Perfect Happiness (19 page)

And so Tabitha for several weeks had gone to church on Sunday mornings with Susie's family, returning home in a state of defiant grace, shooting glances at Steven and Frances, who obligingly adjusted weekend plans so as not to interfere with this new practice. And then the church pews had become rather hard and the services longer than she had thought and her relationship with Susie began to creak a little and presently she stopped going to church. Nobody remarked on this and life went on exactly as before. And now, she realized, her beliefs – or absence of beliefs – were much as Steven's, though probably less deliberately arrived at.

Three days after he died, Frances had said to them – to her and to Harry and to Zoe – ‘I wish I was a Christian.’ Only Zoe had nodded, in apparent understanding.

Now Tabitha, doggedly ploughing her way through the days, thought that she understood. What I am feeling, she thought, is nothing at all compared to what she has been feeling, I know that. But I am wretched in a way that I did not know it was possible to be wretched. Surely, if believing in God does anything for people, it helps them through things like this?

Then, back with the books, with the huge impersonal problems of the past, she felt small and peevish, beating her fists against impervious windows. All this has happened to everyone, she thought. Not that that helps.

*

Frances, driving up on to the Westway, contemplated the day ahead with resignation. In the last ten months the mandatory visits to her mother and her mother-in-law, living respectively in High Wycombe and Marlow, had been among the most exacting moments. Both women, widowed, had in their different ways tried to claim community of suffering; Frances had found herself driven into a resentful resistance. She did not want to discuss the processes of bereavement with her mother, or share her grief with Steven's. She felt guilt at her irritation, and the guilt sent her at regular intervals along the Westway, in expiation.

Mrs Brooklyn sat in the farthest corner of the sofa, as though in retreat from her visitor, knitting. She said, for the second time, ‘I hope you had an easy drive down, dear.’ And then, ‘You'll give my love to the children, won't you?’ Appropriately affectionate messages, Christmas and birthday presents had been, on the whole, the extent of her relationship with Harry and Tabitha; they evidently alarmed her in the way that her own children had alarmed her. Both she and her husband, Frances thought, would have gladly done without the provocations of parenthood; their purpose in life, if such it could be called, had been to exist as unexceptionally and as unobtrusively as possible. Steven used to say that their most fervent injunctions had been that he and Zoe should not attract attention to themselves.

And from that nerveless upbringing had emerged Zoe, and Steven. Frances, thinking of this, smiled. Her mother-in-law looked across at her with mistrust. ‘Keeping well, are you? I always say, moving house is a terrible strain.’

You haven't moved house for forty years, thought Frances. The room depressed her unutterably, as it always had. All the furnishings were chosen for neutrality of effect or qualities of endurance; a limp beige colour predominated. She got up. ‘Can I have a look round the garden?’

Together, they toured the lawn and the symmetrical semicircles of the flower-beds, in which standard roses were strapped to posts like prisoners awaiting execution. Mrs Brooklyn reiterated how difficult it was to keep it as her husband had liked it; a boy came in on Saturdays, but was not to be trusted. In the circular central bed, clumps of lobelia alternated with red salvia, as they had done ever since Frances could remember. French marigolds burned beside the small terrace. Frances, determinedly, related the contents of Harry's last letter from France. Steven had found it difficult to love his mother; his attitude towards her had been a mixture of duty and an irritated tolerance. Frances, more than ever, felt a bewildered gloom that she should be tethered to this woman with whom she had nothing in common except the fact that she had borne two people she loved. And in whom there seemed to be nothing of her.

She said, ‘Zoe had a very good article in the
Sunday Times
– about the Vienna conference.’

Mrs Brooklyn stooped to twitch a weed from the scoured bed. ‘I don't often see the papers. We used to enjoy watching Steven on the television. Mrs Rogers next door was saying only the other day he had such a presence. She always used to pop round when she noticed he was going to be on, in case I'd not seen.’

Frances said with sudden quiet rage, ‘Zoe is very highly thought of, you know.’

Mrs Brooklyn looked up, catching the tone and instinctively heading away from trouble, ‘Oh, she's done very well. Harold always said, Zoe's done very well, you know. It's a shame she's never married.’

