The House on Fortune Street (3 page)

theories. It was after one of their more dismal meetings—Georgina had disputed his interpretation of Keats’s unfinished faerie tale, “The Cap and Bells”—that he had run into Valentine in the covered market.

The two had become friends as undergraduates and continued to meet occasionally when they both moved to London. Since Sean’s return to Oxford they had fallen out of touch; now they greeted each other with enthusiasm. Valentine was in town to review Mother Courage at the Playhouse. He suggested a drink which turned into lunch. Over steak and kidney pie, he expressed admiration for Sean’s scholarly choice, pursuing a Ph.D., and Sean hastened to reciprocate, praising Valentine’s more worldly activities. “How many people”—he waved toward the bar—“give a toss about Keats?”

“In this room”—Valentine pretended a quick survey—“probably eight. The rest prefer Coleridge.” Then he confessed that he’d been trying to sell a book proposal. He had heard this morning that it had been rejected, again. From his jacket pocket he produced a letter, and began to read it aloud. The first paragraph was indeed a refusal, but the second mentioned a different project: writing the family history of a well-known Labour peer.

“That sounds interesting,” Sean had said. “And it would give you a foot in the door.”

By the end of lunch he had talked Valentine into accepting the editor’s suggestion and Valentine had talked him into helping with the book. “Join me in Grub Street,” he had said, laughing. When Sean went home and told Judy, she too had laughed. A fortnight later, however, when the contract appeared, she had been less amused. He needed to bear down on his dissertation, she argued, not get distracted. He reminded her that he’d been wrestling with the second chapter for most of the last year. A few months more wouldn’t make a difference, and the money would. She remained unconvinced, but he had signed the contract, and even she had to admit that their household was a happier place without

his writer’s block. He no longer spent a morning on a sentence, a week on a paragraph. He liked the comparatively minimal research, and he liked the prospect of seeing the book in stores, where people might buy it and even read it.

Only after they exchanged chapters did he understand that his work was no longer his own; it was inextricably yoked to Valentine’s. Valentine had rung up brimming with compliments. “Hey, this is in terrific shape. There’s just one or two places where you’re being a little too fancy for our readers.” Then he asked about his chapters and Sean faltered. They were a mess at every level. The sentences were awkward; the organization muddled; the research poorly integrated. “I’m doing some fine-tuning,” he said. “Ironing out some contradictions.”

“So when can we put the whole thing together? This weekend?” “How about next Wednesday?”

He hadn’t worked so hard since he was an undergraduate writing essays at the last moment. By the time he finished scarcely a sentence of Valentine’s chapters was left untouched. On Tuesday night he was smugly pleased with the results. On Wednesday morning he woke to the complications of what he’d done. He spent the bus journey to London rehearsing conciliatory speeches: Valentine’s work was fine, most of the changes were due to the way he, Sean, had written his chapters. As he waited on Valentine’s doorstep, he pictured his advisor staring listlessly out of the window while he offered his latest insights. He had always assumed that she was bored. Now he wondered if she hated his prose, despised his research.

Valentine had greeted him exuberantly, poured coffee, and begun to show Sean the changes he’d made on his pages, mostly for the worse. They were on chapter four when the phone rang. “Absolutely,” said Valentine into the receiver. “I’m free for the next few weeks.”

When he hung up he announced that he’d been asked to do some television reviews; all the pleasures of home, and you could tape them

if you fell asleep. Then he looked at the clock and said there was no need to scrutinize every page; they could catch things in copyediting. And so Sean had pointed out a couple of alterations. “I thought head-ings would help.” “This seemed a stronger conclusion.” Within no time the manuscript was disappearing into Valentine’s briefcase to be delivered to the publisher that afternoon.

Initially Sean had been jubilant. He’d done it, he’d got away with it. The book would be readable, intelligent, unembarrassing. They went out for an excellent meal, the editor was happy, the agent was happy, and Valentine himself seemed oblivious to the transformation his prose had undergone. Only later did Sean grasp the unfortunate precedent he’d established.

He was even slower to realize how working with Valentine had changed his marriage. His harmonious routines with Judy—those long afternoons at the library when they always seemed to reach a good stopping point at the same moment, the predictable discussion about whether to go to the pub on the way home, the pleasant encounters with friends—had been disrupted and were not to be easily restored. Before the book they had always spent weekends together, but that autumn when Sean’s old friend Tyler invited them to Sunday lunch and Judy had a cold, he had not thought twice about going to London alone.

