Part 18 (1/2)
The empty garden was quiet. There was a lull in everything: the wind, the sound of the sea, and even the light, as if a thin cloud was pa.s.sing over the sun. Ruth settled her head into the pillow Frida had given her and rested for some time, in order to gather the strength she would require to reach the telephone. She thought of Harry as she lay there in the garden because she knew he was dead, and she knew she had forgotten he was dead. That seemed the same as forgetting he had lived. Mainly she thought of how his face looked beside hers in bed. Ruth thought of Harry and squeezed her own hand. She rubbed her feet together the way happy babies do, but she couldn't feel them. It was as if a soft coat had risen over her legs-something soft and heavy, also warm, but not a fabric. It took her some time to decide what this blanket might be, and eventually it occurred to her-since she couldn't seem to lift her head from where it lay on the pillow-that Frida might have covered her feet with the skin of the tiger. Then she saw herself under the tree under the tiger skin, and what would Harry say? He would say, George, George, George. Young George stole everyone's livery money. Ruth couldn't tell if she had stopped rubbing her feet. She thought Frida should have brought the telephone out here if she wanted her to call George so badly. She thought Frida should have done many things differently. Something was cutting into her hand as she squeezed it, and after she had squeezed some more, she realized it was her mother's engagement ring.
Soon she would have to get to the house to find the telephone. It would be wound in white cord. Ruth couldn't feel her feet, but she thought she could feel her elbows. She tried to lift herself on them the way she had the day she was caught in the tiger trap. They wouldn't lift; nothing would. When she lay in the tiger trap, there was only the wide sky, but here there was the green slant of the sun in the frangipani. Ruth knew the size of that sun, and all of its properties: it was moving now down the length of her spine, burning some things away and dulling others. Its heat rolled, but subtly. She imagined her spine as a rough shaft, crusted and frayed, like underwater wood. She needed to find this shaft of wood where it splintered underwater; she seized hold of it with her hands; she tugged and the wood came free. Then Ruth came out of the sea. She tasted the salt on her lips to check that it was the sea; she had no memory of getting there. Also she was holding this piece of clammy wood, which was easy enough to throw out over the sand, so that it flew above the dunes and up and into the long-distance wind. The wind made a high piping sound before leaving pinkish traces behind. The sky reddened a little-the tiniest drop of blood stirred in water-which was the strangest weather. A storm might be coming, or leaving; this might be the centre of it. It rattled the windowpanes like a herald, as if to say, ”Prepare! Prepare!” Someone must take the chair into the house before it was ruined. No one could move the gull away from the frangipani, but he might fly off with the first piece of rain. The whales would sound deeper, where there was no storm, and the boy might speed out across the water in his boat to look for them. Then Harry, that necessary man, would call out from the sh.o.r.eline, ”Prepare! Prepare!” He was too busy to take the chair in from the garden, so it would have to be bound with white cord and pulled, the way the wood was pulled from under the sea. Harry ran along the sh.o.r.e, calling out, and the boat was a narrow yellow spill on the bay. The waves rose up and sent spray out over the dunes. The spray fell across the frangipani tree, but the gull stayed; it only turned one curious eye. The cord was too heavy to lift from the floor, so the chair shook, but couldn't be moved. The sun was gone now; it was no longer the sun. There was no name for it because it wouldn't come again. A papery blue shape fell from somewhere and gusted up into the tree. It wasn't terribly important. The chair would have to stay outside, and so would the man calling below the dunes. The windows could rattle and rattle, and no one and nothing would be inside.
Then the rub of the storm over the trees. There was no rain; only sound. First the birds, objecting, as if morning had come in the middle of the night, and then every insect. A bell rang to call a doctor out of sleep. ”Not in this weather,” said a woman, a mother, but the father went out into the sound nevertheless. He went down to the beach, where people stood with binoculars. He waded there among the people and it was as if a G.o.d had come among them; an old, pastoral G.o.d, driving sheep. The mother's ring spanned her finger. She had lost her husband, too, and was inconsolable; she said, ”There's no marriage in heaven.” Now the volume of the jungle increased, but it wasn't quite right: there were monkeys and macaws, all the wrong objects, great opening lilies that sent out a smell of rain. Nothing is so loud as the sound of insects. And on the faint sea: a yellow shape that wasn't a boat. It was long and walking out of the water. It paused to inspect items on the beach; it turned every now and then when it heard someone crying out, but at a distance. It stayed in the rough edge of the waves, and it came closer and was recognizable. The tiger was there in the water. His throat wasn't cut, and he wore his own seared skin. Tigers can be patient; they know how to wait.
