by James Lasdun
Is there something wrong in my being so moved by this creature? she’d wondered. Something naive? False? Sentimental? She didn’t think so, but she was peculiarly moved by it. Its calm acceptance of her; the attentive gaze of its eye as she came close; that curious way in which it seemed to cooperate with her against its own fear when she lifted it up, was a source of undiminishing pleasure. Occasionally with the smaller birds she’d felt glimmerings of a consciousness capable of responding, in more than purely reflex ways, to her own. But this seemed a different order of reciprocal awareness: charged and volatile, as if the creature might be forming as richly strange an impression of her as she was of it. During the daytime, even though there was little she needed to do for it, she found herself reluctant to leave its side. And at night it would flood back into her mind, a soft brilliance, its domed head with the little sharp-angled mask over the eyes, held aloft in the dark or else tucked (as she’d seen it once to her everlasting delight) under a wing. Just picturing it was a source of strange joy. It was as if some benign, otherworldly being had taken shelter in their home. She had felt something like this in the first months after Daniel had been born.
Every few days Carla dropped by to see how the recovery was progressing. Once, noticing the sheaf of printouts sitting on the studio windowsill where Sara had left them, she asked with her customary unabashed inquisitiveness if Richard had given them to her.
He had, Sara said, a little embarrassed. ‘But only because his head of science gave them to him.’
Carla looked at her a moment, her axe-hewn features transmitting regal displeasure.
‘Deirdre Wagoner,’ she said. ‘I know her well. She’s been an antagonist of mine in more than one incarnation.’
Used to ignoring such remarks, Sara continued:
‘I think Richard just felt I should know what I was getting into. I haven’t actually read them, yet.’
Gathering the folds of her dress, Carla knelt down beside the swan.
‘I’ve mentioned to you, haven’t I, my belief that past a certain age the sexes among higher mammals become not merely indifferent towards each other but in fact functionally opposed?’
Sara nodded, assuming the half-defensive, half-receptive posture she adopted whenever Carla embarked on one of these lectures. One was forced into the role of acolyte, in her company, whether one liked it or not.
‘I’ve published several papers on the subject,’ Carla went on. ‘You can look them up online. In some of them I speak of what I call the “moil”. The moil of sex and money and power. For men between the age of puberty and that of impotence this constitutes their entire image of reality. It is all they are capable of thinking about, biologically speaking. And of course, when one is embroiled with a man, one is also embroiled with this vision of life, along with all its seemingly urgent imperatives. One accepts it as the objective picture of reality. But it isn’t. There are other realities, only one must be unembroiled, to see them.’
She paused, examining the swan’s feet.
Why are you telling me this? Sara was thinking. As always, she bridled slightly at Carla’s presumption in speaking to her in this cryptic way about Richard. It seemed a little ignoble, somehow, to hint that you knew or intuited certain things about a person’s marriage that they didn’t know themselves. After all, what could Carla know? All she knows, Sara thought, is her own marriage, and she clearly has some bitterness left over from that, though she probably wouldn’t admit it. It occurred to her that some of what Carla presented to the world as strength, was in fact the opposite: a gaping wound. Was this falsification perhaps what made her seem wooden at times, not quite human?
And yet along with the nonsense she talked there was always a sense of impending revelation that appealed to Sara. What exactly do you mean? she wanted to ask. What other realities? Tell me about them. I’d like to hear … She stood, waiting for Carla to pursue the theme.
The older woman was looking closely at the underside of one of the swan’s feet.
‘Dammit,’ she said, prosaically, ‘he has bumblefoot.’
This was a fungal condition, she explained, common in birds and rodents. It had infected the swan’s uninjured foot, probably because of the extra weight being put on it.
‘You’ll have to bring him to the vet.’
