Free The Tiger in the Tiger Pit by Janette Turner Hospital Page A

this obsession with time and space and simultaneity I imposed my own grammar texts on an entire nation so that I could pull out my timepiece and say: Every twelve-year-old in France is doing exercise III on page forty.
    Insane, Elizabeth tells him, but magnificent in its own way Not incomprehensible.
    Thank you, he says. The passion for order.
    For harmony, Elizabeth corrects, for wholeness.
    She puts down her pen and crosses to the piano. She begins to play Handel’s Water Music. She sees the River Thames and the Greenwich boat rocking gently at the Westminster pier. She and Adam find seats by the rail on the front deck. It matters to neither of them that everyone else is huddled inside against the rain and the bleakness.
    Yesterday he was seven. She looks at him and holds his hand and knows that all things are possible. The way spring makes churlish old misanthropes smile at their neighbours in spite of themselves: that was how it was with a grandchild. She knows if she can just get Edward and Adam into the same room together …
    She stops playing and leans on the keyboard. Frowns. What is the word she’s trying to think of? Catalysis ? She goes to the bookshelf and takes down a volume of the encyclopedia. But the Cs waylay her utterly.
    Carthage. A city founded in the ninth century BC by Dido of passionate memory. And what has Elizabeth ever suspected of the glories, the rises and falls of that fabled place? Defeat at the hands of Gelon of Syracuse in 480 BC. But then Hannibal, great general, with his convoys of elephants and troops, soars with victory in his wings. Elizabeth closes her eyes and sees the elephants humping over the Alps, their bewildered trunks groping delicately, inquiringly, sensuously in the snow, causing astonished Swiss dairy maids to have lascivious thoughts.
    She reads of Casimir , duke of Cracow, 1177—1194, and of Castor and Pollux and of Castruccio Castracani , leader of the Ghibellines in thirteenth-century Italy. Dante gave him a spot in the Inferno , she has not read Dante for years, she makes a mental note to do so again. There are glowing pages of Catalan art (fifteenth century) and the history of catalepsy to be absorbed before she reaches catalysis, remembering.
    Yes. She was right. It was the word. If she brings them together, Adam and Edward, the chemical reaction will take care of itself She won’t need to do anything else.
    She goes back to Handel’s Water Music. She is on the Thames again. Adam has made this trip before, with his school. See, he points out for her, as they glide past the graceful Norman towers. That’s the Traitor’s Gate. And Sir Walter Raleigh was in that tower there.
    But it was in Greenwich, in the old Royal Observatory, as they dallied among astrolabes, that he said: “Dave would love this. I wish Dave could be here.”
    â€œWho is Dave?” she asked him.
    â€œDaves my father. Sort of. He’s not really my father, but he’s my real father.”
    Elizabeth loves the illicit and the passionate as much as Adam does. She seduces him. He tells her everything. About the shearing and the wool sales and the law office and the Blue Wanderer and the time Dave didn’t come to the airport to say goodbye. But Dave calls on his birthdays and at Christmas, and yes he does have Dave’s address.
    She wrote her first letter as soon as she got back to Ashville, He replied, she wrote again. She kept all his letters in a drawer in Emily’s old room. About some things, she felt superstition couldn’t hurt.
    She was still playing the Water Music . If she were a better planner, she might have been able to orchestrate Dave’s presence at the reunion. Yet what could she have done when she still didn’t know for certain if Emily would come? Nevertheless, there would probably have been a way. And then: catalysis again. Simply bring them together, she is certain, and these senseless barriers Emily has erected against