Perfect Happiness (25 page)

‘What slant, Zoe?’

‘Nothing very original. Just a strong feeling that being around despite the perversities is a damn sight better than not being around. In the absence of any firm evidence of a life to come.’ She looked directly at Frances. ‘What you've always been very well aware of, love, until recently. Is there any hope that you might be beginning to feel that way again, at all?’

‘Some days,’ said Frances, ‘I believe there is.’

It had taken Morris two weeks of scouring salerooms and antique shops to track down a sufficiently appealing picture of a dog. Dogs, he had decided, are not in themselves appealing; the presentation is all. And when at last he achieved a feathery spaniel creature brooding over a dead pheasant amid autumn leaves he anguished about whether it had period charm or was merely a cliché. In a state of dreadful anxiety he presented it to Frances, watching her face intently. He knew at once that it was all right.

‘I thought it would be something you haven't got,’ he said modestly.

‘I shall hang it over the mantelpiece. I'd been wondering what to have there.’

For the next half hour Morris tried to ask what he wanted to ask and retreated, each time, at the brink. At last he proposed that he should hang the picture for her and then, standing on a chair with his back to her, hammer in one hand and picture hook in the other, he got it out. At least her face wouldn't tell him at once that this wasn't all right.

‘I have to go to this festival in Canterbury the weekend after next. Baroque music, mainly. A couple of nights. I wondered if you might like to come with me.’ He squinted in agonized suspense at the picture, his nose a few inches from the glossy painted nose of the dog – an artful dog, he now decided, an artful sycophantic dog, posing forever with its pheasant and its glistening anthropomorphic brown eyes. ‘Just an idea,’ he said lightly (too lightly?) and heard Frances say, in a perfectly ordinary matter-of-fact tone that why yes, that sounded fun, she hadn't anything on the weekend after next, yes, why not?

Frances, later, when he had gone, straightened the picture which had hung lop-sided since Morris, unsuccessfully simulating calm and nonchalance, had got down from the chair. She thought, in alarm, what have I done? what am I doing?

It was the middle of October. Frances, Zoe, Morris and Tabitha, all of whom spent a good part of their days sitting behind a desk, separately watched, through glass, the mutation of the year. They sat with books or papers or typewriters and looked up, every now and then, at skies that were sometimes serenely blue and sometimes loaded with rain. Each noted the onward rush of time and looked back at their own innocence of a year ago. Frances measured the progress of her grief. Zoe thought, I am without Eric, but I am with Tab, and I am not ill. Morris thought, A year ago I knew nothing of her, I did not know she existed.

Tabitha, crunching around through the fallen leaves of Cambridge – was there ever a place so drowned in leaves? – thought about books. She had lived, she realized, ever since she could confidently read, through the pages of books. She had been Tess and Natasha and Catherine Earnshaw and the girl in
Rebecca
and later and more ambitiously Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina. She knew all about passion and suffering and the complexity of things. She had grown up in feverish pursuit of information, and there it all was, stacked away on the shelves. Accordingly she was prepared for anything; nothing could surely be either better or worse than the books said it would be.

She remembered, as a small child, rushing into a sea which had turned out to be quite startlingly wet and cold, its feel utterly unrelated to its look. The quilted surface and the delicately frilled waves had been lies – no, not lies but another dimension. And the books while not lying were similarly quite unconnected with the raw facts. They told you – oh dear me yes, they told you – but what they were telling you saw as through a glass, darkly. They could not explain the shocking truth that when someone you love dies they cease to be there any more in a way that is barely credible, or that happiness scarcely gives you time to know it for what it is or that unhappiness is pain.

Or that the past is overlaid by the present. She telephoned Zoe and said, ‘Do I look like him, at all?’

‘Like who?’

‘Him. The man. My, um, father.’

‘I don't think so,’ said Zoe, after a moment. ‘I'm pretty sure not. He was tall. You're stunted, like me.’

‘Small,’ said Tabitha.

‘Petite, then.’ There was silence. ‘I'm sorry,’ Zoe went on. ‘You see I don't remember him very well.’ There was a further silence. ‘I feel… shabby.’

‘Don't,’ said Tabitha. ‘Please don't. I'd much rather you didn't. Anyway, it doesn't really matter.’

The events of the summer were retreating. She began to see them as though down a tunnel, getting increasingly smaller, leaving only the flavours of joy and distress. She saw and did new things. The autumn days took her onwards with them.

