The Tiger in the Tiger Pit Read Online Free Page A

it somehow.”
    â€œIt would be nice if you were right”
    â€œBye, darling.”
    â€œBye, Mother”
    Yes, she thought, climbing the stairs again. It would indeed be nice. And she would be right.
    He was still drowsing.
    From the awkward set of his shoulder, she knew he would wake with pain. She crossed the room in slippered feet and eased a cushion behind his neck. He stirred, whimpered Bessie in his sleep, groped vaguely and made contact with her arm, the trusting gesture of a child. Half woke then, grumbled, threw the cushion on the floor, slithered back into his nap.
    Elizabeth smiled. Wryly. Affectionately. A mother acknowledging bratty behaviour and indulging it. For a moment she laid her cheek against his. Then she eased herself on to the windowsill, leaning lightly against the moulding and crossing her arms. Still smiling, she observed him calmly: the air of a magician with an ace up her sleeve.

III Emily
    Emily had intense relationships with a number of men — Vivaldi, Bach, Beethoven, Sibelius. She remained faithful to them to atone for earlier mistakes. When in the course of the past three years she had felt too sharp a need for lesser men, she had expended her passion on the more turbulent movements of violin concertos or soothed herself with Bach’s austerity.
    Or perhaps, if she were away on concert tour, she would spend a poignant but chaste evening with some member of the local orchestra or with one of the attendant music critics or academics who frequented the parties preceding or following engagements. These men were invariably married. They were gentle and sad and searching for some indefinable flicker of happiness which they seemed to believe Emily could provide.
    She would be insouciant and compassionate but would excuse herself, when the drift of innuendo eddied toward the flesh, with the gentlest of regrets.
    I have a little boy, she would say. His name is Adam and he’s eight years old. I find it better to avoid involvements. You understand.
    She thought of love as a kind of refugee act, akin to handling a live grenade, something to be engaged in while poised for flight. Always claustrophobia and imminent bloodiness waited in the wings like hobgoblins in a morality play while the euphoric pull of sensual comfort had its foolish little moment on stage. An old gazebo choked with honeysuckle would rear into her dreams, a shadowy portent, her lover’s eyes in every leaf, his breath heavy in the creamy blossoms, his limbs in its throttling branches. She would have to break out, escape, flee the country.
    England was her fourth country of residence.
    And now already there were signs in the air, vibrations and patterns she recognised, temptations to warmth, indications that it might become necessary to move on. Or, more frightening, to move back. To Australia. To Dave. Her importunate physical yearnings kept up a whisper, raspily and obscenely like ill-mannered concert goers during a performance. She drowned them with music. Through insomniac nights she played Vivaldi and Bach. Eventually the prick of deprivation would mute itself and everything would return to normal.
    She hoped.
    Otherwise …
    She knew that if she were ever to “settle down” somewhere, belong somewhere, for Adam’s sake, she would have to cultivate impermanence; she would have to learn the knack of fragmentary affairs that went nowhere, that did not disrupt. But as old churches attract antiquarians, so men with a sempiternal itch burgeoned into her life. This was what she had against casual sex: that a lover could not be counted on to leave the next morning; that he might break the rules; that he might take root and expand into her days like a bewitched beanstalk, declaring his addiction to continuity and to her.
    She thought wistfully that she would like to become the sort of person who would grow old in this little house in Harrow. She liked the sound of London. Of Harrow-on-the-Hill and