Perfect Happiness (10 page)

Lying in a bed, once upon a time somewhere in France, exhausted, ripped in half, looking up at Frances (her face… in which joy and worry contend…), saying, there, tell me how clever I am, she's gorgeous, take her, quick…

She made a further call to the office and left for Heathrow. On the plane she sat reading a file of clippings by the office. In Dublin, she sought various quarry, ending with a long smoke-laden session with the politican during which his evasions were matched by Zoe's guile, a process appreciated by both of them. She went to her hotel and sat in her room for a couple of hours scowling and typing. At half-past ten she descended to the hotel bar and saw instantly on the far side of the red plush room in which musak softly seeped from the walls and American tourists sat plumply padded out with Arran sweaters one of those four men she once frenziedly loved. The man, a fellow journalist, looked up over his glass and waved. Zoe joined him.

‘Well, well, well. Fancy seeing you, Stan.’

‘Good to see you, Zoe. Looking fine, too.’

‘Drop dead,’ said Zoe. ‘I'm shagged out and I need a bath and if I'd known I was going to run into the remembrance of things past I'd at least have combed my hair. I'll have a whisky. How's the wife and kids?’

‘Reasonable. Who've you been grilling, then?’

‘Himself. Funny, I was thinking of you this morning, in a general kind of way.’

‘I never think of you, Zoe, in anything but the most particular kind of way.’

‘Huh. There's no need to be coarse.’

‘I was being gallant,’ said Stan.

Zoe laughed. ‘I like you, and you can't say that of everyone.’ She looked at him, roseate in the sunset lighting of the bar, and thought once upon a time I climbed all over you in a bed in Manchester of all places. I couldn't have enough of you and now there's not a flicker, not so much as a frisson, not a single quiver of the faithless flesh. Oh dear oh dear oh dear.

‘I was sorry to hear about your brother.’

‘Mmn. I can't remember – did you ever meet Frances?’

‘Once. Quiet. Good-looking. And a bouncy little girl with a funny name.’

‘Tabitha. Our Tab. Grown-up now.’

‘I only met your brother once. He put me in my place at a press conference. When he was chairman of that Royal Commission.’

‘That sounds like Steven,’ said Zoe.

The American tourists had begun to ebb from the bar. It was past eleven. Zoe commented that there wasn't an Irish voice to be heard. The barman was Italian. ‘Joints like this have a nationality all of their own. A kind of territorial Esperanto. Thank God I've been talking to real Irishmen all day or I'd feel like the Flying Dutchman.’

‘Ever woken in a strange hotel room and had to check with reception where you were?’

‘Near enough. Why do we do it?’

‘Because we want to,’ said Stan crisply. ‘Drink?’

‘My turn. Doesn't, um, Sally, mind?’

‘She's got used to it. She minds, yes.’

‘So would I. No wonder no-one ever married me.’

‘Not for want of trying.’

‘Cut it out. The age of chivalry is over.’

‘I must say,’ said Stan, ‘I thought at one time Eric Sadler was going to make it. I gather he's being seen around with Liz Harcourt these days.’

Zoe gazed for a few moments, intently, at the mirror behind the bar. A mirror with art nouveau motifs painted thereon, in a rather disagreeable green. She paid for the drinks, moved Stan's towards him, replaced her purse in her handbag. She drank the whisky, too fast. ‘That'll be the new girl on
The Observer
. Ah, these gay young things. How nice for Eric. You know something, Stan, I feel a sudden crazy urge for some fresh air. I think I'll take a walk into town.’

‘Well, take care. I'd come with you but…’

‘You get yourself a night's sleep. Good seeing you.’

She walked through the foyer out into the street and in the direction of the Liffey. Men spilled from a bar and passed her, with comments that Zoe ignored – barely, indeed, heard. She was noting, at that moment, the intensity of the stars, spiking the city sky with such brilliance that the street lights seemed tarnished. She isolated the Plough, the North Star, Orion, and as she did so it came to her that the last time she had been so conscious of constellations had been in New York, a few weeks ago, seeing them laid out behind the panoramic screen of an office window, unearthly backdrop to the balding head of a Manhattan police chief. That's the kind of thing that keeps people sane, she thought, at rough moments. Constancy. That night will follow day. That the world at least is reliable.

