Perfect Happiness

  ‘Of course. And he was always a tonic to work with. If he said he was going to do something he did it. If he promised to be somewhere, you knew he would be.’ Patricia Geering beamed, showing bad teeth. ‘It was largely thanks to his fundraising efforts that we were able to move here. This block was only finished a couple of years ago, you know. This was one of the last surviving bomb-sites.’ She gestured at the room and Frances, glancing at the filing-cabinets and black swivel chairs and glossy walls had a disorienting sense of the whole arrangement as a frail palimpsest upon the landscape of rubble and willowherb and buddleia that had preceded it and the Victorian brick that had presumably filled the space before that. She said, with a sudden frankness induced by the sherry and this friendly woman, ‘One of the most unnerving things about bereavement is that it rocks any sense of permanence.’

  ‘So I imagine.’ There was a moment's silence, and then Patricia Geering went on, ‘Incidentally, we have some books and copies of periodicals of Steven's here. I've been meaning to get in touch with you before about them. Things he loaned to the library at one point. Should I have them sent to you? Come and see what there is, anyway.’

  She took Frances into a room heaped with books and papers, lined with filing-cabinets. ‘They're in here somewhere, I know. This is the editorial room – chaos at the moment, my assistant left recently and I've not been able to find a replacement. Ah – here we are.’ She pulled out a box. ‘Have a look through, anyway.’

  Frances said, ‘Why don't you keep them for the Institute? Truth to tell, I'm trying to dispose of books, rather than acquire more. Most of his library is going to the university. I'll just take this one of his own – it's the first he wrote and out of print now.’ Opening the book, she saw Steven's handwriting on the fly-leaf: S. Brooklyn, 1958. The ink faded to a light brown, like old photographs.

  Patricia Geering said, ‘Well, that would be very nice. Thank you. Let me give you a copy of the journal. There's an obituary…’ Her voice trailed away. Brightly, she went on, ‘But of course it's home from home for you. You did editorial work yourself, didn't you?’

  ‘Yes. As a matter of fact I…’

  ‘I say, I suppose you wouldn't like to come and help me out? That is, if you're free.’

  ‘I am,’ said Frances, ‘I do want a job. But…’ she hesitated, ‘I'm just about to move house. Maybe after that…’

  ‘Think it over, anyway.’

  On the way home Frances thought, why didn't I jump at that? Say, yes please, next week please. The move was an excuse. I am behaving as though I were convalescent. And this job is right in the middle of Steven's territory, he would be on all sides. I'm not sure that I want that.

  Tabitha, roaming the shelves of a library, came at almost the same moment upon the same book. She, too, looked inside, and saw a date which, being before her own birth, had the flavour of another kind of past – not only more distant but reassuringly unreachable. She put the book back, and went to her desk, where she sat for a while not reading or writing but with her eyes pricking. Distantly, Steven's firm no-nonsense voice told her to pull herself together and she sniffed and blew her nose and picked up a pen. When you were a small child mum was the one you rushed to when something was wrong and dad was a person whose most frequent word was ‘sensible’. Be sensible; don't be silly. And who wasn't often there, anyway. And then later mum went on being mum but dad somehow turned into a different person, a visitant from busy adult worlds, a little alarming for that merciless common sense, but more approachable. You realized he was sort of famous, and preened yourself accordingly, and were ashamed for doing so. You smouldered your way through being fifteen and sixteen and thought you hated them both and then realized you didn't and suddenly they both seemed in some odd way physically smaller and in no way infallible and more lovable and then… And then it happens, the sort of thing that should be going on outside, over there, in someone else's life, not yours. So that at first, in the first few weeks, you woke at night having dreamed it hadn't really happened, he was still alive, it was all a dream.

  It was real now, digested: true. Things could still make the eyes smart, like coming across that book, or getting through the first Christmas without him. And there was always the knowing that whatever one felt oneself it didn't bear much relation to what mum was feeling, and had felt. Knowledge lurked, now, of unsampled depths; the world was shadowed in places where there had been untrammelled sunlight. It was like those first childhood experiences of complexity of feeling.