And then this woman, with hair the color of corn and eyes that made him think of the flowers his mother grew, had sat down beside him and hung on his every word. A few weeks later she was in Oxford to see a play and had asked, quite casually, if he’d like to have a drink, and a few weeks after that she had accompanied him to the British Museum. Nothing like this had happened to Sean before. University had cured him of the notion that he was an outstanding scholar. As for his appearance, he knew he was tall and dark, but it had never occurred to him that the combination of his father’s thick hair and elegant nose with his mother’s fair skin and full lips could be counted handsome.

By the time he understood that Abigail was not merely interested in his literary expertise, or he in her lively conversation, it was too late. She made him feel vivid and fascinating, and she made the world feel that way too.

There were obstacles—her career with its uncertain demands, his marriage, the fact that she was in London, he in Oxford, the protests of friends, including Tyler—but he and Abigail had believed that something amazing had befallen them. Which was not to say that he had ever intended to leave Judy. Bewilderingly, excruciatingly, his passion for Abigail failed to cancel his feelings for Judy, and vice versa. The thought of choosing one, and renouncing the other, made him feel as if he were wandering in a library where every shelf was bare.

“If you love me,” said Judy, repeatedly, “you’ll stop hurting me.” One bleak afternoon—they had been walking by the river—she even hinted that her despair might be fatal.

Abigail neither accused nor blamed him; this thing had happened; it was no one’s fault. Instead, as surely as any Socrates, she led him to the knowledge that his marriage was a failure or, more kindly, a way of getting through his twenties. He and Judy were friends, they had interests in common, but how could they make each other happy when there was no passion? Sean would listen, and agree, but later, after he and Abigail had made love, he would lie beside her thinking about the spring he and Judy had borrowed a cottage near Lyme Regis and spent a whole, blustery day walking the cliff path, gathering little pencil-shaped fos-sils, and debating where they would go if they won the lottery. Or the evening they’d gone punting on the river and come across a choir of schoolchildren, standing on the bank, singing Brahms, and Judy, sitting at his feet, had joined in. She was his other self; the thought of a future without her was insupportable. He just needed one more day with Abigail, one more night. Then he would give her up, without regret, and resume his old life.

His vacillation intensified Abigail’s ardor, or so it seemed. She had strewn their bed with rose petals; she had taken him to Keats’s house, and, embarrassingly, stood beside the plum tree reciting “Ode to a Nightingale”; she had examined the bumps and hollows of his skull and praised his fillings. Then one day she left a message on his phone saying she had had enough, and disappeared. Her voice mail was full and, when he made the journey to London, her door remained closed. At the height of his anguish, Judy announced that she was moving in with a vet named Roger, who had two Labradors and a six-year-old son, and wanted to share his life with her. In a daze Sean had packed his suitcases and gone in search of Abigail. Newly back from Paris, she answered the door and, when he said he couldn’t live without her, flung her arms around him. He knew the syllogisms of romance. He had broken his life apart for her; therefore she must be the love of his life. Endless promises were exchanged, including the promise of no promises. You can’t legislate affection, Abigail had argued.

At the time he had agreed. More recently, though, he had found himself thinking that marriage was not merely an empty ritual. It was a plea for patience on the part of those involved, and for mercy on the part of bystanders. Abigail’s relentless assault on his marriage was, he’d discovered, most unusual. All very well for his friends to take the moral high ground, but how many of them, faced with such temptation, such ingenuity, would have fared any better?

ince starting his job at the theater, Sean had learned to divide his working day. The morning hours, when he felt freshest, went to Keats. In the afternoons he read scripts and worked on pro-gram notes. In the evenings he did research or, when she was available, enjoyed Abigail’s company. Now, in this full schedule, a space must be

made to dash off his chapters on euthanasia. He had to remind himself what a relief it had been to make cordial arrangements for an overdraft.

The morning after the meeting with the secretary, he carried his coffee upstairs and sat down at his desk. He was in the middle of explaining how the parts of Endymion written in Oxford owed a debt to the seventeenth-century poet Katherine Philips. As he tried to retrace his argument, he caught sight of the folder of case histories lying on the corner of the desk. What had he meant by c.f. Canto IV? He reached for the poem, hoping to find a marginal note or yellow flag. A fat, metal-lic fly buzzed in through the window, orbited his desk, and sauntered out again. Following its flight, Sean noticed that the sky was no longer a cloudless blue but had, in the last hour, turned to some molten non-color. It was already very warm. He stood up. On his way to fetch a glass of water, he moved the folder to the bookcase by the door.

