The Circle (6 page)
Authors: Elaine Feinstein
–What do you think of my boat? he asked both of them cheerfully.
Lena stared at his face.
–Michael, she said. Look what’s happened to Adam’s racquet.
–My god, he said immediately. Alan. How did you do that?
–Do it? Do it? Alan was dancing with incoherence.
–Michael, asked Lena slowly.
He turned on her with sudden hostility: Oh, I see. You’re going to say I did it.
–I haven’t said anything yet.
–Well, I didn’t, said Michael flatly.
–Just a moment, Lena tried to control her voice, (Alan, go IN, she said furiously, yes go IN, it can be re-strung, shut up). She pushed him out of the way, needing to think clearly.
–Just a moment, Michael.
Now his black eyes fixed hers like open tunnels. She could see no end to them. Weakly she began: Did you see anyone? Come in the garden? Any of those park boys?
–I’ve been in the shed, he answered her.
–But did you hear anything?
He appeared to give it fair thought.
–Wait a minute. Yes. There was some sort of scuffling. But I suppose that might have been Alan and Johnnie after tea. Now she felt very tired, and a great wave of tenderness for him at the same time.
–Come here darling, she said. Let’s go in with your boat.
–Phew! He blew an exaggerated sigh of relief. For one moment I really did think you believed it was me.
With her arm round his thin shoulders, his head in her chest, she didn’t know how to tackle the situation.
–Did you have a good afternoon? She asked him.
–Most of it, he said quickly.
And she hugged at his thin arms miserably not knowing what to do for the best.
–Poor Alan, she said experimentally. He’s so unhappy about his racquet.
Michael said: Such a
funny
thing
to happen.
And she flinched at that.
–Michael, listen. She knelt down to his level and held
his arm, kissed him. I know Alan is a bit rotten to you sometimes. Please. If you did that I’d understand. It would worry me, it would mean you were horribly unhappy, that’s why, but I’d have to know. Do you see?
–Well, if that’s what you want to know I can tell you. I’m bloody unhappy.
She looked into his completely untearful eye.
–But I didn’t do that to his racquet, he said. And if you ask me again I’ll never forgive you.
They walked into the house in silence.
When they came in Alan was sitting at the piano, light in his hair from a reading lamp. He was fumbling over a book of music he didn’t know, his blunt stubborn fingers following one line at a time, struggling to pull the piece together.
—Bach, he said, smiling, as they came in. Lovely. Or it would be.
Lena was holding Michael’s hand.
–You’ve nearly got it, she said.
Alan played the same four bars again, making the same mistake.
Michael grunted: Just listen to that.
Alan stopped without annoyance.
–Come on then, he challenged. You do it.
–I don’t play like that sort of stuff, said Michael loftily. All the same he went over to the piano and began to pick out the top line, by ear, he couldn’t read the music.
–Sure, sure, said Alan. It’s when the other hand comes in it gets difficult.
Michael, as all three of them knew, had only one thing he could do with his left hand, a sort of crude sequence of five chords. Rather charmingly now, he grinned and re-phrased it, putting the rhythm of his right hand into an old-time blues.
–That’s fun, said Lena.
–It’s nothing like
right
,
though, said Alan. And for the first time he sounded hot and angry. Nothing like as good either, he muttered.
Lena sighed! You have different talents. Don’t you know that? She put her arms round both of them.
–Just think of me then, she tempted. Can’t sight read, can’t play a note by ear, can’t get past book one of
Microcosmos
?
The boys eyed her tolerantly.
–You’re awful, they agreed.
–Well, I’ll get supper.
In fact she went and sat in the kitchen a long time, doing nothing, while in some compromised and temporary alliance the noises continued. The boys were playing a hand each. She listened to them. Reflecting.
How the beauty of their talents were all Ben’s, all
his
lovely free flowing ease at any musical instrument, it was all his ease of rhythm, his joy in melodies,
remembering
. How before he’d known her he had sung and played and made music all over London and he did none of that now, had not for years: and she was ashamed. Because it seemed to her that clearly it must have been her fault to have so reduced him. And was afraid (thinking of slit strings and that invisible hatred) of what she might do to the children.
How she needed Ben. The life in him that made him search and search she had turned by her
incomprehension
into brutality. Yes she had simplified him in her thought to forget that, and now hearing his life in their children, innocent and free, she knew again what she could only let herself know occasionally: what was there in him that she had stopped by her explicitness, by her failure to understand what he wanted.
