Perfect Happiness (12 page)

‘We've been here fifteen years,’ said Marsha. ‘And it's stupid to talk like that, Philip. Our house is the only run-down one left, just about.’

He ignored her. ‘Anything to do with Steven Brooklyn, by any chance?’

Frances said reluctantly, ‘He was my husband.’

‘Well, well. I was at school with him.’ His gaze, still, was fixed on her; she could not understand why he made her so uncomfortable. ‘Make us some coffee, Marsha.’

‘Actually, I must go.’

‘Why?’ said Philip Landon.

She could think of no reply.

‘He was very much the golden lad, your husband. Clearly destined for higher things.’

‘I don't remember him ever mentioning…’ Frances began.

‘No. He wouldn't have. We weren't what you might call birds of a feather.’

Silence, unnervingly, descended. Marsha was spooning instant coffee into mugs. Frances, driven to speech, began to talk brightly about the neighbourhood. Coffee, not quite hot enough, was set before her. Philip Landon lit another cigarette; he seemed uncannily at odds with the times, his seediness was the seediness of another era, his destructive cynicism was in some way unrooted. Marsha spoke of local politics; his comments and interruptions, always derogatory, veered unsettlingly across the spectrum of opinion; it would have been quite impossible to tell where his political fidelities lay, if indeed they lay at all. He made Frances think of the fifties; another atmosphere clung to him – afternoon drinking-clubs, cinema queues, duffel coats and jazz played on wind-up gramophones. A recollection, an unwelcome sleazy recollection stirred – not of this man but another, similar man. A smoky room and too much raw wine. A knee thrusting between hers, wanting-to conflicting with not-wanting-to in a humiliating blinding loss of control. Long ago. Time out of mind ago. Time before Steven. She knew now, up to a point, why Philip Landon made her uneasy.

He and Marsha continued to talk of local issues. What she stated, he contradicted or criticized. At one point she snapped, ‘You don't know anything about it, Philip, you sit here on your arse all day, when did you last go to anything?’ She turned to Frances. ‘He writes.’

Philip watched with amusement. ‘Now you've got the poor woman wondering if she should have heard of me.’

Irritation tingled. Frances said, ‘I don't think I have. What do you write?’

He continued to watch her, smiling. ‘Books.’

‘Two books,’ said Marsha. Spite thickened the air: the high note, beyond hearing, of an old strife, customary and formalized.

Philip said, ‘Frances's husband wrote lots of books. Scholarly books. Learned books.’

‘Your books are learned in a way.’ Marsha tucked a strand of black uncherished hair behind her ear; she was dimly attractive, waif-like, apparently without self-regard. She went on, to Frances, ‘One of them's about the suffragettes and the other's about those progressive schools in the thirties.’

‘Did you go to one?’ asked Frances – and then added, ‘No, of course, you went to Steven's school.’

‘I remember Steven rather well,’ said Philip. ‘Interesting, somehow, that I should have known him even before you did. Shall I tell you about him?’

Frances stiffened. She gulped the rest of the clammy coffee. The puppy nosed at her leg and, gratefully, she stooped to pat it and clip the lead to its collar. ‘I really must go now. Thanks so much for ministering to me.’

Philip, his chin propped still on his arms, astride the chair as he had been since he came into the room, made no move. ‘Why don't you come round for a drink on Thursday? There'll be others. Meet the neighbours.’

‘Well, it's awfully kind,’ she began. ‘But I'm not quite sure .. I'll have to look when I get back and see if…’

‘Don't you want to take on some protective colouring? Get settled in. Therapeutic, I should have thought.’

She flushed. This is impertinent, she thought. I don't like him. ‘Well…’

‘Do come,’ said Marsha, in an off-hand way.

Philip stood up. ‘Come upstairs a minute. I'll show you something.’

Reluctantly, Frances followed him. The shabbiness of the house accelerated as they climbed; through a half open door she caught sight of an unmade bed, another room seemed to be filled with cardboard boxes and piles of newspapers. They went into an attic on the top floor, Marsha bringing up the rear. It was lined with bookshelves in which books were carelessly stacked, upright and in piles. A desk with typewriter and disordered sheets of paper stood before the window. Dirty mugs and glasses were pushed into a corner of the uncarpeted floor.

