The Tiger in the Tiger Pit (26 page)

Under the harsh flare of light, the watchers could see how the water punched into Tory's jangling breasts and foamed at the V between her legs and how it hurled itself at the boy's jiggling penis and spumed around his testicles.

It seemed to go on for ever, Edward's cries and Tory's sobbing and the dreadful lashing of water and the wide-eyed horror of the teenage guests (though already some of the boys were snickering), and Jason and Emily clung to each other at the upstairs window and shuddered, and afterwards Emily was sick.

Adam, white faced, still shivering. Still clinging to Emily. Arrival of the doctor. General confusion. Guests hovering and discreetly leaving. The massaging of the fallen body. The injections. Tory weeping quietly. Elizabeth leaning over Edward, stroking his hand.

“Heart's still functioning,” the doctor said. “Bit of a miracle. It's weak and erratic. I don't recommend this sort of excitement for my heart patients. Let's get him inside till the ambulance comes.”

XXII Coda

Vacuum. The ambulance gone with Edward and Elizabeth, the guests vanished, the silence overwhelming.

On the porch four figures, still as a painting, gazed across a lawn full of tables abandoned in mid-revel, a litter of half-empty glasses, dwindling ice cubes, stigmata of single bites on sandwiches and pieces of cake, ice cream slowly drowning in itself. It might have been a garden bewitched, mysteriously deserted without trace or sign of cause.

Only the slow creak of the porch swing on which Jason and Tory sat suggested life. And also, to a close observer, the eyes of the child — which missed nothing, monitoring and translating every nuance of facial expression.

He said to them earnestly: “Grandpa's not going to die, I know it.”

“Of course he's not, darling,” his mother said quickly.

And he understood that she was not at all sure. He realised they all thought he had been stating his fears. It would be a waste of time trying to explain that he
knew,
that he could somehow tell, from the touch and smell of his grandmother as she hugged him and then climbed into the back of the ambulance, that all would be well.

How would he say it? Simply: She can make things happen. Or maybe: When she holds something in her hands in a certain way, it cannot slip through her fingers and get lost.

He was confident she would not let Grandpa's life slither away from him. When he thought of his grandmother, he thought of something strong and anchored, like a maypole. He thought of everyone else as ribbons braiding themselves around her.

Could this be put into words they would understand? Probably not. Grown-ups were exasperating, noticing so little.

For example: he suspected that his mother and Uncle Jason were not aware that Aunt Tory was …
different
somehow. She had terrified him with all that crying and shouting and the garden hose and the water, but now — yes, it was her eyes. They didn't drift as much, they focused. And also, even the way she was sitting was different: as though someone had tightened up all her loose strings.

The telephone rang, a spattering of sound, and everyone jumped. Jason went into the house to answer it and the others waited, suspended. Five minutes. Six. Tory's feet began to stutter against the porch floor like typewriter keys. Then Jason returned.

“Reprieve,” he announced. “Doctor says he's out of the critical stage. He hasn't regained consciousness yet, but of course he's sedated. Mother's going to stay with him tonight.”

The child wanted to remind them: I told you.

Tory hugged herself and smiled and said suddenly: “Now that he's all right.” And then, as though there were a link: “Adam, when will we visit Australia?”

Even the boy, who followed his aunt's switchback logic more easily than anyone else, was caught off guard. Every nerve in his body hummed like a telegraph wire. So much in the balance. He was afraid to speak. He crossed his fingers behind his back and looked at his mother — a mute plea.

Emily felt herself to be ten years old again, poised terrified at the tip of the high diving board, a crowd of children watching from below, others waiting impatiently behind her on the ladder. She'd had no idea how far up this was, how much the board swayed, how hard and deadly the distant surface of water would look. There was no way back. She had to close her eyes and dive in full knowledge of risk.

She breathed slowly and said: “I'll call Dave tonight. We'll discuss it.”

Adam did not move until he had counted to ten. Just in case he was dreaming. Then he was all over her like a jubilant terrier, hugging and kissing, his happiness a halo of incoherent sound, Tory began to produce something like a singing from deep within herself, and the garden filled up with their strange duet, non-verbal, high-pitched, and atonal — as though some avant-garde composer had written a new
Ode to Joy.

