‘Heavens!’ Sophie put her suitcase down on the concrete path and watched the cat flatten itself under a daphne bush and disappear.
‘I don’t know why she does that,’ Caroline said, looking after it abstractedly.
‘I don’t usually terrify cats.’
‘No, it isn’t you.’ Caroline led the way up the broad steps to her house. ‘She always acts as if she thinks someone’s going to murder her.’
Knocking Sophie’s bag against the wall as she went ahead in a nervous rush, Caroline stopped at the entrance to a bedroom with two big windows and a view of eucalyptcovered hillside. She looked anxiously about. ‘Is this all right? Perhaps I should have given you the other room?’
‘Caroline, no. This is lovely. It was so kind of you to let me come.’ And Sophie, who thought she never blushed, blushed from waist to forehead, and turned to give the oblongs of countryside her polite attention.
‘I asked you.’
Drawing a dubious breath, Sophie saw imposed on the wooded slope another landscape of such complexity that she could think of no one thing to say.
Caroline straightened the Indian rug, then eyed her guest, and went on laboriously, ‘How are you, anyway? Now that we’re established.’
‘Oh, extremely healthy, as always.’ Sophie heard the sudden liveliness in her own voice, felt herself brim, for Caroline’s benefit, with something resembling animation and high spirits. Apart from the fact that none of this was true, she could see it must seem a little odd that someone as fine as all that should have taken up in so urgent a fashion—involving trunk calls and telegrams—an invitation given warmly, but on the spur of the moment, months before in Sydney. They had friends in common. Caroline was a widow, a doctor, and lived alone in this small country town. She was grey-haired, sturdy and, Sophie felt, mildly fantastic. Sophie herself was a pianist. This was almost all they knew about each other.
By way of explanation, Sophie now repeated, as she blindly snapped open the locks of her case, what she had said in yesterday’s calls. ‘Suddenly the city just—got me down. A few free days turned up and I thought, if you don’t mind…’
This was so far from being a characteristic impulse that she hardly knew how to account for herself. The universe was hostile. The sun rose in the west. She was in danger. Only strangers might not be malevolent. Something like all this was wrong.
‘Mind!’ Caroline clapped her hands to her head, then fixed her springy hair behind her ears. ‘If you knew how we like to be visited! Now, come and have lunch. Then we’ll produce some of this famous country air for you. Scoot around in the car. There were mushrooms out the other day.’
‘Really?’
They both smiled and relaxed slightly.
Sophie was not surprised to find that the mushrooms had been claimed by hungrier souls since Caroline first noticed them, but there was a wonderful cloud-streaked sky, a river, and waves of little hills to the horizon. Completing Caroline’s circular tour, they returned to the house, took rugs on to the grass, and lay in the shade of a pear tree drinking iced coffee and losing control of the Sunday papers.
‘You won’t see much of me. I’m missing all day and sometimes half the night, so you’ll have the place to yourself. Mrs Barratt comes in to tidy up. Oh, and I forgot to show you the piano. Mr Crump tuned it yesterday as a special favour. Came out of retirement!’
‘Caroline.’ Sophie looked at her in dismay. ‘All this trouble you’ve gone to. So kind. It makes me feel—’
‘What?’
‘Terrible. False colours, false pretences.’
‘I’ll expect to hear of hours of practice when I get back every night,’ Caroline continued firmly.
‘But I wasn’t going to practise. I don’t practise much any more. I’m—getting lazy,’ she improvised.
Caroline glanced at her quickly, then thumped at a party of scavenging ants with a folded newspaper. ‘Of course you’ll practise.’
Sophie shook her head. ‘Truly. It doesn’t matter. Music’s not the most important thing in the world.’ She gazed down the grassy slope and up to the hills in the distance.
‘The most important thing in the world!’ Scornful, roused, Caroline asked, ‘What is?’
‘Ah, well…’ Sophie’s voice had no expression. She did know.
