The Fog Garden

by Marion Halligan

  She knew that a lot of people thought he had a dreadfully male-centred vision of love, even misogynistic, that his women were objects with no minds or feeling of their own, and maybe that was true, but when she read the poems she was caught up in their sexuality in a way that was neither mindless nor objectified. For the space of a poem she would be one of his women, her body responded and so did her emotions and especially her intellect.

  Some poems intrigued her in a different way; these were the ones where the woman was voluptuous and voracious and destroyed the man, squashing him, swallowing. Even a sugar-and-spice milk-toothed Little Red Riding Hood could swallow the Wolf in a single delicate gulp of her minikin mouth. Botticelli’s Venus is hardly a huge white woman who will roll over on Mars and squash him so flat she will to turn him into a bedside mat, but maybe there is something . . . She is dressed with a certain demureness, her gown seems transparent, but you can see nothing through it, though it shapes her round breasts with gold-embroidered braid and falls between her wide thighs. (Round breasts, wide thighs, slender waist, very A. D. Hope.) Only her feet and hands and a little of her neck are bare. As Venuses go she is cool, more elegant than fleshly, not one of your lusty knowing pneumatic goddesses, and yet perhaps that thoughtful gaze appraises, maybe Botticelli is seeing her ready to open her delicate mouth and gobble Mars whole, maybe Mars is feigning sleep to postpone the apprehended moment of his devouring.

  She prefers her version to this putative Hopish version.

  But then, gloss this with his poem about the Countess of Pembroke’s dream. This is a much later work, it was not around in her youth, in fact she has just read it for the first time. How this beautiful intelligent cultivated young noblewoman loved to watch stallions mating, and wished for such power to be unleashed on her. She doesn’t want to swallow anybody, she begs for a man to batter, master, crush her, as befits a man, that’s her idea. So Hope has it, following Aubrey in his Brief Lives. But no man comes near to achieving the power she sees in the stallions.

  She dreams she is a centaur.

  Does everybody know that centaurs have two sets of genitals? One human, one equine, to match their double nature. The Countess dreams she is a centaur coupling with her brother, Sir Philip Sidney, in the same form, first of all in the human way, when

  . . . each in love and gratitude conspires

  To mount the other’s ladder of desires.

  This copulation is ecstatic, violent in its way, they lose themselves in the blind locking and rearing and swaying of their bodies, but the terms are human, and they finish by gently pressing together and kissing. But then suddenly they realise that they are horses and the brute fury rises within them and demands its due and they gallop off and couple in the manner of stallion and mare. As the Countess watched them through the peephole on the stairs at Wilton. Hope describes their loosing of seed as a prayer from Nature and from Zeus, whose presence blends the natures of god and man and beast, and is the source of heroes who will renew the world.

  Maybe the problem with Mars and Venus is that they are both gods.

  And maybe she is reading them quite awry. Maybe Botticelli is being a bit thoughtful himself, giving the goddess of love a pensive rather than a sexy expression. Or maybe he simply painted his model, and at that moment she happened to be thinking about something quite everyday, like what would be for dinner, or which style to have her new dress made in.

  Later she finds a line in Kenneth Clark’s book, The Nude: No doubt it is the strength of Venus that her face reveals no thought beyond the present. Not Botticelli’s; Clare can read pasts and futures, disappointments and possibilities in the face of his elegant Florentine.

  She takes the underground and sits in that crowded public solitude watching people. Regarding them closely (Clare, don’t stare, said her mother) while pretending her eyes are idle. Opposite is a fat young woman doing her homework. Conning it. Her lips move as she reads the words meaningfully clumped on the pages in front of her. Her face is anxious. Clare imagines her future hanging on getting this right, some course, some diploma, some job. She eavesdrops with her eyes, and reads the words: Save your life again.

  Save your life again? Have you nearly lost it once? Several times?

  When she looks at the words again they say, Save your file. Save your life, save your file. Two letters transposed and you are in different worlds. Or perhaps not.

  The doorway next to her building has an awning over it, and leads to an establishment called The Gaslight. One night she comes home late after the theatre and there’s a bouncer standing outside. Wearing a fine navy blue cashmere overcoat. Good evening, he says, politely, with a faint accent that might be Italian, and when she has trouble with her key he helps her to open the door.

  The Gaslight is a gentlemen’s club, but not the usual St James variety. It offers naked ladies dancing. All credit cards accepted. And after that, whenever she comes home late, there is the bouncer, courteous, inquiring after her health, her day, chatting about the weather. She sends a postcard to Elvira. It’s what every girl needs, she writes, a bouncer at the door to protect. You feel so safe, coming home late, knowing there’s a man at the door whose profession is the protection of womenfolk. Whatever your profession.

  One day she went to Oxford, to see an old friend. She took her to evensong at Magdalen, the chapel dim, high, very quiet, the choristers all children, none of the men singing, their voices so pure and gentle and yet so filling of that ancient space that she remembered the cathedral of grief and how it makes everything more poignant, more important, more full of its own savour. She’d been feeling nervy and overexcited that day, full of babble. The singing of the children saved her. And when she got home, late, catching the bus and then a taxi from Victoria, looking forward to the comforting presence of the bouncer, and had her conversation with him, she told him all about the children singing, and he seemed interested.

