The House on Fortune Street

by Margot Livesey

  “Where’s London?” said Fergus, cheeks quivering. “Can I come?”

  “Maybe when you’re older,” I said.

  “London is where I was born,” said Dara. “Why do you have to go, Daddy? Why can’t you stay here?”

  “Darling,” I said. “I have to earn money to take care of us.”

  “You can talk to him on the phone,” said Fiona. “Get your shoes on. We’re going swimming.”

  I packed stealthily until the fatal Monday arrived. Then I announced at breakfast that I was going to London that day. Dara frowned and started to question me, but Fiona interrupted to ask what kind of sandwich she wanted. Fergus didn’t seem to register my remark; he was too busy talking about his spelling words. I had got permission from Fiona to walk them to school one last time. As we made the familiar journey—the school was only a few streets away—Dara asked about Fiona’s birthday. Would I take her shopping for a present? Could we bake a cake? I said yes to everything. At the school gates, I bent to kiss first her, then Fergus. As soon as I released them, they darted off to join their friends.

  I was waiting to cross the road when, on the far side, I saw Iris and Ingrid. I had run into all three members of the family several times since our camping trip but, given that I was working overtime, leaving early and returning late, not as often as usual. Each occasion had been horribly awkward. In spite of her claim to believe in my innocence, Iris treated me with a breezy reserve. Carol seemed to simply hate me. As for Ingrid, that was worst of all. She ran toward me smiling and suddenly checked herself. What words, I wondered, had her mother used to warn her against me? Now I stood watching her and Iris. They still hadn’t noticed me. Iris, on her way to work, wore a navy suit. Ingrid was dressed in the school uniform: a short-sleeved white shirt and black trousers. Her hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail. For a few seconds I saw her as my singular, golden beloved. Then that moment too passed and she looked just like all the other girls I had seen milling around in the playground. There was a pause in the traffic and, at the same instant, we stepped off the curb. As we passed each other in the middle of the road, I raised my hand in a little wave. So did Ingrid.

  EXCEPT FOR MY MANNER OF EARNING A LIVING, MY LIFE CHANGED utterly. The dissolution of my marriage swept away my family and my friends. I rented a bedsit in North London which was as grim as it sounds. I got a job that was well paid and then—I was lucky—another job, even better paid. For a few months I did phone the children but it was too hard. I was no longer part of their daily lives; I no longer knew what questions to ask: Who were their teachers? Who were their friends? Instead I wrote weekly, trying to make my letters entertaining with stories and little jokes. I even attempted a few sketches as Dodgson had used to do in his letters to his many young friends.

  The one person who survived this radical housecleaning was Davy, who was also now living on his own, although in a far pleasanter and more sociable fashion. He had moved to a different, even smarter furniture shop and become part owner. We started meeting regularly to swim or play squash. I told him that Fiona and I had separated because of irreconcilable differences and he said how sorry he was. The first few times we met I was braced for prying questions—if anyone had the right to ask surely it was my oldest friend—but he said nothing. So I was caught off-guard when, almost a year after I moved south, he said, “Are you ever going to tell me why Fiona threw you out?”

  We were at his flat, nearing the end of a leisurely dinner and well into the second bottle of wine. “How do you know she threw me out?” I said.

  “Why would you leave your lovely family for a crummy bedsit?” He reached across to refill my glass and topped up his own. The light hung low over the circular table, illuminating the remains of the stuffed trout, and when Davy sat back his face was in shadow. “Whatever you’ve done,” he said, “I’m sure I’ve done something worse. I speak as someone who’s buggered an underage boy in a public toilet. He charged me twenty quid.”

  “Don’t bet on it.”

  For one minute, perhaps two, the silence expanded around us.

  “Remember Dara’s friend Ingrid?” I said at last. “She was in several of the photographs in the hall.”

  “The roller-skater,” he said.

  Slowly, haltingly, I began to tell him what had happened since that day Annabel took my hand. Davy listened in silence. He expressed neither shock nor dismay. Finally I got to the camping expedition and my injudicious photograph. “I never touched her, I never said a word to her, I was never alone with her, but Fiona wouldn’t listen.”

  “So if you were alone with Ingrid, if you could do whatever you wanted with no fear of the consequences, what would you do?” said Davy.

