The House on Fortune Street (9 page)

felt a flash of pleasure. He drank some more scotch. He was setting down his glass, preparing to interrupt, when Valentine said, “I’ve got something to tell you,” and popped his eyes. Then there were only the worst kinds of clichés. Sean had left him, mid-sentence, and gone back to the house to start packing. As he folded his shirts, he understood that Valentine had simply been waiting until he finished his half of the book to break the news. He had brought two suitcases and several boxes in Lochlan’s car; everything else he had left, stacked in a corner of his former study.

hen he did emerge from his room, Lochlan and Cleo

treated him like an invalid, lowering their voices and refrain-ing from jokes. Lochlan set up his computer and offered to help him unpack; Cleo offered cups of tea and apologized for the odd Eastern music she listened to while doing yoga. Neither of them asked questions, which, mostly, he appreciated. He had not, since he left London, checked his e-mail or his voice mail. The one worldly task he managed, with Cleo’s help, was to contact the secretary. He sat at the kitchen table while she introduced herself as Mr. Wyman’s sister-in-law and explained that she was calling on his behalf to let the secretary know that Valentine would be responsible for any further work on the book. There was a pause while she cocked her head, listening. Sean noticed that her cheeks had grown plump with pregnancy.

“I’m not at liberty to say,” she said, “but Mr. Wyman has had family difficulties. . . . Thank you. I will.”

She hung up. “There, that’s done.” “How did he sound?”

“Nice. He asked me to convey his sympathy. Would you like to go for a walk? It’s a lovely day.”

He had been about to retreat to his room, but something in Cleo’s voice made him agree, and even the simple act of putting on his boots lifted him an inch or two from his slough of despond. Outside the weather was unusually mild. She led the way down the lane, past the village cricket pitch, and along the disused railway line. The rails had been removed and only the sleepers were left. Should he mention her condition, he wondered, ask how she was feeling, but she was in the midst of talking about the plans for a village museum. A grant from the lottery had come through and they were turning the old forge into an exhibition space.

“Great,” said Sean. From beneath his right foot came a tiny crack.

Looking down, he discovered a snail, irrevocably flattened.

“It’s all due to Lochlan. He wrote the application. But he’s probably going to have to resign from the committee. His boss seems to be getting ready to fire him.”

“But that’s outrageous. He told me sales were up for the last quarter.” “He doesn’t want you to know,” Cleo continued. “If worse comes to worst, I’ve said he can stay at home while I go back to work but he has

some old-fashioned notion about being the breadwinner.”

As she spoke, her voice grew scratchy. Sean hurried to offer consola-tion: maybe his boss would relent, and if he didn’t Lochlan was sure to find a good job again soon; he had terrific qualifications. A few yards ahead a rabbit raised its head from the grass to give them a bright-eyed stare. As it hopped, in a leisurely fashion, across the tracks, he pictured Dara deftly sketching the neat paws and upright ears.

he next morning he woke to the sound of Lochlan driving

away. Before he could think about what he was doing, he got out of bed and approached his computer. He turned it on, and went to make

coffee. Back at his desk he checked his e-mail. The news of Lochlan’s difficulties had made him realize that he couldn’t keep hiding indefi-nitely. Among the rubbish and notes from friends were eight messages from Abigail, two from Valentine with the subject heading The Book, and one with the heading Apologies.

Abigail had finally phoned while he was packing his books, F through

H. “I just got out of the evening show,” she said. “We had three curtain calls. It was fantastic.”

Earlier, before Valentine, while he sat on the sofa, he had tried to think how to tell her that her best friend had died, by her own hand, while they were playing charades. Or perhaps while they were driving back to London. Or while they were buying groceries. Or making moussaka. Or brushing their teeth. But now that the moment had arrived he uttered the simplest possible sentence, a noun and a verb. In the ensuing chaos he had eventually managed to convey two additional pieces of information: the manner of Dara’s death and that Valentine had talked to him. What had Abigail done after he hung up? He didn’t know, or care. He had seen her only once more, at the funeral; she had sat with Dara’s parents while he sat in the back row.

