The House on Fortune Street (4 page)

campaign to legalize euthanasia and, even more crucial, the assisting thereof. That the case histories were baldly written and largely lack-ing in self-pity only made them more affecting. Standing at the sink, rinsing his plate, Sean felt as if the room were filled with the members of that determined tribe who had decided to end their tenure on the planet and who could contemplate that decision so calmly that they were able to weigh the pros and cons of pills over plastic bags, cliffs over cars, razors over ropes. He turned off the tap, retrieved his notebook, and headed to the library.

is trip to Oxford began badly. He was up until midnight the night before and woke early, uncertain about one of his key points. As he reached the bus stop the rain started; umbrella-less, he did his best to protect his bag of books. The bus, when it came, was crowded, and the large man he sat next to fidgeted throughout the journey. Staring past him at the sodden fields, still wan from the recent heat wave, Sean struggled to decide whether the results of his late-night efforts were brilliant or specious. In town with almost an hour to spare, he decided to go to a café near the college. Perhaps coffee and a crois-sant would clarify his thoughts. He was sitting at a corner table, going

over his notes, when someone said his name.

“How are you?” said Judy.“May I join you?” She was standing before him, an umbrella in one hand, a book in the other.

“I’m here to see Georgina,” Sean said.

“Well, I promise not to make you late,” she said, setting her book on the table and herself in a chair. “It must be my month for meeting the Wymans. I ran into your brother last week.”

Sean stared at her incredulously. Her voice was warm; she was smiling. Was this the same woman who less than two years ago had called

him a moral pygmy, hauled his suitcases out of the closet, and told him to pack? “How was Lochlan?” he said, trying to match her tone. “I haven’t spoken to him in a while.”

“He seemed fine.” Judy’s dimple made a brief appearance. “Very pleased about his promotion. How’s Keats?”

Sean felt himself grimace. In an ideal world he would report that everything was going splendidly, but the habit of complaining to Judy was too strong. He described his struggles with tracing Keats’s influ-ences and asked about her work.

Judy confided that she had defended her thesis, received her doctorate, and best of all, Macmillan was going to publish her manuscript next year; she just had to make it more accessible. “At first I wanted to defend every footnote,” she said.“Then I began to enjoy myself. It’s nice to think that people like my mother will be able to read the book.”

“That’s great.” He would have given ten years of his life to be able to announce the same three events.

“And”—she smiled—“I’m pregnant. Your coffee smells so good.” As if realizing that he was having trouble processing the informa-

tion, she added that the baby was due in January. “Great,” Sean said again. It seemed the key word for his side of this conversation. He and Judy had talked about babies as something to be considered only after their dissertations were done, which, of course, hers was. He glanced at his watch, too rapidly to take in the time, and said that he had to go.

“I’m so glad we ran into each other,” she said. “Maybe it’s the baby, but I’ve been thinking about you recently, wanting to let you know that I don’t bear you a grudge any longer. People do change. Roger and I are very happy together. I hope you and Abigail are too.” She stood up—now he could see the small bulge taking over her waistline—and bent to hug him. As her arms wrapped around him, Sean smelled her familiar perfume. For a shameful moment he felt the sting of tears.

Back out in the rainy street he no longer cared whom he encoun-

tered. He strode along oblivious to pedestrians, umbrellas, puddles, traffic. Soon after their wedding, he and Judy had spent a day explor-ing the Cotswolds. They were driving from one exquisite village to the next when, in the middle of a field of cows, they spotted a small stone church. They had pulled onto the verge and gone to investigate. The door was locked, a bird’s nest wedged in one corner, but round the back they had found a couple of milk crates and climbed up to peer through the leaded windows. Sean had never forgotten the sight that met his eyes. The narrow nave was crammed not with pews but with statues of knights, maybe eight or nine of them, lying on their tombs, hands folded on their chests, dogs or swords or, in one case, a book, at their pointed feet. How peaceful and dusty they looked. He wished he’d asked Judy if she remembered them too. It would have been nice to be back together, even briefly, in that pool of memory where no one else would ever swim.