But such a statement struck Caroline as merely silly. Quite apart from medicine, the world was full of causes, calls to effort. The list in her mind was endless. Even the imminent perfecting of man through education was not a thing she had doubts about.
The women eyed each other with goodwill and an awareness that they were natural strangers. The views of persons like that could not be taken seriously. It was almost a relief. They talked about politics and local controversies, and it scarcely mattered at all what anyone said.
‘You see!’ Caroline stopped herself in mid-flight. ‘There’s no one here to argue with except a few old cronies. So I rush back to Sydney every month, go round the galleries, and see some plays. Try to keep up…’
Sophie realised that she was at least partly in earnest, and felt a pang of appalled compassion as she habitually did now at what interested people, at the trouble they took to act in the world, move. If only they knew!
‘I’m going to leave you in peace now while I do some weeding. It’s the Sunday ritual.’ Caroline stood up, looking resolutely about the big garden.
How courageous! What fortitude! Pity moved in Sophie and she got to her knees, ready to stand. ‘Let me help. I can weed, or anything.’ There was so much Caroline and everyone must never know.
‘Stay there. You’re on holiday. You can do some watering later.’ Preoccupied already, Caroline disappeared round the corner of the house, and Sophie sank back horizontal on the rug, and the light went out of her. Tears came to her eyes and she wiped them away and sat up again.
Her instruction resumed at full volume. Phrases that were by now only symbols indicating the devastation caused by grief transfixed her attention. The instruction had been going on for several months now. When she was in company or asleep, the volume was reduced, but the question and answer, the statements below the level of thought, never really stopped. A massive shock. A surprise of great magnitude. ‘A great surprise,’ she repeated obediently.
In its way, the instruction was trying to save her, Sophie supposed. It wanted her to live. She humoured this innocent desire, attending to its words as though it were a kind, stupid teacher.
To be or not to be. Her lips half-smiled. Out in the world, when she lived out in the world, she had been stringently trained: nothing about herself, her life, her death, was worth taking seriously. Sophie smiled again. No wonder humankind could not bear much reality. The things that happened.
Caroline crossed the lawn, purposeful and silent, grasping secateurs. A long interval followed, during which only bees and shadows and leaves moved in the garden. The green tranquillity wavered and shifted in the currents of air. Sophie’s heart jumped about in disorder as it often did now as the cat suddenly fled past her, out of a shady ambush. Patches of her forehead and head froze with fright. She took a deep breath and tried to stifle the bumping in her chest. Only the cat. Only Caroline’s poor cat.
‘Puss? Puss?’ Her tone compelled the cat to acknowledge her presence. ‘Don’t be frightened. How nervous you are. Everything’s all right.’
The stricken animal thawed and fled, leaving only a haunted path. Sophie mourned for it, mourned for its view of her as an object potentially powerful and evil, hardened. How wise are you, cat, to resist my blandishments, my tender voice, my endless—I would have you think—capacity for kindness. It is almost endless, too. I would never hurt you, except by accident, and hardly even then. But, oh, how sad I am, cat.
Her mouth smiled at ‘sad’.
‘You look very contented and peaceful there,’ Caroline said, wandering over to her. ‘That’s good. Means you’re settling in. Who volunteered to water the garden while I make some dinner?’
Syringa, woodbine, japonica, tangled cascades of roses hanging from old fences. Sophie wandered, trailing the hose, its silver spray hissing gently. Daylight was fading from moment to moment, the air cooling. Magpies held a dialogue as they flew, swooping low. Hearing them, Sophie told herself: I’m in the bush.
Then suicide thought of her. Unlike the instruction, which was of a labyrinthine complexity, suicide used simple words and images and, when it overcame the instruction and claimed her in a tug of war, it used them ceaselessly. Suicide was easy provided the balance of your mind was not disturbed. The essential point, neglected by faint hearts, was to commit the deed in a place where you would not soon be discovered. You would leave the city, taking with you a quantity of painkilling drugs or sleeping pills. You would post one or two letters before catching the train, because it would be cruel never to let yourself be found. And there were the reasons, the reasons you were dying for…Which no one wanted to know and would prefer never to understand, anyway…Then you would board a train going in a direction previously chosen, climb out at the selected station, walk to a secluded spot, lie down, and swallow the tablets. Having taken care, of course, to bring water.