Jason, not unaffected, touched his younger sister's shoulder. “I think,” he said — though he had trouble speaking, and had to clear his throat — “that I'll go to the hospital for a while.”

XXIII Elizabeth

The greatest mystery, Elizabeth thinks, is the wildness of the beast within us. At any moment we may move in some primal way, take a mere step in the direction of private desire, stretch an arm: and our claws have left blood in their wake.

Nevertheless she believes unswervingly in the efficacy of hope. Simply the growing, she thinks, the movement from day to day, ruptures old forms and is violent with beauty.

Is there a way to minimise the damage? To stretch into our jostled strip of time without harming another living thing? This is the quest. Each morning's waking thoughts scatter a million seeds of possibility.

She lifts Edward's hand to her cheek and holds it there, but his arm is heavy with sedation and sags back toward the bed. And yet it could flex itself into savagery. Who knows what might happen? It could snap its sinews in the cause of outrage, like Othello extinguishing Desdemona.

What is he dreaming?

What does she know of him? After fifty years: intimate aliens.

And yet how well some strangers know us.

She thinks of Marta who called her by her proper name. No diminutives. This pleases Elizabeth. They have never underestimated each other, she and Marta.

She supposes they have both spent a lifetime wondering what might have happened after the war. If Joseph had come back. Is it possible to resift all that? Is it necessary? Elizabeth would rather think of Adam whose voice rises into her mind like a benediction. She would rather stroke the dead weight of Edward's arm and coax it back to warmth. She would rather listen for the nurse's step in the hallway

Is that Jason at the door? It seems so. He stands behind her chair and rests his hands on her shoulders. She turns to look at him and thinks of a tuning fork — something giving off a hum of excitement. Words float from him. “I really think, from now on, I'll be able to
do
something.”

With his life, he means, with his patients.

She knows it is simply that he has discovered hope.

Sometimes she has tried to picture Jason functioning in his office in New York. His waiting room presents itself to her as teeming with unhappiness: subway crowds in hell, a cramming of people exhausted by the lives they drag around behind them like monstrous dragon-plated tails. Clank, clank: the sound of so many tormented pasts. All waiting for Jason to hand out the magic. And Jason waiting for the alchemist's stone. But
from now on
, he believes.

Elizabeth touches such moments as though fingering silk. She has always preferred today to yesterday.

Though sometimes yesterday intrudes, blundering back like a drunken guest after the party is over. Jason leaves, the past arrives. Elizabeth thinks of Marta. She remembers youth. The recklessness. The intensity. The awful heedlessness to consequences. The conviction (quaint now) that it will not be possible to go on living without the one most fervently desired body tangled into yours.

Elizabeth finds that some atom of memory stores everything. It lies around, this smoking chunk of history, in abandoned corridors of the brain, a hand grenade, waiting. A pin is pulled and it is all still there in undiluted vibrancy. The senses reel. Elizabeth sees, hears, tastes, smells, touches Joseph.

It is so disorienting, this visitation, so intense, that she covers her face with her hands. She shuts out the war, but cannot stop the ringing of the fateful phone call. She covers her ears. Futile. She knows all over again, as she knew it then, by the mere weight of the receiver, by the burden of dread in the air.

She watches herself: pregnant as a beached whale with Jason, her hand poised, afraid to lift up the news, afraid not to. Will it be about Edward or Joe? Which will be the more unbearable? And if it is Joe: will Marta, also eight and a half months' vast, be reaching for the phone in New York?

Elizabeth ponders this now. The labyrinth of simultaneous events, it has always fascinated her. What was Edward facing on the beaches when the jungle swallowed Joe? Had she and Marta received synchronised phone calls? Or sequential ones from the same disengaged official voice? (Joe must have listed them both: in the event of … please notify …)

Elizabeth is agitated, her hands over her ears, her body buffeted by outer shock waves from the distant jangling of that telephone. She thinks: Perhaps we stiffened like that for every telegram, every phone call, in those days, and only afterwards told ourselves: I knew it. I knew it from the first ring.

