The Tiger in the Tiger Pit Read online

  THE TIGER IN THE TIGER PIT

  “An intense psychological drama which captures the tensions and passions of three generations.”

  Margaret Drabble

  “A writer of remarkable talent who writes about family relationships with rare insight and compassion.”

  Publishers Weekly

  “One of the most elegant prose styles in the business.”

  John Nicolson, The Times

  “The Tiger in the Tiger Pit is an exciting work which holds the promise of greatness. The word is not to be used casually. Turner Hospital knows more than a little about human depths, and is not afraid to sound them.”

  Patricia Morley, Ottawa Citizen

  “Hospital’s first novel, The Ivory Swing, was nominated for the Booker Prize. With the release of this second novel, she fully establishes herself as a writer of remarkable talent … Hospital’s writing teems with rich, sensual metaphors … One feels the rush of life in her pages, ‘the tide of chaos’ it sometimes causes, the strong ties of family, and the awesome, redeeming power of love. Hospital is a writer of infinite promise.”

  Don Matthews, Pittsburgh Magazine

  “What makes this compulsively readable novel superior to others of the type is the wide intellectual context, the poetry of much of the description, and the luminescence of the writing.”

  Ken Goodwin, Courier-Mail

  “The Tiger in the Tiger Pit is a riveting tale, leading to a superb conclusion. It is a very clever piece of writing.”

  Sunday Sun

  “A beautifully constructed book.”

  Katharine England, Adelaide Advertiser

  “This striking novel is a resonant, ultimately hopeful exploration of the melancholy way that familial love can constrict even as it sustains.”

  American Library Association Booklist

  “An author to keep track of… Its accessible story and metaphorical basis combine the advantages of both popular and serious fiction.”

  Caryn James, Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Hospital does some splendid things with words. Her images are piled upon each other lavishly, and some are startingly beautiful. Her description of Australia is seductive, full of sunlight and ripe fruit.”

  Barbara Black, Montreal Gazette

  THE TIGER IN THE TIGER PIT

  Janette Turner Hospital was born in Melbourne in 1942, but her family moved to Brisbane when she was seven years old. She has taught in Queensland high schools, and in universities in Australia, Canada, USA, England and Europe. Her short stories and her novels have won a number of international awards, and she is published in ten languages. In Australia her novels have been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin, the Banjo, the Townsville Foundation for Literature and the Adelaide Festival National Fiction Awards. The Tiger in the Tiger Pit was listed in Critics’ Choice columns in The Times (London), the Los Angeles Times, Pittsburgh Magazine and Vanity Fair. In 1999, she was invited by the University of South Carolina to be the successor to the late James Dickey, and she now holds a permanent position there as Professor and Distinguished Writer m Residence.

  Other books by

  Janette Turner Hospital

  Novels

  The Ivory Swing

  Borderline

  Charades

  The Last Magician Oyster

  Due Preparations for the Plague

  Short Stories

  Dislocations

  Isobars

  Collected Stories

  North of Nowhere, South of Loss

  The tiger in the tiger-pit

  Is not more irritable than I.

  The whipping tail is not more still

  Than when I smell the enemy

  Writhing in the essential blood

  Or dangling from the friendly tree.

  When I lay bare the tooth of wit

  The hissing over the archèd tongue

  Is more affectionate than hate,

  More bitter than the love of youth,

  And inaccessible by the young.

  Reflected from my golden eye

  The dullard knows that he is mad.

  Tell me if I am not glad!