She remembered Ben and the children playing in the light of long windows one evening; two recorders and
piano, the laughter, the joy they had together. Why and how had she put that down? She, who had only wanted to help him, had been she supposed the
ultimate
deadener: by her literalness, her listening only to the words of his complaint, and not the thwarted music that lay in his head behind it.
She thought of him restless angry
demanding:
all the early years of their marriage wanting to build some pattern of life that she had not the force to give him. She saw him smiling, nimble-fingered faultless in phrasing: music, yes, he had the music of life and to that she had wholly failed to direct her attention, yes she had chosen to be bound, only in the dull surface of his meanings; bound in her own lack of a talent which was a lack in her, and yet as necessary as to him. She sucked it from him; but what had she given back?
Joy. It was the lust for joy he had killed in himself, she reflected, when he stayed with her. And that softness; that she guyed and caricatured in her mind to make his words more bearable: that softness; wasn’t it only what his compassion had exacted from his
physiology
?
A crueller man, she reflected, would have saved
himself
: and taken his own way.
–If only I had some stable domestic help! So mourned Kari, Lena’s closest woman friend, her sweet breast, veins distended, in the mouth of her youngest child, her own lovely head back on the pillow of a day bed. Six pregnancies had brought a peculiar purplish tint to her skin and her long brown nipples looked as tough as leather.
Lena poured herself another inch of whisky into a tumbler. They were celebrating Kari’s birthday.
–Do you still have Gertrud? asked Kari. How
beautifully
free you are, how free, she murmured, changing the child to her other breast. You do what you want, Lena, you
do
it, and I do nothing.
Lena shook her head. She felt humble and depressed. Kari was so much the more intelligent in every ordinary sense of the term, so much more certain of the value of
doing
than she was, it seemed an absurdity the way their lives had grown so differently. And Kari’s unfinished thesis, to which (she could tell) even now the
conversation
was moving: she knew for Kari it was truly the rich piece of her, the piece where all her dreams were centred. Yet as she watched, Kari lifted the fat legs of the baby lovingly, and swabbed between them with
cream. The female crease of sex was always a surprise to Lena who had only sons. It distracted her as she listened distantly to Kari’s slow and measured voice, wondering at the hideous effort of control in the tone, and the way that struggle was belied by the soft moving of the hands, the adjustment of the soft breasts. Through the hatch into the kitchen Kari’s voice, hardly altering a note, advised two older children off the draining board and continued:
–My mother wants me to see the psychiatrist again.
–If it would help, wondered Lena, thinking of all her friends, all her sick friends. What a
lethargic
generation we all are, she thought. And the only help we can think of for one another is to learn to stop wanting what we want.
Kari put the child in the pram, and her big hand started a regular rhythm of shaking.
–When she sleeps I get something done. And I have an hour in the mornings. John is very good. But he doesn’t really understand how slow I am, have
become
,
she corrected, how I can’t seem to use the time he gives me. Yesterday. I walked into town, Lena, playing a game with the traffic, crossing the road. I knew then I didn’t really care any more. What happened. That nothing ever will happen now for me.
Lena looked into red eyes that were held too wide to let any water run from them. And the hand that shook and shook at the pram.
–Nothing will happen now to make sense of Kari. The voice continued. John can’t understand. He thinks, if he loves me, that should be enough. It hurts him. He feels, somehow. It’s
his
failure.
–Which in its way is enviable, said Lena evenly. At the same time she wondered why she had no desire to share her own misery. None whatever, though she
loved Kari and knew her that rare thing, no gossip, having a strange twisted nobility of soul that people coupled wrongly to the grotesque, and was in fact only an offshoot of a dammed intelligence. She trusted her, she had known her from childhood, sitting over the same fire to ponder were they pregnant? were they loved? would they ever marry? And yet she had no desire to share her present thought, she could see no help in putting it out before her, as Kari made a noise of self-disgust, shaking her head, muttering. Then surprisingly, Kari began another confession: how just last week she had let herself be fucked in the back of a car by a friend of John’s she didn’t particularly like, and how she was afraid now in case it might happen again. And her ravaged face lit with mischief over it, so that for a moment the old Chinese beauty of the cheekbones and high brow showed and they were girls again wondering: how to make it clear without prudery
no
.
Lena felt her spirits lift (and the Scotch working) as they discussed the absurdities of sex in confined positions.
