Perfect Happiness (7 page)

She moved into the shade and looked at the map. She opened the guide-book, and read. Names on the pages quivered and set up answering vibrations in her mind. Did we not go there? Don't I remember that? Carpaccio, Donatello, Verrocchio, San Stefano, San Rocco, Santa Maria della Salute. She stared at the map, and the geometry of the streets and squares reeled and shimmered. She set off, across open spaces and down alleyways and over bridges. The city ensnared her like a web, a maze. When she tried to match her position to the lines and names on the map there seemed to be no possible relationship. What was, and what was said to be, were not the same. The crumbling fading landscape of arches and pillars and snatches of water and curving bridges and ever-shifting skylines was a stage-set, a tricksy deceptive palimpsest. Alleys furtively opened in walls that appeared blank; streets swung round corners into concealed squares; canals blocked her passage. She abandoned the map and simply wandered, digested by the city. She saw nothing that related in any way to that other time. Once, a statue halted her, setting up some reverberation, but when she looked harder she realized that it resembled a bronze of a horse and a rider in a London street.

She went into a church. At the entrance, a placard announced its date and listed its treasures. Inside, she sat for a moment on a chair, in the scented gloom; footsteps tapped and whispered on the marble floor. She got up and wandered from painting to painting; Madonnas and Christs and the patriarchal cloaked figures of biblical mythology. Each picture was a complex system of reference and meaning; it told a story. It assumed in the viewer an answering set of responses. If you did not know the language of Christianity these paintings would be meaningless; works of art, no more and no less. She found her own knowledge wanting from time to time. Who was Emmaus? The Maccabees? Saint Barbara? Above all, the tableaux, the faces, the emotions seemed to exist outside the straitjacket of time, to be as permanent and detached as natural landscape. Their power was aesthetic, the frozen grief or rejoicing upon the faces was as safely beyond actual sorrow or joy as were the bearers of those names on the tombstones in that London burial ground.

She stood before a triptych Virgin and Child and felt more utterly alone than at any point since Steven's death.

On the morning of the third day Frances tried to telephone Zoe. She had already done so once but, finding her out, had left a message on the answering machine. Now she again fumbled with the unfamiliar mechanism of an Italian phone-box. She dialled the international code and distant voices chattered at her. She had no idea where in the city she was; she had lost the map and discarded the guide-book. When at last Zoe's distorted recorded voice replied she left another message.

It must be the third day because of the date on the newspaper she had taken to Harry that morning. Otherwise, the time since she had been here had merged into a continuous present, exempt from the conventional divisions of day and night, eating and sleeping. She had returned to the hotel when she was too exhausted to go on wandering the city, slept and eaten when it occurred to her. The only fixed points had been her twice daily visits to Harry. She had sat by his bed for the prescribed time, had talked to him, had brought him the things he needed. He was something of a celebrity in the hospital, petted by the nurses and visited by the relatives of other inmates of the ward, who gathered around his bed smiling and pressing on him small gifts by way of chocolate, fruit and even flowers. An ambulant patient was teaching him Italian. He sat by Harry's bed, patiently enunciating, a huge amiable man stripped to a pair of pyjama trousers above which rose a torso blanketed with curly black hair. When Frances arrived he would rise, bowing and grinning, and pad away again to his own bed.

‘You're all right here, then?’

‘It's O.K. The doctor says I'll have another X-ray tomorrow and then they'll know when I can go.’

‘Yes. I've seen him too. He thinks possibly at the weekend. I'm going to book flights in case.’

She talked to him mechanically, hardly knowing what she said, hearing her own voice as though it were someone else's. From time to time she would see him suddenly, with a sharper awareness, and was astonished by him: his lanky adult body, his man's voice, his laconic remarks. Once, she said, ‘Do you remember that time you got stuck on a cliff in Cornwall?’ Harry stared for a moment, blankly: ‘Oh God – yes, vaguely. I'd had a fight with Tab. It was a bit of machismo stuff. How old was I?’ ‘About ten.’ ‘I remember thinking Dad would give me a roasting but all he said was, “That was a pointless thing to do, as you presumably now realize.” Dad never went in for recriminations, did he?’ ‘No, he didn't.’