Twice a week, then, for the next three weeks, Sara drove the swan to the vet in East Deerfield. For the journey she would lift it into a tall-sided basket which she would place in the front passenger seat of the car. There beside her, it would stare out at the traffic and houses reeling past, seemingly spellbound by what it saw; its long neck stretched up above the sides of the basket, as if it were periscoping up into this world of streets and cars and houses from some hidden world of its own. The urge to watch it as it gazed out was strong; at times so strong Sara could hardly keep her eyes on the road. What did it see? she found herself wondering. What was its reality? Not Carla’s ‘moil’, presumably; but what then? Was there really some radically different way of inhabiting the world, or was that just wishful thinking? Do I even wish it? And if so why? Carla’s little homilies of recent weeks had begun to insinuate themselves into her mind. Words, phrases, whole arguments would come back to her at odd moments. Questions she’d never thought necessary to ask, began to repeat themselves in Carla’s sonorous voice: Have you considered what a woman is for, my dear, after she passes the mating age? What position of any importance can such a figure hope to occupy under the predominating vision of reality? How may she grow old gracefully in a world that has no fundamental use for her? What is there to grow into? What vital role? What function beyond the purely honorary? What respect beyond lip service? This is the pathos of a woman ageing in our particular culture, my dear. Unlike our ancestors, we live purely in historical time. All the great ceremonies of renewal and rebirth are gone from our lives. Time is absolute – we have no myth of eternal return; no sense that our stay on earth is purely one cycle in a great rhythm of being and dissolution. All we can see in an older woman is an old woman, a crone, a hag. And if she is not careful this is all she begins to see in herself …
A shift seemed to be occurring in the way Sara thought of certain people. A new set of criteria had begun to prevail. Women, older women especially, were seen increasingly in relation to Carla’s ‘predominating vision’. Either they had turned their backs on it, or else they were still ‘embroiled’. Both categories, in the past, had seemed to present a daunting image of what it was to grow old: the Carla types with their sexless, hardened appearance, or the others, drowning in their cosmetics and hair dye, their garish faces stiffening with the Botox that more and more of them appeared to be using. Each, now, as she thought of them, was like a mask she could try on, and peer through into the world.
All the while there was something tentative, provisional, about the way Sara revolved these subjects. She wasn’t sure what bearing they really had on her own life. None at all, she would tell herself. And yet her thoughts kept returning to them, drawn back in, as if to an unsolved puzzle they couldn’t stop working on.
By July the swan’s fracture had mended and the vet had declared the infection healed. Carla wanted to start re-acclimatising it to the water.
There was a good-sized pond in the town land near the municipal offices. In the daytime there were too many people and dogs around to let the swan out safely, but it was quiet in the evening.
‘Let me know when you’re free,’ Carla commanded. ‘The sooner the better.’
That Saturday Richard was in New York, where he’d had to substitute at the last minute for a speaker at a conference for educators. There was a reception afterwards and he’d decided to stay the night at a hotel in the city.
Taking advantage of the free evening, Sara arranged to go with Carla to the pond. Daniel, offered the choice, opted for a sleepover with a friend.
It was dusk when the two women set off from Sara’s house; a clear, warm evening. Sara sat in the back of Carla’s jeep, w
atching the swan from behind as it peered out. Looking at it, she remembered that in the early hours that morning, she’d woken herself and Richard by laughing in her sleep. The cause of this laughter had escaped her at the time, but it came to her now that it was just this: the swan in its basket staring out at the world with that look of unearthly calm. Recalling it, she felt an echo of the strange hilarity that had surged through her sleeping body; the very pleasurable sensation of tension being released in long ripples of delight.
Richard had woken. ‘What? What is it? What are you laughing at?’ he’d asked in a kind of muffled panic that seemed to originate deep inside him, before sinking back into his own dreams. Carla would appreciate the little story, she thought, and for a moment she considered telling her, but then changed her mind, shrinking from the small disloyalty it would entail.
They pulled up in the municipal parking lot. There were several beat-up looking trucks already parked there.
‘Richard’s in New York, is he?’ Carla carried the swan along the footpath, one on each side of the basket.
‘Yes.’
‘Doing what?’
‘He went to a conference.’
Carla grimaced.
‘My husband was forever attending conferences.’