  “Lines for an Old Man”

  by T. S. Eliot

  In the juvescence of the year

  Came Christ the tiger

  From “Gerontion”

  by T. S. Eliot

  CONTENTS

  Chapter I – Edward

  Chapter II – Elizabeth

  Chapter III – Emily

  Chapter IV – Edward

  Chapter V – Adam

  Chapter VI – Elizabeth

  Chapter VII – Edward

  Chapter VIII – Victoria

  Chapter IX – Elizabeth

  Chapter X – Edward

  Chapter XI – Jason

  Chapter XII – Elizabeth

  Chapter XIII – Edward

  Chapter XIV – Elizabeth

  Chapter XV – Converging

  Chapter XVI – Edward

  Chapter XVII – Elizabeth

  Chapter XVIII – In Central Park

  Chapter XIX – Adam

  Chapter XX – Prelude

  Chapter XXI – The Tiger Pit

  Chapter XXII – Coda

  Chapter XXIII – Elizabeth

  I Edward

  Anger’s my meat, I’ll sup upon myself …

  Lately lines from Coriolanus and Tim on of Athens and Macbeth, the angry plays, had begun to surface in his mind like breath-starved divers rocketing up for air. And all his life he had been such a courteous and correct gentleman, right up until his seventieth birthday a little over three years ago when nothing remarkable had happened to make him so suddenly cantankerous — unless he counted a few discordant shrieks of mortality from his heart and the news about Adam who was, no doubt, a very ordinary boy. And perhaps he should count the occasional random reappearances in dreams of a woman who was not at all ordinary, whose face launched in him a thousand illicit memories and regrets.

  O! full of scorpions is my mind …

  These were his inspirational thoughts, soothing as whiskey Ah yes, there had been a time when he used to indulge in classroom declamations of the more extravagant lines — Mark Antonys oration, Romeo s lament over Juliet in the crypt, Hamlet’s anguish, that sort of thing — with the inevitable snickers from one or two in the class but with most of the children hooked, their eyes alight with theatre magic. A long time ago, all that.

  He wondered if Emily would bring Adam to see him on Sunday. How old would the child be now? Eight. He had an eight-year-old grandson whom he had never seen, of whose existence he had been unaware until three years ago. He could feel the rage of a lifetime rising in him like a thrombosis swelling and flowering and unfolding its clotted petals.

  Hence, rotten thing, or I shall shake thy bones out of thy garments!

  He recited that inwardly as his brooding eyes looked out on yet another morning arrogant with early summer. And as though on cue, Bessie moaned a little with the abrasiveness of waking, rolled her old bones out of bed, and shuffled slowly downstairs to make coffee. He was elated, his blood unknotted itself, he felt gifted with arcane potency.

  He kicked back the bedding, snarling at his legs so obscenely shrunken and gnarled. There were veins branching like deformed walnut trees. Iago! he hissed. He had begun to hold insulting conversations with his body since it had chosen to go its own defiant way. Just as his children had done. He was a well-mocked man.

  With the help of his canes, he heaved himself across to his chair by the window. The pacemaker went berserk and he thumped the tin box in his chest with contempt. There was something pleasurable about the way it — Iago, his body
—winced.

  Bessie kept the row of little bottles on the windowsill and he shook from them, one by one, his daily dose. A red tablet, a yellow tablet, a capsule full of multicoloured dots. For his heart, for his liver, for God knew what. Iago-fodder.

  With his good eye he took a careful sighting and flicked them one by one through the rip in the screen. His flicking finger was as keen as it had been sixty years ago when he could win every marble in the ring. And then of course he used to give them all back, every last little coloured glass ball, to the kids who looked crestfallen or pathetic. Or who looked as if they might tell. Oh he was a real Robin Hood, scared to death of not being good. His troubles had started early. By the tender age of ten he had already been hopelessly — and fearfully — committed to a life of moral rectitude.

  If he missed the jagged tear in the screen and hit the mesh, the tablets would bounce back like concussed athletes off a tram-poline. He punished himself by eating them. Though sometimes he cheated by enlarging the hole and trying again. He aimed for the forsythia or the lilacs that stretched in a shaggy undisciplined curve all the way to the old gazebo. He had to concede that the tablets were beneficial. His morale was certainly up at medication time, his energy level was up. He had some hope of poisoning the bushes by the end of the growing season. The lilacs in particular enraged him, all that exhibitionistic flamboyance. They reminded him of his son, Jason, and of his younger daughter, Emily.

