The Fog Garden

by Marion Halligan

  Clare is beginning to decide what to do with Geoffrey’s ashes. One day soon they will take them down in their box from the high bookshelf and scatter them in certain beloved places, and then they will begin to live again. The ashes.

  life is dangerous

  CLARE WENT TO TASMANIA IN winter and raging seemed a better word than lapping for what the water was doing. Last time had been summer, now it was winter moving into spring, spring being the flowers and blossoming trees believing it was, not the weather. At night she sat inside the warm firelit house with the windows covered to keep out the cold, listening to the roaring rushing pelting noises. She thought the water tanks would be getting full, but no, it was just the wind and the water of the bay roaring, there was no rain. The wind was so fierce it blew through the closed windows. The blinds shuddered, in a movement tight, unwilling, yet obliged.

  There were a lot of noises in the night, not just the wind and water and the trees, but knockings and hangings. Once she woke and wondered where she was, and only after a panicky rehearsal of places where she might be fixed on the right one. Someone was knocking on the wall of the house, knocking and wanting to come in. It was not her place to let him in. She went back to sleep, curiously comforted that someone should come knocking on the wall of the house, knocking and wanting to come in. A friendly and safekeeping knock, it seemed, she did not need to stay awake to do something about it.

  In the morning she remembered this, the half-asleep response to what seemed urgent human or maybe ghostly knocking but was almost certainly the wind, and puzzled that it should have seemed so comforting; either it was importunate, dangerous, or else it was a sad and shut-out presence wanting to come in, and neither should have soothed her back to sleep. But that had happened, and she was aware of it all day, as some dreams stay through waking hours and make us believe they were greatly important, so that they become part of our consciousness like things that have actually happened to us, and isn’t it the case, she said to herself, that they actually have, a dream is an experience we have lived through and can change us.

  The day was much calmer. She sat at the table in front of the broad windows and watched the small waves run before the wind which sometimes flurried them white. They hit the shore around the coral-roofed boathouse, that might have been oriental and might have been Venetian but was not very convincingly either. Now and then a small dark squall crossed the water like a fleeting frown, as though a busy person suddenly scrunched up her forehead and said, why did you do that?

  There was still a gull crying, the sound plaintive and stretched out, like a blade pulled from a stone piercing the tumultuous air.

  She sat at the table writing, and the pen slipped easily across the silky graph paper.

  She had her camera with her, the new one, the other one got lost on the last visit. She hadn’t been very upset, it just seemed appropriate that in such a huge loss would be contained a whole lot of smaller ones. The scale of loss had so completely changed that all the old calculations were having to be redone.

  The water shimmered, so did the weather, sudden showers of rain flinging from the sky, the mountain disappearing in a mauve mist, then the sun shining, the bay glittering in the dancing cobblestone way that water has. The bare trees sparkled, so did drops of rain on the window, and needles of it pricking down from the sky. Clare was trying to discover if any of these were photographable.

  The cathedral of grief was as lofty as ever, but she sat in it, for its comfort, mysterious, perhaps unavailable; cold, demanding, a place of wonder. Still ambiguously splendid. Needing a lot of learning.

  The day of arriving in Tasmania was another anniversary. There are a lot when you measure them out in months. Perhaps after twelve of them you can start measuring out in years.

  She said to a colleague: Do you ever wonder what will become of you?

  The colleague stared. Her eyes were cool. I have been looking after myself since I was fifteen, she said. I’ve always been responsible for myself.

  Clare didn’t think that was the answer, but she didn’t say so. There are conversations that are doomed from the start. You might as well save your energies for people who want to play. Like her beloved Polly. She gazed at the rain, a bit surprised to find herself thinking beloved, but dear wasn’t strong enough.

