Trio Page 13

  She realised that she had turned down the television and wasn’t even seeing what was on the screen. There: this was proof than even when her thoughts weren’t exactly a cause for joy they were well placed to keep her on her mettle. She sat in silence and heard outside the rasp of metal on metal that could be someone maliciously scraping their keys against cars. Or it could be simply the rasp of a half-stifled cough. There was only one thing to do: make herself a cup of tea.

  When she was in the term break she missed the students. The miracle of getting this teaching job. Though surely there was no reason for surprise as she’d always got jobs. They now gave her three evenings a week; no one liked teaching at nights but it suited Marcia’s long-time regimen of taking it easy, gathering her forces during the day, and strutting her stuff in the evenings.

  The current crop of students, all adults, worked at tedious jobs in factories designed for slow-moving people during the daylight hours. It was work for people with what they called ‘learning difficulties’. No one had yet managed to come up with a phrase that wasn’t condescending or downright insulting. This batch of students was merely slow in learning and applying the alphabet, nothing more. She was teaching them how to read and write and they were improving every week. Put people in a place with other slow-moving people and they would become slower and sadder, she reckoned. But when their daytime job was finished they would come to Marcia’s evening class, Marcia who teased them into learning, who laughed and sang and walked from desk to desk until they knew what to do. With smiles on their faces they made friends with each other and brought gifts for her at the end of each term. She was patient: taking the exercises with them one syllable at a time where necessary. And how they tried – the determination was daunting to see. One of her students in particular had a gift for laughing at her own misunderstandings.

  They were not at their best at 7 p.m. but she, Marcia, was in fine form, and would stroll around the classroom, according to the mood of the lesson, making wicked eye contact with each of them, using that voice, bringing them to life just like Coppelia in the toymaker’s shop, making them laugh – and isn’t that the very moment you learn something new?

  In the past she’d put out much of her strength dreading what she should have recognised as trivial setbacks: her knees going to water as she struggled to face her A Levels; in Newcastle once, overcoming jumping nerves and losing lines even as the curtain was going up. Yet she retrieved them. There was the time too, only a few years ago, travelling alone, she thought she would never get out of Asia Minor when she fell ill; she managed to get a flight and heard the friendly drawl of the Qantas steward saying: ‘Good evening, Madam,’ and she wanted to sink to the ground and kiss the hem of his trousers.

  So life was pretty much a doddle. There was just this other little problem she had, something that required her courage, her British grit: she wouldn’t get out of it, nor over it, yet she knew she would get through it. Perhaps this was what life taught us – that one does manage, and it’s just a matter of time.

  A pox on insomnia. Celia had sauntered into her dreams. She lay awake and began to think lucidly, instead of emptying her mind. This was a mistake, it spelt the end of sleep for at least another two hours. The brain, temporarily restored, was slowly grinding to a start, one could say. Once that fertile field was indulged, allowed to pry and snoop into those corners best kept for daylight hours, it couldn’t stop following paths down foreign streets, the alleyways, the footpaths by the river, the oceans that lapped against continents far away in the distance. He leads me to still waters, oh God, let me not get religious at this stage but make me unflinching. I’m not being led by You or anyone else but simply following my own destiny, though with some difficulty at the moment.

  Something of a worry was the episode only a few days ago, sitting on a low wall in a park, where she had to vomit, discreetly, so no one else would be troubled by it. She would see the doctor tomorrow but make it clear she didn’t want anything to do with drastic procedures. He had told her to watch her diet: she was to have just a quarter of an avocado at a time. So she’d had a whole one yesterday. Well then, what could one expect?

  She had sat there for some time, quite alone and some distance from others, pretending she was admiring the flowers upon which she had just lost her lunch. Dabbing at her mouth she took deep long breaths and decided to buy a small bottle of water shortly. If she could just stay here for an hour, or eternity, sitting on the wall, sipping water.

