The House on Fortune Street

by Margot Livesey

  When I let go, she floundered to her feet. “What’s that?” she said, pointing to my stomach.

  I looked down uncertainly. The water came to just below my waist and my trunks were firmly in place.

  “That’s his appendix scar,” said Dara. “He had it out when he was eleven.” She paddled over and took my hand.

  FOR ALMOST A YEAR I HAD BEEN KEEPING MY BALANCE, BEING A good father to Dara and Fergus, being a good friend to Iris and her daughters, largely ignoring any other feelings. My restraint may have made me more virtuous but it did not make me more observant. Otherwise I would have understood sooner that Carol had fairly intense feelings about me.

  By the time I ushered the children out of the water they were all four blue and shivering. Fiona came over with towels to dry the girls. I took care of Fergus and Paul. We played chase until we were warm. Then I fetched my camera from the car and, while the women and children gathered wood for that evening’s fire, I photographed Mike and Carol. I was very professional, bossing them around, using a light meter. Through the lens Carol looked much older than fifteen and together they made a near perfect couple: smiling, starry-eyed, the energy sparking between them.

  When I finished, they wandered off. I picked up a couple of pieces of driftwood and carried them over to the rocks where Iris was once again supervising the wood gathering. “I wish you hadn’t done that,” she said, as I added my logs to the pile.

  “Done what?”

  “Taken those pictures. Carol is head over heels about this boy, and I foresee nothing ahead but heartbreak. He’s much too old for her, much too experienced, and is about to vanish like a ship in the night.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have invited him over this morning. It never occurred to me that anything would happen. I think of Carol as just a teenager.”

  “She is,” said Iris. “With a thing for older men. I don’t mean to bark at you. This would probably have happened without your raising a finger. We’re in the presence of an irresistible force. But perhaps you could help to run intervention.”

  I was promising to do whatever I could when Dara and Ingrid came over, dragging a log between them. “Well done, girls,” said Iris. “Put it here.”

  At the children’s request we made supper on the beach, cooking over the fire. It took a dozen disorganized trips to bring down the food and utensils. Iris had taken Carol aside, and to my surprise the girl responded to whatever her mother had said with good grace, fetching and carrying uncomplainingly. Meanwhile Mike read to Fergus and Paul.

  We ate baked potatoes and baked beans and sausages, charred over the flames. Then the children roasted marshmallows again and I made hot chocolate for everyone. The adults added rum to theirs. We sang songs. Mike led us in “Waltzing Matilda.” Predictably, he turned out to have a nice tenor voice. The children went off, two by two, to sleep. When Iris announced, at a fairly early hour, that she was exhausted, I took the hint and said, “Me too. I’m not used to all this fresh air.”

  I expected Carol and Mike to object but Carol yawned and stretched, and Mike agreed it had been a long day. Fiona was the one who demurred. The moon was setting and she was going to walk down to the water to see how many constellations she could identify with her star chart. But I had been in my sleeping bag for only ten minutes before she joined me. The sky had clouded over, she said, and she had barely been able to find the plough. She kissed my cheek and we fell asleep.

  “Cameron,” someone whispered. “Wake up.”

  My first thought was that the thieves had returned. I groped for my jacket and shoes and stepped through the flaps of the tent. Outside the wind filled my pajamas. Iris grabbed my arm and pulled me away.

  “What is it?” I whispered. “What’s wrong?”

  “Carol’s disappeared. I woke up and she was gone. She’s not in the toilets and when I went over to Mike’s tent, it was empty. I think they must be on the beach.” It was too dark to make out her expression but her voice was full of urgency.

  “Perhaps they went for a walk,” I said feebly.

  “Come on.”

  She started toward the line of rushes. I followed, protesting. “Iris, I feel very strange about this. Carol is your daughter but I’m just a friend.”

  “Carol is underage,” she said, still whispering. “If they’re doing what I think they’re doing, then Mike is committing statutory rape.”

  We had passed through the rushes and were walking across the sand. The darkness covered my eyes like a gloved hand. “Christ,” said Iris. “We’ll never find them.” She turned on a flashlight and handed one to me. The narrow cones of light shone on the sand. “You go that way,” she said.

