Perfect Happiness

  She could not endure sympathy. The rest she could stand, would get through with. Alone. If I have to come to it, she thought, the visits and the forced optimism and the bloody flowers and the damn grapes, then I have to come to it. But for the time being I'll do it on my own.

  There is time, which is supposed to be linear, and there are seconds and minutes and hours which are supposed to be of a particular duration. And there are also days, in which we live. The day on which Zoe went into hospital was not linear, neither was it composed of minutes or hours that bore any resemblance to one another. They raced, or they crept. Occasionally the day stopped altogether and hung suspended in the greenish light of the ward, quite self-contained, like the sterile world of a space capsule.

  Once, obediently, Zoe padded down corridors in her dressing-gown and slippers to be wired up to a machine that whirred and clicked and showered figures and numbers across a television screen. ‘Your heart,’ said a woman in white, ‘is quite normal.’ ‘I'm glad to hear it,’ replied Zoe. ‘I've sometimes wondered.’ The woman smiled. ‘Back to the ward now. Can you find your way?’ Zoe padded off, past ordinary people in their suits and dresses and jackets, a creature apart. Now I know, she thought, why the first thing they do with prisoners is remove their clothes.

  In the ward, she sat on a chair reading. Nurses, from time to time, tried to tidy her away into the bed. ‘No thanks,’ said Zoe. ‘If you don't mind. I'm not ill till tomorrow.’

  Most of the women were old. Their grey or white hair was a curious affront to their pastel nightclothes, to the lemon nylon and pale pink candlewick and the frills and arch transparencies, as though they were macabre dolls. Some sat propped against pillows, others shuffled past, peeping at Zoe with curious eyes. She was offered sweets and newspapers; hospitals are kindly places; people are nice to one another. Sometimes it was still morning, the morning on which she had been told to present herself, and at other times a gilded evening light flooded down through the high windows, striping the shiny linoleum floor. The day folded back and forth; she was no longer in real time, just as she was no longer in the real world.

  She tried to penetrate the customs of the place, as though it were an alien society; nurses, she noted, are labelled by name and their rank denoted by subtleties of dress. She observed caps and the colours of sleeves. She talked to a young woman hooked up to a Christmas tree of chrome and tubes and bright pouches of blood and serum. ‘What are you in for?’ asked the girl. ‘Armed robbery,’ said Zoe. The girl, clutching her side, laughed, and the Christmas tree danced and glinted. An old woman shuffled by on her way to the lavatory, steered from behind by a nurse with both hands on her hips; the light shone through the old woman's nightdress so that the body beneath was like a statue, heavy thighs and sagging breasts, a dark clump of pubic hair.

  A young woman doctor came and talked to Zoe. ‘Don't worry,’ she kept saying. ‘I'm not,’ said Zoe with honesty. What she felt was not worry but a curious deadening, akin to hopelessness; she had stepped aside from life, and did not expect to step back.

  In the evening, she got into the bed. The ward doors were opened and visitors arrived, homing upon the bedsides to sit awkwardly there like gaolers or ministering priests. When the bell rang and they left the ward seemed to heave a little with relief. Nurses came round with trolleys, dishing out pills and drug cocktails in tiny plastic cups. Zoe was given a mug of Ovaltine and a sleeping pill. ‘Nothing more for you till after the op,’ said the nurse. ‘They'll be taking you down to the theatre at ten.’ Zoe declined the pill. ‘Sure?’ said the nurse doubtfully. ‘Some people feel a bit wakeful, the night before.’ ‘No thanks,’ said Zoe. ‘I've never touched the things.’