At the college, he barely nodded to the porter. He made his way through the archway, along the gloomy cloisters, and up the dark stairs that led to Georgina’s door. Although he was ten minutes early, he knocked twice. Her voice, surprisingly deep for such a reed of a woman, said, “Come in.”

Inside she was sitting in her usual chair. The first time Sean had entered this room, with its large desk and walls of books, he had thought it the perfect scholar’s lair, a place of high wit and deep endeavor. Now, by the feeble light of the desk lamp, the books looked dusty, the fur-nishings soiled; it seemed a fitting home for fraudulent theories and secondhand thoughts. “Sean,” said Georgina, “you’re very prompt. I worried the rain might slow you down.”

“I caught an earlier bus.”

Georgina stood up from behind her desk—she was wearing a smoke gray dress—and gesturing for him to sit in one of the two chairs by

the window, left the room. Before he could speculate as to what she was doing, she returned with a white towel in her outstretched hand. Unthinkingly he buried his face in the fabric. It felt good to be surrounded, even momentarily, by warm darkness. If only he didn’t have to emerge. But he did, and there was Georgina, staring out of the rainy window as usual.

“‘In drear-nighted December,’” she said in a conversational voice,“‘too happy, happy tree, thy branches ne’er remember their green felicity.’”

She was quoting, Sean knew, from the poem Keats had written when he finished Endymion; the promise of those lines had been one of the factors that persuaded him, after months of uncertainty, to give up his career in insurance.

“We’re in the middle of Book III, aren’t we?” she said.

“No.” The towel lay in his lap, absurdly, like a napkin, and his hands, pink and raw, lay on top.

At last she turned to look at him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Am I mis-remembering?”

“No.” All you needed for any conversation was one word. “You’re correct about the book, wrong about the tense. We were in the middle of Book III, but no longer. I’ve decided to quit. I’m tired of being a burden to myself, and you, and everyone else. I’m tired of this endless quest.”

In the silence that followed, he thought she might be about to start quoting again—something about the happy, happy brook—but instead she looked at him for a few more seconds, and turned back to the window.

“Of course it’s your choice,” she said, “but I do think it’s a pity. Another six months and you would have made a really useful contribu-tion to Keats scholarship.”

So why did you always behave like I was boring you to death, thought

Sean. He was so angry he could hardly speak. “Thank you,” he said. As he stood up, the towel fell to the floor. He left it lying there, a crumpled flag of surrender, and walked out.

n the next bus back to London, with two seats to himself,

he stared once again at the wan fields. He remembered how when he was ten he had smashed his entire collection of birds’ eggs—three years’ work gone in three minutes—because a boy at school had made a joke. Then there was the occasion he had stolen his brother’s blazer and thrown it in a ditch. He had been a teenager before he learned, as his mother was always asking, to use his words, not his fists. And then, it was around the time he discovered girls, he began to realize that words were not just a substitute for fighting; they could persuade, seduce, get you things. Until then he had wanted to be a train driver, like his father, but suddenly he had started to study and do his home-work. He was only the third pupil from his small high school to get a place at Oxford.

Now, in an impulsive moment, he had turned his back on nearly seven years of work, and he desperately needed Abigail to tell him he had made the right choice. He got off the bus at Marble Arch and dodged his way through the crowds to the underground station. For once every train was punctual, every escalator working, and at the theater office his luck held. Abigail was at her desk; she smiled at the sight of him, and was happy to go to the pub on the corner. She had had a meeting at the bank that morning and, in her suit, with her hair pinned up, she looked disconcertingly like one of his former colleagues at the insurance company. Beneath her fuchsia umbrella her face glowed, from which he guessed that his own, beneath the black one he’d bor-

rowed from the stage manager, must have a funereal tinge. “What is it?” she kept asking. But he refused to say anything until they were seated, her with a glass of wine, him with a scotch. The pub was nearly empty, save for a group of nurses—going off duty we hope, said Abigail—and four boys playing darts.

“Cheers,” Sean said, raising his glass. The sharp fragrance of whiskey filled his head and was at once translated into the sharp taste. To his surprise his heart was racing, as if he were on the edge of something momentous, although surely he had stepped over that edge two hours before. He took a second, smaller sip and said, “I quit. I told Georgina I wasn’t going to finish my dissertation.”

