The House on Fortune Street

by Margot Livesey

  When he came downstairs she had set out beer and cheese. While he helped himself to both she told him that advance ticket sales for Hull were promising, and visits to two schools had been arranged. He nodded and ate and drank. He felt a keen determination not to bring up the letter.

  “Have you ever been to Hull?” she asked, cutting a wedge of cheddar.

  “No. I picture it as rather gray and gloomy. Maybe that’s just the name: Hull, dull, skull.”

  “I was there with my parents when I was four or five. All I remember is a black dog in the park.” She pushed her hair back purposefully. “Can I see the letter?”

  Reluctantly he returned upstairs and retrieved it from between the pages of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a book he hadn’t opened for nearly a decade and which he had hoped not to open for a decade more. In the kitchen he handed the envelope to Abigail. She looked closely at the blurred postmark and drew out the folded sheet. She read it a couple of times as if the original might yield a different meaning than the fax.

  “Who do you think wrote this,” she said, “a man or a woman?”

  “Something about the phrasing—Mr. Cupid, Sunshine—seems more masculine.”

  “That’s my guess too.”

  They began to debate between the stage manager, the accountant, and the wardrobe mistress. Sean was at his wittiest, proposing wild theories about who fancied whom. He made her laugh, he made himself laugh, with his increasingly outrageous suggestions. But later, in bed, levity failed him; only by dint of Abigail’s efforts did they make love.

  THE NEXT DAY WAS ONE OF HIS AFTERNOONS AT THE THEATER AND, even as he hung up his jacket, everyone seemed excessively friendly. In the middle of a conversation about props with the stage manager, or a joking exchange with the accountant, he would catch himself wondering, Did you write the letter? Did you? At his desk, ostensibly editing a grant application, he found himself parsing, in minute detail, the way the accountant had offered to buy him coffee—“You take it white,” she had said—or the fund-raiser’s praise of Abigail. Several times, he looked up from his computer, convinced he was being watched, only to find his colleagues absorbed in their tasks. Meanwhile Abigail was returning phone calls, making lists, pleading with people to take on one more thing. He could not detect the slightest sign of uneasiness.

  Three days later she left for Hull. An hour after her taxi pulled away, the phone rang; it was Valentine. Before Sean could launch into his standard speech about how well his chapters were going, Valentine said, “So listen. Abigail told me someone wrote a stupid letter.”

  “A letter?”

  “Of course you know the pub is on my way home,” Valentine went on, very heartily. Once or twice he had stopped in for a drink and, no surprises, run into Abigail. Surely he had said something? But if he hadn’t, if neither of them had, it was because it was such an everyday occurrence.

  Everyday, Sean thought, or every day? “Of course,” he repeated. “Did you ever hear back from that doctor the secretary recommended?”

  They chatted about the book for what felt like fifteen minutes but was probably barely five. Without consulting him, or even mentioning it after the fact, she had told Valentine. Was that a sign of innocence or guilt? He couldn’t decide, and there was no way he could ask; the natural channels of communication between him and Abigail, those glittering, lively streams that had begun to flow at their first meeting, were now clogged with doubt and disagreement, forced underground. Only after he hung up did he wonder whether the conversation might have taken place in person, rather than on the phone. Perhaps—he clenched his fists—she had even shown Valentine the letter. Once again he regretted the fax.

  He paced the living room back and forth, back and forth, and at last flung himself down on the sofa. He had set aside the entire day for writing but now seemed doomed to squander it in hopeless speculation. His gaze fastened on the painting above the fireplace. Abigail had shown him the vivid oil the first time he came to the house and told him that the artist was her best friend. “That’s Dara.” She pointed. “And that’s me. We were having a picnic on the beach at St. Andrews.” Normally the sight of the two of them, sitting on a tartan rug, surrounded by food, cheered him, but today all he could see was Valentine popping his eyes. Had she? Hadn’t she? Would she? Wouldn’t she? That he had subjected Judy to similar torments only made him feel worse.