  She did not sleep at all. Time had failed altogether. Now and for always she lay in the twilight of the ward, listening sometimes to the noises – the squeak of the nurses' shoes, the sighs and moans of patients – and drifting at other times into a kind of privacy in which she summoned up ghosts. She talked to Steven and to Frances. She shuffled the pack of days and selected one here and one there; she lay with Eric in a bed in Prague, when first she knew him; she watched an infant Tabitha take her first wobbling steps across a sun-blotched lawn; she had a row with a one-time boss, a glorious liberating eruptive moment of verbal violence, as cleansing to the spirit as absolution. But for the most part she simply lay there, passive, alone and yet surrounded by people whose breathings and sighings gave the ward a corporate life as though it were some great somnolent creature. From time to time there were crises: someone would call out, nurses pattered to and fro. Screens were put round a bed; a doctor came. Beyond the screens voices muttered. A nurse kept saying, ‘It's all right, dear.’ Someone groaned and groaned. Zoe turned on to her side. When it was daylight the screens were gone and the bed was empty, clean sheets strapped tightly to the mattress. She thought, I have been present at the death of a person I never knew.

  It was another day. Early morning of another day. The end of which was invisible in a particular sense. All days are open-ended, she thought, this one is more open than others. And with the thought came an odd tranquillity. The dull queasiness that had gnawed at her for a week now ebbed away and in its place there came a determination. She knew that whichever way it turned out, she had gained something in these last surreal hours. She remembered what she herself had said to Tabitha: Nothing is wasted.

  The woman doctor returned. She said, ‘All right?’ She sat for a moment on Zoe's bed; her young face was strained with fatigue. Zoe said, ‘I'm fine, love.’ She added, ‘You've been up half the night, haven't you?’ The girl nodded. This place is driving me sentimental, Zoe thought, something is happening to my natural distrust of humanity. I keep seeing goodness.

  She was given an injection, and floated into a careless drunken world in which nothing really mattered. An elderly Pakistani toured the ward with an immense floor-polisher, importantly poking it beneath the beds. He said to Zoe, ‘Machine is coming.’ ‘So I see,’ said Zoe. ‘Is very good machine, is doing very good cleaning’; the hospital and its mysterious workings were relegated, he ran his hand down the metal stem of the polisher with respectful familiarity, like a groom handling a thoroughbred. ‘It's a beautiful machine,’ said Zoe.

  Presently, hands lifted her on to a trolley. She slid down corridors, gazing at the shiny ceilings. Time ceased altogether.

  Morris and Frances sat in deck chairs in Green Park. At a short distance the band played, bestowing an atmosphere of decorous carnival. Dogs scampered; a child turned somersaults; Frances said, ‘What a good idea this was.’ Morris glowed.

  It was their second outing. She had come with him to a South Bank concert and now, a week later, he had felt able to telephone at short notice and wonder if she would care for an afternoon at Burlington House, followed by tea in the park. And here they were. From time to time Morris gazed, furtively, at Frances. She wore a sea-green dress and high-heeled sandals. He liked the way she wore very little make-up and the streak of grey across the front of her fair hair was undisguised; deceptions, of any kind, had always irritated him. A tribulation of his professional life was the interviewing of opera divas that he from time to time had to do. One glossy lady had lied so prodigiously about her age that he had listened to her with distaste ever since. Which was irrational: her voice remained the same. Preoccupied, momentarily, with this theme of honesty, it occurred to him that there was one thing he ought to make clear before this friendship, if friendship it were to be, got any further. He said ‘My wife left me.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Frances. ‘You said so. When we met in Venice.’

  Morris, doggedly, added, ‘I mean she simply got tired of me. It wasn't that there was anyone else.’ It occurred to him, now, that he might be inflicting confidences where they were not welcome. In confusion, he added, ‘Not that it matters.’

  ‘Of course it matters,’ said Frances. ‘It must have been awful. But it's all over now, I imagine.’

  ‘In so far as things are
ever over.’

  ‘That's a gloomy line to take. And quite the wrong one for me just now.’

  ‘I'm sorry,’ said Morris, in anguish. ‘That was thoughtless.’ After a moment he went on tentatively, ‘Are things… any better?’

  ‘Sometimes they're better and sometimes they're not. But probably more better than worse.’ Frances paused; the band finished a selection from The Mikado and there was a flutter of applause. ‘I got absurdly distressed a couple of weeks ago because I found that Steven had been briefly engaged to someone before I met him. It unnerved me, in some way, that that should always have existed and I never knew. But I think I've digested it now. It doesn't seem so important.’