He was also fast; he was coming. He seemed to know there was nothing to stop him. Now he was out of the water and on the sand; now at the bottom of the dune where the end of the trap lay. His breath came in evenly over the sound of the birds, his ears lay back against his head, and his claws in the sand made a sound of rolling rock. He was the colour of the gone sun. And he sang! He sang a low hymn as he ran, which came out with his breath over his irregular tongue. Now he came singing up the dune, and all the birds flew screaming behind him, except the one gull in the frangipani tree. That tree swam in and out of the green light. It was bound around with a long white cord that couldn't be lifted from the ground, and a sound intermittently rang out from it. Could it really be so loud under this tree, after all that quiet? Here he was at the beginning of the gra.s.s. His heavy head was so familiar, and he still sang in a low, familiar voice. What a large gold s.p.a.ce he filled at the edge of the garden. His face flared out from itself, and every black line was only a moving away, so he seemed to be retreating even when he stood his ground. And he was totally unharmed; someone had lied about this tiger. A woman as large as he was, and real as he was, had lied. When he came forward over the lawn, the hydrangeas shook and the dune gra.s.s blew back from the greener gra.s.s. He stopped at the chair and reached forward-all that length of him, reaching forward-and sharpened his claws on its wooden leg. Then he leant back on his hind legs, and paused, and leapt onto the chair. It tipped to the left. He didn't sing, after all, but his breath was melodic, and he sat up tall with his paws together, like a circus tiger. He began to groom his symmetrical sides.
”Now,” said Ruth. Ruth was her name. It had been promised to her and had remained faithful. ”Now!” she called out, but the tiger didn't move. She noticed she was in the process of standing only because she was no longer on the ground. Weren't those oil tankers high in the water? Her wooden spine was burned away, and she could stand. There wasn't even any need to hold on to the white cord, which was just as well, because where would it lead her? Standing, as she was now, she was as tall as the tiger. He didn't watch her, only licked and smoothed. Ruth held her hands out to him. She crossed the fine, dusty lawn, and every step seemed to sweep it away. All the gra.s.s flew down the dune, and only the barest, brownest white showed through.
”Now,” she said to the tiger, but he only swung his lazy head to his other flank and licked it down. He defined his stripes. He fastened them with his tongue.
So Ruth stepped closer. ”Kit, kit, kit!” she said. She reached out with her arms and gripped the rough, warm fur on his shoulders. Now the bird in the tree began to sing out for the first time. It sang ”Prepare! Prepare!” But there was no reason to be afraid of this calm tiger. He smelled like dirty water. She leaned her head into his soft chest, where his great heart ticked.
20.
The cats found a home with Ellen Gibson. She learned of their plight because her sister was a receptionist at the veterinary surgery Jeffrey called to ask for details about the nearest cat shelter. He was apologetic on the phone, Ellen's sister reported, but there were dogs and international flights and allergies to consider, and his tone was both guilty and defensive. Ellen knew that when Jeffrey called the surgery he had just come from the bank-various people had seen him there and witnessed his rage with the bank manager and with Gail Talitsikas, and they all talked about him in those fresh, suspenseful days, so that everywhere Ellen went she heard new details: that Frida's surname was not Young, for example, and that the government had never sent her.
Ellen drove in her small red car to the top of the hill, parked it on the coastal road, and made her way to the house on foot. Her intention had been to arrive without fuss and with no air of judgment, but she was forced to battle with the scrub that had overtaken the drive. Low, stunted trees caught at her legs and in her hair, and the dune gra.s.ses shook off a seedy substance that made her sneeze. Jeffrey was waiting for her when she emerged by the house.
”It's like a fairy-tale castle, isn't it,” he said. He wore old clothes that might have been his father's, and gardening kneepads.
