing he could do. Certainly he could not go to England, he would never impose.

There is no one else
, Elizabeth wrote.
Emily must have lied in self-defence. Please go to England.

One cannot coerce
, he replied.

It was mad the way people baulked at their own happiness. She should have planned better, should have arranged for Dave to be at this reunion, for Emily to be caught off guard. The problem was her precarious grip on time. It was too late now to do anything.

She went back to her letter.
Dear Dave
, it said.
The problem is …
She wrote:

The problem is my precarious grip on time. I should have brought you together, should have thought this all out earlier. In any case, I want you to know that I am hoping to have Emily and Adam here at the weekend for a family reunion. If it happens, it will be significant, considering all the vowing never to set eyes on, et cetera, that has gone on. (I told you what happened in New York.) I rather expect something (I don't quite know what) to happen. (If this letter strikes you as a little ludicrous, put it down to an old woman's wishful belief in hocus-pocus and magic.) Anyway, I thought you should know.

A rare practicality inspired her. The problem of time: Emily would (if all went well) be here in a few days; letters took over a week to reach Australia.

She called Western Union and dictated it as a telegram.

The clerk giggled nervously. “I think that's the longest cable I've ever taken. Are you sure you want to send the whole thing? You could cut it a bit.”

“You're right,” Elizabeth said. “Omit the
Dear Dave.
It's unnecessary, isn't it?”

VII Edward

Sometimes they still eddy through cracks of memory. They are lingering smells: the machine-oil slick of a mill town; the sodden whiskey stink of defeat; mother's perfume of soap suds and fear. But I washed my hands of them. I shook the dust of childhood from my shoes. I left. And it was as though that time had never been. It was prehistory, the incunabula of my life.

Then came the events of college and marriage and the birth of my first child.

This was all Advent: life before Marta.

I remember waiting for the doorbell to ring …

Let me illustrate. At an airport, say, a man waits for a flight that is bringing his wife and children home. There is a sombre announcement: disaster; an air collision; no survivors.

At the takeoff point another man in another transit lounge, having missed that very flight, has been fuming over his beer, cursing a slow taxi driver, rehearsing apologies to his corporate overlords. There is an announcement … His hand trembles. He orders another beer.

Afterwards it seems to both men that they already knew, that the waiting was febrile with extraordinary premonitions.

Even so I remember waiting for the doorbell to ring. Knowing nothing, blandly expectant, and yet in retrospect surely conscious that the quality of life was about to change for ever.

It is important to reconstruct objectively, it is important to conduct research from different perspectives, looking for clues. Experiment number one, then.

He was waiting for the doorbell to ring.

Mrs Weatherby, had she been able to speak freely from the depths of the sofa, might have remarked to her sister, Miss Constance Simcoe, that Edward Carpenter was such a
competent
young man.

“And so handsome,” Miss Constance might well have murmured in response, watching the light burnish his fair hair with reddish gold.

“Really, Constance, I don't think that is a fitting remark when we are both on the school board. Pedagogical excellence, that is our concern.”

Edward Carpenter, however, was unaware of their admiration; and he was, as he clenched his hands and waited for the doorbell, as extremely nervous as he was tentatively proud of himself. He moved the heavy drapes a little, partly in order to observe whether his hand was visibly trembling, partly to ensure that one edge of the drapes made a pleasing off-centre perpendicular to the sofa. He grimaced at the clutter of music on the piano and when Mrs Weatherby and Miss Simcoe moved out on to the terrace with his wife, scooped everything up and jammed it below the hinged lid of the piano stool, paused, riffled through the books and selected one. Schubert. He flipped through it until he found a page suitably dense with demi-semi-quavers and then propped it open above the keyboard.

It was as though he had awakened one morning to find himself miraculously poised in the middle of a swaying tightrope, no safety net beneath, so many faces watching. Such hierarchies in a small New England town! A wrong step would be disastrous. He was obsessed with correctness and suffered the perpetual anxiety of a soldier crossing a mined field under enemy fire.

In the mornings, as he held his cheeks taut for shaving, he would ask his image: Am I doing it correctly? Should the sideburns be perhaps a quarter of an inch shorter?

And the eyes in the mirror would flash back unease.
We are not certain, we are never certain. You must be more observant.

His wife was indifferent to correctness, knowing all the rules by heart. This was allowable, a natural law. Only to those who are not sure of the rules is it forbidden to break them. He was therefore afraid of this dinner party, although it had been his suggestion. He had to suggest it. It was the correct thing to do. He was even more afraid when he saw, through the window, two couples arriving simultaneously.

