She’s always known about the energy that keeps people going though funerals, which are the one thing in life which happen to us without our choosing the time of them, unlike weddings or even birthdays, which you can plan for.
She looks around the garden and remembers Geoffrey’s wake; the after-the-funeral was at one in the afternoon and it was one in the morning before the last people left; some had gone away back to work and then returned. Everyone said how Geoffrey would have enjoyed it. She ordered two dozen bottles of wine, and her children said, Not nearly enough, so she got another dozen and a half (thinking that people would stay until three perhaps, maybe four, and wouldn’t drink much in the middle of a working day), and that still wasn’t enough, they had to send a nursing mother out for more, and then later still for pizzas to feed people, late in the evening. The nursing mother being the one sober enough to drive. People sat in the garden and wandered about and talked, there were old people and her contemporaries and her children’s friends and small children and babies, and they talked and laughed and she moved from one group to another and it was a wonderful celebration of Geoffrey in his house and his garden.
And the next morning—she was lying in bed, it was a bit after eight, she didn’t have to get up, nothing to get up for, when she heard the noise of a truck outside, its engine running while it was parked. It sounded like a delivery of some sort. Not for her. And then she remembered: the clothes drier had packed up, it was more than twenty years old, had simply stopped functioning, and her sister had just bought a new one and done lots of research into the best kind so she rang up several shops and ordered the same machine from the one offering the best price, she might have to do without a husband but she was bloody well not going to live without a clothes drier. The truck would be it. She was just jumping out of bed when the knocker thundered. Found dressing gown and slippers and hurried down the stairs as fast as possible; two surly men on the doorstep.
The laundry was full of empty bottles and even a couple of full ones swimming in the melted ice in the tub. The men looked around, and sniffed. While she moved trays of glasses from the top of the washing machine, so they could put the drier on top of it. You’re installing it, aren’t you, she said, and they grunted. That was it, they just put it there, she could plug it in. She said, You have to take the old one away, too, and took them out to the garage for it; it was big as well as old and hadn’t fitted in the laundry. On the back terrace their feet crunched broken glass. They looked at the debris, the glasses whole and smashed, the fish-pond full of flowers, the messy aftermath. Looks like quite a party here last night, said one of the men. Their disapproval was so sour, so sneering, that she said, Yes, we had a funeral. She didn’t trust them to know the word wake. And not telling them that it was her husband’s. Afterwards she turned it into a good story to entertain people, the terrible dour critical sniffiness, the positive disamusement, of the delivery men.
She looks over the orderly garden. No sign of the party now. Except every now and then a spike of glass. And still in a pile, round a corner, the shards of a pot full of basil that someone knocked off the terrace. The basil replanted and dead now too, only the pieces of terracotta remain.
Elvira comes visiting again. How are all our cranesbills, she asks, and Clare takes her out to see the true geraniums growing. Not quite lustily, but delicately and well. They sit on the silvery bench in the grieving garden with mosquito coils wafting scented smoke about them. With a bottle of the Veuve Clicquot that Elvira has brought. Some habits are greatly comforting. After a bit Elvira stands up and delicately on her high-heeled sandals makes her way to the geranium plants, pouring a little champagne on to each. Clare looks at her with scandalised delight. Veuve Clicquot, poured on geraniums.
A libation, says Elvira. You always have to use the best wine for libations. She brushes her nose across a medlar flower. The diamond earrings she bought from a little jeweller she knows in Bangkok flash discreetly, but precisely. You have to wait until medlars are bletted, before you eat them, she says.
Sleepy, says Clare.
What?
Bletted. Sleepy.
Oh. Yes. Apparently they can go from the point of perfect ripeness to disgusting rottenness in a minute, so people used to wait up all night with a candle and a plate and knife, watching for the moment. I read about that in a novel. Elvira pulls a yellow leaf off a camellia. You are lucky, she says, you can grieve.
Maybe I am, says Clare to herself. Geoffrey didn’t leave her, didn’t betray her, didn’t prefer another person, another sex. Though sometimes she has reproached him, directly: Why did you leave me, how could you be so cruel.
The hardest thing, says Elvira, for a person like me, in my situation, is hanging on to what you once had. Believing that when you were in love, once, you were. I’ve not always been very good at that.
It was true, says Clare. It still is true, of then. I remember how much he loved you. I was there. I remember when the children were born, how he looked at you.
Oh, the children. He was always besotted with the children.
And you. He loved you. You don’t fake that.
Ah me, sighs Elvira. Eheu, eheu. Oh yes, I do believe it. I tell myself to do so. You can’t let the present taint the past. But it is another country.
But the wenches aren’t dead. We’re as lusty as ever.
And still committing fornication. She snorts into her champagne and nearly chokes.
Do you ever have affairs with married men, asks Clare.
Only when it’s safe.
Safe.
When I know they won’t get some stupid idea of leaving their wives and coming and living with me.
Ah.
