Homework: A Novel - Softcover

Margot Livesey is the author of a story collection and several novels, including Eva Moves the Furniture. She lives and teaches in Massachusetts.

HOMEWORK
PART I CHAPTER 1 It was the Saturday before Easter and all day the weather had been seesawing between winter and spring. As I approached the zoo the sun came out again. There was no sign of Stephen and Jenny among the queue of people waiting to gain admission, and I sat down on the wooden bench beside the entrance. In the shelter of the high wall, it was warm enough to unbutton my jacket. I closed my eyes and turned my face to the sun, feeling the brightness on my eyelids. I could smell the rising smells of spring--damp earth, growth, decay--as if these odours, kept prisoner all winter long, were now released. In our garden the daffodils would soon be in bloom. From within the zoo, barely audible above the noise of traffic and the cries of children, came a strange honking sound and then, from another quarter, a muffled roar. The light dimmed. I opened my eyes. A stand of dark clouds had covered the sun, and a chilly wind forced me to my feet. When I glanced up from buttoning my jacket, I saw Stephen walking along the pavement on the far side of the road; he had not noticed me. He was looking down, talking to Jenny. She was holding his hand and smiling up at him. For a few seconds I stared at them, as if they were strangers, and then, like one's own reflection glimpsed surprisingly in a public place, they swam into recognition. I was suddenly aware of the astonishing fact that this small girl was Stephen's daughter. The relationship between them was as inevitable as the force that lengthened the days; whatever happened, shewas connected to him in a more profound way than I could ever be. While they waited for a pause in the traffic, Stephen caught sight of me and waved. He said something to Jenny. They were hidden by a silver-grey tourist bus. Then they crossed the street, and the three of us came together. Stephen bent and kissed me on the mouth. "Are we late?" he asked, pressing my hand. "No, I was early. I didn't know how long the bus would take." I turned to greet Jenny, and found her gaze fixed upon me. "Hello, Jenny," I said. "How are you?" "I'm fine, thank you, Celia." She smiled, briefly, and I thought how adult she was in her politeness. We joined the queue for tickets. Immediately in front of us, a man wearing a sheepskin jacket was discussing feeding times with a woman in a green anorak; they both had ruddy complexions of the kind I had come to regard, since I moved to Edinburgh, as peculiarly Scottish. Next to them four sandy-haired boys were arguing, pushing each other back and forth and saying, "I did," "You didn't." Jenny eyed them curiously; her stillness was in marked contrast to their noisy jostling. Before I first met Jenny, the photographs Stephen kept balanced on the mantelpiece had made me familiar with her appearance. She was unusually small for her age. She had pale skin, the colour of paper, which, framed by her dark, utterly straight hair, looked even paler. In one photograph her mouth seemed slightly crooked, in another not, and this imperfection, if such it was, had the effect of making me, whenever I met her, look and look again in an effort to determine her expression. "Did you find what you wanted in the shops?" Stephen asked. Jenny was standing on his other side, and I moved slightly forward to include her in the conversation. While I explained how I had walked along Princes Street, trying onshoes, and had then given up and bought a shirt instead, she continued to stare at the boys. "I went into Habitat," I said. "They have some quite nice rugs." "Maybe we could go and look on Monday. I was saying to Jenny that by next weekend we ought to be sufficiently organised for her to come over to the house." As soon as Stephen began to speak, Jenny slid away, squeezing between the man in sheepskin and one of the boys. Over their shoulders I saw her weaseling past the rest of the queue. When we reached the ticket booth she had stationed herself in the doorway and was examining each family in turn. "Two adults and a child, please," said Stephen, and pushed a ten pound note under the small window. Inside the zoo, Jenny led the way up the hill, past a series of pools containing different kinds of waterfowl, to the sea lions' enclosure. Feeding was in progress, and she seemed to stop almost in spite of herself to watch the keeper dispense fish to the three sea lions. The animals sat on the rocks, raising their small heads and adroitly catching the silver fish. Whenever the keeper paused, they began to make the honking sound I had heard earlier. We found a place at the barrier, among the other adults and children. "Can you see?" Stephen asked Jenny. "Shall I lift you up?" "No. I can see everything." She was observing the scene with an expression of grave attention such as I imagined she might wear when watching her teacher write a problem on the blackboard. The largest of the sea lions raised itself on its flippers and caught a fish with