Harry frowned. He lay staring at the ceiling and then flashed her a sideways look in which lurked embarrassment, compunction and loss of words. He said, ‘Don't feel you need hang around here, Mum. I mean, why don't you have a look at Venice while you're at it.’ He turned away again and his black hair which, now, someone had washed, lay in strands upon the pillow.

As thus, then, it stands in quills against the electric blue nylon blanket in which he lies swathed in a plastic carry-cot in the office of the adoption society to which they have driven, almost in silence, through south London. Relax, said Steven, once, putting out a hand, laying it for a moment on her knee, relax for goodness sake. You're as stiff as a poker, I can feel it. You're going to fetch a baby, not stand trial for murder. And she looks down into the carry-cot where this infant, this alien infant, is fast asleep, snuffling gently like an asthmatic dog. She looks at the dark quills and, when suddenly he turns his head, the soft dent in the back of his neck invokes in her a sensation of internal dissolution not unlike sexual desire. She wants to pick him up and clamp him to her breast. She knows that she does not give a damn whose he is or where he comes from. She stares down at him and behind her Steven and the adoption society lady are talking and she does not hear a word they say.

‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I've been here before. Dad and I spent our honeymoon here. Surely we must have talked about it…’ And Harry, embarrassed again, replies that oh yes, sure, he'd forgotten, but anyway… I suppose I'll never get to see the Doge's Palace and all that now, he went on, the whole point of coming here…

‘You've got all your life,’ said Frances. ‘Venice will continue.’

The process of transition from one place to another was as mechanical as her conversations with Harry. She was in the hospital, and then somehow she was back in the city, walking, sitting at a café, passing through arcades from flaring light to deep shadow. She went in and out of the hotel, waited for the lift, locked and unlocked the door of her room.

On one of these visits she was aware of the American woman, Ruth Bowers, beside her. ‘I'm sorry?’

‘I just wondered if you'd care to meet up for a meal later.’

‘Oh,’ said Frances, confused. ‘How nice – yes, well, maybe.’ She stared round the hotel lobby. In locked display cases were examples of Venetian glass: tormented structures of extreme ugliness – animals, fluted vases, encrusted bowls. She saw them with great intensity – their boiled sweet colours, the twists and pleats and bubbles of the glass. Like the rest of the physical world, they had the sharpness of accessories in dreams; she was acutely aware of sight and sound. The world seemed to glow and roar around her. ‘For lunch, you mean?’

‘Frances,’ said Ruth Bowers. ‘It's past four o'clock in the afternoon now. Look, dear, I don't want to pry, but are you sure you're all right at the moment. I passed you in the piazza this morning and you seemed kind of dazed.’

‘I'm fine,’ said Frances. ‘Truly.’ She achieved, from somewhere, a smile, a brisk reassuring smile. ‘Enjoying the sights. Harry's getting on well, they say. Do let's meet up tomorrow.’ And smiling still she left Ruth Bowers, who watched her go, seeing a woman with unkempt hair, dark pouches under her eyes and a crumpled skirt.

At some point that evening, when Frances was sitting at a café in one of the smaller and more hidden squares, she knew that she had been here before, on this precise spot. She looked up at the floodlit façade of a church and knew that that same arrangement of pink and apricot light was lodged within her head, the accompaniment to Steven's voice asking if she would like to go to a concert. She is wearing a pink striped dress; they have eaten a delicious meal; from time to time, with tranquil pleasure, she wonders if she is pregnant. She looks up at this glowing floating church and Steven asks if she would like to go to a concert. And the whiff of all this hung still in the square as she had known it would if only she searched long enough. The public place became private, hers alone, and she sat there until the peace that she had won tipped suddenly back into restless uncertainty. The waiter, his eye on the solitary woman who had sat so long with a single drink, saw her rise in sudden agitation and watched her hurry away, one drab foreign tourist among many.

She telephoned, and again Zoe was not there. She left a message, a bleak sentence delivered with painful urgency: ‘What colour were Steven's eyes?’

On the morning of the fourth day Ruth Bowers began to follow Frances through the streets of Venice. She trotted some twenty or thirty paces behind, weaving deftly through the crowds, and at the points when she thought Frances might turn and see her she would stop to stare in a shop window, or study the details of a building. In fact, these ruses were quite unnecessary, as she suspected: Frances was seeing nothing.