Mind you, it mostly is. Thoroughly safe. The thing about most men is, they’re faithful to their marriages, they’re just not faithful to their wives.
Is that a paradox?
Not at all. They want to be married, they want to stay married, the woman they’re married to is a nice habit. They just want to fuck other women but not leave their wives.
But sometimes they do leave.
True. And you’ll find it’s nearly always because they’ve slept with the wrong woman, some female who decides she wants to be the wife and inveigles him into giving the other the shove. Exceptions, of course, some really bad marriages, deeply unhappy people and all that, which is why I said you’ve got to watch that it’s safe. But it’s pretty generally true. That’s why you see second marriages that are no better than the first. Worse sometimes.
But what if it’s the women leaving? That’s supposed to be more common.
Oh yes indeed and that’s a whole other matter. I’m talking about nicely married men sleeping around.
Faithful to their marriages but not their wives. Positively epigrammatic, says Clare.
Feel free, make it your own.
Two women, sitting in a garden that one of them has made, one in a black linen shift dress which you know is fabulously expensive but not why you know, with evident diamonds, the other in leggings and an old coral-coloured clinging silk shirt, neither quite offering glimpses of skimpy black lacy bras—Elvira’s first rule of underwear: it’s for the wearer’s benefit, no one else’s, and Clare suspects that one of Elvira’s little wisps of lace costs more than all her underwear put together—decadent women, dissolute women, desirable women, guzzling champagne and secrets, women who had they been their mothers that age would have been considered elderly, though they suspect now that maybe their mothers didn’t quite believe it either. They just went along with it, and these women don’t. Age is a figment of other people’s imaginations.
In fact, says Elvira, it’s the present that’s another country, it’s here that we do things differently.
Elvira’s good at change. She turned herself from a blue-stockinged (literally at times, under large woollen skirts and bulky pullovers) teacher of Greek and Latin into an expert on computers, taught herself by reading books and magazines, anything she could, s
o that they went from being incomprehensible to a language she spoke intimately, and from then to running her own custom-made software business, turned herself from a plump contented wife to a lean and glamorous woman of affairs.
I saw the writing on the screen, she says. Didn’t take genius. Four Latin students and none at all in Greek were pretty soon going to add up to redundancy.
She read an article in a newspaper, long before computers were household objects, saying that Latin scholars made the best computer programmers, and off she went. But could still be teaching in a school, had Bruce not decided to come to terms with his sexuality.
Besides, she says, doing something for a while is enough. You don’t have to do it for always.
Yeah, I know, says Clare, I think that too. But I’d like to have gone on living with Geoffrey a hell of a lot longer.
Ah yes, yes indeed. She stares into her glass, then wriggles and crosses her legs, no stockings today, a lot of slim tanned leg (fake, the tan, says Elvira) and Clare notices again that she often moves abruptly when there’s an unpleasant thought about, as though sloughing it off. Ah well, she says, no point in repining. Needs must when the devil drives. She stretches her arms over her head, the shapely well-muscled arms of a woman who goes to the gym. One day I’ll have a garden again, she says.
I thought you did, your gorgeous rooftop creation.
Clare has visited her apartment in the city; it is the top floor of an old wool store, and has several enormous terraces with formal beds, trees in tubs, box hedges, gardenias scenting the night air, iceberg roses trained as standards.
Garden. That’s not a garden, that’s a parterre. I wander in it like a Louis XIV whose Versailles has shrunk. I don’t do anything in it. The people who installed it come and tinker with it from time to time. I wouldn’t dare touch it. Even the watering is automatic.
Install. Tinker. It sounds like something on a computer.
Yeah. The nearest you can get to a virtual garden and still have real leaves. You might wonder, it’s all so perfect, but I know they’re real. The young woman who maintains it comes and washes the city grime off them, every so often. And if something isn’t flourishing, it’s discreetly removed and replaced with one in good nick. How’s that for a metaphor for our times?
Clare shivers. Everything disposable. Nothing irreplaceable.
No, says Elvira, one day I’ll have a real garden, and grub in it and get dirty, and let chaos reign.
The other night, says Clare, I was watching the gardening programme on ABC and there was a marvellous garden in Western Australia, in the desert. The woman who’d made it pointed out wisteria and blossoming fruit trees and oh all sorts of things that would be wonderful anywhere, but in the desert . . . stunning. Especially roses. The interviewer said, Tell me, what is the secret of your roses. Well, she said, I dig a hole eighteen inches deep and in the bottom of it I put a dead animal.
Wow, said Elvira.
And the thing is, he didn’t ask her what sort of animal, and whether she killed it especially, like a sacrifice to the gods, or whether she often had dead animals around. Does she catch possums? The neighbours’ cats? Does she slaughter a cow? Mice? I’ve been wondering ever since. How can I possibly emulate that handy hint?
Elvira laughs. Stick with the blood and bone, my dear. Nice and sanitised, in a packet.
It is time for her to go. Her car is waiting. Tonight she is dining with a lover. I must go and bathe and perfume myself. And put on my new dress.
