Perfect Happiness (11 page)

There are days, which succeed one another, and in which we do what has to be done and in which time runs level; passing, simply, bringing with it pleasure and irritation and satiety and tiredness and all those ordinary furnishings of life. And then, rarely and unpredictably, there are fragments and passages from days which are of another order altogether. They are beyond and without chronology; they hang suspended, possessions for all time. To be called up out of darkness.

She stood on the side of this hill, at the top of which there was a prehistoric fort or something, and the blue day rolled away below her: fields and trees and a sky with small coasting clouds. And the wind blew through her hair. The children were running on ahead, bobbing in and out of view between the contours of the hill. She had thought herself alone, had thought Steven was with them, and then suddenly she felt his hand on her back, between her shoulder-blades. And the touch was extraordinary, as though he had never touched her before, as charged as his first touch, the first time he had taken her hand, the first time he had kissed her. She stood there, without turning to look at him, and he said, ‘I love you.’ He who so rarely spoke those words.

There was a kestrel that hung at eye-level, negotiating the winds. And very small brown butterflies on the cropped bouncy turf.

She said nothing. He took his hand from her back but she felt still the print of it (as she felt it now… lying in the darkness of another time…). She had thought: why suddenly does happiness descend, out of nowhere, like an archangel, out of a day that on the face of it is like any other? How can it be that life is quite unexceptional, and then all of a sudden it is not: it becomes a marvel?

Steven said, ‘I am not with you enough. I know that. But you must never think it is because I don't want to be. It is because I cannot help being the sort of person I am.’

‘I know. It doesn't matter.’

‘Last week, when I rang you from Paris, I was missing you unbearably.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That happens to me too.’

They began to walk up the hill. Ahead, above, the children scurried in the sunshine. Tabitha, aged eight. And Harry, seven.

‘Just so long as you realize,’ he went on, ‘I don't talk about this sort of thing very much, I know. But that doesn't mean…’

‘Darling,’ she said, ‘I know. It's all perfectly all right.’

‘Sometimes, when I'm in the middle of something, I think of you. Committees. Teaching. I think of you and I know that you are there, that you are always there, and I can hardly believe it.’

Frances said, ‘I love you too.’

And later, in the bedroom of a hotel that had faded subsequently to an impression of over-patterned rooms and walls that crawled with flowers they had made love, late into the night, and as though that too were for the first time. Steven had said, in the middle of it, ‘I'm sorry about being sharp sometimes. And distant. When that happens, please think of this, if you can.’ And Frances had replied, ‘I will. It's all right – I do.’

All this, now, in the awful solitude of the new house, she summoned up. Deliberately and in fear. Over the last months, that time and others had summoned her, when she least wanted it, when she could least resist it, and she had suffered them, in anguish. She had longed to be without the power of recollection; bleached of memory. Tonight, she sought out the Dorset hillside of her own free will, and while the pain was still there, so also was something else. A privacy. That is mine also, she thought, mine alone. Eventually, she slept.

The new house was in that north London area of early nineteenth century terraced houses north-east of King's Cross. To Frances, used to the leafier heights of Highgate and sensitive, as Londoners are, to nuances of change in architecture and the pattern of streets, it seemed more densely urban and disproportionately strange. A landscape that is unknown is also unresponsive; she was walking around now in a place without associations. She was irritated by the nostalgia she felt for the familiar shops and banks and bus-stops and arterial roads from which she had come and to which she had never been particularly attached; to be so vulnerable to place seemed an unnecessary frailty. Determinedly, she stumped this new environment, attaching herself to it.

It was an area hustled by change, ever since the linked villages of which it was composed had erupted and fused with the city. The terraces had mostly been built within ten or twenty years of each other suggesting that at the time the place must have been one feverish building site, and indeed this state of growth and mutation persisted, with piles of ginger sand along the pavements, stacked bricks and timber, the occasional churning cement mixer. Now, those stolidly surviving structures were being shored up and reconstructed and improved and thus hauled into the late twentieth century and a different strata of society. They housed today the youngish middle class. Though by no means entirely so; survivors of another time still brought kitchen chairs out on to doorsteps on sunny days, as determinedly as the cobbles that bubbled up from beneath the tarmac of the roads after a bad winter. And the corner shops lived on, run now by Asians, their cluttered and comprehensive stock of sugar, toothpaste, birthday cards, washing powder and newspapers competing nicely with the gleaming shelves of Sainsbury's and Marks and Spencer. The past does not lie down and die, Frances saw, a good deal of it is regenerative, like those primitive organisms that reproduce by splitting off their more resilient parts.

When she was not thus acclimatizing herself, she spent the time getting the house to rights and going through the many boxes of Steven's papers, resolutely destroying everything that seemed unimportant. She was determined that the house should not be one of those overstocked domestic archives in which everything is indiscriminately preserved. She had kept only those furnishings she liked best or which were most useful and set about, now, keeping only those things of Steven's that she felt to be especially significant.

On one of these occasions, kneeling on the floor with boxes and files spread out around her, she was interrupted by Harry. He hung around for a few minutes, picking things up and putting them down again and then said awkwardly, ‘By the way I think I'll be off again next week. Some people I know are hitching for two or three weeks in France and I thought I'd go with them.’

‘Are you sure the leg's strong enough?’

‘Hitching, not walking. At least that's the idea.’ He fiddled with the window catch. ‘You don't mind?’

‘Of course I don't mind. But be sensible.’

‘Oh,
yes
,’ said Harry irritably. After a moment he went on. ‘Actually, I've got a present for you.’

‘A present? How nice.’

‘Hang on…’ She heard him stump down the stairs. When he returned she stared in amazement. ‘Heavens!’

