The Tiger in the Tiger Pit Read online

  Once, on the harbour ferry, he and Dave had left her standing at the railing and had gone to buy ice creams. When they came back up on deck she had been surrounded by three young men who might have stepped down from billboards advertising suntan lotion. Emily was smiling at all of them in her impartial absent-minded way.

  Adam hated the three men instantly. He had tightened his grip on Dave’s hand, instinctively afraid that Dave would be upset. But Dave had grinned at him and sighed.

  “Don’t worry mate. Only you and her violin stand a chance in her life.” His mother, Dave had told him, was like a Blue Wanderer. An odd thing to say but something Adam had never forgotten. He knew all about the rare butterflies called Blue Wanderers. He had seen one land light as a birds feather on a bush, its turquoise wings trembling. He knew that a Blue Wanderer could never be kept still.

  “…and we’ll meet back at the amphitheatre in one hour for the picnic lunch,” Mr Price was saying. “Until then you are free to browse in the sections of the museum that interest you most. But I want everyone to look carefully at the restored pictures in the floor tiles and wall paintings. And I want you to study the models of the villa and of the baths, so that you can tell me what aspects of our modern plumbing we owe to the Romans. I want you to look for the present in the past, and for the past in the present.”

  Dave did that.

  Dave had shown him a cave up in the Blue Mountains. When you lit a match you saw paintings on the rock walls: stick figures, animals, webbed designs that suggested the ghostly sounds of the didgeridoo and the rhythmic stamping of Aboriginal tribesmen.

  “Those paintings have been here since before the first white man came to Australia, Adam,” Dave had told him. “And they will probably still be here after the last man of any colour has gone up in nuclear smoke.”

  Did that mean, Adam wondered, that the paintings had been there before the Romans built Verulamium? He was hazy about the sequence of such distant events.

  Time.

  It was a mystery even greater than the mystery of words.

  In the dawn light of his birthdays, he would be wakened by Dave’s telephone calls. In Sydney, Dave would tell him, it was black as pitch. Uncle Jason disturbed his midnight sleep to tell him the sun was still shining in New York.

  Was Dave, right now, deep in a dream of Adam and Emily? Were the stars winking down on the Blue Mountains? He knew it was winter there, that the cave walls would be crusted with frost. How could they be so far away, so out of season, out of reach, when he saw them so clearly in his mind that he could have touched them?

  Tempus fugit.

  He stared at the sundial as a thin ray of sunlight fell across it, marking out the hour close to midday.

  He felt giddy, time whirling him around through space and through history like a toy on a string.

  Tomorrow he would leave for New York. For a few days, Uncle Jason had said. And yes, he wanted very much to see Uncle Jason and his grandmother again — especially Uncle Jason. He had a sort of hunger for the rough caresses of men, for the smell and texture of tweed jackets when one is crushed against them. He thought he had lost Uncle Jason and his grandmother as he, had lost Dave. But would he now lose Snelby and Mr Price? Would his mother really bring him back? He thought of the Blue Wanderer and could not be sure.

  Was there a place in history where he could just be still for a little while?

  He put his arms around the sundial as though anchoring himself to something that had kept its moorings in the mad tidal flux of years, a still point at the eye of the reeling storm of history.

  “What is it, Carpenter?” Mr Price asked in a kindly way. “Is something bothering you?”

  “Oh! No, sir”

  “If you don’t hurry up and study the museum model of the baths, you won’t be able to tell me about the plumbing in school tomorrow, will you?”

  “I won’t be there, sir. My mother is going to speak to you about it today. We’re flying to New York tomorrow and I’ll be away for a week.”

  “New York! Goodness me, Carpenter, what a lucky fellow you are, travelling around the world with a famous mother!”

  “Yes, sir”

  “I keep forgetting you are actually an American. You sounded so very Australian when you came to us. I suppose you’ve been to the States many times for your mother’s concerts?”

  “I’ve never been there yet, sir. I’m not an American, really, although my mother is. I’m a citizen of the world.”

