Perfect Happiness

PENGUIN BOOKS

PERFECT HAPPINESS

Penelope Lively grew up in Egypt but settled in England after the war and took a degree in history at St Anne's College, Oxford. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of PEN and the Society of Authors. She is married to Professor Jack Lively, has a daughter, a son and four grandchildren, and lives in Oxford-shire and London.

Penelope Lively is the author of many prize-winning novels and short-story collections for both adults and children. She has twice been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: once in 1977 for her first novel,
The Road to Lichfield
, and again in 1984 for
According to Mark
. She later won the Booker Prize for her highly acclaimed novel
Moon Tiger
in 1987. Her other novels include
Passing On
, shortlisted for the 1989
Sunday Express
Book of the Year Award,
City of the Mind, Cleopatra's Sister
and
Heat Wave
, and her most recent book is
Beyond the Blue Mountains
, a collection of short stories. Many of her books, including
Going Back
, which first appeared as a children's book, and
Oleander, Jacaranda
, an autobiographical memoir of her childhood days in Egypt, are published by Penguin.

Penelope Lively has also written radio and television scripts and has acted as presenter for a BBC Radio 4 programme on children's literature. She is a popular writer for children and has won both the Carnegie Medal and the Whitbread Award.

TITLES BY PENELOPE LIVELY IN PENGUIN

Fiction

Going Back

The Road to Lichfield

Treasures of Time

Judgement Day

Next to Nature, Art

Perfect Happiness

According to Mark

Pack of Cards: Collected Short Stories
1978–1986

Moon Tiger

Passing On

City of the Mind

Cleopatra's Sister

Autobiography

Oleander, Jacaranda

PENELOPE LIVELY

Perfect Happiness

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England

Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, 182–190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

First published by William Heinemann Ltd 1983

Published in Penguin Books 1985

Copyright © Penelope Lively, 1983

All rights reserved

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-190992-9

TO
ANN AND ANTHONY

The fifth Brandenburg. Somewhere, some place, every moment, an orchestra is playing the fifth Brandenburg concerto. Violins are tucked under chins, bows rise and fall; in recording studios and concert rooms, and here in the dining-hall of a Cambridge college where a hundred and fifty people are gathered together for no reason except circumstance which is perhaps the reason for everything. They are together for one hour fifty minutes and for the most part will never see one another again.

Some, of course, will.

Zoe, scowling at the ceiling of the hall and thinking of the perversity of such places in which everything was hitched once to a day, to an hour, but is adrift now in a distant day, an unheeded hour. Once careful hands created the plasterwork of that ceiling. Other eyes have blinked in the light from that window. Through this room have passed beliefs too alien to contemplate. She directs her scowl – which indicates concentration rather than mood – to the portraits at the far end, above the orchestra. The portraits too are adrift. Their hefty gilt frames are a matching set but they wall in people tethered by their appearance to seventeenth, eighteenth or nineteenth century: ruff, armour, cravat, wig. They are left behind, these people, of no account, present and yet profoundly absent, presiding mindless over Brandenburg Five undreamed of in their unimaginable yesterdays.

Tabitha, in a frilled white shirt, furiously intent among the second violins.

Morris.

Frances, sitting with hands folded and face blank, recollecting not in tranquillity but in ripe howling grief her husband Steven dead now eight months two weeks one day.

It is for one of them, for two, perhaps for several, a moment outside time, one of those moments when the needle gets stuck, when what happens goes on happening, down the years, again and again, recorded messages of glassy clarity whose resonances are always the same and yet also subtly different, charged with the insights of today, and yesterday. Forever, people are playing Brandenburg Five.

Frances Brooklyn stood outside to wait for her sister-in-law. Glossy heaps of cloud cruised in a clear pale sky, the buildings glowed, people eddied around her. She waited, saw that the college clock stood at twelve forty-five, and looked no further. She never, now, looked further; she did not much care what happened in the next hour, or day, or week.

Zoe came down the steps, burrowing into an enormous bag in which seethed notebooks, scarves, wallets, spectacle cases. ‘That, frankly, was gorgeous. Where's my blasted purse – I'll have to ring the office before we eat. Does the child meet us here or in the pub?’ She stared with sudden suspicion at Frances. ‘You haven't been weeping, have you? Music can be fatal.’