”A little.” Ellen sneezed again and gave a small laugh; she felt both intrusive and self-righteous. She felt silly.
”It's much better in a car,” said Jeffrey. ”You just nose your way through and push everything out of the way.”
Ellen thought Jeffrey should be ashamed of having, among other things, allowed his mother's property to reach this state; but she also remembered the condition of the drive only a week ago, which hadn't struck her as nearly this impa.s.sable. It was as if the garden had deliberately grown up to hide the house. She gave Jeffrey a small, awkward hug, and he patted her shoulder lightly, as if to say, ”There, there.”
”You seem to be the guardian angel of our family,” he said.
The angel of death, thought Ellen. She had thought about this. She was a bad omen; a bird circling overhead asking, ”Are you all right?”-when no one was ever all right.
”I'm so sorry about-everything,” said Ellen; but that sounded like an apology and there was nothing, really, to apologize for. The part of Ellen that considered it Jeffrey's place to cancel her apology and make one of his own was hushed by another, more sympathetic part. He was leaner than he'd been at his father's funeral, as if that death had surprised him into cardiovascular diligence. But he also stood with one fist balled into the small of his back, stretching it out, as if he'd inherited Ruth's back and was only just feeling it now. Maybe a family's troubles, thought Ellen, are always with them, and they just pa.s.s among the members with every death. Of course-silly-that's genetics, isn't it.
”We're very grateful to you.”
”Oh, there's no need. I wish I could have done more.” She wished, actually, that she could have done less.
”We all wish we could have done more,” said Jeffrey, which was intolerable; for a minute Ellen let her full disgust at Jeffrey rise up from some bottomless place. If Ruth had been my mother, she thought, as she had thought so many times before; but she gave her head a compa.s.sionate tilt. It was difficult to think what to say. Jeffrey had a strange convalescent look, like a man recovering from a dreamlike illness, and all his movements had a submarine quality: he stepped over to a wheelbarrow that lay by the side of the house and half lifted it, then let it drop again. So he was suffering, which Ellen realized she required from him, and then she was afraid she would cry.
Phillip erupted from the house.
”Ellen!” he called. He looked like his mother, with that same light-haired, dairy-fed roundness of cheek, and he had her expansive smile. He was the baby of his family and had never quite abandoned the undignified safety of that position. His duty to be sweetly jovial was, under the circ.u.mstances, a great burden; he enfolded Ellen and held her for some time. He smelled of fresh laundry. When he released her, he was smiling-but sadly, lovably. He held her hand. Phillip was much easier to forgive than his brother.
”I feel like you're part of the family,” he said as Jeffrey walked away from them around the side of the house. ”Like you're a sister.” Ellen preferred this to being an angel. She squeezed his hand in hers.
”I can't imagine-” she began, but she could imagine, so she stopped.
They went inside to find the cats.
The house was tidy, but important objects were missing-the lounge, for example, and then, in the kitchen, the oven. The wall behind it was stained a deep, frazzled brown, as if there had been a fire. There were no longer any paintings or photographs on the walls, and the lounge room was full of funeral flowers. Ellen had sent hers ahead to the funeral parlour and now regretted it. Ruth's favourite chair stood where the lounge should have been; it looked battered and bleached, as if it had sat outside for many days in strong temperatures. The dining table was covered in papers; Phillip swept his arm over them and said, ”Everything the police didn't want. You'll have a cup of tea, won't you?”
Through the windows, Ellen could see Jeffrey in the garden. He seemed to be pulling weeds out of the dune gra.s.s with some difficulty; or perhaps he was pulling up the gra.s.s itself. The sea behind him was a drenched green.
”Are you selling the house?”
”Absolutely.” Then, as if to temper the finality of this, Phillip said, ”Yes.” He called for the cats by name but without conviction, and they didn't come.
He was obviously adrift in the kitchen. He opened cupboards and closed them again, looking for cups and tea and sugar in a slow slapstick. Ellen sat in one of the dining chairs and made an effort not to look at the papers on the table. When the water began to rattle in the kettle, she said, ”I hear they found Frida's brother. That's good news.”
”He was her boyfriend,” said Phillip, fussing with milk.