The Tiger in the Tiger Pit Read online

  “Boston or New York?” Jason asked.

  “What?”

  “Where do you want to be met?”

  “What did you say to Adam?”

  “I knew he’d want to come. Where will I meet you?”

  “Oh, Boston, I suppose. If I can get a direct flight.”

  “If you can get a Thursday flight, come to New York. That way we can all spend Friday at my place and then drive up to Ashville on Saturday afternoon. Tory will be with us from the middle of this week. I figure she needs a debriefing period — as it were — before Father is sprung upon her. We felt we could cope for a few days.”

  “We?”

  “Ruth and myself.”

  “Oh.” Emily, had almost come to believe that Ruth did not exist, that she was a necessary fictional background to make affairs illicit and possible. “You really live with her?”

  “Quite happily.”

  “She’s coming to Ashville?”

  “Probably not. It would be pointless, I think. The family has nothing to do with her.”

  “Hmm. I would have thought…”

  “New York then? Thursday. Call me with the flight number.”

  “Oh Adam,” Emily said as she hung up. “We seem to be committed to it. You capitulated.”

  She often spoke to him as though he were an adult and a co-planner of their lives. He waited for her to translate.

  “I thought you didn’t want to go,” she said.

  “I didn’t want to miss Verulamium. And I thought, I was afraid … we’d never come back here. But Uncle Jason said it was only for a few days.”

  “Aha. You do like living in London.”

  “I like my school,” he conceded uncertainly, afraid of entrapment. “But I wish we could go back to Australia.”

  He said it the way a child says: I wish I could fly to the moon. I wish I had a million dollars. Intense, but aware of powerlessness.

  And Emily, against her will, was back there. Refugee from Montreal and Sergei. Foreigner. Drifter in the sun. Awaiting the birth of Adam.

  Sydney in the early 1970s was hardly what she expected — a city dignified as an Empire dowager with secret slatternly ways. On mornings when she should have been practising, Emily spent hours on the harbour ferries, travelling through blueness, letting the child ripen in the warmth. The sun fondled her like a lover. And this was supposed to be winter!

  At the Taronga Park dock she would leave the ferry and simply walk a quarter of a mile and back along the road, filling in time until the boat returned.

  Perhaps it was the pregnancy, perhaps the eucalypt-sharp air, perhaps the sun. Contentment was everywhere, a profound physical fact. She walked with one hand on her belly and was able to think of Sergei with gratitude, with affection, without anguish. Almost.

  I will not need men any more, she decided. She had leaned into the very flume of obsession (a siren song, deadly) and had careened on as unscathed as Ulysses.

  Not like Mother.

  Unbidden that image arose (it had floated up in dreams recently, because of the baby, she supposed): the delicate figure, intense with otherness, caged behind the French windows of the old house. She thought also of Anna in Montreal.

  But she, Emily had escaped.

  When the ferry slapped softly against the dock timbers she would commit herself again to the harbour, tranquil cradle, and glide back toward the skyscrapers and Circular Quay. The Opera House arches, white and glistering as Fabergé eggshells, soared into lapis lazuli.

  When they finish building it, she thought, I will be playing there. People on the ferry boats will hear the applause drifting out over the water. This is the lucky country; no entanglement in wars, no civil strife, no dark side; a country still in the innocence of childhood.

  “Utter rubbish, I’m afraid,” Ian said, handing her a beer under the shade of his trees in Mosman. To the assembled company strewn about his lawn he announced: “Emily thinks we’re an innocent country.”

  A breeze of tolerant derision wisped through two dozen people, turning heads, stirring languid limbs. Such an extravagance of golden flesh and sun-bleached hair, Emily thought. How casually Australians take their bodies. As they take their sun. With an easy gluttonous indifference.

  “Innocent!” Someone laughed. “Wishful bloody thinking, sweetheart.”

  “Once upon a time,” Ian said, “some Chinamen were strung up in these trees like flypapers for living too cheaply when the gold gave out and doing the Aussie worker in. I could point to many contemporary blots.”

