The Circle (3 page)

Fragments. Like shrapnel in the brain. One morning. A light blue day. Up the curving wood stair with the letters in her hand. Up the uncarpeted stair on a
Saturday
morning, to the attic floor, that lovely structure of low roof and light through curved windows. Listening for the friendly noise of the children playing below. And Lena feeling friendly and free, bearing some minor good news to Ben, walking lightly up the stairs: casual, bare-footed.

She opened the door of their bedroom. There red-lit through curtains on a sprawl of sheets and clothes.
Unexpectedly
. Two bodies. A girl, white-shouldered white breasts naked. Ben in his vest. And as Lena stared the girl rose white and solid before her; it was Gertrud. And Ben. Lay there his arm behind the back of his neck expressionless. Lena cold with shock, her heart banging and what to say what? still incredulous, almost
uncertain
what she had discovered.

So that when the girl was gone Lena sat carefully on his bed and her voice was puzzled and polite even through its shaking.

–Do you want me to go?

–Don’t be silly, he said. And:    I wanted you to find out. And:    I never pretended to like her.

Young white girl, she thought. No whore/ she brought you sex with custard and rhubarb pie and she washed your socks and underpants like she did the children’s. She was the mother you needed. Now I understand when she washed her hair, and put that record on to wait at the window while you took me to the station. Poor girl. Yet:    Lena thought, she would have
delighted
in my death.

–Well. She must go, she said.

–But not at once, he agreed. That would be cruel.

And those last words reached down into some deep confusion which made her silent. Under the blank surface of her thought there was suddenly something else working. And it was eleven thirty. Time to go out with the children. Lena looked for their coats and gloves numbly. Then they drove off, just she and Ben and the children, along the sea-front silent in the silver March sun, and she barely moved in her seat and could have given no account of what she thought. When Ben found a quiet stretch of sand, they pulled up and at once the children raced off looking for shells. Lena and Ben walked, she could taste the sea on her lips, she was watching the children running, her mind dazed in the sea light. As she watched Ben. And the buried part of her mind was turning about out of her reach, and she could see that the discovery had already receded for him. It was nothing, he insisted again. As they sat on the wooden posts that led down into the sea. And she listened to the cries of the children, the birds there, white birds everywhere and smelt the weed smells and shivered. While the year, the fragments of that savage year turned in her.

They were being murdered by debts. And Lena had fallen utterly into deceit and fear, getting up early in
the morning to intercept the post, to hide the
threatening
letters; to protect herself from Ben’s knowledge. Always in all their conversations she offered the same mistaken optimism. Like a defence. Which he had to tear down.

–I won’t listen, he would say. Because that’s what got us into this mess.

–But it’s not so bad this month, she would persist, stupidly.

–Ha. I can’t even afford a pair of trousers.

–But you can, she would say eagerly.

–With that overdraft? You and your fiddling ways with money. Where’s it all gone? Anyway I never even liked this bloody house.

–No, she would say. That isn’t fair and would be already crying so that he looked at her with real hatred.

–God, what a life I have. Must you do that?

And upstairs Gertrud, moving about, humming to her transistor. One tune, always one tune. Gertrud, not quite au pair. So long with them now. Sometimes she told them stories of her home in East Germany, some isolated village in deep countryside where her father had his farm labourer’s job, and there were fruit trees and nuts to be taken from common land; of how she and her brother had to climb to the top of a hill to get the deliveries of rich local bread and how there were soft brown cows, that put warm faces through her window in the mornings. Long ago all that, she’d had her schooling in England, her voice and vowels were wholly those of East Anglia, only in the width of her arse and the flatness of her face was there any touch of the foreign. And really she was a plain girl, except for her skin, and her hair, which she wore long and was red like a copper beech. She was like some great mother animal, humming pop song about the house, taking her
weekly pay, ignorant of their disasters. Her job: children and clothes, no more; no housework ever.

