Perfect Happiness (17 page)

‘No,’ said Frances, with a sigh.

‘He walked all over me. He had me for breakfast. He chewed me up and spat me out. It was a run-through for all those devastating performances on
Panorama and The World Tonight
and so forth. I stuttered and forgot what I was going to say and lost by about a hundred per cent. Afterwards I met him in the corridor and he said, “Well done, Landon”. He meant it, in a way; he meant I hadn't had a hope and we both knew it and I daresay he was trying to give me what bit of credit could be given, for having a go. But it was the last straw. I kicked him. I think I even hoped in a mad way that we might have a fight; I was bigger than him and fighting wasn't allowed so he'd get in more trouble than I would. I hadn't any status to lose anyway. But he did nothing. He just looked at me – I can still see the way he looked and I'm afraid that I still hate him – he looked and then just walked away. I doubt if he ever gave me another thought. But I watched him, for ever after. In newspapers. On the radio and the telly.’

‘I'm afraid I can't find anything to say to all that,’ said Frances at last. ‘It's a pity you ever had to meet me, I think. A pity for both of us.’

‘I haven't thought that.’

‘What happened the other night was to do with your feelings about Steven, not any feelings about me.’

‘Up to a point. What an astute woman you are, Frances. Almost too astute for your own comfort.’

And now, she thought, you hate me too. You had better go away and let me try to digest this episode as best I can. She said, ‘I can hear Tabitha coming down. I'll have to get the supper.’

‘I'm going.’

At the front door he paused for a moment. ‘Goodbye, Frances. I wish I could think we were going to be friends, but I can't see it working out like that, can you? After this. As you see, I have a certain talent for self-destruction. And now I know that Steven had impeccable good fortune in wives, as in everything else.’

Tabitha, in the kitchen, said, ‘Who was that?’

‘Someone who lives in the street.’

Tabitha, staring out of the window, neither seeing nor hearing, nodded.

She had slept last night, for the first time since she got back from Scotland. And then when she woke – in this strange house, her mother's house, her home – for a moment she could not remember what it was that lurked at the edges of consciousness, why she could not trust her serenity. She had lain for a few moments watching the light spill through a crack in the curtains and then it had come back, slapping her as violently as had his words when she opened his letter, pouring a cold chill through her.

When Tabitha was a child she had a recurrent dream about a paradisiac garden. This garden was filled with flowers, trees that could be climbed and swings that could be swung on. There was ambrosial food and drink. The sun shone. Its inspiration, she later realized, was probably a song that Frances used to sing to them when they were small, a song about a big rock candy mountain, about lemonade springs and cigarette trees… Always, on waking up, wrenched from this dream, back into which one could never wittingly go, she had experienced a sense of outraged loss. A part of what she felt now was akin to that. If she had never known what she had known, if she had never tasted that amazing happiness, if she had never fallen in love, then the state of ignorance would have been perfectly acceptable. There was before, and there was after, which was now. It was as though she had suffered a loss of innocence. She had been in the garden, and was now expelled.

She tried not to remember. She tried to endure and to move through days and to tell herself that eventually it would be all right. And failed, dismally. Memory, she realized, which only last week had been so honeyed, which had been something to take out and savour and relish, had turned treacherously into a torment. It crept up on her when she thought she had fought it off, and brought tears suddenly to her eyes, it rose up in the wastes of the night, and mocked her. She did not want it, but it was always with her.

‘I'm afraid,’ Frances had sadly said, ‘there's something wrong. I wish you'd tell me.’ And Tabitha had shaken her head; she could not talk, misery had made her a pariah.

She kept his letter. At first she had kept it in the hope that by some miracle the words would change into other words. Now she kept it because to destroy it would be an act of self-deception; it was in any case indestructible, like the past.

