The House on Fortune Street

by Margot Livesey

  “Isn’t it better, though, to give people a choice, rather than forcing them to endure until modern medicine decides to release them?”

  “Thanks. But what if you change your mind? What if you discover after it’s too late that you did want one more day, even if all you do is watch the light move across the bedroom ceiling, and you die hating yourself? For most people the gap between thought and action is huge.”

  But not for you, he almost added. Abigail had already been talking about starting a theater when they met and in their early conversations had quizzed him about nineteenth-century dramatists. He had enjoyed their discussions, not recognizing them for what they were—another step in Abigail’s courtship—and never expecting that the theater would become a reality. But soon after he moved in with her, a famous actor had agreed to star in her first production; people started returning her calls. “You brought me luck, Sean,” she exclaimed. And suddenly she was gone from eight in the morning until midnight. “The house will be nice and quiet,” she had said. “It’ll be perfect for finishing your dissertation.” The house had been perfect for many things—regret, loneliness, watching every single Arsenal match—but not for the sustained concentration that was necessary for Sean to bring into focus the mass of material he had gathered over several years as he changed the topic of his dissertation. Judy had been right; even the closest reading of the poems revealed few traces of Keats’s medical studies.

  Now Abigail wiped her plate with a slice of bread, and announced that she had to make some phone calls. Only as she stood up did she ask, muffling the crucial question in the scrape of her chair, how much he was getting paid for the book.

  “I’m not sure. Valentine’s agent is the one who sorts all that out.”

  “Whatever they offer,” she said, heading for the door, “ask for more.”

  Alone, loading the dishwasher, Sean recalled, not for the first time, the conversation he and Abigail had had at their third meeting, at the British Museum. Standing in front of the Elgin Marbles, she had told him about the unexpected windfall from an aunt that had enabled her, at the age of twenty-six, to buy a house on Fortune Street in Brixton. “There’s a downstairs flat,” she explained. “The rent more or less pays the mortgage.” “What a good arrangement,” Sean had said, and pointed out the athletic centaurs. Later, when they became lovers, she had assured him that life in London didn’t need to be expensive; she had made his poverty, like his marriage, seem irrelevant. For six months after he moved in they had taken turns, amicably, paying for groceries and films. Then one evening, walking home from the pub through the misty streets, his arm around her shoulders, her hand in the pocket of his jeans, she had remarked, as casually as if she were commenting on the weather, that he must start paying rent.

  “Rent?” Sean had said. “But I thought Dara’s rent covered things.”

  “No,” said Abigail, and for several steps it seemed that might be her entire answer. Then she began to list all the expenses: insurance, water, taxes, repairs. “You need to contribute,” she said.

  He wanted to remind her of her promise that his work on Keats, a thing of beauty, was more important than the contents of his wallet. Instead, staring at the halo around the nearest streetlight, he asked how much she had in mind.

  “I don’t know.” Through the fabric of his jeans she squeezed thoughtfully. “A hundred?”

  “A month?”

  “A week.”

  “I don’t think,” he had managed, “I could afford that.”

  She had finally agreed to two hundred pounds a month. The next day Sean had phoned Valentine, and they had embarked on their second project, the biography of a minor film star. To his own surprise he had, when he told Abigail about it, reduced the amount of the advance by four thousand. Another piece of the idyll gone—the promise of a life without lies—but only this one, he had vowed. Now, as he closed the dishwasher and set it humming on its journey, he realized that he was already planning to reduce the new advance too, and he felt entirely justified in doing so.

  OVER THE NEXT WEEK FAXES AND E-MAILS FLEW BACK AND FORTH between Valentine and Sean, the agent and the Belladonna Society. An agreement was reached and a meeting arranged between the two authors and the society’s secretary. One hot June afternoon (the weather had turned summery again), he and Valentine made their way through the stuffy streets and up four flights of stairs to an office near Ludgate Circus. The ruddy-cheeked man who rose to greet them looked, Sean thought, in his crumpled white shirt and faded brown trousers, as if he ought to be striding across a field behind a herd of cows. The secretary thanked them enthusiastically for taking on the book, apologized for the heat, turned on a fan, and urged them to sit down. On the table was a thick stack of documents. As the top pages lifted in the fan’s passing, Sean glimpsed the heading “Interviews with the Deceased.” For a moment he pictured a group of well-dressed people, who happened to be dead, strolling back and forth on the terrace of a Tuscan villa, sipping the local Chianti, and congratulating themselves: “The best thing I ever did,” “Wish I’d had the guts to do it five years earlier.”

