Perfect Happiness (2 page)

Zoe, too, is snatched up by the course of events. She, too, is in the world of telegrams and not anger but irresistible forces. She cannot come for the weekend because the paper is sending her to cover a party conference; she must dash off on Boxing Day, sorry, because there's a chance to interview this visiting celebrity in London. Be my still calm centre, Frances love, she says, God knows I need one. And, in a different still calm centre, there she forever is, in the head, unreachable and unchanging.

… Sitting cross-legged on a mottled green carpet that is balding and pitted in places with cigarette burns, squinting in a bar of sunlight and saying, ‘Stay and meet my brother Steven, my brother what I told you about, him that's just got a first the clever sod. He's all right, though, he's not like other people's brothers. You haven't got one, have you, duckie? Share mine.’ And she pours tea from a flowery Victorian pot that will one day stand on the mantelpiece of an office in Fleet Street, a home for Kleenex and rubber bands, one of the mindless things that travel with us through our lives: objects and places…

Places, above all, are minefields. This, the grieving learn. Cambridge, now, has been braved, thought Frances. Cambridge, where last year Steven came with me to take Tabitha's stuff up for her and we quarrelled because I thought he was coming home after and in fact he was going to Manchester for a meeting and he said as it was he hadn't really the time for this… Not a happy day, no, but one that nevertheless made a minefield of Cambridge, which has now been gingerly trodden.

Happiness, of course, is forever bound to place, to the physical world. We are never happy now, only then. Walking then on a Dorset hill, wind lifting the hair, and a hand, suddenly, on one's back… Sunlight sifting down through the apple tree in the garden at Pulborough, lying like coins among the daisies of the lawn. Happiness is out there, back there, in association with those sights and sounds, and to retrieve it is to retrieve them also, to bring them crowding into the dark bedroom at three in the morning: mocking. Perfect happiness, past perfect, pluperfect.

Unhappiness, now so intimately known, is a very different matter. Unhappiness is now, not then at all. Unhappiness is like being in love: it occupies every moment of every day. It will not be put aside and like love it isolates; grief is never contagious.

Loss clamped her every morning as she woke; it sat its grinding weight on her and rode her, like the old man of the sea. It roared in her ears when people talked to her so that frequently she did not hear what they said. It interrupted her when she spoke, so that she faltered in mid-sentence, lost track. A little less, now; remissions came and went. The days stalked by, taking her with them.

On the first day, on the morning of the first day, the day after Steven was found dead from a heart-attack in his car in the car park of the BBC Television Centre she had woken in a world that had no right to be as it was, from which Steven had gone and in which all should be numbed with her. Instead of which birds sang beyond the window and sunshine lay in hazy blobs on the bedspread. She had lain fuddled still from the sleeping pills that Zoe, Tabitha, someone, had made her take and had fretted, absurdly and irrelevantly, because she did not even know for the recording of what programme he had gone there. He was often on television. The known and loved face talked to her, bizarrely, from beyond the glass as though she were a roomful of strangers.

The sunshine lay on the bed and beyond the closed door was the day, into which she had to go. And the next day, and the next.

And this one, eight months two weeks one day on, in which she drove now into the gathering traffic of outer London and eventually into the driveway of the house.

The house which was not hers, in which she had lived by courtesy of Steven's office and from which, now, she would willingly move. It belonged to the college and they had inhabited it with reluctance. The tied cottage, Steven had called it, with deliberate irony: it shone anachronistically in a street of late-Victorian villas – a pillared and stuccoed building belonging to another time, that must once have stood in isolation amid fields and lanes. A graceful house, but impersonal in all the years she had lived there: an official home. The appointment of Steven's successor would not take effect for several months yet and the college administration had urged her to stay on if she wished, but she was anxious to go. She felt as though she were there on sufferance, as though the building itself waited politely for her departure. She had bought a house in another part of London, to which she would soon be able to move.