Frances, through the window beside her desk at the Institute, could observe the building-site next door. It looked, at times, as complex and difficult to analyse as one of those teeming Italian paintings: a Calvary or a Rape of the Sabines or Massacre of the Innocents. Men and machinery clambered around landscapes of rubble and timber structures that changed their form day by day, the men picked out by their brilliant yellow helmets, the trucks and bulldozers gaudily orange and red. Lakes appeared and disappeared. It was impossible to discern any kind of purpose. And then as the summer ended method emerged from the chaos: the random burrowing gave way to a forest of poles and girders, the skeleton of a huge building began to rise from the London soil. Frances and Patricia, for whom site-watching had become a compulsive occupation during their coffee and lunch breaks, felt a sense of personal achievement.

‘When I'm an old woman,’ said Patricia, ‘I shall be able to say I knew that block when it was nothing.’

They had formed a comfortable relationship. A few days before Patricia had said briskly, ‘How do you feel about staying on permanently? If it suits you, it suits me. I've already had a word with the Director.’ Frances replied, ‘Thank you. I'd like to.’

That night, lying in bed, she was filled with cautious pleasure. I have occupation, she thought. I am not indispensable but modestly useful; I have made myself a home, of a kind; I have friends who never knew Steven. I am moving on.

She had been sent the list of those to be invited to the memorial lecture, with a note from the chairman of the committee asking her to make any further suggestions she thought proper. She read through the columns of names and added Steven's mother and her own, knowing that neither would come but that both would derive a small vicarious glory. Several people were included, she noticed, who had been official enemies of Steven's; she wondered if she was allowed also to make deletions. That would cause an interesting stir. Shall I? she said to him, with a glint. And remembered an occasion when one of these same people had come up to them in a street somewhere, greeting Steven with effusive and apparently unfeigned warmth. He had been infuriated; ‘What's the world coming to when you can't even rely on your enemies?’ She sat smiling, the list in her hand.

Zoe went to Kew Gardens, alone. She walked among the flaming trees and marvelled. She studied the little metal plaques attached to them and wrote down names, deriding at the same time the professional tic that made her do this. For Christ's sake, she said to herself, you rush through life with your head down writing it up and then you come here and do the same. She dropped the notebook into a litter bin and walked on, looking at trees graceful and trees majestic and trees that smouldered like candles. I know nothing about vegetation, she thought. You move around the world and know nothing of it. I will get a book about botany and I will learn Italian at last, I swear it. And I'll take a holiday.

On the morning that Frances was to meet Morris at Charing Cross for the train to Canterbury she re-packed her case twice, seized with nervousness that took the form of distaste for all her clothes. She put things in and then took them out again and then searched frantically for a garment that seemed suddenly indispensable and thus kept the taxi waiting five minutes and departed breathlessly, grabbing the letters from the hall table as she went. Glancing through them she found a card from Ruth Bowers: ‘I find myself with an unexpected assignment to a librarians' conference in your city next week. I'll take you up on your invitation to visit, if I may. Will call you on…’ The date was illegible. Frances thrust the card into her pocket. Good, she thought, I shall like to see her again.

Morris was at the barrier. They were flung, immediately, into a disabling uneasiness and both began to talk at once.

‘Sorry I'm late. You must have thought I was going to miss the train. I wonder if there are any seats left.’

‘Let me take your case. It looks as though the weather's going to be good, anyway. There's a buffet car, I see.’

They walked self-consciously down the platform. Morris said, ‘Do you know Canterbury at all?’

Frances stopped. She faced him. ‘I've been looking forward to this so much, Morris.’

He beamed. ‘Have you? That's all right, then. I certainly have. I was so excited this morning I couldn't eat any breakfast.’

Frances laughed. She took his arm. ‘We'd better get somewhere near this buffet car, in that case.’

In the train, Morris said, ‘Two concerts are musts. For me, at any rate. For the rest of the time we do exactly what we like.’

‘I shall go to everything you're going to.’

The train rocked through the fields and woods: the tranquil somehow old-fashioned southern English landscape that bore still a whiff of those thirties railway posters, as though busty girl hikers in shorts should appear on a skyline, or the white-painted stations offer Cream Teas. They sat side by side and did not talk all the time; Frances read the newspaper and Morris a book he was reviewing. She thought, startled; to others we presumably look like a married couple. Long-married, given our ages.