Philip opened a cupboard and rummaged around. ‘Here we are. The alma mater.’ He laid a photo album on the table.

The photograph, sepia with age, showed rows of boys, stepped one above another. Lines of faces, almost indistinguishable. In the centre, masters sat with folded arms. Frances said, ‘Yes. Steven had one of those.’ She looked away from the photograph at once.

Philip leaned over it. ‘Let's see now. Here's me. Steven of course is a prefect – that's him, isn't it?’ Marsha, from the doorway, said in a low voice, ‘Don't go
on
, Philip.’

‘I'm sorry, Frances,’ said Philip, in a new tone of voice, conciliatory, without that mocking edge. ‘Have I been tactless? I just thought you might be interested.’ He closed the album. ‘Look at my view. Right down to St Paul's on a clear day.’ He stood beside her at the window, and, as she looked out, laid a hand for a moment lightly on her shoulder to turn her ‘No, not that way – the other side.’

Frances, her agitation subsiding, said, ‘Oh yes, I see. It must be a nice place to work.’ His change of tone had further confused her; another, less abrasive man seemed to lurk. His hand was no longer on her but she shifted slightly away from him. She looked at the grey London landscape reaching away to a pearly horizon; towers and spires rose up fragile from the mass of buildings, like paper cut-outs; a gull drifted across the window at eye-level. But the room was stuffy, rank like an unaired bedroom. She searched for another gambit by which to escape. Marsha had dumped herself down in a decaying basket chair and was looking at a copy of
The Times Literary Supplement
. She said, ‘Philip, this is nineteen seventy-
six
. Why the hell don't you ever chuck anything out?’

‘I sometimes ask myself that question.’ They looked steadily at each other for a moment and then Marsha dropped her eyes once more to the paper. Frances said, ‘And I really must get back home to do just that – I'm still in the middle of a whole lot of sorting out. It seems to take for ever.’ She moved, resolutely, towards the door. The Landons remained exactly where they were, watching her, Marsha in the chair and Philip in front of the window; she thought, in bewilderment and irritation, that they were simply going to remain there and let her find her way downstairs and out by herself. And then, as she hesitated, Philip said, ‘Well, far be it from us to stand in your way. Nice of you to look in.’ He spoke as though the visit were of her seeking. In silence, they descended the stairs. At the door Marsha said, ‘See you on Thursday.’ Frances, tugging at the puppy, which seemed inclined to stay, murmured something noncommittal.

When she got home she saw in the hall mirror that a button of her blouse was undone, presumably ever since she had struggled from the bomb-site; her bra, and a slice of bare skin, showed through the gap. She thought of Philip Landon, watching her across that stained kitchen table, and glowed with chagrin and annoyance. There was a letter from Tabitha; a rather flat narrative of events, carefully drained, it seemed to Frances, of any information that might actually interest.

Tabitha, upon a peak in Darien, on a hillside on the west coast of Scotland, intensely alone and surrounded by others, silent and conversing with a Swedish boy about violin strings, felt the letter in her pocket rustle as she changed position. His letter. The letter. The one and only letter. She said things and saw things and existed elsewhere. She told the Swedish boy that there was this place in London where strings were cheaper, definitely cheaper, she'd give him the address. She saw the long slack outline of islands in a silver sea and felt the wet ooze up out of the peaty ground. She heard the moan of sea-birds, those cries that would be now forever linked with a certain feeling, with this feeling, with this fracture of the mind that was like nothing else, that was like they said it was in books and yet was not. Books, in fact, lie; they lie through their teeth and tell you nothing. They sit smug on shelves, knowing all, and keep it to themselves. They are experts, they tell it how it happens, with their stories and their poems, but when it comes to the point they have led you up the garden path: Catherine Earnshaw and Tess and Jane Eyre and Dorothea and Anna and the rest of them. Whatever you thought you knew about it, you do not.

The Swedish boy, now, was talking about the broch people. Why, he was saying were they so crazy as to come and live somewhere like this where there was nothing to do but look at the view, and Tabitha laughed obligingly. The Swedish boy was nice; he was studying English, not archaeology, so the emphasis of all this, for him, was on something rather different. He was the camp fool; he made jokes and did not pretend to expertise and deflated, from time to time, the archaeologists, who tended to be ponderous. Tabitha knew, now, that she no longer wanted to be an archaeologist. She thought, vaguely, that she might like to work in a museum, but she was not thinking of the future very much at all at the moment, or at least no future beyond the week after next when she would go back to London and he would be at King's Cross, he had said, he would meet the train, he would be at the barrier.