Now he scrolled through the e-mails, forwarding them to her and then deleting them, the modern equivalent of sending letters back unopened. He did the same with Valentine’s. He was about to log off when he noticed among the remaining messages one from Georgina, sent the day before. Still in his mood of brisk efficiency, he opened it.

Dear Sean,

I keep thinking about our last conversation and wish I’d tried harder to find out why you’d decided to give up on your dissertation. I can’t help worrying that the fault may be partly mine for failing to convey sufficient enthusiasm. I am very poor at this sort of

thing—I think it’s called human relations!—but if you would care to discuss the matter at any point, I am at your service.

Belated seasonal greetings,

Georgina

Perhaps in some extreme way, Sean thought, he was finally learning what Keats had meant when he claimed that soul making was the main business of the world.

hat night he fell asleep only to find himself, an hour later, open-eyed in the glimmering dark. It was the time he most dreaded, the energy of the previous day gone and the next one still impossibly far away. He tried to focus on the outline of the nearer window, a dim rectangle, and count his breaths. At nineteen he glimpsed a movement by the bookcase—Ian, the builder, figuring out how to put his head in the oven—and at twenty-eight, here was Frank with his brain tumor. He stopped counting when he saw Bridget’s husband, Kingsley, writhing in pain beside the other window. Then he spotted Dara by the desk, her bicycle helmet in one hand, a gardening trowel in

the other. He seized his dressing gown, and fled.

Downstairs he was relieved to find a light on in the living room and Cleo on the sofa, reading. “Hello,” he said. “Couldn’t you sleep?” He sat down in an armchair.

“No, it’s the baby. By nine at night I can scarcely keep my eyes open. Then I wake up to pee and he starts kicking and I can’t get back to sleep. I find reading gardening books helps.”

“Dara liked gardening,” he said.

“She was Abigail’s friend, wasn’t she?” said Cleo.

And then he told the story the only way he could, zigzagging back and forth between what he knew of Dara’s life and his own small role in it. “She was always ready to listen to me, always ready to help. I should have guessed something was wrong the last time I saw her when she wouldn’t stay for supper. And then—it doesn’t bear thinking about—I went on and on about the euthanasia book, and how no one regretted suicide.”

He described Dara’s questions and how he couldn’t help feeling that the conversation, and his work in general, had in some way contributed to her death; how she had left a note for her parents, torn into many pieces. “I took the envelope before I phoned the police. I didn’t think they could stand the disappointment.”

“Do you still have it?” He nodded.

Cleo was heaving herself off the sofa. “Please,” she said.

Upstairs he retrieved the envelope from the bottom of his suitcase and, pushing his computer aside, carefully emptied the contents onto the desk. Cleo bent over the fragments and began to move the pieces of paper around: Dear Mum an—, life tog—, little girl. At last, with a sigh, she straightened.“Forgive me, Sean,” she said,“but I think you ought to send this to her parents. It shows that their daughter was trying to reach them, that she thought about them during those last hours. Maybe”— she gazed up at him—“that’s better than nothing.”

He nodded again. Cleo was moving toward the door. On the thresh-old she turned, but whatever thought had waylaid her, she decided to keep to herself. She stepped out of the room and gently closed the door. He sat down at the desk and moved the lamp to shine on the fragments.

Dear Mum an—, little girl

Everything, he thought, he had got everything wrong. There he was with Abigail, claiming she was the love of his life, while she was

screwing his old friend. There was Valentine betraying him on the page and between the sheets. There was Dara, seeming so cheerful with her useful job, her sketching and her gardening, as she walked further and further into the valley of shadow. There was the secretary, leaning out of the basket of a balloon, searching the horizon in all directions for his wife’s soul.

Dear Cameron, he wrote, I owe you . . .

always intended to live as an upright man. I remember, when I was seventeen, telling my friend Davy that I thought it was wrong to eat anything I couldn’t kill myself.“I don’t mean that I have to

kill everything I eat,” I explained, “but I want to be sure that I can.”

We were taking a break from doing our homework, leaning on the gate of one of his father’s fields, smoking. It was our new, illicit hobby. Between us, when we put our minds to it, we managed to get through a pack a week. A couple of months before, Davy and I had followed the harvester across this field, stacking the bales of straw. Now, in early November, the drab stubble was nearly buried in mud. Rain had fallen every day for a week and, on the far side of the valley, coppery clouds promised more.