At the hotel reception desk they were seized again with awkwardness. ‘I've booked two rooms,’ said Morris. ‘Of course.’

‘Yes,’ said Frances. ‘Thank you,’ she added, foolishly.

They went to the Festival Office for Morris to collect tickets and brochures. The town was brandishing the occasion with pride: there were posters all over the place. ‘Tonight the English Chamber Orchestra in the cathedral,’ said Morris. ‘Tomorrow the LSO. For now – a general potter around?’

In the train, and standing with him in her hotel room, pointing out the distant view of the cathedral towers, Frances had been filled with a sense of physical proximity which was partly sexual and partly something else. They seemed, both of them, intensely there: hands and eyes and hair and the ring of footsteps and movement of limbs. Entering the cathedral, passing from the bright gusty outside into that still and sober height all this suddenly fell away. It was as though they, and everyone else, shrank and faded. People drifted about looking upwards, not at each other. Frances, after a few minutes, realized that she had lost Morris; she came upon him at last in the choir, poring over the guide-book. She was gripped by a wave of affection and relief, as when one struggles through anonymous crowds to find the familiar face at a rendezvous. Although she had lived in a city much of her life it never ceased to surprise her that we move, most of the time, among people we have never seen before and will never see again. Occasionally, this had given her a curious sense of panic. Here, though, the way in which the cathedral drained individuals of significance and made one feel oneself impersonal was somehow satisfying. Morris's known face, though, shone for her. She went up and laid a hand on his arm. He began to read her extracts from the guide-book: the fire, the re-building, the use of Purbeck marble. ‘Do you want to hear all this? Some people prefer just looking?’

‘Go on,’ she said. ‘I want to hear.’ It came to her that he was doing just what Steven would have done; she tried to drive the thought away. Morris said, ‘The crypt, I think, is the next thing. Solid Norman, apparently, and considered one of the best.’ She followed him down the steps.

Secrecy supplanted space: the secrecies of mysterious and incommunicable mythologies. Frances, looking along the squat ranks of piers, at the vaulted roof, thought: even the air here is different. She examined the strange inhuman faces on the capitals, man-beast mutations, malevolent serpentine heads, and then glanced at Morris, at an elderly man with a camera, squinting upwards, at a little girl in a pink dress. Here we are, she thought, all flesh and feeling in the middle of this dead stone and cold thick air, a place beyond grief or pleasure. She said to Morris, ‘It feels hostile.’

He looked at her, with a slight frown. ‘How?’

‘Because it is beyond everything. Outside time altogether.’

‘We'll go,’ he said solicitously, ‘if it makes you uncomfortable.’

‘Not uncomfortable, really. Just out of place.’

They walked in the cloister. Frances said, ‘I'm flagging, I shall have to have a rest.’ She sat on the stone wall, in sunshine, leaning against a column. She could feel, without turning her head, Morris looking at her; his gaze lay on her face, warm. She moved her head and smiled. Morris said, ‘What is unthinkable is that this weekend has to come to an end.’

‘Then don't think it.’ She stood up. ‘Let's go and have some lunch.’

Morris thought, I shall never be able to come to this place again. Whatever happens between us. For ever after this pleasant Kentish town will be hallowed. Or tainted, as the case may be. Even cathedrals, he realized a little wildly, might be insecure. For ever after, in the dim calm light of naves and choirs, he would see Frances's fair head tilted upwards, inspecting capitals and vaulting.

And the day did not slip from his fingers, as he had feared, but most beautifully expanded. It went on and on. It became, in some miraculous way, time apart; a different quality of time. There was the time in the cathedral and the time eating lunch in the rather crowded pub at the end of the High Street and the time wandering in the afternoon around the bookshops and the cathedral precinct and the garden in which roses so exuberantly bloomed. The time back at the hotel, bathing and changing for dinner, when he came to fetch Frances and found her not yet ready, and sat entranced on the bed while she did her hair and sought out the shoes she needed, and the necklace. The time back in the cathedral, at the concert. The time afterwards, having dinner. Each of which was different: times of gaiety and times of sobriety and times of intimacy and times when distantly, almost beyond awareness, sadness lurked. ‘In the midst of life we are in death,’ said an inscription in the cathedral; Morris, noting it, had thought: no, not death, just change, instability, the flight of things.