Perfect Happiness

  Her own mother, forty-five minutes later, poured tea, slipped off her shoes and settled to talk. Frances, from whom a minimal response was all that was required, sat supine, not thinking, in that no-man's-land that precedes reaction. From time to time she returned to the photograph, saw it again, turned it over again and re-read the date. Her mother was recounting plans for re-decoration of her bedroom: ‘… very pale pinky-grey walls and new curtains I've ordered with bluey-green flowers.’ Always inclined to plumpness, she was now fat, overflowing softly into the crannies of the armchair, her ankles puffy, her chin rolling down into her neck. But her clothes were girlish, as they always had been, and her fingernails painted pearl-pink. The room was too warm; comfort had always been the signature of this house – a nice fire, a lovely hot bath. The carpets were deep and the curtains thick; whatever went on in the world, went on beyond them. Years ago, Frances had said to Steven, ‘In fact, our mothers are not unalike, though neither of them would recognize that.’

  ‘… and a sweet lacy bedcover I found at John Lewis. And I'm having those Redouté flower prints framed that Daddy never liked very much. Chokky bikkie, darling?’

  Frances remembered Steven's observation, in a moment of asperity, that a whole thesis could be written on the semantics of speech as a reflection of personality, using her mother as a model.

  ‘Did you say you were going to see Mrs Brooklyn?’

  ‘I've been.’

  Her mother slipped a cushion behind her head. ‘How was she? Poor thing, I thought she looked awfully washed out that time I saw her at Christmas. Of course, I expect she has a bit of a dull time.’ She looked across at Frances. ‘And now, darling, tell me how you're really feeling in yourself.’

  ‘Not too bad.’

  Her mother sighed. ‘Well, you know I'm the one person who knows and understands. And I still think you should have come here for a bit. After Daddy died the horridest part of all was waking up in an empty house in the mornings. You see, I do so know what it's like, other people simply can't imagine. And now all this moving house… I still think that was silly. They asked you to stay on till next year.’

  ‘It was far too big for me on my own.’ Frances put her cup down. ‘I'll have to go – I told Tab I'd be back by seven.’

  ‘I've got a tiny bit of bad back today,’ said her mother. ‘So I won't come out to say bye-bye. You will look for that cream braid for me?’

  ‘Yes, mamma.’

  ‘Harrods, I should think. Or failing there, Peter Jones.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Frances drove back to London, along the motorway and then packed tight in the traffic that poured back into the city as though by suction, shoals of cars surging up on to the Westway, sailing above the rooftops, riding among the tower-blocks. The flow sank to a crawl and she sat amid this metal, these trapped bodies, and the photograph printed itself on the windscreen in front of her: perfectly polite but entirely insistent. The kaleidoscope was twisted, the pattern of the past re-assembled, all previous image lost for ever.

  ‘Who was Sarah Hennings?’

  ‘Sarah what?’ said Zoe, ‘I dunno. Oh, good grief, yes I do. That girl of Steve's, centuries ago. Whatever brought her up?’

  ‘Steven's fiancée.’

  There was a pause. A typewriter clattered. Zoe, voice muted, turning evidently from the phone, said, ‘O.K., Tim, with you in a minute.’ She returned. ‘What's all this, Frances? Why her, suddenly? Yes, they were engaged, now I come to think of it. Didn't you know?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, so what?’ said Zoe, almost crossly. ‘It was years before you and he ever met. She's a blank as far as I'm concerned – I don't even remember what she looks like.’

  ‘There's a photo of her in one of the albums at Marlow.’

  ‘Well, it's passed me by, if there is.’

  ‘He never mentioned. That they were engaged. I must have seen the photo before and just thought she was some friend. I think he did once say something about a Sarah, but as though she was just… anyone.’

  There was silence for a moment. ‘Frances,’ said Zoe, ‘This is crazy. You're going on as if you'd unearthed some massive infidelity. She was a girl he didn't marry, long before he met you. If he never said then presumably he had his reasons, being Steven. Presumably because he didn't think it was important. When were you at Marlow?’

  ‘Yesterday. She seemed fine.’

  ‘You're a saint – haven't been there for a month. Listen, you're not really brooding about Sarah Hennings, are you? She doesn't matter.’