  She gazes through the glittering window and remembers all the times Polly has sat in her house, in the kitchen, in the garden, in the sitting room, drinking wine, drinking tea, serious, frowning, laughing, ready for anything Clare might ask her (though she has never mentioned the lover), Polly fiercely pulling her silvery curls straight in a gesture she doesn’t even realise she is making as she pays attention to her answer. She recalls a particular conversation, one evening, sitting in the yellow chairs by the fire, in this last winter that has lasted such a very long time, drinking white wine, Polly wearing her red dress again and making Clare think of parrot tulips.

  Life is dangerous, Polly had said. We know that now.

  Yes, said Clare. I wake up in the morning, and, well, sometimes, terror is the only word.

  What do you do?

  Lie there and talk myself out of it. But you know, sometimes I look at people, especially when I’m in Melbourne, on a tram, and you know how dreary and grey Melbourne can be, and I look around me and I think how exceptionally brave people are, what a sublime act of courage it is, simply getting out of bed in the morning, having to go through another day and what terrors it may bring. Because if it’s hard for me, who does a job she likes, and is materially okay and all that, so far anyway, how much harder is it for people who don’t have those things, who have sorrows and anguish and hardships as well.

  When we were young, Polly said. She meant when they were girls, living in the hall of residence. We knew then that life could be dangerous.

  Yes, said Clare.

  Then they asked the question, What would become of them? What would they become? Would they have jobs? Careers? Would they ever marry? Unspoken, this question. Their relations thought they wouldn’t, quiet girls, they thought, serious, studious, set down for spinsters; when Clare turned twenty-one her aunts fussed at her mother over what to give her, nothing for the glory box, that wouldn’t be suitable, that would be a reproach. Would they have children? And then at twenty-three they married loving and kind husbands, and forgot that life was dangerous, until in middle age it reared up, and they knew again.

  Would they have children? Hostages to fortune. The just-born baby, the delicate hold on life: If you believe in baptising babies, I would baptise this one. The sudden intimation of the terror that lies in love. And Clare and Geoffrey did christen her, not because they believed she’d be damned if they didn’t, or stuck in limbo or whatever, but because so tiny a life deserved to be marked by ceremony. When he got old enough to realise it their son was mildly miffed that his sister was christened and he wasn’t. And so it turned out that sometimes fear could be reassuring. Danger could threaten and then slither away. And all manner of things would be well. Except in Polly’s case it didn’t threaten, out of a sunny summer day it struck suddenly, and life might have all sorts of good things in it, but would never be well again. Summer, fishing, children, bicycles, a quiet road, an unaware truck, and the world tilts. And forever afterwards that tilting false motion can make your stomach sick. You may forget it briefly, but there’s a tremor, it’s still rough, your stomach heaves. You don’t have to have been there, knowing can do it.

  They don’t say any of this. When we were young, said Polly. And all these things went through their heads, while they drank their wine and their eyes filled with tears. Clare put more wood on the fire.

  The thing is, she said, our fears were the fears of innocence. We were afraid of things not happening. Now we fear them happening.

  And you can’t even think that the worst has happened, said Polly. We’ll be safe because the worst has happened. Because you only have to look around to see that more and more can. More and more, and worse a
nd worse.

  Yes, said Clare, thinking of her daughter, to whom more and worse might be about to happen.

  Enough of this.

  I’ve done it again, Clare said, leaning back in her yellow chair. This damn Tasmania trip. I’m going to be away in the spring. Again. Every year I swear I won’t, I’ll stay to see all the new things happening in the garden, and to plant things at the right time, and every year I find myself not here. And photographs aren’t the same. I know. I’ve tried.

  It won’t be long. Hardly more than a week.

  Long enough to miss things. The daffodils will come and go, or be blown to bits by the wind.

  Next year, said Polly.

  For certain, said Clare.