–I wish I could drink with you, Kari sighed. But I’m too lazy. To give up breast feeding, I mean. All that sterilising and finding the teats in the dark. Do you remember that?
She pictured Kari struggling about. And the release of laughter was so beautiful that Lena let it swell in her like a bubble at the base of her brain.
But too soon Kari had gone into her own dark again.
–Mess. Mess. Lena. Everything I touch is
misshapen
by it.
As one of her sons came in his knee streaming blood, and his eyes solemn with shock.
–I just fell out of the tree, he said.
And still talking, her green eyes still dark, Kari sat him on her lap and dabbed at the blood, kissing him as he snuggled under her armpit grinning happily (he was not in any pain). She cuddled him hard saying, It’s no use. I’ve made myself into this sort of creature for too many years, a cushion is what I am. And put her face down into the boy’s hair holding him into her.
There was a way the conversation could have gone then about the others, the true cushions who loved their softness and their womanliness but Lena could not do it. They had said these things too many times and now it was not so easy, and the pain came too close. Instead she began telling without much point how the other day she had sat opposite two girls in the college restaurant and listened invisibly to their talk about some boy and hated them. For their terrible submission. How they went round and round querying the shades of meaning in his behaviour, how shameless their dependence on his approval. And yet even as she felt the wind of the story breathing close to her own
situation
she stopped short. And wondered. If Kari too must always be stopping short of the truth that really tormented her. Perhaps after all it was little enough to do with the making of any academic thing in the world.
–You have too many children, she speculated instead aloud.
And Kari laughed at that, agreeing. All of a piece, Lena, feckless in all things. It’s the cream, she explained, I always run out of the cream. And it seems so
calculating
somehow doesn’t it, not tonight darling. Both women laughed but Kari added more soberly. No, of course it’s worse than that. Forgetting to buy lavatory paper is one thing, but
that
.
Is a real insult.
–Only what happens when you turn out to be pregnant again? inquired Lena.
Kari said: Oh, that’s O.K. It makes him feel good. Like he’s got sperm that can overcome every natural obstacle.
And Lena wondered again sceptically. I bet he knows really, she said.
–No, said Kari. I can tell you that. He’d never forgive me. For being so bloody stupid.
On the table a bowl of lettuce glistened with salad oil and Lena picked a piece of it.
–John
is
pompous, she said. Which Kari didn’t mind.
–He’s too clever, she agreed. No. Too bloody
well-organised
that’s it. He can’t understand how anyone can leave a transistor on all night or. Did I ever tell you Lena? I once lost the
car
.
I couldn’t remember where I’d parked it. I was taking the kids to the dentist and I put it up a side street, and when I came out. In the end I had to get the police to help.
Lena could see that the boy was ready now to run off. But Kari restrained him, petting him, running her hands sensuously over his neck and shoulders as she thought of it, coming back again and again. To her own inadequacies. And Lena wondered about John, wondered about him, he was a puzzle to her.
On what thought wave she could not tell, Kari asked: How’s Ben?
–Oh. Well. As usual.
It seemed to her that there was something alarmingly purposive suddenly about Kari’s abrupt pat on the boy’s bottom, his dismissal to the garden.
–Does Ben mind? Kari asked her. All the things you do.
–Well, No. Said Lena. In fact I think he probably likes the money.
She could see that Kari was searching through the record cabinet now, through tidy row after row of neatly catalogued dust jackets.
–Yes, it makes a difference that. You earn money. That’s why you’re free. That’s why you can do what I can’t.
–Let’s have that Armstrong, said Lena. You
are
talking shit, Kari.
–No. If you get
paid
,
its real work, said Kari.
And Louis took the first old notes easily, like a man walking who knows he can run a mile any time he wants to.
–Listen, said Lena. You are talking shit because
work
: look what you do that I don’t. I mean this place looks
normal
.
You must be washing and cleaning every minute of the waking day.
–
Normal
,
Kari roared at her. She waved her hand at an untidied sewing table. John, she said, puts up with a lot.
–Does he?
–His standards, said Kari firmly. Are higher.
And a great ribald screech of the Armstrong trumpet took a triumphant top note.
–Ben’s are certainly different, admitted Lena. But even through the whisky and the tranquillised pain, she was niggled at this invitation to put him next to John. Good old-fashioned G.P.—but she wouldn’t be inveigled into it. And she thought back, knowing how much Ben needed order, just to function, and how she could never give him that; and yet it wasn’t John’s order either; but something almost supernatural, more like a sign.
