When the World Was Steady

by Claire Messud

  She had not thought anything of the summons, but Simon was stiff with her, and this heightened her already anxious mood. When he shut the doors to his office and offered her a seat, she felt her chest tighten and declined. This, she knew, was the formula for hiring and firing people. This, she thought at the same time, had something to do with Martin. Simon, too, would not sit: he paced the room and straightened all the pictures, one by one. He brushed his plaque for dust. He did not seem to know how to begin. She noticed that his bottom was wide in its loose covering and in her confused state she couldn’t tell whether this was appealing or not.

  ‘I’ve been thinking, since this morning—’

  ‘Yes? What?’ Her eyes popped open and shut. ‘Is it something I’ve said?’

  ‘Don’t be so defensive, Virginia. I just wondered whether you had any holiday plans? You haven’t mentioned it.’ He took from his desk a chart that marked off all the holidays and sick days members of the department had taken. ‘It’s June now. You’ve only taken two days all year, you know. And one was for a root canal.’

  Virginia shrugged. ‘I’ve got a lot to take care of.’

  ‘We all do, but we take holidays. Don’t you want some time off?’

  Something about this didn’t ring true to Virginia. ‘Why since this morning?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Why have you been thinking about it since this morning?’

  ‘You seem tired.’

  ‘Of course I’m tired. But it doesn’t mean I want a holiday. You don’t take a holiday just because you get out of bed on the wrong side, do you? There’s work to be done!’ Even as she finished she could hear her shrill voice. It echoed among the pictures. ‘Besides,’ she said more calmly, ‘Selina is taking a lot of time very soon. Maybe I’ll take some later on, August, or September.’

  ‘You don’t do Selina’s job. It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘The summer’s very busy for me. I can’t leave everything on Mandy’s shoulders.’

  ‘You don’t have to: Martin needs to learn. He can fill in for a couple of weeks. He’ll do it fine.’

  Little fluorescent bulbs exploded in her head. ‘No,’ she said, only it came out of her mouth as a shriek, and a long one at that. Later, to her mother, she said, ‘I suppose I saw red.’

  ‘Virginia—’ Simon was coming towards her.

  ‘I knew it. I knew he was behind this. It’s his idea, and you—I thought we were friends! I thought we were colleagues.’ She spat this out, her eyes screwed shut as she tried to regain composure, so far lost she couldn’t imagine it. He put his arm on her back, on her shoulder.

  ‘I won’t go. Not for him, I won’t go. You can’t make me.’ She could feel Simon’s chest very close and she pummelled at it a little but he didn’t move away.

  ‘I think you need it,’ he said, and she opened her eyes to see a mixture of curiosity and pity on his close, coarse face. And of course she cried: for the first time in the many years they had worked together, she cried in front of him, fell against him and cried into his damp neck, into his department store cologne smell, while he patted her awkwardly on the back. To Mrs Simpson she said only, ‘I had a bit of a tantrum.’

  And the funny thing was that amid all the fuss and the tension and the clammy body fluids, Virginia could see the absurdity of her fantasies, of ever having imagined this man crooning to her or disrobing. She almost started to laugh among her sobs; and for a second she didn’t care that her whole life had gone wrong, that she had lost control at such an inopportune time. It was just plain funny.

  The hilarity didn’t last long. She didn’t remember it as she told her story to Mrs Simpson—although she wouldn’t have said had she recalled—and it was certainly not very amusing to be on indefinite leave on the grounds of nervous exhaustion. It was not amusing at all.

  In the telling, however circumspect, of the afternoon’s goings-on, Virginia shed still more tears. It was like losing blood: she was reduced, trembling and small by the time Mrs Simpson more or less understood what had happened, her eyes swollen and bloodshot, her nose crimson and damp. But the rest of Virginia’s face was pale—testimony, Mrs Simpson felt, to great trauma and shock.