  It’s still winter in Tasmania, whatever the blossoms think, and you could suppose them being punished for temerity. But her daughter is all right, that’s one worst that didn’t happen. There are brief shafts of sunlight, when the rain sparkles on the glass, its silver refracting the gloomy indigos of the stormy afternoon. Carefully she photographs it, trying to work out the light, adjusting aperture and speed, she’s new to this and has to go haltingly through it. Maybe one day it will become automatic, like driving a car, which Geoffrey in his deft way taught her to do (though once she burst into tears over it) saying, One day you won’t have to think about it at all, it will just come naturally, which didn’t seem at all possible, but then it had, and she could just do it. When she’d come back from a trip to Canada, after several weeks of not driving, she’d been zooming up to an intersection with red lights to be stopped at and suddenly panicked, not knowing which foot to use on the brake, and she’d remembered Geoffrey saying, It will become automatic, and managed to stop thinking, to disengage her mind like the car’s clutch and let her feet do what they’d done millions of times before, get the clutch and the brake right, and it had worked. But of course a camera could never become quite so automatic as that, there’d always be some thinking to do.

  Geoffrey had liked the beauty of storms. Had liked the sea grey and raging, or pewter-coloured in the twilight. He didn’t care for its bright blue under the harsh sunlight. He preferred the evening, when there was a cold inshore wind and all the swimmers and sunbathers had gone home, with only a few holey-jumpered fishermen left. She’d taken photographs of this stretch of water in the summer, when it was blue and sunny, but never seen them, they were in the lost camera. But that seems a glaring and unsubtle beauty, compared with these moody colours and the raindrops now pierced and glittering with the sunlight, now pewter-heavy and gleaming. It’s all how you see things, she said to herself. She wasn’t too worried about the technicalities of the camera, what was more important was what her eyes saw and chose to make a picture out of. She wanted her pictures to do what her words did when they worked; show people ways of looking at the world which maybe they hadn’t seen before, and perhaps make sense of it, but probably not that; at least see that it can be beautiful.

  A man and woman are rowing in a small boat across the water which looks calmer now but is still running violently with the title so you can see the strain of his pulling, the way the water drags the boat sideways and he has to keep countering it. When they get to the jetty they pull the boat up out of the water with ropes, hand over hand, so that it hangs protected under the faded red roof. The wind worries at them, they have to struggle with it as much as with the boat, which lurches in its grip, several times it slips and falls and has to be hauled back up again. Their japaras are plastered to their bodies, she can’t see their faces or hear their ragged breathing but she can see the effort it’s costing them. When it’s finally stowed they walk along the jetty and disappear below the slope in front of the house, then come into sight where the road curves up the hill away from the shore. They are walking hand in hand, tight-clasped, contented.

  She watches them, holding close against the wind, and remembers saying to the man who used to be her lover, in one of those long after love-making conversations, Have you ever thought just how dangerous life is? How bleak. How it can hurt you.

  He huffed his breath out in a little sigh, meaning he did not think about such things. He kissed her, in the way he had, long, gentle, slow.

  All there is, she said, is skin against skin. Bodies touching for a little while.

  He held her closer. No, he said, there’s more than that.

  Yes, there’s art. But art takes no account of us.

  It does. It speaks to us, intimately. It moves us. Think of the Arnolfini wedding. How you can stand in front of it, and look and look, and there is still so much to see.

  But it doesn’t see us. It doesn’t pay any attention to us. It doesn’t care about us.

  It’s important to us.

  Oh yes. But it doesn’t know we exist. No, the only comfort is skin against skin. Human beings touching one another.

  He slid his fingers over her body, as though to prove it.

  That shocks you, doesn’t it, she said. Because you have never known what it is to be without it.

  He was silent.

  Have you, she said. You have never had to be without it. Never in your entire life.

  No.

  Clare sitting at the table staring out the window has stopped writing. She’s stopped taking photographs. There’s a limit to how many you want of water running down a pane against a stormy landscape. She turns over the notes in her folder, all the bits of paper on which she’d been writing things that seemed important to her.

  We are in the hands of the Lord . . . that was Mrs Ramsay, knitting her sock, looking out at the lighthouse in the dusk, her spirit meeting its long steady stroke. And then annoyed with herself, she didn’t mean it, it wasn’t true. How could any Lord have made this world, she asks.