  In an effort to distract himself he decided to read plays. He hadn’t reviewed any since he sent back the one on Keats; after a promising start it had quickly lapsed into a lecture. Now a stack was sitting conveniently beside the sofa. He opened the first one. Newcastle Baby read the title page. A racehorse? A person? He didn’t care. The cast list was acceptably short and he started reading. He reached the bottom of the first page with no idea of what he’d read, though he knew there was a typo in the third line. The next page yielded the same results. His eyes passed over the words, presumably they entered his brain, but he was unable to convert them into units of thought and sense. He closed Newcastle Baby and picked up the next script: A Gift for Miss Honey-man. Again the lines meant nothing. After a third attempt, he went to his study and fetched a pile of form rejections. Sitting on the floor, he went through the entire stack, plucking off the accompanying letters and neatly affixing rejections. He put them in the hall to await return to the theater, and decided to go to the one place he could think of that promised solace: the library.

  Outside he almost collided with a familiar figure. As with the plays, he could not quite bring the man on Dara’s doorstep into focus. Then the man said, “Hello, Sean,” and he recognized her father. Cameron had helped Dara to move into the flat and Sean had lent him a hammer and assisted with the heavier boxes. Their conversations had been brief and mundane, and since then they had spoken only in passing, but now, seeing again his surprisingly unlined face and deep-set eyes, Sean remembered how, for no reason he could articulate, he had been struck by Cameron’s faint, indecipherable air of melancholy.

  “Your garden is looking lovely,” said Cameron.

  “All Dara’s doing.” In an effort at politeness, he added that he had the opposite of a green thumb. “My father used to make my brother and me mow the grass twice, first one way then at right angles. It’s left me with a lifelong grudge against plants.”

  While he was speaking, Dara appeared. She was looking, he noticed, in a purple blouse and blue skirt, unusually pretty. “Hi, Dad,” she said. “Come on, Sean. At a certain point we have to stop blaming our parents for everything. Besides, you like plants; you just don’t like tending them.” She linked her arm through her father’s and added that they were going to Sissinghurst, the country house in Kent, to see the famous gardens.

  “I’ve heard they’re beautiful,” Sean managed. The prospect of company, a destination, was so tempting that he almost asked if he could come too.

  THE LIBRARY DID HELP, BUT ONLY WHILE HE WAS THERE. THE IDEAL distraction, he discovered in the next few days, was interviewing people. The secretary’s list had arrived shortly after the anonymous letter and, at a particularly low ebb, he had picked a name at random—Mrs. Margaret Green—and phoned. He had worried that she might regard him as a kind of bailiff, come to collect emotional debts, but as soon as he introduced himself Mrs. Green was eager to describe how she had assisted her sister after a stroke. “She couldn’t smile any longer, poor lamb, but when she felt herself going I could see her trying.” The other people he contacted were equally eloquent and forthcoming. No one expressed regrets at having helped a loved one to die; indeed several claimed that doing so had eased their grief. Their quarrels were with a government that tried to make them feel like criminals and the occasional unsympathetic doctor. Much to Sean’s relief no one expected him to give an account of himself; his job was simply to ask questions and listen while people volunteered deeply personal information. The process was almost addictive, he told Dara, when he ran into her at the bus stop.

  ABIGAIL CAME BACK FROM HULL
FOR FOUR BREATHLESS DAYS during which, although he thought of little else, he did not find a single opportunity to ask why she had told Valentine about the letter. She made love to him twice, and each time he pictured her ticking it off her list. Then she was gone again, to Bradford.

  Two days later Sean went to interview Bridget Flanigan. A widow who lived in a small village near Cambridge, Mrs. Flanigan was in the unusual situation of having assisted first her mother, and then her husband. Her voice on the phone, however, gave no hint of these wrenching choices. She suggested he take the two o’clock train and gave directions to her cottage from the station. The walk, as she’d predicted, took ten minutes. When he reached the garden gate he saw a woman, wearing a man’s shirt, jeans, and Wellingtons, kneeling on the grass, holding a blowtorch to a large metal sculpture: it looked like a tree flying apart. He would have liked to watch her unobserved, but two dogs, one large, one small, started to bark. The woman straightened and, still holding the flaring torch, turned toward him. She was at least a decade younger than he had expected, perhaps in her late thirties.