  After plying her daughter with Bovril, Mrs Simpson called the doctor, who came swiftly and provided an immediate sedative along with a prescription for some more. At the door she whispered to Mrs Simpson, ‘We’ll see how it goes. Might be a good idea for her to talk to someone. Therapy, you know. NHS covers it, although a lot of people don’t know.’

  ‘Thank you, Doctor, but I don’t think she’ll need to. My daughter gets her counselling straight from the source. She’s probably praying as we speak.’

  Virginia wasn’t, in fact. She was lying in bed, where it seemed she had not been for ages, watching little transparent creatures swim back and forth across her closed eyelids. She felt free of the leaden weight of her limbs, inconvenienced only by the blockage in her nostrils, and sleepy, terribly sleepy. By the time Melody Simpson came in and kissed her daughter’s brow, Virginia was almost smiling and very far away.

  Which left Mrs Simpson to the dusk, to a tin of baked beans, and to the past that had led her and Virginia here. This was not as bad as it could have been; it was not as bad as the other two times, after the last of which Virginia had found God, and after the first of which she had come home for good.

  Virginia had been pretty then, always better built than her sister, with delicate wrists and only a slightly too-long face. Emmy had already left, and Virginia was jealous. Melody Simpson could see her eldest tight-lipped at the mention of William Richmond’s growing fortune, listening over Sunday lunch to stories of Emmy’s climb through Sydney society.

  For almost a year Sunday lunch was the only time Mrs Simpson saw Virginia. Even then they didn’t get along; Virginia wasn’t exactly rebellious, but when Emmy left she grew ambitious out of spite, and needled her mother in ways Mrs Simpson could not stand. Virginia was a secretary, taking evening classes, in control, never late, never a ladder in her stockings. But terribly shy, really, which only her mother knew—no wonder she hated her mother so—and which, at that time, was about all Mrs Simpson could have said with certainty about her daughter.

  She never saw the flat Virginia lived in with two other girls; she was never invited and wasn’t the sort to poke her nose in unwanted. She never met the man, and once it was all over, he was never mentioned again. But when her Ginny slumped on to the settee in three-day-dirty clothes, without stockings in March, without having called in sick to work, Mrs Simpson had known how to take care of her own. It was much worse than ‘nervous exhaustion’ then: the words for it left you blighted for life, were better left unsaid. Remembering that time, Melody Simpson thought again that one didn’t live through such periods and grow to like people any better—she would always prefer Emmy as a person, selfish though she was—but that one learned something stronger, and better, than easy affections. And she poked at her baked beans in a fury as she thought how Virginia’s flatmates had only been to visit her once.

  It wasn’t until she had finished her meal; not until she had washed the few dishes and hung up her new dress—which looked, now, with its red leatherette belt, like an announcement of her guilt for Virginia’s state of mind; not until she was wiping down the table and tidying for bed that Mrs Simpson came across the pile of late mail.

  There wasn’t usually much in the noon delivery; a flyer or an insurance document, perhaps a reminder for Virginia from the greedy dentist. But this evening, among the worthless wastepaper, Mrs Simpson found a worn blue envelope of the cheapest quality, one half of one side covered with large, ornate stamps. These threw her slightly, and she turned it this way and that unopened, and examined the smudged postmark, before recognizing the generous, swooping slant of her younger daughter’s hand. She was tempted to run into Virginia’s room and shake her, to force her awake to the rare prize of a letter from Emmy, but she did not. Mrs Simpson took a sharp knife from the draw
er, slit the top of the envelope, stealthy as a spy, and withdrew the flimsy sheets. She paused before unfolding them to fetch a bar of chocolate from the fridge, then settled down to the compounded indulgence of devouring sweets and words at once.

  BALI

  EMMY WAS WAKENED by the workmen shattering stones outside her room. When she peered through the slats of her door-shutters, she could see men silhouetted around and inside the hole that would be the swimming-pool. Behind them hovered the shadow of the gorge, then the sacred ridge, then the blood-orange disk of the sun, creeping up the sky. As she rubbed at the sleep in her eyes and at the film of sweat across her cheeks, she became aware of the stirrings above her in the house, and of the early-morning movements along the road outside.