Sophie sighed. A crude, peculiar, material way of dealing with extreme unhappiness. Like wars. Beside the point.
‘What will you have to drink? Whisky? There’s everything.’ Caroline stood at the front door looking out remotely at the sky and the darkening garden.
‘Thank you. Yes. I was watching the light on the hills there.’
‘Lovely. You’ve brought good weather. Whisky, then. Don’t stay out in the cold.’
‘I’ll just put the hose away.’
Light came on in the house. As Sophie went along the side path, she felt the consoling silence all about. Silence lay enormous behind the sound of her footsteps on grass, the dragging hose, late bird cries, insect scrapings.
Because, the argument resumed, being dead was not what she wanted most. It was the only alternative. Just as, presumably, generals did not want, first and foremost, dead bodies and buildings fallen down.
Over dinner Caroline, who had emerged as funny, generous, and Christian, asked about their Sydney friends and showed an inclination to dissect them as though they were interesting cadavers. Dismay ground Sophie to an almost total stop when this disloyalty displayed itself. Any betrayal, of whatever order, instantly related itself to the great calamities of the world. Which of these had not originated in one person? Her knife and fork grew heavy in her fingers, and it was an effort to breathe. Her dear friends! Unfitted to judge though she might be—no Christian—she knew she would judge Caroline later. Though even dear friends were now like faded frescoes. That response in their defence was only an outdated reflex. It was of no consequence that they would never meet again, so how should Caroline’s mild malice disturb?
While Sophie drooped over her dinner, Caroline grew more and more inclined to ramble, and finally rambled right out of the field of friendship into small-town scandal—unfrocked ministers and cows that ate free-growing marijuana.
‘Everyone drinks their milk. Can you wonder at the things that go on here?’
Sophie laughed with relief, a little too long.
In the morning Caroline left for the hospital at seven. Sophie showered, dressed, and brushed her hair, advancing jerkily from one operation to the next. No one and nothing could be relied on now. Nothing was automatic. The simplest habits had deserted. Everything took thought, yet thought was what she had nothing to spare of. Because she had so much to think about and it was so important. And nobody realised.
Wandering through to the kitchen, she made some toast and coffee and set it out on the back veranda in the sun. The grey cat appeared at the door and saw her, coffee cup raised to lips, and after a moment’s paralysis slunk off like a hunted thing. Sophie called after it in a beseeching voice, then rose and went to stand in the doorway. She spoke to the breathing garden, hoping the cat could hear, but there was no sign of it. When the dishes were washed, she trundled out the lawnmower and mowed some square yards of Caroline’s dewy grass. The day was beautiful.
It was rather feeble to attempt suicide and fail. It definitely placed a person’s good faith in doubt. It was worse to make an attempt with the conscious intention of not succeeding. Anyway. Anyway, she felt contempt for suicide. Butcher yourself? Why should you? Fall into a decline because nothing was what it seemed? Some had ambitions perhaps to enter the higher reaches of blackmail. But Sophie had never thought of suicide. It was just that lately she could not stop thinking about it.
Little ridges of grass that had escaped her stood conspicuous. She pushed the mower to and fro, stopping once to throw off her sweater. Only a psychosis could make the deed anything but (Sophie pushed the mower so hard that it was airborne) pusillanimous. Pusillanimous. And had she any desire to be that?
Worn out by the violence of her repudiation, she stopped for an indignant breath. Then nervously ran the four fingers of her left hand across her forehead. It was just a fact that she wasn’t safe, wasn’t safe yet. And all you had to do was not be found too soon…
Small black ants were swarming over her bare feet and ankles. She stamped about, brushing the tenacious ones away, dropping the handle of the mower. Bent right over, hair hanging, her glance slanted suddenly sideways: the cat sat under a bush some yards away, watching with round yellow eyes.
