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.”
S
he 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
Elizabeth is stuck in the past now, it crashes around her like a landslide.
While the house hums with conviviality they quarrel in the kitchen in whispered snatches.
“The army, Joe! I can’t bear it. You can’t leave me, I’ve been waiting to tell you, I’m pregnant.”
“Oh god, Liz.” Elation and dismay in equal parts. A momentary embrace. A hasty parting as someone comes into the room. Small talk and jokes. The guest leaves, they resume.
“Oh god,” Joe says, “I keep trying to repress it, I didn’t want to tell you. But so is Marta.”
“So is Marta what?”
“Pregnant. Everything is madness. Madness.”
Biting her tongue on jealous rage till three more guests fix drinks, joke, wander off. Accusing: “You’ve made love to her!”
“She’s my wife!”
“You wanted her. You’re still in love with her.”
“Hush. It’s you I can’t live without. A baby!”
“It might be Edward’s.”
Stunned rage. “But I thought … you said you hardly ever, that he didn’t …”
“I never said that. He just doesn’t like me to respond. It wasn’t me who made overtures. I simply submitted.”
“You let him when I …”
“And you wanted Marta …”
Under the ebb and flow of party farewells, wartime frenzied hilarity, toasts to Joseph, a dark primitive undertow of jealousy and impending loss. And finally they are alone in the house, guests gone, Edward outside somewhere immersed in farewells (they assume), Marta gone to send the babysitter home.
“Joe, Joe, I can’t bear it. I don’t want you to go. I’m afraid.”
“This isn’t a time to decide anything, Liz. All this chaos. Do you think I’m not distraught? Leaving you. Leaving Marta with one child and a baby coming …”
“You’re thinking about her.”
“Two lives beginning and I’ve no idea how I’ll learn to face death …”
There is a wildness of kissing.
“Liz, Liz,” he moans. “Oh Liz, oh my god.”
They are on the sofa, her dress torn at the
shoulder, the skirt bunched up around her waist. A ravenous moment, two people conscious of time run out, of mortality, of apocalypse. Her legs are locked around him, she wants to suck him deeper and deeper inside, to keep him there. To offer in time of war the great velvet refuge of her vagina.
She hears a sound on the stairs, half sees a flutter of movement. It is peripheral, to be ignored. But she turns and there is Victoria, a nightgowned wraith, watching from the doorway.
“Tory!” she whispers, frozen with shock and shame.
The child stares back with eyes like moons lost in orbit. Then she turns and runs out into the darkness.
“Tory!” Elizabeth is crying, wrenching free.
No doubt she is brutally abrupt. And distraught. Some animal sound, some groaning sob, part rage, escapes from Joe.
“It’s impossible, Liz, it’s impossible. It will always be impossible.”
Madness, madness, madness.
Elizabeth is floundering about in the garden, in the past, looking for Tory. She throws out an arm, hangs on to the chair and the bed, catching at the present. Collides with Edward all over again.
For every moment of passionate elation there is an equal and opposite cost. This, Elizabeth believes, is an axiom. And these were the sentences handed down: the death of Joe, the damaging of Tory. She does not imply a simple-minded vengeful God. She is merely aware of the intricate ecology of human actions, the consequences of recklessness.
And yet, and yet …
Elizabeth cannot free herself of the expectation of that which is good, she is a glutton for each new morning, she takes the marrow from it. She holds today in her cupped hands: it is rare and beautiful, like an orchid or a butterfly.
It is to be savoured.
It will never be seen again.
Edward is stirring now, she is at his side, he is conscious at last of her hand in his.
He is trying to say something, she bends over him, straining to catch his words.
The Tiger in the Tiger Pit Page 24