She remembers lifting the receiver. Remembers the words, a telegram intoned. Joseph Wilson. Killed in action. Death confirmed by comrade who tried to recover the body under fire. Central highlands of New Guinea. She does not remember whether she replaced the receiver. She does recall the slumping, the touch of the carpet where she sat hunched and cowering. She might have been hiding from Japanese patrols. She remembers reaching out with her arms — to enfold Marta, perhaps, in New York. To howl with her. Though perhaps Marta would have clawed her like a cat.

Elizabeth mourned, prowling through New Guinea in her mind, imagining trees like twisted ropes and leaves vast as sails and vines like honeysuckle gone savage. She sat in the hallway all day, and all that night — except when like a sleep walker. She fed Tory and read to her and tucked her into bed. And Tory, with her white face and wide eyes, clung and whimpered, waiting for her fear to be put into words. But Elizabeth could not speak it.

She remembers the tug of the little girl's arms. The frightened whisper at last: “Mommy, is it Daddy?”

“Not Daddy darling. Sonia's daddy.”

Then Tory's quiet crying, the trailing off into sleep. Elizabeth returned to her vigil. She sat in the hallway all night. She felt safe with her back against the wall, beside the phone, close to the last filament of contact. On the following evening, she went into labour. It was Joe she wanted, a new edition, rising like a phoenix from between her legs.

But when Jason was born, when he came forth with Edward's eyes and nose, with Edward's fair hair burnished with copper, she was overcome. The rush of life took her by surprise, its variousness, its richness, its inexhaustible offerings of irony. She cradled the tiny body between her breasts. Mere hours from a death, minutes from its own before-life, its bawling grip on the day exhilarated her. She crooned to it …

Elizabeth realises that she is fondling Edward's sluggish arm between her breasts, that Jason, hesitant, is watching her from the doorway. She lowers the arm gently on to the bedding and rests her face on it. Jason is transfixed, as though stumbling on the primal love scene. An echo of the afternoon eddies into Elizabeth's brain, Marta's voice, full of bewildered pleasure:
He's Edward's!

Elizabeth sighs. Why had she never let Marta know? Another facet of the mystery, she thinks. Where do we store all this cruelty? She strokes her arms and is surprised to feel flesh. She realises she was expecting something coarser, the pelt of a tiger perhaps.

Why is Jason filling the room like a vapour? How long has he been here? She considers telling him to leave the air alone, to stop pacing. She is afraid of dislodging another slag heap of memory. This is the problem: nothing is settled in the past, it is a shifting region of fault lines and instability. Consider what a random conjunction of
now
and
then
can do, consider Tory rampant as a thunderstorm …

Tory, Elizabeth thinks, is
essence
: pure childhood, pure terror, pure anger, pure pleasure. Elizabeth has always — in spite of the sin of favouritism — loved Tory uncritically and best, before all the others. Though it must be admitted she thinks this of whichever child she is holding in her mind's eye at a given moment.

“And as for Adam,” Jason says.

Oh especially Adam. “Adam can pull love from the air,” she agrees. It clings to him like pollen.

Jason is smiling. “If only the non-sequiturs of my patients were half as dazzling.” He is tossing words into the room like Catherine wheels, they buzz and glitter around Elizabeth's ears.

She makes an effort, knitting her brows. “And Adam?”

“He's beside himself with excitement.”

She smiles absently and Jason shakes his head. “Oh Mother, Mother. Did you hear me? I said Emily is calling Australia.”

Something sings inside Elizabeth, she moves her hands, if she were at home she would go to the piano. Excellent, she thinks. I have composed it well. Though one's control is never total.

Jason has gone, the air settles, Edward stirs.

She waits like a bird coasting on nothing. She reads his dream in the spasm of a muscle along his jaw. She waits for him to sit up and declaim from
Othello
: O
curse of marriage! That we can call these delicate creatures ours, and not their appetites!

And how will she explain? How account for a whirlwind, a flash flood? Why does he want to know
now
? Forty years and he pulls the past out of a hat like a rabbit.

Behold, he says, swirling his magician's cape; Marta!

Explain, he demands.

Or had planned to demand. And was forestalled by Tory's spraying the air with indictments.

J'accuse, j'accuse,
it has grown to an epidemic.