Cautiously, Sophie lowered herself to the ground, sat motionless on the grass, exchanging eyes with the cat. Then she began very gently to talk to it, and the cat listened, for the first time showing no fear.
Sophie looked vaguely into its green retreat, and rested her cheek on her knee. She closed her eyes. It was the tone of voice, she told herself. Cats must be susceptible to voices. And there was a slight, but temporary, amelioration of her suffering.
It was not a thing you could do, not in an immediate, noticeable way. It was not considerate to wreck other people’s lives for no better reason than that you would prefer to be dead. Wreck? Well, perhaps that did overstate the case. Inconvenience, she amended.
‘What a pity!’ Sophie muttered. ‘What a pity!’ It was hard to understand, something she could never be reconciled to. Real love was not so common even in so large a place as the world.
Mortal wounds, the instruction said. The psychic knife went in; the psychic blood came out…
My own doing, Sophie reflected, while the instruction rattled on in the background monotonously. It was she who had done the empowering, delivered herself over. Nothing she had previously understood or learned had prepared her. Yet her life had never been sheltered. Again now, the magnitude of her surprise, of her mistake, bore down on her. Public violence, bombs, wars were this private passion to destroy made manifest on a large scale.
‘That grass is wet, Sophie. I have to call on old Mr Crisp out past the church, so I came in to see if you were all right.’
As Caroline emerged from the tunnel of honeysuckle and may, Sophie scrambled up uncertainly, rubbing damp hands and cut grass on her damp slacks. ‘Oh, Caroline…I was mowing the grass…I was talking to the cat.’
‘Did she let you?’
‘In a way. Almost.’
‘I don’t think there’s time, or we could have a cup of tea together. Walk back up to the car with me, anyway. I only looked in. She was operated on once, poor Cat, and I’m convinced the vet was led astray by curiosity. He’d just qualified. She lost faith in the human race.’
Leaf mould lay thick beneath the trees.
‘How awful,’ Sophie said.
‘Mmm.’ Caroline frowned at the path for a few steps, then looked up briskly, glancing at her watch. ‘You could try feeding her if you want to be friends. There’s plenty of stuff in the fridge.’
‘I don’t think she’s hungry.’
Her right hand on the gate, Caroline paused. Sophie looked at this small tough hand and waited obediently. She had the impression that she was expecting a message, and that perhaps Caroline was the person who was going to deliver it to her.
But Caroline just said absently, ‘No, it isn’t that. It’s a bit demoralising to have her flitting about like the victim of a vivisectionist. Which she is. I really wondered if I’d find you practising. I was going to creep off. It isn’t right, Sophie, that you should throw away your talents.’
Though once upon a time she herself had said this sort of thing to encourage other people, Sophie smiled with a sort of heartless gaiety. ‘Did you really come back for that?’
‘I did indeed. You practise, my girl, or we’ll turn you into a medico and send you overseas to do good.’ Her concern, which seemed real enough, disinterested, made Sophie feel ashamed of her own duplicity, though the concern was so misplaced and even preposterous that she laughed aloud.
‘How can you think it matters, Caroline? Talent. Playing pianos. And even give it priority over doing good?’ She felt tremendously amused, full of laughter.
‘Just get on with it!’ With a minatory nod, Caroline made for her little yellow car, and Sophie waited and waved through the familiar grating and humming of gears; then Caroline was gone, and so was the hilarity that had felt so permanent.
Alone again, Sophie conversed with herself about the weather as though to distract an invalid acquaintance. But, really, the light was dazzling, like the first morning of the world. Radiance pealed across Caroline’s small valley from sky to dandelion. After staring into it for a time, Sophie continued back along the path to the uneven square of cut grass. Safely there, and gazing as if to count the blades, it seemed to her that something as mesmeric, as impersonal, and of the same dimensions as the sun was before her eyes. And this was the instruction.