  Their parting had been strained: no animosity or anything unpleasant there, more sorrowful than anything. It was possible that Celia may not be curious to see her again. No, that was unlikely; warm, impulsive Cele. Something else was preventing Celia from ringing; something holding her back. What could it be? The meal they’d shared in that peculiar place hadn’t helped matters.

  CELIA AND MARCIA

  10

  Perth, 1984

  Odd indeed how constraint can create a wedge. An unwelcome tension had taken hold between them. The mystery was it had come out of nothing. Yet nothing comes from nothing. She could see them now, Celia and herself, sitting in a deconsecrated church in Perth that had been turned into a restaurant. Mickey had gone back to England and Celia was considering the same path.

  ‘A strange time for you to be returning,’ Marcia murmured. ‘The miners still on strike, IRA bombings.’

  ‘The miners’ strike will hardly affect me,’ said Celia with a short laugh, an attempt at humour but it merely sounded disagreeable.

  They didn’t seem to have anything to say to each other. Mickey’s defection stood there like a judgement and each of them had her own thoughts about it. The high blue skies hadn’t made up for, for what, exactly? He had missed the unglamorous things, he said: the greyness of London, the soft drizzling rain, the hard wet pavements. When his two friends looked at him he’d continued: the dark alleys, the mix of voices and the tucked-away theatres – the whole buzz and difficulty and discomfort of London, its subterranean pulse.

  Marcia looked around the restaurant, sitting opposite Celia. ‘Does this place work, do you think?’ Celia pulled a face for answer, working her mouth around. Motes of dust swirled above, the air hung above them, redolent of the place’s former nervous virtue and creaking duty, whispers of mumbled sanctity perhaps warring with a style of decoration that bordered on the garish, and lights that were not quite bright enough or dim enough.

  With the man in the triangle gone, Celia had felt a lift. His disappearance was in some way the lightening of a burden. She tried to arrange things with Marcia – plays, movies and the like, sometimes with James as well. But in the end each woman moved into her own plans, a separate life, as if it was a release to be alone. And now there was this unease, this clutch of unsaid utterances. How to explain it?

  ‘Things fall apart,’ said Marcia, trying for an opening.

  ‘Yes.’ Celia was playing with the salt and pepper, placing them behind the vase containing one flower, then bringing them back, one and a time, to where they were, as if considering a move in chess. Then she said on a sigh, ‘He was angry with me. Disappointed, about some long-ago thing I should have said on his behalf, but didn’t.’

  Marcia was looking interested, nodding a bit. It was just possible she knew nothing about it.

  ‘Oh, it was more than that, I think.’ Marcia had had her own troubles with Mickey: the falling away of love, an erosion of former reliance. It was a removal of engagement with the other person, slowly, slowly. Mickey had lost all interest in her, she thought, and perhaps she in him. And what an indictment on the human heart this is, she thought, as she looked down at her bread, that we should cease to care about someone we’ve previously loved. Yet how else could it be if she wanted to survive for a time herself? His increasing fecklessness – she saw the decline before Celia, she was sure – the constant drinking, missed appointments, bemused shrugs, his neglect of her had all festered at one point in a naked ire that physically assailed her.
She felt she might grow ill from disenchantment, from her own answering malaise of spirit. Something almost malign was there between them. Then the feelings dissipated, leaving a whiff of something vague in the air, too subtle to explain, and nothing.

  The oysters were impossible; the biggest they had ever seen and therefore quite tough, devoid of all taste, even saturated with lemon and the now retrieved salt and pepper. As soon as they started a conversation, Marcia saying something about a tiny part she’d just been offered after all these years, and Celia with food in her mouth, the waiter came over and interrupted them with: ‘Everything all right, ladies?’

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ said Marcia, while Celia frowned and brandished her knife at him. He hurried away so didn’t hear Marcia say that she supposed it wasn’t his fault, the oysters. Celia did her cross-eyed look and Marcia laughed her ah ah ah. Their mood lifted a little.

  The mediocrity of the food continued while Celia told of a poem she’d had accepted by a small magazine. She said she was tired of doing dogsbody jobs and found she couldn’t do anything at all but knew that she wanted to write one good book of poems, but no one here was interested in her work.

