Authors: Penelope Lively
Perfect Happiness (27 page)
The telephone rang.
She sat looking at it, in alarm.
She picked it up, at last, and said, ‘Yes?’
‘Is that Frances? This is Ruth Bowers here.’
‘Ruth!’ she exclaimed, ‘You're in London! But of course – your postcard. Only I didn't know exactly when… I couldn't read the date. It's very good to hear you.’
Ruth was saying, ‘And how are
you
?… I called you earlier, I couldn't figure out what I should do, I thought maybe you were out of town…’ ‘How are you?’ she said again. That brisk slightly harsh voice; the voice of goodness and sanity and time was – not so much time, either – salvation.
Frances said, ‘I have been well. Really quite well. Just at this moment I'm feeling rather low, I'm afraid.’
There was a pause. ‘How about me dropping over and visiting for a while?’ said Ruth. ‘If it's not too late for you, it's not too late for me.’
They sat on the sitting-room sofa eating scrambled eggs. The bottle of red wine was half empty. Ruth Bowers said, ‘This is the nearest I've got in years to being back in the dormitory in college.’ She shook, suddenly, with laughter. ‘Hey – will you look at the time! I guess I will take up that offer of your spare bed. My hotel will think I'm having a night on the tiles.’
Frances said, ‘You seem fated to arrive in time to pick up the pieces, where I'm concerned.’
Ruth patted her arm. ‘But you're going to be O.K. now, right?’
‘I think so. Yes, I'm sure I will.’
‘This won't be the last bad day. But I guess each time you'll get a bit better at it. You know something – I'd say your Steven gave that lady the push, way back, never mind all that stuff about mutually agreeing.’
‘Maybe,’ said Frances. ‘In fact I daresay that's right. It wasn't so much her that upset me – I was more upset the first time I realized about her – as this feeling that someone you didn't even know had been eyeing you, for years.’
‘Frances,’ said Ruth. ‘There's an awful lot of people in this world feel the grass somewhere else is greener. Your Steven was the green grass she didn't have.’
‘Not him, really. What went with him.’
Ruth yawned. ‘If you'll excuse me, Frances, I'll borrow that nightdress and go to bed. We have our big day tomorrow and I have to chair one of the sessions.’
‘It was good of you to come over, Ruth. I was feeling very… precarious. Thank you.’
Ruth patted her arm again. ‘A pleasure. Tell you something – Thursday we get our free day and a tour of Blenheim Palace and Stratford upon Avon I can do without. Why don't we have a private day out?’
‘That will be my pleasure,’ said Frances.
A few miles away, sharing nothing with her but the hour, separated by space and by what he felt, Morris lay thinking of Frances. Or rather, since thought implies deliberation, he lay in awareness of Frances. He would have preferred, in fact, to do otherwise, but had no choice. She filled the darkness around his bed, inducing feelings so assorted that he had long since lost track of whether pleasure predominated, or distress. He savoured those hours in Canterbury, again and again; he sat once more in the park with her hand in his; he basked in the warmth of her look. He wondered, protectively, how she had fared at the lecture and the reception. It may be a bit of an ordeal, she had said in the train from Canterbury. And so, all day, he had thought of this; late in the evening he had itched to telephone her, but had resisted, fearing to intrude.
He switched on the light. It was three in the morning. He went to the kitchen, made himself a cup of tea and took it into the living room. He stood for a moment in front of a pile of records on which he had to write an article and placed one on the turntable. But almost at once he took it off, searched along his record cabinet and found the fifth Brandenburg Concerto. Do your worst, he said to it.
And indeed the music invoked that occasion when first he saw her, but what it also brought as he sat there in the middle of the solitary city night was the recognition that in all beginnings, stealthy and unnoticed, lurking like the pod amid the petals, are their endings. Every moment has spawned already its descendants and there is nothing to be done.
It is not ended, he thought. She likes me and she liked going to bed with me and I shall see her again. But I shall not, because of what I now fear would be said in return, ever say to her the things I hoped to say. At least not now and perhaps never. I don't think that she will ever marry me or come to live with me.
And, even as he thought this, resistance softly but stubbornly flamed. But I may be wrong. I do not know. We none of us know. It is not knowing that makes it all endurable.
Frances, Zoe and Tabitha, some weeks later, on a grey afternoon at the dark end of the year, in November, in Cambridge, listen also to music. Not Brandenburg Five but Bartok which Tabitha, who is playing as well as listening, finds tricky. She peers at the score and occasionally is obliged to do some dexterous improvisation (I must practise more, she tells herself sternly) but she is swept along with the rest of them, bar by bar and movement by movement, beginning to end.
Frances and Zoe separately contemplate those impervious faces walled up in their gilt frames and their unimaginable times, those other live and intent faces of the musicians, and the fragile daylight that comes down through the windows. Last time they were here those shafts had been the robust yellow sunshine of early summer and both, independently, note this.
Zoe looks at Tabitha, who is as she was then and also subtly different. I need you, she thinks, I am going to need you, though I will never let on, being the obstinate cuss that I am. We are both older and wiser than when we were last in this room. Especially I, who thought I had done all the learning and changing I ever would.
Five months, thinks Frances. Onward by five months. Onward and outward. And where have they brought me? She considers, sitting there with her hands folded in her lap and the music carrying her with it. Not out of grief but into a state in which, eventually, I can live. Which I have made for myself, out of the past and out of a future that I begin to be able to look at. I am hitched, again, to time and to the world.
*
Later, she drove into London, alone. The city gathered around her as she penetrated it, the houses and shops closing ranks, the traffic slowing and thickening. The grey wintry afternoon was jewelled with lights, green and red and amber in a brilliant avenue ahead all the way down the streets. When she reached her own part it was almost night; the long perspectives of the terraces gleamed pale behind the wrought-iron precision of bare trees and the sudden brilliant flare of street-lamps. The tail-lights of cars glowed, piling up ahead in a bank of colour. An office-block soared into the sky like an incandescent bar and the sky itself was orange, not sky but an extension of what lay beneath, a huge wild reflection of the city. She thought it beautiful, and was quietly exhilarated, as though this were some private vision. She drove towards her house, neither happy nor grieving, looking not backwards into the day but on into the next.
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