Beth was a glorious foreign country. He loved lying with her in the pale night of her bedroom, he loved the weight of her against him, the heat of her skin, her breath on his neck. He loved her hand on his belly, her body snuggled into his back. In the dark, in bed, they talked very little; it was the physical presence of the other they both desired and they grabbed it whole-heartedly. And he came to realise how completely he had accommodated the deficits in his life. His was a marriage in which unhappiness had become so routine he’d ceased to notice it.
There was a book in the stack on Scott’s side of the bed that he’d heard of but never read. Called The Captive Mind, it was a long essay by the Polish poet Milosz exploring how it could happen that Stalinism had captured the minds of so many. He asked to borrow it, and when Beth hesitated – the book bore her husband’s annotations, she said – he assured her he would treat it like a rare manuscript and return it that evening.
He showered at her place and before it became too hot walked to one of the local cafés with a shaded courtyard. There he settled Addie with a bone and himself to Milosz’s essay.
That the book bore Scott’s annotations was an understatement. Hardly a page had escaped comment. More in keeping with diary entries than a dialogue with the book – there were even references to ‘B’ – Scott’s marginalia were annoying and distracting. Elliot pushed himself through the early pages, but as he was pulled into the current of the book, so the annotations ceased to intrude. Within thirty minutes Scott’s jottings may as well have become invisible for all he noticed them.
How can people believe they are blessed with the most humane system in the world when they live in fear of betrayal by neighbours, work-mates, even family, Milosz asks. How can they believe theirs is the most benevolent of systems when their own speech or actions or even their thoughts can have them thrown into prison? How can they believe theirs is the fairest system, when ordinary people are forced to manage without sufficient food, heat and other basics? The propaganda says they enjoy the best of lives, their reality is all about fear and deprivation. What twist of mind and heart can make people deny their own perceptions, their own reason?
Over the next several hours he read The Captive Mind. He read slowly, lifting his gaze every so often to reflect on a point or check on Addie. Walking back to the van later in the day he was filled with the book. How easily is the mind captured. Zoe looks at Ramsay and she sees Switzerland. Everyone else looks at Ramsay and sees a desert. And what about him? Did he, Elliot Wood, really love his wife? The very question distressed him. Or had he merely developed the habit of loving? (That phrase, the title of a short story by Doris Lessing, only now did he really understand it.) What indeed was there to love? Zoe was courteous but cold. She had a talent for domesticity, but it was a job not a gift. Yet when he tried to imagine life without her, he could not, nor did he want to. Zoe might well be his habit of loving, but it was a habit he didn’t want to relinquish. What he wanted was for her and their marriage to be different.
Chapter 13. The Hour of Lead
1.
Zoe is locked in a desultory pacing around Ramsay’s garden. The late sun casts dreary shadows across the dusty grass, the air is yellowish and worn. It feels like a lifetime since George died. With his passing, Zoe had hoped for change, some vague yet brilliant replacement of old discontents. And while she hasn’t yet buried the future of her dreams, she knows she will have to. Ramsay has left her no other choice.
Inside the house he is with a woman he calls Mrs Monday.
It was to have been a perfect day, a mid-term school break and she and Ramsay were to spend it together. Such a happy prospect had staunched her recent dissatisfactions, so when she arrived around midday the world was still spinning on its axis and she was still locked in fantasyland. A mere six hours ago she had breezed into the house with sandwiches for lunch and a range of suggestions for their afternoon together.
‘We’ll need to be back by five,’ Ramsay had said. ‘In time for Mrs Monday.’
‘Mrs Monday?’
Ramsay had laughed. ‘George named her. Her real name’s Vera, but between ourselves, George and me, we always referred to her as Mrs Monday. Monday’s her day, she always comes on Monday.’
Which explains why Zoe hasn’t met her. The school string orchestra practises on Monday afternoons and she never arrives at Ramsay’s before six. Zoe assumes this woman is a not particularly efficient cleaning lady given the state of the house, or an odd-jobbing person, someone who does a bit of gardening and sewing, some minor repairs.
