Perfect Happiness (18 page)

Patricia smiled, showing bad teeth. She was a kind, decent woman, assiduous about her work. Steven had dismissed her as tiresome. He was wrong, Frances thought. I accepted, too readily, his opinion of people. She went with Patricia for lunch at a wine bar round the corner; Patricia talked about the Institute and fretted, apologetically, about an ailing cat. Beyond her Frances sensed a solitary life: the Siamese cat, a flat filled with carefully chosen objects.

Frances had worked for a number of years on an architectural journal. The Institute's journal, more sternly academic, required much the same skills; by the second week she felt confident and found herself setting off for the office with enthusiasm. She decided that her misgivings about working somewhere so closely connected with Steven's world were misplaced; she began to hope that Patricia Geering would say that she could have the job permanently, and wondered how to raise the matter. Patricia's attitude remained friendly but decorous: a working relationship.

It was only gradually that she sensed something awry in the way others at the place behaved towards her. An awkwardness; a neutrality tinged even with hostility; a faint patronage. One of the older secretaries, hovering in the journal office, remarked with a curious prurience, ‘Well, all this must be very different for you, Mrs Brooklyn.’ A former colleague of Steven's, meeting her in a corridor, stood around ineptly, repeating that she must come over and have dinner one evening. The Director, coming into the room one morning, kept hoping that she was settling in all right. As he left he said, almost furtively, ‘So very glad Patricia's been able to fit you in, Frances.’

Enlightenment dawned on Frances. When he had gone she turned to Patricia. ‘That man thinks that I am being done a favour. For Steven's sake.’

Patricia, her face an ungainly red, fiddled with a pile of proofs.

‘Is that the case?’ Frances demanded.

‘No. It isn't. As I think I once told you, your husband didn't like me and, well, I had reservations myself – he could be awfully… short.’ Patricia's composure returned. ‘I asked you – admittedly on the spur of the moment – because I was getting rather desperate for qualified help. And subsequently, I have to admit, I checked up on you. Where you'd worked previously.’

‘Good. If I thought otherwise I should have to go.’

Patricia said sternly, ‘I assure you.’ Both women returned to what they had been doing; the office was filled with the small companionable sounds of work – the shuffling of papers, shunt of a filing cabinet drawer.

The practical production of a journal is interesting but not necessarily consuming work. As she read, corrected, wrote letters, Frances found herself uncannily hitched once again to her years on the architectural magazine; she felt at moments as though the furnishings of that time were still there – the children safely stowed away for the day in their schools, Steven out there somewhere in the city, the nub of her life. Her own hands, hovering over the typewriter, startled her: the thinner skin, the brown blotches. Different hands.

In all the remorseless liturgies of grief, the processes through which she had moved as though conducted by irresistible forces, the realization that had most affronted her was that Steven would be halted, forever, at a certain physical point. She would grow old; Steven was frozen, now, as the man she had last seen. She returned again and again to this; alongside it ran the reflection that she, already, week by week and month by month, was turning into a person Steven had never known.

Once, she had sat alone in the darkened kitchen of their first house, in the middle of the night, with a baby on her lap: Harry, wakeful and fretting. At last he had fallen asleep and she had continued to sit for a while, looking at his small features, the bluish translucence of his skin, filled with the tranquillity of those who have lulled a crying child.

Looking up, she saw Steven standing in the doorway.

‘Sorry – I hoped he hadn't woken you.’ She was nagged, from time to time, by the fear that her own intense need for children had forced them upon Steven.

‘He didn't. When you are not there the bed has a blankness that distresses. What was wrong with him?’

‘Nothing, really. He just doesn't sleep as easily as Tab used to. Do go back to bed.’

Steven said, ‘I'll take him.’ He sat down, holding the child, looking down at him. ‘It seems barely credible that a grown man will emerge from this.’

Their two faces that night lay for her beneath their subsequent faces: Harry still with the peeled and private look of the recently born, Steven still nearer youth than middle age. She had stood staring at them, possessive and faintly apprehensive. She had said, ‘I don't even think of that.’ And then, diffidently, ‘What do you feel about him? Or is it too early yet to know?’

He reached out, put his free arm round her. ‘I feel what you feel.’

‘Honestly? You're not just saying it?’

‘Oh, Frances… No, love, I'm not just saying it. I wanted him too.’

