The Tiger in the Tiger Pit (27 page)

Elizabeth is stuck in the past now, it crashes around her like a landslide.

While the house hums with conviviality they quarrel in the kitchen in whispered snatches.

“The army, Joe! I can't bear it. You can't leave me, I've been waiting to tell you, I'm pregnant.”

“Oh god, Liz.” Elation and dismay in equal parts. A momentary embrace. A hasty parting as someone comes into the room. Small talk and jokes. The guest leaves, they resume.

“Oh god,” Joe says, “I keep trying to repress it, I didn't want to tell you. But so is Marta.”

“So is Marta what?”

“Pregnant. Everything is madness. Madness.”

Biting her tongue on jealous rage till three more guests fix drinks, joke, wander off. Accusing: “You've made love to her!”

“She's my wife!”

“You wanted her. You're still in love with her.”

“Hush. It's you I can't live without. A baby!”

“It might be Edward's.”

Stunned rage. “But I thought … you said you hardly ever, that he didn't …”

“I never said that. He just doesn't like me to respond. It wasn't me who made overtures. I simply submitted.”

“You
let
him when I …”

“And you
wanted
Marta …”

Under the ebb and flow of party farewells, wartime frenzied hilarity, toasts to Joseph, a dark primitive undertow of jealousy and impending loss. And finally they are alone in the house, guests gone, Edward outside somewhere immersed in farewells (they assume), Marta gone to send the babysitter home.

“Joe, Joe, I can't bear it. I don't want you to go. I'm afraid.”

“This isn't a time to decide anything, Liz. All this chaos. Do you think I'm not distraught? Leaving you. Leaving Marta with one child and a baby coming …”

“You're thinking about
her.
”

“Two lives beginning and I've no idea how I'll learn to face death …”

There is a wildness of kissing.

“Liz, Liz,” he moans. “Oh Liz, oh my god.”

They are on the sofa, her dress torn at the shoulder, the skirt bunched up around her waist. A ravenous moment, two people conscious of time run out, of mortality, of apocalypse. Her legs are locked around him, she wants to suck him deeper and deeper inside, to keep him there. To offer in time of war the great velvet refuge of her vagina.

She hears a sound on the stairs, half sees a flutter of movement. It is peripheral, to be ignored. But she turns and there is Victoria, a nightgowned wraith, watching from the doorway.

“Tory!” she whispers, frozen with shock and shame.

The child stares back with eyes like moons lost in orbit. Then she turns and runs out into the darkness.

“Tory!” Elizabeth is crying, wrenching free.

No doubt she is brutally abrupt. And distraught. Some animal sound, some groaning sob, part rage, escapes from Joe.

“It's impossible, Liz, it's impossible. It will always be impossible.”

Madness, madness, madness.

Elizabeth is floundering about in the garden, in the past, looking for Tory. She throws out an arm, hangs on to the chair and the bed, catching at the present. Collides with Edward all over again.

For every moment of passionate elation there is an equal and opposite cost. This, Elizabeth believes, is an axiom. And these were the sentences handed down: the death of Joe, the damaging of Tory. She does not imply a simple-minded vengeful God. She is merely aware of the intricate ecology of human actions, the consequences of recklessness.

And yet, and yet …

Elizabeth cannot free herself of the expectation of that which is good, she is a glutton for each new morning, she takes the marrow from it. She holds today in her cupped hands: it is rare and beautiful, like an orchid or a butterfly.

It is to be savoured.

It will never be seen again.

Edward is stirring now, she is at his side, he is conscious at last of her hand in his.

He is trying to say something, she bends over him, straining to catch his words.

“Still here, Bessie?” A tissue of sound.

Will it be bloodiness he wants? An act of contrition?

“About Marta,” he whispers. “Forgive me.”

Elizabeth smiles. She kisses him on the lips. “It cleared the air,” she says. “It was a good thing to do.”

He marshals his strength to say something further. “I swear,” he whispers — though the words are thinner than air, they brush Elizabeth s ears like the shadow of an echo — “I swear it never came to anything.”

She smiles her incomprehension and he touches her hair. She thinks: it is all behind us then. She leans toward him, rests her cheek beside his, and murmurs: “I love you, Edward.”

Soon, she knows, he will begin to complain testily of the bedding and the nurses. By tomorrow the hearing aid and the pacemaker will assault his sensibilities unendurably. But for this moment he smiles and touches her face.

