Isobel on the Way to the Corner Shop (4 page)

Liza hated her. She didn’t know why. It had happened before and she never did know why.

Don’t invent life, she told herself firmly. Let it happen. Wait at least till it happens.

But she heard those words so clearly that her heart thudded in her uneasy body as she forced herself to go back to the living room.

Ray was now standing beside Joel in front of the batik hanging.

‘See the motorbike?’ Joel was saying. ‘You can imagine that it’s the first motorbike he’d ever seen. Like drawing the excitement of childhood, wouldn’t you say?’

I did say, thought Isobel, and felt better. Laughter was the bones of the mind, or its carapace.

‘I don’t read emotion into graphics myself,’ said Ray.

Serve you right, thought Isobel.

There were more people in the room now, standing in groups, heads lifted above the taut, shining net of conversation. She stood watching, drinking her wine, taking comfort from the sound. She didn’t want to be in there helping to weave the net. She would tear it, tear some great, jagged hole in it.

She said to herself, ‘I’m seeing them from the middle distance.’

The middle distance was the most favourable range for viewing the human race. Usually she saw them too close, or too far away.

The girl in the Indian dress and her companion had come back. She was sitting on the divan and he on his heels on the floor beside her, silent, looking at nothing. She didn’t see them in the middle distance. They were far away, in another world. Or maybe not; in another world all right, but close, too close.

‘Want a refill there?’ asked a middle-aged man with silvered black hair and a shadowy jaw.

It seemed that she did.

He tilted the jug he was carrying and filled her glass.

‘What are you dreaming about?’

‘Looking at the batik hanging. Do you like it?’

‘Charming. Indonesian, isn’t it? Have you been to Indonesia?’

‘No.’

All my journeys are inward.

The man moved on.

I hate them for taking it for granted, like people born rich. Staring into space, but each knowing the other is there and feeling the better for it. If they feel just one fraction of an inch the better for it, then the thing exists; even as a delusion, the thing exists.

Now she bends down and feels in her sandal and he looks down too. She takes off the sandal and he feels inside it. A nail, a rough place. No words. A private patch of sunlight. Their small candle. How did they manage to open their mouths and speak without blowing it out?

She had forgotten her uneasiness about Liza. She went back to the dining room to fill her glass. There were two couples there now filling glasses. The kitchen door—odd again—was half closed. Because of the presence of the couples she took only one cracker biscuit, thinking that was a mistake, that it would only remind her stomach what food was like.

The couples departed. While she was filling her glass, Duncan came out of the kitchen, pulled the door to behind him as if there was something to be hidden, and walked past her set-faced, without speaking.

There was trouble all right, but it had nothing to do with her. Probably they were having a domestic row in the kitchen.

Suddenly she felt anxious. It wouldn’t—it couldn’t interfere with supper. They had to give you supper.

Wearing a serious and intent expression, as if she had been sent to fetch it, she took a bowl of cashew nuts and carried it back to the living room. She set it down on a small table where she could graze discreetly.

In the living room, Duncan was talking to the Fergusons and Barbara Smith, animated, laughing loudly.

She began to eat the nuts, quickly and privately. This was the third glass of wine. Dangerous on an empty stomach. Go easy.

‘Isobel! There you are!’

Here came Robbie, beaming, his deepset eyes almost closed between the low forehead and the rounded cheekbones of his jolly-fat-boy face, such a contrast with his bony frame that he gave the false impression of having outgrown his clothes, of showing thin wrists and ankles, though they were covered by sober clothing of good quality.

She smiled at him, welcoming the safety of his simple view of the world. Robbie saw everything at the middle distance. When he looked at her, he saw a girl who lived in an attic and wrote—how romantic. How she would like to be the thing that Robbie saw.

‘Will you come over? There’s somebody who wants to meet you. Stephen Hines, he does some reviewing for the
Herald
besides lecturing in English.’

He took her arm and drew her away from the bowl of nuts. She came with her eyebrows raised in surprise. She did know of Stephen Hines. The name had a life of its own, and, crossing the room with Robbie, she was creating an image to match it. The image deflated in a soft fizzle of laughter at the sight of him, a little slip of a man, so young in face and in figure that the even grey of his hair and his beard looked as if it had been applied from a bottle in an effort to achieve a mature and dignified appearance.