  Frances paused. ‘I'm afraid she does. She matters to me, and there isn't anything I can do about that.’

  Later, she took the puppy out for a walk on Hampstead Heath. She walked for two hours, and tried, during that time, to absorb this jolting, disturbing fact. A person is a fact. Everything – each day, each moment – had to be adjusted to accommodate the distant shadowy figure of this girl. This once-girl. Am I jealous? Frances asked herself. Why did Steven never speak of her? Because, as Zoe says, he thought it was neither here nor there? Yes, when I search hard, there were times when he spoke of a Sarah. Casually. What I didn't know was that they were to marry; that they stood once against a background of privet or possibly laurel, holding hands. And now I shall never know any of the answers, because Steven cannot tell me – who would have done, had I asked – and goodness knows who or where this woman is now, and unhinged as I am at this moment I am not quite unhinged enough to seek her out.

  She scrutinized what she felt; she picked at her distress and held it up to the light and laid it out for dissection. What mattered was the sense of intrusion. Always, unknown, there had been this episode, lying like an unseen rock under the surface of the sea. However unimportant, it had been there, in Steven's head and not in hers. Why didn't you tell me? she said, now, to the sparkling morning air and the trees and the bright grass, and Steven, a long time ago, replied: Frances, sometimes you are possessive.

  She came home, disconsolate, obsessed. She knew that what she felt was irrational and paranoic and knowing this was of no help at all. When the certainties of the past are tampered with, reason itself dissolves. She wondered, wretchedly, if she were in for another spell of madness, as in Venice. She noted, too, that still, day by day, the content of her life was dominated by what had been rather than what was. Even that miserable business with Philip Landon, she thought, was to do with Steven, not me.

  Tabitha, coming into the room, stood for a moment looking at Frances who was kneeling on the floor riffling through a box of papers, a curious expression on her face, almost of savagery. She looked up with a start.

  ‘Tab… you made me jump!’

  ‘Sorry, I thought you'd heard me.’ Tabitha loitered, picking up a heap of newspaper clippings. She said, ‘Goodness, what a lot of stuff…’

  ‘That's what a life seems to amount to. A great many bits of paper.’

  ‘Shall I help?’

  ‘Thanks – but I've got a sort of method which is probably impenetrable to anyone else.’ She sounded abstracted, and sat staring down at a ring-file of handwritten notes. Tabitha, looking over her shoulder, said, ‘Undergraduate essays. He never threw anything away, did he?’

  Frances slammed the file shut. ‘Selected items, evidently.’ She bit her lip, began to sort through a bundle of letters.

  ‘Are you looking for something in particular?’

  ‘No,’ said Frances, snapping. ‘Just sorting.’

  Tabitha, faintly offended, changed her tone. ‘By the way, I forgot – man telephoned when you were out. Someone called Morris Corfield. He said he'd ring again.’

  There was nothing: no letter, no postcard, no mention. No evidence. An absence which proved nothing, and was neither solace nor provocation.

  During the days that passed the two women, Tabitha and Frances, lived together and profoundly apart. At meal-times they talked, determinedly, and when they passed one another on the stairs or in the hall of the small house
they exchanged smiles of guilt. Each felt that she betrayed the other with her preoccupation; neither felt able to penetrate the other's purgatory. Tabitha continued to tell herself, uselessly, that her own plight was trivial and universal; Frances blamed herself for inadequacy in being unable to counsel or console. They were like invalids in neighbouring hospital beds, slung about the apparatus of their own disease. Both thought of Steven and mourned the loss of his objectivity and calmness; both recited to themselves what he would have said, how he would have advised. They loved one another, and found the love embarrassing.

