Perfect Happiness (4 page)

She lay drowsing. Oh Steven, she thought, I miss you. I'd have called you, later, and told you the gossip I picked up in New York and about that crazy Senator and had a barney with you about one of our many subjects of disagreement and felt the better for it. I don't understand death. It's not a question of raging or refusing to accept; I simply don't understand it. I don't understand how a person can go, for ever. How the air-space – for lack of a better term – that person filled is empty; how there is nothing left but a name and some unassociated thoughts. My thoughts and Frances's thoughts and the thoughts of a few others. How can Steven, of all people, be reduced to a matter of other people's thoughts?

Mum used to put us in the bath together, time out of mind ago. Taking it in turns theoretically for the tap end, but as soon as she wasn't looking we used to start a fight about it, may the best man win, me usually because I was more reckless about splashing and getting found out. Steven would calculate and manoeuvre. I was always the one in trouble. Poor mum and dad, we bewildered them from the start. We were clever and not ordinary and we burst out of their lives, perhaps we were both changelings. Mum looks at me now from behind a wall of knitting bless her and says, keeping well, I hope, dear, that's good, mind I couldn't live like you do but of course you have your job. She avoids reading anything I have written. It embarrasses her still to have a daughter who gets her name in the papers. Steven on the telly was acceptable; television confers status at least in Marlow and anyway Steven's world was more mysteriously respectable. But we were both cuckoos in the nest; we should have been unobtrusive and uneventful and lived out tidy lives in the Thames valley, like mum and dad. When dad died the neighbours turned out and said he had a good life, he had what he wanted, he always kept the garden wonderfully, he'll be missed at the Rotary. True, all of it; I doubt he ever knew the torments of frustration or envy or aspiration. Clearly genetics are not always straightforward. They gave me a good plain serviceable name and when I was seven I announced that I was not Jane but Zoe, the second name given me in dutiful tribute to dad's mother who died young. Maybe she was the errant gene. But I knew I couldn't go through life as Jane, with my face and my temperament. And because I was always more strong-willed than either of them or even both together they had to give in, and Zoe I was and am. Zoe Jane.

The bath water cooled and in it Zoe dozed, sliding without effort into that restful place where reality is fractured, where emotion is untrue, where things are not really happening, from which one can always escape. She dreamed and half-dreamed; she had sex and lost her temper and fled in fear, but none of this could touch her. She woke, with a start, to the pealing telephone.

Frances, given all her life to the construction of alternative futures, stuffed into a black plastic bag the contents of those ransacked drawers – the old calendars and Christmas cards and engagement diaries. The black plastic bag would be received into the churning maw of the council lorry and the shredded remains consigned to some smouldering rubbish tip. Or so one supposed. The diary with its dead days would become pulp or ash and the days themselves would survive only in the head, a random selection. Most would be extinguished, unless they happened to include the assassination of Kennedy, or more personal circumstances whose echoes inescapably persist.

The wedding day, preserved in the photographer's album gently requested by Steven's parents (and indulgently despised by hers, people of a different caste of mind). Glossy faces smiling (or not) amid flowers and hats and the draperies of some public room. The album must be kept, though what it shows is neither what happened nor what was rehearsed, at least by Frances. Mostly, what did not happen is eclipsed by what did, but those dreaming rehearsals, curiously, survived yet, the anticipatory time during which she went to work and rode in London buses and controlled in the head the processes of that day. Held conversations and constructed scenes, considered and arranged and re-arranged. Presided over the fraternization of her parents and the Brooklyns, hopefully joined together Zoe and her friend Henry Winters, drove away with Steven into – well, no, not into the sunset but at least a rose-tinted plane to Venice. All this lingers still, but is overlaid by the sharper image of her mother and father, smiling benignly but uncomprehendingly at the Brooklyns who are enduring the day, and can be seen to be doing so. And Henry Winters was unable in the event to come and did not care for Zoe when eventually he did meet her. And the plane was tiresomely delayed so that what remains is irritability at the airport born of tiredness and subsiding elation. And Steven's briefcase, stuffed with work which surely could have been laid aside for a few days. And Zoe, later, fondly scoffing: ‘Your parents, love, and our mum and dad, will send each other Christmas cards for five years and be thankful never to set eyes on one another again. Our mum and dad are alarmed by yours, and yours are made uncomfortable by ours. So what? Why should everybody love each other?’ – and, reading Frances's thoughts – ‘Oh yes, of course they like Steven, your dad can spot a young man who's going to go far, and don't think I'm being snide, he's not a headmaster of a famous school for nothing, he knows a high-flier when he sees one. So Steven gets the British Housemaster seal of approval. And don't look like that, you silly girl, my mum and dad don't
want
dinner invitations and weekend parties; they want to sit tight where they feel safe and no-one's going to expect them to put themselves out.’