‘The Coopers and Stephen rang to say how much they enjoyed the other night.’ Caroline looked up from the telephone directory.
‘How punctilious! They were nice.’ On her way to the kitchen with a large copper vase, Sophie paused.
‘You were a great success.’
‘I liked them, too.’
Caroline began to turn the pages distractedly. ‘I’m looking for that new garage man who took Alec’s place. The car’s due for an oil change.’ She sighed and let the book fall shut. ‘I’ll call in when I’m passing. It’s a shame you have to go tomorrow. There’s no reason to rush away.’
‘I do work,’ Sophie reminded her. ‘Someone’s going to notice I’m not there.’ While she would almost certainly be nowhere, there was no reason to burden Caroline with that information.
‘I daresay.’
‘You’ve been marvellous.’
With Caroline gone, chains dropping from her, Sophie sank from the platform in space where it was laid on her to make conversation and act as if she believed in the great conspiracy. It was amazing what quantities of time could be passed out there when necessary, she reflected, filling the vase with fresh water. Some people spent the whole of their lives there without even knowing it. Like Ivan Ilyich and innumerable other characters who crowded to suggest themselves. Sophie clasped her hands round the cold vase and rushed through to the sitting room, leaning slightly backwards to avoid the spreading branches of japonica. Placing the vase carefully on the low table by the windows she escaped from the house to the open air, and stood bathed in surprise.
Here was the real world you could never remember inside houses: soft rounded hills and trees that had been there before history. Sophie looked at them and breathed. Help, her eyes said to the hills. Help, to the clouds, treetops, and grass. They bore her appeal like so many gods, with silence, no change of expression. She continued to look at them.
She continued to look at them, but addressed no more petitions. Words trivialised. Thought trivialised. Her unhappiness was so extraordinary that it was literally not to be thought of.
She stood motionless. But from a distance she was being stared at. After a time, her eyes were pulled to the cat’s eyes, and she slowly roused herself and looked into them with some sense of obligation. Knowing it would come to her, Sophie drew a breath to summon the cat. Then she frowned and closed her mouth, repelled by her power over something more vulnerable than herself. She felt physically a nausea of the heart, and understood that ‘heartsick’ wasn’t, after all, poetic rhetoric, but a description of a state of being. One which it would be preferable never to know.
Animals should beware of humans. How tempting, evidently, to play God and play games with little puppets for the sake of testing your skills…Sophie shivered and shook her head. Some humans should beware of others. All should learn early the safety limits of love and trust. But what a pity! How could you? How could you? she thought. And how could I? Some other day, if there was another day, she would think about these rights and wrongs.
Glancing again at the cat, who was still awaiting command, Sophie said, ‘Be independent,’ and feeling itself without instruction the cat prowled in a circle, curled up, and slept.
Caroline had stolen a remarkable pink rock from a faraway beach, a golden-pink rock worn into a chaise longue by the Pacific. Now Sophie lay on its sea-washed curves, supported and warmed, grateful to the rock. She closed her eyes and a single line creased her forehead. Minutes passed, and she opened her eyes. In the whole sky there were only three small clouds, three of Dalí’s small, premonitory clouds, looking as unreal as his. It was possible that this time tomorrow, this time tomorrow, she would be dead.
Of whom, Sophie debated with herself coldly, might that not be said?
She made no response. It was unanswerably true that she had placed herself in the hands of death; she was in the airy halls of death now, with all formalities complete except the last one. Everywhere there was the certainty, the expectation, that she would make the final move at any moment. And it was so clear that the alternative to death was something worse.
If she lived, sooner or later this sorrow would go, and then she would change and be a different person and a worse one, dead in truth. For the sorrow was all that was left of the best she had had it in her to be, the best she had been able to offer the world, the result of the experiment that she was. So it was bound to seem of some importance, just now, while she could still understand it.