  After almost two weeks in this household, this was the moment in the day that she liked best: it was secret and serene. She almost felt like a conjuror, in her room against the hillside beneath the rest of the building, as if she could emerge into a world of her own imagining. By the time she was dressed, however, and faced with the prospect of opening her shutters on to the men and the pool, this supreme confidence had inevitably dissipated.

  Staying here had just sort of happened. Max had pushed for it—they got on well—and somehow Emmy had been caught up in the strange Sparke dynamic. Not that Buddy was attentive: he hardly spoke to her except when she protested that she ought to leave. She felt a bit like an old servant on the sidelines, observing. But Emmy didn’t mind. She was fascinated, horrified, entranced by this life, and said to herself almost every evening that she would stay just a few days longer, just long enough to understand.

  After the meal on the edge of the Monkey Forest all that time ago, it had been too late for the trip back to Kintamani, and Emmy had not been sorry to follow Buddy, Max and the two women back to the house. Arriving exhausted as night fell, she had not appreciated the beauty of the place, and only after a long rest for her twisted muscles, on a generous and welcoming bed, had she first seen the sacred sunrise.

  From then on, things seemed to be beyond her control, despite her fantasies to the contrary. When, over a haphazard breakfast in the vast main room of the house, Max asked if she would stay another day or two, she thought just long enough to slip a spoonful of papaya into her mouth, and accepted, only to discover that K’tut had already been dispatched to return Gdé and young Wayan to Kintamani and to retrieve her bag from the dreary losmen there.

  Her new accommodation was quite splendid. She had this room to herself, with its sprawling framed bed, carved armoire and cool stone floor, and even a little bathroom with a shower and erratic plumbing, all separate from the body of the house, so that her privacy (and theirs) was not infringed. Above her was the main room, which she reached via a pathway and some concrete steps. It was a large room, with sofas and armchairs and another, immense bed in one corner, everything covered in intricate batiks. Off this room, open to it, stretched a long, thatch-covered porch looking across the ridge; and at the other side of the house, a narrow kitchen. To reach Buddy’s private quarters, one had to go outside again and climb a flight of steps. There, off an external corridor, were three more bedrooms with private facilities, one for Max, one for Buddy, and one for any of a variety of visitors—women, mostly.

  The patterns of life in this place were at the same time orderly and random: orderly in terms of Buddy’s life, and indifferent, hence random, in terms of everyone else’s. It had its natural movements—the rustling of geckos in the thatch, the rotation of the days around the sun’s progress, so that bedtime came with nightfall and the day began for all at five. And then the rest: Buddy did not take breakfast, so none was regularly provided. But he took his other meals like clockwork, and already at sunrise a group of Ubud girls and women had arrived and begun work. They prepared lunch and washed the floors daily; they beat the cushions and refilled the oil lamps; they created what semblance of normality there was, talking and laughing among themselves and blushing at the sight of young Max. They did not leave until the last dish was washed, the last mosquito coil set and smouldering, and then they set off down the rutted path by torchlight, still talking and joking in the night.

  For Emmy, her stay had been calm. She and Max frequently set off together to see the temples or markets within easy reach. They had wandered together like mother and son, wading through rice paddies to visit villages unattainable by road, stopping for meals at warungs. She had gone with him to a tailor in Ubud, and had counselled him on which fabrics would suit shirts or jackets for himself, dresses for his mother. She had stopped comparing him to Pod, had stopped considering Pod so much at all, but in this way she felt she was coming to understand her daughter better.

  She knew that Buddy considered her purely as a companion for Max, a toy as his own women were toys, and she suspected that this extraordinary father would be unperturbed, relieved even, if she and Max were to go to bed together. He obviously saw little other purpose for women, no matter what their age; and it wounded her pride. She struggled not to take his indifference as a challenge or a slight, but it was nonetheless a struggle. And when she had, on occasion, found Buddy in the sitting-room alone, and had attempted conversation, she had felt her usually dormant temper bubbling to the surface. Hence her dread, in the mornings, at the few short steps to the main house.