He was listening to an emphatic speech from a big, bony girl perched like a raven on the arm of a chair which was occupied by a smaller, more graceful girl who bent her neat ballerina head as she listened with attention to the pair.

‘But Stephen, symbolism is acceptable when it is the only possible language to convey meaning. It isn’t a mere enhancement of the commonplace. It’s for something that can’t be said in any other way.’

‘You have something there.’

He paused as they came within speaking range.

‘Here she is, then,’ said Robbie. ‘Isobel, this is Stephen Hines. Isobel Callaghan.’

Stephen Hines’s deeply serious expression seemed, like the colour of his hair, to be an attempt at gravitas. In spite of it, he looked like a pixie.

‘I was very impressed by a story of yours in
Seminal
. About the survivor of a suicide pact.’

She nodded.

‘“Meet me there”.’

‘You write with great power.’

‘Thank you.’

‘What made you choose such a subject?’

Made fretful by hunger, she answered sharply, ‘I don’t choose subjects. They choose me.’

‘That’s an interesting observation. I suppose subjects do choose writers, but I wouldn’t have expected a writer to say so. Do you think that is a good thing?’

‘It’s rather limiting. Depends on one’s range, I suppose. I’d like to be able to venture outside my limitations.’

‘If you can write about a suicide pact and make it so convincing—but so unexpected, the happiness of that pair constructing an afterlife that will give them everything the world has denied them, such an air of play about it—I don’t think your limits are very narrow.’

Isobel said, ‘Sometimes the extreme things are easier. Ordinary things can be most difficult.’

She looked across at the young couple on the divan, sitting now side by side, heads bent, talking quietly together.

‘That boy and girl,’ she said. ‘I suppose they aren’t planning suicide.’

‘Not by the look of them, no.’

He gave up dignity at that and grinned a pixie grin.

‘But…how do they…’ she tried for a word, ‘how do they communicate? That ought to be easy, but it isn’t.’

The raven girl came to her help.

‘You mean the love talk. I can see the difficulty. What one may say in life would sound pretty foolish in fiction.’

‘It’s for the moment only,’ agreed Stephen.

‘But if it’s my business to catch the moment,’ said Isobel.

‘Yes, we can see the problem, but we can’t solve it for you. It’s unfortunate that it is when one is expressing one’s sincerest feelings that one sounds most artificial.’

The ballerina girl spoke.

‘The artificial can sound sincere enough. Remember Romeo and Juliet and the saints and palmers. That rings true, all right.’

‘I think you may be right, Judith. Love seeks disguise. It is always literature.’

‘One dresses the naked feeling in symbols.’

‘What was that, Sybil, about enhancing the commonplace?’

‘If you think it commonplace, Stephen, you have lived a very interesting life.’

‘Touché!’

Stephen laughed very heartily.

Isobel had her mind on George and Anna.

‘Everybody isn’t up to thinking in symbols.’

‘But a symbol can be a very simple thing. Everybody isn’t an expert with words, either.’

‘There’s a lot to be said for body talk,’ said a young man who had come to listen and was standing behind the armchair. ‘But we have that sorted out back home. There’s one creek called Today Creek, and another called Tomorrow Creek. So you ask a girl to go for a walk, a mile to Today Creek, and if you’re looking for a wife, you stop at Today Creek and ask her if she wants to go any further. “How far?” she asks you. “As far as Tomorrow Creek?” If she says yes, you’re engaged. Simple.’

‘But suppose her feet are killing her?’ asked Sybil.

‘That’s the beauty of it,’ said the young man. ‘Girls need stamina, where I come from.’

‘Would you call that ritual, or symbol?’

‘I call it a test of a girl’s devotion, not to mention her stamina. How far is it to Tomorrow Creek?’

‘If she asks that, she’s not worth having.’

Judith said, leaning back to look up at him, ‘It’s very much the man’s way, I think.’

‘Well, we’re the ones with the problem.’

Stephen Hines spoke to Isobel, taking his responsibility seriously.

