The Tiger in the Tiger Pit Read online

  Then came the events of college and marriage and the birth of my first child.

  This was all Advent: life before Marta.

  I remember waiting for the doorbell to ring …

  Let me illustrate. At an airport, say, a man waits for a flight that is bringing his wife and children home. There is a sombre announcement: disaster; an air collision; no survivors.

  At the takeoff point another man in another transit lounge, having missed that very flight, has been fuming over his beer, cursing a slow taxi driver, rehearsing apologies to his corporate overlords. There is an announcement … His hand trembles. He orders another beer.

  Afterwards it seems to both men that they already knew, that the waiting was febrile with extraordinary premonitions.

  Even so I remember waiting for the doorbell to ring. Knowing nothing, blandly expectant, and yet in retrospect surely conscious that the quality of life was about to change for ever.

  It is important to reconstruct objectively, it is important to conduct research from different perspectives, looking for clues. Experiment number one, then.

  He was waiting for the doorbell to ring.

  Mrs Weatherby, had she been able to speak freely from the depths of the sofa, might have remarked to her sister, Miss Constance Simcoe, that Edward Carpenter was such a competent young man.

  “And so handsome,” Miss Constance might well have murmured in response, watching the light burnish his fair hair with reddish gold.

  “Really, Constance, I don’t think that is a fitting remark when we are both on the school board. Pedagogical excellence, that is our concern.”

  Edward Carpenter, however, was unaware of their admiration; and he was, as he clenched his hands and waited for the doorbell, as extremely nervous as he was tentatively proud of himself. He moved the heavy drapes a little, partly in order to observe whether his hand was visibly trembling, partly to ensure that one edge of the drapes made a pleasing off-centre perpendicular to the sofa. He grimaced at the clutter of music on the piano and when Mrs Weatherby and Miss Simcoe moved out on to the terrace with his wife, scooped everything up and jammed it below the hinged lid of the piano stool, paused, riffled through the books and selected one. Schubert. He flipped through it until he found a page suitably dense with demi-semi-quavers and then propped it open above the keyboard.

  It was as though he had awakened one morning to find himself miraculously poised in the middle of a swaying tightrope, no safety net beneath, so many faces watching. Such hierarchies in a small New England town! A wrong step would be disastrous. He was obsessed with correctness and suffered the perpetual anxiety of a soldier crossing a mined field under enemy fire.

  In the mornings, as he held his cheeks taut for shaving, he would ask his image: Am I doing it correctly? Should the sideburns be perhaps a quarter of an inch shorter?

  And the eyes in the mirror would flash back unease. We are not certain, we are never certain. You must be more observant.

  His wife was indifferent to correctness, knowing all the rules by heart. This was allowable, a natural law. Only to those who are not sure of the rules is it forbidden to break them. He was therefore afraid of this dinner party, although it had been his suggestion. He had to suggest it. It was the correct thing to do. He was even more afraid when he saw, through the window, two couples arriving simultaneously.

  The doorbell rang.

  (Who should greet? Should the host? The hostess?)

  “Ah,” he said, in a scramble with screen door and guests and hands to be shaken. “Allow me to present my wife, Elizabeth. Bessie, my dear, this is Mr Dalton, chairman of the board of trustees, and Joseph Wilson, my deputy principal. And their wives.”

  (Oh, gauche! Should he not have mentioned the wives first? And by name? Should the entire thing have been the other way around? Should he have introduced them to Bessie first?)

  Mrs Wilson — Marta, he had been informed, but he could not possibly say such an extravagant name out loud — was alarmingly incorrect. She was absolutely not what he had been expecting in the spouse of a staff member under his jurisdiction. She wore gold hoop earrings that swung when she turned her head and a dress of unnecessarily bright colours in some flimsy fabric. Edward foresaw disturbances on the respectable and tranquil horizon of secondary education. He glanced warily at Mrs Dalton and Mrs Weatherby who seemed to intimate: We regard Mrs Wilson as an exercise in enlightened though painful toleration. Bessie, on the other hand, they had taken straight to their proper hearts. He was humbly grateful.

