The Fog Garden

by Marion Halligan

  About this business of the universe being hostile, she said to the man who had been her lover.

  Not hostile, I didn’t say hostile, just indifferent. Not caring one way or another.

  I used to think it was benign.

  So it is. To human life generally. That is how we survive on this planet. But not to any one individual. The species survives, but the individual is of no account. It’s not paying attention to any one person. And even if we say it is benign because it allows humanity to flourish in it, you have to remember that we have evolved to do so; we have made ourselves to fit it. Indifferent is the word for the universe.

  Along with Rhett Butler; frankly my dear it doesn’t give a damn. It’s hard to accept.

  You are used to people loving you. You want the universe to love you too.

  Not to love me. To be kind to me. To be kind to the people I love.

  Only people can do that.

  Her daughter has to have an operation. It will be dangerous. Clare knows now the impotence of wishing and wanting; they won’t change what will be. She keeps hearing a Lady Bracknell voice in her head. To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness. The same must be said of losing both a husband and a daughter. Carelessness. The word does a clumsy hysterical dance in her brain. All the care in the world, and it will make no difference; it will look like carelessness.

  Her daughter is in hospital, all ready, settled into a pastel pink and turquoise room, her clothes packed away, her mind prepared, that is, its acceptance held at a fragile point of balance by great will power, when suddenly the anaesthetist, a cardiac anaesthetist, notices she is taking aspirin to thin her blood, prevent clotting. She could bleed to death. Notices? Surely it is one of the first things that everyone involved should have paid attention to. The first question to ask.

  She has to go home and wait until her blood is rid of it. The terror of it will have to be faced all over again. Of doctors saying, You know that this is risky, don’t you. It’s dangerous. We can’t be certain nothing will go wrong. Yes of course she knows the risks, she does not need to have them rehearsed for her.

  As the surgeon said to Geoffrey when he was taking out some wisdom teeth, under a general anaesthetic. There is the possibility of paralysis on one side of your face. Of destroying nerves so you won’t be able to taste things any more. Of something going wrong with your tongue. And then, of course, there’s death.

  And so her daughter has to go home, and contain her fear for . . . well, as long as it takes.

  That isn’t the universe being hostile, that’s doctors making a monumental stuff-up, her lover says.

  Her friend Polly comes in after work to drink wine with her. Clare has lit the fire. The central heating is perfectly efficient, but the fire is a pleasure. And one of those things Clare is proud of herself for managing. In Geoffrey’s last year they didn’t often have fires, because it was too much effort for him to come and sit in front of them. Now she brings in wood and collects fallen twigs from the oak trees for kindling. She makes a neat fire. When her son comes to visit he takes over this job. When she is critical of his fire-making (fires are a patriarchal activity, he says; if this were Bosnia he’d be the head of the family, she’d have to do what he tells her) he calls her a fire fascist. These wintry evenings (at a time that would still be the afternoon in the summer) she sits beside her fire and reads Dante. Slowly, paying attention, making notes. She is much taken by the lines:

  Then he turned round

  And seemed like one of those who over the flat

  And open course in the fields beside Verona

  Run for the green cloth; and he seemed at that

  Not like a loser, but the winning runner.

  She wonders why she likes them so much. There is a particular melancholic cadence to them, and a kind of mysterious triumph as well. And that last line of the canto, it falls very beautifully, its shape just right. It’s the rhythm, perhaps, here it works especially well, as Sayers’ attempts at translating into terza rima don’t always. And maybe there’s the idea of seeming not a loser, but the winning runner. Though of course however beautiful the lines he is a loser, he’s in hell; he’s Brunetto Latini, once Dante’s neighbour, a man who taught him a lot. He’s here because he was a sodomite. Dante asks him to sit down and talk to him, but he can’t: Should one of our lot rest one second, a hundred years must he lie low, which means that he has to let the flames consume him, he isn’t allowed to beat them off. His face is scorched, his skin is shrivelled, his face scarred.

