The Fog Garden

by Marion Halligan

  The grief of the memory of all this loss fills her with a kind of happiness, a bitter pleasure that she desires and cultivates. That nourishes.

  She is roasting a chicken, quite plain, the skin rubbed with cut lemon, then the pieces put inside it, the spit poked through as carefully centred as possible so that it will turn smoothly, the bird trussed with string and tied in place.

  She goes to the grill, to open it and switch it on to get good and hot before she sets the bird turning. Its own fat will run over it and brown it before dripping into the pan beneath, it will be tender and succulent and dark golden brown, though some people will not eat the skin, far too rich and fatty, far too dangerous.

  She grasps the door.

  CAREFUL!

  LIFT BY

  THE EDGES

  Careful she is, sliding her fingers in behind the rim, pulling it down. The yellow post-it note flutters. Careful. Don’t spill any grease on it. It’s to be treasured, this little yellow note. A message from beyond the grave, she says to herself. Laughs. That’s your kind of joke, Geoffrey.

  the boat

  LIFE IS DYNAMIC, SAYS CLARE TO her lover on the telephone. He usually telephones in the morning, and they talk about things like original sin and the immaculate conception and enlightenment and Sartre, about Huit Clos and the movie of it he saw as a student as well as existentialism, he said once that he’d been using the words existential angst for thirty-five years and had only just understood what they meant. Anguish in the face of an uncaring universe, he said. An indifferent universe. She said she thought that was what everybody feared. Not being seen with the eyes of love. Anger is better than indifference; a tearing terrible fight with someone you love preferable to his not paying attention to you.

  Clare has only just formed this life-is-dynamic idea into words, and she likes it, it is new and exciting for her and she has not yet obliged herself to think that it would be certain that somebody had said it all before. The thing is, she says, life has to change, and it doesn’t at all mind changing in the direction of getting better, but if it can’t do that, it will change in the direction of getting worse. And that’s the thing with marriages, if they don’t get better they get worse. People want them to stay the same, but they don’t, they can’t, a simple smug easy content may seem nice, but it can’t happen. At first it’s usually all right, because being a couple is all so new, and exciting, terrifying even, and finding out about sex—well, in my day anyway, she says—and getting a house, and children, and them growing up, and jobs, and you growing up, except that I’m not sure you do, really. But then everything seems to be done, you’re established, there’s nothing new, and that’s when it changes in bad ways. Of course, she finishes up (these telephone conversations allow for very long exchanges, they don’t interrupt one another much, just breathe quietly), I’m sure there’s nothing new in this, it’s just that I haven’t particularly thought it before. I don’t think. But I expect someone has.

  Probably some Greek, he says. The doctrine of becoming, was it? That the world is made of becoming.

  Is that Heraclitus, she asks. The same as flux, maybe. Didn’t he say that? That no one steps twice into the same river.

  Clare put that not stepping twice into the same river in a book once. She thinks it is a powerful image. She likes the idea of calling a book after it, one day. The Same River. Has done so, but only in a book.

  Wasn’t he the one that said most men are bad, he asks.

  Probably. After all, I am wicked, she says, savouring the idea, but not happily.

  And that the world is a vast battlefield. He reckoned that you can’t get rid of war or there’ll be nothing left, because war is the father of all things.

  Who’s their mother, she wonders.

  I don’t think he says. Heraclitus the Obscure, he was called. Or the Dark.

  Oh yes. Dark.

  They are both dredging up memories of Philosophy 1, or some such, and not getting far. It is existentialism he is reading now, not the ancient Greeks.

  This conversation is because his wife has found out about them and there has been a huge blow-up, nights of tears and storming, anger, misery, terror. It is a change all right. And curiously, for the better, this angry intertwining beating anger brings the husband and wife together, almost the whole way across the politeness that has parted them.

  I thought it would, said Clare. I knew it would. It’s a gift I’ve given you.

  The discovery has stopped the marriage sinking further into badness. Not that it was very bad, it was contented enough, not unhappy. Very civil. It just wasn’t as happy as two people together loving one another can be. We are getting older, his wife might have said. This is maturity. Serenity is not to be sneezed at.

  The lover says that a state of not being unhappy is in fact unhappiness. He has been unhappy, he’s been in a bleak black depression. Now he is happy, Clare has made him so. Or he has been, until he saw the pain he is causing, now.

  He had thought he could tell his wife about it in a rational manner, and that she wouldn’t mind too much. Would agree that parting was the only sensible thing to do. That she might even be glad to see the back of him.

  I see that you did not know about anguish, says Clare.

  No, he says.

  Whereas Clare is an expert in anguish. Ever since her daughter was born, and the doctor said, If you believe in having babies christened, I would christen this one. And they did, not because they were religious but because so small a life demanded some ceremony. But the baby didn’t die. But needed two heart operations, and they were risky; after the second Clare heard the intensive care nurse tell her sister on the telephone from Brisbane that her condition was critical but stable. What a cold weight was in those words. Then Geoffrey’s heart attacks. And the time . . . still too painful, just say: when he thought he might want to stop being married to her. As her lover might have to his wife, but hasn’t, and in Geoffrey’s case not so quickly resolved. And then Geoffrey’s death. After a long illness. Another cold and weighty phrase. Clare is well schooled, long-learned, in anguish. And all its clichés.