  “The spearhead of our argument,” said the secretary, “is the case histories and interviews. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that it’s important to include a range of ages, classes, occupations, races. We want to show that euthanasia is not just some white, middle-class, elderly thing.”

  “Though it mostly is, isn’t it?” said Valentine, smiling broadly as he often did when being contentious.

  “Not at all.” The secretary fanned himself with a folder; Sean caught the flash of a wedding ring. “Given their circumstances, surprisingly few elderly people choose to die. Committing euthanasia is a sign of mental vigor, not the reverse.”

  “What about the role of doctors?” said Sean, wanting both to change the subject and to assert himself.

  “That’s tricky and, of course, a key factor. As the law stands a doctor who publicly admits to euthanasia faces jail. Privately it’s a different story. Quite a number of physicians have talked to me about assisting patients. And of course there’s a controversial no-man’s-land between active assistance and benign neglect. Forgive my asking: do either of you have any personal experience with these matters?”

  “I’m afraid so,” said Valentine, and launched into an account of an aunt who had had a stroke. The secretary stopped fanning and leaned forward. Watching the way his face changed as he followed Valentine’s story, Sean revised his earlier impression; this man would be wasted on cows. “And how did you?” the secretary asked delicately.

  “That’s the trouble,” said Valentine, “we didn’t. She took an overdose of one of her medicines but it just made her sick. After that, all we could do was watch her suffer.”

  “Terrible.” His ruddy cheeks crinkled and he reached out to pat Valentine’s arm. “You have my condolences but it does make you the ideal author for this book.”

  They discussed a timetable—the manuscript must be ready by December—and how to organize additional interviews. If there was anything he could do, the secretary said, don’t hesitate to get in touch. The three of them exchanged rather damp handshakes. As Sean followed Valentine down the stairs he started to offer his own condolences. He had uttered only a phrase when Valentine, from the flight below, gave him a sardonic upward glance. In the embrace of his own stupidity, Sean fell silent.

  BACK AT THE HOUSE HE LEFT HIS BICYCLE IN THE COOL HALLWAY and ascended to his study. Like the society’s office it was on the top floor, and step by step the temperature rose until, when he at last pushed open the door, the caged heat leaped out. He set the folder of case histories and interviews the secretary had given him on the desk and went to raise the window. There was not a breath of wind. Standing with his hands on the sash, he could see the honeysuckle in Dara’s garden four floors below, and the plum tree with its first green burden of fruit. Sometimes last summer, on warm evenings, she had invited him and Abigail to have a drink. The three of t
hem had sat around her picnic table, discussing the virtues of organic wine and whether Sean and Abigail should do the Thames walk this year. Often while they talked Dara sketched, making quick, beautiful drawings of her two friends, her garden, the neighbor’s cat.

  He stepped back from the window, and the view of the garden was replaced by the rooftops, chimney pots, and aerials that, from many long hours at his desk, he knew in intimate detail. This small room was his sanctuary, the place where, for good and ill, he felt most like himself. When he moved in with Abigail, they had painted it together, and chosen a new carpet. After the fitters left, he had remarked that the color reminded him of the beach where he’d played as a child. “I’m glad,” said Abigail. “I want you to feel that this is your home.” He had reached for her jeans and pulled her to the floor.

  Subsequently he had put up shelves on the long wall and alphabetized his books. On the wall opposite the window he had hung his familiars: portraits of Keats and Fanny Brawne, and a copy of the famous death mask, which he had positioned so that the poet’s closed eyes were a little below five feet. More recently he had bought a bookcase for the plays he ferried to and from the theater office; he had placed it near the door to signal their lowly status.