  I set off in the direction she had indicated. The tide was almost in, and along the water’s edge I caught the glint of white foam and the occasional dark mound of seaweed. For the first time since that afternoon I was able to think about Ingrid in the tent: her laughing eyes watching me, her slender legs kicking. How happy she had looked, and how beautiful. I was nearly at the rocks that marked the headland when Iris cried out.

  At the far end of the beach I saw the small glow of her flashlight. I ran toward it, slipping in the sand. As I drew close I made out Mike sitting up in what must be a sleeping bag; standing over him were Iris, clothed, and Carol, not.

  I had always thought of Carol as modest and rather shy. Now she stood there naked in front of two men, yelling at her mother. “Just because you had a hard time with Dad you think all men are rotten. You think no one else should have a boyfriend. I’m fed up with your rules and curfews. I’m old enough to do what I want and I want to be with Mike. Mind your own business. Go away.”

  Suddenly she caught sight of me standing behind Iris. “And you,” she said, “always ogling my little sister. Who the fuck do you think you are, trying to tell me how to behave?”

  “Carol, I—”

  I don’t know how I would have finished the sentence if Iris hadn’t lunged forward and grabbed her daughter’s wrist. “Do you want to ruin yourself?” she asked. In a moment the two were struggling.

  Mike had somehow got into his jeans. Now he stood up and begged them to stop. It was all I could do not to turn and run back to the tent, grab the car keys, and drive away. As I’d feared, words had transformed beauty into ugliness. “I don’t think we’re needed here,” I said to Mike.

  “You’re not,” he said, “but I’m not leaving Carol in the lurch.” He stepped forward and seized each woman by the arm. “Stop,” he shouted.

  “Please stop. Carol, put some clothes on. You’ll freeze. Iris, listen to me.”

  Both women did what he said. While he protested that this was all his idea, he’d got carried away, I stepped back, trying to figure out my own situation. Even in the midst of my panic, I knew that the essential thing was to speak to Iris as soon as possible. It was true, I’d explain, that I’d taken a lot of photographs of Dara and Ingrid but only at Fiona’s suggestion, as a way to hone my skills. There was nothing I couldn’t display in St. Giles’ Cathedral.

  “I’m no Casanova,” Mike was saying. “Carol was just as keen as I was.”

  “She’s fifteen,” said Iris. “However she behaves, she’s legally a child. We should prosecute you.”

  “Let’s talk about this in the morning,” said Mike. “You and I both want the best for Carol but we’re all worked up now. And I’m freezing.”

  Eventually Iris relented. Before I had a chance to talk to her she was marching Carol down the beach, leaving me to accompany Mike.

  “Christ,” he said. “What a battle-axe. Glad I’m not sharing a tent with her tonight.”

  I looked over, taken aback by the easy contempt in his voice. Where was the frank, cheerful young man I had met that morning? “She’s worried,” I said. “Her husband is completely out of the picture.”

  “From what Carol says, you’re the one she should be worrying about, mate.” He was shaking out the sleeping bag.

  So much
for my hope that, in the chaos, Carol’s comment had gone unnoticed. “I don’t know what got into her,” I said, trying to match his tone. “I’m working on becoming a children’s photographer—it was my wife’s suggestion—but there’s never been anything”—I hesitated—“weird about it.”

  “Still you want to watch yourself. A mate of mine, a great guy, worked in a nursery school in Sydney. He had to quit because someone saw him lifting a girl onto the slide and reported him. It was a real shame.” He slung the sleeping bag over his shoulder and started walking.

  I followed. “‘There is nothing either good or bad,’” I said, “‘but thinking makes it so.’” The quotation—I had no idea where it came from—sprang unbidden to my lips.

  “Try telling that to Iris,” Mike said.

  I had turned off the flashlight, the beam was growing dim, but my eyes had adjusted to the point where I could distinguish the piles of seaweed and occasional rocks. I thought one or the other of us might say something—maybe Mike would tender an apology, or I might explain the purity of my feelings—but neither of us spoke until we passed through the rushes into the field.

  “Good night, mate,” said Mike.

  I WOKE TO THE PLEASING PATTER OF RAIN ON THE TENT. FOR A FEW moments I lay there, listening, enjoying the snugness of my sleeping bag. Then Fiona was standing over me, fully dressed, telling me to get up. “We need to have breakfast in here,” she said.

