The Fog Garden

by Marion Halligan

  Punished? Of course not, he says. You can’t accept even the simple principle of it. Think of that first level, the no-hope lot. Everybody who isn’t baptised is there. From Adam up to the time of Christ.

  Not Adam, I don’t think. Isn’t he in the rose of heaven.

  Is he? Well, all the rest of the Old Testament. Moses. Virgil. Babies. Virtuous Moslems. Not to mention Buddhists. How can you believe in a god who is so mean about punishing people? Good people. It can’t be true.

  He says this while kissing her. They have taught themselves to kiss while talking. This may allow for profound utterances, possibly lengthy ones, but certainly it means that argument is difficult. Something has to be lost in a kissing conversation, and it is the chilly powers of reasoning. But she doesn’t want to argue, of course she doesn’t believe in hell at all, not this souls in everlasting carnal torment version.

  But then, she doesn’t believe in adultery either.

  old happy times

  SCREWED TO THE WALL IN THE laundry is a rotisserie and grill. When it’s closed it’s a flattish stainless-steel oblong, then when you pull the front panel down the electric grilling mechanism rises up, and the opened door forms a base. You can hang a grill pan on levers at the back, or fasten a spit so it turns slowly and produces crisply browned roasted meat: chickens, beef fillets, legs of lamb. Altogether it is a cunning device.

  On the front is a notice, on a largish yellow post-it note. It says, in bold block letters:

  CAREFUL!

  LIFT BY

  THE EDGES

  HANDLE LOOSE

  This message is written in pencil and stuck by its narrow gummy edge just where you put your hand to grasp the broken handle. It has been there for at least three years, perhaps four.

  The machine isn’t used every day, but frequently enough, and the label has stayed stuck all that time, isn’t even greasy or dog-eared or curled, and the pencil writing has not smudged or faded.

  It is Geoffrey’s writing, and every time she opens the thing by the edges, not the handle, which is indeed loose, being attached on only one side, she marvels with a kind of bitter marvel. This frail little scrap of paper, and it endures, while Geoffrey is dead. Every time she reads his admonition, looking at the handwriting she loves, she has this thought. It endures, and Geoffrey is dead. Was ill for more than a year before that. The label was written in the days of his good health, the pencil strokes are vigorous, they believed there was a lot of life left to him, still.

  Once, a long time ago, they had an argument, she was angry and accused him of caring more for objects than for people. He was careful, he liked to look after things, to polish shoes and keep cars clean and preserve the gleaming surfaces on furniture. But people, she said, you do not care so much for people. We can always get a new table, or a car, or a pair of shoes, but if I am hurt or injured a new me is not so easy to come by. I may not easily be mended, either.

  At the time she was meaning they had just bought a marvellous Hiroe Swen pot, large and darkly glazed, with a great bird scraped into the clay underneath. She had considered it a kind of token, a promise of faith, a return to their ways of doing things, but then thought it wasn’t honest in that way at all. She wanted to drop it on the terrazzo doorstep so that its fragments were the first thing he saw when he came home in the afternoon. But she could not bring herself to do so, it was too beautiful as a work of art, it did not deserve to be destroyed in a conjugal quarrel. And she thought even more bitterly, I can be hurt, but I cannot hurt this inanimate thing.

  What she did instead in the middle of a fury as visceral as the grief she now feels was smash a drinking glass in the upstairs bathroom and scratch her wrists with it. She drew blood, but knew even in her fury that she could never cut deep enough to make it a real act. He was furious with her too, did not believe she would do it, thought it was a threat, mainly he thought it was a threat though he was afraid too. And held her in his arms, and bound up the scratch, and cleaned up the glass that had strewn its sharp shards all over the floor.

  He was wounded when she accused him of caring more for things than people, and she knew that it was a clever angry remark, intended to hurt. And it wasn’t true. Not at the bad time. Never did he stop caring for her. Never stop loving her. Even in the year of his dying he took care of her, listened to her, paid attention. She knew it at the time, and how much more now when he isn’t here.