  “A citizen of the world!” Mr Price raised a startled and amused eyebrow. “Is that so, Carpenter?”

  “Yes, sir. You see I was conceived in Canada and born in Australia and now I am being educated in England.”

  “I see. Yes, Quite, ah, quite cosmopolitan, Carpenter. Your … ah … your mother … won’t she be upset if you describe yourself like this?”

  “Sir?”

  “I mean, you know … the bit about Canada?”

  Adam was surprised. “But my mother told me that, sir.”

  “I see. Your mother is … ah, quite a remarkable woman. I have been to some of her concerts, you know. Quite extraordinary.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I play clarinet myself. Passably, I think. I do hope you’re going to introduce me to your mother, Carpenter.”

  “Oh yes, sir. I will.”

  “Quite pre-Raphaelite, isn’t she?”

  “Pardon, sir?”

  “Sorry, Carpenter. Just rambling. Here comes your mother now.”

  Emily was walking in her light unhurried way, her soft skirt lifting and floating gently around her. Her fair hair was shoulder length, a mane of soft and wayward curls that wisped about her forehead and cheeks, always looking just slightly and charmingly in disarray Her blue eyes, as always, were distant and abstracted, as though — like the sundial — she existed outside of the hurly-burly of time.

  She reached them and touched Adam lightly on the shoulder and then moved her hand quickly away, remembering that he had asked her not to do that in public. Snelby would be merciless if he saw it. Her hand fluttered a little like a dove that wants desperately to perch on a forbidden tree.

  “Mummy,” Adam said. “This is Mr Price.”

  She gave him her hand and smiled.

  “Adam thinks very highly of you, Mr Price. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”

  Mr Price seemed to have some difficulty catching his breath.

  “I’ve been to your concerts, Mrs Carpenter,” he said, stammering a little. “I’m an ardent admirer.”

  “How kind of you. It’s not Mrs, actually. Just Emily Carpenter.”

  “Oh, pardon me, Mrs … ah … I wonder if we might talk a little, while Adam is in the museum. Could we walk through the forum perhaps?”

  “Of course.”

  Adam watched them go. He found that he did not want to move away from the sundial, did not want to disconnect himself from its bluff strength. He traced the engraved furrows of Tempus fugit with his index finger. Who had carved it? Who had stood here fifteen centuries ago? Who had stood here since?

  There was just enough sunlight for him to see that the shadow of the marker had moved a little around the circular dial. Day after day, year after year, century after century, it had moved around the same circle and come back to where it had started from.

  Time itself moves on, his mother had said, meaning he could never go back to Australia, never see Dave again. Time itself moves on, moves on, moves on.

  Not on, he thought with sudden excitement. But around and back!

  The realisation came to him like an epiphany The past was not gone, not lost. The Roman roads, the Aboriginal cave paintings, they were all still with him.

  And Dave.

  Dave who phoned him on his birthdays and at Christmas, and from across time and space whispered into his ear: “Whatever happens, mate, we’ll always have each other. Don’t forget that. Always”

  Tomorrow he would fly to New York. He could hardly wai
t. He had been so careful not to let Uncle Jason and his grandmother matter, not to let himself miss them. Now he would meet his Aunt Tory and his grandfather too. There was more past in his future, time and history rolling over and over on themselves, an acrobatic display for his special private pleasure.

  He felt certain now that Dave would somersault into a London or a New York morning. It could happen any old time. They would slither through present and past and future like guppies through the creeks of New South Wales. And together they would weave a magic net for the Blue Wanderer — not to kidnap her; just to keep her still for a little while.

  He hugged the sundial to himself and touched his lips against its cool bronze face in an ecstatic kiss.

  Then he looked quickly back over his shoulder in case Snelby was anywhere about.

  VI Elizabeth

  Dear Dave, she writes, The problem is, and then looks out across the lawn, forgetting what she was going to say, wondering: what does he see from his window in Sydney?