  As well as being a sodomite, a man of perverse vice, he was worldly and did not care for the soul. That’s not helping him here. He asks Dante to keep his Thesaurus, his Treasure Book, handy, because he is still alive in that.

  Brunetto these days is the name of a restaurant in the next suburb. With an apostrophe s.

  Polly taps on the glass, Clare has left the curtains open over the french windows so the fire will welcome her as she comes up the path. She looks up and sees Polly’s laughing face, her hair turned into a halo by the misty streetlight, that round head of curls that used to be fair and is now silvery.

  Your hair’s a silver-gilt halo, says Clare.

  Well, I am a saint, of course, says Polly.

  With a tarnished halo, says Clare.

  What a picture, Polly says, the fire, the yellow chair, the book. She sits in the other yellow chair; in her red dress she looks like a parrot tulip.

  Dante, what’s more, says Clare, and Polly hoots. It’s a construct, she says.

  My life is a construct, says Clare. She gets a bottle of sauvignon blanc, some olives, and a bowl of hoummos with little toasts. She loves these visits of Polly’s; the delight of them sits happily within her grief. Polly shares her enthusiasm for curious facts, sometimes of a theological nature. Ever since they were blue-stockingy girls living in a university hall of residence with rather risible Oxbridgean pretensions.

  Why are you reading Dante, asks Polly.

  Ah, if Clare were to tell her.

  Do you know, she says, that the usurers and the sodomites are paired in hell?

  No. There must be a good reason?

  Because the sodomites make sterile that which should be fertile, and the usurers make fertile that which by nature should be sterile. Namely, of course, money.

  Blimey, says Polly. Come to think of it, usury’s interesting stuff. It’s one sin that doesn’t exist any more. Nobody can possibly be blamed for being a usurer any more. Well, not unless they’re loan sharks, but that’s a different category.

  Yes, that’s greed and extortion and menaces and stuff. But ordinary grasping bank-type usury is eminently respectable. We should all be merchant bankers.

  Ha, says Polly, taking a mouthful. Good wine.

  It would be better if I were a merchant banker.

  Funny to think of sins going in and out of fashion.

  Some never do.

  (Polly doesn’t know about the lover. Clare thinks she doesn’t. And now he isn’t any more she need never find out.)

  She tells her of her thoughts about the benign or hostile universe. When Geoffrey was dying she talked to Polly about life after death. They both agreed that they didn’t know but didn’t believe in simple absolute snuffing out.

  I think it’s something to do with being good girls, good women, says Clare. We can’t believe that it’s not of value. That there aren’t any rewards.

  We can’t help believing that somewhere out there are the scales, says Polly.

  Clare is much taken with this image. Over the years they’ve sent one another photographs from Romanesque tympani and column capitals of St Michael weighing souls, on balances like those they learned to use in school science, and devils pitchforking the heavy ones (how heavy is heavy?) into the gaping maws of hell. Quite literally sometimes, huge open mouths with jagged teeth.

  And we continue to live as though the scales are within our experience, says Polly.
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br />   It’s an Egyptian idea too, says Clare. Wasn’t it Anubis who weighed the souls of the dead? Against feathers, wasn’t it?

  When she tells her lover, her former lover, about the scales he says, Yes, of course, there have to be scales. It’s what you weigh in them that matters. And what you weigh it against.

  You mean moral behaviour, choosing what is moral for you.

  Yes. Is it truth, or goodness. But how do we know what they are? You know, I liked it when you could believe in God. You knew where you were. You had faith . . .

  Couldn’t you choose to believe in God again?

  He doesn’t let me. Faith is a supernatural gift from God which enables us to believe without doubting what God has revealed.

  Is that the catechism?

  Of course. And God does not give me his supernatural gift of faith. I can’t do anything about that.

  God is dead, so we must invent ourselves.

  Sartre again.

  He and Polly have both been Catholics. Polly still is. But even that isn’t simple any more.

  Clare says to Polly, Why are all the women we know so full of pain?

