The House on Fortune Street

by Margot Livesey

  At the time he had agreed. More recently, though, he had found himself thinking that marriage was not merely an empty ritual. It was a plea for patience on the part of those involved, and for mercy on the part of bystanders. Abigail’s relentless assault on his marriage was, he’d discovered, most unusual. All very well for his friends to take the moral high ground, but how many of them, faced with such temptation, such ingenuity, would have fared any better?

  SINCE STARTING HIS JOB AT THE THEATER, SEAN HAD LEARNED TO divide his working day. The morning hours, when he felt freshest, went to Keats. In the afternoons he read scripts and worked on program notes. In the evenings he did research or, when she was available, enjoyed Abigail’s company. Now, in this full schedule, a space must be made to dash off his chapters on euthanasia. He had to remind himself what a relief it had been to make cordial arrangements for an overdraft.

  The morning after the meeting with the secretary, he carried his coffee upstairs and sat down at his desk. He was in the middle of explaining how the parts of Endymion written in Oxford owed a debt to the seventeenth-century poet Katherine Philips. As he tried to retrace his argument, he caught sight of the folder of case histories lying on the corner of the desk. What had he meant by c.f. Canto IV? He reached for the poem, hoping to find a marginal note or yellow flag. A fat, metallic fly buzzed in through the window, orbited his desk, and sauntered out again. Following its flight, Sean noticed that the sky was no longer a cloudless blue but had, in the last hour, turned to some molten non-color. It was already very warm. He stood up. On his way to fetch a glass of water, he moved the folder to the bookcase by the door.

  Back at his desk he switched on his computer and, refusing the lure of e-mail, opened his current chapter. Was it necessary, he pondered, to give much detail about the obscure Philips? The mere possibility was aggravating, but he had an appointment with his supervisor next week. At their last meeting, when he had expected her to dismiss him until late September, Georgina had suggested that they get together once a fortnight throughout the summer. Sean had not had the wit, or the wherewithal, to protest that he could barely produce enough material for their present monthly schedule. The last four or five days before each meeting found him at his desk until midnight, trying to grind out a few more paragraphs. And (surely it was just his imagination) Abigail often seemed, during these busy times, to have free tickets to a play, or to want to invite friends to dinner. Judy had sometimes been frustrated by his working methods, by his need to have each sentence perfect before he could proceed, but she had sympathized with his ambitions. Abigail, at first so full of admiration, had lately seemed bewildered by his lack of progress. Last week she had remarked that Dickens wrote Great Expectations in less than a year.

  Even more than the anguish of producing pages, Sean hated going back to Oxford. He had first come to the city as an eighteen-year-old, thrilled to have got a place at Wadham College. He had loved wandering the busy streets and he had loved leaving the streets for the cloistered world of the colleges. After graduation he had left reluctantly to pursue his sensible job in London. When at last he returned, he had thought of himself as following, far behind but honorably, in Keats’s footsteps, choosing this arcane world over more conventional ambitions: a career, a mortgage, children. In leaving Judy, he had not understood that he was also leaving Oxford. Although he still went to the college, and still worked at the Bodleian Library, he was now an outsider. On the bus from London his heart sank as the city came into view; the sight of each familiar landmark was like a hammer blow to his spirits. When he finally got off the bus, near St. Catherine’s College, he would wear his sunglasses and keep his gaze on the pavement, in the hope of not meeting anyone he knew, or if he did, of passing unnoticed. On the rare occasions when people recognized him, he asked about their lives, their work, and, as soon as they began to reciprocate, claimed an urgent appointment. Now Georgina was telling him to subject himself to these torments even more frequently only to end up in her study, stammering out his meager insights, while she gazed at the college’s exquisite gardens.

  Slowly Sean found his way back into his argument; slowly he tracked down a crucial passage in Philips, then looked up a phrase in Paradise Lost, losing himself for nearly an hour in Milton’s fluent verse. He consulted a letter Keats had written to Benjamin Bailey, and reviewed Bailey’s comments on Book III of Endymion, at which point it was time for lunch.

  The kitchen was a little cooler, and he decided he might as well glance at the case histories while he ate. Stupid to dread a pile of pages. He must try to take Valentine’s robust attitude: this was just a job; it meant gin in the cupboard, money in the bank. He put together a ham sandwich, retrieved the folder from upstairs, and sat at the table.

  Each history consisted of a brief description of the person’s age, circumstances, and illness, as well as an account, in his or her own words, of the reasons for suicide. Here was Anne, aged seventy-three, a widow, comfortably off with two married daughters, diagnosed with Parkinson’s. I’m a prisoner, she wrote, condemned to endless solitary confinement. Why would anyone inflict this on another person? She had hoarded her prescriptions, painfully, for months, paid her cleaner, had her hair permed, and chosen the dress she wanted to wear in her coffin. She had consumed her pills and died, as she had hoped, at home in her sleep.