  “Mr. Wyman, I presume,” she said, turning off the torch and setting it down. “Wait a moment while I get Rollo under control.” She whistled to the larger dog, and seized his collar. “Ignore Suzie.”

  He opened the gate and stepped around the smaller dog. “This is lovely,” he said. “Am I interrupting? Please call me Sean.”

  “No, I was expecting you. I’m Bridget.”

  She released the dog and led the way indoors. In the hall she exchanged her Wellingtons for clogs and removed the shirt to reveal a white blouse. When they were seated on opposite sides of the kitchen table, each with a glass of water, he saw that her thick, straight hair was almost the same color as her lightly tanned arms.

  “Do you mind if I record our conversation?” he asked.

  “Of course not. So where do we start? I feel a little foolish.”

  “Start at the beginning, which I think means your mother. Do you have siblings?”

  “No, and my father died when I was fifteen so it was just Mum and me. She was sixty-three, apparently in excellent health—working as an accountant, sailing at weekends—when she developed a cough that wouldn’t go away. At first it seemed more irritating than serious. Then suddenly she had cancer.”

  She described the rapid advancement of her mother’s illness; Sean asked her to spell a couple of the scientific terms. “Even when she didn’t feel rotten, she was so scared that she couldn’t enjoy anything. Over and over she begged us—Kingsley, my husband, and me—to kill her. Of course we said no, and then one day we were driving home from seeing her, and Kingsley said he thought we ought to listen to her. As soon as he spoke, I knew he was right. I’d been mouthing all these platitudes—you’ll feel better soon—but if this was what she wanted, we had to help her.

  “We were passing a small wood on the road back from Wisbech. Kingsley stopped the car and we got out. The sun had set, and there were one or two stars. We stood listening to the wind moving through the trees, and it was like a benediction on our conversation.” She glanced toward the window as if the wood lay just outside. “The next time my mother said she wished she were dead, I said if that’s really what you want, we can help. Once she understood what I was offering, she became her old self. If I’d ended up going to jail for five years it would have been worth it to see her have those last few weeks in control again, not scared.”

  Watching her face, Sean wondered was there any large choice in his life about which he felt such certainty, such a lack of regret.

  Bridget insisted on making tea before she told him about her husband. While the kettle boiled they chatted about the village: the erratic train service to London, the newly reopened shop. Then he switched on the tape recorder again.

  “This is harder,” she said. “Kingsley was only forty-one when he was diagnosed, and it just seemed unacceptable that he wasn’t going to have more time, that we weren’t going to have more time. I wanted him to keep fighting, to keep looking for alternatives. Between conventional medicine and the acupuncture, the feng shui, the coffee enemas, the sleeping on electrical beds—well, there was always more to try. What I came to understand was that there is a level of pain that destroys a person. If you take enough medicine to avoid that pain, you don’t become your old self; you become a drugged zombie. I finally realized that I couldn’t ask Kingsley to endure that for a second longer than he had to.”

  She held out her hands, palms up, for inspection. A thin white scar bisected the mound of Venus on her left hand; a fresh cut nicked her right index finger. “They tell you to leave the pills in reach, not to actually give them to the person. Maybe that changes things legally but it doesn’t change them morally. I look at my hands and I know I’ve killed two people. That’s what the sculpture I’m working on is about.”

  “You must be lonely,” said Sean.

  “Yes.”

  She was looking at him across the table, her eyes deep and steady, and he knew that if he stretched out his hand she would lead him to her bedroom. He sat there, meeting her gaze, imagining the skin he could see leading to the skin he couldn’t, imagining the pleasure of sex without history. At last, not sure if he was being courageous or cowardly, he looked away.

  ALL THE WAY BACK TO LONDON HE KEPT THINKING NOT ABOUT that final moment but about the conversation. He and Valentine ought to be writing a much larger book, there was so much to say, and they ought to be talking to a commercial publisher. When he got back to the house, he phoned Valentine, first at home and then on his mobile. Valentine answered the latter on the fifth ring.

