Drooling and pawing is a new concept, for Tony. She has never been drooled on or pawed. She would like to ask how it is done, but refrains.

Sometimes the two of them really do paint sets. Not that Tony’s any good at painting—she’s never painted anything before in her life—but the others give her a brush and the paint and show her where, and she puts on the base colours. She gets paint on her face and in her hair, and on the man’s shirt they’ve provided, which comes down to her knees. She feels baptized.

By the others—the thin scornful straight-maned women, the black-sweatered, ironic men—she is almost accepted, which is,—naturally Zenia’s doing. For some reason that none of these people can figure out, Zenia and Tony are thick as thieves. Even the girls in the residence have noticed it. They no longer call Tony Tonikins, or offer her cookie shards, or beg her to sing “Darling Clementine” in reverse. They have backed off. Tony can’t tell if this is dislike or respect; or possibly it’s fright, because Zenia, it seems, has a certain reputation among them. Although none of them know her personally, she is one of the visible people—visible to everyone else, but unseen by Tony before now because she wasn’t looking. It’s partly her appearance: Zenia is the incarnation of how plainer, more oblong women wish to look, and therefore to be: it’s a belief of theirs that such things can be arranged from the outside in. She is thought also to be brilliant, and she gets top marks—though she doesn’t exert herself, she hardly ever attends a lecture, so how does she do it? Brilliant, and also fearsome. Wolfish, feral, beyond the pale.

Tony hears some of this from Roz, who barges into her room one morning while Tony is studying, trying to catch up on the time she’s missed the night before. Mothering Roz descends with squawks and a flutter of feathers, and attempts to enlighten small Tony, towards whom she feels protective. Tony listens in silence, her eyes hardening, her ears closing over. She will not hear a word against Zenia. Jealous bitch, she thinks. Hctib suolaej.

She has different clothes now, too, because Zenia has redesigned her. She has black corduroy jeans, and a pullover with a huge rolled collar in which her head sits like an egg in its nest, and a gigantic wraparound green scarf. It’s not as though you can’t afford it, says Zenia, propelling her through the stores. The pageboy with the velvet hairband is gone; instead, Tony’s hair is cut short and tousled on top, with artful wisps coming out of it. Some days Tony thinks she looks a little like Audrey Hepburn; other days, like an electrocuted mop: Much more sophisticated, Zenia has pronounced. She has also made Tony exchange her normal-sized horn-rimmed glasses for bigger ones, enormous ones.

“But they’re too exaggerated,” said Tony. “Unbalanced:”

“That’s what beauty is,” said Zenia. “Exaggerated. Unbalanced. Pay more attention and you’ll see:”

This is the theory behind the outsized sweaters too, the blanket-like scarves: Tony, swimming within them, is rendered even scrawnier. “I look like a stick,” she says. “I look ten!”

“Slender,” says Zenia. Juvenile. Some men like that.”

“Then they’re warped,” says Tony.

“Listen to me, Antonia,” says Zenia seriously. “All men are warped. This is something you must never forget:”

The waitress comes, dollops of fat under her chin, support hose on her legs and clumpy shoes on her feet, a grey bibbed bosom with a stain of ketchup on it bulging out in front. Indifferently she refills their cups. “She’s one too,” says Zenia, when her back is turned. “A prostie. In her spare time.”

Tony scans the stolid rump, the bored slope of the shoulders, the straggling bun of dead-squirrel-coloured hair. “No!” she says. “Who would want to?”

“Bet you anything,” says Zenia. “Go on!”

She means that Tony should continue with whatever story she’s been telling, but Tony can scarcely remember where she was. This friendship with Zenia has been very sudden. She feels as if she’s being dragged along on a rope, behind a speeding motorboat, with the waves sloshing over her and her ears full of applause; or as if she’s racketing downhill on a bicycle, with no hands and no brakes either. She’s out of control; at the same time, she’s unusually alert, as if the small hairs on her arms and on the back of her neck are standing straight up. These are perilous waters. But why? They’re only talking.

Though it’s making Tony dizzy, all this reckless verbiage. She’s never listened so much to one person; also, she herself has~never said so much, so heedlessly. She has hardly gone in for self-revelation, in her previous life. Who was there to tell? She has no idea what might come reeling out, the next time she opens her mouth.

“Go on,” says Zenia once more, leaning forward, across the speckled-brown table, the half-empty cups, the butts in the brown metal ashtray. And Tony does.

XXI

What Tony is telling about is her mother. This is the first time Tony has ever said very much to anyone about her mother, beyond the bare bones, that is. Lost and gone, says Tony, and Dreadful sorry, says everyone else. Why say more? Who would be interested?

Zenia is, as it turns out. She can see it’s a painful subject for Tony, but this doesn’t deter her; if anything it spurs her on. She pushes and prods and makes all the right noises, curious and amazed, horrified, indulgent, and relentless, and pulls Tony inside out like a sock.

It takes time, because Tony has no single clear image of her mother. The memory of her is composed of shiny fragments, like a vandalized mosaic, or like something brittle that’s been dropped on the floor. Every once in a while Tony takes out the pieces and arranges and rearranges them, trying to make them fit. (Though she hasn’t spent very long at this yet. The wreck is too immediate.)

So all Zenia can get out of her is a handful of shards. Why does she want such a thing? That’s for Zenia to know and Tony to find out. But, in the entranced and voluble moment, it doesn’t occur to Tony even to ask.     :

Tony was hardened off early. This is what she calls it by now, ruefully, in her cellar, at three a.m., with the shambles of Otto the Red’s clove army strewn on the sand-table behind her and West sleeping the sleep of the unjust upstairs, and Zenia raging unchecked, somewhere out there in the city. “Hardened off” is a term she’s lifted from Charis, who has explained that it’s what you do to seedlings to toughen them up and make them frostresistant and help them to transplant better. You don’t water them very much, and you leave them outside in the cold. This is what happened to Tony. She was a premature baby, as her mother was fond of telling her, and was kept in a glass box. (Was there a note of regret in her mother’s voice, as if it was a pity that she was eventually taken out?) So Tony spent her first days motherless. Nor—in the long run—did things improve.

For instance:

When Tony was five, her mother decided she would take her tobogganing. Tony knew what tobogganing was, although she had never done it. Her mother had only a vague idea, gleaned from Christmas cards. But it was one of her romantic English images of Canada.

Where did she get the toboggan? Probably she borrowed it from one of her bridge club friends. She zipped Tony into her snowsuit and got them to the tobogganing hill in a taxi. The toboggan was just a small one, so it fit into the back seat, on a slant, along with Tony. Her mother sat in the front. Tony’s father had the car that day, as he did most days. This was just as well, as the streets were icy and Tony’s mother was at best a spontaneous driver.

By the time they got to the tobogganing hill the sun was low and huge and dimly pink in the grey winter sky, and the shadows were bluish. The hill was very high. It was on the side of a ravine, and covered with close-packed, icy snow. Groups of—screaming children and a few adults were careering down it on sleighs and toboggans and large pieces of cardboard. Some had overturned, and there were pile-ups. Those that reached the bottom disappeared behind a clump of dark fir trees.