  Here was Ian, paralyzed since an accident at a building site when he was twenty-four. Now, at fifty-one, macular degeneration was destroying his last great pleasure: reading. Sean winced and added mustard to his sandwich. Using considerable ingenuity and a gas oven, Ian had killed himself. A friend helped me figure out how to do it, he wrote with his specially modified keypad, but I made sure he was down at the pub all evening so he wouldn’t get in trouble.

  Here was Frank, thirty-three (my age, thought Sean), a landscape gardener, in the grip of an aggressive brain tumor. He was already researching euthanasia when his father had a stroke. It’s too much for my mum, he said, looking after the two of us. My dad is sixty-one. He deserves his best shot at the next twenty years. After the failure of his first attempt, he spoke with fury about his doctor who doled out his pills a week at a time. She’d rather I traumatize some train driver than die peacefully in my own bed. If I could, I’d detonate myself in her waiting room.

  These and similar testimonials formed the heart of the society’s campaign to legalize euthanasia and, even more crucial, the assisting thereof. That the case histories were baldly written and largely lacking in self-pity only made them more affecting. Standing at the sink, rinsing his plate, Sean felt as if the room were filled with the members of that determined tribe who had decided to end their tenure on the planet and who could contemplate that decision so calmly that they were able to weigh the pros and cons of pills over plastic bags, cliffs over cars, razors over ropes. He turned off the tap, retrieved his notebook, and headed to the library.

  HIS TRIP TO OXFORD BEGAN BADLY. HE WAS UP UNTIL MIDNIGHT the night before and woke early, uncertain about one of his key points. As he reached the bus stop the rain started; umbrella-less, he did his best to protect his bag of books. The bus, when it came, was crowded, and the large man he sat next to fidgeted throughout the journey. Staring past him at the sodden fields, still wan from the recent heat wave, Sean struggled to decide whether the results of his late-night efforts were brilliant or specious. In town with almost an hour to spare, he decided to go to a café near the college. Perhaps coffee and a croissant would clarify his thoughts. He was sitting at a corner table, going over his notes, when someone said his name.

  “How are you?” said Judy. “May I join you?” She was standing before him, an umbrella in one hand, a book in the other.

  “I’m here to see Georgina,” Sean said.

  “Well, I promise not to make you late,” she said, setting her book on the table and herself in a chair. “It must be my month for meeting the Wymans. I ran into your brother last week.”

  Sean stared at her incredulously. Her voic
e was warm; she was smiling. Was this the same woman who less than two years ago had called him a moral pygmy, hauled his suitcases out of the closet, and told him to pack? “How was Lochlan?” he said, trying to match her tone. “I haven’t spoken to him in a while.”

  “He seemed fine.” Judy’s dimple made a brief appearance. “Very pleased about his promotion. How’s Keats?”

  Sean felt himself grimace. In an ideal world he would report that everything was going splendidly, but the habit of complaining to Judy was too strong. He described his struggles with tracing Keats’s influences and asked about her work.

  Judy confided that she had defended her thesis, received her doctorate, and best of all, Macmillan was going to publish her manuscript next year; she just had to make it more accessible. “At first I wanted to defend every footnote,” she said. “Then I began to enjoy myself. It’s nice to think that people like my mother will be able to read the book.”

  “That’s great.” He would have given ten years of his life to be able to announce the same three events.

  “And”—she smiled—“I’m pregnant. Your coffee smells so good.”

  As if realizing that he was having trouble processing the information, she added that the baby was due in January. “Great,” Sean said again. It seemed the key word for his side of this conversation. He and Judy had talked about babies as something to be considered only after their dissertations were done, which, of course, hers was. He glanced at his watch, too rapidly to take in the time, and said that he had to go.

  “I’m so glad we ran into each other,” she said. “Maybe it’s the baby, but I’ve been thinking about you recently, wanting to let you know that I don’t bear you a grudge any longer. People do change. Roger and I are very happy together. I hope you and Abigail are too.” She stood up—now he could see the small bulge taking over her waistline—and bent to hug him. As her arms wrapped around him, Sean smelled her familiar perfume. For a shameful moment he felt the sting of tears.

  Back out in the rainy street he no longer cared whom he encountered. He strode along oblivious to pedestrians, umbrellas, puddles, traffic. Soon after their wedding, he and Judy had spent a day exploring the Cotswolds. They were driving from one exquisite village to the next when, in the middle of a field of cows, they spotted a small stone church. They had pulled onto the verge and gone to investigate. The door was locked, a bird’s nest wedged in one corner, but round the back they had found a couple of milk crates and climbed up to peer through the leaded windows. Sean had never forgotten the sight that met his eyes. The narrow nave was crammed not with pews but with statues of knights, maybe eight or nine of them, lying on their tombs, hands folded on their chests, dogs or swords or, in one case, a book, at their pointed feet. How peaceful and dusty they looked. He wished he’d asked Judy if she remembered them too. It would have been nice to be back together, even briefly, in that pool of memory where no one else would ever swim.

  At the college, he barely nodded to the porter. He made his way through the archway, along the gloomy cloisters, and up the dark stairs that led to Georgina’s door. Although he was ten minutes early, he knocked twice. Her voice, surprisingly deep for such a reed of a woman, said, “Come in.”