  They have been to a reading, of some short stories, and there was such pain in them the audience was flabbergasted. Immensely excited, because they were so good, the pain had been turned into such a work of art that the listeners felt its wounds, the words were so exact, very simple and so much stronger than their lightness would have suggested. Load-bearing words, somebody called them. And they make you feel exactly what load it is they are bearing. Clare looked out at the room from the booth where she was sitting. In that slice of it she could see five widows, three women whose husbands had left them for other women, usually younger, two whose husbands had simply left them, two whose husbands had come to the conclusion that they were gay. Another whose lover had gone back to his frightful wife. She could see two actual couples, men and women together, but she didn’t know them. And a number of lesbian partnerships, and who knows what sorrow had to be lived through before this safety was reached.

  Clare tells her former lover’s wife that she is one of the few women she knows who are not full of pain. She’s had a shock, she’s been furiously angry, but she has recovered her happiness.

  They were sitting by a fire in a clubby sort of bar at the Hyatt drinking glasses of white wine. An expensive act. But necessary.

  I would have coped, she said. I’d have chucked him out and not given him a second thought. I’d have thrown myself into my career, worked hard, moved up, I’d have taken control of my life and become a successful woman and enjoyed life.

  We are all that, said Clare. We all do that. Look at me, I zip through the days, I have fun, I have a great time with my friends, my work goes well, I’ve got plenty of it, I love my house and my children and my way of life. All of this happens, it happens to all of the women I am thinking of, we are all successful and busy and fulfilled. And deep inside, full of pain. I mean, she goes on, not bowed down, lugubrious, lachrymose, groaning . . . She is about to say, like one of Dante’s damned souls drifting and running, eternally tormented, but decides this isn’t a good image. Like, like Niobe, all tears, she finishes.

  Well, I suppose you might think of Gertrude. Remember? Or ere those shoes were old that she wore to her husband’s funeral, there she is jumping into bed with the next one, betraying the old one.

  Clare remembers what a quick ear her friend always had for a quotation.

  O, most wicked speed, to post

  With such dexterity to incestuous sheets.

  she finishes. I’ve been a lot of things, but not incestuous. The thing about quoting the classics, she says, is that you can always find something to fit. More or less. You may have to chop off its feet or stretch it on a rack, but there’s precedent for that too.

  Beds, and lying in them. Hah.

  I always wondered why if you fell into the hands of Procrustes you couldn’t just curl up, says Clare.

  That would make you into one of those people who can’t lie straight in bed.

  Isn’t lying always crooked?

  They are at their old games. Though now the edge of the fun is sharper. It wounds like a paper cut, drawing little blood, not very visible, but stinging for a long time.

  What’s happened to our generation, she asks Polly, pouring more of the modest sauvignon blanc into her glass. I don’t think our mothers were unhappy at our age. Were they?

  Probably, in different ways. They just got on with it. They couldn’t change anything, so they made the best of it.

  I think my parents were happy. They loved each other. Were a comfort.

  Some people are lucky. Still are.

  Another time is made for the operation. Her daughter closes down her life again, wrapping herself away from any outside contact. The winter is cold. Her chest was clear, let’s keep it that way.

  Clare drives her into the hospital, drops her at the door, parks the car. The room is another of the pink and blue and pale turquoise pretty. Safe and dull. Far too hot. A view of cold suburbs against the hill doesn’t cool it down. Neither Clare nor her daughter likes hospitals.

  Early in the year her daughter spent five days in a Melbourne hospital, having tests. Overdue, these, but life stopped when Geoffrey was ill. She was put in a kind of holding ward, no television or phones, no comfort, there were simply beds for people passing through on their way to surgery. It was the only ward they could find space for her. If you think the set-up stinks, said a nurse, write to the minister. Every night there was a different person in the two-bed ward, being prepared for an operation the next day. Usually a man. Even the usual segregations didn’t apply. Early on there was a Greek man, who spoke no English; he was very hairy, and a Jehovah’s Witness. All through the day registrars and residents came in and shouted at him: You don’t want any blood? No blood? What if something goes wrong? You might need blood. Are you sure you don’t want any blood?

