Perfect Happiness (9 page)

‘You shouldn't have done it,’ said Ruth Bowers. ‘Those flowers. They must've cost an arm and a leg. But I love them. I don't know when I last got given flowers.’ She laughed. ‘They don't often come my way.’

Frances said, ‘You've been so kind. You really have. What I don't understand is how you happened to be there – at the other hotel.’

‘Now this is where you're maybe going to get angry with me, Frances, but I followed you. I could see when you went out in the morning there was something wrong. So I thought well, better maybe to play it safe and I just hung around with you for a while. Well, for most of the day. We looked at a lot of pictures, remember?’

‘I don't see how I could be angry. It was extraordinarily good of you. I don't remember the pictures at all.’

‘Donatello. Carpaccio. You name it… We did a real hard day. But I didn't think at the time you were taking much in. And then you dashed off down this street as though something had come into your head all of a sudden and I thought, hey, this looks peculiar… And that was how it was.’

‘Do you think I'm ill?’

‘No,’ said Ruth briskly, ‘I'd say you weren't. I think you just kind of collapsed briefly through being overtired and overstrained and generally het up. I'd say you were all better now. Maybe you should check up with your doctor when you get home, but I don't think you're ill.’

She wore, this morning, yet another pastel trouser suit and a peaked cap pulled tightly down over her grey hair, the fringe sticking out below it. This is a good woman, Frances thought, you expect goodness to go around with some sort of distinguishing mark – uniforms and robes and discreet medals – but when it turns up it is decked with apricot crimplene and an ugly jockey cap and gilt-framed sun-glasses. Nothing is ever as it seems to be. She said, ‘After my husband – Steven – died I was determined to get through it all on my own. The doctor kept trying to give me some sort of tranquillizer but I wouldn't take them.’

‘Good for you. Stay that way.’

‘But this is a bit… well, a bit unnerving. Suppose it happens again?’

‘Why should it? Listen, Frances, I guess some people would say you should see a shrink. And I'd say don't. I'm not very typical. Most of my friends have been in therapy at one time or another and you know what puzzles me about it? It's the idea that there's any kind of tidy answer to things. Life doesn't seem to me like that – it's a mess. But most people – or at least most people back home – go at it like they were after the secret of the universe. Just find the right formula and you'll get happy. You'll hit on the answer like you might hit on the right colour-scheme for the living-room and the sun will come out and shine for ever after. Coming to terms with life, that's what it's called. But personally I don't see how you come to terms with something that's basically fouled-up in a lot of ways. And I don't call that pessimism, I call it common sense. You know what I think? I think it's a misplaced faith in science. This is a scientific age and by heavens it ought to come up with a scientific answer to everything. Even how to get through life without trouble. Excuse me, Frances, I talk too much. How's your boy doing?’

‘Very well, apparently. We can go home early tomorrow’

‘I see they caught one of the guys that did it. But the guy was a girl.’

‘Yes.’

‘Twenty-one years old. Jesus! I mean, when I was twenty-one years old I was worrying about whether my lipstick was the right shade.’

They sat on the terrace of a café, in the shade of a pergola. Morning glory flowers drooped and turned purple, their brief moment already gone. Pigeons milled around the tables. Frances, earlier, had worked out that she must have been in Venice for a week. She had telephoned Zoe and eventually reached her at her office. I'm all right, she had said, quite all right. I wasn't for a while but I am now, and I'm sorry I got you worried, it seems I left some stupid message. Blow that, said Zoe, forget it, skip it, just talk now I've got you. Did Morris Corfield look you up? He paid for your dinner. Good for him, then. And now when do we see you?

Ruth Bowers was leaving the next day to meet up with her friend in Rome. Frances said, ‘Could we keep in touch?’

‘Sure we'll keep in touch. I'm the type that keeps in touch. I show up, uninvited.’ She grinned, with the glimmer of a gold-capped tooth.