  Sometimes she was included in family events, taken in K’tut’s bus to ceremonies or public gatherings, to Den Pasar for household trips. Buddy was planning a trip to Komodo, and spoke as if Emmy would go with them. And other times she enjoyed a sublime, serene solitude. She watched the bus pull off loaded with Sparkes and retinue, and she returned to read, or to walk along the pebbled riverside at the bottom of the gorge, or to swim in the spring-fed pool that belonged to the neighbouring hotel and that Buddy and his guests were welcome to use until their own pool was completed.

  She enjoyed a certain status, staying with Buddy: there were chuckles and whispers, but all the locals asked if she was well, if she needed anything, if they could escort her anywhere. She was beginning to know some of them by name, particularly the men, because they wandered up to the house in the afternoon or early evening to recline on the bed in the sitting-room and watch Ubud’s only colour television, complete with video recorder. The younger men came in groups, with gallon jugs of rice liquor, and grew raucous over Clint Eastwood videos. The older ones generally came alone, seeking conferences with Buddy about their rice harvest, their daughters’ marriages, the feuding of local politics. When they watched television, it was stealthily, from the corners of their eyes, as they stood contemplating greater things.

  Emmy was fascinated by these people who accepted Buddy’s life as ordinary and who made niches for themselves inside it. And she was fascinated, above all, by the women. Sylvia and Sasha had moved on almost at once, and Max—who could hear everything—assured Emmy that nothing had come of their fledgling intimacy with Buddy. Since their departure, two others, New Zealanders, had stayed one night and scuttled northwards, but none of them learned what Emmy knew, from Max and from her quiet observation.

  There was Suchi, Buddy’s official girlfriend and expectant mother of his child. She was young and physically frail, her belly as yet only gently swollen. K’tut would pick her up from her parents’ house in the bus and bring her to Buddy in the evenings. She spoke no English, he hardly any Balinese or Indonesian, except the phrase ‘shy as a cat’. They would be sitting over supper—Buddy, Max, Emmy, Suchi and any others—and he would tap lightly on Suchi’s nose and recite his foreign phrase: ‘shy as a cat’. Whereupon her face would crinkle, orchid-like, into an expression of delight, and she would cover her eyes with her hands. He would grin and pat her on the arm as if to praise her performance: a party-trick, used over and over again.

  It wasn’t clear to Emmy whether Suchi knew about the others. She was friendly with the women who cared for the house, and perhaps they had told her, but one of Buddy’s favourites, Jenny, was among them, and Emmy could not te
ll where the women’s loyalties lay.

  Jenny, unlike Suchi, was sturdy and small, with a broad face and clever eyes. She spoke a fair amount of English—she had been to Den Pasar, to the university, she told Emmy, although she hadn’t had the money to finish her studies. She was twenty-four. She functioned as the housekeeper, leader of the troupe of younger women. More than anything, she hoped that Buddy would arrange a visa for her so she could go to Australia, to study accounting and to work.

  She never spoke of her liaison with her employer; she seemed to value discretion more than he did, and Emmy sometimes wondered whether strategy did not play a large part in Jenny’s surrender to his charms. If anything, she seemed to be interested in Max, engaging him in conversation, asking him to correct her English letters, standing close enough to smell his skin for longer than was necessary. It was only because of Max’s firm reports that Emmy knew Jenny and Buddy were entangled at all, and it seemed a shame to her because she knew how Max felt about women his father had ‘had’, and because she could see that when Jenny stood at Max’s elbow, he didn’t really want to move away.

  There were others, too. There was a brassy peroxided American living further up the road, who made brightly-coloured children’s clothes for export. She accosted Max in town as though he were her son, but defiantly cut Buddy dead when he passed. There was a plain woman who ran the restaurant in the hotel next door, and who also suffered from being discarded: she responded by swinging her head and laughing sharply whenever Buddy came near.