Perfect Happiness (5 page)

The Institute was in a part of London she did not know. Stopping on a corner, she studied the
A to Z
. The street, in fact, was in a state of frenzied transition. One one side, a terrace of nineteenth century houses was decked with builders' signs and ‘For Sale’ notices; raw new windows gaped glassless, the pavement was littered with hillocks of yellow sand. Here and there a whole frontage was in the process of reconstruction – the original London stock bricks carefully replacing the demolished structure as though the houses possessed the secret of eternal resurrection, springing time and again from their own rubble. But on the opposite side was a building-site, screened by high hoardings above which cranes wandered stork-like, swinging timbers and girders against the skyline. And beyond it stood a new block, a building almost entirely encased in glass, rank upon rank of rectangular mirrors across which flowed the reflection of the sky and clouds so that the building seemed in a state of perpetual movement, swimming above the traffic and the building site and the cluttered façade of the nineteenth century terrace. This, Frances realized, was where the Institute had its offices.

There were half a dozen people at the meeting, only two of whom she had met. She sat silent through much of the discussion, imagining Steven in conjunction with these strangers; in her obsessive thoughts of him, lately, his relationships with others – and so many others – had become a curious threat. It was as though they had the capacity to dilute her hold on her own memory of him. ‘Sometimes you are possessive…’

‘Are you happy about that, Mrs Brooklyn?’

‘I'm sorry?’ she said, guiltily.

‘That we should have the lectures here.’

‘Oh yes, of course.’

After the meeting ended she stood for a while in perfunctory talk. People drifted off. A woman who had made brisk and practical suggestions came up and offered a glass of sherry. ‘My name's Patricia Geering. I work here. I knew your husband quite well.’

Frances remembered. A rather tiresome woman called somebody Geering…

‘He didn't like me, I'm afraid.’ The woman, suddenly, smiled. Frances, embarrassed, stared into her sherry.

‘Sorry, that sounds awful. I just didn't want you to think I was an old crony. I had a great respect for him. And there were plenty of people he didn't like, so I never felt especially discriminated against.’ She smiled again; amiable, sympathetic. Frances said something about Steven being involved with so many organizations, working with so many people. The remark sounded as inane as it was.

‘Of course. And he was always a tonic to work with. If he said he was going to do something he did it. If he promised to be somewhere, you knew he would be.’ Patricia Geering beamed, showing bad teeth. ‘It was largely thanks to his fundraising efforts that we were able to move here. This block was only finished a couple of years ago, you know. This was one of the last surviving bomb-sites.’ She gestured at the room and Frances, glancing at the filing-cabinets and black swivel chairs and glossy walls had a disorienting sense of the whole arrangement as a frail palimpsest upon the landscape of rubble and willowherb and buddleia that had preceded it and the Victorian brick that had presumably filled the space before that. She said, with a sudden frankness induced by the sherry and this friendly woman, ‘One of the most unnerving things about bereavement is that it rocks any sense of permanence.’

‘So I imagine.’ There was a moment's silence, and then Patricia Geering went on, ‘Incidentally, we have some books and copies of periodicals of Steven's here. I've been meaning to get in touch with you before about them. Things he loaned to the library at one point. Should I have them sent to you? Come and see what there is, anyway.’

She took Frances into a room heaped with books and papers, lined with filing-cabinets. ‘They're in here somewhere, I know. This is the editorial room – chaos at the moment, my assistant left recently and I've not been able to find a replacement. Ah – here we are.’ She pulled out a box. ‘Have a look through, anyway.’

Frances said, ‘Why don't you keep them for the Institute? Truth to tell, I'm trying to dispose of books, rather than acquire more. Most of his library is going to the university. I'll just take this one of his own – it's the first he wrote and out of print now.’ Opening the book, she saw Steven's handwriting on the fly-leaf: S. Brooklyn, 1958. The ink faded to a light brown, like old photographs.