  I was good at being married, she writes to Oliver. Her old lover, her lovely heart-breaking illicit love, from when she was twenty-one, a girl with long straight hair and a tentative expression. He hasn’t seen her since those days, but now they email every day. He writes back: I can see that, from your letters. She thinks of this; thirty-five years, learning to be good at being married, it came naturally but needed training into, as well. And now it is a skill she may never need again. She is entirely engaged in developing a quite other skill, in becoming good at not being married. She appears to be a success at that too, she pays her bills, entertains friends, maintains the house and garden, lights fires, orders wine. Even does her job, in a minor way; she keeps being asked to do small well-paid writing tasks, and if the novel is not getting written, well, it takes an orderly and calm mind as well as house to write novels, and that she may one day achieve, too.

  Besides, she is writing stories, which she describes as unpublishable. A friend says, Oh, I expect somebody might take them, some time, you shouldn’t worry too much, and she says, No, I mean unpublishable by me, not by anybody else.

  She discusses the nature of fiction with Oliver. It is about illuminating the world we live in, she says. That’s why we read, she says. To make sense of this difficult world. No, he writes back, it is about language. Language is what literature is about. But then he agrees you need both; life without language is tedious, language without life is sterile. What’s more, it’s about consolation, she says. Like all art, it fills us with desire, which it doesn’t quite assuage, but itself is some comfort.

  Oliver started writing to her after more than thirty years of absence, of silence, because he had searched out copies of her books and read them. I knew you would never be a routine I-love-a-sunburnt-country writer, he said, in that first letter, a delayed love letter he called it, but I did not know what I was missing. Clare wondered if he had not got hold of the books sooner because he was afraid she’d be no good. Protecting the old love turned into a novelist from failure, and disappointing him.

  She thought of all the characters she’d turned him into over the years. They may have done what you did, she wrote, but I did not see you as quite such a baddie. I hoped not, he said, I was fairly sure not.

  Later, in the middle of the year of the epistolary novel emails, he sent her an amazing bunch of flowers, signed with the name of one of the characters she’d loaned some of their story. Making him charming, not the seducer and betrayer she sometimes rather maliciously turned him into. A sad story, this, of meeting in later years and parting. Not at all prescient, as it turns out.

  But she did not keep up that first renewed correspondence, not then. She did not tell Geoffrey about it, and let it lapse. When Geoffrey died and she had to learn how to live without him she wrote again to Oliver, wanting to tell him about this immense thing that had happened to her, and then she was telling him about all her life since she’d seen him, constructing its narratives for him and for herself too, creating for him the person that those more than thirty years have turned her into. And in return he pays attention to them, and to her.

  She sends him the stories, too, and he tells her how much he likes them.

  Clare takes pleasure in her survival skills, she is happy sometimes, has fun sometimes, even has small flashing moments, not usually those of fun or pleasure, when she is not conscious of grief. She makes the curious discovery that grief feeds off happiness, and pleasure nourishes it. Grief grows fat and richly fleshed, and sits in her chest like a big suety pudding.

  She treasures the yellow sticky
label on the door of the grill. It’s a message. Neat and syntactical. She can believe he is still taking care of her. CAREFUL! He often said careful. It was one of his words.

  Careful. Careful didn’t help. Careful couldn’t save Geoffrey. All of her care didn’t work.

  There are other bits of paper around the house in his handwriting. Shopping lists, addresses, the names and numbers of compact discs he planned to buy. She tucks them back into books and boxes and kitchen drawers so they will turn up their small random memories of comfort at unexpected moments.

  One of the things that Geoffrey said to her in his dying year was that she was the love of his life. Of course, she knew that, but the words are a precious gift that she can take out and gaze on. She can slip over her head the necklace of pearls he gave her for their thirtieth wedding anniversary, wear her rings, pin on the tiny antique coral brooch she bought in Tasmania because he had rung up some jewellers and discovered that corals are the token of thirty-five years married. And she can hold in her hands the words: You are the love of my life.

  In the bottom of a drawer full of junk she finds the card he gave her one Christmas, to go with a tiny silver cherub holding a pearl: Happy Christmas to a pearl among women, love from Cupid. You could have expected years more of such small fond jokes. In that beloved writing, black ink, cursive, firm, eminently readable.