  “However, since he likes his view of the harbour and his ever escalating equity in this piece of real estate,” a woman said sardonically, “he’ll refrain, for decency’s sake. Besides, we all have hope that Whitlam will save our national soul, and Ian’ll vote Labor with the rest of us. But that’s as far as it goes, right, Ian?”

  “Denny, darling, since you’re making so free with my booze and my steaks, why don’t you go jump in the harbour and leave me to dazzle Emily with my jaded innocence?”

  “Subtle, aren’t they?” Denny demanded. “You’ll find the men are a decade behind North America. Especially the intellectuals. Don’t contradict them, whatever you do.”

  “Try to ignore her,” Ian said sagely. “She writes strident poetry but we love her because she has such gorgeous breasts. She spent a semester at Iowa (as feminist in residence, I think) which is why she’s an authority on the American male.”

  “Fuck off,” Denny told him amiably. “Actually, Emily, if you can allow for Neanderthal imagery and symbol systems, the Australian male is tolerable. Shall I treat you to my insightful glossary on this particular collection of painters, poets, musicians, intellectuals, and other misfits all pining for London or New York?”

  “London if they haven’t been fully appreciated yet,” one of the men said, a shaggily bearded satyr, brown as desert sands, shambling over to them barefoot. “Critically speaking, that is. New York if they’re past that stage and just want to make money.”

  “This is Deakin,” Denny explained. “History prof. Haggard from churning out papers to present at overseas conferences so that the world will remember his existence and his Oxford D.Phil. And will offer him a professorship in California which has higher salaries and gentler tax brackets.”

  Ignoring her, Deakin said: “What you are going to have to realise from the start, Emily, is that you don’t have a hope of being taken seriously here while you’re so undilutedly American. You can’t expect to get anywhere in Australia until you’ve suffered through a couple of winters in a poorly heated London flat. There’s just no evidence of artistic integrity.”

  “Deak’s hot new scheme for an expenses-paid trip to Denver, Colorado,” one of the women said. She wore very short shorts and a halter top and tossed her long chestnut hair like a colt. “A Social History of the Colonial Inferiority Complex: Some Cultural Implications. Grateful acknowledgments to the Australian government who made this trip possible. Annotations, pomposity, and bullshit courtesy of Deakin Frazer.”

  “Come here, Heather,” Deak said sternly, frowning at her from under his bushy eyebrows.

  “Make me.”

  “With pleasure.”

  He scooped her up and slung her over his shoulder like a sack of wheat; she hammered on his back with her fists; they rolled in the grass together, laughing,

  Emily was entranced. It is the sun, she thought again. It is a lubricant; it gives a perspective of mirth to everything; it coats their faint bitterness with nonchalance. She wondered if it were possible for anyone to maintain outrage or moral purpose or even the selfish restlessness of ambition in Sydney.

  Tranquillity must surely do everyone in.

  “True. It’s like molasses.” She was startled. Had she been thinking aloud then? “Like trying to run in a dream.”

  What she noticed, apart from the inevitable glow of tanned flesh that assaults the senses of newcomers, were his eyes, the skin around them weathered like a network
of dried riverbeds.

  “I’m Dave,” he said.

  “It’s the sun,” Emily was eager to explain, to give him the benefit of an outsider’s clear-sightedness. “You take it for granted. You can’t imagine what a difference it makes. And the sheer clarity of sky. You must grow up with the goodwill of the universe as a certainty in your bones.”

  “That’s just Mosman, lush with shade and well-watered gardens. I would only need to drive you out into the southwestern suburbs to see grit and irritation. I could take you out to my property west of the Blue Mountains and you could see dry waterholes and the carcasses of sheep and bushfire scars. I grew up there and I never thought of the land as well-intentioned. I guess I thought of her …” He trailed into silence, seeing the shimmer of heatwaves over scrubby spinifex grasses. “She’s a tough seductive sheila. She’s a bitch I’m in love with. It’s a thrill to do battle with her because she never lets up.”

  “Oh!” I am fascinated by men with obsessions, Emily thought. I see the tongues of fire over their heads and am instantly bewitched. “I’m partial to bitches. I hope you’ll introduce me.”