The doorbell rang.

(Who should greet? Should the host? The hostess?)

“Ah,” he said, in a scramble with screen door and guests and hands to be shaken. “Allow me to present my wife, Elizabeth. Bessie, my dear, this is Mr Dalton, chairman of the board of trustees, and Joseph Wilson, my deputy principal. And their wives.”

(Oh,
gauche!
Should he not have mentioned the wives first? And by name? Should the entire thing have been the other way around? Should he have introduced
them
to Bessie first?)

Mrs Wilson — Marta, he had been informed, but he could not possibly say such an extravagant name out loud — was alarmingly incorrect. She was absolutely not what he had been expecting in the spouse of a staff member under his jurisdiction. She wore gold hoop earrings that swung when she turned her head and a dress of unnecessarily bright colours in some flimsy fabric. Edward foresaw disturbances on the respectable and tranquil horizon of secondary education. He glanced warily at Mrs Dalton and Mrs Weatherby who seemed to intimate: We regard Mrs Wilson as an exercise in enlightened though painful toleration. Bessie, on the other hand, they had taken straight to their proper hearts. He was humbly grateful.

As he carved the roast, he surreptitiously observed his deputy principal — an intense-looking man with an air of absent-mindedness — who perhaps had been pondering philosophical questions while dressing for dinner; hence the slightly crumpled jacket that should have been at the cleaners. This was acceptable, even desirably academic. Edward could see that Mrs Weatherby deferred to Joseph Wilson's opinion. But what could the man have been thinking of, to take such a wife?

It transpired, it drifted to Edward between carving the roast and pouring the wine, that his own wife and Joseph Wilson knew each other distantly, had dim shared childhood and college memories, and mutual acquaintances several times removed. It did not altogether surprise him. Abstractedness. Intensity. It seemed to be as much a part of their kind as the family albums and afternoon teas. What, then, could possibly explain Joseph Wilson's marriage? The only faint hint of rakish propensity that Edward was able to detect was a lock of dark hair falling across his forehead as he leaned toward Bessie to stress a point.

The two were earnestly engaged in a discussion of European affairs as though the outcome of events depended entirely on their deliberations. Was congressional approval of lend-lease aid to Britain sufficient? Would they move to active involvement now that Germany had invaded Russia?

Bessie's face was vibrant with disputation. She still had those pretensions of course — politics and culture. The slow slide into her domestic and interior coma had barely begun. Nevertheless Edward was grateful. Mr Dalton and Mrs Weatherby were listening as to oracles. He could not imagine that they would listen to Mrs Wilson. He could not begin to imagine the effect she must have on some of the older members of the board of trustees — Dr Richardson, for instance.

“Don't you think so, Mr Carpenter?” Mrs Wilson asked him now, catching him unawares, her huge eyes, murky as midnight and witchery, resting earnestly on his face. Her gaze, wholly and undividedly his, implied that no decision on the topic under discussion could possibly be reached until his considered judgment had been given.

He was not used to that sort of attention. He did not go in for that sort of thing.

“I'm afraid I wasn't following the conversation.” Self-consciously hinting at reproach, his vocal cords jamming.

He had to clear his throat. It suddenly occurred to him that Mrs Wilson could have a whole boardroom full of school trustees grovelling at her feet. Not Mrs Weatherby perhaps, but what resistance could Dr Richardson offer to those eyes?

Mrs Wilson raised one eyebrow slightly in lieu of reiterating her question and Mr Dalton came stumbling in over his own words to rush her with a gallantry of answers. Edward noticed that his own hand was trembling slightly on the tablecloth and he closed it gratefully around the wine bottle beside his plate.

“More wine?” he asked, drawing the mantle of host about himself.

“Thank you, Edward.”

He was taken aback. How had they reached first names so abruptly? He did not approve of spurious sociability. He knew it was considered incorrect.

“My pleasure, Mrs Wilson.” He spoke primly as to an erring child.

“Marta.” Looking up at him, smiling lambently. “My name is Marta. That's enough wine, Edward. Thank you so much.”

To his embarrassment, he saw that he had filled her glass to an inelegant quarter-inch of the top. He saw Mrs Weatherby's assessing eye on the glass. His hand accidentally brushed Mrs Wilson's arm and the wine bottle bridled nervously as he set it down. A dark splash ran on to the lace tablecloth and spread like a burgundy lily opening its petals. Marta traced its outline languidly with an index finger and Edward felt helplessly that a die had been cast.