  One day of his illness he said, I don’t suppose I shall ever go to Paris again. I wonder, she said. Probably not. I may not, either. But you’ve done it, she said. Think how well you’ve done it. Over and over. Think how well you know it.

  That’s true, he said.

  She sighed. And anyway life is full of things we’ll never do again. Or do at all. We’ll never have a baby again. And think what a nice thing that was, it’s sad it won’t happen. We’ll never learn to ski. Or tango really well. But think of all the things we’ve done, and loved doing. I think we’ve done everything we wanted, don’t you?

  He smiled, and she could see her words pleased him.

  And as I say, I doubt I’ll get to Paris again myself.

  (Even when she said it she suspected she wasn’t telling the truth. Now: in her filing cabinet now is an airline ticket. Melbourne Singapore London Paris Singapore Melbourne. She is still greedy, still wants.)

  Not everything she said to him was comforting. Once she was miserable and muttered to him, The person who dies is all right, they are alive and then they aren’t. But the other person has to stay alive and full of grief and who is going to comfort them?

  Even though she was upset she was trying to keep her words vague: person, them; not you, me. But then she said, You’re all right, I am here looking after you. But what will happen to me when I get sick? There’ll be nobody to care for me. I’ll be all alone. I’ll have to go to the hospice. I’ll have to be among strangers.

  This made him cry, and she did too. She was heartbroken by what she had said, and put her arms gently around him, and they both sobbed, until she took a deep breath and turned a sob into a breathy little giggle and said, Oh well, with a bit of luck I’ll fall under a bus and it’ll all be over nice and quickly. He smiled too, and the moment went away, but she was aghast at her words, still is, she cannot forgive herself for them, they were cruel and selfish, her feeling desolate was not enough to excuse them. After all, she is alive, and full of energy.

  But the words are true. He will not be there to love her when she’s dying.

  Once she said, I’m trusting you to plan me a decent funeral. Some good music.

  What about the Entry of the Queen of Sheba, he said, and sang it.

  Oh yes.

  This was not the time to talk about that. He would not be planning her funeral. She said, None of us knows the moment of our coming hither or our going hence.

  Men must endure

  Their going hence, even as their coming hither.

  Ripeness is all.

  She remembers studying King Lear, and how you recognise that this is a precious moment in the play, not its message, or its note of hope, or anything so neat, simply that, a precious moment, to be paid attention to. They are both enduring Geoffrey’s going hence. But whether ripeness is a word to be applied is another matter.

  She said to him, You know how you nearly died when you were a baby, when you had whooping cough. Well, you could say that all the years since then have been a bonus. Sixty-three is a lot better than being a baby. Sixty-three already.

  His face opened in that particular soft luminous smile which showed her words pleased him.

  Mm, he said.

  To herself she said, But seventy-three would have been better. Eighty-three.

  It’s a bitter winter, cold and wet, she lights her fire and sits by it with a book. She has been reading Dante, since listening to a recording of the Cantos of Hell, in quite other circumstances. She thought that Geoffrey would have a copy somewhere, and so he does, a Penguin edition, translated by Dorothy Sayers, a curious piece of work which endeavours to keep the terza rima of the original and so is not altogether successful as English. But it has good notes which explain the literal and allegorical meanings of the text. The beasts, for instance, which Dante meets at the beginning, when he’s been lost in the Dark Wood and trying to get out of it by climbing the Mountain. There’s

  a Leopard, nimble and light and fleet

  Clothed in a fine furred pelt all dapple-dyed

  which comes gambolling out and hinders him, so he has to keep retreating. Then there’s a Lion, swift and savage, making straight for him, with ravenous hunger raving. Third is the Wolf, gaunt with famished craving, and Dante is driven back, in terror and despair, and that’s when Virgil comes to lead him.

  The beasts, says Sayers, are the images of sin. To be identified with Lust, Pride, Avarice. Or with the sins of Youth, Manhood, and Age. ‘The gay Leopard is the image of the self-indulgent sins, Incontinence; the fierce Lion, of the violent sins—Bestiality; the She-Wolf of the malicious sins, which involve Fraud’.

