The Tiger in the Tiger Pit Read online

  When her mother’s letter arrived, London was pouting with summer rain and Emily was trying to open the French windows on to her garden. Not a simple task, everything wooden sulking from the damp. She applied her shoulder as a battering ram and went spinning suddenly on to the brick paving under the cherry tree.

  For these she had bought the house — for the French windows and the cherry tree. House! Box, her father would call it. Because of just such cramped tenements his forefathers had crossed the ocean to win for themselves the large Georgian houses and gazebo-enhanced grounds of western Massachusetts.

  It was true that in the sliver of town house to which she held title she could barely turn around in the kitchen, that the bathroom was primitive by transatlantic standards, that the water heater had to be coddled as one might an eccentric wealthy relative, and that an insatiable gas meter gorged itself on coins all winter, blackmailing her with the absence of heat. Nevertheless she had fallen in love — with a bay window in the living room, a trellis of roses, the French windows, the cherry tree, and a garrulous upstairs neighbour who called her “luv” and was a marvellous nanny to Adam.

  To see the cherry hung with snow, she murmured, reciting talismanic words (a prayer, perhaps, of appeasement), sitting under a drizzle of the last few wet petals and the finest powdering of rain, inhaling tranquillity, holding unease at bay for a few more minutes. She thought of Massachusetts. The gazebo would be riotous with honeysuckle now, and what would Mother be doing? She sighed, braced herself, opened the letter and read it.

  I won’t go, she thought immediately. I can’t. Not even for Mother.

  She wrapped her arms around the cherry tree and tapped her forehead softly and rhythmically against its trunk as though exorcising a constant pain. Family, family. One could never escape. There were no pockets in the world distant enough. One was hooked at birth and no matter how far the line was played out one could always be hauled in again. Because of course one always consented.

  I don’t want to apply unfair pressure, Emily and I’ll understand if you feel you can’t. But your father is frail and unhappy. I am having some trouble with stairs myself lately. We can’t last for ever.

  I know, I know. That’s unfair pressure. I confess: I’ll stoop to almost anything to see the whole family together for this occasion.

  Frail and unhappy. Your father is. Still is.

  A guilty ache in the gut. A swooning sense of hurtling toward the death of a parent. Daddy! (Something she could rarely say to him; usually “Father” in his presence.) An acute desire to put her arms around his wasted body knowing that in his presence it would probably be impossible, that she would probably become incapable of making, and he of receiving, such a gesture.

  Irritation, a merciful painkiller, coated her grief. Rage to the rescue. Why such short notice? Six days, for god’s sake. It was impossible. Had Mother waited, hoping against hope that Emily would think of it herself? Would just drop in for a spontaneous visit, crossing the Atlantic, parachuting from the bosom of Pan Am? Happy golden wedding anniversary, Mom and Dad!

  Absurd. I wasn’t around for the original occasion. Can I be expected to keep score for fifty years?

  But perhaps it was a way of providing her with an excuse for not going? (She had always thought of her mother as a co-con-spirator.) No. I’ll stoop to almost anything … More likely a device to give her no time to think of subterfuge.

  She wondered if Jason would go. I must phone him tonight, she thought, suddenly wanting to. Wanting quite intensely to see him again. Protector against bullies, binder of wounds. A year ago, when he came to London for that conference (The New Face of Freud? Psychoanalysis — Junger Than Ever? something like that; they had joked about it), how delightful it had been. A kind of intimate abandon as sometimes occurs after a few drinks between strangers who meet at a party, strangers who stumble into an agreeably vibrant comfort, happening upon esoteric but shared past experiences. And they were like strangers, new to each other after so many years. Foraging through childhood. Two archeologists unearthing long-forgotten clues to time past. Do you remember …? No, no that’s not how it happened … Don’t correct me, Emily, I’m five years older than you. But not necessarily wiser, Jason.

  Perhaps after all, Emily reflected, she should go.