The words, in that treasured handwriting, crawled across the crumpled paper: ‘… shan't be able to get to King's X after all… going to Ireland with John and some other people… Expect we'll see each other around… too involved… stay friends.’ She did not re-read them because she did not need to. She moved from one leaden day to the next; she couldn't believe that people survived this kind of thing; she couldn't believe that this kind of thing had ever happened to anyone else.

Zoe's desk, at the window of her flat, overlooked the garden of the square below. From it, while working, she could see the comings and goings of children and dogs and those who accompanied them; she would stare down, her head full of other matters, and the small colourful scurrying figures were a solace – a reassurance of life. Ferociously active, the deskbound part of her profession was an irritant. She preferred, indeed, to write in airport lounges, in hotel rooms, in the clattering interrupted atmosphere of her office. But from time to time need dictated that she should work at home and the square, on these occasions, was a compensation.

She looked down into it now. On the other side of the room Eric Sadler sat swilling whisky round and round in the glass. Zoe said, ‘Since you were last here the spaniel has had puppies and there are two new prams. I like that. Continuity of things.’

‘Ah. How was Vienna?’

‘Vienna was all go. I think I had four hours' sleep.’

Eric shifted, a big bear of a man, the sofa creaking under him.

‘What's up?’ asked Zoe. ‘I can feel it. Come on, tell. Get it over with.’

The sounds of children and a yapping dog floated up from the square and in at the open window with the other noises of the London evening and above them Zoe heard Eric Sadler say that he was going to get married. He said it looking at the floor, and when it was said he went on looking at the floor; she thought she had never seen a man look so laden with guilt; she wanted to console him.

‘
Why?
’ she said, at last. ‘Why now? Why this one?’

‘I want a home. I want… I think I want… a child.’

‘I see. Well, you've every right. I can't possibly blame you. Or resent it.’

‘Do you, though?’

‘Of course I bloody well do.’

They looked now, at each other.

‘Oh,
Christ
,’ said Eric.

Zoe re-filled his glass, and her own. ‘Here… It can't make things worse and the morning will be hell anyway. When?’

He muttered something.

‘I hadn't realized,’ said Zoe, ‘about children. You never said.’

‘It didn't seem appropriate.’

‘Well, no I suppose not. I'm sorry. I feel as though I've been rather obtuse.’

‘You've been, always, exactly right. No-one else, ever, comes anywhere near…’

‘Shut up,’ said Zoe.

‘I mean it.’

‘I know you mean it. That's why you've got to shut up. Or we shan't get through with this.’

‘I nearly didn't come. I walked round the block three times. I never knew I was a coward.’

‘Look, it's me that's supposed to be the loser, not you. Don't steal my thunder.’

Zoe had turned her desk chair to face into the room. They sat, for a while, silent. Below, children shrilly chanted. Eric said, ‘If you hate me, I'll have to damn well put up with it. But I so very much hope you won't.’

‘I don't hate you. I shan't want to see you for a while. Quite a long while, maybe. And don't ask me to be a godmother. That wouldn't be appropriate either.’ She saw his face, stopped. ‘Oh, hell, Eric… It's my own damn fault. I should have been different. I should have been marriageable. I should have realized about children.’

‘I didn't want you any other than you were.’

‘All the same… I've no business complaining.’

‘Oh Zoe, stop being so damn nice about it.’

‘I'm not being nice. I'm screaming. But I'm being honest. And keep her out of my way. Her I do hate.’

He was staring at the carpet again, as though he might drill holes in it.

‘No, I don't,’ said Zoe. ‘Not when I stop and think. Not real gut hating. Just the odd twinge of malevolence. Does she know about your bad moods? D'you know – I'll miss them, even. As much as the good times.’

‘I'm going to miss you too, Zoe. I'm going to miss you one hell of a lot. It's knowing just how much that almost made this out of the question.’

‘But not quite. Now then, who exactly is weeping on whose shoulder?’

They sat looking at one another. Eric put out his hand.

‘No,’ said Zoe, ‘don't touch me. That would be fatal.’

He drew back. ‘Could I have another drink?’