As he spoke clapping broke out; the tallest of the boys had thrown a bull’s-eye. On the bus Sean had pictured Abigail applauding when he told her what he’d done, giving him an exuberant kiss. Finally he was relinquishing this project that took so much time and brought him neither money nor delight. Finally he was rejoining the adult world, where people expected a proper return for their labor.

“But why?” She made her pouting expression. “You’ve worked on it for so long. You’re nearly finished. Why would you give up now? I remember the first time we met you talked about Keats and Fanny. They’re like members of our household.”

Each sentence winged its way unerringly to the target, and each was more wounding because it was something he could also imagine Judy saying. And that, of course, their accidental meeting, was what he could not reveal to Abigail. “I thought you’d be pleased,” he said. “You’re always complaining about how slowly I work.”

“Of course I complain. You do too. I never thought that meant you would give up.” She put down her own drink and, moving their glasses aside, reached for his hands.“What happened? Did Georgina say something?”

“No.” He struggled against the impulse to pull free of her grasp. “And please don’t keep saying I gave up. This wasn’t a search for the elixir of life; this was another book about a poet who’s already been the subject of far too many books. I got tired of being overextended. I got tired of juggling the theater and Keats and the project with Valentine. It was too many words to read and write. And even when I finished the dissertation, nothing would have changed. You can’t get an academic job without publications and you can’t publish without an academic affiliation. You wouldn’t keep putting on plays if no one came to see them.”

“I suppose”—Abigail squeezed his hands—“but that’s different. This just seems such a big decision. And you didn’t mention it to me.”

“I did drop a couple of hints. You’ve been so busy.” He wasn’t sure himself if this was true but, for the first time that day, a woman responded to him in the way he hoped. Abigail began to apologize for being so preoccupied. “I know sometimes things get away from me,” she said.

Halfway through his second whiskey, he confided Georgina’s parting remark. “It made me furious.”

“But isn’t it nice to know you were doing well?”

“It’s so fucking Ox-bridge. I work like a dog for six years, nearly seven, without a glimmer of encouragement, and now out of the blue, when she’s driven me to quit, she praises me.”

“You don’t have to be interested in everything you’re good at. Besides”—Abigail smiled—“you’ve already been working on Keats’s poems for longer than he took to write them.”

Last week on the phone Valentine had made the same irritating comment. Now, while Abigail continued to mouth reassurances, he followed Georgina’s example, staring through the window at the street outside. His heart had stopped racing; if anything it seemed to be going about its business even more slowly than usual. How could he say to Abigail that his failure as an academic had been one more item tip-ping the scales in her direction? If he had thought his dissertation was

going well, he wouldn’t have been lured into working with Valentine, spending time apart from Judy; he might never have met Abigail and surrendered to the barrage of her affection.

or several days he didn’t tell anyone else about what he

regarded as his second divorce. He talked to friends on the phone, he went to the theater office, he e-mailed with Valentine, and did not mention that his life had changed. Abigail, either sensing the fury that lay behind his decision or, more likely, busy and already consigning his failure to the unalterable past, asked no further questions. Almost a week after his trip to Oxford, on his way to buy groceries, he ran into Dara. She was kneeling beside the flower bed in the front garden. “Oh, Sean,” she said, getting to her feet, “I was just trying to make more room. I overplanted, as usual.”

Her reddish brown hair was falling around her face and her cheeks were flushed. She looked much more attractive, Sean thought, than Virginia Woolf, whose famous portrait adorned her T-shirt. The sleeves were rolled up, and he glimpsed the pale pock of a vaccination mark on one biceps. When he announced he was going to the supermarket—could he get her anything?—she set aside her trowel and said she’d come too. As they headed down the street, he asked if she had the day off; she often worked odd hours at the counseling center.

“I’m afraid not. I have to go in this afternoon to run support groups. Attendance is erratic in the summer, but the people who are around need the groups more than ever, so we decided to keep them going. You’re off to Tuscany next week, aren’t you?”

“Yes. I’m sure it’ll be great once we get there, but right now we’re both in a panic about how much we have to do before we go. What about you and Edward? When do you leave for Brittany?”