  As he carved the roast, he surreptitiously observed his deputy principal — an intense-looking man with an air of absent-mindedness — who perhaps had been pondering philosophical questions while dressing for dinner; hence the slightly crumpled jacket that should have been at the cleaners. This was acceptable, even desirably academic. Edward could see that Mrs Weatherby deferred to Joseph Wilson’s opinion. But what could the man have been thinking of, to take such a wife?

  It transpired, it drifted to Edward between carving the roast and pouring the wine, that his own wife and Joseph Wilson knew each other distantly, had dim shared childhood and college memories, and mutual acquaintances several times removed. It did not altogether surprise him. Abstractedness. Intensity. It seemed to be as much a part of their kind as the family albums and afternoon teas. What, then, could possibly explain Joseph Wilson’s marriage? The only faint hint of rakish propensity that Edward was able to detect was a lock of dark hair falling across his forehead as he leaned toward Bessie to stress a point.

  The two were earnestly engaged in a discussion of European affairs as though the outcome of events depended entirely on their deliberations. Was congressional approval of lend-lease aid to Britain sufficient? Would they move to active involvement now that Germany had invaded Russia?

  Bessie’s face was vibrant with disputation. She still had those pretensions of course — politics and culture. The slow slide into her domestic and interior coma had barely begun. Nevertheless Edward was grateful. Mr Dalton and Mrs Weatherby were listening as to oracles. He could not imagine that they would listen to Mrs Wilson. He could not begin to imagine the effect she must have on some of the older members of the board of trustees — Dr Richardson, for instance.

  “Don’t you think so, Mr Carpenter?” Mrs Wilson asked him now, catching him unawares, her huge eyes, murky as midnight and witchery, resting earnestly on his face. Her gaze, wholly and undividedly his, implied that no decision on the topic under discussion could possibly be reached until his considered judgment had been given.

  He was not used to that sort of attention. He did not go in for that sort of thing.

  “I’m afraid I wasn’t following the conversation.” Self-consciously hinting at reproach, his vocal cords jamming.

  He had to clear his throat. It suddenly occurred to him that Mrs Wilson could have a whole boardroom full of school trustees grovelling at her feet. Not Mrs Weatherby perhaps, but what resistance could Dr Richardson offer to those eyes?

  Mrs Wilson raised one eyebrow slightly in lieu of reiterating her question and Mr Dalton came stumbling in over his own words to rush her with a gallantry of answers. Edward noticed that his own hand was trembling slightly on the tablecloth and he closed it gratefully around the wine bottle beside his plate.

  “More wine?” he asked, drawing the mantle of host about himself.

  “Thank you, Edward.”

  He was taken aback. How had they reached first names so abruptly? He did not approve of spurious sociability. He knew it was considered incorrect.

  “My pleasure, Mrs Wilson.” He spoke primly as to an erring child.

  “Marta.” Looking up at him, smiling lambently. “My name is Marta. That’s enough wine, Edward. Thank you so much.”

  To his embarrassment, he saw that he had filled her glass to an inelegant quarter-inch of the top. He saw Mrs Weatherby’s assessing eye on the glass. His hand accidentally brushed Mrs Wilson’s arm and the wine bottle bridled nervo
usly as he set it down. A dark splash ran on to the lace tablecloth and spread like a burgundy lily opening its petals. Marta traced its outline languidly with an index finger and Edward felt helplessly that a die had been cast.

  “We were discussing,” she said, “whether Chamberlain could reasonably have been expected to foresee what advantage Hitler would take of the Munich Pact.”

  Edward had removed his hands, which were refusing to behave calmly, from public view. He clasped them rigidly below the table.

  “I mean,” Marta went on, her eyes beneath fluttering lashes never wavering in their trustful intensity, “it’s so easy for everyone to call him a betrayer of Czechoslovakia now. It’s as though the international press had perversely decided to ignore the difference between its own foresight and hindsight.”

  Edward had a sudden glimpse into chaos, a queasy earthquake-like awareness of a great chasm fixed between a peaceful, socially advantageous marriage and a disastrous passion.