  I pulled on the clothes I had worn the day before, shivering at the touch of the chill fabric. As soon as I was dressed, a disheveled group crowded into the tent. Carol’s cheeks were red and her eyelids puffy. Iris looked tired. Paul and Fergus were grumbling loudly. Even Ingrid and Dara seemed subdued. Only Fiona was brisk and jolly as she filled cereal bowls and offered instant coffee.

  “Why did he leave?” said Paul.

  “He promised we could ride his bike today,” Fergus said. “He promised.”

  A suspicion took shape in my head. I started to ask a question, thought better of it, and, on the pretext of fetching more orange juice, stepped outside. For a befuddled second I wondered if I was looking in the wrong direction, but no, the field was empty. The blue tent, the motorbike, every vestige of Mike was gone. Relief swept over me. I lifted my face to the rain, struggling to compose my expression, before I returned to the tent.

  As soon as breakfast was done, we settled Fergus and Paul in the backseat of the car with their coloring books and began to pack. There ought, in all the coming and going, to have been several opportunities to talk to Iris privately, but either Fiona or one of the girls was always present. Nothing untoward about that, I thought, but when Iris spoke to me—had I seen the groundsheet? did we have the kettle?—her voice sounded different, almost as if I had been last night’s perpetrator. I kept telling myself not to be paranoid; I hadn’t done anything; there was nothing to be worried about except Carol’s state of mind. She, unlike her mother, seemed desperate to talk to me and, after several attempts, cornered me by the dustbins.

  “Cameron,” she said hoarsely.

  I paused, the lid of the bin in one hand, a bag of rubbish in the other. For a few vain seconds I hoped she was about to apologize for her remark of the night before.

  “Did you see Mike before he left?” she said. “Did he leave a message for me?”

  “No.”

  She screwed her eyes shut, and when she opened them tears spilled out. “Do you know his surname?” she said.

  “No,” I said again, and whether out of pity or an impulse to torture her further added, “Maybe the farmer can help?”

  Before I could say more, she was hurrying toward the farmhouse. Judging by her face when she reappeared a few minutes later, the farmer knew no more than I did.

  On the drive up Fiona and I had brought Fergus and Paul, and Iris had brought the girls. Without discussion we fell into the same arrangement going home. Soon both boys were asleep and I was alone with Fiona. “So what went on last night?” she said. “I woke up and it was as if I’d missed Armageddon. Iris said you’d explain.”

  I told her everything, everything except what Carol had said about me, and that, of course, was my mistake. An innocent person would have been outraged, or at least perplexed, and taken the first opportunity to confide in his wife. But that only occurred to me later. As we drove along, talking quietly while the windscreen wipers slid back and forth and one of the boys, Fergus I think, snored softly, our conversation was all about Iris and Carol.

  “Poor Iris,” said Fiona. “I bet Carol’s going to blame her for this. It’s much better to think Mike fled because her mother threatened to prosecute him than because he’s a charming wastrel.”

  “Maybe we can lock Dara up until she’s twenty-one? I couldn’t answer for my behavior if someone treated her like that.”

  Fiona patted my knee. “Dara will have friends her own age. She won’t yearn after unavailable men. According to Iris’s therapist, it’s girls who don’t get enough attention from their fathers who are most vulnerable to the attentions of older men.”

  “What amazed me,” I said, “was how Carol stood up to Iris. She didn’t seem to feel ashamed or embarrassed for a second.”

  I was still describing the scene when, from the backseat, Fergus asked for a drink, or perhaps it was Paul.

  I DIDN’T FORGET CAROL’S ACCUSATION, BUT IN THE BUSTLE OF OUR return I allowed myself to ignore it and to hope that she and her mother were doing the same. When Iris phoned two days later and said not to worry, she would take the girls to and from ballet that evening, I was mildly disappointed but such changes of plan were common. I settled down to play snap with Fergus and make his favorite supper: plain pasta with tuna. The next night Dara announced that she and Ingrid were going to a friend’s house. On Friday I was working late and Fiona took care of the children.