Elizabeth is moved to tears. It has sung itself well, she thinks. She likes this ending.

OTHER FICTION BY
JANETTE TURNER HOSPITAL

NORTH OF NOWHERE SOUTH OF LOSS

“I live at the desiccating edge of things, on the dividing line between two countries, nowhere, everywhere, in the margins.”

Janette Turner Hospital's stories have won widespread international acclaim for their dazzling style, intellectual depth and crackling energy. Her characters oscillate between estrangement and a sense of belonging, as Hospital herself has suffered geographical displacement from the Deep North of Australia to the Deep South of the United States.

Seven of these fourteen stories were included in the “North of Nowhere” section of
Collected Stories
(UQP 1995). Seven, including “South of Loss”, are published here in book form for the first time.

“Her stories are like brief cyclones wrapped around an unexpected center of calm.”

Los Angeles Times Book Review

“Sensuous, speculative fictions about the experience of dislocation … her stories develop like poems or meditations.”

New York Times Book Review

ISBN: 0 7022 3333 1

CHARADES

This vibrant, superbly crafted novel explores the elusive boundaries between existence and imagination, memory and truth. From the subtropical lushness of Queensland's Tamborine rainforest to the claustrophobic bedroom of a Boston physicist, Hospital's characters breathe an atmosphere of passion and suspense. Charade Ryan, an enigmatic story-spinning Scheherazade, searches for a way to unravel the long-held secrets of her family origins.

“A journey of strange and beautiful complexity through some of the finest prose being written anywhere today.”

Toronto Star

“Janette Turner Hospital goes from strength to literary strength — ever brilliant in ideas, graceful in expression, resourceful in story — and in
Charades
throwing in, for good measure, a heady eroticism. I loved it!”

Fay Weldon

ISBN: 0 7022 3388 9

THE LAST MAGICIAN

This superb novel is richly textured and intellectually challenging, a tour de force from our most elegantly seductive writer.

The last magician is Charlie, the photographer, who monitors and records everything as he seeks the silent Cat through physical and emotional infernos. Charlie, Cat, Robbie and Catherine shared a childhood summer in a Queensland rainforest. But a death intruded on their charmed circle, binding them to complicity and silence.

Decades later, festering memories seep through into the present, in the same way as the desperate underside of a corrupt Sydney breaks through into tidy lives and well-kept secrets.

“Spellbinding reading, an adventure of the mind and heart that enthralls from first page to last … Haunting, disturbing, subversive.”

Newsday,
New York

“The real magic at work here is the writer's … an ambitious, intense and satisfying book.”

New York Times Book Review

ISBN: 0 7022 3401 X

BORDERLINE

A meat truck is intercepted at the Canadian-American border, and a group of illegal immigrants is removed. Felicity watches from her car, and talks with Gus who is also waiting in the queue. When they realise a woman has been left behind, they impulsively smuggle her across the border. La Magdalena will change their lives irrevocably.

In this, her third novel, Janette Turner Hospital transforms a thrilling and suspenseful story into a deadly resonant parable for our times, leaving her readers not just entertained, but enriched.

“Janette Turner Hospital is a stunningly stylish writer who turns almost every chapter into a virtuoso performance … this is a very clever, very fascinating book which should not be missed.”

Brenda Little,
Australian

“This book is brilliant in its several meanings: sparkling, intelligent, distinguished … Hospital is in complete and wondrous control of her material.”

Shirley Streshinsky,
San Francisco Chronicle

ISBN: 0 7022 3400 1

THE IVORY SWING

Juliet yearns for the “ebb and flow of life lived avidly”, for the pace and challenge of city living. The conflict between her love of husband and children and her own passionate need for expression is intensified by her move from small town Canada to Southern India.

The stifling restrictions on Juliet's freedom are magnified in the plight of her young widowed neighbour. The beautiful Yashoda longs to embrace the Western values that would release her from the strictures of Indian tradition. But the ancient mores are powerful and enduring, and challenging them inevitably leads to tragedy.

“The steamy, subtle, utterly impenetrable mysteries of India … a work both emotionally and stylistically deft.”

Thomas Keneally

“A truly magnificent literary achievement.”

Booklist
, USA

ISBN: 0 7022 3403 6