She reassures him they’ll be back in time, but for now they have several hours together. She proposes a visit to the beach, the latest exhibition at the National Gallery, a drive to the berry farm for fresh strawberries. Ramsay is interested in none of these. She suggests the zoo, Healesville Sanctuary, the Lost Dogs’ Home. He rejects each in turn. She tries a couple more suggestions – a walk in the Dandenong Ranges, a visit to the gold museum – before giving up. And now he leaps in as if he has just been waiting for her to exhaust her ideas: he knows exactly what he wants to do.
‘It’s an exhibition, Zoe. A model world expo with a huge display of accurately scaled models of the world’s major cities. I read about it online. It looks fantastic.’
He says he’ll eat his lunch in the car, he doesn’t consider how she is to eat hers, but that’s Ramsay in a state of excitement, childlike excitement. And while it has its downside, it’s invigorating to see a grown man flaunting what most adults so carelessly discard.
An hour later they are standing in the main hall of the Royal Exhibition Building. In front of them stretch long rows partitioned into cubicles, each space of a few square metres displaying a city or landscape recreated in miniature. This is not an exhibition Zoe would choose to visit, but now she’s here she is curious to see these tiny portrayals of well-known places. There’s something fascinating about a person or an object wrenched out of its normal proportions: the gargantuan peach in America’s peach state of Georgia; the giants and dwarfs photographed by Diane Arbus; the giant- and dwarf-sized people you see in the normal run of your everyday life; even that old film with Lily Tomlin, The Incredible Shrinking Woman. Something about this sort of aberration that demands to be stared at, but too often in the real world you can’t for fear of giving offence.
Ramsay is eager to begin. He pauses just a moment in the entrance before crossing to a display at the top of one of the long rows; the sign reads Holland. There’s a crowd in this part of the hall and Zoe’s view is momentarily obstructed; when Ramsay is again visible he is crouched in front of the miniature Holland. How quickly he slips from the world at large, Zoe is thinking, and how much she would like to squat alongside him, loop her arm through his, be with him in his absorption – like when they used to play music together. But she knows it won’t happen: he’d shrug her off, he wouldn’t even notice it was her. She collects her disappointment, turns away from him and wanders down a different aisle.
Ramsay loves this Holland. Dominating the scene are the tulips, broad stripes of red and yellow and orange, with a tiny turning windmill at the rear. In the channels between the rows are miniature men with spades, and women in weird white bonnets carrying baskets and secateurs. Each figure is wearing wooden clogs smaller than a peanut. Over to one side is a cart already laden with pails of flowers. Dotted among the fields are cottages and small villages, vegetable gardens and farm animals, and beyond the fields the great dykes holding back the sea. The scene is exactly like the coloured plates of Holland in a picture book he had as a child.
He would like to linger, but with so many more places to see, he makes himself move to the next display. He thought it might be Amsterdam but he finds himself staring at Manhattan. It’s an odd perspective: rather than looking northwards from where the Twin Towers used to be, Manhattan has been tipped on its side – clearly the cubicles come in a standard size. Briefly he is disoriented (if this were real he’d be standing in the East
River) but quickly he rights himself. Brooklyn is part of the display, but without any distinguishing features it’s just an excuse to include the Brooklyn Bridge; the other boroughs have been omitted altogether. And suddenly he recalls: New York was originally New Amsterdam, so it makes sense to place it alongside Holland.
He wants to find the building where he lived on the Upper West Side, he wants to find the Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall too, but there are three boys blocking his view. He moves forward, stands far too close. The boys look at him, they look at each other. They don’t budge. Another step and his arm brushes against one of them.
The boy glares at him, shoves him with an elbow.
Ramsay moves even closer.
‘Get away from me, you fucker.’ The boy sounds more threatening than he looks.