  “I just did this amazing interview,” said Sean. “I’ve been thinking we should try to take this book to another level. Or write another book.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t catch that. I’m on the train to Leeds.”

  “Leeds?” His geography was poor but Leeds was no more than twenty miles from Bradford.

  Valentine said something—the connection was bad—about a new museum. Then his voice came through, clear and strong. “The northern arts beat. By gum, lad, they do have culture north of Oxford. Listen, tell me your plan about the book when I get back. Or shoot me an e-mail. I’ll be checking in.”

  “When do you get back?” said Sean, but the line was dead. He stood holding the empty phone in the empty house. He could call Abigail, he thought, but either he would get her voice mail, or she would talk at length about how well things were going. As he replaced the phone, he remembered a conversation he’d had with Georgina about Keats’s attacks of jealousy. In May 1820 Fanny Brawne had gone to a party, unchaperoned, and Keats had written her a series of anguished letters: You could not step or move an eyelid but it would shoot to my heart—I am greedy of you—Do not think of any thing but me…. If you could really what is call’d enjoy yourself at a Party—if you can smile in peoples faces, and wish them to admire you now, you never have nor ever will love me. We have to understand this in the light of his illness, Georgina had argued; nothing else makes sense of his reaction. At the time Sean had agreed.

  Now he wandered from room to room. In the living room another stack of plays was waiting. In the bedroom the neatly made bed seemed to mock him. In his study the chapters clamored. He ought to be working, transcribing the interview, but he did not want to be alone with Bridget’s voice. Why had he resisted her? Finally he went downstairs and knocked on Dara’s door. A light shone in the window but there was no answer. He knocked again and, when he still heard nothing, retreated.

  Back upstairs he telephoned his brother. For most of their adult lives, since he went to university and Lochlan decided to work in a men’s clothing shop, the two of them had been on perfectly cordial, utterly different wavelengths. But Lochlan had liked Judy, and since the divorce they had spoken less often. Or so it had seemed to Sean. Now, as he heard Lochlan’s voice, he wondered if he had simply imagined his brother’s disapproval.

  “How’s it going?” said Lochlan. “Cle
o and I were just saying we hadn’t spoken to you in ages, our fault as much as yours.”

  Sean reported that he was working on a new book with Valentine. “About euthanasia. Not the most cheery topic.”

  “And what about your own book? Is there light at the end of the tunnel?”

  “I’m afraid Keats is on the back burner.” He couldn’t deal with all that at the moment. “How are you and Cleo? Did you have a good summer? How’s the job?”

  “We did have a good summer. We had a terrific holiday in Corsica and my job is going well, touch wood. Sales for the last quarter are up. But the big news is that Cleo is pregnant, four months and growing. We told the parents last week.”

  “Great,” said Sean. This time he managed to ask the right questions and exclaim appropriately. He couldn’t wait to be an uncle, an Easter baby, fantastic.

  Then Lochlan asked about Abigail, and he tried to sound just as pleased about his own life. That his brother had not, on the basis of a single awkward lunch, warmed to Abigail only made him more anxious to conceal his present difficulties. He described the tour and managed to bring the conversation round to their mother’s birthday. Did Lochlan have any ideas for a gift?

  ABIGAIL ARRIVED BACK FROM BRADFORD ON A SUNDAY AFTERNOON. When she had unpacked and dealt with the mail, she suggested they go to the local Italian restaurant for dinner. At their window table she plied him with wine, told amusing stories, reminisced about Tuscany, and asked about the interviews. Sean answered, drank the wine, and observed his own bifurcated reactions. One part of him blossomed in the warmth of her attention; the other was convinced that she was trying to pull the wool over his eyes. As she described a crisis with the sets, he remembered his father explaining how the train driver could stop and start the train but had no choice as to where he went. Whoever controlled the points controlled the route. Finally, from behind his raised glass, Sean mentioned Valentine: had she seen him up north?