  It would mean seeing Victoria again. Of course she should see Victoria again. It was quite appalling … how much time had gone by? Eight, nine years since she had seen her sister. Montreal, that frightful scene at the airport. Oh god. The trouble with memory: pick up a pebble and an avalanche comes thundering about your head. Poor Tory spinning her own sticky webs for the family, holding all of them in thrall, her poems fluttering around the mail routes of the globe like lost souls:

  under dead honysuckle leaves

  there are eyes that glitter like quartz.

  The bones are neatly arranged, all the bodies

  folded and put away. Wherever you move

  the eyes follow …

  Wild and whirling words. Mentally, Emily crossed herself every day before she opened her mailbox. So far England was safe. Tory did not have her London address.

  I can’t, I can’t, she told herself. I can’t go back. I might never get out again.

  She was smeared with Ashville and the family as with birdlime. She would never allow Adam to be tainted.

  And please bring Adam. Yes, yes, I know what your father said. But your father’s rages have to be taken with a grain of salt. They are a reflex action with him. He spent too many years with a switch in his hand. Besides, Emily you cannot deny me Adam, surely you cannot. With your father so ill, I cannot travel to London again.

  Bring Adam. You must give your father a chance.

  A chance.

  That was what Juilliard had been. New York and freedom.

  A chance to get away from a town where every boy had had your father as his high school principal, every boy had heard rumours of what old Carpenter did to anyone who messed with his daughters, every boy kept a wide and nervous distance. (Yet in later years, when she had met some of those boys in New York or Boston or wherever, they were always awash in nostalgia, sighing for Ashville High, sentimentalising her father beyond recognition.)

  In New York there had not been a soul to ask discreet prying questions about Victoria. At Juilliard, no one had heard of her father.

  New York was chance itself— city of the random encounter, of the unexpected event, of the indiscretion without repercussions, of blissful anonymity. To be forever unknown and unmonitored seemed to Emily the most desirable of goods. To be free.

  And now her mother was cajoling her back to the cage.

  It had taken her until the age of nineteen to escape. She was now thirty-four. She had not been home in between.

  Perhaps at last she could go back with head held high. The heroine’s return. Even into the columns of the Ashville Daily Chronicle the news must have dropped like carbon datings: Juilliard; Montreal Philharmonic; Sydney Symphony; Harrow Chamber Orchestra; concert violinist.

  She imagined wandering casually into Berring’s corner store:

  — Why Emily Carpenter! You haven’t changed a bit.

  — Back with your husband and child?

  — Not married …? Ahh …

  — Still traipsing around with your violin? Why yes, I believe now you mention it, I did read something …

  — And how is your sister Tory, poor dear?

  Even after fifteen years, not a chance.

  No, she thought again, decisively. I can’t do it. I’ll plead concert engagements. I’ll offer to meet them again in New York in a few weeks’ time. I’ll take them out to dinner. I’ll bring them both over here for Adam’s next birthday. I’ll send masses of flowers.

  No sense in calling Jason, no sense in stickying the web any further. It was hard enough to remain free as things were. She hugged the cherry tree and began murmuring to herself as though reciting an essential catechism: Stay detached. Do not capitulate. Do
not be done in by sentimentality.

  I know you think this is equivalent to throwing a party for the passing of the dinosaurs. I know you think it foolish of me to have stayed for fifty years. But for my generation, my dear, marriage is so much more complex and painful and satisfying than for yours.

  Please come. And bring Adam with you.

  Above all, stop thinking about Mother before guilt itself decides the issue.

  Run.

  And through the French windows came Adam, for whom she would indeed run through fire.

  “Oh Adam!” Hugging him, wanting to hold him longer, remembering Father’s stifling embraces and letting him go. “How would you like to see Grandma again? And Uncle Jason? How would you like to fly to New York?”

  Adam stared at her with wide uneasy eyes. He had reason to fear sudden departures.

  Emily, glancing restively at the soggy dreariness of grey sky, warmed recklessly and involuntarily to the mad idea, to the thought of sun on Cape Cod beaches.

  “We could leave tomorrow. An adventure!”

