The Tiger in the Tiger Pit Read Online Free

than benign. Without being conscious of her movements, she put the crumpled towel on top of the piano and began to play.
    She played the family. An adagio for Victoria, a dark piece, haunted and mad. Broadening into long tranquil cadences, sweet with melancholy. (She loved to sit with her daughter in the gardens of her various institutions; they would thread flowers together while Tory ranted poetry or sang nursery rhymes.) This was one of her sins: the pleasure she took in Tory as Tory was, when no doubt anguish and guilt were more appropriate. Except that those goads — in which the others all wallowed — afflicted Tory like arrows. If Tory could come home and be at peace … They would sit in the gazebo together, she would hold Tory’s hand and read her stories.
    If Tory could come home. Possible only if the furies in Edward could be lulled. She played the taming of furies, the casting out of demons. She circled him with Adam, an intrusion of grace notes.
    An allegro for Jason, the phrases restless, full of syncopation and discord. (Jason her well-beloved, who wore life like a hair shirt.) There were double pianissimo sections, fractured, but whispering of old intimacies. (Perhaps she had damaged him with closeness, with too much responsibility.) She wound the discordant strands into harmony, a soft coda. This was what she yearned for.
    Emily: a scherzo life. (The one who escaped, but who, like the dove from the ark, fluttered across the breast of the waters finding nowhere to rest.) She played runs and arpeggios and the melody seemed scattered beyond the recognising, a keyboard hide-and-seek. But sneaking up from the left hand came a persistent theme and it infiltrated the flighty right-hand phrases, subsuming them into its orbit. She played the homecoming of Emily and Adam, a stasis of chords.
    In the final movement, a slow rich one, a resolution of all themes, they were all present and at peace, old and young in one another’s arms. It will happen that way she thought, her hands still resting on the keyboard. I’ll write it that way.
    She wondered idly why there were smudges of red ink on some of the keys and rubbed at them with a towel that had been left on the piano. Perhaps it was time to see if Edward wanted morning tea. She passed the hallway mirror where a garish clown’s face startled her. She widened her eyes at it for a moment, shook her head at it.
    Really, Elizabeth, she sighed. You’re crowding the stage. You’ll blow your cover. It’s Bessie he’s expecting. You want to precipitate another heart attack?
    In the bathroom she washed her face and bandaged her hand. There was a watch on the side of the basin. Hers. Must have left it there earlier in the morning. According to the watch, it was a few minutes after one. In the afternoon presumably. Surely not? Had she forgotten his lunch?
    He was drowsing in his chair, a hand on the windowsill, the head sagging on one shoulder. Like a skeleton daubed with clothes. Or perhaps a small tangle of barbed wire, braced against the marauder happiness in whatever stray guises it might stalk him in sleep.
    She stood watching. If she could just bundle up his spikiness in her arms and croon away the jagged edges. It was this conspiracy that absorbed her, to sabotage him with contentment before the end. She remembered that it was essential to put a call through to Jason. Now. Before she forgot again, or dreamed that she had done it. She went downstairs and called him at his New York office.
    â€œHow is he?” Jason asked,
    â€œGrumbling about it. But not actually refusing to let it take place. I haven’t heard from Emily yet. I’m counting on you, Jason.”
    â€œI’ll call her tonight. And you, Mother, how are you?”
    â€œI’m fine, of course, darling. I’m excited really”
    â€œI hope you won’t be disappointed”
    â€œYou think I’m bound to be. But you’re wrong. I sense