‘It’s pretty rare for Richard.’
A drumming sound came through the trees.
‘Ah, yes. The Rainbow People,’ Carla said.
Every year, from June till September, the Rainbow Family of Living Light, along with a motley collection of local sympathisers and hangers-on, would congregate on Saturday nights in one of the old pastures here on the town land, and play their drums around a bonfire.
‘Such children,’ Carla continued. ‘The girls who work for me can barely write their names. But they have the right spirit. There’s a great deal they could learn from me if they chose.’
Sara smiled.
Their path took them away from the drumming, across an old pear orchard, and on through woods of white birch and pine, where it descended to the pond.
In the deep twilight the black surface of the water teemed with faint reflections of the birches. Here and there fish rose, spreading circular ripples. The low trill of tree frogs made a continuous soft pulsing.
Lifting the swan from the basket, Carla placed it on the grassy shore. It stood, looking out at the water.
‘Go on now,’ Carla encouraged it. After a moment it began stepping, with a fastidious, slightly hobbled gait, towards the water; surprisingly ungainly, as if it were in danger of toppling over. Once in, however, it glided effortlessly off towards the centre. The two women watched from the shore. There was no moon yet, but the last of the daylight lingered overhead, a greyish violet glow. In it, the whiteness of the white birches and the swan on the water looked lit from within. The rhythmic beat of the drumming came faintly on the breeze. Closer, there was an occasional bass croak of a bullfrog. A heightened silence seemed to enclose each of these sounds, so that they too seemed lit from within. Nothing felt quite of this world. Even Carla, standing very still at the pond’s edge, her thick white hair fanning over her shoulders, seemed a figure in a dream. Sara felt as if she’d stepped outside her life, into some interim space. It occurred to her that she was undergoing some transition. She had no idea where it might be leading, and wasn’t even especially interested in knowing.
The swan, close to the shore again, had begun hooping its neck to peer into the water. Abruptly it plunged downward, tipping its tail feathers out of the water, the flame shape of its rear end glowing briefly on the surface like an enormous white water lily before the head rose back up, a strand of pondweed dangling from its bill.
Carla turned to Sara.
‘I believe he’s ready to go home. His real home, I mean. I’ll take him to the river tomorrow. Can you come?’
‘Yes,’ Sara said, surprised. She hadn’t expected to be letting go of the creature so soon.
For several more minutes the swan fed. When it was finished, Carla called to it from the shore, and it swam back to her as if this were most natural thing in the world.
It was almost dark now. Sara had a small flashlight but Carla had a headband with an LED light that cast a blue-white brilliance all around her. She’d bought it from the camping store, she said as she lifted the swan into its basket.
‘I wear it at home all the time after dark. It frees the hands for work, and of course, it dispenses with the need for electric light. You should buy one yourself.’
‘I will!’
The thought of Carla wandering around her house at night with this Cyclops eye blazing from her forehead was oddly impressive to Sara. It seemed to her majestically, almost transfiguringly, original. Carla had this capacity for flooring one; often just as you were running out of patience with her. In its eerie radiance the swan’s masked face, suspended between them, looked like that of some carnival-goer, returning home from unimaginable revelries.
Paradise Meadow, the popular name for the old dairy pasture where the drumming took place, was beyond the woods on the other side of the municipal parking lot. The drumbeats grew louder as the women returned along the footpath with the swan. The red glow of the bonfire appeared between the trees as they reached Carla’s jeep. The parking lot itself had filled up; figures in feathered hats and cloak-like garments moved swiftly down the path on the far side of it. As Carla was pulling out, she peered through her window at one of the parked vehicles, a pickup truck with bales of hay in the back.
‘That’s Bonnie’s truck,’ she said. ‘I wonder what she’s doing here. Maybe she came along with those Rainbow girls. Now there’s a hard-working woman: does landscaping for half the town as well as working for me. Her daughter’s at your husband’s school, isn’t she?’