  On an afternoon of brooding September heat, when the city seemed to lie numbed and static at this hinge of the year, Tabitha, unable to bear the sight of her books any longer, went out into London. She got on to a bus, almost at random, and sat on the top deck looking down at the crowded pavements and the office blocks and the sober enduring façades of eighteenth century houses. In Gower Street, as the bus halted at a traffic light, she looked along Great Russell Street and saw the zebra crossing in front of the British Museum, across which she and he had once walked hand in hand. He had been wearing jeans and a blue shirt; she, the skirt that she had on now. The happiness of that day seemed to give the place a mocking clarity: the bright stucco of the buildings, the swaying green of a tree, the orderly black railings of the museum. She looked, unable not to, and it was as though she saw, with the eyes of inexorable experience, a ghost of herself; thus she remembered recently meeting the eyes of the five-year-old Tabitha in the photograph on Frances's dressing-table: eyes that did not know, and did not wish to, and to which there was nothing to be said. The bus jerked into motion again, leaving the place behind, and Tabitha was carried on towards the clamour of Oxford Street, a leaden weight within her, wondering for how long everything she saw and heard would be thus blighted, how people exorcise their landscapes, how they go on walking a world which does not allow anything to be forgotten.

  She left the bus, went into a shop in which music sobbed from the walls, and bought a shirt. She would have liked to buy a skirt and throw away the one she wore, with its tormenting associations, but she did not have enough money. She got on to another bus and travelled to the park, where she walked for a while on the dusty grass, looking at the dark stooping shapes of the trees, the running dogs and leaping children. She sat for a while in a deck-chair. She walked again, across into Kensington Gardens. She examined the Albert Memorial and stared at the hulk of the Albert Hall and then, on an impulse, seeing that the afternoon had slid into early evening, she went into a telephone kiosk and dialled Zoe's number.

  ‘What happened?’ said Zoe. ‘Did he just bugger off?’

  Tabitha nodded. ‘Sort of.’

  Zoe sighed. ‘You poor love.’ She got up and stood looking out of the window. ‘Likewise,’ she said, but Tabitha did not hear this, nor had it been intended that she should. ‘Lousy, isn't it? You know something?’ – she turned back to Tabitha – ‘Eventually it won't matter. It simply will not matter. You wouldn't believe how little it will matter. Remember having measles?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘It's hardly the same thing,’ said Tabitha with dignity.

  ‘I didn't say that it was. I was just trying to show how time mercifully obliterates. Not what happened but what it felt like.’

  ‘We were so happy…’ cried Tabitha. ‘That's what I can't bear. It was the most perfect feeling I've ever known. And for it all to be wasted.’

  ‘It's not wasted. Nothing's wasted. You'll see.’

  They sat, Tabitha and Zoe, for a minute or so, in silence. From below in the square came the high continuous sound of children playing; a shaft of evening sunshine came through the window and lay like a topaz flag on the carpet.

  Tabitha said, ‘I'm sorry to be making such a fuss about something so frightfully ordinary.’

  ‘If you think it's ordinary,’ replied Zoe, ‘then you aren't the girl I think you are. Nor are you feeling what you ought to be feeling.’

  A small smile glimmered upon Tabitha's face.

  ‘There is nothing ordinary,’ said Zoe, ‘about being either happy or unhappy. Whatever the reasons may be. Apart from anything else, I've always assumed that no two people do it in quite the same way.’

  They faced each other across the room, Tabitha huddled into one end of the sofa, Zoe in the chair. The flag of sunlight climbed up the side of Tabitha's leg and laid one corner on her skirt. Zoe saw in Tabitha's face a whole sequence of other faces, the children that were mother to the woman, while Tabitha heard in Zoe's voice a great many other words, spoken down the years, serious and gay, urgent and inconsequential. Each felt the presence of the other to be bolstered by many other presences and Zoe, suddenly, got up. She crossed the room, poured herself a drink, said to Tabitha, ‘What about you?’

  ‘O.K. Wine, please.’

  Zoe sat down again. She began to talk. She talked about Frances and about Steven. She remembered a holiday they had spent in Italy and Christmasses here and there and the time they lost Harry in Piccadilly tube station. The shaft of sunlight died and the room became darker but still warm, as though the day would never really end. And then Zoe said, ‘I don't know if I'm doing the right thing at the right moment or not, all I know is that it has to be done sooner or later, and maybe too much calculation never did anyone any good. Tab, I'm going to tell you a story…’

  Tabitha, in amazement, listened.

  She let herself into the house and called ‘Mum…?’ And even as she said it she realized that the word was not the same as it had been a few hours ago. But, in the event, it had gone unheard. There was a note from Frances on the hall table: ‘Gone out to dinner. Food for you in the fridge. Don't wait up.’