This is not all that rough a moment. It has happened before and no doubt will happen again. And those who are not prepared to give all cannot expect to have all, either. But I am dog tired and fifty next week and I feel as though someone has just given me a light punch in the belly.

She leaned over the parapet of a bridge. A passing man made a suggestion. ‘Sod off,’ said Zoe without turning her head. The Liffey lay sluggish below her, oil patches gleaming. I have been here before, she thought, I have passed this exact spot. It comes back now, that quay and this bridge and the Custom House over there. I walked along here with – with I forget who – time out of mind ago, when I had my first job. All keen and bright and pushy, doing a piece on de Valera. Hi there, Zoe. Zoe Brooklyn, then and now. Not so very different, if you disregard the hand of time. We'd recognize one another. And there's consolation in this, too; knowing from whence you have come. That you passed this way before. It wasn't such a bad idea to take a walk; better than soaking up more whisky with old Stan. Not his fault; he wasn't to know. The punch in the belly is wearing off a bit. We can take it. And there is work to be done, thank God, and tomorrow will be another day.

It had begun to rain. She shoved her hands in the pockets of her coat and walked back across the bridge, fast, arranging in her head the opening paragraphs of an article.

After Frances and Harry arrived back in London one or two newspaper reporters telephoned. Harry, stiffly, gave minimum replies: yes, thank you, he was better; no, he didn't know quite what he'd be doing next; no, he didn't really want to talk about the airport bombing. There was a photograph of him in
The Standard
, with a few lines of comment that referred more to Steven than to Harry. The other British casualty, a middle-aged woman from Bristol, was not mentioned.

It had become hot: dusty London mid-summer. Tabitha came back from Cambridge and went away again almost at once to an archaeological dig in Scotland. She was irritable and abstracted. Frances, hurt, asked Harry what was wrong.

‘There's some bloke, I think,’ said Harry, embarrassed.

‘You mean she's in love? It's nothing to be ashamed of. She was so furtive. I wish she'd talk to me.’

Harry shrugged, evidently finding the whole matter distasteful. He spent his time sitting in the garden reading, or shuffling around on his crutches, patiently waiting for the leg to mend. He never complained. He is doing, Frances thought, exactly what Steven would have done. If he were Steven's natural son people would say he had his temperament; he is pragmatic and rational, like Steven, almost disconcertingly so. But he isn't Steven's son, nor mine, we are just people with whom he has spent his life. He has never displayed the slightest interest in his origins; that, too, of course may be a matter of temperament. Since he is what he is, and has what he has, there is no point in considering what might have been. That also would have been Steven's position.

She visited the new house; the smaller house in another part of London. The house suitable for a widow whose children were no longer permanently resident. Its present owners were a young couple expecting a third baby, seeking expansion. The mother, a toddler slung across her hip, wandered round the rooms as Frances measured floors and windows. ‘I'm sad to be going, in a way, I mean, the new place is great, there's a real garden for the kids, somewhere for John to have a workshop. But you leave a bit of yourself in a house, don't you?’ Frances, looking out on to the unfamiliar street that soon would not be so, nodded. She saw the terrace opposite, its doors and flights of steps and frontages with small displays of personality by way of plants or new paint, and thought of houses as vessels through which people unceasingly flow. Passive, and ultimately triumphant. These houses were over a hundred years old. And doing nicely. The mother set the child down and he began to poke spent match sticks from an ashtray through a crack in the floorboards with tiny, delicate fingers. ‘Don't do that, Tom. This'll be Mrs Brooklyn's house next month. She doesn't want a lot of rubbish under her floors.’ The child flung itself at her, clutching her round the knees, and she stroked his hair, absently, automatically. ‘The neighbours are nice. We've never had neighbour problems. And there's the new Sainsbury's just opened beyond the tube station – you know…’ Frances shook her head; she had chosen this area for just those reasons: it was unfamiliar, a blank sheet. If Steven had ever walked these streets she knew nothing of it, she had not been with him. ‘Oh well, it's five minutes away, and you can park round the back. Would you like a cup of coffee?’