  “We can’t, Mummy” Adam’s voice was overly precise, as though he spoke a meticulously learned second language, the chiselled diction of a boys’ school. (He had suffered greatly from arriving with an Australian accent.) “What about Verulamium?”

  “Verulamium?”

  “You remember” On a faltering note. “Our field trip.”

  “Field trip? Oh! Those Roman ruins near St Albans. ”

  “Mr Price said to remind you that the parents have to be at the school at eight sharp on Wednesday morning.”

  “I have to go too?”

  “Mummy, you promised. You signed it on the permission letter.”

  “Oh dear. I’d forgotten. Well then, that settles it. We can’t go to New York this week.”

  Pass to freedom. A legitimate excuse.

  Somewhere close to midnight the phone rang. Surfacing from sleep, Emily thought the sound came from the flat above.

  “Mummy!” Adam stood in her doorway, ghostly in white pyjamas. “Is it Dave?”

  Because of the hour. One thought of overseas where time played games. Also, Dave called on Adam’s birthday each year. And occasionally at other times.

  “No, no, darling. It won’t be Dave. Go back to bed.”

  She stumbled into the hallway, feeling for the receiver.

  “Emily. Did I wake you? What time is it there?”

  “Jason! Don’t do this to me. It’s somewhere around midnight, I think.”

  “Sorry. It’s cheaper after six our time. This is to find out what day you’re flying in and whether you want to be met in Boston or New York.”

  “Oh Jason. I don’t know. Do we have to go?”

  “Emily, really Yes, I would say we have to.”

  “Here we go again,” she said with mock despair. “Your Edwardian sense of propriety. The oddest notions. And so contradictory”

  “On the contrary. Quite logical.”

  “Form is paramount, of course.” A sardonic barb.

  “It is. The psyche requires imposed order.”

  “Excuse me. Should I be taking notes?”

  Order in Jason’s life? Form, empty form. That sad marriage to Nina, and then this long strange thing with Ruth, whom Emily had never met. (Did Ruth really exist?) And who could keep count of the other women? But officially monogamous and filial always, that was the thing. Imposed order.

  “You’re very odd, Jason,” she sighed, remembering his visit to the London conference, the long talks, the rediscoveries and amazements.

  Love and passion, he had claimed, were absolutely matters of illusion. They had to be played against a backdrop of danger and betrayal or they did not exist. As for the rest, for daily living, one imposed a form. As necessary and as peripheral to the brief bloom of love as mulch was to the rose.

  “Oh you’re so wrong, Jason,” Emily had protested. “So ludicrously wrong.” Love was voracious, it could swallow one’s life whole. “Look at Mother.”

  “Yes. Look at Mother.”

  “A stupid permanent vegetable love for Father. Her life seeping into oblivion.”

  “What utter rubbish, Emily. Father has very little to do with her life, really Just a frame for it.”

  “A cage, more like.”

  “No. She’s indifferent to where she is. Unaware of it. That abstracted and absorbed way she plays the piano.”

  “Exactly. She might have been a concert pianist.”

  “That’s not what’s significant …”

  “Hah! Is that so? You think I want to dispense with audiences and bouquets?”

  “I’m saying they’ve never mattered to Mother.”

  “Incredible! Incredible! Believe me, I know her better.”

  “Emily,” he said quietly, suddenly turning to her and putting his hands on her shoulders. “Believe me, you don’t. You don’t know her as well as I do.”

  They walked in silence beside the Thames. Emily remembered a long-gone summer evening when she had been sitting in the gazebo listening to the music drifting out from the living room — her mother playing Beethoven. Quite abruptly the music had stopped, the pianist apparently arrested by some thought in midphrase. She had appeared at the closed French windows, her arms spread in entreaty or despair, a crucified figure against the liv-ing-room lamps. A caged woman behind a barred window.

  Watching her, Emily had held her breath in a kind of pain. I will never let myself be trapped like that, she had vowed.

  Jason sighed heavily. “Do you know I was afraid to see you again? After your New York concert.”

  “New York! Please!” Indicating an event too awful to be dragged into discussion.