Ramsay makes no response. He certainly doesn’t move.
The boy gathers his mates. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here.’ As he pushes past Ramsay he hisses, ‘Fucking perv.’
Ramsay now has the view he wants. Again he squats down. And there it is, up near 87th and West End Avenue, his apartment building, the actual building. And twenty-five blocks south, the Lincoln Center with the new forecourt and a working fountain. He peers closer, yes, real water. And real water in the Hudson too. And the Cloisters, they’ve included the Cloisters the mock castle affair at the northern tip of Manhattan, and all the subway stations too. And there’s his local, the #1, with a replica train on the above-ground section.
He jumps to his feet. They’ve made a mistake: they’ve got the train emerging at 112th but it doesn’t surface until 116th. And it returns underground at 135th, but on this model it stays above ground all the way to the Bronx. There’s been a mistake. He has to tell someone. He looks around, hails an official.
‘There’s a mistake,’ he says pointing to the display. ‘Over there, with the subway.’ He’s speaking far too quickly.
The official is not in the least concerned. ‘There’s a mistake in Santiago, too. That’s where I come from. And I expect there are mistakes in Athens and London, in all the places.’ He bends his head towards Ramsay and lowers his voice. ‘Confidentially, I think it’s bloody amazing they got so much of it right.’
Ramsay had been ready to quit the exhibition, but he realises the man makes a fair point. He’d prefer one hundred per cent accuracy, but ninety-nine per cent, he decides, is acceptable. He thanks the official, he calms himself down, he leaves New York and passes on to Ho Chi Minh City. He’s never been there, but seeing it laid out before him, he thinks he’d like it. There’s a pleasing jumble about the place. The roads are clogged with cars and bikes, the narrower streets and alleys are teeming with people and street stalls. And such a variety of buildings: French colonial blocks that wouldn’t be out of place in Paris, a patchwork of bright terracotta-tiled roofs, colourful exotic temples and quite a few skyscrapers too. The city really does appeal. He’d ride a bike everywhere, a week’s holiday, maybe longer, although without George how to manage it? Without George, and he shakes the thought from his mind: he lives without George every minute of the day, he needs a break, he wants to enjoy himself, and moves to the next cubicle.
It’s London, one of his favourite cities. ‘One of everyone’s favourite cities,’ George used to say.
He inspects the display, ticking off the major landmarks – Trafalgar Square, Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament, St. Paul’s. There are clusters of heavy grey buildings heaped between narrow streets, and stamp-sized neighbourhood squares, and double-decker buses and black London cabs, and a mass of tiny figures on the footpaths of Oxford and Regent streets. The green patches of Hyde Park and Regent’s Park look to be made of real grass; the trees seem to be fashioned from real plant material, the ducks on the ponds have real feathers. London, unlike New York, is perfect. There are people riding in Rotten Row. He’s never been on a horse; he’s admired them and petted them, but now it occurs to him he’d like to ride one. George would have forbidden it as too dangerous, but a new experience might help him out of this terrible malaise. He’ll ask Zoe to organise it for him, she’s good at practical tasks and she wants to help. Perhaps she could look into Ho Chi Minh City as well.
He moves on to the next display, it is the huge bulk of Antarctica. He leans in closer, a chill nips his face: this Antarctica is constructed from real ice. Mountains of snow and rock plunge to the water, glaciers fill the spaces between the peaks and slide into the sea. Glistening wetly on the lower reaches of the land are ice sculptures with intricate peepholes and bulging curves. He inhales the crisp air. With its clarity and purity this landscape reminds him of Bach.
The water itself is filled with floating ice. In some places the ice looks like thick white marble, in others it looks as perilous as porcelain. And there are icebergs too, magnificent, unearthly structures. One looks like a miniature white Uluru. The water, the icebergs, the cliffs of ice scored with deep cracks, the bulky white mountains create a misty-magical atmosphere, and Ramsay imagines himself standing on the ice surrounded by the white mountains and the frozen sea, wrapped in the cold and shuffling silence. All the angry anxious wind has left him; he feels weightless and at ease.