  Morris nodded. He wished that he had not asked that. Now the husband hung there again, an inhibiting presence. I must not get into the position of some kind of therapist, he thought, that would be to start off on the wrong foot. He pushed Steven aside, with a twinge of guilt. ‘I've been putting into practice your advice about indexing. The thing begins to look more shapely.’

  ‘Good,’ said Frances. And beamed. ‘It's nice to be useful.’

  At which point Morris became, it later seemed to him, slightly unhinged. He reached out across the gap between their two chairs and took her hand. They sat there, thus, looking at one another. Frances wore an expression of mild panic which Morris misinterpreted as distaste; he continued to hold her hand but his stomach lurched and he could find nothing to say. Frances, in anxiety, could only think: But you are not Steven; I don't know if I can go on with this; you are not Steven.

  Tabitha, on the train to Cambridge, watched the landscape flow past; the same landscape that had flown the other way three months before. Opposite, a young man she slightly knew, a medical student, was going on about dissection. ‘Yuck,’ said Tabitha, ‘I don't know how you can.’ A small town streamed by: church tower, wet slate roofs, red brick cartwheels of a housing estate; I've seen that before, she thought, I remember the church. ‘Is it right,’ she said, ‘that your blood cells are changing all the time?’

  ‘They renew themselves,’ said the medical student, ‘every few weeks.’

  ‘And skin?’

  ‘That's growing and flaking all the time.’

  ‘I am not physically the same person that I was three months ago,’ said Tabitha. ‘Not even that.’

  ‘Oh well, come on,’ said the boy. ‘Bones… Muscles… Do you want a cup of coffee?’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Tabitha. The boy went off to the buffet car and she continued to watch the landscape. It is much more than three months, she thought, since I came past here; time is not only to do with months or weeks, it is to do with feelings and what you know and who you are. Time eats you up; there is practically nothing of me that is the same as when I last saw that church, those trees.

  When Zoe came swimming up into the world again the figure beside her bed was not white-gowned but dressed in blue and was smiling. The ward sister said, ‘There you are, back with us.’

  Zoe gazed at this face which she had known for twenty-four hours and which seemed more familiar to her than any she had ever known.

  ‘You're fine. No malignancy. They had to do a hysterectomy so you're going to be feeling a bit sore.’

  ‘That's all right,’ said Zoe, ‘I have all the children I want.’

  ‘Well, good,’ said the woman briskly. ‘And now why don't you have a little sleep. You've nothing to worry about any more.’

  It was early afternoon. The ward still had that greenish underwater atmosphere, but from somewhere outside there came a murmur of traffic. Feet tapped along a pavement; someone was whistling. Zoe lay quite still. The way she felt reminded her of something and somehow the most immediate thing was to remember what. And then it came to her. In just such a state of transcendental joy had one lain as a very small girl with the knowledge that unseen but quite tangible the Christmas stocking rested plumply against the end of the bed. She laughed, out loud. The woman next to her peered round a magazine, startled. ‘It's all right,’ said Zoe, ‘I just thought of something ridiculous.’

  She closed her eyes. If one were religious, she thought, there would be something positive to be done. Prayers of thanksgiving. Candles. Gifts to charity. Implementation of all those vows of virtue if spared. For the agnostic hoi polloi there is nothing. Nothing but this amazing sense of being the object of a miracle. That the thunderbolt has fallen elsewhere, again.

  She began to drift into sleep. But even as she did so she knew, quite clearly, that despite all that nothing would ever be quite as it was. Even with no-one to be grateful to, the emotion remained. I feel shriven, she thought, I am not the same as I was yesterday, or any of my yesterdays.

  Frances, in those early weeks and months of her grief, had found ritual examinations of her state of mind mildly therapeutic. They had not helped much, but they had helped a little. Daily, she had assessed herself; whether she felt worse than the day before, or not. She seized on the occasional tranquil hour as a trophy, entered it on the chart. She logged unflinchingly the days of deterioration. Out of it, something might come.