  He watched a translucent cluster of pale mauve blossoms shudder from the impact of a crimson pellet. In a matter of days, he consoled himself, the lilacs would be nothing but foliage and unsightly brown cones. But he, Edward Carpenter, retired school principal of Ashville, Massachusetts, would still be there. Endurance was everything.

  His wife came into the room with the breakfast tray. It seemed to him monstrous that Bessie, who had been sweet and stupid all her life, should be able to negotiate stairs alone.

  Caged! he thought with a fury that was no good at all for his heart. Caged. With a senile smiling keeper. At times he had to restrain himself from punching out the screen with his bare fists and catapulting his body over the sill for the sheer pleasure of unimpeded movement. It was a seductive ending: to lie broken-backed in the smashed lilacs, mouth full of warm June mud, taking a host of living things with him, vengeful as Samson.

  How delightfully embarrassing and humiliating it would be for Jason.

  Dr Jason Carpenter’s father passed away floridly and florally in the the town of Ashville where he had been school principal for far too many years, having overreached himself like an aging Icarus and fallen to earth at last. He requested that there be no flowers…

  “Have you taken your tablets, Edward?”

  He saw her lips moving. He hated the way she had begun to mumble to herself.

  “What? Speak up, Bessie! Damn it, woman, if you can climb stairs you can speak clearly.”

  “You’re not wearing your hearing aid,” she said mildly, pointing to it.

  So. He had forgotten again. Not that he would need it if she didn’t muffle up her words so wilfully.

  “If you would stop mumbling!” Shouting to give authority to a voice that reached his own ears on a fading note. He plugged himself in to the fractious world.

  She smiled. And why the ironic tug at the corners of her mouth? Arrogant woman, nursing a fantasy of superiority all these years. To think he had wasted a lifetime being faithful to her. What had it profited him, this careful shepherding of his soul? What had he gained? A whole world, a life irretrievably lost.

  What I want, he thought passionately, is a last Faustian toss with the Devil. My exemplary life in exchange for the freedom to sin. Seventy-three years of keeping the rules bartered for one fresh temptation and the strength to yield to it.

  Three children were rolling a rubber ball back and forth along his stretch of sidewalk while two mothers, their hands resting on occupied strollers, stood talking. The ball rolled on to his lawn and a little girl ran after it. Her laughter surrounded her like a cloud of bells. How beautiful children were, with their thistledown hair and their translucent skin. How he hated them. Perhaps he would even hate Adam whom he had vowed never to see. Surely Emily would bring the boy with her on Sunday. If Emily came at all. She must certainly realise that he had not meant … well, he had meant it at the time, the night he had raged in New York, but given half a chance he would not mean it. If she had any perception at all, she would realise that.

  If Emily did not bring Adam he thought that the pacemaker would not help much. He would be too proud to reproach or beg. His systems would simply shut down.

  Below him, the little girl had retrieved her ball but her attention had been caught by the gazebo, a domed octagon veiled in a tangle of honeysuckle. She climbed its rickety steps and stood on the bench that ran around the inside, her face peering out between swaying green tendrils.

  Edward leaned forward, his forehead pushing against the screen so that it bellied out like a spinnaker before the wind. He did not know if he was more shocked by this intrusion into his past (he saw Marta’s face, he saw Victoria’s face, staring at him from the same gazebo, the same honeysuckle), or more afraid that the child would fall through the rotting benchwood and injure herself.

  He thought of shouting harshly: Little girl! If you set foot in my gazebo again, I’ll cut off your legs!

  The words eddied up from childhood nightmares. From old Mrs Weston, neighbourhood Medusa. Off my grass, she would scream, or I’ll chop off your feet! You want to see my icebox full of legs?

  She had had a leading role in bad dreams through which he heaved himself on bloody stumps, yelling for help. There was his drunken father, floozy on arm, trying to shush him, an unsteady finger to lips.