It is so hard to leave Antarctica but he must see more of these wonderful places. He passes on to Rome, then Hawaii, to the Serengeti, to Casablanca and Edinburgh, Rio, Toronto and Paris; he enters each of these dioramas as if it is the only place in the world, and when he feels a hand on his arm he shoves it off. Don’t disturb me, leave me alone. And then he sees it is Zoe and mumbles an apology.
‘It’s time,’ she is saying. ‘If you want to be home by five we’ll need to leave.’
Zoe watches him surface.
‘We can come back again,’ she says. But she knows the moment of enchantment will have passed. For both of them.
They are caught in the early peak-hour traffic and when they arrive home, Mrs Monday – Vera – is seated at the kitchen table with a cup of tea. There’s no sign of washing or ironing, no cleaning has been done or none that Zoe can see. Vera stands up, gives Ramsay a quick embrace.
‘How are you travelling?’ she asks him.
He says he’s fine, better now she’s here.
Vera looks at Zoe. ‘He’s a man of routine is this one.’
Vera makes fresh tea and the three of them sit around the table. It’s clear that Vera has never heard of Zoe for she asks how long she has known Ramsay. With Zoe’s ‘Practically my entire life’, Vera laughs and says ‘a little longer than me – although I’m coming up for seventeen years.’
It emerges she is a book-keeper who still works part-time for the dental-supply company that once employed George, and suddenly Zoe realises how she fits into Ramsay’s life: she does his accounts.
After fifteen or twenty minutes Vera checks her watch and stands up. She touches Ramsay on the shoulder. ‘We’d better get started.’
‘Let me know if I can bring you anything,’ Zoe says, as Ramsay pushes back his chair. ‘More tea. A cold drink. Just give a yell.’
‘We won’t be long,’ Ramsay says, before turning away.
Zoe does not grasp what is about to happen. Not when Vera leaves the kitchen, nor when Ramsay follows her. Not even when they enter Ramsay’s bedroom together. If Zoe’d had any idea she would not have walked up the hallway to use the bathroom before she started the dinner, she would not have heard them together in Ramsay’s room, seen them too, through the door left slightly ajar, on Ramsay’s bed – she couldn’t believe she counted so little they’d not even bothered to shut the door. She tiptoes back down the hall and then she runs, through the kitchen and laundry and out to the garden. She’s choking, she feels sick, she cannot believe that what is happening is truly happening.
Seventeen years of Mrs Monday and just another facet of Ramsay’s ordered life. Over and over again Ramsay has said how George looked after everything. Everything. Zoe can’t think, doesn’t want to think, lights a cigarette, paces the garden, should get
in the car and drive away, can’t believe it, a mistake, surely a mistake. Ten minutes later with a fresh cigarette and she is still pacing the garden. She has no idea what to say to Ramsay when Mrs Monday leaves.
But what is there to say? What could possibly be said now? How much more humiliation can she bring upon herself?
Go, she tells herself.
At last a clear and sensible voice.
Go. Go now.
She slips back into the house and collects her bag and keys. She scribbles a note for Ramsay – Something’s come up at home. There’s a lasagne defrosting on the sink. All you need do is heat it in the microwave – and leaves the house, while Mrs Monday attends to Ramsay, as she has for seventeen years.
2.
Callum was sitting on his bed with legs outstretched, his back against the wall. He was threaded to his phone, his head was nodding to music and he was tapping away on his laptop. He neither saw Hayley standing in the doorway, nor heard her call his name. She walked towards the bed – still no awareness – and stood in front of him waving her arms and making faces. At last he looked up with that glazed expression of someone whose gaze has been too long on the screen – a dope-face, her father called it, because it reminded him of people who were stoned.
The Memory Trap Page 25