  The man looked rather wild-eyed. No blood, he said. When he first came in his adult daughters explained in clear English to the admitting doctor that he was a Jehovah’s Witness and that it was against his religion to have a blood transfusion. That doctor wrote it down. So why do they have to keep coming and shouting at the bewildered man, Are you sure you don’t want any blood? You don’t want any blood? What if something goes wrong?

  Clare hadn’t come across a Greek Jehovah’s Witness before.

  He’s having bypass surgery. That means his chest has to be shaved. It is thick with long black stiffly curling hairs. So is his back. That has to be shaved too. And his arms. And his legs. They are not sure whether they will take the veins for the bypass out of his arms or his legs. His groin must be cleared too. It takes a long time, scraping away, to do all this shaving.

  Afterwards, the hair drifts in large clumps over the floor. For days. The room is cleaned every day, a languid woman comes in with a mop, then a duster. So how is it that it happens that the hair runs around for days? Even so desultory as the mopping seems. The hair clumps together with the other dust in the room. The slut’s wool. Clare sitting reading by the bed, overwhelmed by that paradoxical mixture of boredom and fear that hospitals and wars engender, sees out of the corner of her eyes a large black hairy creature running out from under the bed. A rat! No. A clump of hair. The Greek man goes, presumably to a successful operation and a new life, another man and then another takes his place, but still the hairy rats run round the linoleum floor.

  In this pink and blue room, with its carpet and television set and private if surgical bathroom, Clare unpacks her daughter’s things into drawers and wardrobe. Her daughter bends over and peers under the bed.

  What are you looking for?

  Just checking. To see if there’s any hair running around.

  Ah, yes. She is her father’s daughter. Humour as black and hairy as the rats it conjures up. Clare laughs and laughs, and maybe it is the laughing that fills her eyes with tears.

  Not like a loser, but the w
inning runner. Why do those words keep saying themselves in her head?

  a good death

  CLARE WONDERS IF SHE SHOULD stop writing about Geoffrey for a bit. Write a story for its own sake. She feels like some simple action. Adventure. Murder. An opening line pops into her head one morning when she isn’t getting up, is dreaming herself into words. Carl decided to kill his wife because he couldn’t bear to hurt her. She writes it down, and later in the day, filling in time in a cafe, she scribbles away at it. Using the backs of some heavy cream paper flyers left on the counter, advertising a cathedral concert of Monteverdi’s Vespers.

  a good death: a short story

  Carl decided to kill his wife because he couldn’t bear to hurt her. He loved her dearly and couldn’t bear to cause her the pain he knew would result from his actions. He did love her, very much, and had for a long time, in different ways, from when she was a beautiful sixteen-year-old. But he did not want to live with her any longer, and he knew that would cause her more anguish than he could stand.

  But if she died quickly, unknowingly, painlessly, then he could grieve and after a decent interval go and live with the woman he was in love with. It was only necessary to find a good manner of death, something comfortable for her, and also not one that he could be blamed for. He didn’t want to get caught and have to spend years in gaol. It wasn’t that he was all that unhappy with his wife, he just wasn’t deliriously happy as he was with his lover, so he’d be better off with things as they were than being in prison for the rest of his life. If he told his wife he wanted to go and live with his lover . . . well, he couldn’t quite imagine what would happen. Her heart would be broken, she would be full of rage, she would believe he had destroyed her life. She might even think of suicide.

  He didn’t plan to tell his lover about his plans to kill his wife. She wouldn’t approve, might think it was a callous thing to do, when what he was being was tender-hearted. Not wanting to hurt. The other thing was, he knew it would be safer if no one else knew. He trusted his lover, of course, with his life he would have, certainly with his happiness. But he also knew that the best way to get somebody to keep a secret is not to tell it to them.