  Hush, now, Edward. Don’t want to bring mother rushing out. Don’t want to upset her.

  But mother, a fluster of hardships, would fill the air with beating wings, shielding her eyes from the blood and from father’s woman. And always Mrs Weston, old witch, was there — leaning casually on her gory cleaver with a manic smile on her lips.

  He was terrified even to walk on her side of the block.

  To his relief the little girl emerged from the gazebo. He let her run, unharmed, back to her playmates.

  But his memory was full of Mrs Weston. Such potency she had. The most powerful person in the world, the most dangerously alive. A lifetime later he could still remember her name. It was a kind of immortality.

  The little girl was back in his garden, stepping on his lilies of the valley, foraging under forsythia boughs. He stared moodily at the mothers on the sidewalk. Listless figures, like colour photographs that have faded.

  Motherhood, he thought, is a hibernation from which most women never emerge. At least in his time that had been true. (In his time, indeed! Verbal litter. He did not easily forgive himself for succumbing to the clichés of the young, for this past tense view of himself.) Motherhood. He had lost Bessie in that steamy cave. Her bearings had been lost, she had never wakened again. It was supposed to be different now. So he heard. And so he read in the Sunday supplements. Women full of waking anger all over the place. Not that they were any easier to live with apparently. His daughters, for instance. One burned out and the other raging every which way like a forest fire.

  But the two mothers on the sidewalk, he could see, were classic throwbacks to the old dormant order, slow and heavy-hipped, the movements of their heads and eyes languid, their voices bored.

  And yet he had the power to energise them. He imagined how they would snap taut in outrage if he should hurl bolts of terror down upon the child.

  “Little girl!” he roared.

  The child looked up, momentarily startled. The slack bodies of the mothers tightened as though an inner spring were being wound. Squinting, the child located the face above and waved.

  “Hi, mister!” A smile of delighted complicity.

  Even children have changed, thought the old man with baffled anger. I
t is scarcely possible to frighten them any more. It was not even possible to maintain the desire. Their amiable trust was so subversive.

  “Can you find your ball?” he called gruffly.

  The mothers relaxed and turned away. Indifferent to sacrilege, the little girl frolicked in the gazebo again. Edward wished he had been vicious. He would never star in anyone’s dreams. He would never rampage, hugely alive with the threat of death, through the imaginations of the neighbourhood children. He was not made of indelible stuff.

  No one would mourn his passing extravagantly. Certainly not his own children. Not even Bessie for whom it would probably be conveniently restful. But he wanted to be mourned extravagantly. Things should have been otherwise. He should have been approaching death in grander style. There should have been a beautiful woman, desolate with impending loss, bending over him.

  There should have been Marta. He whispered it like an incantation: Marta, Marta.

  After turning seventy, one craved unremittingly for the roads not taken.

  He had been restrained, at the moment of choice, by the laws of moral propriety, by what is expected of a school principal, by Bessie’s need, by the claims of his eldest child, Victoria, by the approaching birth of his son, Jason. At thirty-three, he had done the right thing: he had chosen renunciation and responsibility. At seventy-three he wanted to retract. He did not forgive his family for keeping him righteous.

  For several years now he had been devouring everything he could find on the final years of Sartre and Picasso. Napoleon on Elba obsessed him. Also Boethius. And the antic aging of Salvador Dali. He was an expert on geriatric fame.

  In what objective sense, he asked himself, was this the dawning of his eighth decade different from their declining years? They had all dwindled and doddered into decrepitude, living in isolation, their past passions and achievements a wan glow in the debris of years. Or consider Dante, hallucinating in exile. Were they not alike, he and Dante, frantic dreamers of alternative autobiography?

  Suppose he simply equated himself with the significant livers by an act of will? It seemed to him expedient now to edit and revise his life, to compose a variant past, to approach death from a different and more bearable direction.