In Certain Circles by Elizabeth Harrower

had failed at nothing.
    Sitting up, she let the book fall shut. Any moment now her mother would come in and she would be nineteen or seventeen. She would smile; her mother would look bedazzled and loving. Under the press-cutting book, she saw a smaller volume. Family photographs. Russell, Lily and the twins. Grandparents, now dead. Zoe could just remember the muted sensation of their going. It had seemed unaffecting, quite natural and unmoving, that grandparents should die. They had lived in other cities, were unfamiliar except in anecdote. As they dropped away, her mother and father showed no great sign, determined to cast no shadows on their children, not to be overthrown by emotion. They had each other.
    Anna’s wedding. Zoe studied this with a swooning mind. David’s face looked large and smooth, his eyes lively and intelligent, his mouth sensitive and magnanimous, ready to smile. They were married for eighteen months. Then out of the blue she had heard that he was in hospital with some difficult-to-diagnose disease. In six weeks he was dead, Anna a young widow. He was only thirty-three.
    Till now there had seemed to be so much time. Since time stops, the world—which has been waiting for you in particular—stops when you arrive and grow up. It must be some inbuilt trickery, some necessary blindness, that makes us think so. And she had felt herself scarcely launched, still only standing up to her ankles in the ocean. When all the while human beings disappeared constantly from view. Likeable men of thirty-three. Her mother .
    â€˜Come on, sweetheart. Don’t stay up here by yourself.’ Her father stood behind her with a hand on her shoulder. She twisted round to look up at him. He had lost weight.
    He said, ‘Anna’s downstairs talking to Russell and Lily. She and Stephen have come over to see you.’
    â€˜Oh, yes.’ Zoe paused, then rose to her feet. She swayed and held her father’s arm.
    The room was lit like a stage directed to represent the desert at midday, though it was some unidentifiable hour of night. Numerous persons of a mind-jerking familiarity (like the crooked wooden telegraph poles, like the weeds, strongly calling and signalling to her through the car window on the drive from Mascot, like the sweet breath of the continent blowing through her mother’s room) sat about or walked in and out on errands, making her think again of the stage, of actors waiting for a rehearsal to begin. Apart from her family, Lily’s mother and father were there, Uncle John from Melbourne, the Pattersons, and the Blakes, friends since childhood, Janet Bell, her mother’s best friend, Tony Merson from Biology, and finally, Anna—now Anna Clermont—and Stephen Quayle.
    After embraces, Zoe sat down expecting her mother to come in swiftly and switch off half the lights, making the room habitable and intimate and like itself. Everyone murmured apologetically about her death. Minute after minute, she failed to appear. Zoe’s head continued to swoon. Her heart fell into hallucinated regions while the gathering, intent on cheering up, questioned her about the wide world.
    Almost for the first time in her life, Zoe felt herself at the mercy of circumstances. She was never overborne, yet she was overborne, letting herself be talked to, meek, unable to assert her will, or even to be certain what that was. All the things ever said about death were true. Like a light going out. If her mother came in the door now, turning off all the lamps, still the glow from her presence would make the room visible.
    â€˜We were always seeing pictures of you taking pictures.’ Tony Merson eyed her intensely, giving the impression that his glance was taking a hundred tiny photographs for future reference. ‘You know, the parachute one, and in the refugee camps with the kids. Living dangerously,’ he said, taking further pictures with his eyes.
    Still her mother waited outside