  … You belt down the road on the new bike, aged about eight, feeling ten feet tall, as brave as a lion, as fast as sound. And suddenly you look up and see her, standing there with a sort of smile that isn't quite a smile, and you are swamped by another feeling, as grey as guilt, as hot as pity. Because you know she didn't want you to have the bike in case you got yourself killed by a car, and you went on and on at them and in the end you were allowed to. And hence this feeling – queasy, treacherous – and the hiss of the tyres on the tarmac and the cold of the wind in your hair have lost their flavour.

  She turned to a clean page of her note-pad and began to write. Another hour and a half in the library; finished the essay by the evening. Around her people rustled and breathed and coughed, the pervasive present. In three weeks time she would be twenty-one.

  Frances, turning her key in the front door lock, heard the telephone ringing inside the house. Doggedly, like an alarm.

  ‘It would have to be Venice.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Oh, Christ,’ said Zoe, ‘I'd forgotten. Look, for goodness sake let me jack in this damn deadline…’

  ‘No. I'm going to do this on my own. I want to do this on my own.’

  ‘What's the hotel? Call me – promise.’

  ‘I promise. Tell me again exactly what the hospital said.’

  ‘Broken right leg. Cuts and bruises. Something about his shoulder that I didn't follow but it's not serious. One of the lucky ones, they said.’

  Frances closed her eyes for a moment. She put her hand on the desk.

  ‘Hello? Are you there?’

  ‘I'm here. I'd better go now – I haven't packed and the plane's at twelve.’

  ‘Swear you'll call me. And give that boy a hug from me and tell him trust him to have to be where the action is. Remember Cornwall?’

  ‘I remember Cornwall,’ said Frances.

  ‘It's nasty, isn't it?’ said the woman on the plane. ‘Having to go to the same airport. Though in a way you can't help thinking well lightning never strikes twice… I said to my husband when we saw it on the news, three days later and it could have been us. One of the people killed was English. The Arabs did it.’

  From the seat beyond, her husband sent a prying look at Frances. ‘No they didn't – it was those Italian terrorists. Going on holiday, are you?’

  Frances said, ‘No, not exactly.’ The Alps glittered below.

  ‘It's our first time there. The Lakes we've done twice, and Florence. You can never have too much of Italy, I say.’

  The woman offered a packet of sweets. ‘No? I read somewhere the bomb was in one of those Alitalia holdalls. The black plastic kind. I'll never see one again without wondering. They'd stood it just by the Duty Free.’

  ‘The odds against being involved in something like that yourself are something of the order of a million to one,’ said the husband. ‘I told you that when there was the IRA bombing in London. I said, the chances that it's you in Oxford Circus Underground at that precise moment… It's like plane crashes.’

  ‘Oh, shut up!’ The woman nudged him, her eyes still on Frances. ‘You know I'm windy about flying. On your own, are you?’

  ‘Yes, I'm on my own.’

  All along the cigar-tube of the plane heads lolled. A small child sank its chin into the top of a seat and stared backwards at the row of faces. Frances's head ached; she had not slept much the previous night. She felt slightly unsteady and when she filled in the flight card her hands were shaki
ng. She kept checking her handbag: passport, ticket, addresses of hotel and hospital. She closed her eyes. Beside her, the woman opened a magazine.

  Over the years, one's heart had almost stopped a dozen times: leaning over a cot in which a baby lay unnaturally still; a squeal of brakes coinciding with the disappearance of a child; Tabitha delirious with fever and a thermometer that read one hundred and five; Cornwall…

  The bright Cornish beach from which, suddenly, Harry is absent. The cliff, the tide… the stuff of newspaper items, tucked away behind public events. The frenzied scurrying to and fro. Zoe, with borrowed field-glasses: ‘There he is, the little sod, up there.’ The man with a rope, and the thundering relief that switches in a split second to embarrassment, guilt. Steven on the phone, matter-of-fact. Defiant, humiliated Harry.

  The plan began to bump. The woman was stowing her magazine into a grip. ‘Down we go. Here's to the first campari soda. Staying out at the Lido, are you?’

  ‘No, actually I'm not.’

  The husband, emptying English money from his pockets, leaned over. ‘A word to the wise. If you don't know the place I'm told the thing to do is steer clear of the guided tours. You can do better on your own. Have a good time.’