  Now, looking around the neat room, he wondered how he was going to manage this third task. He was responsible for six chapters of the euthanasia book, and, to meet the deadline, he would have to exchange them with Valentine by late November, which meant more than a chapter a month. He thought again of the secretary listening so empathetically to Valentine’s shabby lies. Suddenly it occurred to him that the man had almost certainly come to his position at the society through loss and hardship. Perhaps a dead wife, he guessed, picturing the gold ring. He glanced down at his own hand, still surprised by its bareness.

  ALMOST EVERYONE IN SEAN’S LIFE, INCLUDING HIS FRIENDS, HIS younger brother, and himself, had been baffled by the demise of his marriage. He and Judy had been kindred spirits, and the only real quarrel between them had concerned his dissertation. While Judy worked efficiently, piling up chapters and footnotes, he was stalled in his analysis of Keats’s longer poems. His advisor, a pale, angular woman, seemed more interested in the view from her study window than in his theories. It was after one of their more dismal meetings—Georgina had disputed his interpretation of Keats’s unfinished faerie tale, “The Cap and Bells”—that he had run into Valentine in the covered market.

  The two had become friends as undergraduates and continued to meet occasionally when they both moved to London. Since Sean’s return to Oxford they had fallen out of touch; now they greeted each other with enthusiasm. Valentine was in town to review Mother Courage at the Playhouse. He suggested a drink which turned into lunch. Over steak and kidney pie, he expressed admiration for Sean’s scholarly choice, pursuing a Ph.D., and Sean hastened to reciprocate, praising Valentine’s more worldly activities. “How many people”—he waved toward the bar—“give a toss about Keats?”

  “In this room”—Valentine pretended a quick survey—“probably eight. The rest prefer Coleridge.” Then he confessed that he’d been trying to sell a book proposal. He had heard this morning that it had been rejected, again. From his jacket pocket he produced a letter, and began to read it aloud. The first paragraph was indeed a refusal, but the second mentioned a different project: writing the family history of a well-known Labour peer.

  “That sounds interesting,” Sean had said. “And it would give you a foot in the door.”

  By the end of lunch he had talked Valentine into accepting the editor’s suggestion and Valentine had talked him into helping with the book. “Join me in Grub Street,” he had said, laughing. When Sean went home and told Judy, she too had laughed. A fortnight later, however, when the contract appeared, she had been less amused. He needed to bear down on his dissertation, she argued, not get distracted. He reminded her that he’d been wrestling with the second chapter for most of the last year. A few months more wouldn’t make a difference, and the money would. She remained unconvinced, but he had signed the contract, and even she had to admit that their household was a happier place without his writer’s block. He no longer spent a morning on a sentence, a week on a paragraph. He liked the comparatively minimal research, and he liked the prospect of seeing the book in stores, where people might buy it and even read it.

  Only after they exchanged chapters did he understand that his work was no longer his own; it was inextricably yoked to Valentine’s. Valentine had rung up brimming with compliments. “Hey, this is in terrific shape. There’s just one or two places where you’re being a little too fancy for our readers.” Then he asked about his chapters and Sean faltered. They were a mess at every level. The sentences were awkward; the organization muddled; the research poorly integrated. “I’m doing some fine-tuning,” he said. “Ironing out some contradictions.”

  “So when can we put the whole thing together? This weekend?”

  “How about next Wednesday?”

  He hadn’t worked so hard since he was an undergraduate writing essays at the last moment. By the time he finished scarcely a sentence of Valentine’s chapters was left untouched. On Tuesday night he was smugly pleased with the results. On Wednesday morning he woke to the complications of what he’d done. He spent the bus journey to London rehearsing conciliatory speeches: Valentine’s work was fine, most of the changes were due to the way he, Sean, had written his chapters. As he waited on Valentine’s doorstep, he pictured his advisor staring listlessly out of the window while he offered his latest insights. He had always assumed that she was bored. Now he wondered if she hated his prose, despised his research.

  Valentine had greeted him exuberantly, poured coffee, and begun to show Sean the changes he’d made on his pages, mostly for the worse. They were on chapter four when the phone rang. “Absolutely,” said Valentine into the receiver. “I’m free for the next few weeks.”