  With her mind she had always seized the fact that there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor. There was no treachery too base for the world to commit; she knew that. No happiness lasted; she knew that.

  And Clare thinks, there we are, back with the indifferent universe again. No Lord seeing everything. No Father noting the fall of sparrows. Underneath no everlasting arms.

  But then . . . she tried to remember the exact words about the sparrows. Automatic again, the text learned by heart at Sunday school. Something about two sparrows selling for a farthing but not one falling to the ground without the Lord our Father seeing. Not doing anything about. Not picking up. Not saving. There’s no suggestion that people shouldn’t be selling sparrows in the market at two for a farthing. What we are being told is that the Father sees, he knows. He takes account.

  It’s what we want from our friends, our lovers, our spouses. That they should see us, that they should pay attention. Should know.

  Nobody can save us.

  Clare could identify with Mrs Ramsay, a woman who sits and thinks the world she lives in into meaning. She’d forgotten about Virginia Woolf’s mad exuberant prose, the long disjointing breathless sentences, the images that catch your breath: the old friendship dead but preserved like the body of a young man in peat, still red-lipped. She hasn’t read To the Lighthouse since she was a teenager, would not have made of it then what she does now. Mrs Ramsay may deny the hands of the Lord, but she knows that it is the work of her body and mind to draw ecstasy out of the simple glorious things about her, the beam of light across the sea as it turns from blue to pure lemon, the joy that rises like the fume from the boeuf en daube, the sonnet that is there, suddenly entirely shaped in her hands, beautiful and reasonable, clear and complete, the essence sucked out of life and held rounded here.

  So Clare looks through the dazzled pane and out across the channel at the mountain slumbering in the shape of Sleeping Beauty, so the locals say, under the indigo sky and reads these words and thinks of Mrs Ramsay: It is enough. It is enough.

  Art does not see us, she says to herself. But we see it, and can know that it has seen, if not us, our condition. The likes of us. That’s something. Maybe enough.

  She h
as the house to herself. She’s had to stay another day because of a mix-up with planes, she’s done the work she came for, the gruelling exhilarating festival, now she can write and think and read, look at the weather beyond the window, take photos, make herself a sandwich, pour a glass of wine for lunch because this is a day out of the ordinary, not her place, not her job, not her duty, alone in a house not hers she can feel solitude like the smooth poignant taste of the red wine in her mouth, sipped and sucked at, stimulating and soothing together. Why all this alliteration, she wonders. Catches her breath in a small laugh. Solitude isn’t something she knows much about. Has never gone in for it. Works alone, yes, but in a house inhabited by the breathing of others, known to be there, available when you need them; Clare managed to live for thirty-one years in her house and only once spend a night alone in it, and that was because she won a prize so didn’t go on holiday until a day later than the rest of the family. Not true any longer. She’s learning solitude like a child chucked into a swimming pool. She might not be swimming with an elegant stroke but she’s dog-paddling away and only occasionally swallowing gulps of water, which is almost making her believe it is a buoyant medium.

  Red wine and a friendly swimming pool. A nicely mixed metaphor. Maybe the inner and the outer woman.

  She doesn’t care for swimming pools much. Too static. The Christmas after Geoffrey died she didn’t stay at home but went back to the seaside where she’d grown up, and nearly every day she went swimming in the sea. She hadn’t done it since she married, though she’d always known how much she loved it. Now she went in a part of the beach where the waves weren’t violent, for it was a summer of rough seas and rips and terrible dumpers, and she gave herself to the lift and swell of these unbreaking waves as she’s written them for characters in her books, she’d remembered all those years how they were and been able to write them. The sea being a lover, intense, devoted, caressing, never faithless, always ready to hold you in an embrace gentle, knowing, the everlasting arms, and sometimes rough, fun. Cruel, even, but you could be in control of that; if a lover gets too violent you need to slip out of his arms for a space.