She unlocked the door and picked up the post from the doormat. Letters still came for Steven; there was one now, a circular from a publisher. She walked into the kitchen and filled the kettle. The house stretched emptily around her in the same silence that once, in the days of young children, she would have greedily savoured. Solitude is enjoyed only by those who are not alone; the lonely feel differently about it.

Frances had ceased, nowadays, to weep. There was a time when she was always crying. Tears came out of her in an unstoppable flow as though she bled from inexhaustible arteries. She could not see what she was doing, shuttered off by her tears, moving through a world that swam and shimmered, dripping into the kitchen sink, on to the wheel of the car, over the papers on the desk. Now, except for the occasional lapse, she was dry-eyed.

She drank a cup of tea and read a letter from the lawyer about the purchase of the new house. There was a letter also from Harry, spending his months between school and college on the continent. The stamps were Italian but he wrote, apparently, from Yugoslavia. There was no date. She wondered why she did not worry more about this.

The last letter was from the editor of a journal to whom she had written applying for a job. She had worked, on and off, as an editorial assistant: intermittently when the children were small, afterwards for a considerable length of time on a particular journal. When that job had come to an end a couple of years ago she had not sought another, relishing a period at home. She read the letter, which was polite but regretful: no assistance needed, either now or in the foreseeable future. It was Zoe who was urging her to look for something.

‘You've got to. Essential therapy.’

‘If it's just therapy, I can't be bothered. Anyway, a somewhat rusty forty-nine-year-old is not all that employable.’

‘Rubbish,’ said Zoe angrily. ‘And you cannot sit here pining. Thinking. Whatever you're doing. What the hell do you think Steven would have said?’

‘Oh, I know the sort of thing Steven would have said.’

Steven gone has more controllable responses than Steven present. Yes, Steven would have said when a situation is irreversible you have got to see what can be done with it as it is. Not making the best of things – Steven never did that – investigating them. Steven never knew anything like this, of course, but if he had he would have coped. If it had been the other way round he would have mourned me, and looked ahead. Which is not callous but reasonable. And Steven was a man governed by reason.

Not by passion. ‘I think,’ she said to Zoe, on the fifth day after Steven's death, ‘I always loved him more than he loved me.’ And Zoe, piling suits and shirts from the wardrobe, replied, ‘You are a person who does a lot of loving. Steven had his limitations, that way. He was driven by other things. But he loved you more than he ever loved anyone. And don't
mull
,’ she suddenly snapped, ‘I know you can't help it dammit but don't stew things over. Promise me. Here, fold this shirt.’

What cannot be said to Zoe because there are some things that cannot be said even to Zoe is that in bed it was always I who knew rapture, I who cried out and lay afterwards in a state of wonder that such feelings are possible. Steven was good at sex like he was good at everything but he could manage quite happily without it and he was never for one instant, I suspect, lost in it. Which of course does not necessarily mean that he did not love me but simply that that experience, like all others, had two faces. People collide in the dark; we do things together, but what is happening to me is not what is happening to you. Perhaps love is more profoundly separate than anything.

She washed her tea-cup, put the letters on her desk and went upstairs to change her clothes. The evening, now, had arrived and must be filled, methodically. Later, food must be prepared and eaten, and then a book read perhaps until sleep came, but first there must be a measure of activity, of mindless physical activity, doing things with the hands, cleaning the house or doing more of the clearing out that was needed before the move.

She sat on her heels before the crammed drawers of the old desk she never used and piled into a bin defunct calendars, brochures, garbage of twenty years ago. Her engagement diary for nineteen sixty-three, the pages of which were filled with tidy entries: dentist 10.30, S. to America, Tabitha's birthday, S. from America. The diary plotted the year ahead, carved it up and laid it out day by day and week by week. It placed Easter and August Bank Holiday and advised that sunrise on the twenty-second of August would be at five fifty-seven and that there would be a new moon on the fourth of May. Those things, presumably, came about. But Frances herself had added to this: she had added in her firm clear handwriting that on June the fourteenth she and Steven would leave for Italy and that on the twenty-second of November they would go to the theatre and that on December the twelfth a baby must be fetched from Camberwell.

