The Tiger in the Tiger Pit by Janette Turner Hospital Read Free Book Online Page A

keep in touch. Besides they’re all clients of mine, not all of them paying ones.”
    â€œWhat do you do?”
    â€œI’m a lawyer. Partner in a Sydney firm. And a gentleman farmer on a modest scale. Benefactor of the arts. That means I give free legal advice to impoverished writers and painters I was an undergraduate with.”
    â€œIt’s an interesting group.”
    â€œWe’re all scholarship kids. Amazing country when you think of it. Anti-intellectual to the core, and yet there’s a pack of us. I was the golden boy of Forbes High who won a university fellowship. My father sheared sheep for station owners all over western New South Wales and never had two sixpenny bits to rub together. I managed to buy Kurrajong in time for him to die on it.”
    Kurrajong.
    If it had not been for Tory’s letters, Emily thought. If the past had not crowded her, if she had not been pregnant, if she had not retreated to Kurrajong. If she had never taken refuge in the town house in Sydney.
    If extrication were as simple as the process of hopeless entanglement with Dave had been.
    â€œOh Adam,” she said, holding him tightly, remembering his birth, the tiny body cradled between the crook of her elbow and the palm of her hand, the sense of awe (a life, a responsibility). Dave, as proud as though he were the father, bending over both of them, telling her:
    â€œI’ll call your parents.”
    â€œNo!”
    â€œBut Emily, surely …?”
    â€œNo. It’s not their affair. It has nothing to do with them. I don’t want them to know.”
    I do not, she could not quite have articulated, want this occasion sullied by my father’s judgments, by the things he will not be able to stop himself from saying.
    There had been more than shock in Dave’s eyes. She had perceived a kind of stunned fear, as of something more awful than he was able to understand. He had stroked her hair with one hand and the baby’s down-soft head with the other, waiting for her to reconsider. Not able to believe she meant it.
    She had seen the, same gaunt look of loss in his eyes five years later.
    â€œYou can’t dispense with your parents like that, Emily. You can’t dispense with me like this. You can’t do it to Adam. He has a right to all of us. I have a right to him. I have a right to meet your family and they have a right to know about me. You can’t snap your fingers and extinguish people.”
    But I can, Emily had thought then. I have to.
    She had changed her flight reservations secretly, leaving for England several days earlier than Dave was expecting. No one had seen her off from Sydney airport, no one had met her in London.
    But Adam still mourned, three years later, for Australia and Dave. He said it again, his voice uninflected by hope: “I wish we could go back.”
    â€œEveryone has to move on, Adam.” She snapped her fingers to disperse his memories. “Time itself moves on.”

IV Edward
    In moonlight the flakes of peeling paint jut out against the light like a cluster of batwings. I possess it then. Alone at my window, pacing through a litter of memories like an unquiet ghost, I pass through its matted tresses of honeysuckle and stalk its benches like a tomcat. Under the weightless pads of my feet, the wood is soft and rotten, smelling of sugared vinegar or overripe oranges. I pace, I pace, snarling into its eight niches, sniffing out the past. The tiger in the tiger pit is not more irritable than I.
    By day it is merely shabby, listing toward the southwest plane of its octagon. In daylight it is violated by squirrels and small children. Sunlight, the great mocker, leers in at my window where I sit helpless, chained to my chair, manacled to my unedited and unacceptable life. I watch the smothering mutations of the honeysuckle.
    Since the thaw the entire structure has slumped a little more into its southwest footing. I monitor this decline with