The baby snuffled; his face flickered, like water under a breeze. It was half past two in the morning. There was no-one else in the world, it seemed, but the three of them.

When Frances returned from the Institute that evening Tabitha said, ‘Zoe wants us to go round for a drink. She says she's bored and cross and there's someone coming who you met in Venice. That man who writes things about music.’

In fact there were a number of people in Zoe's flat when they arrived. Zoe herself bustled about, apparently exuberant. Frances said, ‘I thought you were bored and cross.’

‘I'm recovering. Come and talk to Morris. He's been asking about you.’

Frances had almost forgotten about him. And now his face – the pointed furry beard, the rather melancholy brown eyes – prompted a response that was purely reflexive: positive. She realized with surprise that she must have liked him more than she knew. They began to talk about Venice; not about murderous children nor about the treachery of beauty that does not acknowledge the feelings of the observer, but about a picture of St Jerome in his study with a little white dog before which, in that inflamed week, Frances had experienced her only moment of pleasure. And then, Venice disposed of, she told him about her new house, and the job, and he told her about the progress of his book and his problems with compiling such things as bibliography and index. ‘I'm a mere journalist,’ he said. ‘I've never had to deal with these refinements before.’

‘I once did an index for Steven,’ said Frances. ‘It's not so difficult. The thing is to have all these little cards…’ Morris Corfield nodded gravely as she talked, appearing to take careful note. The conversation, it occurred to Frances, was becoming somewhat banal. She said, ‘All this is rather dull.’ Morris nodded in acquiescence and then jumped slightly.

‘Not at all. Absolutely not.’

Frances laughed. ‘You were getting a glazed look.’

‘I was concentrating,’ he said. His tone had the defensiveness of a child caught out in a moment of inattention. He seemed, indeed, a more vulnerable and less assured man than she remembered. The dinner in Venice came back, with a vague power to disconcert. Then, her impression had been of someone amiable, level-headed and a little detached. And I said all sorts of things, she thought, I wasn't myself at all.

She looked across the room and caught sight of Tabitha, washed up against a wall, looking bleak. ‘We must go. It's been nice to see you again. I'm afraid I was in rather a bad state last time we met. You were very kind.’

‘It was a pleasure.’

‘Well… Thank you.’ She began to move towards Tabitha.

‘You're looking very much better,’ said Morris.

‘I am better.’ Francis glanced across the room. ‘I must rescue Tab. Goodbye.’

Morris seemed about to launch another remark and then said, ‘Goodbye.’

Zoe, alone, opened the windows to the dark blue noisy London night. She stacked the empty glasses beside the kitchen sink and closed the door on them. She went back into the sitting room and sat in the armchair looking out at the square of sky across which tracked a red and white winking jewel. She finished off a bowl of peanuts and watched the jewel disappear into a black wing of cloud and wished that she had gone back for supper with Frances and Tabitha, as suggested.

All right, she thought, let's look it in the face. I am missing Eric. I am missing Eric more than I would ever have believed possible. Here am I, who believed herself self-sufficient, who built a fortress around her independence, and now I am sufficient unto myself and I am lonely. In my way, I loved him, and now he is not there I know that I needed him. You have only yourself to thank, Zoe; as our mum used to say, time out of mind ago, of rather lesser griefs. You brought it upon your own head, dear. And yes, I have brought things upon my head all my life, out of risk and out of carelessness. So don't complain.

She sat on in the darkened room, travelling in melancholy from one image to another. She saw Eric, heard his voice, and the sense of deprivation ground into her. She revisited other loves and other miseries, and took stock. I shall get through this, she thought, because I shall grit my teeth and put up with it, but I would rather go to sleep for six months. For the first time in my life I would readily give up a chunk of it in exchange for absolution from distress. I have always reckoned on a fair share of that – swings and roundabouts, rough with smooth – but just now I feel somewhat less well equipped.

Morris Corfield, arriving in time for the second half of a concert in the Purcell Room, achieved his seat and realized that he was in danger of falling asleep – the effect not of the orchestra but of drink. He had always been uncomfortably susceptible to alcohol; in youth, it had made him more drunk than other people, nowadays he tended to become comatose. He coasted through the first piece (some sprightly Vivaldi, by good luck), gathered himself sufficiently to make a note or two, and settled down for the Brandenburg.

