On her insulated feet she makes her way stealthily down the hall to her study. She prefers to spend an hour in there first thing every morning; she finds it concentrates her mind. There’s an eastern exposure, so she catches the sunrise when there is one. Today there is.
Her study has new green curtains in a palm-tree-and-exoticfruit print, and an easy chair with matching cushions. Roz helped her choose the print, and talked her into paying the price, which was higher than what Tony would have paid if she’d been alone. Listen to me, sweetie, said Roz. Now this—this! is a bargain. Anyway, it’s for the place where you think! It’s your mental environment! Get rid of those dull old navy blue sailboats! You owe it to yourself. There are days when Tony is overwhelmed by the trumpet vines and the orange mangoes, or whatever they are; but she’s intimidated by interior decoration, and finds Roz’s expertise hard to resist.
She feels more at home with the rest of the study. Books and papers are stacked in piles on the carpet; on the wall there’s a print of the Battle of Trafalgar, and another one of Laura Secord, in unlikely white, driving her mythical cow through the American lines to warn the British during the War of 1812. Armfuls of dog-eared war memoirs and collections of letters and foxed volumes of front-line reportage by long-forgotten journalists are stuffed into the olive green bookcase, along with several copies of Tony’s two publishedbooks, Five Ambushes and Four Lost Causes. Meticulously researched; a refreshing new interpretation, say the reviews quoted on the quality paperbacks. Sensationalistic; overly digressive; marred by obsessive detail, say those not quoted. Tony’s face, owl-eyed and elf-nosed and younger than her face is now, goggles out from the back covers, frowning slightly in an attempt to look substantial.
In addition to a study desk she has an architect’s drawing board with a high swivelling stool that renders her instantly taller. She uses it for marking student term papers: she likes to perch up there on the stool, swinging her short legs, with the papers on a slant in front of her, and correct from a judicious distance, as if painting. The truth is that she’s getting far-sighted as well as the near-sighted she’s always been. Bifocals will soon be her fate.
She marks with her left hand, using different-coloured pencils, which she holds between the fingers of her right hand like brushes: red for bad comments, blue for good ones, orange for spelling mistakes, and mauve for queries. Sometimes she reverses hands. When each paper is finished she drops it onto the floor, making a satisfying flurry. To combat boredom she occasionally reads a few sentences out loud to herself, backwards. Seigolonhcet gnitepmoc fo ecneics eht si raw fo ecneics eht. How true. She has said it herself, many times.
Today she marks quickly, today she’s synchronized. Her left hand knows what her right hand is doing. Her two halves are superimposed: there’s only a slight penumbra, a slight degree of slippage.
Tony marks papers until quarter to eight. Sunlight floods the room, made golden by the yellow leaves outside; a jet flies over; the garbage truck approaches along the street, clanking ,-like a tank. Tony hears it, slippers hastily down the stairs and into the kitchen, lifts the plastic sack from its bin, twist-ties it, runs to the front door with it, and scampers down the porch steps, hiking up her dressing gown. She has to sprint only a short distance before catching up with the truck. The men grin at her: they’ve seen her in her dressing gown before. West is supposed to do the garbage, but he forgets.
She goes back to the kitchen and makes the tea, warming the pot, measuring the leaves carefully, timing the steeping with her big-numbers wristwatch. It was Tony’s mother who taught her about making tea; one of the few useful things she did teach her. Tony has known how to make tea since she was nine. She can remember standing on the kitchen stool, measuring, pouring, carrying the cup upstairs, tenderly balanced, to where her mother was lying in bed under the sheet, a rounded mound, white as a snowdrift. How lovely. Put it there. And finding the cup later, cold, still full.
Begone, Mother, she thinks. Rehtom, enogeb. She banishes her, not for the first time.
West always drinks the tea that Tony makes. He always accepts her offerings. When she goes upstairs with his cup he’s standing by the back window, looking out over the neglected and derelict autumn yard. (Both of them say they will plant things in it, soon, later. Neither of them does.) He’s already dressed: jeans, and a blue sweatshirt that says Scales & Tails and has a turtle on it. Some organization devoted to the saving of amphibians and reptiles, which—Tony imagines—doesn’t have a very large membership, yet. There are so many other things, these days, that require saving.
“Here’s your tea,” she says.
West bends in several places, like a camel sitting down, in order to kiss her. She raises herself on tiptoe.
“Sorry about the garbage,” he says.
“It’s all right,” she says, “it wasn’t heavy. One egg or two?” Once, during the morning garbage race, she tripped on her dressing gown and took a header down the front steps. Luckily she landed on the bag itself, which burst. She didn’t mention= this to West, though. She’s always careful with him. She knows how frangible he is, how subject to breakage.
While boiling the eggs Tony thinks of Zenia: Is it a premonition? Not at all. She frequently thinks of Zenia, more frequently than when Zenia was alive. Zenia dead is less of a threat, and doesn’t have to be shoved away, shoved back into the spidery corner where Tony keeps her shadows.
Though even Zenia’s name is enough to evoke the old sense of outrage, of humiliation and confused pain. Or at least an echo of it. The truth is that at certain times—early mornings, the middle of the night—she finds it hard to believe that Zenia is really dead. Despite herself, despite the rational part of herself, Tony keeps expecting her to turn up, stroll in through some unlocked door, climb through a window carelessly left open. It seems improbable that she would simply have evaporated, with nothing left over. There was too much of her: all that malign vitality must have gone somewhere.
Tony slides two slices of bread. into the toaster, then rummages in the cupboard for the jam. Zenia is dead, of course. Lost and gone forever. Dead as a cinder. Every time Tony thinks this, the air goes into her lungs, then out in a long sigh of relief.
Zenia’s memorial service was five years ago, or four and a half. It was in March. Tony can recall the day perfectly, a wet grey day that turned, to sleet later. What surprised her at the time was that there were so few people there. Men, mostly, with their coat collars turned up. They avoided the front row and kept trying to get behind one another, as if they didn’t want to be seen.
None of these men was Roz’s runaway husband Mitch, Tony noted with interest and some disappointment, though she was glad for Roz. She could sense Roz craning her neck, riffling through the faces: she must have expected him to be there, and then what? Then there would have been a scene.
Charis was looking too, in a less obtrusive way; but if any of these men was Billy, Tony wouldn’t have been able to tell, because she’d never met Billy. He’d arrived, then vanished, during the interval when she hadn’t been in touch with Charis.
True, Charis had shown her a photo, but the focus was bad and the top of Billy’s head was cut off; and he’d had a beard then. Men’s faces changed more than women’s did, over time. Or they could change them more, at will. Add facial hair and subtract it.