  Coevality. The notion absorbs her. What is Emily doing at this instant, as my pen is poised above paper? From the moon, say, could one tell London from Ashville from Sydney? When I think of Emily and Dave in conjunction, does something happen in the ether where thought waves bounce around like ping-pong balls?

  Napoleon materialises from the grab-bag of her mind. He wears a cocked hat and tight tights and a hand on his breast. He bows and pontificates: Allow me a suggestion. I understand this obsession with time and space and simultaneity I imposed my own grammar texts on an entire nation so that I could pull out my timepiece and say: Every twelve-year-old in France is doing exercise III on page forty.

  Insane, Elizabeth tells him, but magnificent in its own way Not incomprehensible.

  Thank you, he says. The passion for order.

  For harmony, Elizabeth corrects, for wholeness.

  She puts down her pen and crosses to the piano. She begins to play Handel’s Water Music. She sees the River Thames and the Greenwich boat rocking gently at the Westminster pier. She and Adam find seats by the rail on the front deck. It matters to neither of them that everyone else is huddled inside against the rain and the bleakness.

  Yesterday he was seven. She looks at him and holds his hand and knows that all things are possible. The way spring makes churlish old misanthropes smile at their neighbours in spite of themselves: that was how it was with a grandchild. She knows if she can just get Edward and Adam into the same room together …

  She stops playing and leans on the keyboard. Frowns. What is the word she’s trying to think of? Catalysis? She goes to the bookshelf and takes down a volume of the encyclopedia. But the Cs waylay her utterly.

  Carthage. A city founded in the ninth century BC by Dido of passionate memory. And what has Elizabeth ever suspected of the glories, the rises and falls of that fabled place? Defeat at the hands of Gelon of Syracuse in 480 BC. But then Hannibal, great general, with his convoys of elephants and troops, soars with victory in his wings. Elizabeth closes her eyes and sees the elephants humping over the Alps, their bewildered trunks groping delicately, inquiringly, sensuously in the snow, causing astonished Swiss dairy maids to have lascivious thoughts.

  She reads of Casimir, duke of Cracow, 1177—1194, and of Castor and Pollux and of Castruccio Castracani, leader of the Ghibellines in thirteenth-century Italy. Dante gave him a spot in the Inferno, she has not read Dante for years, she makes a mental note to do so again. There are glowing pages of Catalan art (fifteenth century) and the history of catalepsy to be absorbed before she reaches catalysis, remembering.

  Yes. She was right. It was the word. If she brings them together, Adam and Edward, the chemical reaction will take care of itself She won’t need to do anything else.

  She goes back to Handel’s Water Music. She is on the Thames again. Adam has made this trip before, with his school. See, he points out for her, as they glide past the graceful Norman towers. That’s the Traitor’s Gate. And Sir Walter Raleigh was in that tower there.

  But it was in Greenwich, in the old Royal Observatory, as they dallied among astrolabes, that he said: “Dave would love this. I wish Dave could be here.”

  “Who is Dave?” she asked him.

  “Daves my father. Sort of. He’s not really my father, but he’s my real father.”

  Elizabeth loves the illicit and the passionate as much as Adam does. She seduces him. He tells her everything. About the shearing and the wool sales and the law office and the Blue Wanderer and the time Dave didn’t come to the airport to say goodbye. But Dave calls on his birthdays and at Christmas, and yes he does have Dave’s address.

  She wrote her first letter as soon as she got back to Ashville, He replied, she wrote again. She kept all his letters in a drawer in Emily’s old room. About some things, she felt superstition couldn’t hurt.

  She was still playing the Water Music. If she were a better planner, she might have been able to orchestrate Dave’s presence at the reunion. Yet what could she have done when she still didn’t know for certain if Emily would come? Nevertheless, there would probably have been a way. And then: catalysis again. Simply bring them together, she is certain, and these senseless barriers Emily has erected against her own happiness will crumble.

  Is Elizabeth a meddler? Does she have the right? She considers the question seriously.

  She is in Emily’s minuscule kitchen again, saying with careful lightness: “Adam seems to miss Dave a lot.”

