The House on Fortune Street (23 page)

of protection, and then Edward was fumbling with her, on top of her, inside her.

It was not pleasurable, not at all, but something even more powerful than pleasure: a painful, naked intimacy. Repeatedly both work and life had taught Dara that the act they were committing was well-nigh meaningless, or at least quite unreliable in its meaning, yet the feeling swept over her. Now we are lovers, she thought jubilantly.

When he was finished Edward turned to her.“What can I do to please you?” he said, his chestnut eyes fixed on hers.

“I was pleased,” she protested. “I am.” “No. I was rushing. Show me what to do.”

She was embarrassed, fearful. What if he did everything and she still couldn’t climb over that other barrier, the one inside herself that often at such moments kept her slightly apart, observing her own experiences rather than experiencing them? Then he reached out and the barrier began to fall away.

Perhaps twenty minutes later, perhaps half an hour, Edward got out of bed and started to dress. She assumed he was going to the bathroom, one of the inconveniences of a shared house, but he was bending down, kissing her, and wishing her sweet dreams. Alone, Dara rolled over to the place where he had lain. In her last waking moments, she summoned a series of comforting disasters: Edward struck by lightning on his way home, the house bursting into flames, herself penniless, lost, wandering in some barren landscape. And her dark imaginings worked. In the morning, before she had time to get anxious, Edward phoned to ask if she was free next Tuesday. There was a film he wanted to see.

hat weekend Dara accompanied her father to a photogra-

phy exhibition. For reasons she didn’t care to examine she was

usually late for their meetings, so it was not the sight of him, waiting patiently at a corner table in a café near Bond Street, that startled her, but his hair. For as long as she could remember he had worn it falling over his forehead, parted on the left. Now, barely half an inch long, it bristled salt and pepper, leaving his face oddly exposed. Beneath the pale expanse of his forehead his eyes were an almost deep watery blue.

“Dad, you’ve cut your hair.”

With an awkward shrug, he rose to greet her. “Louise claimed I was getting shaggy,” he said. “What a lovely scarf.”

“You gave it to me last Christmas,” Dara said, kissing his cheek. That too, she was sure, had been Louise’s choice. Her hopes of getting to know her father were constantly colliding with his second marriage. For years he had said that she was always welcome at their house, but when she had phoned to tell him about her new job in London, his first words had been not “Come and stay,” but “Where will you live?” She had said not to worry; she’d stay with Abigail until she found her own place. The truth was, as she had come to understand over months of awkward meetings, she was welcome in her father’s life when she was in a good mood and could take an intelligent interest in Louise’s projects and had a home of her own. She was not welcome in need, or disarray, or pain.

Now he insisted that the scarf suited her. “Would you like some coffee? Or a cake?” He waved his hand toward the counter with its trays of baked goods and, taking in their sparse contents, frowned.

Watching his furrowed brow, Dara remembered those awkward out-ings in Edinburgh when he had plied her and Fergus with food as if this were the only way to prove his affection; any small problem, a restaurant running out of Fergus’s favorite pudding, a dearth of chocolate ice cream, had threatened disaster. “Let’s go to the gallery first,” she said, “and have coffee afterward.”

“Good idea,” he said, sounding disproportionately relieved.

In the street, walking past the sleek, expensive shops, he told her that his friend Davy hoped to open a second branch of his furniture shop in the neighborhood. “The rents are astronomical but he thinks it’ll put the seal of approval on the business.”

That her father had a best friend from childhood was one of the things that made Dara feel more optimistic about her own relationship with him. “I finally went to his shop,” she volunteered. “Everyone who works there looks as if they belong in a fashion magazine. They were ignoring me until Davy came out of his office.”

“I know. I’m always telling him how rude his staff are but he says people won’t pay his prices unless they’re abused.”

They passed a shop with a single black dress hanging in the window. As they waited to cross the street Dara asked whose work they were going to see.

“It’s an exhibition of Charles Dodgson’s photographs, the man who wrote Alice in Wonderland. They’re meant to be exquisite.”