–Look at these. It was Michael. Lena took them, the pearled stones, the strands of green rubbery stuff, fronded, tentacular, mysterious, took them into her hand and said: Look, Ben. Aren’t they lovely?

And she could feel the pain starting like a slow acting poison somewhere in the blood.

–This place is a mess, Ben said, looking round the kitchen.

–It’s the weekends are always the worst, Lena said. But I’ll get it straight. She began to push things about.

–Do what you like, I’m going out, he said.

–Out?

–Yes. I can’t stand it here. But I’ll take the kids, he offered.

And Gertrud came down the stairs in a new frock, untouched laughing.

–Do you want to come to town? he asked her. Why not? And yet it was a strange set-up.

When they were gone Lena worked. As she could work when she wanted to. She cleaned the house,
tight-lipped
and like her mother would, fast and angry and fit. And when they all came back there were flowers in the vases and the floors all shone.

–What do you think, she said incautiously as Ben entered the room, and looked: at where she stood, hair wild as a witch, shining with effort, her feet stuck in old shoes. His nose wrinkled.

–The room, she cried out stricken by that look. Can’t you see? while you’ve been out. What’s happened?

But he’d walked off into the hall again to find post in the mat. She could hear him opening the envelopes.
Sat in the chair, lit a cigarette. Listened to his feet returning.

–Look at this, he said.

And she looked familiarly. The bill was not one she’d concealed, as it happened, but he said he couldn’t remember seeing it before.

–They’ll wait, she said sullenly.

–How many more? How many more?

–It was like a cry for help. You went away. He said it, staring over the sands.

And it was true she had gone away. Not often and not for long, but not for money either or not only. She had her own desperation; for something that could be her own, that she could hold to under the savagery of his definitions. And sometimes she had even been grateful. That he had forced her to exist as a separate creature. But now she sat on a spar in the width of a grey March beach in a rising wind and wanted to deny it.

Yes, she had travelled away to give lectures, she worked very hard at that, at every chance to do that she could take and it was money for them; Gertrud looked after the children when she was away. She did that well. Nevertheless, Lena hated her for it. It was partly because she was the inarticulate witness to those arguments between herself and Ben, as she sat at the window, her long red hair just washed down over her eyes; and partly it was her very placidity, the very quality that made her essential. The small, fat face, which offended her; she never went out, had no
boy-friends
. And knew she was needed, loved. The children loved her. And this in itself was confusing, it left Lena feeling safe away from home, and yet in some deep and damaging way it made her feel: replaceable.

One night Lena prepared to go off into the cold
winter rain, into the strange black schizophrenic world of away from home. Hurrying to put the children to bed, to catch the train, sloppily herding them about a bit brutally, because of the pressure of time, worrying them out of the bath, Michael said, thoughtfully. You know, in a way things are. Somehow calmer when you’re away.

And she’d slapped at him furiously: Think that, little bugger, do you.

He’d tried, without crying, and alarmed at her misery to explain: how nice it was to find breakfast ready laid on the table, but crossly she’d involved herself in a piece of nastiness.

–You little fool, she said. Gertrud does what I ask her for money. She’s paid to put your breakfast on the table.

–No, Michael shook his head. Rubbing his arm and preoccupied as he thought it through. And suddenly even then, back then, Lena thought, he’s right. And when the girl came down to eat with them, she watched her a bit guiltily. Waiting to have Michael repeat the question.

–It’s not true is it? You wouldn’t go if Mummy didn’t pay you.

–Of course not, the girl said softly. And she seemed pleased.

And Lena had thought, now what is this alarm. It’s true, she wouldn’t. Is she. Waiting? To take over from me? Is that what she wants? And behaved badly. Weeping on Michael’s bed, so that he had to comfort her, a serious puzzled child, comforting his mother, and when Ben came back at the last moment to take her to the station, she’d said: in that funny bodiless state which always came over her in the stink of the station, the clang and the wheel rollings in her ears saying goodbye.

–If I die. Don’t marry Gertrud will you?

