Perfect Happiness (15 page)

But she shakes her head. Not Dan. ‘Don't ask. Nobody. Nobody who matters. A stupid damn
mistake
.’

Zoe's face. Zoe's funny monkey face all pinched and blotched with cold, her eyes pink-rimmed, her black fuzzy hair gleaming with rain-drops, glittery with drops, red and blue and yellow.

‘What will you…?’

‘Some beastly murdering illegal quack,’ says Zoe.

No. No, no, no.

‘It's no good,’ says Zoe. ‘Of course I've thought. Thought and thought. In between throwing up. I'd be hopeless. Poor little blighter. I couldn't cope. And I'm going to Paris. I haven't told you. I got the Reuter's job.’

Say it.

‘Oh,
hell
…’ says Zoe.

The glittery diamond drops; a smear of butter on her chin; her eyes watery. Zoe crying, who never does.

‘Let me have it. Please. Let us have it.’

Oh, please.

And now today a Zoe who is another but the same stripped off a different red coat and flung herself on the sofa. ‘What
are
you seeing, love, with that misty look?’

‘I was thinking of the day we decided about Tab.’

There was a silence. ‘Yes,’ said Zoe. ‘I've thought of that lately. Rather a lot. Because of her being so grown-up and complete now. And because of not having Steven any more to be sensible and decisive. Should we tell her?’

‘Eventually, yes. Steven always said eventually.’

‘Eventually,’ said Zoe, ‘was curiously imprecise for Steven. Perhaps it was the one thing even he wasn't quite sure how to deal with.’

‘And yet we have all dealt with it well, I think. Better than I ever thought possible.’

‘We've dealt with the easy part. With what could be dealt with.’

‘Yes,’ said Frances after a moment. ‘I suppose what we never really thought of, back then, was now.’

‘Now was unthinkable, then. Up to a point we did. In so far as we could. Steven and the lawyers. All the stuff you and I didn't think mattered. Everything down on paper, so there should be no mistakes.’

‘Will she hate us for it?’

‘No.’

‘For not having told before.’

Zoe sighed. ‘Then all we can say is that we thought it was for the best. That Steven thought that. That we all did.’

‘It will change everything. Inevitably. Whatever she feels about it.’

‘Not what has already happened. Her childhood.’

‘Even that,’ said Frances. ‘Particularly that. Believe me, Zoe. That is what I have learned, these months.’

‘Then we shall have to cope as best we can. Oh, Frances – I'm craven, I'm not in good enough nick to face it just now. Nor are you. Presently. Eventually.’

‘Why always are you wearing long skirts,’ asked the Swedish boy, ‘when the other girls are wearing jeans?’

‘I don't know,’ said Tabitha, ‘I just do. I suppose it's a bit silly, on a dig. They get filthy.’

‘It is nice,’ said the Swedish boy. ‘Very… womanly.’ He gazed surreptitiously at Tabitha, whom he found quite unnervingly agreeable, and Tabitha, for whom the Swedish boy barely existed, looked out into the morning, the blue and purple Scottish morning in which people stumped around getting breakfast and seabirds cruised the skies, and thought with joy that one more day had gone, that she was one day nearer to seeing him, one day nearer to that moment when he would be at the barrier at King's Cross. The Swedish boy decided that he would remember Tabitha all his life: her small pale pointed face and the dark hair straggling over her shoulders, forever falling across her face and being wiped aside with an impatient hand, her serious abstracted look and the frailty of her, a small thin girl in trailing skirts like some apparition of the past amid the heather. He said, ‘Always you are thinking about something. Always so solemn, thinking.’ And Tabitha, who had not realized that her condition was thus apparent, laughed awkwardly and said, ‘Well, I'm that kind of person, I suppose. I don't chatter.’

The Swedish boy who, despite his admiration, had other appetites, went to find some breakfast and Tabitha continued to wait here by the hut to which the person who had gone to the village to collect the post would return. There might be a letter. There probably would not. But there might be. And while waiting in that comfortable state of not knowing, of hope and expectation (because if there was none her heart would sink and the day would be clouded, the morning would be less bright, the hills less purple… While if there was, oh if there was…), while waiting she would allow herself the supreme pleasure, the indulgence of recollection. Of going back into particular moments.