  ‘Publishers aren’t interested in poetry here anymore. Everything’s run by bloody philistines.’

  ‘Hey, come on, Cele,’ said Marcia. ‘Things will improve.’

  ‘It’s all right for you, you’ve practically never been out of work. Also you’re British. You thrive on adversity.’ Trying to make a joke of it, but her tone wasn’t quite right; they were not entirely able to pull themselves into a state of harmony.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Celia. ‘There’s something you want to say to me. He did tell you didn’t he? About Albie, when you were both in Scotland? And the time you were alone in Liverpool when he and I …’

  Marcia was looking at her. ‘He did tell me all that, yes, just before he left. But you don’t have to explain anything. I think I understand about the Scotland thing, our leaving you alone while we were imitating Darby and Joan.’

  They sipped their wine, looking at each other.

  ‘And the other thing,’ Marcia shrugged, ‘while I was away and you two went to that South American gig … well it was only sex; that doesn’t worry me much.’ She paused to think. ‘We used to drink too much … no, I didn’t really mind too much hearing about it. But you could have told me yourself, at the time.’ She looked towards the waiter. ‘He let it slip; there was nothing spiteful or intentional.’

  ‘No, I would think not. But Marcia, it was nothing; I had almost forgotten it.’

  ‘Yes, though why didn’t you ever mention it? I’d have trusted you with anyone, anything. That was what rankled, it was unlike you; you’ve never played at deception of any kind.’ But there was no rancour; the kind tone, so essential to Marcia, prevailed.

  ‘I suppose because I was embarrassed, or guilty, or something. I don’t know.’

  They didn’t speak for a while, each dwelling on the carefree, or was it careless nature of their alliance, how they had imagined it would look after itself. The space between them stayed dense, with unsaid thoughts; they didn’t want to do any lasting damage, raise any other old ghosts that would mar things further. Marcia, the essence of gravity, even sorrow, said in her dark honey voice:

  ‘For my part, I’m sorry if I’ve disappointed you – that our, our threesome, could you call it experiment? – wasn’t what you wanted.’

  ‘But it was, just what I wanted, a life shared with you two, and especially having you in it. I think it’s me, it’s my life that seems to have had no direction, no success.’ She gave a defeated, make-do smile. ‘No partner.’ These were difficult things to say without sounding like a whingeing ingrate, Celia knew this, but she had to try.

  Marcia had her own reflections, but they were private. She was more disillusioned with herself than with Celia, wondering, with all her faults, why she had even bothered to discuss the one night’s indiscretion by dear Cele who had spent ninety-eight percent of her life being celibate. Whereas she, Marcia, had once thought nothing of putting herself about, when she was around twenty. She’d told Celia all about that. The men were just as eager to get on with it as she was. But there was one called Marcus, a name unheard of in that small town at the time. He was a teacher, a few years older than herself, a philosophical type who liked to talk – as they looked at the sky – about astronomy and physics. Also he was interested in her, in a smiling lazy way, in her mind and in her being, as no one ever had been. So of course she threw him over.

  They soon asked for the bill and left. When they arrived at home Celia said she’d like to take a little walk, to digest. Marcia protested, she even took her friend’s arm. The weather looked ugly, but Celia insisted, saying she’d only be fifteen minutes.

  She went off at a brisk pace, towards a thunderstorm, blackness all ahead as far as she could see but she kept walking, determined to take the brunt of it. Rain was falling all about, as if it were looking for some harm to wreak. What was Mickey doing, she wondered. Having a drink in some shambolic lair. She herself might have more luck in London. Yes, she would find a little place in Shepherd’s Bush, get a job, join a writers’ guild, read more and write good poetry, get an agent, a publisher. The scope was there.