No, says Clare. Not a new dress! I don’t believe it.
Sarky bugger.
Who this time?
Colette Dinnigan. I wondered if I was too old and then I tried it on and decided I wasn’t.
Beware of the mutton dressing as lamb.
Oh, I do, I do, never fear it. This one’s black, with faint brown roses. Pink, now, I might have drawn the line at pink.
They hug one another for quite a long time before Elvira gets in the car. Remember, keep on drinking la Veuve, she says.
I’ll have to write a best-seller first.
Well, okay, any decent bubbly.
Clare goes back to her garden and sits on the bench. A blackbird is trilling. The light is falling greenly through the leaves. She can have a green thought in a green shade. There are words that the mind gathers and lays like balm on the heart, believing that they will heal, but still the heart aches. Surely a little less? Maybe for a moment.
She wonders whether it is because of the movie that she thinks of Elvira as a tightrope walker. A movie she saw when she was young and in love and will never watch again in case it is not as good as she remembers it. Elvira stepping along her high wire. Such poise, such talent, such skill, but above all such will, to keep going, not to fall, never for a moment can the will flag or she will be lost, all her skill will not avail her and she will tumble ungracefully down, splat, limbs all jangled, no safety net to catch her, the Colette Dinnigan split and blooming with blood jelly roses. Of course Elvira has no regrets, they might sap her will. She moves swiftly, agile, as if dancing, not letting herself look back along the tightrope of her life, so clever she makes it look easy, and only a fellow funambule knows how hard it is.
The coils are burned out, the mozzies are biting, the evening is chilly. She winds some more of the star jasmine around its pyramid of bamboo, gathers bottle and glasses and Persian cushions, and goes inside. The bottle isn’t empty, and she stoppers it. You can have enough champagne, even the Widow.
remarrying
THERE’S AN ARTICLE IN THE weekend paper about John Bayley and how he is getting married again. So soon, is the implication, after his devastating loss of Iris Murdoch, which he wrote about so movingly, so freely. Months after her death her medicines were still in the fridge, her clothes lying about. People thought that the rest of his life would be a footnote to his forty-three years with her.
He’s going to marry their old friend, Audi Villers, whom he has known for years; she and her late husband Borys and Iris and John used to holiday together. Later the widowed Audi would help him shower Iris. Friends seem to be saying that they are so much in love, that it is a marriage made in heaven. Bayley says, It’s a question of having started out as four, then three, and now we are the two survivors. So we are just doing what’s logical for survivors.
A spokesman for some national bereavement council says people often think the widowed remarry too soon, on the rebound. As if there were only one way to grieve. In fact, he says, an early remarriage can be a sign of great love for the dead spouse. That elderly people often remarry quite quickly because they are so used to being married the death of the partner leaves a void that they can’t stand. Whereas people who are married less time, who are widowed at a younger age, often never marry again. He also says that people do not understand the utter devastation of bereavement, unless it happens to them.
(You could consider here Ethel Kennedy, pregnant when Bobby was assassinated, thirty-four years later still not choosing to be a wife again.)
It’s often children who object to a parent’s remarrying, says the article, but Bayley and Iris never had any. Furthermore, she had been ill for a long time, he had been getting used to the idea of her death. The article finishes by saying the ghosts of the past will not trouble the newlyweds, the past is what they have in common. Far from never talking about it, it is probably what they will do, most of the time.
Bayley is seventy-four, the age of his wife-to-be isn’t mentioned. Apparently he wrote that he and Iris were never much interested in sex, even at the beginning. They used to like kissing one another’s arms. So you can speculate that maybe sex won’t have much role in the new marriage. Maybe it will be mainly friendly, and not totally and utterly erotic, as was the love of Iris and Bayley, from the moment he saw her riding past on a bicycle, and fell in love with her, and stayed that way all her life and after. Never needing children, just Iris.
listening to herself living
YOU WILL SOON FI
ND ANOTHER lover, said the man who had been that. The light leaking round the edges of the curtains was pewter grey and cold, the room warm and yellow lamplit. She sighed.
You will soon find another lover, he said.
Would you be jealous, she asked.
This was when they were still lovers. They were in bed, having one of those conversations full of the curiosity that belongs to such moments.
Oh no, he said. I would like you to tell me all about it. I think I am a voyeur at heart.
Not even a little bit jealous?
I don’t think so.
She thought she could feel put out by this, but then remembered that jealousy wasn’t part of their affair, she was not jealous of his life with his wife, this was their own small illicit moment of adultery, secret, private, and when they went out of it they went out into another world (not the real world, she said, this is the real world, but this was a remark that only could exist in the small illicit space of the adultery) and became quite different people.
Ah, she said to herself, not to him: another lover; when that happens, if that happens, I shall not tell you about it. But she wondered if she meant it. She would not know until the moment came. She was reading her life like a book that someone else was writing; not until she turned that page would she know what she was going to do.
The Fog Garden Page 19