  Now, on a morning in early October, she came downstairs through her house and was pleased with what she saw. She drew back the curtains in the sitting room and early sun flooded in. She opened the french window and stepped out into the small garden. She had cleared and re-planted the beds herself; paving had been laid to make a small terrace, new creepers reached tentatively up the wall of the house. Today she would fill the tubs with bulbs for the spring. Next summer, she would sit out here; a bench must be bought, a table…

  She went back through the house into the kitchen. In the sitting room, she tidied a heap of books dumped on the table by Harry last night, plumped up cushions. The photographs on the book-case had been pushed aside by a pile of newspapers; she removed the papers and straightened the photographs: Steven, the children. As she did so she realized that she was performing these small tasks not out of duty but with pleasure. She inhabited, now, this house; it gave her satisfaction to arrange its rooms, to dispose around them the things she had kept from the other house, to add a few more – new curtains, a rug.

  In the hall ticked the long-case clock that had been a wedding present from her parents. Steven's desk stood in the sitting room. On the kitchen dresser hung the quirkily-shaped pottery mug made by Tabitha in the school art class. And while these objects had still the power to cause pain, to make her eyes prick at moments of vulnerability, they had taken on also the quality of anchors. Sometimes, she was uncertain which was stronger – their capacity to distress or to reassure. But she knew that she could not do without them.

  She went through into the kitchen and began to get breakfast. Harry had arrived back a few days before; he had spent most of the time since asleep, like the survivor of some military campaign. Now, she could hear him moving around overhead and presently he came down. He stood in the doorway, blinking.

  ‘Where's Tab these days?’

  ‘Harry! I told you – she went back to Cambridge.’

  ‘Oh yes, sure. I forgot.’

  ‘I'm glad you've surfaced. You'd better come with me to see the grandmothers today. It's the last chance before you go. I'm working the rest of this week.’

  ‘Will do…’ He poured himself a cup of coffee. ‘Is it O.K., this job?’

  ‘It's all right. In fact I quite enjoy it. I am about to be briefed in the use of some alarming new piece of office machinery. A sort of computer thing.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Harry. ‘No problem,’ he went on, dismissively. ‘Can I do a fry-up?’

  ‘Yes. Well, electronics have never been my strong point. Let's hope I manage to come out on top.’

  ‘No problem,’ repeated Harry, unfurling strips of bacon into the pan. He stood at the stove, frowning slightly as though perturbed by what she had just said. In fact, as Frances guessed, he was thinking of something quite different and, indeed, began in a moment to discuss a logistical problem to do with the trans
port of his possessions to college later in the week. The self-absorption of the young, she thought with resentful indulgence, is like a perpetual heavy cold, locking out much that goes on beyond the sufferer's head. She watched him, covertly; the dent in the back of his neck that was for some reason so intensely moving in small boys and that even now, in maturity, evoked feelings of tenderness; the vaguely oriental caste to his features that implied confused and mysterious ancestries; the familiar but now gatheringly strange Harry-ness of him. In a year or two, he would be someone quite different; a relative only of the child she had raised.

  She said, ‘Harry, there's something I've got to tell you. Now's as good a time as ever. It's about Tab.’

  He sat there, eating bacon and eggs, listening, placing eventually his knife and fork neatly together on his plate, looking not at her but steadily at the table.

  When she had finished he said, ‘Is that all?’

  ‘All?’ Frances, shaken, stared at him.

  ‘I mean. It's just Tab?’

  ‘Oh, heavens, yes. Not you. No revelations about you. Everything's just as it always was.’

  Harry wiped his mouth. ‘Simply that one likes to know where one is.’ He sounded brusque; in fact, as Frances recognized, was assuming the false nonchalance of one glimpsing undreamed-of complexities. After a moment he added, with deliberate casualness, ‘How does Tab feel about it?’

  ‘It was a bit of a shock, I'm afraid.’

  ‘Actually,’ said Harry, ‘Tab looks rather like Zoe. It had never occurred to me before.’

  ‘Yes.’

  They sat in silence. The puppy, under the table, whimpered, like a child sensing tension. Harry said, ‘Do you like it?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘The dog.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Frances. ‘Him. Yes, of course I do. I've got very fond of him. I've called him Hector, by the way. I needed a name to shout – you know, when he gets out into the street.’