Look at him now, Elizabeth thinks. Even sedated, his face contorts itself into a frown. Preparing the case for the prosecution. It is irresistible, his rawness. She raises his still-clenched hand to her cheek, bends to kiss him. A witch's kiss: since the war she has schemed to bring him peace, has worked on a spell of contentment, has conspired to have happiness stalk him and startle his features with laughter.

It has been like a game of chess with Adam as queen's bishop. Last night he laughed! And she had thought:
Checkmate!
With a head full of dreams she had climbed to his bed.

His bed. Oh Edward, my puritan, she sighs. How comic that when she first saw him so obviously ill at ease in her father's drawing room, he looked like salvation. His hair rumpled, his tie altogether too carefully tied, his eyes hungry. Elizabeth remembers her answering hunger: I must have him. I must have those knotted muscles, that tamped-down rage. She thought it would slither like lightning through decorum, she imagined it exploding between her thighs.

Fantasies, fantasies. While she dreamed of fire, he dreamed of ice.

Of course she learned to lie still like a virgin on an altar.

It was Tory who was punished.

He would have preferred three immaculate conceptions, Elizabeth thinks. Not that he was inclined to celibacy. Oh no, his hungers consumed him. It was only her participation that affronted him.

When Joe came like a new season at the end of winter, when he spoke to her eager flesh with his body, she had no more sense of a decision to be made than parched earth thinks of refusing rain.

After the war, she thinks, if I had taken my babies and left Edward, the scandal (back then) would have been indelible. It would have clung to her like an odour of garbage. Not that she would have cared.

It was not why she stayed.

These days, she thinks, in certain circles, it is a scandal that I did
not
leave him. In magazines she follows with amazement the reasons for which marriages are abandoned. Insane. It is true that her body has mourned for Joe, it is true that cravings have come and she has had to bury her head in the honeysuckle or play the piano for hours. But, she asks herself, for the price of solitary climaxes, for fifty years of licking my finger and sliding it between my legs, would I have forfeited this family and this marriage?

But where is the significance? clamour the writers of articles, crowding her. What of the stoppered passions, the lost concert audiences, the music composed for unlistening air, the waste?

But then who, she wonders, escapes waste? And who has time for all the opportunities that
are?
Why all this
angst
? People paying small fortunes for a listener, asking: What is the meaning of my life? It astonishes her. Elizabeth thinks there is more meaning between one blink of her eye and the next than anyone has time to write a gloss on. She stuffs her senses with the smell of sheets, the sound of an old man snuffling through a filter of drugs, the creak of her chair. She rests her head on Edward's chest and hears the erratic, the miraculous, the plaintively vulnerable tick-tock of the heart.

The present is overwhelming, thick with import. How should the past dare to seep under it? Why should loss and waste, reeking of regret, sneak into …

Elizabeth is agitated again. She goes to the window, inhales the moment, mad with summer. Only today matters, she insists, only today.

Too late.

Here comes Joe, huge as a colossus, striding into her senses as he first loomed into this toy-town where only genealogies and recipes and last year's snowfall were suitable topics of discussion. He comes trailing clouds of childhood and college, shared memories. Reminiscence slides over their tongues with the sherry, the old cerebral addictions: talk of music and politics and college mixers and who is where now and is Chamberlain taking the right course and is the Lend-Lease Act morally sufficient and is it inevitable that we will enter the war before the end?

A voice in the wilderness. A quickening. That was all. Just small daily pleasures, Joe dropping by on his walk home from the school, the two of them sipping beer on the porch and talking endlessly. Who could account for why it changed?

Elizabeth wonders: When did I realise what was happening?

The first day Joe did not come, by the extent of my dismay. Here are the details that will begin to matter, she thought the next day, hearing his scrunch on the gravel (a cavalier, almost swaggering step): the particular way his hair fell across his forehead, the careless disposing of his body on a porch chair, the way he placed one foot across the other thigh in negligent ease. The body's codes: how unpredictably translated in her emotions — Edward's unease and Joe's nonchalance both meaning love. This is clearly an aberration, they told each other, she and Joe. We will come to our senses presently. And soon: How can we possibly inflict all this chaos? How can we not? And then the war, great decider, and the final party