Thus, the wedding day. Crystallized now, but susceptible of course to the revisions of what is yet to be.

Making love, at last, in the Venetian hotel, in the small hours of the morning, exhausted and with waning desire but mutual compunction. Frances dazed suddenly with the realization that it is true, it has happened, she is married to Steven. Standing beside the bed pulling off her clothes, with the new nightdress laid out ready and Steven saying I shouldn't bother to put that on, darling. Are you sure you want… she says, seeing for an instant his tired face, and he answers firmly that of course he does, why, don't you? Have you…? says Steven delicately, and she says just a minute, I'll pop in the bathroom, and once there she takes the diaphragm from her toilet bag and looks at it and puts it back again with guilt and abandon knowing that he would be cross but she can always say it was an accident, everyone knows they're not a hundred per cent reliable. And oh please God may I have a baby. Lying beside Steven in the morning, holding his hand, water slapping the sides of a canal beyond the window, privately and indulgently constructing this child, its eyes its hair its sayings the school to which it will go its clothes…

Today, in north London, taking the black plastic bag outside the back door, such games are no longer played. The wisdoms of today cloud the reflection, lying across that frame of the Venetian bedroom like slides flung down one upon another. Steven's profile against the flashing poplars of a French road, swish-swish, the kilometres ticking away, another twenty-five to go, another fifteen… Zoe, lying against huge feather pillows, saying, ‘Give us a kiss…’

She put the plastic bag down beside the dustbins and the growing heap of domestic rejections alongside. This paring down of possessions gave her a dour satisfaction. She stood staring at the line of rooftops opposite. The sky had the immense and translucent look of city skies; aircraft crawled across it. The skimpy front gardens of the houses were shabby with London summer, offering tattered leaves and grass pocked with litter. The pavement was planted at regular intervals with young trees girdled by little wire fences, products of the energies of the local Residents' Association, of which Steven had been for some years the inactive President. They can have my name, he said crisply, but not my time, I'm afraid; the arrangement was apparently agreeable to all. The trees were flourishing, in copious leaf and un-vandalized.

A neighbour walked past, smiling awkwardly as she caught sight of Frances. She had never succeeded in making more than peripheral contact with others in the street. Those who knew of Steven tended to be intimidated; those who did not were puzzled at their failure to match the house. Living somewhere like that, they should have appeared richer or smarter. Steven, in any case, was both bored and irritated by random social contacts. He was impatient with the foolish and disliked being exposed to the curious responses that the well-known arouse in others: lust, prurience, hostility and aggression. He had perfected the art of avoidance; entering a room, he would select at once those to whom he wished to talk, and slide quite unobtrusively away from everyone else. He seldom gave offence, oddly enough; he was adept at simply disappearing, not being at hand, slipping from the room. The neighbours had seldom seen more of him than a departing back and an undiscriminating smile. Frances, tarred with Steven's inaccessibility, was on equable but distant terms with them. Content with her life, she did not really wish it otherwise, but disliked the idea of being thought aloof.

In a few weeks, now, she would leave this street behind. It would become, simply, another landscape in the head. She tied the neck of the plastic bag more tightly, rearranged a stack of cardboard boxes, and went back into the house. She had to go out, to attend the meeting of a committee arranging a series of lectures in Steven's memory.

