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

avid interest, with far more precision than that sapling of an intern takes over my heart charts. I would like to think that on the day of my death the foundation will give way with an organic moan, will offer itself up to the honeysuckle in vegetable submission. My personal icon.
    I remember the first day I saw it.
    I remember the instant of lust, the precise moment of obsession, the determination to be offered this hitherto unappealing position. I would become the principal of a country high school, I would live in this schoolmaster’s house. How I coveted that skeletal tribute to graciousness, not even knowing what it was called. Resolutely I looked away from it, feigned a lack of interest, afraid the board members would detect the beating pulse of my motivation.
    It has always been a problem, this tendency to fixate on details. For example, the minutiae of love. Insanity. I tripped over details too fine for an unfevered eye. Bessie, that first time I saw her …
    But this requires a detached perspective …
    One Sunday afternoon in Boston in his prehistory, his apple-tree days, young Edward Carpenter stands diffidently outside an imposing house, the scholarship boy from the mill town who has scrabbled his way into respectability via earnest years at Harvard, via chalky days of teaching at Cambridge Latin. He has made passing acquaintance with the families of several of his students, he has been invited to a number of terrifyingly stuffy afternoon teas to which he has always gone although knowing his presence to be a symbol of benevolent condescension.
    He subjects himself to the sherry, the small talk, the quietly arrogant susurration of silk skirts and silk cravats, the rough edges of his ambition snagging in that seamless web of genteel indifference. He can never belong. The only way to acquire ease here is to inherit it. He is completely other to them, pickled like a museum specimen in their immaculate politeness. Their patronage coats his tongue with a fur of bitterness like the taste of a cheap and juvenile sherry.
    Through the forest of fathers discussing boardrooms and cigars, he sees a young woman sitting at the piano, playing. She is slender, almost gaunt, with intense cavernous black eyes. An intellectual, a New England version of Virginia Woolf. The type alarms him — with those blackbird eyes casting about for a passionate cause on which to alight. He feels repelled, as by some aberration in nature, yet fascinated.
    But then as he watches and listens, she raises her head to look out the window, her hands and body still making music in an abstracted sleepwalking way. Gradually her hands enter the stillness of her vision — some movement of light outside the window? a bird? memories of another time and place? — and rest themselves motionless on the keys. Her lips are slightly parted, her head raised like that of an alert woodland creature, her neck extended. It is white and vulnerable and exposed, unbearably fragile. A vein flutters and twitches like a blemish in finest porcelain. He is mesmerised by it, by that bleating dimple of blue blood against her white skin.
    I married her for that. Fifty years of marriage based on the vagaries of capillary activity. It is astonishing how simply and inconsequentially a die is cast. On that very afternoon, at that very moment, I made up my mind. I would have it all — the swan neck, the blue blood, the sherry, the monogrammed napkin rings, the crystal salt-cellars with miniature silver spoons, the children born into thoughtless ease with it all.
    If Jason knew, if Emily knew, the cost of their comfortable sarcasm. I gave them that. I gave them the right to be disdainful about propriety, the vantage point from which it is safe to spurn silverware and wedlock and nineteenth-century poetry. If they knew the cost.
    I am told that Victoria sometimes throws tantrums, demanding elegance. That she has hurled aluminium salt and pepper shakers across the