  Her lover saying that lust is not the worst sin because it is shared, it isn’t selfish. The Leopard is gay, he gambols, his coat is beautiful. And his sin is a sin of the young. Of incontinence.

  On the contrary, she says to herself, very self-contained, it is. And nothing to do with being young.

  She considers Sayers’ remark, that the place, hell, is not remedial, since once you’ve got there it’s for all eternity, but that the idea of hell is remedial, if you use the fear of it to keep you out of it. She doesn’t know why she finds these ideas so potent since neither she nor Geoffrey believed in hell, except in the sense of the mind being its own place, and making a hell of heaven, a heaven of hell. Geoffrey believed death is death, the end, final, absolute. She doesn’t, though she doesn’t know how it isn’t. But she doesn’t believe that all that remains of him is in a plastic casket inside a cardboard box on a high bookshelf. His ashes that they will decide what to do with one day.

  Polly who practises Catholicism but is unsure about eternal life says it’s okay not to know, and okay to think that one day we will. Or not, says Clare. Or not, Polly agrees.

  She remembers Alec Hope telling her he was learning Italian so he could read Dante in the original. Now reading this sacred text of Western civilisation she has her own dialogue with its author. Arguing often. As with the lines:

  The bitterest of woes

  Is to remember in our wretchedness

  Old happy times.

  This is Sayers. She finds another simpler translation:

  There is no greater sorrow than to recall a time of happiness in misery.

  She thinks of the year of Geoffrey’s dying, and how they remembered their past, forming it into little stories for one another’s delight. Like small beautiful objects passed back and forth between them, to admire the craft, the skill, the intricate detail, the devotion. Old happy times. She believes that the past is alive, that it should be more alive than the future, that things that have happened should be talk
ed about with as much pleasure as those you are planning to make happen. (How much more so when there is no future.) That the past should be dwelt in as energetically as the present, remembering how much was invested in making it come to pass.

  Ah yes, she thinks, but they were happy then, Geoffrey was alive, even if he was dying, they were together, they were remembering old happy times in a present happy time, and they knew it. It is a gift to know you are happy.

  And Dante has a word to say. Context. You can’t quote me out of context. I am talking about the lovers in hell, remember, the adulterous pair, doomed to remember not just their past happiness but their old wickedness.

  But they are together, she says to him, that must help. Hell doesn’t seem so bad like that. Hand in hand they are.

  Ah, but consider, it is for eternity. What is it that Joyce says about the raven? Well, not Joyce, but his character, the priest . . . if every grain of sand from every beach in the world was piled up and a raven came once every million years and took one grain away, by the time he’d got rid of the whole pile of them just one second of eternity would have passed.

  Imagine how that would have terrified all the little hell-believing kids. Imagine how Paolo and Francesca feel, vexed by the blasts, hopeless of any rest, endlessly whirling and wailing.

  But when she looks at the text of Canto V again she finds Francesca saying:

  Love

  Took me with such great joy of him, that see!

  It holds me yet and never shall leave me more.

  Love holds me yet . . . And so it does. In her own time scale she gets pleasure from remembering. She looks at photographs, at his name written in the front of books, at his gifts to her, at the things they bought together, furniture, pictures, carpets, pots; at the words he gave her. Most of all she believes she can be a time traveller in her mind. She’s in hospital, in the second year of her marriage, having a miscarriage, she is lying in bed, he is holding her hand, the curtains are closed. The nurse pokes her head in, curt: Time to go. Your wife needs to rest. He leans forward and kisses her, the kiss goes on and on, his mouth is on hers, time flows over them, ages later the nurse bustling back, the nurse’s shocked voice, but somehow respectful, she has felt the power of that kiss, miscarriages are her business but the small curtained space is full of the passion that makes babies in the first place. He goes, and she lies dazed in the secret dreaming happiness of that kiss, her lips tremble now with the tender gentle power of it, thirty-however many years later she sits dazed and trembling in its aftermath, it is fresher in her mouth than the coolness of his just-dead skin in that last hospital room.