He put the puppy down in the middle of the room; it was brown, with sparse wiry fur through which pink skin faintly gleamed. ‘I'm not quite sure what kind it is; I think it's a sort of mixture but apparently it won't get very big. I'm afraid it seems to pee on things rather.’

‘It's sweet,’ said Frances doubtfully. ‘But Harry, I'm not sure if I like dogs. We've never had one.’

‘Only because Dad didn't like them. All right,’ he added, offended. ‘I'll take it back to the shop.’

‘No, no… No, of course I'll like it. Thank you. It was a lovely thought. I'm sure we'll be very happy together.’

Harry, complacent, looked down benignly at the dog. ‘It eats sort of biscuit stuff. And meat out of tins. I got some for you to start off with.’

‘Thank you very much, darling.’

‘That's O.K. Well… see you later. I've got to go out.’

She sat down and contemplated the puppy, which was paddling around on a heap of Steven's papers. It, too, sat, and looked at her for a moment with an expression of, it seemed, subservience mixed with expectation. Its stumpy tail convulsively twitched. Downstairs, Frances could hear Harry telephoning a friend: a terse and worldly discussion about cross-channel ferry fares and the route from Dieppe to Aix-en-Provence.

At the end of the street in which Frances was now living there was a triangular piece of derelict ground, half an acre or more in size, separated from the roads at either side by a crumbling brick wall. Its apex was bordered by the last house of a four-storey terrace, the tattered wall that had once been the inside of rooms showing the hollows of fireplaces and the ghost of a staircase. The level of the ground was several feet below the street; an oasis amid the tarmac and crammed frontages, it billowed with greenery – willowherb and brambles and rangy clumps of buddleia amid which roosted old bedsteads and mattresses, skeletal television sets and a doorless refrigerator. Frances, who as a schoolgirl had seen the waste land of the City around St Paul's in the late nineteen forties, recognized this distinctive scenery with another kind of nostalgia and learned from neighbours that it was indeed a bomb-site, though no-one any longer knew when the bomb fell or what precisely it had fallen on.

A week after Harry had brought the puppy it managed to slip its head through the collar and shot excitedly through a gap in the wall whence it slithered down into the bomb-site. Frances could see it rummaging in the bushes. At that point she realized the mistake she had made in failing so far to give it a name; feeling foolish, she shouted ‘Come here!’ once or twice. Passersby looked at her and hurried on. The puppy continued to explore. Frances watched for a few minutes, and then to her dismay saw it settle down on one of the old mattresses, apparently preparing to go to sleep. She called again. The puppy pricked its ears, gave a propitiating twitch to its tail and laid its nose between its paws. Looking at the drop from the gap in the wall down into the waste ground she saw now that in any case it would be most unlikely to be able to jump up again.

I need a child, she thought, an obliging athletic child of about ten who could climb down there and get it for me. But there was no child to hand. And it was beginning to rain. Exasperated, she put her shopping-bag on the pavement and began to clamber through the gap in the wall. The puppy, lifting its head, watched with interest. She slithered awkwardly down the drop and advanced on the puppy, collar in hand; it greeted her with enthusiasm and a trace of reproach, as though the whole situation were of her making. Tugging it behind her on the lead, she set about the return journey. The drop, seen from below, was steeper than she had thought: a treacherous arrangement of crumbling earth topped by the brick foundation of the wall. She tried unsuccessfully to get a foothold. An elderly man glanced down at her and then walked away.

For several minutes she scrambled and slipped back, falling once into a piece of rusty iron which gashed her leg. It was raining steadily; she was on the edge of tears. And then suddenly there was a woman looking down at her, a youngish woman with long lank black hair. She said, ‘Is there anything I can do?’

‘If you could… find something I could get hold of and give me a pull. I can't get a foothold.’

‘I've only got the belt on my rain-coat. Here, catch hold…’

When, at last, Frances achieved the pavement she was mud-streaked and soaking wet. The woman said, ‘You've got a cut on your leg. That's our house opposite. You'd better come in and wash it.’

‘I live just down the road…’

‘You're getting blood all over your shoe. You'd better come.’ There was something at once persistent and resigned about her; she had a very white face, bare of make-up. On the doorstep she paused: ‘I'm Marsha Landon.’

The house, within, was identical to Frances's own, but of such different temper as to be startling. The shabbiness of walls and floors was almost aggressive; plaster was chipped from the cornices, the dark floral wallpapers had been torn away in places, the boards were either bare or covered with fraying cord carpet or disintegrating rush matting. From somewhere came the sound of a typewriter. Marsha led Frances into a kitchen in which the remains of a meal stood on the table and a sink was piled high with dirty crockery. She filled a bowl with water and brought a towel; a not very clean towel. Then she stood watching while Frances wiped mud and blood from her leg; she was, Frances now saw, older than she had at first appeared, fortyish, but with a pale childish face and skinny body. ‘P'raps you should go and have some stitches in it.’

Frances said, ‘I think it'll be all right.’

A man appeared in the doorway. Marsha said, ‘This is Philip. My husband. Sorry, I don't know your name.’

‘Frances Brooklyn. Your wife very kindly…’

‘She lost her dog in the bomb-site.’

Philip Landon was in his mid-fifties, a tall man with a long face on which skin hung in folds. He wore an out-at-elbow sweater and trousers so ill-fitting that they seemed hardly to graze his lean body. He pulled a chair out and straddled it, leaning his elbows on the back. The stare he directed at Frances was so disconcerting that she found herself looking away; it both disquieted and compelled attention.

‘You're a neighbour?’

‘Yes. I came here just last month.’

‘I'd heard the gentry were moving in.’