  “What do you think, Edward?” she persisted gently.

  “It is not a distinction,” he mumbled, dazed, “in which I have ever previously believed.”

  “Pardon?”

  He felt faint and dizzy, singled out for extraordinary sensations. He felt that perhaps he was capable of great thoughts and daring actions. He felt foolish.

  “Forgive me … I’m not following … Where were we?”

  “Foresight and hindsight.”

  “Oh yes. Quite right. An enormous difference,” he assented vehemently, foreseeing tumults and betrayals and surrenders.

  “Will we declare war, do you think?”

  “Yes. Oh yes. I would say that’s inevitable.”

  And he fancied that Mrs Weatherby’s eye and ear had taken in the truth whole.

  But what of Bessie? What of Joseph Wilson?

  Sparring with ideas, engrossed in other wars and treaties and deployments, they saw nothing. Throughout that rollercoaster year, and throughout the next summer and fall, as they all careened toward Pearl Harbor, it was the same: his wife and colleague, absorbed, blind, safe in the armchairs of talk, noticed nothing; while he, once so rationally inclined, teetered on the high wire of obsession.

  Even on that last chaotic night in the gazebo when pandemonium had stalked their lives, what was Bessie doing? She was discussing with party guests the theatres of war — Europe, Africa, the Pacific — as though assigning grades.

  On that night, as he had stumbled from the gazebo in the darkness, heading blindly for the house, he had collided with his wife. Was she not as frantic and distracted as he was? Had she at last realised? How much did she know? he had wondered with terror, fearing a new element in the cataclysmic decisions to be made.

  “Edward, have you seen Victoria? She’s not in her bed. She’s outside somewhere, I saw her run out.”

  He felt weak with relief. Such a simple and surmountable anxiety. Such a clearly defined task: calling her name into the night, Tory, Tory; checking her favourite play places. When they found her, huddled and shivering under the honeysuckle, she seemed dazed, she did not remember anything.

  Sleepwalking, presumably.

  It was the first inkling that there was something not quite right about Victoria.

  And after she was safely asleep again, Bessie had said: “Edward, there’s something I have to say.”

  She knows after all, he had thought with a clutch of panic.

  “I’m going to have another baby.”

  And so of course the decision had been made for him. There had never been any real choice or real chance.

  He had always associated Jason with the loss of Marta. Within a few weeks the war had lifted him up like so much effluvia and dropped him in the Pacific. Death everywhere. Disintegration. When his son was born he was in a bloodied bunker and it was weeks before the news reached him.

  Yes, a fair account, I think. A fair account, and an honest one, though other versions are no doubt possible. Perhaps I flatter myself, perhaps I overdo the insecurity and innocence. Nothing to be gained at this age, I suppose, by not being ruthless, by trying to keep the past in candlelight. Shall I drag it into the full glare of regret?

  Why did I so easily make the wrong choice? That is the question.

  Revised editions possible, no doubt, and maybe even beneficial. Try again, begin again. Fast forward in time. Experiment number two: things as they might have happened. Should have happened.

  “Here he is!” Mrs Weatherby said as though serving up dessert, the pièce de résistance, to the select Sunday afternoon company. “Here he is, our Jason, and just in time for tea.”

  “And what are they doing in Boston these days?” Dr Richardson asked, forgetting his question before it was answered and relighting the pipe he constantly forgot he was smoking.

  “Dear boy, dear boy, how lovely to see you again. You’ve been up at the schoolhouse visiting your father and mother? And poor Victoria, of course?”

  “Well naturally he has, Constance, what a foolish question.”

  And Jason, dryly: “Oh yes. Father and I have had our obligatory battle.”

  “You are too hard on him, Jason ” Mrs Weatherby observed him thoughtfully as the small talk ricocheted inanely back and forth. With casual brightness she invited him to inspect her oriental poppies in full raucous bloom beyond the terrace.

  And then she would tell him, feeling it was time.

  “You should know this, Jason. It may help to explain. You’ve tended, I think, to blame your father but you are wrong. You cannot know the struggle he has had. I knew him from the first, you know, I miss nothing. He was raw when he first came here, of course. Quite raw.”