Back at his desk he switched on his computer and, refusing the lure of e-mail, opened his current chapter. Was it necessary, he pondered, to give much detail about the obscure Philips? The mere possibility was aggravating, but he had an appointment with his supervisor next week. At their last meeting, when he had expected her to dismiss him until late September, Georgina had suggested that they get together once a fortnight throughout the summer. Sean had not had the wit, or the wherewithal, to protest that he could barely produce enough material for their present monthly schedule. The last four or five days before each meeting found him at his desk until midnight, trying to grind out a few more paragraphs. And (surely it was just his imagination) Abigail often seemed, during these busy times, to have free tickets to a play, or to want to invite friends to dinner. Judy had sometimes been frustrated by his working methods, by his need to have each sentence perfect before he could proceed, but she had sympathized with his ambitions. Abigail, at first so full of admiration, had lately seemed bewildered by

his lack of progress. Last week she had remarked that Dickens wrote

Great Expectations in less than a year.

Even more than the anguish of producing pages, Sean hated going back to Oxford. He had first come to the city as an eighteen-year-old, thrilled to have got a place at Wadham College. He had loved wandering the busy streets and he had loved leaving the streets for the cloistered world of the colleges. After graduation he had left reluctantly to pursue his sensible job in London. When at last he returned, he had thought of himself as following, far behind but honorably, in Keats’s footsteps, choosing this arcane world over more conventional ambitions: a career, a mortgage, children. In leaving Judy, he had not understood that he was also leaving Oxford. Although he still went to the college, and still worked at the Bodleian Library, he was now an outsider. On the bus from London his heart sank as the city came into view; the sight of each familiar landmark was like a hammer blow to his spirits. When he finally got off the bus, near St. Catherine’s College, he would wear his sunglasses and keep his gaze on the pavement, in the hope of not meeting anyone he knew, or if he did, of passing unnoticed. On the rare occasions when people recognized him, he asked about their lives, their work, and, as soon as they began to reciprocate, claimed an urgent appointment. Now Georgina was telling him to subject himself to these torments even more frequently only to end up in her study, stammering out his meager insights, while she gazed at the college’s exquisite gardens.

Slowly Sean found his way back into his argument; slowly he tracked down a crucial passage in Philips, then looked up a phrase in Para-dise Lost, losing himself for nearly an hour in Milton’s fluent verse. He consulted a letter Keats had written to Benjamin Bailey, and reviewed Bailey’s comments on Book III of Endymion, at which point it was time for lunch.

The kitchen was a little cooler, and he decided he might as well

glance at the case histories while he ate. Stupid to dread a pile of pages. He must try to take Valentine’s robust attitude: this was just a job; it meant gin in the cupboard, money in the bank. He put together a ham sandwich, retrieved the folder from upstairs, and sat at the table.

Each history consisted of a brief description of the person’s age, circumstances, and illness, as well as an account, in his or her own words, of the reasons for suicide. Here was Anne, aged seventy-three, a widow, comfortably off with two married daughters, diagnosed with Parkinson’s. I’m a prisoner, she wrote, condemned to endless solitary confinement. Why would anyone inflict this on another person? She had hoarded her prescriptions, painfully, for months, paid her cleaner, had her hair permed, and chosen the dress she wanted to wear in her coffin. She had consumed her pills and died, as she had hoped, at home in her sleep.

Here was Ian, paralyzed since an accident at a building site when he was twenty-four. Now, at fifty-one, macular degeneration was destroy-ing his last great pleasure: reading. Sean winced and added mustard to his sandwich. Using considerable ingenuity and a gas oven, Ian had killed himself. A friend helped me figure out how to do it, he wrote with his specially modified keypad, but I made sure he was down at the pub all evening so he wouldn’t get in trouble.

Here was Frank, thirty-three (my age, thought Sean), a landscape gardener, in the grip of an aggressive brain tumor. He was already researching euthanasia when his father had a stroke. It’s too much for my mum, he said, looking after the two of us. My dad is sixty-one. He deserves his best shot at the next twenty years. After the failure of his first attempt, he spoke with fury about his doctor who doled out his pills a week at a time. She’d rather I traumatize some train driver than die peacefully in my own bed. If I could, I’d detonate myself in her waiting

room.

These and similar testimonials formed the heart of the society’s