special dexterity. There was a round of applause. Stephen laughed and clapped. "Good catch. Did you see that, Jenny?" "Come on," she said. She hurried along the path to the next enclosure, and Stephen and I followed. When I looked over the low stone wall, I saw a pair of otters playing beside a small pool. The surrounding bank was trodden to mud, andon the far side was a little wooden house, like a dog kennel, where presumably the animals slept. The otters themselves were sleek, brown, and much smaller than I had remembered. One of them was playing with a penny, tossing the coin into the air and trying to catch it. The other was scrabbling in the mud at the base of the wall directly below the spot where Jenny stood. "Here, here," she called. The otter glanced up, then continued to dig, with even greater determination. "He needs a penny too, Dad," Jenny said. "Can we give him one?" I noticed that she had decided on the sex of the animal. "No, it might be dangerous. The people at the zoo give the animals everything they need." Stephen leaned forward, resting his elbows on the wall. "I wonder what it's digging for. Do you think it buried some food?" "I don't know," said Jenny. "Maybe he's trying to get out." The idea of the otter persisting day after day in such a fruitless enterprise had not occurred to me, and I found it distressing. I tried to focus on the playful animal. It rolled over on its back and ducked into the pond. Suddenly I noticed something small and yellow floating on the surface of the muddy water; it was a dead chicken, so young that the flesh was barely dusted with feathers. At once I saw that there were several more. I glanced at Stephen. He was standing beside me, absorbed in the otter's antics. Then I felt Jenny watching me. As soon as my eyes met hers, she turned pointedly in the direction of one of the tiny corpses. Hastily I stepped back from the wall. "Let's go," I said. We passed the penguin compound. A platoon of birds was waddling up and down, squawking and waving their outstretched flippers. They seemed to demand an audience, but Jenny claimed there were better penguins further on and barely broke her stride. She stopped again at the polar bears. Stephen took my hand, and we walked to the far end of thepool. Fifteen or twenty feet below a single bear lay sprawled on the rocks, its rumpled fur the colour of old linen. "Do you see how low the water is?" Stephen said. "Apparently when the zoo was started the water level was much higher, and one of the bears managed to climb out. Ever since, they've given them just this puddle to swim in." "How old is the zoo?" I asked. "It was founded in 1909, and most of what we're seeing was built then." He smiled. "I've been here on so many school outings that I could be a tour guide. Look." He pointed to the bear, which rose to its feet and lumbered down to the water. It began to swim across the pool. When it reached the wall of rock at the end, it heaved its head and shoulders high out of the water, opened its jaws in a kind of grimace, and, almost in the same motion, threw its huge body down into a somersaulting turn. It swam back to the other end and performed exactly the same manoeuvres. The pool was so small that each length took only a matter of seconds. As we stood watching, the bear heaved, and grimaced, and turned, over and over, with as little variation as a mechanical toy. Perhaps because of Jenny's remark about the otter, I could not help thinking of a prisoner pacing a cell. After a few minutes Stephen stepped back, shaking his head. "This is horrible," he said. "I remember reading an article which claimed that many of the animals kept in zoos become insane. And I can see why." We started walking again. "Somehow I thought that nowadays they kept the animals in larger enclosures," I said. "What are you talking about?" Jenny demanded. She was skipping along on the other side of Stephen. "We're talking about the fact that the animals don't look very happy, that they don't have enough room." She nodded. "I like it better when we see them on television. Then they have lots of space." We continued to make our way up the hill. I had not beento a zoo for years, and animal after animal contradicted my puny efforts at imagination. I could not have visualised the impossibly large mass of the white rhinoceros, nor the curious proportions of the elephant. While Stephen and I meandered along, pausing in front of each enclosure, Jenny, for whose sake we were there, kept walking at a tremendous pace, as if she were on her way to her friend Anna's house and the animals, like the houses separating her from Anna, were simply to be gotten past as quickly as possible. Other children were running around, but they lacked Jenny's distinguishing air of purpose. We caught up with her again just beyond the brown bears. She was standing in front of a small cage, which according to the sign housed the Scottish wildcat. Although the sun had come out, the interior of the cage was dim, and I searched for a moment or two before I saw the cat. It was sitting on a tree stump, washing itself. As I