Frances examined herself. She examined her state of mind and found it not too bad. She was not agitated any more, the sense of panic had gone, it was possible calmly to see to things like plane reservations and the cashing of travellers' cheques. She was trudging once more that level grey plain of sorrow. But there were one or two curiosities, to be inspected and considered. The flow of warmth she had felt for Ruth Bowers, a stranger, and the faint but inescapable satisfaction that she was alone in this encounter. Steven would not have cared for Ruth Bowers. Steven would have found Ruth Bowers tedious and ultimately uninteresting. Which she is not, Frances thought. Which I think she is not.

The second curiosity was the fact that she had seen this city, today and yesterday, for odd moments, as a place in its own right, independent and untouched by what went before. Accompanying Ruth on a last walk round the central area, she had found herself looking at the façade of a building with eyes that were shriven; she saw the windows and the pillars and the flaking pink stucco for themselves and not in any relationship to that other time. Whether she had passed this way then, with Steven, was neither here nor there; she wanted, simply to know the name of this particular palazzo and when it was built. She examined, now, this response and found it interesting.

Harry was out of bed and walking with crutches, egged on with cries of encouragement by his fellow patients. Well-wishers came to see him in the ward and stood over his bed, uttering condolences in broken English or simply beaming. Harry, who at school had maintained a stubborn and unfashionably xenophobic refusal to attempt foreign languages, had acquired a good deal of inaccurate but valiant Italian. Watching him joke with the nurses Frances was astonished; she saw suddenly the man he would presently be, with attitudes and mannerisms all his own, derived beyond child-hood, unfamiliar. He had been interviewed by journalists and television people; one of the articles was translated for her by the doctor, along with Harry's curiously laconic replies. The doctor, holding the newspaper from which stared Harry's passport photograph, three years younger in school uniform, said, ‘Your son is very… tolerant. He does not grudge. That people should do such a thing.’

‘I think he feels rather as I do. It seems more like some awful – Act of God – rather than something people have done.’

‘Act of God…’ said the doctor. He grimaced, throwing the newspaper into a bin. ‘I have examined him this morning. He is well. The leg is going all right. There will be no scars. Only maybe’ – he grimaced again – ‘inside.’

Frances said, ‘Thank you for looking after him so well.’

In fact, it seemed to her that Harry had taken it all very calmly. Apart from that one moment of candour – ‘It was shit’ – he had not referred again to the time at the airport and had seemed mainly interested in all that had come after – the life of the hospital, the people he had met there, his own situation. For someone to whom, in a brief lifetime, nothing violent had ever happened before he appeared to be reassuringly stoical. He's doing better than I have, Frances thought. Within a year he has seen his father die and been blown up in a foreign country by people of whose existence he had never heard; perhaps, after this, he will grow up with expectations of a different kind from mine, and maybe that will be all the better for him.

Until she was eighteen nothing had ever happened to her. She had grown up wrapped in the bland self-deception of a mother who refused to contemplate misfortune. It was a mindlessly placid world in which things would always work out for the best, in which one must look on the bright side, in which dead pets had gone to sleep, the old were mercifully released and illness was just a matter of a few days in bed. Her mother's concerns were domestic and local, bounded by the school of which her husband was headmaster, the parents connected therewith, other people she knew and, at a stretch, matters of wider parochial interest such as structural alterations to the landscape of the small market town in which they lived. She never read newspapers and, as Frances presently realized, lived throughout the development of nuclear weapons and the advent of the Cold War without apparently having any idea of the implications of either. Years later, Frances sat out the Cuba crisis with a hard fist of fear in her stomach, the children playing at her feet during the pulsing signature theme of the news bulletins, a sound that would for ever afterwards induce queasiness. She stared at the faces of statesmen, at ships ploughing across a gleaming quilted sea. The world turned, uncontrollable. Her mother, telephoning one evening, talked of weather and the school prize-giving – ‘The news, darling? Oh, I know, I know – but these things always blow over, don't they?’ The first time Frances brought Steven home he had become involved in an argument about politics with her father. Her mother had been shocked by his intensity: ‘I mean it's not as though it was something personal. Just the government, and that sort of thing. I don't understand people getting so heated. Of course, I can see he's very clever.’ She had not liked Steven, who in turn had treated her with the scrupulous politeness that conceals contempt. And who can blame him, thought Frances. They didn't breathe the same air.