There were those times when the world stood still: when he said this, when he did that. Hitched each of them to backgrounds now and for ever sanctified: Oxford Circus tube station, a wine bar in Covent Garden, a field in Cambridge-shire. Invested each of them with wonder: as though you walked for the first time in a country of whose existence you had always known but whose reality was beyond all imagining. I am so happy, she had said once, and had heard the amazement in her own voice.

She sat at the roadside by the hut, her arms clasping her knees, waiting. On the other side of the rough dirt road there was an outcrop of rock, rosy pink rock encrusted with a greyish green lichen, the two colours so wonderful a combination that mere random uncaring nature seemed an impossibility. And Tabitha remembered suddenly Steven; she remembered standing with him in a wood, a wood that must have been a birch wood because she could see still the soaring silver trunks, silver patched with bronze, soaring up into a blue sky. The branches had been bare and on them had been the tiny swellings of the new leaves, and somewhere far above small jewelled birds had darted against the swaying trees and the endless sky. And Tabitha, perceiving all this, the structure and the colour and what was suggested by those small secret buds, had been greatly excited. She had been exhilarated and amazed and aware of some enormous problem – aware that all this could not simply exist and no more than that; that such complexity invited wonder and speculation. How old had she been? Nine? Ten? She had worn sandals through the gaps of which twigs tickled her feet. She had demanded of Steven an explanation. She had turned to Steven who in his wisdom and common sense always knew how things had come about and what should be done, and had required an answer. She had raised questions of God and Time and Death. Why? she had said, and How? And Steven had said he did not know. He had explained that nobody knew; he had said that people argued over these things, that the arguments themselves were as important as the things, that the fact that there were no answers was less important than the arguments. And Tabitha had felt cheated; she had asked for knowledge, for huge significant knowledge, and all she was offered were uncertainties. While above her the trees blandly waved their pregnant branches against the sky.

A long time ago… Ten years ago. And now Steven was gone, obliterated, surviving only in such recreations, while somewhere perhaps those same trees rose still in their bronze and silver glory. I don't understand, Tabitha thought, I don't understand any better than I did then.

Distantly, round the bend in the road, there came the car driven by the person who had gone to collect the post from the village. Tabitha's heart leapt; she got up; she waited.

When Marsha Landon returned, a few days later, Frances knew with absolute certainty that she could not have her in contact with Steven's papers. It would be an intrusion, an affront to his ordered and positive nature. In desperation, she steered her into the spare bedroom, where boxes of books were not yet unpacked. Here, Marsha laconically sorted titles into piles according to subject and author. She did so with the air of one conferring a favour, wandering every now and then to find Frances with some query, or simply to stand talking. She was, Frances realized, as incapable of structuring her days as a child, and she hated to be alone.

‘Philip was talking about your husband last night. At school. They had some sort of fight.’

‘Fight?’ said Frances vaguely. She sat back on her heels, amid a throng of letters and documents, beset as usual with problems of retention and destruction.

‘Not hitting, I don't mean. A row of some kind. I don't know… Philip was a bit pissed last night. He's been depressed lately. He was going on about one thing and another. He has this complex about people doing him down. The BBC push-off has been the last straw.’

‘Mmn…’ I don't know how much of this I can stand, Frances thought. She consigned a heap of papers to the waste paper basket, distracted by Marsha's lingering presence. Her pallor and her slow way of moving gave the impression of someone from whom all relish of life had long been leaking. ‘Marsha, I've got to go out soon. It's nice of you to help but I mustn't take up too much of your time.’

‘Have you… sort of got over it yet?’ said Marsha suddenly. ‘I mean your husband dying.’

‘No,’ said Frances shortly. ‘I don't imagine people do. It's a question of getting yourself going again, not getting over.’

‘It must be worse being unhappy when you have been happy.’

Frances looked at her. The remark seemed to suggest unexpected perception of several kinds. ‘Possibly.’

‘I'll have to go, actually.’ Marsha spoke as if she had been impeded in some way. ‘I'm going down to Kent for a couple of days to see my sister. Philip's going to have to fend for himself. I'll look in again when I get back.’