‘No. Look.’ Frances turned for inspection, half a head taller, looking down on to Zoe's dark frizzy hair, speckled here and there with grey, at her interesting ugly face to which always all glances are drawn, into her glittering clever eyes. Small vital powerful Zoe; friend and counsellor.

‘Good for you. I was on the point, once. All those bloody
nice
young, not throwing bricks through shop windows, not beating people up. Oh, I know, I know – privileged to the eyeballs. But all the same. Where
is
the child? Look, I'm going to dash to a phone – I'll meet you. Good grief – what are you doing here, Morris?’

‘Zoe!’

‘My sister-in-law, Frances. Morris Corfield. And here's my niece, Tabitha. Hi, Tab.’

Frances, finding that useful mechanical smile, hugging Tabitha with one arm, looked at this dumpy man with pointed beard and noticeable brown eyes and saw in his expression the flicker of awkwardness that she generated now all around her. The bereaved are faintly leprous. ‘Hello.’

‘Morris,’ said Zoe, ‘knows more than anyone else in the world about – hang on – Baroque opera. Have I got that right? In other words, he's a musicologist. And music critic. Morris why don't you…’

… join us for lunch, thought Frances, finishing in the head the sentence as one does for those one knows through and through, in depth, in totality, whose responses are learned as a familiar landscape.

‘… give me a ring at the paper and we'll have a meal,’ said Zoe, thinking: no, dammit, I want Frances and Tab to myself, we want to talk, I haven't seen Tab for a month and there's a god-awful week ahead goodness knows when I'll see Frances.

And Morris Corfield, smiling, commenting on the concert, thought for a moment and with passing interest of Steven Brooklyn whom he had not known but whose face and whose incisive irrefutable style were familiar from the television screen and from newspapers. Chairman of this and that. College Principal. A public man. Writer. Authority on, um, international relations wasn't it? His widow and daughter, then. Um. Handsome woman, pale oval face with the bruised look of those who grieve, fair untidy hair flopping over one eye. Girl carrying a violin.

Goodbye… Goodbye… Zoe. Mrs Brooklyn. Yes, I'll give you a ring…

‘He's nice,’ said Zoe. ‘But not just now, I want you to myself. He writes for the paper sometimes, that's how I know him. From time to time he chucks me free concert tickets he can't use. Anyway, enough of him… That was smashing, Tab. I want to take the conductor home and keep him for a pet, by the way. I never saw such a delectable young man.’

Tabitha said, ‘There's a boy called Mike Corfield in the orchestra.’

‘Ah. Son, no doubt. I'm famished. For heaven's sake let's go and eat.’

Later, Frances drove back to London alone. Zoe had gone north, on some journalistic assignment. Tabitha was in midterm. There was no further reason to be in Cambridge.

Or, indeed, anywhere.

She laid out her reactions to the day, and examined them. When you have been in the habit of expectation, of dangerous and excessive expectation, and when planning, fruitless planning, has been the practice of a lifetime, and when such habits are arbitrarily broken, a substitute is necessary. When you have learned finally and too late that life cannot be arranged and does not make sense, then there is nothing left but to move through days as they come, passively. Noting, simply, what happens.

No tears, today. The twisting of the guts, at points, but that is standard. A moment of uplift, once: the skyline of King's chapel. Warmth of Zoe and Tabitha. Music, of course, a torment.

She would return to an empty house, but that was something she had often done. Those who are married to public people become accustomed to returning to empty houses, to last-minute changes of plan, to apologetic telephone calls. Once, time out of mind ago, in the first months of marriage, she greeted Steven weeping and reproachful because he was two unexplained hours late: ‘I thought you'd had an
accident
. I was
worried
.’ And he had stared at her and said not unkindly but positively, ‘Frances, if you are going to be like that we shall be no good to each other. You mustn't try always to control everything.’

There is what you intend to happen, and there is what happens. Events slip from the grasp; people, above all, evade. They set out as one thing, and become another.

The quiet, clever, successful but companionable young man you married becomes a person harnessed to a larger world, wanted for this and that, the property of telephones and unknown voices, present but subtly absent. ‘Duckie,’ says Zoe, ‘this was always going to happen, you know. Didn't you realize? I did. And he's faithful, I can tell you that. It might have been other women.’ ‘But I never know, from day to day, what to expect.’ ‘Be thankful,’ says Zoe.