The walls of the gallery were hung with large black-and-white photographs simply framed. Several couples and a very tall gray-haired man were looking at them. Her father stopped at the first photograph. A girl of perhaps eight or nine, wearing an odd, ragged costume, stood barefoot beside a wall. Her dark hair was bobbed and she gazed at the viewer with great intensity. “This is Alice Liddell,” he said. “Apparently her mother didn’t like this photograph. She thought it made Alice look like a beggar.”

“I think she looks like a fairy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Dara offered. “Cobweb or Pease Blossom.” In fact the girl, with her knowing stare, resembled no fairy Dara could imagine, but she was glad to see her father smile.

The next photograph showed a young girl, Alice again, pretending to be asleep. And the next showed two girls in Oriental costume, one holding a large parasol. A quick survey of the room confirmed Dara’s

growing suspicion. All the pictures were of girls—the youngest maybe four or five, the oldest perhaps ten—each carefully posed, never smiling. Her father was talking about how complicated photography was in Dodgson’s day, what astonishing results he had been able to obtain using the wet collodion plates. “Look at the depth of focus,” he said, gesturing to a girl lying amid a mass of drapery.

“Did he only take pictures of girls?” Dara said. Beside her the tall man leaned forward to examine the girl’s face.

“No, he photographed many famous people, including Tennyson and Queen Victoria’s younger son. And he did landscapes as well. But this exhibition is his photographs of children. Don’t you like them?” In a gesture she remembered from childhood he tugged his earlobe.

“Yes and no. The first one was beautiful, but when there are more and more girls, it gets a bit creepy. I wish they’d included some of the adult portraits.”

“He never harmed them,” said her father. “He was a great friend to children. He taught them riddles, made up stories, wrote them letters. But he never harmed them.”

“How do you know?” Quickly she pushed her hands into her pockets. “I don’t mean what is the documentary evidence, but how can we be sure what harms a child? Some therapists claim that you can molest someone without touching them, without even saying anything. Just the inappropriate desire can be harmful.” Claire had never said what happened after her father came into her bedroom.

Her own father gave a small cough and stepped back from the pictures.

“Sorry, Dad. I don’t mean to preach. I can see these are gorgeous but I can’t rise above the content. In my book men who like young girls are bad news.”

“Let’s go and get that coffee.”

In the street she saw that his eyes, clear when they met half an hour

ago, were bloodshot. If only she hadn’t been so strident in her disapproval. He had been offering her a part of himself—his enthusiasm for the photographs—and she had spurned it. Why was she so quick to fly off the handle? As they again passed the black dress in the window, she tried to make amends by telling him that she’d met someone. “A tall, dark Welshman and he’s a violinist. Maybe we can go to one of his concerts.”

“That would be nice,” said her father. “How did you meet?”

Dara regaled him with the story as they made their way through the crowds of Oxford Street to a café in St. Christopher’s Court. They each ordered cappuccino and cannoli. Reaching for the sugar, her father remarked how much he admired her work at the center, dealing with women from such diverse backgrounds. Dara listened and watched the sugar sinking, crystal by crystal, beneath the foam. All these compli-ments, she thought. He too was trying to make amends.

When he paused to sip his coffee she said, “On my training course we figured out that, of the eighteen of us, sixteen had parents whose jobs didn’t involve people.”

“Science involves people, but I know what you mean. So you were all reacting against your parents when you went into social work?”

She shook her head. “I can’t speak for the others but I don’t think you had much influence either way. A friend asked me to do a shift at the Samaritans and I realized I was more interested in the clients’ stories than the ones I read in books. There is a theory that people go into counseling because they need help themselves—the wounded caregiver—but I think that’s because society distrusts the notion of altruism. At the same time”—she reached for her cannoli—“no one likes the idea that counseling is just a job.”

“So either you’re neurotic or coldly calculating? That’s not fair. But it does seem the ideal job for you. Even when you were little, you were so good with people.”

Dara allowed herself a moment to enjoy the sweetness of the pastry. Then she gave a theatrical sigh. “I’m not sure how good I am these days. Counseling is meant to work irrespective of the practitioner, but recently I’ve begun to wonder.”

Anyone else would have asked what she meant; her father simply nodded. “When I first came to London,” he said, “I saw a therapist. Most of the time I didn’t have a clue what he was thinking.”