It was the end of August. The year was tipping downwards again. Frances, with the intense awareness of time that she had had since Steven's death, saw the changing quality of the light, that softness of dying summer. Waking in the mornings, she noted the spicy coolness of the draught through the open window; later in the day, tidying up the small garden, she watched the afternoon sun hanging always a little lower above the line of the rooftops, felt its tentative warmth on her face and arms. This consciousness of the physical world had been with her all the last months; sometimes she had felt that she was nothing but a pair of eyes and ears. She had walked about as though she were invisible and mindless, acutely registering what she saw and heard; colours were brighter, sounds louder. And always there had been the tormenting contradiction: whether the permanence of place was a solace or a mockery. In Venice, she had seen that beauty is constant, heartless and quite detached from the beholder. She had sat in a café staring at the Doge's Palace in numb misery and the harmony of light and shade and shape had been exactly the same as twenty years before. And at other times she had seen suddenly the incandescence of clouds piled above a horizon, or the play of leaf shadows on the pavement outside the window, and had been strengthened. In the first days, the days of raw shock, she had thought only that she was stranded alone in an unfeeling and meaningless world; it did not seem possible that the days could march unstoppably on, as they did, that Steven could be gone and yet that she could still inhabit the same landscape, use the same objects, see with the same eyes.

And now it was almost autumn and a finite amount of time had passed and everything was as it had been but immeasurably different. She was both better and worse: she did not accept but had begun to endure; she was looking forward as well as back; at times she was free. But treachery lurked, always: the black hours, the long aching nights. The physical yearning, grabbing like the resumption of a disease.

She wished that she had planned some kind of holiday. It would have distracted, at least. Almost daily, postcards lay in bright slabs of colour on the door-mat, carrying that suggestion that the world glitters more brightly elsewhere, that the sender has achieved nirvana; Harry, in France, Tab still on her Scottish hillside, friends in Salzburg and Portugal, Ruth Bowers back home and weekending on Cape Cod: ‘I just know we'll get together again, Frances, it was a real pleasure meeting you.’

The weather broke. On a day that had begun with sunshine, shafting through the windows of the house in bars so densely yellow that they seemed solid, immense towering black clouds gathered in the afternoon and hung above the city like a pall of smoke. By early evening the light had quite gone and the rain fell as thickly as the sunlight had earlier lain on floors and walls. Frances, feeling the chill, turned up the heating and put on a sweater; in the street, cars ploughed by, throwing up spray, their headlights shimmering in the thick blue atmosphere. The rain, streaming down the windows, revealed constructional deficiencies: she went round mopping up and stuffing wads of torn-up sheets against the worst leaks. By eight o'clock, although the rain had lessened, it was as dark as a winter evening; water coursed along the gutters, there was a small lake in the dip further down the street. The pavements were empty, as though the city were abandoned.

The storm, when it came, was oddly exhilarating. She stood at the kitchen window watching the lightning slash the sky, which was now almost black: the rooftops, against it, a tone darker, looked as artificial as a stage-set. The whole scene was operatic rather than elemental. The puppy, frightened of the thunder, whimpered around her feet; she stopped to pick it up and saw that water was streaming steadily through the crack beneath the door.

The kitchen and dining room, opening respectively on to a small area and a courtyard below the garden, were both a few feet below ground level. The drains, she realized, were unable to cope with the flow of water. Both the area and the courtyard were inches deep, the level rising perceptibly.

She tried to block the flow with old sheets and curtains. For a while this worked, and then the sodden mess burst like a sponge: black, stinking water oozed all over the floor. The whole basement could be flooded. She became slightly distraught, rushing around squeezing and mopping.

And then all the lights went out. She was on the stairs, fetching more sheets, and had to grope her way down; at the bottom she missed a step and the physical shock reduced her almost to tears: she felt quite absurdly demoralized. There is a power failure and a lot of water, she told herself sternly, and I am alone; nothing to get in such a state about. She found the torch, and a candle, and saw that the kitchen floor was now completely covered. She tried to roll up the big Indian carpet in the dining room, part of which was already sodden, and in doing so banged her head on the table. Her eyes, again, filled with tears. Outside, she could hear the siren of a police car, or possibly a fire-engine. Presumably much of the district was in the same plight. Doggedly, she continued to struggle with the carpet. In the middle of this, someone started knocking on the front door. The puppy, which had just learned to bark, did so, hysterically.