  Not that it’s a rough neighbourhood. The pavements outside its elegant shops are decked with terracotta pots stuffed with cyclamen and other extravagant flowering plants, and nobody ever seems to steal them or vandalise them. Imagine Canberra, she writes to Polly, they wouldn’t last two minutes.

  At an antique market in St James churchyard with clusters of small stalls and some knowing customers—one is looking for a Stilton spoon—she wanders round solitary looking at the wares, for a moment buying each object that takes her eye, for a moment becoming the person owning this thing, taking it away, making it belong to her, changing her life imperceptibly with its butterfly wing, until she passes on, saying to herself, of course you had no intention, but for a second she did, for another second she passed from intention to ownership. What she does buy is teaspoons. She has suddenly seen them as good presents for friends, small, light, unbreakable, belonging to this place. They are Georgian silver, 1818, 1823, 1826, say the hallmarks, as deciphered by the stallholders—the knowing customers can work them out for themselves—the spoons themselves worn, frail, their rims thin, their bowls wafery, in one case pitted, all the hands which have touched them, used them in the humble ways of teaspoons, wearing their silver away, so now they are a kind of etherealised essence of teaspoon, and yet at the same time the hands and years have given them weight and substance, so that their frailty contains this solid lengthy life. They are polished to a moony gleaming splendour, and the friends for whom they are intended should delight in them.

  And then it is time for Oliver to come. His voice is tinny on the intercom. And before she can look at him he has wrapped his arms around her and is kissing her mouth.

  They go shopping, and buy wine, and bread, and a truss of tomatoes (costing considerably more in pounds than in dollars at home, and it’s not a kind idea to convert because the dollar is worth hardly more than a third of a pound) and some highly artisanal Roquefort. They sit at the little dining table and talk. She has brought photographs and they kneel on the floor at the round coffee table like children hunched over them together while
she tells him their stories. They sit on the floor and talk. They sit in a pair of idiosyncratic armchairs—this is one of the charms of the apartment, all the furniture is full of character and some of it has a certain shabby grandeur which is her favourite thing with furniture, being once good but now worn—and talk, and go out for a meal, an Italian restaurant somewhere in Soho, walking quickly and briskly through the cold air, and she asks if she may take his arm, partly because she likes walking along holding a man’s arm, spent thirty-five years doing it. But also because when you want to move swiftly through crowded pavements it is better to do it as a unit, to make a single space in air with its own single rhythm. Afterwards they come back and talk more. It’s as though all the decades since they’ve seen one another are no more than a source of conversation. When it’s time to go to bed he wraps his arms around her.

  When they were first falling in love he came to her room in the student hall of residence and said, Have you ever slept naked with anyone? It’s nice. I don’t mean making love, I mean just lying together. The words the classical seducer’s trick, but he meant them, that’s what they did. And it was nice. As this now is nice. It’s sweet and comforting and gentle and loving, and when it is time to go to sleep they push their beds together from opposite sides of the room so they won’t lose touch in the night. All night he is there. She can touch him with her foot or her hand. He is not sleeping at her.

  In the morning he looks at her. Ah, your smile. Your smile. It is still the same.

  She can feel it on her face. That smile. She knows what it offers and accepts. But feeling a smile does not mean that it looks like that to someone else. He says it does, and she smiles at him.

  He makes coffee, and they sit at the small table and eat toast and tomatoes. And smile at one another.

  It feels like a kind of Garden of Eden smile, she says.

  If I weren’t married, I’d ask you to marry me.

  She looks at him. Her smile fades, her face grows solemn.

  But maybe you’d say no. Maybe you don’t want to be married again.

  And indeed that is what she has decided, in her year and a day. That she will not marry again. Have lovers, yes, perhaps, but not marry. She has been married, it cannot possibly be done again. But at this moment it is difficult to consider all at once this so severally hypothetical question. If I were not married . . . Henry said the same thing. If I were not married. If my wife were . . . translated. Both these men think they know the misery they would suffer if they lost their wives, but she knows they don’t. They can try to imagine, and maybe at times they whiff the hot breath of that loss. But briefly; immediately they are taking deep steady lungfuls of the fresh bright air of their happy marriages. The stink of loss the faintest waft, never the miasma it is for her.

  Two men—Clare is clever at choosing uxorious men, men who are the marrying kind, good at it—two men, both saying, Ah, if I were not married, I would want to marry you. Meaning it. And they go back to the fresh soft air of their comfortable housekept lives. To a woman they love, who knows them well and cares for them. Possibly better than Clare would, now, in her selfish widowed state. As she cared for Geoffrey. You are brave, these men say to Clare, you are tough, and she looks at them with clear eyes, and is alone.