He continued to talk about the process—the one-sided conversation, the strict time limit—while Dara grappled with this amazing revelation. Her father, her stuffy, reserved father, had been to a therapist. Did this mean he actually regretted abandoning his family? As if he sensed that she might be about to ask untoward questions, he changed the topic. Fergus was coming down from Aberdeen at the end of the month and hoped to have dinner with them. “And guess what,” he said. “Pauline has enrolled them in a ballroom dancing class.”

“Brilliant,” said Dara, and allowed herself to be distracted by one of the few subjects on which she and her father consistently saw eye to eye: her brother. They both found him, and his marriage, utterly mysterious. He doesn’t know the nature of subtext, her father had said once, and she had agreed. Fergus was always fine.

t the center her description of the exhibition caused a heated debate. Why should a hundred and fifty years make exploitation into art, said Reina. But what if Dodgson was just an adult who paid an unusual amount of attention to children at a time when they were largely ignored, asked Frank. Think of the lovely stories he invented for them. That’s no excuse, said Joyce. He sexualized the children for his own pleasure. Even if all he did was take photographs, it’s

still wrong. To her surprise Dara, now that other people were voicing her reservations, sided with Frank and her father. The photographs were beautiful. Something can’t be beautiful when people have been hurt to make it, said Reina. People like Dodgson ought to be carefully supervised. This last reminded Dara of Edward’s story of the conductor with the tracking device in his toe; she repeated it.

“Poor guy,” said Frank. “That sounds a bit gruesome. I don’t approve of molesting children, but I do have some sympathy for people with inappropriate desires. Until recently I’d have been regarded as one of them.”

While they were talking, Halley had come into the kitchen. “That is the big question, isn’t it?” She reached for the kettle. “What to do with inappropriate desires?”

“These days,” said Joyce, “there are quite a lot of alternatives: drugs, aversion therapy, electronic monitoring, self-control.”

“Good, old-fashioned self-control,” said Halley quietly.

Joyce set down her cup—they all heard it hit the counter—and left the room.

“I think that’s my phone,” said Frank, cupping a hand to his ear, and followed, with Reina at his heels.

Still holding the steaming kettle, Halley stared after them. “Well”— she turned to Dara, smiling brightly—“I wanted to ask if you could switch with Reina tomorrow and run the four o’clock group.”

“Let me check my diary,” said Dara, eager for an excuse to get away.

s the lights in the cinema dimmed Edward put his umbrella on the floor and reached for her hand. Dara had been with men

who held her hand as if it were a dull but useful book, and she had been with those whose touch was so careless as to seem irrelevant. But she

had never been with anyone who held her hand like Edward, tenderly, firmly, as if they were having a secret conversation. She barely registered the opening scenes of the film. Now she understood why her relationships with other men had broken down. Although she had pretended to be, wanted to be, she hadn’t really been in love with them. Her deepest self had always been hanging back, reluctant to fully engage, and that in turn had engendered reluctance. Her feelings did make a difference. But with Edward . . . Quickly she summoned precautionary disasters: the flautist, with whom he’d gone to Thailand, reappeared, the center went bankrupt, her bicycle was stolen.

The film, when at last she focused on the screen, was about a musical prodigy, a pianist of dazzling virtuosity who swept all before him only to give up playing at the height of his career. At his farewell concert women threw flowers and hotel room keys on the stage and the conductor had tears in his eyes but the pianist was adamant. The final scene showed him five years later, living in a secluded cottage in Cornwall. As he poured tea, his hand trembled with Parkinson’s. Then the camera took in the rest of the room; a small child was playing in front of the fire and a woman held a plump-cheeked baby.

“So he got the things that mattered,” said Edward. While he leaned forward, studying the credits, Dara tried to hide her elation. He did like children; how wonderful; it had seemed too soon to ask.

Outside they discovered that the rain, falling when they arrived, had stopped. Edward suggested they walk in the direction of Blackfriars Bridge and look for a restaurant. As they passed the National Theater, he began to reminisce about his first music teacher: the angelic Miss Luke. “She was the one who persuaded my parents to let me have lessons. Of course they regret it now. Playing a wooden box with strings is an absurd job for a man. They’re still hoping I’ll move back to Wales and work for my father’s company.”

“Why can’t your brother do that?” said Dara. “He already lives there.”