  Released into the airport, she saw the broken windows, the hastily erected boarding screening off the wrecked area. She walked past and out into the soupy heat.

  Once upon a time a long time ago she had dropped similarly out of the sky and similarly had stepped into a launch that had sped through the grey water trailing a white fan of foam. Then as now there had been this circular world fringed with a skyline of domes and spires against an apricot horizon. Steven had said, ‘Seeing this, Marco Polo seems somewhat unobservant not to have cottoned on to the fact that the world is round before he set off.’ She had held his hand and shed the rest of the day and sat entranced, in perfect happiness. She knew nothing of Harry nor Tabitha nor John Kennedy who would be assassinated nor Cuba nor Vietnam nor crazy Red something terrorists. Nor this other Frances who sat here now, not happy at all. She had made certain arrangements for her life which included none of these.

  The launch thumped over corrugations from another wake. Someone beside her lurched sideways. ‘Excuse me.’ All the other passengers seemed to be American. This woman wore a trouser-suit with knife-sharp creases and a straw hat. Her sun-glasses poked up at the corners, giving her a cat-face. Frances thought, if I notice things still, I am all right. She had a feeling of disorientation that edged at moments into something like panic. When I have seen Harry it will be better. Or worse.

  *

  His bed was at the very end of the ward. There was noise that verged on pandemonium. Other visitors talked and shouted and two women were wailing, rocking to and fro, tears pouring down their faces. A porter clattered plates on a trolley. From beyond the open window motor-scooters buzzed constantly to and fro.

  Harry was half-naked, his leg bundled like a cocoon, stripes of sticking-plaster all over him, a wodge of dressing on one shoulder. She sat beside him on a rickety chair and said, ‘This place is impossible. We'll have to get you out of here.’

  ‘It's O.K. People came this morning and took pictures for Italian telly. That bloke over there was in it too, and the old man at the end. And there's some women in another ward.’

  ‘Does your leg hurt?’

  ‘Not all that much now. There are priests round every hour or so – never a dull moment.’

  ‘I'm going to talk to the doctor. See if we can't get you home.’

  The voices seemed to rise to a crescendo. Frances thought wildly, he can't stand this, I know I couldn't. Harry, suddenly, grinned. ‘Well, see Venice and die.’

  ‘Naples,’ said Frances. ‘Not Venice.’ And then, ‘Must you…’

  She began to cry, copiously and unstoppably. Her face gave way; she found a wad of Kleenex in her bag and dripped into it. Harry, scarlet with embarrassment, turned his head aside and froze.

  ‘Sorry,’ she sniffed. She wiped the Kleenex angrily across her eyes. ‘Though why it should be perfectly all right for Italian women to be weeping all over the place in public but not me I don't know.’

  He looked at her, cautiously.

  ‘All right, I've finished. You can stop disowning me. Zoe sent her love. And Tab. You got your name in the papers, at home, you'll be interested to hear.’

  ‘Fame at last,’ said Harry.

  He was sunburnt, and thin. His hair needed washing and lay against the pillow in black spikes. The first time she laid eyes on him she had been startled by his hair: she hadn't realized a baby could have so much. Black quills on that tiny skull, and the downy dent in the back of his neck.

  ‘What do you need?’

  Harry considered. ‘Things to read. Writing paper and a pen. Oh – and clothes. I've lost all my gear, or at least apparently it was pretty messed up.’

  She said at last, ‘Was it ghastly?’

  Harry blinked. There came across his face the shuttered look of someone caught in a moment of privacy. He looked, for an instant, like a child. He said, ‘Actually it was shit, but I don't remember all that much. Just people screaming, and smoke everywhere. When you get the clothes, could you get some of those striped T-shirts like everyone wears here.’ A bell clanged. ‘They chuck you out now, it's the end of visiting-time.’

  ‘I'll see you tomorrow.’

  Dusk was falling when she got back to the hotel. It was on the waterfront, along from the Doge's Palace, in a different part of Venice to that in which she and Steven had stayed, which she could no longer place. It existed now for her only as a room with blowing white curtains and the sound of slapping water, and the chiming of a church clock.