‘Help yourself.’

‘You?’

She shook her head.

‘I'm fifty-five,’ said Eric. ‘I drink too much and I'm overweight. I shan't make old bones. I want a few years of something I've never had.’

‘I know the why's and wherefore's.’

He spoke with sudden bitterness. ‘We should have married, Zoe, years ago, you and I.’

‘Maybe. Probably not.’

He got up and walked round the room.

‘Sit,’ said Zoe, at last. ‘Don't say any more. It doesn't help.’

It was evening. The light was fading. Zoe said, ‘Frances is out of that albatross of a house. Installed in the new one.’

‘How is she?’

‘Not so bad. Harry has swanned off somewhere. Tab is back from Scotland.’ She paused. ‘Tab has got to be told about things. We both feel that. Soon, probably.’

‘Yes. I agree. I always thought it should have been done before now. But you know that.’

‘Steven said not. He may have been wrong.’

‘It always surprised me,’ said Eric, ‘that such an intellectually tidy man coped so well with such a curiously untidy situation. Don't get me wrong – I'm not criticizing, you know that. But those who only knew him publicly would have been startled, I imagine. It could be seen as a somewhat bohemian arrangement, and Steven was no bohemian.’

‘It was a measure of how much he loved Frances,’ said Zoe. ‘And me, I suppose. He knew Frances had to have children or go barmy. And at the time it looked humane, not bohemian.’

‘He doted on that child. In his crisp way.’

‘Yes.’ Zoe contemplated him. ‘I'm just realizing that you and Frances are the only people I can talk about Tab to. Now, just Frances.’

‘I'll always…’ he began.

‘No, you won't. You won't always be there. You can't be. Don't be damn silly.’

After a moment he said, ‘Anyway, I agree that she should be told. Don't worry about it too much, Zoe. You and she have always been very close.’

‘That may or may not be a help.’

The sun, now, had set, and as the light drained, the square had emptied so that just one small boy remained, kicking a ball among the shadowed bushes. Twilight, smoking up from the ground, was answered by the lit windows of houses and the wash of car head-lamps; soon, there would be the full internal glow of the city at night. And in the hinterland between, the no-man's-land at the end of the day, Zoe and Eric sat on in the darkening room.

When Frances thought of Philip Landon – and she thought of him a good deal – it was with an unsettling combination of distaste and pity. She was obliged to take a roundabout inconvenient route to the shops and the tube station in order to avoid passing the Landons' house. Once, she saw Marsha turn in at the gate; when the front door bell went she did not answer it, lurking guiltily in the kitchen.

She fought her sense of humiliation. She told herself that the need for sex was nothing to be ashamed of, that she had betrayed no-one, done harm to no-one. Marsha, oddly, did not seem to come into it; or if she did, only as some kind of accomplice. And the more she told herself this the more there trooped back images of that night: she saw Steven's photograph observing her from across the room, Philip's expression in orgasm – an expresssion not of pleasure but of furtive triumph. Sitting in that room now, she felt ludicrously as though her familiar possessions, tethered each to other times, looked askance at her.

All that has happened, she told herself, is that I have slept with a man who was taking some kind of adolescent revenge on Steven. It happened because I am sexually vulnerable, which is perfectly understandable and something about which I cannot do much. None of this can damage Steven, who is beyond it all. I do not need to feel so shabby.

She tried to extinguish feeling with rationality. She invited some friends to dinner, continued to sort Steven's papers, talked to Tabitha who answered from somewhere within her private fog of distress. Frances, guessing what had happened, anguished for her, unable to help.

On the first morning that Frances spent with Patricia Geering working on the journal she read proofs of an article which discussed, among other things, Steven's views on the United Nations. Two people came into the office, both of whom referred to having known, or met him. Frances, filing details of books sent in for review, merely nodded. Her typing, she found, was unreliable. She said to Patricia, ‘I'm sorry. I'm rusty. I'll improve, I hope.’