Perfect Happiness

  Frances stood against the window in the Landons' sitting room and talked to an Indian doctor. The Indian doctor lived down the road; his house, he said, was the same as this house. And the same as mine, then, said Frances. The room, like her own, was long and narrow, having originally been two. One wall was lined with books. There was a big sofa, its stuffing leaking, over which an ethnic rug had been thrown as a cover. Above the fireplace, in which stood dried flower-heads furry with dust, was a pencil drawing of Philip in youth; it carried conviction, looked as though it were perhaps by a distinguished artist. Frances peered, but could see no signature. She looked furtively round the room; there were about a dozen people. Philip Landon kept circulating with a decanter of wine. Once, when she looked in his direction, she saw him staring at her. She had been with the Indian doctor for rather a long time now.

  Marsha brought up a small fair woman, introduced simply as Christine. None of these people, indeed, appeared to own to surnames. Jilly, Barry, Sandra, Susannah, Aziz… It was like the clinical anonymity of a television programme dealing with those in social or personal distress. Or hairdressers, Frances thought, suggesting not intimacy but a kind of indifference. Christine kept using her own name, tagging it to the end of inquiries. ‘What do you do, Frances?’ ‘Frances was married to an extremely distinguished fellow called Steven Brooklyn,’ said Philip, coming up with the wine. Collusion and conspiracy bloomed on Christine's face. She said, when Philip had gone, ‘I'm divorced too.’ ‘My husband died,’ said Frances. There was a brief silence, faintly tinged with resentment, and Christine began to talk about the local playgroup. ‘We desperately need helpers.’ When she turned to pick up her glass Frances managed to slide from her and move over to the window, where Philip was talking to a man in a white polo-necked sweater. ‘This is Frances Brooklyn, who moved in down the road recently. Frances was married to…’ ‘I wonder,’ said Frances brightly, ‘if I could have a drop more wine?’

  I am going to have to do something about this, she thought. Here and elsewhere. I will not be made to wear Steven for ever like a regimental brooch; he would not have cared for it any more than I do. She made determined inquiries about local facilities, not taking in the replies. The polo-sweatered man was in television. ‘Not Steven Brooklyn?’ he said, ‘I worked once on a programme he…’ Frances heard herself forge determinedly on, inquiring about swimming-pools. Philip Landon stood watching her; he had, she noticed, reptilian eyes, slightly hooded. What she could not understand was how against all her inclinations something was established between them: a private intimacy, as though they shared a secret knowledge. He both mesmerized her and made her feel uncomfortable. She felt, in this house, profoundly lonely, as lonely as she had ever been since Steven's death, washed up without defences in an alien place.

  And yet, when the guests began to ebb away, she found herself accepting Marsha's laconic offer of supper. She felt muzzy and realized she had drunk rather too much wine. The supper was scrambled eggs, inattentively cooked and served with hunks of bread and a watery salad. The other remaining guests were Christine, who disappeared into the hall from time to time to telephone fretful instructions to a child, and Barry, the television producer. The conversation centred on personalities; an actor was discussed, who lived locally. Barry turned to Frances: ‘Sorry – do you know Paul?’ ‘Frances isn't used to such raffish circles,’ said Philip. ‘Do you find us raffish, Frances?’ ‘Oh, for goodness sake,’ said Marsha. ‘What a way to talk. What do you expect her to say?’ Christine, coming back from the telephone, broke in with a saga about a leaking water cistern. ‘Philip'll fix it for you,’ said Marsha. ‘Philip's marvellous over things like that.’ She stared across the table at her husband, expressionless, her pallor suggesting that she might be in the throes of some distressing illness. ‘Marsha’ said Philip to Frances, conversationally, ‘is being snide, as you no doubt realize. She is referring to the fact that I am not adept on technical matters and that therefore we have to spend good money on plumbers and suchlike.’ ‘ “It is the duty of the wealthy man”,’ said Barry, ‘ “To give employment to the artisan”.’ ‘Oh, yuck!’ exclaimed Christine. ‘Who's that, then? Spike Milligan?’ ‘Belloc,’ said Philip. ‘A bit out of your usual line of reference, I imagine.’ ‘Oh, you're so bloody cultured,’ said Marsha. Christine reached out for the wine: ‘How's the book going, Philip? I do so admire someone who does what you do. I mean, making yourself go to the desk, day after day.’ ‘Me, too,’ said Barry. ‘That amount of self-discipline.’ Marsha, her back to them, piling dishes into the sink, began to laugh.