watched it licking its paws, I was struck by how closely the wildcat resembled my tabby, Tobias. There was something sinister about the spectacle of such an animal in captivity. The cat looked as if it ought to be a beloved family pet; that it was behind bars suggested a ferocity the more frightening for being so thoroughly concealed. Jenny rocked forward on the railing that separated us from the cage. "We learned about wildcats in school," she announced. "So what did you learn?" asked Stephen. "They are native to Scotland and live in remote places. They can never be tamed. Even if you take the kittens away from the mother at birth, when they grow up they'll bite you and run away." She spoke in a singsong voice, as if she had learned these sentences by heart. "Have you ever seen one in the wild?" I asked. "I'm not sure," said Stephen. He turned to Jenny. "Do youremember that time we were up near Ullapool and a cat ran across the road?" "Mummy was sure it was a wildcat and you thought it was lost. We stopped the car, and you walked up and down the road, calling, 'Pussycat, pussycat.'" She giggled. The cat stood up, walked slowly towards the front of the cage, and stopped just short of the bars. We were only a few feet away, but it gave so little indication of noticing our presence that we might have been invisible. The large green eyes stared unblinkingly through us into some other landscape. The three of us fell silent. Beside us a family had paused; the man carried a baby on his back, while the woman held the hand of a small boy. "Look at the kittycat, Phil," she said. "I want to see the camels," said the boy. "You promised there would be camels." "We're getting to them. They're at the top of the hill," said the man. They moved on. Jenny remained staring at the cat. She was, like the animal, completely still and seemed unaware of what was happening around her. I thought how odd it was that after being impervious to the more immediate charms of bears and monkeys, she should be engrossed in this motionless animal. The cat switched its tail and returned to the rear of the cage, leaving behind in the damp sand a neat trail of footprints. Jenny watched the cat retreat and gave a small, satisfied nod. Then she turned her back to the cage. "I'm hungry," she announced to Stephen. "Can we go to the Penguin Pantry?" "What about the rest of the animals?" he said. "If we go to the Pantry, we probably won't have time to see them." "That's okay. I've seen enough." We turned back down the hill. At the crossroads Jenny bent to retie the laces of one of her shoes. I waited beside herwhile Stephen wandered over to look more closely at the flamingoes. From where I stood I could see the rosy-pink birds clustered by twos and threes beneath the leafless trees. Jenny gave the knot a final twist and straightened up. As we started walking again I felt her hand tugging at mine. She often held her father's hand in a manner that seemed both childish and proprietary, but she had never before taken mine. In fact it occurred to me that Jenny had never touched me in any way before, not even accidentally. I was struck by how small and cold her hand was. She walked silently beside me. Stephen turned around to ask if she remembered the baby elephant they had seen last year. He saw her gesture, and smiled. Jenny said that she did remember. As soon as he was no longer looking, her limp fingers slid from my grasp. It was near closing time, and the crowds were moving towards the exit. The cafeteria was empty save for a scattering of elderly people who looked as if they were waiting to be retrieved by younger, more active relatives. We approached the counter. "What would you like?" Stephen asked. Jenny pointed to a cake, and he lifted it off the shelf and put it on our tray. Then she demanded a chocolate biscuit, and an ice cream. "A cup of tea, please," I said to the girl behind the counter. "Won't you be having supper soon, Jenny?" "I'm starving." "Couldn't you get the thing you're going to eat first and then come back if you're still hungry?" I suggested. "The ice cream will melt unless you eat it right away." "I want to eat them at the same time. Daddy always lets me have whatever I want for tea before I go home." She emphasised the word "Daddy" in a way that made it clear that I was intruding. "It does look like a lot," said Stephen, "but if you promise to eat everything, I suppose we'd better get it now. I think they're about to close," he added, apologetically, to me. "I promise." We chose a table by the window. Jenny sat beside Stephen, and I sat opposite. Someone had left a box of matches on the table, and she picked it up and rasped a match along the side. A faint, sulphurous odour mingled with the smell of tea as the match burst into flame. Jenny blew it out, then struck another. She held the match vertical and watched intently until the small flame consumed the wood down to her fingertips. "Ooh," she said with a little gasp, dropping the charred stick. She was reaching for a third, when Stephen said, "Don't, Jenny. Matches aren't a toy." Slowly she closed the l...