There is about my life, he thought, a dreadful passivity. I am a scholarly and detached observer rather than a participator in events. My faculties for sifting all the evidence, for postponing decisions, are over-refined.
His convoluted caution had cost Yashoda her life. He had been engrossed in the inner debate of what he could or should do; it might have absorbed him forever — but there had not been time.
No time.
He felt all at once the gut panic that a dreamer feels on being wrenched from deep sleep by a fire alarm: I will lose Juliet. This was what hindsight, what Yashoda’s death, showed him: small signs accumulate like pollen in springtime, each easily ignored or repressed; then harvest comes in an irreversible rush, and after that the fall.
It seemed to him that Juliet was charged with the high-pitched stillness of a fledgling eagle on the lip of an abyss. At any moment she would marshal sufficient reserves of will and daring to spread her wings and soar. While he watched with the helpless molas-ses-slow muscles of sleep, she would vanish from his world as irrevocably as Yashoda had done.
There must be something, there had to be something he could do to prevent this disaster. But what? He seemed to have lost, long ago, the knack of action, of initiating events. He would have to learn to intrude on the course of his individual history as a stroke victim relearns speech.
Would he, could he, uproot his own life? Could he hurl himself into the jangle and burl of cities, which he had always disliked? Would that avert calamity? (But this was not a simple solution: there were complicated matters of tenure, and of post-sabbatical obligations to his own university.) If he should urge her to go to Montreal now, with his blessing, and beg her to wait until …?
But he feared bereavement and change. Bleak visions came to him: of soaring falcons never returning to the falconer; of the gaunt bronze dancer from the second millennium BC escaping — or being stolen — from her glass case, being lost to the eyes of art lovers and history forever.
There was no guarantee, should he make an incorrect move, that Juliet would ever come back. Perhaps it would be simpler to do nothing.
No. This once he required of himself an act of intervention. Even if he bungled it. It stunned him, the sharp pain of impending loss, but it felt redemptive, bitter as atonement. Nevertheless as he walked towards Juliet through the grove of his penitence, hugging his act of contrition to himself like a millstone, it began to take on a stark and aesthetically pleasing outline.
He took his wife in his arms. We will move to Montreal, he said. Had planned to say. Had rehearsed saying. Nobly and sacrificially. Of course you will have to live there without me for a while; it will be at least a couple of years before I can …
Oh but she would never be lonely in Montreal. The afterglow of that city had always come back with her like an aura. She would go there without a backward glance. And to whom?
He felt dizzy with fear.
He held her and was unable to speak.
In Juliet’s dream, the swing was moving faster and faster, the arcs growing wilder. She and Yashoda clung desperately to each other and to the ivory ropes.
“Don’t look down!” she gasped.
Below them, infinitely distant, were rock-strewn crevasses. They careened lightly as air, fast as light, suspended from nothing, nothingness below.
“I can’t hang on,” Yashoda cried. “I’m failing!”
Juliet felt the savage pull of a plummeting body, the damp slippage of hand from clasped hand. Alone, vertiginous, doomed. As the sickening sensation of free-falling entered her own body, she saw, rushing to meet her eyes, the bird of paradise mangled on the rocks.
Then impact. A ballet of fragments, pieces of her own body her own life, floated before her eyes like atoms in space. She clutched at them, frantic to prevent the dispersal, as her muscles and nerve ends, reflexive, twitched and danced and braided themselves with the damp bedding.
How many days had passed, how many weeks? From the shaggy length of the children’s hair, from the calluses on her hands, Juliet measured time. Between her blistered palms, the stone pestle drummed out tentative decisions, overruled them, reformulated them.
It was, ultimately, fatal to careen between worlds. She knew that now. Her life was as segmented as an orange, her fragments held together by the mere rind of her will. It was dangerous to go on brutally pruning back the irrepressible green shoots of her desire for more fertile soil: urban, intellectual, and political. But they had grown together for so long now, she and David. It would be a savage act, separating their tangled roots. The question was — and she would pound out a final answer — which cluster of losses was the more death-dealing?
By bicycle one morning an arbiter of sorts — an official-looking one, dignified by pith helmet and khaki uniform — came wending down through the coconut grove, and the mailman handed Juliet a letter. It was Jeremy’s handwriting and the postmark was not Boston, but Montreal.