  When he hung up he announced that he’d been asked to do some television reviews; all the pleasures of home, and you could tape them if you fell asleep. Then he looked at the clock and said there was no need to scrutinize every page; they could catch things in copyediting. And so Sean had pointed out a couple of alterations. “I thought headings would help.” “This seemed a stronger conclusion.” Within no time the manuscript was disappearing into Valentine’s briefcase to be delivered to the publisher that afternoon.

  Initially Sean had been jubilant. He’d done it, he’d got away with it. The book would be readable, intelligent, unembarrassing. They went out for an excellent meal, the editor was happy, the agent was happy, and Valentine himself seemed oblivious to the transformation his prose had undergone. Only later did Sean grasp the unfortunate precedent he’d established.

  He was even slower to realize how working with Valentine had changed his marriage. His harmonious routines with Judy—those long afternoons at the library when they always seemed to reach a good stopping point at the same moment, the predictable discussion about whether to go to the pub on the way home, the pleasant encounters with friends—had been disrupted and were not to be easily restored. Before the book they had always spent weekends together, but that autumn when Sean’s old friend Tyler invited them to Sunday lunch and Judy had a cold, he had not thought twice about going to London alone.

  And then this woman, with hair the color of corn and eyes that made him think of the flowers his mother grew, had sat down beside him and hung on his every word. A few weeks later she was in Oxford to see a play and had asked, quite casually, if he’d like to have a drink, and a few weeks after that she had accompanied him to the British Museum. Nothing like this had happened to Sean before. University had cured him of the notion that he was an outstanding scholar. As for his appearance, he knew he was tall and dark, but it had never occurred to him that the combination of his father’s thick hair and elegant nose with his mother’s fair skin and full lips could be counted handsome. By the time he understood that Abigail was not merely interested i
n his literary expertise, or he in her lively conversation, it was too late. She made him feel vivid and fascinating, and she made the world feel that way too.

  There were obstacles—her career with its uncertain demands, his marriage, the fact that she was in London, he in Oxford, the protests of friends, including Tyler—but he and Abigail had believed that something amazing had befallen them. Which was not to say that he had ever intended to leave Judy. Bewilderingly, excruciatingly, his passion for Abigail failed to cancel his feelings for Judy, and vice versa. The thought of choosing one, and renouncing the other, made him feel as if he were wandering in a library where every shelf was bare.

  “If you love me,” said Judy, repeatedly, “you’ll stop hurting me.” One bleak afternoon—they had been walking by the river—she even hinted that her despair might be fatal.

  Abigail neither accused nor blamed him; this thing had happened; it was no one’s fault. Instead, as surely as any Socrates, she led him to the knowledge that his marriage was a failure or, more kindly, a way of getting through his twenties. He and Judy were friends, they had interests in common, but how could they make each other happy when there was no passion? Sean would listen, and agree, but later, after he and Abigail had made love, he would lie beside her thinking about the spring he and Judy had borrowed a cottage near Lyme Regis and spent a whole, blustery day walking the cliff path, gathering little pencil-shaped fossils, and debating where they would go if they won the lottery. Or the evening they’d gone punting on the river and come across a choir of schoolchildren, standing on the bank, singing Brahms, and Judy, sitting at his feet, had joined in. She was his other self; the thought of a future without her was insupportable. He just needed one more day with Abigail, one more night. Then he would give her up, without regret, and resume his old life.

  His vacillation intensified Abigail’s ardor, or so it seemed. She had strewn their bed with rose petals; she had taken him to Keats’s house, and, embarrassingly, stood beside the plum tree reciting “Ode to a Nightingale”; she had examined the bumps and hollows of his skull and praised his fillings. Then one day she left a message on his phone saying she had had enough, and disappeared. Her voice mail was full and, when he made the journey to London, her door remained closed. At the height of his anguish, Judy announced that she was moving in with a vet named Roger, who had two Labradors and a six-year-old son, and wanted to share his life with her. In a daze Sean had packed his suitcases and gone in search of Abigail. Newly back from Paris, she answered the door and, when he said he couldn’t live without her, flung her arms around him. He knew the syllogisms of romance. He had broken his life apart for her; therefore she must be the love of his life. Endless promises were exchanged, including the promise of no promises. You can’t legislate affection, Abigail had argued.