  It was as though she had injected agitation. She sees want in the tremor of Emily’s hand and the quaver of a facial muscle. Elizabeth thinks of childhood anxieties and school heartaches. Of one of the earliest music competitions, when Emily, still just a child, faltered in the difficult second movement of a sonata, missed a phrase, came to a dead stop. Elizabeth, accompanying, marked time, sidling around the problem passage, giving Emily cues, waiting for her to pick up and go on. But Emily was rigid with stage fright. There were little stirrings and rustlings of sympathy from audience and judges.

  “Emily,” Elizabeth called softly. And woodenly the child turned, her white face streaked with tears. “We’ll start the movement again,” Elizabeth whispered. “Face me as you play.”

  Profile to the judges, Emily began again, a perfect performance.

  The trouble one has with one’s youngest, Elizabeth thinks, is the difficulty of accepting she has outgrown one’s power to protect. She wanted to take her daughter in her arms, to say: “There, there, let me fix it.”

  “Why,” she began to ask, “when Dave seems to both you and Adam …”

  But Emily cut her off. “One wasted musician in the family is enough. I don’t want nooses around my neck.”

  Elizabeth does not consider her life a wasted one. She tries to absorb the idea that she has somehow imposed solitude on Emily, and wilful unhappiness. She is unable to say anything. She goes home and writes to Australia.

  Dear Dave:

  It is possibly quite improper of me to send this letter; I am, however; moved to do so by the enthusiasm of my grandson, Adam.

  I wish simply to thank you for the way in which you were and are, his father. He thinks of you constantly. It is clear that you have given him a rich store of love on which to draw. I cannot thank you sufficiently.

  I have reason to believe that Emily misses you as much as Adam does. I cannot know, of course, how events have affected you. But if, as I suspect from your phone calls to Adam, these connections still matter; I wish you would consider visiting them in England.

  Dave answered promptly. He was ovetjoyed to receive her letter, to meet her as it were. He had, in fact, felt connected to the family for years. He was especially grateful for news of Adam whom he missed more than he could say. As for Emily, he would never get over her. And yet he had feared from the start that she would never stay anywhere long. Besides, she had told him that she was involved with someone else. There was nothing he could do. Certainly he could not go to England, he would never impose.

&n
bsp; There is no one else, Elizabeth wrote. Emily must have lied in self-defence. Please go to England.

  One cannot coerce, he replied.

  It was mad the way people baulked at their own happiness. She should have planned better, should have arranged for Dave to be at this reunion, for Emily to be caught off guard. The problem was her precarious grip on time. It was too late now to do anything.

  She went back to her letter. Dear Dave, it said. The problem is … She wrote:

  The problem is my precarious grip on time. I should have brought you together, should have thought this all out earlier. In any case, I want you to know that I am hoping to have Emily and Adam here at the weekend for a family reunion. If it happens, it will be significant, considering all the vowing never to set eyes on, et cetera, that has gone on. (I told you what happened in New York.) I rather expect something (I don’t quite know what) to happen. (If this letter strikes you as a little ludicrous, put it down to an old woman’s wishful belief in hocus-pocus and magic.) Anyway, I thought you should know.

  A rare practicality inspired her. The problem of time: Emily would (if all went well) be here in a few days; letters took over a week to reach Australia.

  She called Western Union and dictated it as a telegram.

  The clerk giggled nervously. “I think that’s the longest cable I’ve ever taken. Are you sure you want to send the whole thing? You could cut it a bit.”

  “You’re right,” Elizabeth said. “Omit the Dear Dave. It’s unnecessary, isn’t it?”

  VII Edward

  Sometimes they still eddy through cracks of memory. They are lingering smells: the machine-oil slick of a mill town; the sodden whiskey stink of defeat; mother’s perfume of soap suds and fear. But I washed my hands of them. I shook the dust of childhood from my shoes. I left. And it was as though that time had never been. It was prehistory, the incunabula of my life.