  That Saturday I went to visit my mother, and while I was gone Fiona did something so obvious and so clever that I realized I had always underestimated her. She collected the rolls of film from my camera bag, including the one that was in the camera, and took them to be developed. Five days later, on Thursday evening after the children were in bed, she closed the dining room door and spread the pictures out on the table.

  They were fine, they were all fine, except for the last one: Ingrid lying on her back in the tent, kicking her bare legs in the air.

  “Dara was there too. I must have pressed the button by mistake.” I reached for the picture but she stayed my hand.

  “Iris was so embarrassed when she told me what Carol had said about you, she barely managed to get the words out after three glasses of wine. I was dumbfounded. Then I couldn’t say enough to defend you. You were a great father. Carol was just jealous that you didn’t pay her more attention. Iris kept nodding. But why were you constantly photographing the girls, she asked. I told her that had been my idea and that clinched it; she apologized profusely.

  “Afterward, though, I kept wondering why you hadn’t mentioned Carol’s comment. I decided to get the films developed. I was sure they would show that Ingrid was your daughter’s best friend and nothing more.” She exhaled with such force that her hair fluttered. “As soon as I saw this picture, I knew I’d been deceiving myself.” She waved at the wall behind us. “Over and over Ingrid is at the center; Dara is off to the side. And it wasn’t only when you were taking photographs. Suddenly I could recall dozens of occasions when you were a little too attentive to Ingrid, when you ought to have been focusing on Dara and instead you were chatting away with her best friend. I used to feel so smug when my friends talked about their husbands: you were such a good father, I was sure you’d never pay attention to another woman. Which was true but in the worst way. I just didn’t want to see it. God knows what harm you’ve done.”

  I reached out my hand but I didn’t dare to touch her. “Fiona, this is ridiculous. We’re talking about a hysterical outburst by a teenage girl who’s babysat for us a few times. Of course I was nice to Ingrid. She’s Da
ra’s friend. In my opinion that’s part of being a good father.” I was trying to muster a tone of outraged innocence.

  “So why did you take this photograph? And why didn’t you tell me what Carol said? We spent the whole drive home talking about what had happened and you never once mentioned it. When Iris asked if we’d discussed it, I hadn’t a clue what she was talking about.”

  I started a dozen useless sentences but what could I say? Except for the moment in the bathroom when I had stared too long at Ingrid, the moment in the tent when I had raised my camera, half a dozen other moments in the course of nearly a year, I was blameless. And yet I was utterly to blame.

  Fiona, however, knew exactly what she wanted to say: “I want a divorce.”

  With ferocious calmness she outlined her terms. “I get the house and the children and as much money as you can manage. You get my promise that I won’t tell people as long as you leave Edinburgh and stay away from the children.”

  I begged, I protested my innocence, I promised to get professional help, I swore up and down that I had never done anything untoward, that I loved Dara and Fergus, that I would give my left hand to prevent harm coming to a hair on their heads. I said how much I loved her, how happy she made me. But Fiona was relentless. She didn’t cry; she didn’t shout. Her cheeks, her lips, her eyelids, even her eyelashes seemed to stiffen. Whatever I said she simply pointed to the photograph. She would have liked me to move out that very evening. I argued that we needed time to break the news to the children, to sort out arrangements. Fiona’s promise of secrecy was worthless if we separated so suddenly; everyone would guess there was a sinister secret.

  TN THE END SHE LET ME STAY FOR FOUR EXCRUCIATING WEEKS, SLEEPING in the guest room. My life in Edinburgh, which I had thought so firmly established, turned out to be surprisingly flimsy. I gave notice at work and applied for a job in London. When I came to pack I had only a few more possessions than the first time I went south, and our mutual friends, relationships of nearly a decade, were now all Fiona’s. With colleagues I used the phrase “trial separation,” and they offered condolences. As for my mother I tried several times to explain that I was moving and would be visiting less often. She nodded and continued to describe the night she’d first seen radar. “And then the beam leaped up,” she said, clasping her hands, smiling. Fiona and I communicated mostly through notes. Before we had shared child care and household tasks. Now I did the shopping, cooking, and cleaning while she took care of the children, keeping them away from me as much as possible. Of course they sensed the tension and were difficult by day and restless at night. Together one Saturday morning she and I explained that I had a new job in London and would be living there for the foreseeable future.