That the world was a manipulable place at all. That there was some way of life to be built in it.
–We’ve never managed, she said out loud.
Kari puzzled at that.
–Turn the record, said Lena. And a funny soaring shout of joy went through her at the first notes.
She remembered going off alone through the rain to the museum at Peterborough at 4 p.m. with the lights on in the winter shops. To find some manuscript she wanted or, perhaps what she wanted was the
strangeness
of that going. The strangeness of being left in an ill-lit room, in the huge booming silence, alone,
searching
, half-afraid and half-exhilarated; knowing this was how it was for Ben most of the time working late in the lab, and that you had to have that, that lonely
excitement
to be free. To do anything. And that it was a killer also.
–Hell, it’s nothing to do with money, she said.
Did it have to be a killer? she wondered inside
herself
. Kari was talking and she could see the arms move and the hands gesture, but Lena was lost inside her own head now wondering. At the indignity of being a woman. How even beauty was no defence. When was it, two days ago she’d called on Millicent Hardwick? In her lovely soft lambswool and her long clean hair black to her shoulders. Sitting in the tiny hoovered room, every shade of orange toning and blending and chosen, and the silk stretched tight over the single bed? What, did she really fornicate there with a married man? It passed belief. And the thin slate roofs entered the tiny room as she listened there too, guilty and bored, slate roofs, grey sky and endless lines of T.V. aerials, as she listened and feebly offered:
–You should get out more.
–But he might phone. The huge brown eyes reproached her. It might be the only time he’s got.
And the reproachful eyes said: shut up: you’ve got a husband and two children. And the vicious
voice went on overtly of the wife:
She
doesn’t
care
. And Lena imagined a middle-aged Conservative lady with a big floral hat, and knew she was probably wrong.
–Have you ever seen her?
–No. But he talks to me, Lena. That’s it, we can talk together we can share things. I have to have someone to share things. I can’t do things by myself. I don’t enjoy them. I want to share, share everything. She poured Lena another cup of tea:
Don
’
t
go
yet
.
You can’t imagine how slowly time passes, how slowly. And then she put her hands up to her face, and her lovely soft mouth went ugly as a carp. As she gasped. I’m so sorry. Huge tears spilling over, wetting her hands. I didn’t mean to do this.
Lena just waited. Because what else. Then: Some things are all right even on your own, she suggested.
–What things? Millicent gave her a pitying smile.
–Well food, said Lena angrily. Because she hadn’t wanted to come, and she didn’t want to be envied, and she didn’t want to feel guilty, and she very much wanted to go. Strawberries, she suggested. You don’t have to keep looking round and saying aren’t these lovely strawberries, do you?
–I’m afraid I’m not very interested in food, said Millicent. And she stared off over Lena’s head, lost and bewildered, into the grey wallpaper. And Lena knew her presence had stopped being useful, that she could go, and the soft rounded girl would go back to waiting. In her perfect orange cell. Her whole being tuned to the note of the phone.
–Lena, said Kari. You aren’t bloody listening at all. What’s the matter?
–I’m drunk, said Lena. And stood up. It was true.
–I’ll make some coffee, said Kari, looked at her watch. Except. Christ, look at that.
–That’s O.K., mumbled Lena. It’s cold out. I’ll recover.
And it was snowing. Very soberly. A wet sleeting snow, that blew about under Lena’s coat, between her jumpers’ torn places, the gaps; reaching through all her resistance. She stood shivering feverishly at the bus stop. And an old lady, neatly dressed, felt hat/stick legs/hobbled over the slippery road with great care, her face set, small rimmed glasses on her nose. The two of them waited together.
No bus came. A little to the left of the stop a group of workmen were digging up the road. One, a big man, a Pole as she guessed, had his leather jacket open in the sleet, his big foot on the drill. The other men looked stunned with cold. It was blowing hard over the open road, and the nearby cars had their windscreens
covered
with a film of frozen rain. Lena watched the men curiously.
They broke off digging to shelter at the far side of their primitive cart and light matches for their
cigarettes
, their faces drawn inside their donkey jackets. They stood sullenly. Except the big Pole. After a puff or two, he went back to it, the cigarette still in his mouth. The wind and snow got in his eyes but he shook his head laughing.