The theatre we never went to, because that day Kennedy was assassinated and Steven was wanted at the BBC, to discuss and predict and pronounce. We did go to Italy but not for the fortnight that the diary mapped because the weather was bad and the car broke down and Steven wanted suddenly to get back and work. The future was as untrustworthy in nineteen sixty-three as it has ever been. The baby, though, was fetched from Camberwell, the baby swathed in an electric blue nylon blanket, asleep in a plastic carry cot, gently snuffling, the baby who was Harry.

Zoe, six and a half miles above the Atlantic, hurtling forwards in time, eyes closed and ear-plugs in her ears, cruised in that shadowy zone between sleeping and waking. She walked with a man friend of hers in a desert landscape and in obedience to the logic of dreams the man wore female clothes and presently with further logic the desert became the London street outside Zoe's flat, the man vanished and his place was taken by a stranger who picked flowers that grew from the paving. She woke, detached herself from the neighbour whose torpid thigh rested against hers and delved in her handbag for brush and comb. Around her heaved and shuffled the jeaned and T-shirted, apparently semi-destitute crowd that peoples transatlantic aircraft. When I was a girl, she thought, foreign travel was not to be undertaken lightly and you dressed the part. I had a coat called a travel coat; now for Christ's sake people move around the world in their underclothes. She took a postcard of a Chinese vase in the Metropolitan Museum from her bag, wrote, ‘I have just dreamed of you in drag. Is this significant or merely Freudian?’, addressed it, and rose to negotiate a passage to the lavatory. She stood in the aisle at the end of a sleazy, yawning queue and stared out of a window beneath which elaborately textured clouds concealed unacceptable depths of air and, ultimately, ocean. She said to the woman next to her, ‘If people in aircraft stopped to think where they were you'd have a riot on your hands.’ The woman, staring for a moment in hostility, twitched a bra strap and said, ‘Well, I always think Pan Am has it over TWA.’ Zoe, still looking out of the window, continued, ‘Mind, that could be said of life in general, I suppose.’ The woman, shuffling forwards, said, ‘Excuse me?’ ‘Forget it,’ said Zoe. ‘Lack of sleep makes me light-headed.’

An hour later, siphoned from the sky and into the maelstrom of Heathrow, she made telephone calls: the office, Frances.

‘Hi, it's me. I'm back.’

‘How was New York?’

‘Surrealist,’ said Zoe. ‘As ever. What are you doing?’

‘Getting up. Having a cup of tea. Looking at the paper.’

‘Good. I like that. I just interviewed five police chiefs. Want to know about the urban crime rate? And a crazy politician. And a painter so doped to the eyebrows he couldn't have told you if it was day or night. Be my…’

‘… still calm centre. I'm not sure I'm as good at that as I used to be.’

‘And I'm an insensitive slob,’ said Zoe. ‘Listen, do me a favour. Come and have lunch. The place near the office. One o'clock. Right?’

She went into London on the tube, reading three newspapers, one of which included an article by herself on disenchanted young people in a northern city. She scanned this with a scowl and discarded the whole bundle of papers in a heap on the seat beside her. For the last four stops she sat apparently staring at the advertisements opposite, a dumpy unimposing woman with eyes of unnerving sharpness who somehow conveyed even sitting hunched and bleary-eyed in the tube, an impression of furious potency. One or two people glanced at her and then away again with faint alarm. A girl who suffered from claustrophobia and knew that one day, quite possibly today, she would be stuck in a trapped and burning train, moved closer to her, knowing who would assume control of the situation. A man looked at her for some while, wondering why he found such a plain, even ugly, woman so attractive.