  “Any time. First the southwestern suburbs,” Dave said. “Brown grass and red dust. Shall we go?”

  Driving across the Harbour Bridge, inevitably he asked her: “What do you think of our white elephant?”

  “Your white elephant?”

  “Our hundred-million-dollar idiot child”— indicating it with a nod of his head.

  “Oh, the Opera House! I think its breathtaking! Dazzling!”

  “Do you really?” He seemed pleased. “To tell you the secret truth, I’m rather crazy about it myself. Though it’s quite unfashionable to admit that. In our circle, anyway.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh I don’t know. Showing off embarrasses Australians. We leave that to the Americans; you know: world’s greatest this or that. We go the other way You’re supposed to say witty disparaging things. Like: It reminds me of an untidily sliced apple.”

  She laughed. “Now that you mention it…”

  “Or a highly successful cement works”

  “Oh cruel. How about a bevy of paper planes?”

  “Hey!” he said sternly. “You can’t say nasty things, only us. Those are the rules. You’re a bloody Yank and it would be filthy cheek on your part!”

  “Well, since I do think it’s gorgeous …”

  “It’s supposed to be finished this year. So we’re promised. With luck you’ll be playing there by Christmas.”

  I’ll be very pregnant, she thought. I’ll play for the opening, but will they make me take leave soon after?

  “Before you,” he said theatrically, in the overly mellow voice of a documentary narrator, “are the rusting iron roofs and shrivelled lawns of suburbia. Behind that peeling paint, the worlds most bored and unhappy women await the return of pot-bellied husbands who are even now emptying their pay envelopes in every corner pub in Sydney.”

  “You seem determined to make me despise the place.”

  “I thought I already explained my coded comments. This is an absolutely dreadful country except for Gough Whitlam and Bob Hawke and Patrick White and Test cricket. And Joan Sutherland and Co., who of course don’t count, having fled. It’s parochial, isolated, sun-blasted, and full of beer-punchy Philistines. I love it with a bigot’s passion and I don’t want you saying anything unpleasant about it. Let’s get away from this ugliness and I’ll show you my house. It has a view of the Pacific. My Sydney house, that is. Maybe one day I’ll show you Kurrajong.”

  “Which is?”

  “My station out near Forbes.”

  “I know you’re not a musician. Are you an artist or a professor?”

  “None of the above. I don’t quite belong. But we all went to university together and we keep in touch. Besides they’re all clients of mine, not all of them paying ones.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I’m a lawyer. Partner in a Sydney firm. And a gentleman farmer on a modest scale. Benefactor of the arts. That means I give free legal advice to impoverished writers and painters I was an undergraduate with.”

  “It’s an interesting group.”

  “We’re all scholarship kids. Amazing country when you think of it. Anti-intellectual to the core, and yet there’s a pack of us. I was the golden boy of Forbes High who won a university fellowship. My father sheared sheep for station owners all over western New South Wales and never had two sixpenny bits to rub together. I managed to buy Kurrajong in time for him to die on it.”

  Kurrajong.

  If it had not been for Tory’s letters, Emily thought. If the past had not crowded her, if she had not been pregnant, if she had not retreated to Kurrajong. If she had never taken refuge in the town house in Sydney.

  If extrication were as simple as the process of hopeless entanglement with Dave had been.

  “Oh Adam,” she said, holding him tightly, remembering his birth, the tiny body cradled between the crook of her elbow and the palm of her hand, the sense of awe (a life, a responsibility). Dave, as proud as though he were the father, bending over both of them, telling her:

  “I’ll call your parents.”

  “No!”

  “But Emily, surely …?”

  “No. It’s not their affair. It has nothing to do with them. I don’t want them to know.”

  I do not, she could not quite have articulated, want this occasion sullied by my father’s judgments, by the things he will not be able to stop himself from saying.

  There had been more than shock in Dave’s eyes. She had perceived a kind of stunned fear, as of something more awful than he was able to understand. He had stroked her hair with one hand and the baby’s down-soft head with the other, waiting for her to reconsider. Not able to believe she meant it.

  She had seen the, same gaunt look of loss in his eyes five years later.