Davy had been to the barber that morning, and when he turned to look at me, all his features, his light blue eyes, his full red lips, seemed larger and more naked. “With your bare hands, Cameron?” he asked, mockingly.

I knew it was just an expression, the “bare” emphasizing the extrem-ity of whatever the hands were doing, but I glanced down at my own hands—rather small for a boy of my age, with my father’s short, flexible thumbs—and I couldn’t imagine them clutching the neck of an animal or bringing a hammer down on a skull.

“Of course not,” I said. “With a gun.” I’d never held a gun of any kind,

other than a toy pistol, but I’d seen enough films that I could picture myself squinting down the barrel, squeezing the trigger.

“How about one of Dad’s pigs? If you kill it, I bet he’ll let you have some of the bacon. Or there are the hens. But they’re so easy, they don’t count.”

Davy himself killed hens on a regular basis, chopping off their heads with a little axe that the rest of the time was used for kindling. On the one occasion when I’d been present the head had fallen to the ground and the rest of the hen, a plump Rhode Island Red, had stood up, blood pulsing from its empty neck, and taken a few tipsy steps in my direction. I had come round to find myself staring at the sky, Davy’s mother wiping my face with a towel, and the bird gone. I pretended I’d missed lunch but no one was fooled.

“Come on,” Davy said, taking a last pull of his cigarette before flick-ing it into a puddle. “Let’s go and choose your dinner.”

I can’t remember which came first—working on the farm during the summer or bicycling over on Saturday afternoons to do homework with Davy and talk endlessly—but for the last year I had felt more comfortable in his house than in my own. On Saturdays his parents were usually out doing their weekly shop and his older sister, if she was around, was either in her room with friends or absorbed in a book. That particular afternoon we’d been puzzling over a passage in Hor-ace’s Odes when Davy said, “Did you see the way Yardley was swinging his briefcase when he left school yesterday? I bet he and Stevenson had it off last night.”

Mr. Yardley was our Latin teacher and Mr. Stevenson was our physics teacher, and Davy had some notion that the two men were a couple. I was equally adamant that they weren’t. The argument could not be resolved, partly due to lack of evidence but mostly because the real subject of the dispute was something that neither of us was ready to mention; this was rural Scotland in the 1960s.

“Don’t talk rubbish,” I had said. “How are you translating Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero pulsanda tellus?”

“You always say that,” said Davy.“You don’t like to admit that anyone is doing anything. Freud would have said you’re repressed.”

“Of course I’m repressed. I live with my parents.”

At that time I threw around words like “repressed” and “inhibited” with no notion of their true meaning. My ignorance about sex, both physically and emotionally, now seems unimaginable, but neither at school nor at home was the topic ever discussed openly. When we studied Othello, it was hinted that Othello’s jealousy stemmed from his intimate relations with Desdemona. And one day while we were thinning the lettuces, my father said, “You’ll be getting into the girls soon, Cameron. Just don’t get carried away thinking that the first one is the love of your life. Not so close together,” he added, pointing at the spindly green plants. So it never occurred to me to connect our playground words, “bugger,” “fag,” “queer,” “poof,” with the sense that had been growing in me for some time that Davy was different from most of our school-fellows. The feeling had intensified that summer when, after an unusually hot day’s harvesting, we’d gone swimming in the river. As I changed into my trunks, I had felt an odd pressure, as if a hundred people were watching me, not just Davy, also changing a few yards away, who’d seen me naked dozens of times. I had hurried into the water and kept my distance rather than indulging in our customary horseplay.

We finished the harvesting, school started again, and Davy had begun to harp on our teachers’ private lives with tedious frequency. That afternoon, trying as usual to change the subject, I had said I wanted a smoke. We had set Horace aside and headed down the lane where I’d held forth about the ethics of eating meat. Now Davy led me to an adjacent field where the pigs held sway. We had last visited them while studying Animal Farm, and agreed that it was easy to see why Orwell made them his leaders. Their small, pale eyes were disquietingly