  “I have this necessary image of you. A frame of reference. My little sister in her first white concert dress.” He began picking up small stones, exploring them with his fingers, rejecting some. Classifying something in his mind. “It’s to do with this sense of …of murk in the past — we both seem to have it — and the wish, the passion, for something pure, some unambiguous memory of childhood … Thank God, you’re always even more beautiful than I remember.”

  He began tossing his stones with a kind of violence into the river, not looking at her, and went on.

  “It’s because of Tory, I suppose. Because of everything … I require you — you’ll have to forgive me — I absolutely require you to remain perfect and innocent and above reproach. And I was so afraid … I nearly didn’t call you. But somehow in spite of… no, because of Adam … you still are.”

  “Oh god, Jason, undeceive yourself, please. At Juilliard I was recklessly promiscuous.”

  “Yes, well. For us that sort of thing was inevitable on first getting out from under Father’s thumb. You seem … rather celibate at the moment.”

  “It shows? It’s for complicated reasons, all of them impure. The world is strewn with my lovers. I’m as consumed by guilt and abandoned loves as St Augustine.”

  “St Augustine. Yes. Exactly”

  “Jason,” she now complained sleepily via transatlantic satellite. “I think I have conflicting concert arrangements, I only just got the letter today. There isn’t time to make changes.”

  “You do not have conflicting concert arrangements. I called your booking agent.”

  “How horrid of you. But anyway, Adam has a school field trip that we both have to go on.”

  “When is it?”

  “Is this an inquisition?”

  “I’m trying to help. What day is the field trip?”

  “Wednesday”

  “Fine. You could get a Thursday flight. Or even Friday. We could still be in Ashville by Saturday.”

  “That’s crazy. To go so far for three or four days. Anyway, it’s probably not possible at such short notice. Summer season, remember. Booked out months ahead.”

  “On a cancellation or a standby it’s always possible. Call me as soon as you have a flight number and time. And Emily: be there. You know, whatever else, certain milesto
nes require tribute.”

  “I cannot imagine how you preserve these shibboleths. I mean, especially someone who scrabbles around in other people’s libidos for a profession.”

  “That’s exactly why. I know the importance of landmarks. And a golden wedding anniversary isn’t something you can ignore. It’s not just hugely significant for them. It’s our lives too.”

  “Jason, I’m terrified of going back. I know that’s irrational, but I am. Quite terrified.”

  “Listen,” he said in a low and conspiratorial whisper of excitement. “The honeysuckle will be in bloom. Remember our midnight picnics in the gazebo? Remember sliding down that rope from my window? Don’t you want to show Adam that?”

  A wave of nostalgia crested over her.

  “Not Adam,” she said, resisting it. “Even if I come, I shouldn’t bring Adam. Aren’t you forgetting what Father said in New York?”

  “I would discount that entirely. You announced it badly. His only grandchild. And Adam can wrap anyone around his little finger in five minutes. We just have to get Father to see him…”

  “No. School’s still in session here and it would be bad for Adam to miss any. Besides, he doesn’t want to come.”

  “I don’t believe it. You’ve presented it badly. As usual You’ve carted him around the world like a chattel and he’s scared of moving. But he’ll love the old house. He has a desperate need for roots.”

  “What rubbish. He’s as footloose as I am. He just doesn’t want to miss out on the final weeks of school right now.”

  “When I talked to him last year he asked incessant questions about his grandparents. And he was also pining quite acutely for a house with a blue door in Sydney and for someone named Dave whom you declined to talk about. Other than to tell me that Dave was not his father.”

  “What a sneak you are.”

  “Let me talk to Adam.”

  “For heaven’s sake, Jason, it’s the middle of the night. Adam’s asleep.”

  “No I’m not, Mummy. Can I talk to Uncle Jason?”

  Emily raised her eyebrows in mock anger and handed him the receiver, bending over to kiss the top of his tousled head.

  Yes, she heard him say. Oh yes, that would be super, Uncle Jason. Just for a little visit, yes. Okay, here’s Mummy.