  I could not believe that one person could be so shattered, her lover says. He uses plain words, like awful, and terrible, and his voice invests them with a power that mostly they have lost. His voice, and his stricken face. He does not think he can inflict that much pain on anyone, he says.

  This anguish went on for several days and mostly nights. And he doesn’t leave her, he won’t, but he must stay friends with Clare. Yes, says his wife, and she wants to, as well. Friends is the word here, friends, and no more.

  Tomorrow is Clare’s wedding anniversary. The first since Geoffrey’s death. She sits at the computer and tears run down her cheeks. Lucky it is not paper and ink, there would be big blots and puddles on the page. Maybe the computer will spark and sizzle and die, and the email she is sending to Oliver in England will fizzle with it. I am living in interesting times, she tells him, in the manner of the Chinese curse. Do you think it is better to be full of passion and excitement and terrible pain, and know you are alive, she asks him, than content and complacent and no pain but no passion either? Clare is going for passion and pain, which is just as well, since she’s got them. Pain, anyway. Her tears fall, for her dead husband, her widowhood, her lost lover, all her lost lovers. What if email had been invented in Oliver’s day, would their affair have been different? It doesn’t help with this one. Email is only as good as the emailer. Don’t swear any terrible oaths, she said to him, her newly lost lover, just say that this is what you intend to happen. Her mind wants a friend, her body wants a lover, and she, who is neither mind nor body but an indissoluble mixture of both, wants both friend and lover. Her tears fall, she doesn’t sleep, lies with itching eyes. She knows she cannot have what she wants, but his wife doesn’t, she believes she can have it all. So Clare thinks, and who knows if she is right. She imagines herself saying to this friend, there are prices, you know, you can have things but there
are prices. Maybe some people never find this out, but she doesn’t know anyone who has lived scot-free.

  She reminds herself that she has given her lover’s wife, her friend, an important gift. The friend might not recognise it now. Clare has shown her how terrifying life might be. Clare has known for a long time, she’s often told her friend, who has nodded sagely, kindly, sympathetically, but telling is never enough. It has to be shown. The burnt finger makes the child know the stove is hot, as no words can ever tell. The old clichés reveal their truth, again.

  She has shown her friend that her husband loves her and will not leave her.

  Her lover, now just friend, takes her out to lunch; he’s remembered it’s her wedding anniversary. How does he know this? It’s a marvel. They go to the restaurant in the sculpture garden. I’ll show you my favourite sculpture, she says.

  Is it the couple making love, he says.

  No, which one’s that?

  The Henry Moore.

  I’ve never noticed they’re making love. They’re not.

  They are. You look.

  Mine’s much more innocent. Childhood. Holidays at the lake. It’s down here. She turns to the side of the pool.

  After lunch, he says, let’s get a table first.

  The fog sculpture is working. She sits sideways in her chair so the sun shines on her thinly stockinged legs—she used to wrap them in warm winter trousers for cold winter days but now it is sheer stockings with lace tops and erotic misery keeping you warm—and watches its white vapour eddy and billow and rise in rags of mist among the reeds and through the casuarinas. Each needle is coated with hundreds of droplets of water and the low sun turns them into tiny points of light so that all the trees and the reeds are spangled with glittering spheres.

  I think the fog garden is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, she says, and he agrees.

  The mist eddies on to the deck of the restaurant and settles its droplets on her hair, not spangling it because her head isn’t in the sunlight, it seems to be laying a greyish veil over it.

  Remember that song? He says the words in a lilting voice, almost music, under his breath:

  I loved her in the summertime

  And in the winter too

  And the only only thing that I ever did wrong

  Was to shield her from the foggy foggy dew

  I thought that was a rugby song, she said, drunken student yobbos waving stubbies.

  They did sing it, all those long drawn-out ooh sounds was what they liked. But it’s a folk song first. And here’s the foggy foggy dew.

  They pay half each for lunch, as friends do. They walk around the Henry Moore. You can see lovers in it, penises, vaginas, thrusting and rearing and lying open, but the two parts don’t touch, they thrust and loop and follow one another’s shapes but never meet.

  If they’re lovers it’s tragic, she says.

  Why? I see them as lovers.

  But they’re not touching. They’re straining together, but not touching.

  It’s an image of copulation; don’t you see it?

  Desire, maybe, but it’s not happening.

  She can see that it is possible to imagine that maybe they will come together one day. The metal’s tension will snap and all that mighty weight will grind together and fall upon itself.

  What a cataclysm, she says, and he laughs and puts his finger on her cheek.

  A great bang, he says.