  “You can’t dispense with your parents like that, Emily. You can’t dispense with me like this. You can’t do it to Adam. He has a right to all of us. I have a right to him. I have a right to meet your family and they have a right to know about me. You can’t snap your fingers and extinguish people.”

  But I can, Emily had thought then. I have to.

  She had changed her flight reservations secretly, leaving for England several days earlier than Dave was expecting. No one had seen her off from Sydney airport, no one had met her in London.

  But Adam still mourned, three years later, for Australia and Dave. He said it again, his voice uninflected by hope: “I wish we could go back.”

  “Everyone has to move on, Adam.” She snapped her fingers to disperse his memories. “Time itself moves on.”

  IV Edward

  In moonlight the flakes of peeling paint jut out against the light like a cluster of batwings. I possess it then. Alone at my window, pacing through a litter of memories like an unquiet ghost, I pass through its matted tresses of honeysuckle and stalk its benches like a tomcat. Under the weightless pads of my feet, the wood is soft and rotten, smelling of sugared vinegar or overripe oranges. I pace, I pace, snarling into its eight niches, sniffing out the past. The tiger in the tiger pit is not more irritable than I.

  By day it is merely shabby, listing toward the southwest plane of its octagon. In daylight it is violated by squirrels and small children. Sunlight, the great mocker, leers in at my window where I sit helpless, chained to my chair, manacled to my unedited and unacceptable life. I watch the smothering mutations of the honeysuckle.

  Since the thaw the entire structure has slumped a little more into its southwest footing. I monitor this decline with avid interest, with far more precision than that sapling of an intern takes over my heart charts. I would like to think that on the day of my death the foundation will give way with an organic moan, will offer itself up to the honeysuckle in vegetable submission. My personal icon.

  I remember the first day I saw it.

  I remember the instant of lust, the precise moment of obsession,
the determination to be offered this hitherto unappealing position. I would become the principal of a country high school, I would live in this schoolmaster’s house. How I coveted that skeletal tribute to graciousness, not even knowing what it was called. Resolutely I looked away from it, feigned a lack of interest, afraid the board members would detect the beating pulse of my motivation.

  It has always been a problem, this tendency to fixate on details. For example, the minutiae of love. Insanity. I tripped over details too fine for an unfevered eye. Bessie, that first time I saw her …

  But this requires a detached perspective …

  One Sunday afternoon in Boston in his prehistory, his apple-tree days, young Edward Carpenter stands diffidently outside an imposing house, the scholarship boy from the mill town who has scrabbled his way into respectability via earnest years at Harvard, via chalky days of teaching at Cambridge Latin. He has made passing acquaintance with the families of several of his students, he has been invited to a number of terrifyingly stuffy afternoon teas to which he has always gone although knowing his presence to be a symbol of benevolent condescension.

  He subjects himself to the sherry, the small talk, the quietly arrogant susurration of silk skirts and silk cravats, the rough edges of his ambition snagging in that seamless web of genteel indifference. He can never belong. The only way to acquire ease here is to inherit it. He is completely other to them, pickled like a museum specimen in their immaculate politeness. Their patronage coats his tongue with a fur of bitterness like the taste of a cheap and juvenile sherry.

  Through the forest of fathers discussing boardrooms and cigars, he sees a young woman sitting at the piano, playing. She is slender, almost gaunt, with intense cavernous black eyes. An intellectual, a New England version of Virginia Woolf. The type alarms him — with those blackbird eyes casting about for a passionate cause on which to alight. He feels repelled, as by some aberration in nature, yet fascinated.

  But then as he watches and listens, she raises her head to look out the window, her hands and body still making music in an abstracted sleepwalking way. Gradually her hands enter the stillness of her vision — some movement of light outside the window? a bird? memories of another time and place? — and rest themselves motionless on the keys. Her lips are slightly parted, her head raised like that of an alert woodland creature, her neck extended. It is white and vulnerable and exposed, unbearably fragile. A vein flutters and twitches like a blemish in finest porcelain. He is mesmerised by it, by that bleating dimple of blue blood against her white skin.