–Gertrud. He didn’t say anything for a moment. Then: No. Except. Supposing she wouldn’t look after us otherwise? The words were said lightly, as if to tease her.

–Marry. Marry. Anyone else. She said hysterically. And he kissed her, the calm soft kiss of those days
without
passion.

–Don’t worry, you aren’t going to die.

And the next day it was all forgotten. Away from Ben changes of weather were an exhilaration, the next day she remembered the cold sunlight entering her like alcohol. Yes, she walked about the town she taught in, alone taking the signs of morning cold still there with joy, the rucks in the grass hard, ice on the smaller puddles brittle and cracking. Alive in her own head.

–Nun, she remembered Ben accusing her. You should never have married.

And driving home in the car, she thought: perhaps she would sleep with someone else. Just that, just the fact of sex she thought, no connections, nothing to touch her affections and needs. Yes, to sail out like the prostitute Ben had once called her, blatantly
unknowing
whoever came, because what she needed was some lust that could be honestly that and untainted. With the terrible continuous burden of relationship.
Remembering
. The lithe Moroccan on the boat out from Marseilles, thin-hipped and beautiful in the steaming wash house, his penis between her open legs as they pressed back on a table, and so easily they came together.

–Ça y est, he’d sighed, as they stood still holding one another, the wetness of her thighs, and the absurdity of the risk she’d just taken coming to mind faintly, and she hardly knew his name, he’d followed her out of a hot dance into the darkness. All before she knew Ben.

–Weren’t you afraid you’d get V.D., Ben had asked her, when she described it to him once.

And now at the edge of the sea as she held his soft hand and followed the black line of children running against the radiance of an uncoloured sky and
considered
that. While the pain changed. As the sexual fact came through to her. As she thought of the two of them giggling together lasciviously in the kitchen while she was upstairs reading or writing; or in bed in the mornings together when it was her day for seeing to the children, or away. And the images came, the white body lying back delighted, and the big blunt penis in it, the big white breasts so different from her own. It was not after all to be so easy a matter she discovered to put at one side.

She took a long bath after supper. All cheated wives feel old bags, grandma, she thought of herself coldly in the long mirror, her lean body, too thin she thought, yet the line to her little round buttocks sweet as a young girl. And in the hot bath she lay there in the scent of soap and hot water drowsing and thinking: how to? Boldly start again. Because now she felt shy of Ben.

It seemed somewhere between bold and comic even to wash her hair, put on an old bottle of perfume, raise long legs up against his chair waiting. For him, as he sat friendly but did not touch her. Though strangely, his refusal excited her more. And she had lewd thoughts of how it would be, what. Pieces of his body she would mouth and handle. But she would do nothing more. Not that, or any night. Without invitation. Or so she told herself until one night, passing the bathroom, she had a flick of wondering: shall I put that thing in or not? And gingerly, why not, unclipping the white case, catching the sweet powder smell and the fainter scent of her own body and his never quite lost, or was that her
thought only. She pasted the edge with jelly, her lips ruefully turning down as that deliberate spermicidal ooze dulled the erotic twinge. Nevertheless she parted her legs and placed it. Wiped herself. Began to wash her breasts and armpits. Then she heard his steps on the stair and as he opened the door they exchanged a smile.

–I want to pee, he said.

The bed was freshly made with clean white sheets, the small red curtains drawn neatly. He came in abstractedly undressed very fast and got into bed first, lying on his back.

She took the long stockings off her legs slowly, though he wasn’t watching her, took off her jumper, her short skirt, her belt.

–Come on, he said impatiently.

She got in naked and they put their arms round one another. It was a familiar loving cuddle unmoved by sexuality.

She shifted on to her elbow, said.

–You’re thinner in the arse, do you know that?

–Perhaps I’m withering away, he groaned. But
cheerfully
.

So she lay on top of him, still a warm and loving act, a companionable gesture, as the hand on her and her neck was, and there was great affection and warmth flowing between them, but no lust.