In London, Zoe, returning to her flat, pressed the switch of her answering machine before pouring two glasses of whisky, one for herself and one for Eric Sadler. When Frances's voice came through, first once and then – after another message from someone else – again, Zoe put down her glass and stood staring at the machine. She listened once more to the messages. She said, ‘I knew I should have gone with her.’

She looked at Eric and said, ‘I have this blasted assignment in Edinburgh tomorrow’, and Eric, a big man with grizzled hair and the sagging belly of the desk-bound scowled for a moment in thought and then said, ‘Hang on, lovey, didn't you say that pal of yours – what's-his-name, the musical guy – didn't you say he was in Venice?’

‘Morris!’ cried Zoe, ‘You clever sod. Dead right – he was going there to lecture to something or other.’

There was something she should do, but she could not think what it was. Some obligation that tugged like the reality lying beyond the compulsive world of a dream. She walked out into the morning knowing that there was some person she should visit, with whom she was concerned. Standing in the drumming heat of the piazza she knew suddenly that it was Harry, that she was here in Venice with Harry, but she no longer remembered why, or where he might be. She was in a condition of juddering nervousness. The calm grey state of grief had gone and in its place had come a jagged anxiety bordering on panic; her legs felt weak and she found herself constantly holding on to things – balustrades, the backs of chairs – as though she were physically infirm and might fall. She walked through streets and squares and saw nothing: the houses and churches and canals rolled by like stage-sets. She was obsessed, isolated, locked within herself, in feverish pursuit. She knew that something disastrous was happening to her, that possibly she was going mad, and she knew also that if she ceased for one moment to think about Steven, to carry him with her in her head, she might lose him. He was dead; he existed only in recollection; when recollection ceased even that tenuous existence would be gone. A name, no more. Like the host of names on the white tombstones of Bunhill Fields burial ground; the silent army beneath the soil.

She brought back his face, his touch, his voice. She listened to the things he said, significant or trivial. The past lost all chronology; its jumbled fragments came and went with kaleidoscopic brilliance. She wandered into a church and stood before pictures that she did not see. Turning to leave she was vaguely aware of a woman who made as though to speak to her, a woman with grey curls and tilt-framed sun-glasses. She smiled at the woman, whom she recognized as an acquaintance, and went quickly past her and out into the street; she could no longer afford intrusions or interruptions.

She was alone now with Steven; the survival of his memory rested with her. She no longer had, herself, any sense of time; she did not know how long she had been in Venice any more than she could remember quite why she had come except, she now began to believe, in search of Steven. He was here, as he was also in London and Cambridge and on a lawn in Sussex and on a hillside in Dorset; she could visit him in these places, and to be with him thus would save him from the awful oblivion beyond memory. I loved you so much, she said to him, and you were always stronger than I am, you knew what had to be done and how to do it, you did not need me as I needed you, but now there is something that I can do for you that you cannot do for yourself, and only I can do it.

She leaned on the parapet of a canal bridge and saw a dead cat float past, a bundle of clotted fur. She heard church bells and the laughter of two young men. Somewhere, a caged bird sang. Sweat trickled down her spine; she had been walking now for two or three hours. She continued to ransack her memory and there came an image of Steven entering the London house, dropping his briefcase beside the little marble-topped table, wiping rain from his spectacles with a red handkerchief, and this was almost at once replaced by another in which he lay beside her in bed, reading, cold-faced and shut off into that world of his own concerns, and another in which he spoke from a television screen, disembodied against a nile-green background. Clenched in the passenger seat of the Ford, she travelled with him down a French road, the kilometres ticking away to the swish-swish of the poplars, another hour-and-a-half, another forty minutes… ‘Take it easy, Frances,’ he says. ‘Nearly there now,’ and his hand lies on her knee. And presently they stand above the bed in which lies Zoe, looking pale, depleted. ‘Give us a kiss,’ says Zoe. ‘Tell me how clever I am.’ And with a twitch of whatever uncontrollable mechanism decides these things that picture was replaced by another of Steven on the far side of the kitchen, hostile and sarcastic, but the words of the quarrel had gone, try as she might to resurrect them. That was not happiness, perfect or imperfect, but must be retrieved and kept along with other things; life is whole and undivided.