  Frances pushed back her chair. ‘I really will have to go.’ ‘So soon?’ said Philip. ‘There's half a bottle of plonk still.’ ‘I'm afraid I must.’

  He stood up. ‘If you insist. I'll find your coat.’

  Marsha had sat down again. The three round the table gazed at Frances. ‘Super meeting you,’ said Barry.

  Frances followed Philip into the hall. He said suddenly, ‘I'll walk back with you.’

  ‘Oh, don't bother. It's only just down the road.’

  ‘I need some fresh air.’

  Outside her door she began to say goodnight. He interrupted. ‘Could I come in for a minute?’

  The walk back had made Frances feel the effects of the wine. She nodded. ‘All right. Not for long, if you don't mind, I was planning an early night. I'll make some coffee.’

  He followed her into the kitchen and perched on the edge of the table. His shanks were so bony that she expected them to click against the wood; he was the most desiccated man she had ever seen. He said, ‘I won't keep you up. I just need to get clear of the house for a bit. The company, as no doubt you'll agree, was a bit dispiriting.’

  Frances murmured vague dissent into the kettle.

  ‘Don't bother, Frances. I could see your expression. Christine is a sad slag and Barry is a second-rater who will remain just that. And Marsha and I are given to scrapping in company which is offensive to others and self-destructive. Sorry you were landed with it.’

  She put the cups on the table. When she looked at him she found his long grey face turned towards her, watching, awaiting a reaction. She felt distaste and pity in confusing conjunction. ‘Philip…’ she began.

  ‘That is the first time you've used my name, incidentally.’

  She sighed. ‘I imagine all married couples squabble occasionally.’

  ‘Not Steven, surely. A perfect gentleman, even at the age of fourteen.’

  She said firmly, ‘Milk? Sugar? Everyone had rather a lot to drink.’

  He moved into a chair. ‘You're slumming, Frances. Unintentionally, of course. This is not the kind of thing you're used to. And I won't mention Steven again, I swear. I can see you don't like it. I'm one of those bloody perverse cusses who are driven to do what they don't really want to do. Christ – you're right – we did drink too much.’ He took a gulp of coffee. ‘Well, you don't have to consort with the neighbours if you don't want to. Truth to tell I don't much myself. Marsha has her cronies. As a matter of fact I detest this place. I detest this country. We lived in Spain for a long time. Sun, cheap booze. God knows how we ever came back. Do you detest this country?’

  ‘No,’ said Frances. She poured herself another cup of coffee. Her head was clearer now. Oddly, she felt a little exhilarated.

  ‘No, you wouldn't. The sun shone on you here, no doubt. It tends to be a bit selective, I've found. I've never had much joy here, one way and another.’ He stubbed his cigarette out in the saucer, ignoring the ashtray Frances had put beside him. ‘And damn all now. If I sound pissed off there's good reason The Beeb gave me the push last week, thereby throttling the one steady source of income. I had some part-time producing work. Now some young turk comes along and decides to prune the dead wood. Frances, I don't suppose you've by any chance got such a thing as a drop of whisky?’

  ‘I'll have a look.’

  He was a man to whom failure and discontent clung like ash. Steven would have
dismissed him. Giving him a small whisky, she felt again that unease. I don't have to know these people, she thought, I have only to be rude, once and for all… She sat down and watched him drink the whisky; he was talking now about a job he had had with the British Council, a contract abruptly ended, a hinted persecution, a betrayal by a publisher – years of work wasted – a failed marriage (so Marsha was a second wife). Tired, she took in the tone rather than the content; it was a tone not so much of complaint as of sarcastic acceptance. He seemed to see himself as someone against whom the dice were loaded; others, unfairly but immutably, would always have the advantage.