  *

  Morris Corfield patrolled his kitchen yet again: table laid, wine opened, saddle of lamb in the oven, fruit salad in the fridge, smoked mackerel for starters laid out on the side. Over the years, he had perfected two menus for entertaining, determined not to become the kind of solitary man who is unable – or professes himself unable – to return hospitality. This was his favourite menu but as he contemplated it he was visited now by doubts. Suppose the lamb was tough? Suppose she didn't care for smoked mackerel? Had he overdone the maraschino in the fruit salad? He returned to the sitting room and stood fretting at the window, alert for the doorbell. Feeling that to invite Frances Brooklyn for the first time on her own might be inappropriate he had provided as ballast another couple and a single man; not knowing how to engineer that these left early, thus allowing him at least a while on his own with her, he had staggered the times at which people were to arrive. Frances was supposed to come at seven thirty, the others at eight. It was now seven thirty-nine, which meant that already things had gone awry.

  When, at last, the bell rang he cantered in agitation to the door to find them all there, Frances and the Hadrills in uneasy conjunction on the step, smiling uncertainly at each other, John Peterson approaching down the street. Nothing, he realized gloomily, as he brought them in and settled them, ever goes how it is supposed to go and even as he thought this he met Frances's eye across the room and was smitten with wild irrational happiness. Frances looked immediately away and continued her conversation with John Peterson, and Morris, in his unnerved state, gave the Hadrills each other's drinks and fled to the kitchen in sudden panic about the condition of the roasting lamb. There, he stood for a moment in front of the stove, hot juicy air gusting into his face, and listened to their voices. I feel wonderful, he thought in amazement, whatever is wrong with me? He returned to the sitting room, where the Hadrills were exchanging drinks. He felt as though his emotional state must be apparent to all, like an escaped shirt-tail or unzipped fly.

  Half-way through the smoked mackerel John Peterson remarked to Frances, in a correctly subdued tone that referred to her condition, that he had met Steven a couple of times at his university. Morris, anxious to deflect this line, interrupted to explain about John being an aca
demic musicologist. ‘You've said all that already,’ put in Susan Hadrill, ‘When you were giving everybody a run-down on everybody else.’ Morris glared at her and then, again, caught Frances's eye across the table which looked not disconcerted but amused. He leaned towards her, intensely. ‘Do you like smoked mackerel?’ The inquiry, immediately it was made, seemed suicidal. If she said no, there was nothing to be done.

  ‘I love it.’

  He sighed. The conversation, thanks to his intrusion, had withered; Morris, ignoring this, got up to pour wine. Frances, he saw, had a small mole on the left side of her neck. He sat down again; the smell of the roast lamb was extraordinarily evocative, endowed with significances beyond itself, like incense; he savoured it as though it were none of his doing. The others were talking now. Susan Hadrill said, ‘Morris, you seem slightly distrait tonight. Should I clear the plates?’

  And so it went. From the mackerel to the lamb to the fruit salad (the maraschino, in the event, quite satisfactorily adjusted) to the cheeses. Time unfolding and bestowing its own perverse alternatives so that when they rose to move to the sitting room nothing that Morris had planned should be said had been said and it was eleven o'clock. Susan Hadrill, stuffed cosily into the best chair, looked all set for the night. ‘I always feel bad, Susan,’ he said sternly, ‘that you have such miles to come when you visit me. That drive back…’ And of course it was Frances who glanced at her watch and said, ‘Goodness, I really must be going.’

  ‘Brandy?’ said Morris, in a panic, ‘Whisky? Cointreau? Port… um, no, not port.’

  But people like events are undeflectable. And so when presently the Hadrills and John Peterson arose in concert and announced departure Frances too got up and Morris found himself suddenly in the hall with them all around him, unstoppably heading for the door. She put a hand out for her coat. He said, ‘Please don't go.’ She hesitated, the others by now beyond the step. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Just for a few minutes,’ and for Morris that heady sense of well-being came rushing back, united now in some permanent way with the smell of roasting lamb. As an afterthought, he waved an effusive farewell to his other guests.