When she was eighteen she had gone to university and discovered that life is insecure. She read, and the world expanded before her eyes. She saw possibilities, and learned the practice of expectation. She joined every organization that offered itself, in a desperate bolt from the burrow in which she had grown up, and then became alarmed by what seemed to her the anonymity of public involvement, and threw away her Young Liberal card, her Debating Society card, her French Club card, her United Nations Group card… By the time she met Steven she had withdrawn into a different kind of privacy: not her mother's privacy of ignorance but another one. The privacy of resistance. She was affronted by the presumption that what happens to people is – has to be – conditioned from beyond. She wanted both to plan and control her own life. Steven, though as opportunist as all ambitious men, would never have conceded the possibility of this. In fact, they never discussed it; Frances made plans and Steven noted the course of events and acted expediently. And when the devils grinned and the world shrugged and Frances's plans went astray, Steven made crisp recommendations. If Frances mourned what was lost, he told her with irritation how to retrieve what could be retrieved, how to side-step and change position. She listened, knowing that she could not change herself.

And now, in Venice, in another existence, she looked with surprise at Harry, sitting in a wicker chair on the balcony of the hospital, his plastered leg stuck out in front of him, asking her when they were moving to the new house. She had almost forgotten about the house that must be moved to, and the house that must be moved from.

‘No,’ said Zoe. ‘No way. Yes. Tell them to get stuffed. Right. 'Bye.’ She put the phone down on the man in the Paris office and made three more calls, booking a flight to Dublin and cancelling two arrangements for the next couple of days. Blown all her working life by unpredictable demands, this did not disturb her at all. Conditioned, indeed, to expect the unexpected, she would have been more disconcerted by a week in which she had done precisely what her engagement diary told her she was likely to be doing. She made a further call to the secretary of the politician in Dublin who had – unexpectedly – agreed to be interviewed and set about packing an overnight bag.

As she did so, she thought of Frances. The overnight bag, as it happened, was a present from Frances; it catered, by way of many compartments and miraculously folding extensions, for the wayward traveller, rashly over-burdening herself. And Zoe, cramming things into it now, saw Frances, holding out the beribboned Christmas present, saying, I hope it's right, there were so many different kinds, and I'm such a non-travelling person myself… And Steven, indulgently allowing the superficialities of Christmas to wash over him. Harry, with his first electric razor. Tab, sparkling over the silver necklace one had pounced on in the market in Teheran, seeing it already around her neck. Objects. Possessions. The material world that we carry around with us, that solders us to events, that outlasts them. The objects with which we manifest love. The possessions with which we possess.

She dialled her office with a message for Frances should she call before her return from Dublin. Tell her I'm back tomorrow evening at latest. Tell her the estate agent rang and I've taken care of it. Tell her…

No, don't tell her I've been worried stiff about her.

I've known Frances all my adult life. For twenty-five years she has been there. Friendship is the love that is ignored; people don't theorize about friendship, write poetry about it. It just goes quietly along, sustaining. Passion spends itself – oh my goodness, does passion spend itself – but friendship is always there. Like a good marriage, it survives attack. I have loved – let me see – four men. Loved to the point of temporary derangement. And of all that spent emotion I remember not a thing. Those times of him-not-telephoning and him-not-being-there and jealousy and doubt are quite gone – oh, the sequence of events still vaguely lingers but the emotion is irretrievable. Like all extinguished pain. But the feeling for Frances is constant, permanent. Like love for children.