  (Yes, admit it, she would have thought that.)

  “Born, as we say, on the wrong side of the tracks. But a man cannot be held responsible for his birth, Jason, and it was given to your father to recognise pearls when they were cast before him. You are too hard on him.”

  Mrs Weatherby walked to one end of the terrace where the lilacs tossed their cones of blossom lighdy against the cement balustrade every time a breeze caught them. She buried her lined but still imposing face in the scented boughs as though conferring with the forces of delicacy.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes. I will tell you. Though you must keep it in the strictest confidence. A temptation of the cruder sort was thrown in your father’s way. Oh I know, Jason, you do not think your father capable of passion — the young never expect it of their parents — but I can assure you … They were kin in a way — both out of place and lost — base blood calling out to base blood, I suppose you might say.”

  (Oh, this is the relentless courage of old age. She must have seen Marta that way.)

  “She was educated and ambitious and so was he, and I can assure you, Jason, that the air around them was charged, positively charged.

  “But he knew it would never do, you see. He knew what there was to lose. His will power was extraordinary, his sacrifice magnificent. And he did it for you, Jason. For you. You must look at him through different eyes.”

  Oh such waste, such waste. To have opted for the good opinion of Mrs Weatherby. To have chosen for Jason’s respectability. I shall go mad.

  But somebody should explain to Jason. I deserve that somebody should explain. And to Emily Surely she will not be so heartless as to leave Adam behind? Somebody should explain to her.

  VIII Victoria

  On the ward they were making apple people. First the fruit was peeled, then the faces carved — any sort of crude holes for eyes, nose, and mouth would do — then the entire apple-head was dunked in lemon juice. After a few days on a sunny windowsill, the heads would wither into a genuine and miraculous old age with pinched cheeks and sunken grin and wrinkled brow. The women on the ward would begin to recognise people they knew — their grandparents, their parents, other patients, themselves.

  “This one is my father,” Victoria said.

  “Why do you say that, Miss Carpenter?” asked the young arts-and-cr
afts volunteer.

  “The prying nose, see? Long and sharp as an eagle’s beak. And these X-ray eyes, a bird of prey. Quoth the raven, nevermore.”

  “So.” The volunteer skewered the apple-head to a stuffed doll’s body. “What sort of clothes do we need for your father? How about these denim coveralls? And a pipe for his mouth.”

  “No, no! Don’t put those coveralls on him. He’ll be very angry. We have to have a grey suit”

  Together they began to rummage through the carton of dolls’ clothing.

  “Miss Carpenter, dear,” called a nurse from the doorway. “Time for you to see Dr Blackburn.”

  “Oh, what a shame. We’ll have to finish your father tomorrow. I’ll find a suit while you’re gone and put it in your workbox.”

  The volunteer handed the undressed doll to Victoria who dropped it, agitated.

  “Cover him, cover him!” she begged.

  She spread her hands over her face and huddled herself into a small bundle that began rocking itself back and forth.

  “Come on, Miss Carpenter, I’ll take you to Dr Blackburn.”

  Victoria, rocking and whimpering like a child, ignored her. The volunteer put her hands under the patient’s armpits from behind, and raised her to a standing position. Ballasted with flesh — a side effect of medication — Miss Carpenter was half guided, half propelled, like a galleon tacking against the wind, toward Dr Blackburn’s office.

  Sometimes Victoria swam, sometimes she flew. In either case, the motion was a tranquil swaying one which she could sustain by minimal muscular contractions in arms and legs. Consequently her movements were invisible to an observer. She could circle him with the languid gracefulness of a porpoise in its aquarium, and he would never realise. Or she could glide around and over him, coasting on banks of air.

  On some days the air would cloud quite abruptly with a smog of minute glass splinters. It would rake across her tongue and through her nostrils and into her lungs ripping and tearing at her as it went. She would spit blood, although the nurses never believed her. It was wilful of them, of course. Ignore the mess and you won’t have to clean it up. She knew their little game. She had written letters to Jason and Emily, complaining, but no one answered.