‘Zoe has never wanted to be married.’

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Brooklyn obscurely. She moved on, pointing out a dying apple tree. ‘I'm wondering if Harold wouldn't have wanted a new one in there. She always knew her own mind, of course, even as a little girl.’

Frances moved away. She walked to the far end of the garden and stood looking at the fence, precisely at eye-height, which shielded this garden from the neighbouring one. She had never been able to decide if the colourlessness of her mother-in-law's utterances reflected a state of mind or simply a determined resistance to the demands of life. Did she actually feel less, having devoted herself to avoiding stress? She had seemed to grieve at Steven's death, but what she had said, over and over again was, ‘It should never have happened.’

Mrs Brooklyn came up. Frances, suffering a mixture of irritation and guilt that had the odd effect of making her tingle, as though mildly electrified, asked about some old photographs she wanted to have copied. They went back into the house. Mrs Brooklyn, taking the albums from the bottom of the sideboard, laid them on the table. ‘Why don't you just take the ones you want for yourself, dear. Going to all that bother of having them copied…’

‘It isn't a bother. And you should have them. The ones of Steven and Zoe as children.’

‘I've got my memories,’ said Mrs Brooklyn. ‘Well, just as you like.’ She picked up her knitting. Frances began to leaf through the albums, removing a snapshot here and there. She passed through infancy and schooldays and reached student days: Zoe tousled and laughing on a sunlit lawn, Steven in a duffel coat, with odd dapper sleek hair. Steven and Zoe together, looking bored. Steven with another girl, the photo over-exposed, the girl's face too dark to make out.

She said, ‘I don't remember this one. Who is that?’

Mrs Brooklyn peered. ‘I think that would be Sarah. Yes, it must be Sarah.’

‘Sarah?’

‘Sarah Hennings. Steven's fiancée.’

Frances blinked. She picked the album up and looked more closely. She prised out the photograph and turned it over. On the back was pencilled, faintly ‘May 1952’. Three years before she had met Steven. She stared again at the photograph: Steven looked young and grave, the girl's expression was quite lost. They stood side by side in some dark leafy place; the girl's hand, it was just possible to make out, lay lightly in Steven's.

She said, ‘I've never heard of her.’

Mrs Brooklyn lowered her knitting; for an instant a tiny shaft of prurient interest lit her eyes. She said, ‘I'd have thought he'd have said. They weren't engaged all that long. She was a nice girl. But they didn't always hit it off I suppose and it came to nothing.’ She spoke as though of distant acquaintances.

Frances returned the photograph to its place on the page. She said, ‘Now I come to think of it, I believe he did once mention something.’ She turned over further pages, selected a couple more photographs, gathered together her pile, found in her handbag a used envelope into which to put them. ‘I'll let you have these back next time I come. The house is looking quite organized now. It's time you came to see it.’

‘Yes,’ said Mrs Brooklyn. ‘I'm planning to do that.’ Both of them knew that she would not. She came with Frances to the door and stood there watching as she got into the car and started the engine. At precisely the right moment, as the car moved off, Mrs Brooklyn raised her hand to wave; Frances had no idea, she realized, whether her visits pleased the old woman or not.

Her own mother, forty-five minutes later, poured tea, slipped off her shoes and settled to talk. Frances, from whom a minimal response was all that was required, sat supine, not thinking, in that no-man's-land that precedes reaction. From time to time she returned to the photograph, saw it again, turned it over again and re-read the date. Her mother was recounting plans for re-decoration of her bedroom: ‘… very pale pinky-grey walls and new curtains I've ordered with bluey-green flowers.’ Always inclined to plumpness, she was now fat, overflowing softly into the crannies of the armchair, her ankles puffy, her chin rolling down into her neck. But her clothes were girlish, as they always had been, and her fingernails painted pearl-pink. The room was too warm; comfort had always been the signature of this house – a nice fire, a lovely hot bath. The carpets were deep and the curtains thick; whatever went on in the world, went on beyond them. Years ago, Frances had said to Steven, ‘In fact, our mothers are not unalike, though neither of them would recognize that.’