She gave a shallow sigh and shifted her position on the rock. In its frame of leaves the cat dozed. Everything altered minutely. The small painted clouds had disappeared. And, of course, it was foolish to complain. In a way, she had been quite surpassingly lucky; and there was a great deal left. The only thing that seemed to have vanished entirely, now that she had time to search among the ruins, was hope.
‘Hope…’ she said aloud, in a toneless voice. ‘It’s amazing what a difference it makes.’
The two women sat drinking coffee and glancing at their watches in the minutes to spare before leaving for the station and the Sydney train. For the twentieth time without success, Sophie sought to thank Caroline. ‘Rubbish! I’m only sorry you’re going so soon.’ And they both smiled and rose from their chairs, glancing about to verify that Sophie’s luggage was where she had placed it ten minutes earlier.
‘Say goodbye to Cat,’ Caroline ordered. ‘You’ve made a friend there!’ She swooped down on her pet and juggled it into Sophie’s arms, before hurrying off to bring the car round to the front door.
For seconds Sophie held it against her chest, saying nothing whatever, feeling comforted by the weight, the warmth, the dumb communion, by the something like forbearance towards her of Caroline’s cat. She let it leap down from the nest of her arms.
Lifting her bag, Sophie cast a final look at the silent room and its furnishings, and went to the door. As she turned the handle, with nothing in her mind but cars and trains and Caroline and, just beyond them all, the city looming, it occurred to her that, regardless of what was past, or what she now knew, she herself might still have the capacity to love. Need not, under some immutable compulsion, merely react. The idea presented itself in so many words. A telegram.
Like a soldier who, perhaps mortally wounded and lying in blood, hears a distant voice that means either death or survival, and unable to care, still half-lifts his head, Sophie listened.
Love…That poor debased word. Poor love. Oh, poor love, she thought. It was the core and essence of her nature, and a force in her compared with which any other was slight indeed. Still alive? Even yet? Ever again? More illusions? Good feeling? The psychic knives had finished all that. Surely? It only remained for her to follow. Surely?
Yet in the car, while she and Caroline exchanged remarks, Sophie’s mind considered her chances. Now and then it condensed its findings and threw her a monosyllabic report, like a simple computer. Her changes were exactly that—a chance. And the sorrow…Only yesterday, the other day, she had believed that if she lived the sorrow would go and that she would then know a worse death than that of her body. But as it seemed now the sorrow would never go, could never leave her; like all else in life it had become an aspect of her person. As her love had. How strange, she thought, that nothing ever goes.
Nevertheless, detailing as they did the unconditional terms of her existence, these thoughts were in themselves a death. Had she been consulted, she would have chosen none of this, none of these steely thorns, inconceivable relinquishments. But no one had asked her; she had had no choice. One or two strengths and the love were what she had, and all she had, and what she would always have. And that was that.
Caroline said, ‘Hear that clanking? I need a new car.’
Pedestrians cut through the tangle of traffic near the railway station. A dog pranced by looking for adventure. Sophie stared at shopping baskets, at boys on bikes, while debating the merits of this car over that with Caroline. ‘Small ones are easier to park.’
Suicide produced just then, like a super-salesman, a picture of the very place. She knew it! Ideal, ideal. A hidden clearing off the track where you wouldn’t be found too soon…
And the instruction resumed its endless cries of surprise, trying to save her. How could you, how could you, it said. The psychic knife went in, it said. The psychic blood came out.
Yes, yes, Sophie agreed. She had heard this many times before, and could only suppose the reiteration had once served a useful purpose. But how like a human organisation! Even at the place of instruction, the right hand did not know what the left was doing. Someone down the line had not yet been informed that times had changed; the long-expected message had been received and was under the deepest consideration.
Walking up the station ramp with Caroline, Sophie took no notice, letting the two sides battle it out. They would learn, they would learn. She had learned.