“We were discussing,” she said, “whether Chamberlain could reasonably have been expected to foresee what advantage Hitler would take of the Munich Pact.”

Edward had removed his hands, which were refusing to behave calmly, from public view. He clasped them rigidly below the table.

“I mean,” Marta went on, her eyes beneath fluttering lashes never wavering in their trustful intensity, “it's so easy for everyone to call him a betrayer of Czechoslovakia
now
. It's as though the international press had perversely decided to ignore the difference between its own foresight and hindsight.”

Edward had a sudden glimpse into chaos, a queasy earthquake-like awareness of a great chasm fixed between a peaceful, socially advantageous marriage and a disastrous passion.

“What do you think, Edward?” she persisted gently.

“It is not a distinction,” he mumbled, dazed, “in which I have ever previously believed.”

“Pardon?”

He felt faint and dizzy, singled out for extraordinary sensations. He felt that perhaps he was capable of great thoughts and daring actions. He felt foolish.

“Forgive me … I'm not following … Where were we?”

“Foresight and hindsight.”

“Oh yes. Quite right. An enormous difference,” he assented vehemently, foreseeing tumults and betrayals and surrenders.

“Will we declare war, do you think?”

“Yes. Oh yes. I would say that's inevitable.”

And he fancied that Mrs Weatherby's eye and ear had taken in the truth whole.

But what of Bessie? What of Joseph Wilson?

Sparring with ideas, engrossed in other wars and treaties and deployments, they saw nothing. Throughout that rollercoaster year, and throughout the next summer and fall, as they all careened toward Pearl Harbor, it was the same: his wife and colleague, absorbed, blind, safe in the armchairs of talk, noticed nothing; while he, once so rationally inclined, teetered on the high wire of obsession.

Even on that last chaotic night in the gazebo when pandemonium had stalked their lives, what was Bessie doing? She was discussing with party guests the theatres of war — Europe, Africa, the Pacific — as though assigning grades.

On that night, as he had stumbled from the gazebo in the darkness, heading blindly for the house, he had collided with his wife. Was she not as frantic and distracted as he was? Had she at last realised? How much did she know? he had wondered with terror, fearing a new element in the cataclysmic decisions to be made.

“Edward, have you seen Victoria? She's not in her bed. She's outside somewhere, I saw her run out.”

He felt weak with relief. Such a simple and surmountable anxiety. Such a clearly defined task: calling her name into the night,
Tory, Tory;
checking her favourite play places. When they found her, huddled and shivering under the honeysuckle, she seemed dazed, she did not remember anything.

Sleepwalking, presumably.

It was the first inkling that there was something not quite right about Victoria.

And after she was safely asleep again, Bessie had said: “Edward, there's something I have to say.”

She knows after all, he had thought with a clutch of panic.

“I'm going to have another baby.”

And so of course the decision had been made for him. There had never been any real choice or real chance.

He had always associated Jason with the loss of Marta. Within a few weeks the war had lifted him up like so much effluvia and dropped him in the Pacific. Death everywhere. Disintegration. When his son was born he was in a bloodied bunker and it was weeks before the news reached him.

Yes, a fair account, I think. A fair account, and an honest one, though other versions are no doubt possible. Perhaps I flatter myself, perhaps I overdo the insecurity and innocence. Nothing to be gained at this age, I suppose, by not being ruthless, by trying to keep the past in candlelight. Shall I drag it into the full glare of regret?

Why did I so easily make the wrong choice? That is the question.

Revised editions possible, no doubt, and maybe even beneficial. Try again, begin again. Fast forward in time. Experiment number two: things as they
might
have happened. Should have happened.

“Here he is!” Mrs Weatherby said as though serving up dessert, the
pièce de résistance
, to the select Sunday afternoon company. “Here he is, our Jason, and just in time for tea.”

“And what are they doing in Boston these days?” Dr Richardson asked, forgetting his question before it was answered and relighting the pipe he constantly forgot he was smoking.

“Dear boy, dear boy, how lovely to see you again. You've been up at the schoolhouse visiting your father and mother? And poor Victoria, of course?”

“Well naturally he has, Constance, what a foolish question.”

And Jason, dryly: “Oh yes. Father and I have had our obligatory battle.”

“You are too hard on him, Jason ” Mrs Weatherby observed him thoughtfully as the small talk ricocheted inanely back and forth. With casual brightness she invited him to inspect her oriental poppies in full raucous bloom beyond the terrace.

And then she would tell him, feeling it was time.