By coincidence, the fifth. At once, the English Chamber Orchestra faded from before his eyes and its place was taken by that student orchestra, gamely playing away beneath the uncomprehending portraits. Their faces, now, were not to be recovered, except for that of his own son Mike and the girl Tabitha of whom he had caught sight again this evening, while talking to her mother. And, as Frances Brooklyn's face now dominated, he detached himself further yet from the Purcell Room and the ECO, till only Bach continued to unite them. In his mind's eye, he continued to talk to this agreeable woman. He said various things for which there had not been the opportunity an hour ago. He hoped to see her again. He remembered, in Venice, the impression she gave of someone determinedly enduring some kind of nightmare; he had felt, in the face of it, inadequate. And, since, he had wondered if her confidences at dinner – deeply uncharacteristic, he suspected – would have made him uncongenial to her. We do not always cherish those to whom we have unburdened ourselves. But, just now, she had seemed perfectly pleased to see him and had barely referred to the occasion. They had talked of quite other things. She had given him some guidance about indexing, of which she apparently had experience, and he had tried to give the impression of taking note while searching for some way to ensure another meeting. Consequently, he could no longer remember what she had said about indexing.

Morris was a less confident man than was realized, either by friends or foes. Behind the professional aplomb and a manner that could verge on urbane, there lurked uncertainties. When he was young he could never entirely believe that people liked him; as time passed a reassuring bank of friendships more or less convinced him that they did, but he could not quite see why. He felt himself to be somewhat unapproachable, through no desire of his own, and personally unattractive. He had never cared for the face and form that he saw in the mirror. The first time that he found himself loved, he had been quite genuinely astonished. And when, towards the end of his marriage, his wife had told him once in a bleak and cruel moment of revelation that she had never really enjoyed sleeping with him, he had nodded in acquiescence. It was only later that the remark had penetrated, subtly and hideously re-adjusting the twelve years of shared lives. For a while, after her departure, his uncertainties had so powerfully surfaced that he had become reclusive. Now, alone for years, he had recovered some self-esteem, if not a normal ration. He had almost, once, re-married, but had drawn back at the last moment, realizing that what he mistook for love was an altogether more pallid emotion; which might of course have done quite well, but he retained still a sad hunger for something better.

The concerto ended. In the foyer, Morris found himself alongside a couple of acquaintances and paused for a few minutes' conversation. Thence he passed out into the bright fairyland of the Embankment: the incandescent buildings, the jewelled bridges, the dark secret gleam of the river. He stood at the parapet, looking, gripped by pleasure; what he saw and what he felt fused into a sensation of elation and gratitude. He was glad to be alive, in that place, with those sights before his eyes; the world, in that moment, seemed to be promising him something.

Tabitha sat reading, day by day. Ranged in front of her on the desk in her room, this strange new room in the new strange house, were three neat piles of books. Every morning she sat down and took one of these, opened her notepad, and began to read. Then a battle ensued between the words before her and her own leaden and thunderous thoughts; on good days the words won and Tabitha travelled with them page by page and chapter by chapter; on bad days she sat, her head churning, and the words might as well have been in Chinese for all the sense they made. From time to time Frances would softly knock and put her head round the door, offering coffee or fruit juice. Tabitha would look up and smile and shake her head and say she was fine, thanks, she'd be down presently.

When she was a child, aged ten or so, she had gone through a religious phase, much taken suddenly with the alien ritual of morning service in the stone-and-flower smelling church of the place in which they were then living. She had gone to a service with her best friend's family and had sat in the envious trance of an outsider; returning, she had smouldered in her agnostic home. ‘I want to go to church on Sundays,’ she had said to Steven, glowering. And Steven, of course, had replied with liberalism and rationality that she must by all means go to church on Sundays if she wished, but that it would not be possible for him to go with her. He explained why not. He explained why he didn't believe in God. But other people, he said, think quite otherwise; you will have to make up your own mind, when you are older, what you feel about it. I am sure that Susie's parents would be quite happy for you to go with them to the service. And Tabitha had scowled, while resentfully perceiving that he was reasonable; she wanted to be part of an ordinary church-going family, done up in best clothes, shaking hands with the vicar, gossiping in the churchyard. Frances, taking pity on her, had accompanied her twice and then had said apologetically, ‘I'm sorry, darling, I'd rather not. I feel silly, you see.’