  He finished the whisky. ‘I'd better push off. One of us'll look in with those glasses.’ In the hall, he paused. ‘Sorry about all the maudlin confessions. I'm afraid you're the sort of person who invites that kind of thing.’ And he smiled, a rare, almost strained gleam that for a moment transformed him. He leaned forward, put an arm round her and kissed her on the cheek. ‘Goodnight, Frances.’

  She locked the doors and went to bed. She was in a state of intense physical arousal. She lay in shame and misery and endured it, longing for sex, for another body, for Steven.

  Zoe stood at the entrance to the Day Room of an Old People's Home in Surrey and looked at the inmates; they sat in opposing rows, in basket chairs, as though about to take part in a debate. One old man was reading a newspaper, two of the women were knitting; most of them were doing nothing. The warden hung at her elbow, talking about the recent rebuilding programme. The Home had been the subject of allegations of neglect and abuse in a local newspaper. Zoe the brisk investigative journalist had spoken all day to various people concerned and made up her mind, more or less, as to the truth or falsehood of these allegations. Now, in the middle of the afternoon, another Zoe surfaced. She said, ‘I'd like to have a word with one or two of them, if that's all right.’

  The warden fidgeted. ‘Well of course, by all means. But you've already spoken to Mr Sanderson about whom these problems have arisen, and Mrs Hampshire. There is no suggestion that anyone you see here…’

  Zoe walked away from him and along the lines of chairs. Some of these people were very old: beyond, she could see, reasonable communication. Only at these helpless points in life, she thought, in childhood and at the end, are we herded together like with like; there was a strange terse affinity between playgrounds of whooping children and this static, largely silent gathering. She paused by various chairs, making conversation; some of the occupants stared vacantly at her, others responded warmly. An old man had some query she could not follow. ‘They get confused,’ murmured a young nurse, confidentially. ‘He thinks you're the almoner.’ Zoe stood by a woman intent on knitting a sock; ‘I haven't seen anyone do that since my mum used to make them for my brother.’ ‘This is for my grandson. I've got five grandchildren, three boys and two girls.’ ‘Wonderful,’ said Zoe. ‘And four children I had, my daughter's in Australia, the others are in London. Mrs Lawrence here's got three, her son's with the Inland Revenue.’ The old woman in the next chair smiled and dipped her head. Is it thus that we are defined, in the end, thought Zoe, by those we have brought forth? Is that what it all comes down to? ‘Have you got children, dear?’ asked the knitting lady. Zoe smiled: ‘I'm not married.’ ‘You should get married, a nice-looking woman like you.’ ‘Well, thanks, love, but I think I've left it a bit late now – I'm not so young as all that.’ The old women gazed at her, their vision a different one.

  She got into the car and set off for London. Fiddling with the radio, she caught a snatch of violins; she turned the volume up and the car was filled with Bach. A Brandenburg? The Fifth Brandenburg? Tabitha sat before her in that college dining-hall, furiously playing, bravely playing. Now and forever, Zoe thought, that piece of music is latched to time and place, to the particular, to those great glossy portraits, to Tab in that frilly white shirt.

  She drove too fast, whipping through the gabled suburban towns. The Brandenburg gave way to something else, and those thoughts to others. Tabitha, in another incarnation, comes prancing down a garden path, the path of that house in Sussex, crying archly, ‘Hello, Auntie Zoe. I ought to call you Auntie, oughtn't I? not just Zoe. Everybody at school calls their aunts Auntie.’ And Frances, wryly smiling, says, ‘Corruption has set in, I'm afraid – the awful hand of conformity.’ They sit on a lawn frenzied with daisies, gilded with sunlight, she and Frances and Steven, while the children whoop and wheel around them. And Frances looks up and says, ‘You know, it's amazing, but it works.’ She says it with wonder, and quietly, as though it should not be said. She looks at Zoe; ‘It works. We had no right, but it works.’

  During the early days and weeks of her solitude Frances had come to realize that grief like illness is unstable; it ebbs and flows in tides, it steals away to a distance and then comes roaring back, it torments by deception. It plays games with time and with reality. On some mornings she would wake and Steven's presence was so distant and yet so reassuring that she thought herself purged; he seemed both absent and present, she felt close to him and at the same time freed, she thought that at last she was walking alone. And then, within hours she would be back once more in that dark trough: incredulous, raging, ground into her misery. Time, that should be linear, had become formless; mercurial and unreliable, it took her away from the moment of Steven's death and then flung her back beside it.

