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

her own happiness will crumble.
    Is Elizabeth a meddler? Does she have the right? She considers the question seriously.
    She is in Emily’s minuscule kitchen again, saying with careful lightness: “Adam seems to miss Dave a lot.”
    It was as though she had injected agitation. She sees want in the tremor of Emily’s hand and the quaver of a facial muscle. Elizabeth thinks of childhood anxieties and school heartaches. Of one of the earliest music competitions, when Emily, still just a child, faltered in the difficult second movement of a sonata, missed a phrase, came to a dead stop. Elizabeth, accompanying, marked time, sidling around the problem passage, giving Emily cues, waiting for her to pick up and go on. But Emily was rigid with stage fright. There were little stirrings and rustlings of sympathy from audience and judges.
    â€œEmily,” Elizabeth called softly. And woodenly the child turned, her white face streaked with tears. “We’ll start the movement again,” Elizabeth whispered. “Face me as you play.”
    Profile to the judges, Emily began again, a perfect performance.
    The trouble one has with one’s youngest, Elizabeth thinks, is the difficulty of accepting she has outgrown one’s power to protect. She wanted to take her daughter in her arms, to say: “There, there, let me fix it.”
    â€œWhy,” she began to ask, “when Dave seems to both you and Adam …”
    But Emily cut her off. “One wasted musician in the family is enough. I don’t want nooses around my neck.”
    Elizabeth does not consider her life a wasted one. She tries to absorb the idea that she has somehow imposed solitude on Emily, and wilful unhappiness. She is unable to say anything. She goes home and writes to Australia.
    Dear Dave:
    It is possibly quite improper of me to send this letter; I am, however; moved to do so by the enthusiasm of my grandson, Adam.
    I wish simply to thank you for the way in which you were and are, his father. He thinks of you constantly. It is clear that you have given him a rich store of love on which to draw. I cannot thank you sufficiently.
    I have reason to believe that Emily misses you as much as Adam does. I cannot know, of course, how events have affected you. But if, as I suspect from your phone calls to Adam, these connections still matter; I wish you would consider visiting them in England.
    Dave answered promptly. He was ovetjoyed to receive her letter, to meet her as it were. He had, in fact, felt connected to the family for years. He was especially grateful for news of Adam whom he missed more than he could say. As for Emily, he would never get over her. And yet he had feared from the start that she would never stay anywhere long. Besides, she had told him that she was involved with someone else. There was nothing he could do. Certainly he could not go to England, he would never impose.
    There is no one else , Elizabeth wrote. Emily must have lied in self-defence. Please go to England.
    One cannot coerce , he replied.
    It was mad the way people baulked at their own happiness. She should have planned better, should have arranged for Dave to be at this reunion, for Emily to be caught off guard. The problem was her precarious grip on time. It was too late now to do anything.
    She went back to her letter. Dear Dave , it said. The problem is … She wrote:
    The problem is my precarious grip on time. I should have brought you together, should have thought this all out earlier. In any case, I want you to know that I am hoping to have Emily and Adam here at the weekend for a family reunion. If it happens, it will be significant, considering all the vowing never to set eyes on, et cetera, that has gone on. (I told you what happened in New York.) I rather expect something (I don’t quite know what) to happen. (If this letter strikes you as a little ludicrous, put it down to an old woman’s wishful belief in hocus-pocus and magic.)