‘Hi!’ said Zoe. ‘Fred! Long time no talk to you. Where are you? We have a stinking awful line, I can hardly hear you. What? Milan. What the hell are you doing in Milan – covering the Scala season? What's a self-respecting political correspondent doing in Milan? Sorry – spell that one out, I didn't get it. Yes, I have a nephew called Harry Brooklyn.’

She wrote, fast. ‘Just give me this slowly, Fred, and shout, do you mind. Right. Yes, I've got that. Jesus… Well, thank God for that at least. Give me that hospital's name again. Which lot of nuts was this? Oh hell – what does it matter… No, you were absolutely right to call me first. Thank you. When exactly was this? Good – I can get to her before she sees a paper. Yes, sure I'll let you know.’

The sound of Frances's telephone beginning to ring was drowned by her slam of the front door. She walked quickly down the street to the bus-stop; she would have preferred to leave the planning of these lectures entirely to those involved, feeling she had little or nothing useful to offer, but people had been insistent. People she did not know, or hardly knew. Voices and names from Steven's external life; voices to whom, over the years, she had said sorry, I'm afraid he's not back yet… can you just hold on, I'll write that down… Names at the foot of letters, scrawled on memo pads.

Well, go with him, says Zoe, years back, counselling, calming… Go to the bloody conference with him, leave the kids with your mum, go and swan around Stockholm or wherever it is for a few days. And so, suddenly, there she had been in this glassed and carpeted hotel in which milled people docketed with their names and occupations and where Steven, similarly docketed, underwent before her eyes a strange metamorphosis. He became someone else. She saw him on the far side of rooms, on platforms, hurrying down corridors, and she saw him as a different person. His expression and his gestures lost the significance of intimacy and became those of an acquaintance. The response of others fed this process; she caught snatches of conversation – ‘Brooklyn of course has a personal axe to grind’, ‘I want to get Steven on the sub-committee’, ‘Steven Brooklyn could be sounded out on that’. At night, in bed, she searched his face and found in it the shadow of this stranger. She told him that she felt, here, distanced from him, and they quarrelled, in that alien room, with light from passing cars washing across the linen-weave curtains. He said, ‘Frances, sometimes you are possessive’, and the words, for years – still, today – stayed in her ears. She wanted to ask him if he loved her, and did not do so. The next day, she sat with a hundred others in a lecture hall and stared at Steven as he spoke: the way the light flashed on his glasses, the tiny scar on his cheek from when he fell off his bike as a boy, the bit of hair that flopped down on to his forehead, the shirt that she had washed. They had been married now for seven years and she thought of this man for much of every day; his moods and his requirements dominated her life not by reason of selfishness or arrogance but because she wished it so. He was her centre. Sitting here, in this strange city, among strangers, her own obsession seemed both misplaced and irrelevant. After the lecture people had gathered round him. She saw him locked in conversations, jotting something on a pad, turning to those who loitered for a word. A man she recognized, a colleague of Steven's from home, said, ‘Busy fellow nowadays, your husband, you'll have to wait your turn.’ She flushed, for herself and at his ineptitude. After that, she seldom accompanied Steven on such occasions. There were tracts of his life of which she knew little, alien jungles whose allure she resented but to which she was resigned. Despising herself, she envied the safely paired lives of neighbouring women. She paid bills and attended school speech days alone and read Steven's name in newspapers, often in contexts of which she knew nothing. If she asked him questions he answered patiently. If I don't tell you about things, he said, it's because I assume you wouldn't find them particularly interesting. I spent all morning with the Roland Committee. I had lunch with someone from the BBC. In the afternoon I gave a lecture at the Institute and then was nobbled by a rather tiresome woman called somebody Geering who wants me to contribute to a journal she edits. He looks across the room, smiling; in a bowl, blue hyacinths lurch on fleshy stalks and beyond the window Tabitha and Harry whoop on the garden swing.