Perfect Happiness (3 page)

And Zoe, looking for an instant back, thought, thank you and feel free. As a matter of fact you've made my morning and to hell with the feminists. Not that one is going to go saying that kind of thing aloud. All the same, eight-thirty a.m. and straight off the overnight flight with a hangover into the bargain, score nine out of ten, Zoe Brooklyn. She grinned at the man. And now off to your office, chum, I've got more important things on my mind.

Such as my sister-in-law for whom I probably care more than I care for anyone in the world, bar one other. Who has spent most of her life looking after other people and must now be – not looked after but watched. Who has tried to plan and protect and prevent and has seen it all come to nothing. And is now… Oh, the hell with it, thought Zoe, I don't know how she is, beyond that stoical public face. Even her, that I know so well. Desperate? Convalescent? She loved Steven like people don't have any right to be loved. And in some deep mad illogical centre of her she thinks it is her fault that he is dead. That she could have planned his survival like she prevented the children falling out of windows or the house catching fire. Frances is the only person I've ever known who owns a fire extinguisher. She has got to come out now into the real awful world in which nothing can be arranged, in which fires are not put out.

And, travelling up the Holborn escalator, resting her flight bag on the step ahead of her, she saw suddenly in the mind, flickering for an instant of total clarity, another fire… a safe domestic fire of obstinate coke that will not burn in the Raeburn stove in that Paddington flat, before which squats Steven, poking it, spilling soot on the mottled green carpet, saying, ‘Who is she?’

‘Frances Caradon. We were at college together. She's my best friend. Look, stop wrecking the landlady's carpet, will you.’

‘Mmn,’ says Steven, and there is on his face that expression, that expression of concentrated unemotional attention that means he has set his sights on some objective. From that moment on it was as certain as things are allowed to be certain that he would marry Frances.

Steven's face, thought Zoe, emerging into the street to battle through the early morning crowds, was not at all like mine. That always surprised me, from early youth. I thought probably one or the other of us was a changeling, dumped on our unsuspecting parents by incompetent midwives. Him, probably. Except of course that he was the good-looking one and changelings are traditionally ugly. He got the looks when they were handing them out, as our auntie Beryl used so helpfully to observe,
sotto voce
, of course, but not quite sotto enough. And Steven's face, apart from being easier on the eye, was the composed and controlled face of a public man; Steven's thoughts and feelings never showed whereas mine yelp and blaze from half a block away.

In her office, she dumped the flight bag in a corner, threw her raincoat over the spare chair, snatched a tissue from a flowered Victorian tea-pot on the windowsill and began immediately to type.

When Frances was nineteen she was rejected by her first lover. Dragging herself gradually from the misery thus engendered she had copied into her diary, ‘Man's love is of man's life a thing apart. 'Tis woman's whole existence’, feeling as she wrote mature, tired and worldly wise. She found it difficult now to remember the boy at all, but the words, and the appearance of the diary (green leather, with a brass catch) remained in the head. And of course the feelings, the force of which could quite easily be recovered, though he who had prompted them was gone for ever. Emotions, as persistent as the landscape, seemed at times to be all that was left of the past; they rose up like spectres, saying remember me? The only truths, it sometimes seemed, in the whole confusing mendacious narrative.

She had visited her solicitor and was early, now, for her lunch with Zoe. To kill time, she wandered off into unfamiliar streets of the City and found herself alongside a large cemetery, Bunhill Fields Burial Ground, a graveyard of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was the name on one of the gravestones that brought back that early betrayal: Paul Fletcher. But the Paul Fletcher in question had departed this life in seventeen thirty-six; hers – twenty in nineteen-fifty – probably enjoyed it yet. She stood looking at the name and the white gravestones reached away all around her, rank upon rank of them, the marshalled dead locked in their different times. Seventeen hundred and six. Seventeen hundred and forty-five. Eighteen hundred and ten. Names, names, names. Aged eighteen years; aged ten months one day; aged sixty-seven years. There were huge trees brilliant with summer leaf, their dark trunks slicing down like sentinels among the tombs. All around the London traffic roared; office girls chattered past; an old man sat on a bench eating a sandwich. A notice said that Blake, Bunyan and Defoe were buried here. And, allegedly, one hundred and fifty thousand others. A silent army in the sour London soil. The thought was somehow paralysing; she stood staring from the notice to the gleaming gravestones.