  As now she looks at Oliver. Maybe I would, she says. Her mind is crossed by a brief comical Victorian memory of politeness: a lady should always thank a gentleman for a proposal of marriage, even if she has no intention of accepting.

  She does not say, this is the second time you have conditionally proposed to me, the first even including asking my father for my hand, both times saying, If I were not married . . . well, the first was rather, When I am not married. But that didn’t happen, not for twenty years or more.

  Not being married.

  But he is. Both times.

  Maybe I would, she says. After all, the situation is not arising. It is a kind of game they are playing, solemn, but a game. But where would we live, she says. Here, or there?

  And the second day passes like the first. With talking, prattle, conversation, exchanges of stories. They go out briefly, to buy food, and in the evening to an Indian restaurant round the corner. There’s far too much to eat, they take some home with them.

  She is happy, hardly even sad. There have been no promises between them, except of love and friendship. They will go back home and continue the multi-volumed epistolary novel they are writing to one another, via email, continue to pay one another attention. That is a definition of love, says Clare, to be seen by another person. Truly seen.

  How well we fit together, he says. It’s so comfortable walking along with you. It seems as though we have always done it.

  She says, Isn’t it odd, to be here, so simply ourselves. I mean, normally we come with houses and gardens and furniture and books and cars and wine cellars and kitchenware and ornaments and pictures, we have people we live with, children, family, friends, jobs and duties and pastimes and habits, and here we are with nothing, just the clothes we are wearing, just simply stripped back to ourselves without all our belongings, encumbrances, the things which to the casual and the loving eye too define us. Just our words.

  Isn’t it good, he says.

  And maybe this is why it doesn’t seem to have been a dangerous enterprise, of the Elizabeth Taylor variety.

  (Except that later she checks up on the Elizabeth Taylor story and realises she has got it wrong. The lobster, and the cat, yes, that’s how it happens, they have to have a tin of sardines instead, and a whole lot of Rockingham cups and saucers come to a bad end in the cat’s stealing of the lobsters (the precious china a glossed-over loss, she won’t care, not in the scale of disasters, but its presence poignantly signifying her spinsterhood: the cups would not be hers, would have come to her from some richer domestic life) but the meaning of the story is quite different from Clare’s memory of it. They have no time to get beyond stiff conversation because the awful sticky-beaking risible neighbour (we are a booky family, the frightful woman says, of course we don’t read the books but we read the reviews) turns up and is appalling whereas in the letters she was wonderfully comical, and the novelist realises what a consummate artist his correspondent is, turning this life of dreadful trivial horror into her letters that are small works of art, and only for him. He is even slightly humble, in a generous way, that she can make so much out of such raw material.

  In the end, our heroine, she mildly becomes that, begins another letter: Dear Edwin. The day is already transforming. It seems they will go back to their relationship of words on the page, even more gratefully than before, and on his part with more percipience. So it is quite a happy ending, or continuance. Different from hers with Oliver, but not undone. She and Oliver can have both, the bodies embracing as well as the letters, the ardent conversations with eyes interlocked, but then they are not a beautifully written story. Which is about the transmuting power of art, with the neat irony that it is the figure of the amateur and not the real writer in which it is vested.)

  On the third morning Oliver lies with his head on her stomach. She gazes down at him; he has that long-limbed high-hipped maybe very faintly androgynous slenderness that you see in pre-Hellenic sculptures. Those divine marble figures with their gleaming sharp-eyed smiles, possessing a clarity that could be a little sinister but is on closer looking self-aware; smiles of contemplation. She lays her hand on that fine pelvic girdle of bone and he curls up with his head on her stomach, which is both hollow and pillowy, and they don’t say much, just let their bodies be conscious of one another, because in a little while he will get up and make coffee and it won’t be long before he has to leave to catch the train home.

  She feels him stir, and tells him this story; he lies back again to listen.

  There was one day when Geoffrey was first ill, he was in hospital, two years ago it would be, a bit more, and I’d gone to see him, I used to spend a lot of the day with him, just being together. He was sitting up in bed read
ing, he felt okay then, and I was in a chair, it must have been quite warm weather because I was wearing sandals I think, at least no socks or stockings, and he had his foot poking out of the bedclothes, he hated having hot feet, my sister said it was because he was Piscean, Pisceans always have difficult feet, and it’s true, he did, beds and chairs would stick their legs out and wound him, but he was irritated by having it blamed on a star sign, and I had my bare foot up on the bed, just touching his, our feet were just resting gently together on the bed. Both of us reading, and our feet just resting together. It was lovely. Anyway, the pharmacist came bustling in, and his face was a study, he did a double take, a mild one, suppressed, but I saw it, and I watched his face when he was leaving, he was smiling the kind of smile he might have smiled if he had found us in a passionate embrace, it was complicit, and pleased, aware of seeing something special, and I imagined it turning into a big grin by the time he got out of the room, enjoying his own little frisson; it was oddly intimate. He saw. And I suddenly knew how important it was for us to be sitting there, together, not paying any particular attention to one another, but knowing the other so thoroughly there, in that gentle touching of our bare feet.