She sat in the heather, brushing earth from the foundations of a little stone wall, the broch people's wall, and thought about him, which of course she did all the time anyway. Thought, though, is perhaps not the word for a process without language, a process involving not consideration but sensation: the sensation of remembering and anticipating and feeling. Feeling above all. For Tabitha, now, this private internal uncommunicable bliss was merged somehow with the world, with the wiry bouncy heather on which she sat, the glitter of the sea and the cool kindly touch of the wind on her face: a physical manifestation of emotion, happiness embodied.

The puppy, unattended for a while one morning, ate Steven's inaugural lecture. There did not seem to be another copy; Frances, guiltily, swept up the shreds and put them in the dustbin. Harry had gone. It was almost September. She counted the months since Steven's death and saw that time was passing, more time even than she had realized. The city was locked into summer, each sultry day succeeded another, indistinguishable, the trees standing motionless and heavy-leafed in pools of shade, the tarmac sticky on the pavements, the grass withering in the gardens. When she was at home, she left the front door open to get a draught of air through the house; returning from the dustbin she saw Philip Landon framed in the entrance, looking at the letters on the hall table.

‘I was just beginning to think there was no-one in. Marsha wondered if by any chance you could lend us a few glasses for tonight. There seems to be a dearth.’ He moved inside the house and stood gazing at a picture. ‘Bring anyone with you, by the way, offspring or whatever.’

It was Thursday, she realized. ‘Yes, do take some glasses. But in fact I'm not absolutely sure that I can manage to come. There's a possibility that…’ She hesitated; she had always been bad at evasion.

He contemplated her. He wore the same decaying sweater and sagging trousers. ‘And you're not entirely sure that we're your sort, are you? You'll have been used to very elevated circles, of course. I used to see Steven on the box, with all the intellectual nobs.’

Frances flushed. She said shortly, ‘I'll get the glasses.’

He followed her into the kitchen. ‘You seem to have everything very organized. Tidy. Not like our life-style, as you'll have noticed.’ He sat down. Frances said, ‘How many glasses do you need?’

He gestured, vaguely. ‘Oh – half a dozen or so. Was I being offensive just then?’ When she did not reply he went on, ‘Yes, I suppose so. I don't have the social graces very well taped. Marsha, as it happens, took rather a fancy to you. Incidentally why did you pick this part to live in? I should have thought it was rather more up-market where you were before.’

It did not occur to her, at that moment, to wonder that he should know where she lived before. She said, ‘Because I don't know it very well, I suppose.’

‘I don't quite see Steven in this
quartier
. Though I understand there are one or two names to drop in the area now.’ And when she cried out, within, for God's sake stop talking about Steven, he went on, ‘Incidentally, should I keep referring to him or not? I don't really know how bereavement takes people, never having suffered it myself.’ She said nothing. He looked at her and then all of a sudden slammed a fist down on the table. ‘Frances, I am being insufferable. I know, and please forgive me. I'll get back. Thanks for the glasses. If you don't show up tonight we'll take the point. I'll drop the glasses back tomorrow.’

He walked out of the house. She saw him going down the street: a lank figure with a slightly shuffling walk. He looked isolated; she was no longer sure if she found him distasteful or pathetic. Now I shall have to go to their blessed party, she thought angrily.

Zoe, in the tail-end of the long summer twilight, looked down into the square where, still, one or two children played. She stood for a while, looking, and then poured herself a drink and went to the telephone. She picked up the receiver and almost at once replaced it. Then she picked it up again and dialled. When there was no reply she put the receiver down and went back to the window. The light, visibly, moment by moment, was going. Now, she could barely see the glimmering forms of the children.

Nearly fifty years old, she thought, who'd credit it? There's some things Steven's well out of – he wouldn't have made old bones any more gracefully than I shall. Frances will. Frances will be a pleasure at eighty. I won't. I could turn nasty, I could. I'll be a savage carping old bag, sneering at the world.