  Now, in the days after the Landons' party, she entered yet again one of those phases. She was glad to be alone and unwitnessed. There was this time none of that disorientation she had known in Venice; she had simply to endure once more the onset of raw pain. She wanted Steven's physical presence until the wanting was beyond endurance; she sat clenched in a chair with a book in her lap and fought her way through the hours, sustained only by the acquired wisdom that the pain would recede, that it would get better, that it might get better.

  It was during one of these sessions, late one evening, that Marsha Landon rang the doorbell.

  ‘I brought your glasses back.’ If she observed Frances's stress she gave no indication. She put the box of glasses down on the hall table and stood; her pale shabby presence required attention, as though to ignore her were to reject a needy child. She wore faded jeans and an airy sweater against which poked small pointed breasts; her hair needed washing. Frances, beyond caring if she stayed or not, said, ‘Have some coffee.’

  ‘I'd rather have a drink, if that's O.K.’

  In the sitting room, she flung herself into a chair and stared round. ‘You've got nice things. Not the tat most people in the street have.’ The puppy, lumbering from a deep sleep, had come over to nose her leg; Marsha eyed it. ‘I've always had cats, if anything. Aren't dogs an awful bother?’

  ‘It's my first,’ said Frances. ‘My son gave it to me before he went away. As a sort of consolation present I think.’

  ‘We never had children. Philip decided it wouldn't be a good idea. He had a daughter by Marguerite and…’ Marsha shrugged ‘… anyway children are an expense and a distraction, or that's the story. Books it was to be, instead of children, though as you'll note, the productivity level in that area hasn't been stunningly high either. How many have you got?’

  ‘Two.’

  Marsha had folded her legs beneath her. She looked very thin, washed up on the corner of the sofa. ‘I used to paint, but that's gone out of the window since we came back from Spain. Philip needs the attic room for a study. Anyway, it's not the same here – dreary old London. God – I wish we were back there.’

  Frances had poured them each a glass of wine. The effort of doing this – of finding bottle and glasses, drawing the cork – and the demands of Marsha's presence had dulled, for the moment, her wretchedness. She looked across the room at Marsha, hardly hearing what she said.

  Marsha said, ‘Do you think Philip's attractive?’

  Frances blinked. ‘I hadn't thought about it.’

  ‘Women usually do.’ Marsha paused, momentarily alert as though listening for some
thing, and then slumped back. ‘He's got that old-fashioned thing called sex appeal, apparently. As well as a lot of other things we won't go into.’ She gave a harsh little laugh. ‘Of course your husband was a writer too, wasn't he? So you know all about the artistic temperament.’ She glanced at her watch, and Frances realized for the first time that she was in a state of high agitation. ‘Sorry – walking in like this… am I interrupting anything?’

  ‘No. I'm alone. I was just going to bed.’

  ‘I simply had to get out for a bit. That damn typewriter clattering away upstairs, and the bloody rain outside. God, the English summer.’

  Frances said, ‘It's only today it's rained.’

  ‘Is it? It feels like for the last month. No wonder people here look like they do – that drab hunted look. In Spain everybody laughs.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Were you happy? Both of you?’

  Marsha looked away. ‘Oh, God, I don't know… It was different, that's all.’

  You've never been happy, Frances thought, you poor discontented creature. And you don't love your husband, perhaps you don't love anyone, perhaps you never have. What does that feel like? It is a condition as mysterious as death. She said, ‘Have you got a job?’

  ‘I help a friend who's got a sort of junk-shop one or two mornings a week.’

  ‘That's not a job. That's filling in the time.’ I sound like Zoe, Frances thought.

  Marsha looked offended. ‘What do you do?’ she countered.

  Frances smiled. ‘At the moment, I'm still busy sorting out Steven's papers, then when I've done that I'm going to see what there is going for a not very well qualified forty-nine year old.’ Am I? Yes, of course I am.

  ‘If you like,’ said Marsha off-handedly, ‘I could help you with this sorting-out you're doing.’