‘… and a sweet lacy bedcover I found at John Lewis. And I'm having those Redouté flower prints framed that Daddy never liked very much. Chokky bikkie, darling?’

Frances remembered Steven's observation, in a moment of asperity, that a whole thesis could be written on the semantics of speech as a reflection of personality, using her mother as a model.

‘Did you say you were going to see Mrs Brooklyn?’

‘I've been.’

Her mother slipped a cushion behind her head. ‘How was she? Poor thing, I thought she looked awfully washed out that time I saw her at Christmas. Of course, I expect she has a bit of a dull time.’ She looked across at Frances. ‘And now, darling, tell me how
you're
really feeling in yourself.’

‘Not too bad.’

Her mother sighed. ‘Well, you know I'm the one person who knows and understands. And I still think you should have come here for a bit. After Daddy died the horridest part of all was waking up in an empty house in the mornings. You see, I do so know what it's like, other people simply can't imagine. And now all this moving house… I still think that was silly. They asked you to stay on till next year.’

‘It was far too big for me on my own.’ Frances put her cup down. ‘I'll have to go – I told Tab I'd be back by seven.’

‘I've got a tiny bit of bad back today,’ said her mother. ‘So I won't come out to say bye-bye. You will look for that cream braid for me?’

‘Yes, mamma.’

‘Harrods, I should think. Or failing there, Peter Jones.’

‘Yes.’

Frances drove back to London, along the motorway and then packed tight in the traffic that poured back into the city as though by suction, shoals of cars surging up on to the Westway, sailing above the rooftops, riding among the tower-blocks. The flow sank to a crawl and she sat amid this metal, these trapped bodies, and the photograph printed itself on the windscreen in front of her: perfectly polite but entirely insistent. The kaleidoscope was twisted, the pattern of the past re-assembled, all previous image lost for ever.

‘Who was Sarah Hennings?’

‘Sarah what?’ said Zoe, ‘I dunno. Oh, good grief, yes I do. That girl of Steve's, centuries ago. Whatever brought her up?’

‘Steven's fiancée.’

There was a pause. A typewriter clattered. Zoe, voice muted, turning evidently from the phone, said, ‘O.K., Tim, with you in a minute.’ She returned. ‘What's all this, Frances? Why her, suddenly? Yes, they were engaged, now I come to think of it. Didn't you know?’

‘No.’

‘Well, so what?’ said Zoe, almost crossly. ‘It was years before you and he ever met. She's a blank as far as I'm concerned – I don't even remember what she looks like.’

‘There's a photo of her in one of the albums at Marlow.’

‘Well, it's passed me by, if there is.’

‘He never mentioned. That they were engaged. I must have seen the photo before and just thought she was some friend. I think he did once say something about a Sarah, but as though she was just… anyone.’

There was silence for a moment. ‘Frances,’ said Zoe, ‘This is crazy. You're going on as if you'd unearthed some massive infidelity. She was a girl he didn't marry, long before he met you. If he never said then presumably he had his reasons, being Steven. Presumably because he didn't think it was important. When were you at Marlow?’

‘Yesterday. She seemed fine.’

‘You're a saint – haven't been there for a month. Listen, you're not really brooding about Sarah Hennings, are you? She doesn't matter.’

Frances paused. ‘I'm afraid she does. She matters to me, and there isn't anything I can do about that.’

Later, she took the puppy out for a walk on Hampstead Heath. She walked for two hours, and tried, during that time, to absorb this jolting, disturbing fact. A person is a fact. Everything – each day, each moment – had to be adjusted to accommodate the distant shadowy figure of this girl. This once-girl. Am I jealous? Frances asked herself. Why did Steven never speak of her? Because, as Zoe says, he thought it was neither here nor there? Yes, when I search hard, there were times when he spoke of a Sarah. Casually. What I didn't know was that they were to marry; that they stood once against a background of privet or possibly laurel, holding hands. And now I shall never know any of the answers, because Steven cannot tell me – who would have done, had I asked – and goodness knows who or where this woman is now, and unhinged as I am at this moment I am not quite unhinged enough to seek her out.