  The ear-splitting noise seemed to come from behind her, a great rending c-r-a-a-c-k that came slowly, yet before she could register its place in the scheme of this suburban park at 11 p.m. the mammoth bough was almost on top of her. She attempted to sidestep it and felt that she was moving in water, her limbs held back by a force that was keeping her from safety and a clear space. The large bough missed her head, only its small branches connecting. But the weight of the wood felled her and held her fast while torrents of rain descended, turning the ground underneath to mud.

  By the time she dragged herself, sluggishly, out of the mass of fallen branches to the verge – it might have been an hour or more – the rain had eased. A passing motorist saw a wild woman, scratched and muddied, staggering away from the park and stopped for her. He took her to Casualty. It wasn’t till morning that Marcia saw she wasn’t home and rang the hospitals.

  Celia had barely escaped serious injury but recuperation was slow, with Marcia at the bedside. Her friend had contracted pneumonia from the drenching: weakness and lethargy engulfed her for weeks; she suffered an inability to listen properly to anyone, as if her mind’s work had been taken from her. Never had she known such frailty. Marcia was full of concern, holding her hand, looking into her face, but Celia turned her head away in lassitude and something like impatience. Here was the nurturing and friendship she craved but she wasn’t up to it. She just wanted to give in.

  Christmas had been hot and steamy that year, some weeks after their church dinner and before Celia’s departure for London. Finally she felt well again, something she never thought would come about. James was having a Yuletide party at his house and they were among the guests.

  In retrospect, it was a mistake to have Jeremy there. The temperature forced people to spill from rooms to the side verandahs. There was no Christmas tree with presents, no tinsel. James didn’t celebrate the occasion at all in any way other than music. Guests were attired in outlandish dresses or formal trousers, casual long shorts or short trousers with tee shirts; Marcia had on a yellow blouse and a brightly-floral cotton skirt. ‘Look what I dug out,’ she was saying to Celia. ‘Fifties retro, they call it, but in fact, hoarder though I’m not, I’ve never thrown this away, not since girlhood.’ Celia nodded and said not surprising as it was lovely, feeling the texture, appreciatively, with thumb and forefinger, like a Jewish tailor. She had on a sarong and a patterned silk blouse caught with a drawstring on the bodice and on the sleeves. ‘You look beautiful,’ said Marcia. ‘You’ve lost a little too much weight, but it suits you.’

  Unexpectedly a handsome young man appeared at their side and said, ‘Hello Marcia, hi there, Celia.’ Here he was, James’s boy. Celia looked up somewhat myopically and smil
ed, trying to place him.

  ‘Jeremy,’ he said, in his helpful way. And bent down to kiss her. Black shirt, so black this must be its first wearing, and beige-coloured moleskins. He still had that springy hair that usually means good health, the smooth skin and the tawny-coloured, crescent-shaped eyes of a Chinese ancestor. Still good teeth. His parents had spent a king’s ransom on him.

  ‘You look so well I didn’t know you,’ she said, recalling his dazed eyes and stumbling bulk of their last meeting, months before. He had called in at James’s house unexpectedly at that time while Celia was there. She recalled the old man’s sorrow on seeing the state of his former protégé.

  ‘I’m very well now,’ he said with a tilt of his head, sitting down and placing one leg over the other, with all the aplomb of Algernon Moncrieff to Celia’s Lady Bracknell. ‘At the hospital I spent a lot of time reading.’

  ‘I’m so glad to hear it! Heavens, you’re a new man.’ Her face was glowing with happiness. ‘What are you reading?’

  ‘My bible is Garfield’

  ‘The comic strip?’ Celia asked, with a blink.

  ‘Hey, forget the comic strip, it’s brilliant!’ said the boy, describing the characters, ending with a burst of maniacal laughter, slapping his thigh with his hand.

  Marcia and a couple of others nearby laughed a little and someone, trying to get into the swing of it, made a remark on Garfield the cat’s owner.

  General talk buzzed for a while over drinks and Christmas food, brought by guests. A small group of teenage musicians ate sparingly, solemnly aware of their imminent role in providing music. James was telling them they’d start very soon as he arranged a couple of electric fans around.