  Inside she was sitting in her usual chair. The first time Sean had entered this room, with its large desk and walls of books, he had thought it the perfect scholar’s lair, a place of high wit and deep endeavor. Now, by the feeble light of the desk lamp, the books looked dusty, the furnishings soiled; it seemed a fitting home for fraudulent theories and secondhand thoughts. “Sean,” said Georgina, “you’re very prompt. I worried the rain might slow you down.”

  “I caught an earlier bus.”

  Georgina stood up from behind her desk—she was wearing a smoke gray dress—and gesturing for him to sit in one of the two chairs by the window, left the room. Before he could speculate as to what she was doing, she returned with a white towel in her outstretched hand. Unthinkingly he buried his face in the fabric. It felt good to be surrounded, even momentarily, by warm darkness. If only he didn’t have to emerge. But he did, and there was Georgina, staring out of the rainy window as usual.

  “‘In drear-nighted December,’” she said in a conversational voice, “‘too happy, happy tree, thy branches ne’er remember their green felicity.’”

  She was quoting, Sean knew, from the poem Keats had written when he finished Endymion; the promise of those lines had been one of the factors that persuaded him, after months of uncertainty, to give up his career in insurance.

  “We’re in the middle of Book III, aren’t we?” she said.

  “No.” The towel lay in his lap, absurdly, like a napkin, and his hands, pink and raw, lay on top.

  At last she turned to look at him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Am I misremembering?”

  “No.” All you needed for any conversation was one word. “You’re correct about the book, wrong about the tense. We were in the middle of Book III, but no longer. I’ve decided to quit. I’m tired of being a burden to myself, and you, and everyone else. I’m tired of this endless quest.”

  In the silence that followed, he thought she might be about to start quoting again—something about the happy, happy brook—but instead she looked at him for a few more seconds, and turned back to the window.

  “Of course it’s your choice,” she said, “but I do think it’s a pity. Another six months and you would have made a really useful contribution to Keats scholarship.”

  So why did you always behave like I was boring you to death, thought Sean. He was so angry he could hardly speak. “Thank you,” he said. As he stood up, the towel fell to the floor. He left it lying there, a crumpled flag of surrender, and walked out.

  ON THE NEXT BUS BACK TO LONDON, WITH TWO SEATS TO HIMSELF, he stared once again at the wan fields. He remembered how when he was ten he had smashed his entire collection of birds’ eggs—three years’ work gone in three minutes—because a boy at school had made a joke. Then there was the occasion he had stolen his brother’s blazer and thrown it in a ditch. He had been a teenager before he learned, as his mother was always asking, to use his words, not his fists. And then, it was around the time he discovered girls, he began to realize that words were not just a substitute for fighting; they could persuade, seduce, get you things. Until then he had wanted to be a train driver, like his father, but suddenly he had started to study and do his homework. He was only the third pupil from his small high school to get a place at Oxford.

  Now, in an impulsive moment, he had turned his back on nearly seven years of work, and he desperately needed Abigail to tell him he had made the right choice. He got off the bus at Marble Arch and dodged his way through the crowds to the underground station. For once every train was punctual, every escalator working, and at the theater office his luck held. Abigail was at her desk; she smiled at the sight of him, and was happy to go to the pub on the corner. She had had a meeting at the bank that morning and, in her suit, with her hair pinned up, she looked disconcertingly like one of his former colleagues at the insurance company. Beneath her fuchsia umbrella her face glowed, from which he guessed that his own, beneath the black one he’d borrowed from the stage manager, must have a funereal tinge. “What is it?” she kept asking. But he refused to say anything until they were seated, her with a glass of wine, him with a scotch. The pub was nearly empty, save for a group of nurses—going off duty we hope, said Abigail—and four boys playing darts.

  “Cheers,” Sean said, raising his glass. The sharp fragrance of whiskey filled his head and was at once translated into the sharp taste. To his surprise his heart was racing, as if he were on the edge of something momentous, although surely he had stepped over that edge two hours before. He took a second, smaller sip and said, “I quit. I told Georgina I wasn’t going to finish my dissertation.”

  As he spoke clapping broke out; the tallest of the boys had thrown a bull’s-eye. On the bus Sean had pictured Abigail applauding when he told her what he�
�d done, giving him an exuberant kiss. Finally he was relinquishing this project that took so much time and brought him neither money nor delight. Finally he was rejoining the adult world, where people expected a proper return for their labor.

  “But why?” She made her pouting expression. “You’ve worked on it for so long. You’re nearly finished. Why would you give up now? I remember the first time we met you talked about Keats and Fanny. They’re like members of our household.”

  Each sentence winged its way unerringly to the target, and each was more wounding because it was something he could also imagine Judy saying. And that, of course, their accidental meeting, was what he could not reveal to Abigail. “I thought you’d be pleased,” he said. “You’re always complaining about how slowly I work.”

  “Of course I complain. You do too. I never thought that meant you would give up.” She put down her own drink and, moving their glasses aside, reached for his hands. “What happened? Did Georgina say something?”