Sara was unable to speak for a moment. She had just seen something extremely perplexing. Parked next to Bonnie’s pickup was Richard’s Saab, the rust-fretted lower edge of the body curving over the wheels like a fringe of rigid lace; unmistakable.
‘Yes,’ she said, trying to hide her bewilderment. Carla didn’t seem to have recognised the car, thank God; at any rate she didn’t mention it. She dropped Sara off with the swan. Sara didn’t invite her in. She’d come up with an explanation for what she’d seen: Richard’s dinner had ended early; he’d come home after all, and remembering that she and Daniel were out, had gone to listen to the drumming. She couldn’t recall him ever showing any interest in the Rainbow People or their drumming, but it wasn’t impossible that he was curious. He was open to that kind of thing. The position of his car right next to Bonnie’s could only have been coincidental.
Leaving the swan in the studio, she went into the house. There was no message on the machine from Richard. She picked up the receiver to call him on his cell phone, but thought better of it: coverage up here was spotty, and if he didn’t answer she’d have merely opened herself to further, possibly needless, anxiety. She went to bed.
At around three in the morning she woke up with a jolt, aware that Richard still wasn’t home. She dialled his cell phone from the phone by the bed. It rang, but he didn’t answer.
She lay in the large bed: unable to stave off the knowledge that something was wrong. He had come back from New York without telling her; had gone to the drumming but hadn’t come home afterwards. The possibilities presented themselves with stark clarity. Either he’d had an accident on the way back from Paradise Meadow or else he was somewhere he didn’t want her to know about, thinking she believed he was in his New York hotel. She picked up the phone and called the emergency dispatch number. There were no reports of any accidents that night.
She got out of bed, unsure what to do. Drifting into the bathroom, she poured herself a glass of water. A nightlight was on above the mirror, lighting her reflection. It was some time since she’d studied her own face for any but the most brusquely practical of reasons. As a teenager, after a certain amount of anguish, she’d settled the question of her looks with the word ‘adequate�
�. When boyfriends, and then Richard, had professed to find her more than that, she’d taken it as chivalrous exaggeration. Her mousey hair had gone grey in her thirties. After she’d turned forty, her complexion had faded. She kept her hair short, and didn’t use dye or make-up; assuming (since he never criticised) that Richard liked her the way she was. But looking at herself now, she felt ancient insecurities stirring inside her. Am I attractive? Am I about to be abandoned? Some forlorn childhood self seemed to be rising up inside her as she stared into the mirror. It seemed to her that her face was covered in a layer of dust.
She turned abruptly, went down to the living room. A bright half-moon shone through the windows, lighting her tapestries. These too seemed covered in dust. Worse: they seemed made of it. What are these pallid things I’ve spent half my life creating? The image of Carla came to her, striding through her house with that headlight. I could use one of those now, she thought, imagining sardonically how Carla might put it: a third eye to see what is happening to me … Well, but there was an insidious persuasiveness in so much of what the woman said. That business about the ‘moil’ … ridiculous, like all her pronouncements, but it had lodged itself in Sara’s mind nevertheless. The question was whether there was any way out of that tangle of, what was it – sex, money and power? – that didn’t necessitate turning oneself into a New Age priestess. That seemed an awful price to pay. A falsification of yourself, it had to be. Even someone as naturally theatrical as Carla must it find wearisome to keep up at times.
Of course, Carla hadn’t really relinquished power, had she? Which no doubt added to the sense of something false about her; forced. So perhaps that’s my answer, Sara reflected: a more thorough letting go than Carla’s … A white light flickered in the windows of her studio. For a moment she thought it was the swan. Even when she realised it was just moonlight reflecting in the glass, she felt the surge of companionable warmth that the thought of the creature always aroused in her. It struck her that she was going to miss it badly after they returned it to the river tomorrow. She opened the front door and stepped outside. Barefoot, she crossed the dew-dampened grass of the lawn, and as if beckoned by some calming force, quietly entered the studio. The swan was asleep, its head tucked under its wing. It didn’t stir. She sat down on the newspaper-covered floor adjacent to it, leaning against the wall.