She sat down. She thought how curious it was that responses such as this – emotions, even – could run parallel with but quite separate from unhappiness. I am unhappy all the time, she thought, and that is a total occupation, but some other part of me still goes on working. I still see that things are beautiful, or significant, and that prompts a feeling. I can be angry, or pleased. But all this with detachment, as though it happened to someone else. It is as though half of me were some stranger, living independently.

She wondered why happiness should be so acutely remembered when sorrow vanishes, like pain. Those brilliant tethered moments are seldom black. I was often miserable – but some kindly (or perverse) mechanism of the memory fades out all that, leaving quite other things, and hence an untruthful whole. We quarrelled, but all I have now of those quarrels is a pungent taste, not words nor phrases but a flavour: his silent back, my churning resentment.

Two pigeons, at her feet, walked in circles, their feet pink against the grey paving. Above, the trees sighed and shifted; traffic flowed beyond the railings. A discarded newspaper flapped a headline about a killing in Northern Ireland. Frances felt suddenly quite unsteady; she gripped the arm of the bench on which she sat. She had a sensation of being only tenuously connected to the physical world. In the days after Steven's death she had experienced the grey unreality of shock; this was different. Sitting in this landscape of names and gravestones, with the pigeons and the traffic and the newspaper, she felt as though her very occupation of the present was in question. She wondered if she was going to have some kind of breakdown. She got up and walked briskly to the restaurant where she was to meet Zoe, and sat alone at the table watching the window on to the street.

Rub the misty restaurant window and the condensation runs together and trickles down and there swimming in the clearer patch is Zoe, crossing the road, darting between two taxis, her scarlet coat hugged to her chin. It is snowing; feeble London snow that dies in black splodges on the pavement. ‘Bread and butter,’ says Zoe. ‘No cakes. Above all, no cakes.’ And the doorbell keeps pinging as people tumble in from the street. ‘I am in the most bloody awful fix,’ says Zoe. ‘Frances, Frances, I need you, love, I really do…’

‘Hey – how long do I have to stand here clamouring for attention?’

‘Zoe – sorry, I didn't see you come…’

‘I'll say you didn't.’ Zoe, dumping herself down, shedding a raincoat (orange, not scarlet), looked sternly across the table. ‘You've not been taking pills or something, have you?’

‘I have not. Nor drink neither.’

‘You're not the drink type. Never were. Now I could – I could end up gibbering over empty whisky bottles in a Bays-water bedsit. But you had that glassy look in your eye – it bothers me. Let's see what a good square meal will do. I bet you don't cook properly nowadays. People who've spent their lives feeding others never do when they're on their own. Unlike us spinster types. I've been known to make crêpes suzette just for me. The only way to self-consideration is to live alone.’

‘How's Eric? I haven't seen him for ages.’

‘I do love your trains of thought. Eric is fine and in Bonn so far as I know. Or possibly Trieste by now. I say – wasn't that concert heavenly? I wish I could have stayed longer in Cambridge. Tab was super. I was drooling with…’

‘Pride?’

‘Yes,’ said Zoe after a moment. ‘Pride.’ Her hand, for an instant, touched Frances's knee. ‘And other things. She had such a look of Steven, fiddling away like mad there. I mean Steven when he was that age, intensely doing things. Never letting anyone else interfere.’

‘She is like Steven, often.’

‘Nature, nurture… I never know how much she misses him She never says.’

‘I don't know either.’ Frances crumbled bread in her fingers. That sensation of unsteadiness lingered still, even through the conversation, Zoe's presence. She said, suddenly, ‘I have this odd feeling these days that absolutely nothing is real. Not even the past. Especially the past. I can't really explain what it's like. It's as though because Steven is no longer here there is nothing to confirm what happened when he was. How we were together.’

‘Other people can confirm. Me. The children.’

‘That's not quite what I mean.’ Frances looked away. ‘It's as though because there is only me now who knows what our life was together then I may be lying about it whenever I think of it. Whether deliberately or not. I am almost ceasing to be sure myself exactly how anything was.’

‘It always is a two-sided business.’