The subterranean thunder of the underground was just audible; Frances pictured, far below, the seated figures lined up in the canister of the train, hurtling through darkness. Scores of strangers, scores of faces one would never see, sharing nevertheless the same small segment of the city, the same moments of time, the same sights and sounds. And, when she looked again out of the window, the sky too was occupied: one plane crawled slowly across the skyline just above the rooftops, purposeful but leisurely, as though searching for a likely spot to land, while another – so high as to be nothing but a silver flash of light – drew a white pencil of vapour across the sky. She imagined these people also, adjusting their seatbelts, opening magazines, talking in foreign tongues. The strangeness of sharing the physical world with unknown others, whose eyes see what we see, whose lives touch ours and then spin off into a mysterious oblivion, had always astonished her. Once, she tried to talk to Steven of this. She saw now his expression, at once puzzled and slightly impatient. He had not understood her; it was not the kind of thing about which he thought, it did not interest him. He would have found the idea sterile.

When the day of the move arrived she came downstairs early in answer to the doorbell and found Zoe on the step.

‘What on earth are you doing here?’

‘Come to help.’

‘You can't do that,’ said Frances, following her into the hall. ‘You've got work to do.’

‘Phooey – it's my day off.’ She surveyed the packing-cases, the cartons spewing books and papers. ‘Lovely. I like a scene of chaos.’

Frances sat down on the bottom step of the stair. ‘You've come because you think leaving here is going to send me into a decline.’

‘If you want to put it like that,’ said Zoe, ‘you're at liberty to do so. How about I get the bed-clothes off the beds and take them on over to the new place in the car and get it swept out?’

‘As a matter of fact I'm not really feeling anything very much about going. I'm glad if anything.’

‘Then it's merely a question of nuts and bolts, over which I might come in handy. Where do I start?’

‘Let's have some breakfast first. Harry's got his plaster off, by the way.’

‘Good. And I had a card from Tab. One, mind, in six weeks or thereabouts.’

‘Apparently she's in love,’ said Frances.

‘Ah. Well, few of us are spared that.’ Zoe dumped nerself on the kitchen chair. ‘And some of us are addicted. Eric has a new fancy lady, incidentally.’

Frances, making toast, glanced at her. ‘Oh, Zoe… But it's not…’

‘The first time. Oh dear me, no. He'll get over it. She's all of twenty-eight and she has ginger curls. Enough of her, though. I am rising above her. Effortlessly. Tab's postcard was all about things called brochs, I couldn't understand a word of it. And signed Elizabeth T. Brooklyn. Has she turned against that crazy name?’

‘It's a joke,’ said Frances. ‘She's always rather liked it. She used to say, at least you never meet another.’

Zoe scowled into her tea-cup. ‘My fault. My fault entirely.

‘I like it. I always have.’

They looked at each other: an old look, a private look. Zoe said, ‘Do you think she ever notices me glowing at her?’

‘She's not all that perceptive.’

‘Rubbish. She's as perceptive as she is beautiful, talented and intelligent. You know, my love, one day soon…’

Frances rose abruptly. ‘Maybe. Look, I'd better rout Harry out of bed. The removal men will be here any minute.’

That night, she lay in her own bed in the strange house and felt, for a while, a resurgence of the panic that had visited her in Venice. She thought, I may have done the wrong thing. I may have been unspeakably stupid. I may have made things worse. She felt like the passenger in a ship from whom the shore slowly recedes. She would live, from now on, between walls that had never known Steven's presence. She would return to what from now on she must call home through a door never opened by Steven. Loss, as so often, gripped her with a clutch that almost took her breath away. She lay staring at the pale square of the curtained window, chilled with the burden of it. And there came into her head suddenly the memory of Ruth Bowers; she saw that ugly kindly face, heard that slightly hoarse voice, talking on. In the first months after Steven's death she had flinched from making any kind of relationship; the admission into her life of people he had not known seemed a kind of betrayal. But in Venice she had felt a satisfaction; even, a small achievement. My friend. And this house, she thought, is mine. Mine alone. I am alone in it.

She held the fact to her, concentrated on it, and presently the panic ebbed. No, she thought, I was not wrong to do this. I have to go on, not stay still. I am not happy but there are times, now, minutes, hours, when I am not miserable either. When I begin to live again.

She lay there, in the alien darkness. Warily, she summoned up one of those moments. Dorset. That hillside.