  She was very tired; everything seemed quite unreal. In the hospital, relief at seeing Harry and the realization that he was at least relatively all right had given her a temporary lift. Now, that feeling of instability returned; walking into the foyer she felt quite dizzy and had to stand for a moment holding on to the reception desk while she waited for her key. Upstairs, she lay down for a while; she could not sleep and such bleakness descended upon her that she got up in a kind of panic and decided to go out and have a meal.

  It was now quite dark. The Riva degli Schiavoni was awash with people. Brilliant ribbons of light quivered across the water. The air was still balmy and the stone of the bridge was warm to the touch. Everyone seemed to be laughing.

  She sat down at the café outside the hotel and ordered a drink. At the next table, she saw suddenly, was the American woman who had been in the launch from the airport. She looked away quickly, avoiding her eye. The boy came with the drink and she fumbled with a fistful of lire, trying to find the right amount. As she did so that dizziness returned, more forcefully; the lights swung and the pavement tipped and in slow motion she began to slide sideways. She heard the scrape of a chair and felt an arm round her. A voice said, ‘O.K., dear, just put your head down between your legs. That's it. You'll be all right in a moment.’ She hung, foolishly, over the pavement, and the tunnel down which she had been retreating faded and the arm held her down. The voice said, ‘Better? Try sitting up now. O.K.? Great.’

  Frances said weakly, ‘Thanks. Thanks so much. So stupid… I…’

  ‘I guess you've got one of these stomach bugs,’ said the woman. ‘A week in Europe and sure as anything I have the runs. You are English, aren't you?’

  ‘Yes. I don't think it is that. I only arrived this morning. I'm rather exhausted, that's all.’

  The waiter was still hanging around. The woman picked up Frances's bill, whisked a couple of notes from a purse. ‘Grazie.’

  ‘Oh no, you mustn't…’

  ‘My pleasure. You're staying at this hotel too, I guess – I saw you get into the elevator. I just love all that gilt everywhere – you'd think they'd been around with a spray-gun. My shower has some kind of jinx on it but apart from that the room seems O.K. How long are you staying? I'm Ruth Bowers, by the way.’

  ‘My nam
e's Frances Brooklyn. I'm not too sure at the moment – probably a week or so.’ She drank her Cinzano and felt firmer. The faintness had gone; it was better, suddenly, to be with someone than alone. Ruth Bowers had crisp grey bangs and wore a different pair of metallic-framed uptilted glasses and another crisply laundered trouser-suit. She was the kind of person from whom Steven, by now, would have quietly retreated. She was talking about the friend with whom she was travelling and who had gone off to Yugoslavia for a few days and would meet up with Ruth in Rome. ‘We agreed from the start to go our own ways from time to time. I can't get enough of Italian painting and Ellen's – well, she can have too much of it. So she's giving the Tintorettos a miss and doing a hop to Zagreb. We're both librarians. Baltimore. Have you visited the United States, Frances?’

  ‘I went there a couple of times with my husband. But not to Baltimore, I'm afraid.’ Frances felt pallid beside this woman's bristling energy. She must be at least sixty and exuded the physical charge of an electric toy, as though it were impossible she should ever run down.

  ‘Well, it's quite a country! If you're ever there, stop by and visit – I'll give you the address. We're vacationing, of course – first time we were over since nineteen seventy-five and we see changes, I can tell you. We just love France, and last week when we were in Chartres, believe me there were…’

  Ruth Bowers laid her hand, as she spoke, on Frances's arm and the physical contact was like a burn, distracting her totally. Two days after Steven's death she had lain in bed and thought, I shall never again feel someone else's arms round me, another person's body close up against mine, not sex, not nakedness, just physical closeness, often, casually, with another human being. And now the touch of others – Zoe's quick hugs, Tabitha's dutiful brushing of the cheek – had this disproportionate effect. To be touched was both a sacrilege and a joy.

  ‘… But I guess nothing stands still and you've got to accept that. Now your country I just love. We had two weeks in London in seventy-five.’ The hand, the friendly emphasizing hand, had been removed and Frances, picking herself up, said, ‘I live in London.’