‘I know. But this is more than that.’

‘I wondered how you were really feeling,’ said Zoe. ‘I didn't realize it was quite like this.’

‘It's not unbearable – don't think that. Just… unnerving.

'Don't for goodness sake be so apologetic. Be a burden, for once. By the way, did you get any joy out of that editor?'

‘No. In any case I'm not entirely sure…’

‘I am. Occupation. It wonderfully concentrates the mind.’

‘Stop offering therapy,’ said Frances, with sudden force.

They stared at each other in surprise. ‘Good,’ said Zoe. ‘We both needed that. O.K. – I'll stop. You're probably right. Let me try offering explanations instead. I think you feel the way you do because of a whole confused guilt about Steven being dead – all right, all right, I know, amateur psychology – which is to do with the kind of person you are. You've always thought you could save people you love. Stop the lightning striking them in particular. Remember Tabitha and the bicycle? And Steven was always apparently untouchable. Born with a silver spoon, as our Auntie Beryl used to say.’

‘It's a theory,’ said Frances, ‘I suppose.’

‘You know something? You look less glassy-eyed. I love you. Where's that darn waiter? I'll have to be back in the office by two-thirty.’

In the tube, riding down an escalator, Frances studied the advertisements; men and women in the pink of health, serene and glossy, displayed underwear and liquor or simply smiled above printed promises. They bore little resemblance to the people around her – untidy, preoccupied, hurried or merely bored. The eyes in the framed faces met hers in frozen greeting; the glances of fellow travellers slid away, as though caught in an act of intrusion. From far off down tunnels came the dismal baying of football fans.

Zoe, climbing the stairs to her flat at the top of a tall house in Fulham, was stricken suddenly with exhaustion. She hauled herself up the final steps, unlocked the door, dropped her bags and threw herself on to the sofa, where she fell almost instantly asleep. The telephone, minutes later, awoke her. ‘You!’ she said. ‘For Christ's sake! I thought you weren't due back till the weekend. I just wrote you a postcard about the funny things you do in dreams.’ At the other end, the man who had been for ten years Zoe's friend and lover made explanations. Zoe yawned. ‘Excuse me. I'm a dog's dinner right now. I'm asleep. If it had been anyone else I'd have bawled them out. Tell me about Bonn…’

Eric Sadler was also a journalist. Zoe had persistently declined either to marry or live with him. There are certain relationships at which I am excellent, she said, such as friend and sister and even up to a point daughter, and others at which I know I should be supremely bad. Let's not find out. This caution seemed, to those who knew her, uncharacteristic of a person otherwise almost addicted to risk. Zoe's provocative pieces, her public quarrels and her crusading temperament were her professional hallmarks. Eric apparently accepted the situation; from time to time he would take up briefly with other women, only to return to Zoe who displayed neither jealousy nor resentment. He lived a few streets away, in a block of flats the roofline of which Zoe could see as she sat at the window, the telephone in her hand. When the conversation was over she stared down for a while into the private garden of the square below; dogs and small children skittered among the bushes. There were always dogs and children there, a permanent and yet transient population; in the fifteen years in which she had lived in the flat children had become adults, dogs had been replaced by other dogs. The big white nineteenth century houses presided over successions of energies and high spirits, just as they enclosed shifting generations of people, a flow of humanity washing through the square. As she watched, a spotted football flew into the air and over the railings, to bounce off the roof of a parked car. On the grass of the garden a small boy stood transfixed, his panic communicating from fifty feet below.

She ran herself a bath and lay in it composing an article about the American gun laws. She had interviewed an old man who had shot a boy of fifteen, one of a marauding gang who had thrown snowballs at his car. She had interviewed also the boy's distraught embittered mother. The old man said bleakly that he wished he were dead: that flare of anger, and the availability of the gun, had wrecked his life. Her article would be brisk and loaded with statistics; it would quote and discuss and record. What it would not do would be to reflect on the random and fatal conjunction of lives, which was not relevant to the problem of the gun laws. I should write novels, Zoe thought, novelists get to have a go at all the interesting stuff. If only…, that old man kept saying, if only they hadn't… if only I hadn't… If only it hadn't happened I'd be enjoying my retirement in Florida. What a lot of emotion is spilled hungering for a different past.