Patricia Geering said, ‘Well, that would be very nice. Thank you. Let me give you a copy of the journal. There's an obituary…’ Her voice trailed away. Brightly, she went on, ‘But of course it's home from home for you. You did editorial work yourself, didn't you?’

‘Yes. As a matter of fact I…’

‘I say, I suppose you wouldn't like to come and help me out? That is, if you're free.’

‘I am,’ said Frances, ‘I do want a job. But…’ she hesitated, ‘I'm just about to move house. Maybe after that…’

‘Think it over, anyway.’

On the way home Frances thought, why didn't I jump at that? Say, yes please, next week please. The move was an excuse. I am behaving as though I were convalescent. And this job is right in the middle of Steven's territory, he would be on all sides. I'm not sure that I want that.

Tabitha, roaming the shelves of a library, came at almost the same moment upon the same book. She, too, looked inside, and saw a date which, being before her own birth, had the flavour of another kind of past – not only more distant but reassuringly unreachable. She put the book back, and went to her desk, where she sat for a while not reading or writing but with her eyes pricking. Distantly, Steven's firm no-nonsense voice told her to pull herself together and she sniffed and blew her nose and picked up a pen. When you were a small child mum was the one you rushed to when something was wrong and dad was a person whose most frequent word was ‘sensible’. Be sensible; don't be silly. And who wasn't often there, anyway. And then later mum went on being mum but dad somehow turned into a different person, a visitant from busy adult worlds, a little alarming for that merciless common sense, but more approachable. You realized he was sort of famous, and preened yourself accordingly, and were ashamed for doing so. You smouldered your way through being fifteen and sixteen and thought you hated them both and then realized you didn't and suddenly they both seemed in some odd way physically smaller and in no way infallible and more lovable and then… And then it happens, the sort of thing that should be going on outside, over there, in someone else's life, not yours. So that at first, in the first few weeks, you woke at night having dreamed it hadn't really happened, he was still alive, it was all a dream.

It was real now, digested: true. Things could still make the eyes smart, like coming across that book, or getting through the first Christmas without him. And there was always the knowing that whatever one felt oneself it didn't bear much relation to what mum was feeling, and had felt. Knowledge lurked, now, of unsampled depths; the world was shadowed in places where there had been untrammelled sunlight. It was like those first childhood experiences of complexity of feeling.

… You belt down the road on the new bike, aged about eight, feeling ten feet tall, as brave as a lion, as fast as sound. And suddenly you look up and see her, standing there with a sort of smile that isn't quite a smile, and you are swamped by another feeling, as grey as guilt, as hot as pity. Because you know she didn't want you to have the bike in case you got yourself killed by a car, and you went on and on at them and in the end you were allowed to. And hence this feeling – queasy, treacherous – and the hiss of the tyres on the tarmac and the cold of the wind in your hair have lost their flavour.

She turned to a clean page of her note-pad and began to write. Another hour and a half in the library; finished the essay by the evening. Around her people rustled and breathed and coughed, the pervasive present. In three weeks time she would be twenty-one.

Frances, turning her key in the front door lock, heard the telephone ringing inside the house. Doggedly, like an alarm.

‘It would have to be Venice.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Oh, Christ,’ said Zoe, ‘I'd forgotten. Look, for goodness sake let me jack in this damn deadline…’

‘No. I'm going to do this on my own. I want to do this on my own.’

‘What's the hotel? Call me – promise.’

‘I promise. Tell me again exactly what the hospital said.’

‘Broken right leg. Cuts and bruises. Something about his shoulder that I didn't follow but it's not serious. One of the lucky ones, they said.’

Frances closed her eyes for a moment. She put her hand on the desk.

‘Hello? Are you there?’

‘I'm here. I'd better go now – I haven't packed and the plane's at twelve.’

‘Swear you'll call me. And give that boy a hug from me and tell him trust him to have to be where the action is. Remember Cornwall?’