She stared at it as though it had come from another universe. Or from a civilization so distant, so buried under layers of cataclysm, that the archaeologist is baffled, unable to hypothesize a meaning for the found object.
She walked out to the paddy with it and where the lowest terrace trickled into the canal that wound through numberless estates to the ocean, she placed it gently on the brackish water, address upwards, and watched it begin its long journey Soon the inked runes of her name and past would bleed into the fluids of the earth and mingle with the ashes of Prabhakaran.
David sensed the irresolute weather of Juliet’s emotions as a massing of rain clouds. Tonight, he thought urgently, before it is too late, I will speak.
When the children were asleep they stood together in the cool night air beneath the palms.
“About Winston,” he said. “Pulling up roots … it isn’t easy for me. It will take time.” And then quickly: “Suppose you were to live in Montreal, I could come every weekend, and as soon as it’s possible …” He spoke sadly, as though he were a doctor intimating a prognosis that was sombre though perhaps not terminal.
She said with a guilty eagerness, as though a great weight of decision-making had been taken off her shoulders: “Yes. Perhaps that would work.” Then, warming to the suggestion: “I could leave in a week or so, with the children.”
So soon. Instinctively he reached out to clasp her, to prevent her, but dropped his hand uncertainly. “I won’t be able to stay here,” he said. “The place will be too full of ghosts. Perhaps I’ll go to Madras for a few weeks.”
“Yes.” She nodded sagely. She might have been agreeing to the merits of an experimental cure — an elixir of herbs or a taking of the waters. “We’ll rent an apartment in Montreal for the time being.”
For the time being.
“Do you think …?” He took both her hands in his. “Do you think you will …?”
He did not need to say “wait” or “reassess”. It was understood.
We are like trapeze artists who swing away from each other, she thought. It is a delicate act, full of balance and hazard. For such a long time we have been skilful, never falling though never certain. Will we touch on the next inward arc? Or will we miss?
“Do you think …?” he asked again.
How can I know? she wondered. All we have between us is more shared years than I can remember, two children, a tragedy, an aching sense of the terrible limits of knowledge and understanding, and this vast tenderness. Just these few things.
“How can I know?” she murmured.
They held each other, frail beneath the moon and the palms, and kissed timidly, as frightened children do.
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 dep
th 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 Stones (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
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
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 TIGER IN THE TIGER PIT
Like the rare Blue Wanderer butterfly, Emily Carpenter is never still for long. She flees emotional commitment, despite the longing of her eight-year-old son for family, and for the easygoing sheep farmer with whom she once found peace.
While Emily’s eccentric mother works to reunite her scattered children, her once tyrannical father does his own scheming, made “irritable as the tiger in the tiger pit” by old age and regret. The scene is set for dramatic confrontation and unexpected revelations.
Janette Turner Hospital explores her fascination with the interweaving of time and place and displays the superlative skills as a storyteller that have won awards and critical acclaim for all of her published books.
“One feels the rush of life in her pages … a writer of remarkable talent who writes about family relationships with rare insight and compassion.”
Publishers Weekly
“Turner Hospital’s gift for memorable characters and poetic prose come together in writing that is strong, wise and exciting.”
Ottawa Citizen
ISBN: 0 7022 3402 8
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
First published by McClelland & Stewart-Bantam Ltd, Canada 1982
Published 1991 by University of Queensland Press
Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia
Reprinted 1994, 2000
This edition 2003
www.uqp.uq.edu.au
© Janette Turner Hospital
This book is copyright. Except for private study, research,
criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act,
no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior
written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.
Typeset by University of Queensland Press
The epigram was taken from a Bengali song in praise of Krishna, translated by Edward C. Dimock, Jr, in The Place of the Hidden Moon© 1966 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The University of Chicago Press.
Sponsored by the Queensland Office
of Arts and Cultural Development.
Cataloguing in Publication Data
National Library of Australia
Hospital, Janette Turner, 1942– .
The ivory swing.
1. Canadians — India — Fiction. 2. Married women — Fiction.
3. India — Fiction. I. Title.
A823.3
ISBN 9780702256035 (ePub)
The Ivory Swing Page 23