‘I do believe that there’s always a little bit of theatre involved, whether it’s ritual or symbolic act. If that is helpful. But as for the words, otherwise, I don’t think there’s anything special about them. They are the same words your mother used when you were a small child.’

And if you didn’t hear them then, you’ll never learn them.

All of them, young or old, short or tall, fat or thin—they talked about love as if they owned it, as if it was for everybody. How could they know?

She stared into her empty glass and felt her heart muscle straining in misery like a rudimentary animal shut in a casket, straining after air and circumstance.

‘Good enough for Shakespeare,’ said Sybil.

‘Always a guarantee,’ she agreed, thinking of getting away and finding something to eat. ‘I’ll work on those lines.’

She looked back from the dining-room door and saw them laughing together. Probably the young man from Tomorrow Creek was entertaining the group. She was sorry to be missing the conversation, but her need was urgent.

There was little food left. She took the last two biscuits and scraped the last of the dip from the bowl.

The kitchen door was open. She heard Liza saying, ‘What about me?’

Were they still involved in that row? Wasn’t it time they snapped out of it and set about getting the supper? What could they be thinking of?

Liza spoke again.

‘What about me? What about me?’

She was repeating the phrase, tonelessly and without emotion, as if she had forgotten what the words meant.

‘What about me?’

Duncan spoke, urgently.

‘All right. All right. But pull yourself together, please. Don’t make a scene.’

‘Get rid of them. Tell them to go away.’

‘Yes, but you stay here. Just try to relax. Keep calm.’

Isobel moved quickly, not wishing to meet Duncan.

Her fear of rejection was now superseded by her fear of going hungry.

They couldn’t do this. They couldn’t.

But Duncan had come in and was talking to the Gilberts, his particular friends; they began to move among the groups, explaining. People looking startled, nodding, women picking up handbags, knots of people moving towards the door.

Duncan spoke to the young couple. They looked at each other, nodded and got up, unaffected by the general unease. They walked out, the last to move except for the Gilberts, who must be intending to stay, Isobel, who did not know what to do, and Robbie, who was standing by the door and must be waiting for her.

Gratefully, she went to join him and they went out together.

‘Liza’s been taken ill. A few of us are going to Stephen’s place. We’ll get some food and drink and have supper there. It’s rotten luck about Liza. Did you like Stephen?’

Since he seemed to want her to like Stephen, she was inclined to say no, out of peevishness over the lost supper, but there was something about Robbie—he was so guileless that it would be a mean trick. He made himself so open to attack that one was never inclined to attack him.

‘Mmm.’ She added fretfully, ‘I’m starving.’

‘Come on, then. I’ll buy you a pie. There’s bound to be something open along here. We’ll eat a pie in the park.’

Robbie did not seem to be at all downcast by the failure of the party. He seemed oddly excited.

They had reached the main road, passed a few of the ejected guests waiting at the tram stop and went on till they found a lighted milk bar where Robbie paused to read the notice in the window.

‘Fresh sandwiches, sausage rolls, hot pies. I should say the sandwiches are probably about as fresh as the notice. I think it had better be pies. Is that all right with you?’

She nodded, although the word ‘pie’ brought cold sweat to her forehead. She must discipline herself. Pies are food. I must eat. This is hunger, only hunger.

While Robbie was buying the pies, she leaned against the window, breathing deeply.

He came out carrying two paper bags. As he handed one of them to her, he bowed and said, with odd formality, ‘Will you accept this pie as a token of my devotion?’ He breathed deeply and said in a quick breath, ‘Dearest Isobel!’

She knew at once, of course. She saw them laughing together after her departure; they must have been laughing at her. Never had heard love talk, poor girl. Have to do something about that. He wouldn’t have thought of it by himself; they must have put him up to it, told him that it would be a service to literature.

‘What sort of fool do you take me for?’ she shouted. ‘Do you think I don’t know what you’re at? Who put you up to this?’

His jaw sagged and he looked at her like a loon. When he had got his face under control, she saw a brief, dead sadness in it. She had done murder. Even if it was of a little thing like a light in the eye, death was still death, the irremediable absence. Nothing would bring that light back, ever again.