‘I remember Cornwall,’ said Frances.

‘It's nasty, isn't it?’ said the woman on the plane. ‘Having to go to the same airport. Though in a way you can't help thinking well lightning never strikes twice… I said to my husband when we saw it on the news, three days later and it could have been us. One of the people killed was English. The Arabs did it.’

From the seat beyond, her husband sent a prying look at Frances. ‘No they didn't – it was those Italian terrorists. Going on holiday, are you?’

Frances said, ‘No, not exactly.’ The Alps glittered below.

‘It's our first time there. The Lakes we've done twice, and Florence. You can never have too much of Italy, I say.’

The woman offered a packet of sweets. ‘No? I read somewhere the bomb was in one of those Alitalia holdalls. The black plastic kind. I'll never see one again without wondering. They'd stood it just by the Duty Free.’

‘The odds against being involved in something like that yourself are something of the order of a million to one,’ said the husband. ‘I told you that when there was the IRA bombing in London. I said, the chances that it's
you
in Oxford Circus Underground at that precise moment… It's like plane crashes.’

‘Oh, shut up!’ The woman nudged him, her eyes still on Frances. ‘You know I'm windy about flying. On your own, are you?’

‘Yes, I'm on my own.’

All along the cigar-tube of the plane heads lolled. A small child sank its chin into the top of a seat and stared backwards at the row of faces. Frances's head ached; she had not slept much the previous night. She felt slightly unsteady and when she filled in the flight card her hands were shaking. She kept checking her handbag: passport, ticket, addresses of hotel and hospital. She closed her eyes. Beside her, the woman opened a magazine.

Over the years, one's heart had almost stopped a dozen times: leaning over a cot in which a baby lay unnaturally still; a squeal of brakes coinciding with the disappearance of a child; Tabitha delirious with fever and a thermometer that read one hundred and five; Cornwall…

The bright Cornish beach from which, suddenly, Harry is absent. The cliff, the tide… the stuff of newspaper items, tucked away behind public events. The frenzied scurrying to and fro. Zoe, with borrowed field-glasses: ‘There he is, the little sod, up there.’ The man with a rope, and the thundering relief that switches in a split second to embarrassment, guilt. Steven on the phone, matter-of-fact. Defiant, humiliated Harry.

The plan began to bump. The woman was stowing her magazine into a grip. ‘Down we go. Here's to the first campari soda. Staying out at the Lido, are you?’

‘No, actually I'm not.’

The husband, emptying English money from his pockets, leaned over. ‘A word to the wise. If you don't know the place I'm told the thing to do is steer clear of the guided tours. You can do better on your own. Have a good time.’

Released into the airport, she saw the broken windows, the hastily erected boarding screening off the wrecked area. She walked past and out into the soupy heat.

Once upon a time a long time ago she had dropped similarly out of the sky and similarly had stepped into a launch that had sped through the grey water trailing a white fan of foam. Then as now there had been this circular world fringed with a skyline of domes and spires against an apricot horizon. Steven had said, ‘Seeing this, Marco Polo seems somewhat unobservant not to have cottoned on to the fact that the world is round before he set off.’ She had held his hand and shed the rest of the day and sat entranced, in perfect happiness. She knew nothing of Harry nor Tabitha nor John Kennedy who would be assassinated nor Cuba nor Vietnam nor crazy Red something terrorists. Nor this other Frances who sat here now, not happy at all. She had made certain arrangements for her life which included none of these.

The launch thumped over corrugations from another wake. Someone beside her lurched sideways. ‘Excuse me.’ All the other passengers seemed to be American. This woman wore a trouser-suit with knife-sharp creases and a straw hat. Her sun-glasses poked up at the corners, giving her a cat-face. Frances thought, if I notice things still, I am all right. She had a feeling of disorientation that edged at moments into something like panic. When I have seen Harry it will be better. Or worse.