  She averts her eyes from the mechanism of the fog sculpture as from sordid detail, the racks of tiny nozzles through which the water is forced into the fine mist whose white billows roil and creep across the pond. She knows what they look like from all the times they weren’t working, were always being sent back to Japan for repairs. It’s really too fragile, people said. Too finicky. But somebody’s clearly worked something out, for now the fog sculpture always functions, every day from twelve to two.

  We probably wouldn’t be any good, living together, she says. Don’t you remember, you said we wouldn’t, at the beginning, there’d be no question of it, we were both too fond of our own agendas. That’s why it was safe.

  He shakes his head. We would, we’d be good, he says. I never did mean that, even when I said it. We’d be good.

  Yes, she says. Sadly. She’s never slept with him, never got up with him, but she too doesn’t believe that they wouldn’t be good at it.

  You said you weren’t going to fall in love with me, she says.

  Ah, yes, I did, and I was telling the truth. I wasn’t going to fall in love with you because I already had, oh, a long time ago.

  He puts his arm round her, squeezes her in a hug. They aren’t lovers, they’re friends, this is the sort of thing friends can do; only lovers, adulterous lovers, must be secret in public, and entwined they walk through the winding bush-scented paths of the garden to a small private space with a bench overlooking the lake. She forgets to show him her sculpture, the one she likes best, after the fog, the boat made of rusty bronze half on the bank, half sinking among the reeds, reduced to a sketch of its timbers, reminding her of those boats by the holiday lakes of her childhood, rotting away in the shallow water, spongy, frail, broken, and it is a thing of wonder that this weight, this mass of bronze, so solid, should capture so perfectly that decay.

  the moral ground

  SHE WAS TALKING TO HER LOVER on the telephone about the sin of onanism. She wondered if she should think of him as her ex-lover, though she still loved him and he loved her. But they weren’t supposed to be making love any more, now he had decided he was going to stay married to his wife. She’d thought that was always his intention, but he hadn’t, for a while he thought his wife would tell him to piss off and he could get together with his lover. But his wife was keen for him to stay. And this wife values honesty above all things. The truth is important to her, more than morality. The only way we can keep on being lovers, he said, is to deceive her, and I cannot do that. I cannot look in her eyes and lie.

  He did say, Perhaps we can hold one another, and touch, and kiss, he said, so long as we don’t actually do it, and he invested the funny little sharpish pronoun with all its old adolescent eroticism. But she said no, he might be a lapsed Catholic but he knew that you can’t avoid sin by weaselling about with words. And you can’t avoid dishonesty either. She in fact did not entirely believe that they needed to stop doing it; what she was promising was to have no designs on her lover as husband, to have no intentions of taking him away from his wife, and she didn’t think a bit of sex made any difference to that. Especially not given the conversation that they were keeping on having. She had always named what they were doing as adultery, which needs a marriage in order to exist, adultery its own little box, precious and shut away, she wouldn’t Pandora it open and let it loose to ravage another woman’s life. An ambiguous little box, that could be so delightful to one, so bitter to another. Ambiguity is her favourite mode. But it was her lover’s honesty that was at stake, and if he believed it had to go like that, well, it did.

  Her other reason for knocking back the heavy petting was not so theoretical. Thanks to the threat their love affair had been to his marriage it seemed to have got back to sex, his wife had recovered her libido and a nice time was being had by both. Only she, the mistress, this other, had to be celibate. She thought it might be easier to be totally so than a bit. How far can you go, was a question they asked when they were young. David Lodge used it as the title of a novel, back in the sixties. About married contraception, as she recalled. Catholic friends had read her copy; Elvira had asked to borrow it because Bruce had seen a review and thought it sounded interesting. But it had also been about virginity, degrees of it, virtual virginity, people could say these days. Did fingers count, that sort of thing. But the Bible had always been clear, lusting after in the heart was as bad as fucking. So if you lusted you might as well do it, her lover had said. But not now was he saying that.

  Ah yes, she’d said, but what about being tempted and resisting? That’s
very virtuous. That’s the gift of Eve to the world, the chance to know evil and to choose good.

  But it wasn’t virtue that was moving her. In these circumstances she thought that pretty thorough celibacy might be easier than allowing desire to have its way, so far, but stopping when it got keen. There isn’t much delight in promising pleasure and then denying it. And she hates the thought of quick furtive couplings. Our sex has been splendid, she said, it’s been glorious. I don’t want anything less.

  But talking on the phone was all right. Which was where they were having this conversation about onanism. When they were really lovers they talked sex on the phone. Long breathy silences, little seething sighs, dreamy fragments, giggles. What are you doing . . . what are you . . . aah . . . what is . . . how do . . . what do your fingers smell like . . . ah . . . yes . . . Remember when people used to say fishy . . . No not fishy, he says, that must have been old weeks-unwashed whores, things could get a bit fishy then, I reckon . . . but not you . . . you smell exquisite . . . and he talks her into having an orgasm in her large leather chair with her feet up on the bookcase and her fingers inside the silk knickers she’s taken to wearing. Why don’t you jump in the car and come over, he says, I would welcome you . . .