  “Feast my eyes.”

  “Not a little fondling? A little”—he tilted his head—“squeezing?”

  When his meaning reached me, I was so angry that I forgot to breathe. He hadn’t understood anything, not a word, if he thought that I would do with Ingrid the smallest part of what I’d done with Fiona.

  “I would not,” I said stiffly, “touch her in any way that a good father doesn’t touch his daughter.”

  “But of course you’re not her father. Calm down, Cameron. I’m not accusing you. I’m trying to understand.” He stood up and left the room. I heard him cross the small hall and then the sounds of pissing, flushing, hand washing. When he came back, he was carrying a new bottle of wine. “So,” he said, “I was right.”

  “Right about what?”

  “When I thought you were different though not in the same way as me.”

  “You’re not”—I hesitated—“repulsed?”

  He shook his head. “I’m just sorry. Sorry that everything came crashing down, that Fiona freaked out, that you feel all alone with this. At least if you were gay you’d have company.”

  I asked if he thought there was any chance Fiona would allow me to see Dara and Fergus again. “That’s what I feel worst about. It’s as if I’d abandoned them and they’ve no idea why.”

  Davy promised to test the waters the next time he went north. “Maybe,” he said, “if you talked to someone, a psychiatrist or therapist. If Fiona knew you regarded this as a problem and that you were trying to fix it, that might mollify her.”

  He stood up, swaying slightly, crossed the room, and bent to kiss me.

  I DID WHAT DAVY SUGGESTED. WITH HIS HELP I FOUND A SYMPATHETIC therapist, a man of about my age. I went and talked to him every week for over a year, after which he wrote a letter saying that in his opinion the possibility of my harming any child, particularly my own, was remote. Meanwhile Davy talked to Fiona. He must have exercised all his diplomatic skills. Almost four years after I left Edinburgh, she allowed me to see the children again in meticulously regulated circumstances. It was probably no coincidence that her leniency coincided with her remarriage. Her new husband was a barrister, a long-faced Scot with a comfortable income and, I gathered, a keen wit. I appreciated his kindness to the children even though it gave me a pang.

  As for the visits, they were, I imagine, what most divorced parents endure: better than nothing but painful. Gone was the easy flow of daily life. We had to have plans, and Dara and Fergus were at such different stages that it was not easy to find common activities. Then too they each grew busier with friends, and spending time with their father was not a priority. But at least I was present again in their lives; there was a relationship, however attenuated.

  THERE ARE TWO MORE PARTS TO THIS STORY. LET ME BEGIN WITH the easy one. Shortly before my forty-seventh birthday I remarried. Louise is buoyant, energetic, sociable; she sings in a choral society and has two grown children from her first marriage to an Italian. After living in Rome for nearly twenty years, she now works at the Italian Embassy in London. Thanks to her I have another life: sunnier, simpler, full of good food and music. Every summer we spend a month in Italy with her sons and their families. I am always on hand at these gatherings as the photographer. Two granddaughters are fast app
roaching what for me is a difficult age. I have learned to take pleasure in their company, but not too much. Neither, happily, possesses Ingrid’s charms.

  The other, the harder part, concerns my children or, to be precise, my daughter. Fergus took a degree in engineering, got a job in Aberdeen, and married a fellow engineer with whom he has a son. He seems unscathed by his childhood, and our rare meetings are jolly occasions. As for Dara, she studied English at St. Andrews University and then trained as a counselor in Glasgow. I would see her when I went to visit my mother once or twice a year. Several times she pressed me about why I had left the family, and I seldom felt at ease in her company. Then, in her late twenties, she got a job in London, working at a women’s center. I hoped proximity would at last allow us to be comfortable together. Louise and I made a point of having her over to dinner every few months, and periodically she and I would go to an exhibition or on an outing.

  A year after she came south, she became involved with a violinist who made his living teaching and playing in various orchestras. She moved from the group house where she’d been living to the garden flat in her friend Abigail’s house. Edward, she explained, lived with his former girlfriend, they had a daughter, and his erratic comings and goings required privacy. Once she’d realized that I wasn’t shocked, she talked about him with increasing frequency. She still had her childhood openness, and when she spoke I could see in her face her longing for this man. As soon as his daughter got over measles, he would leave. As soon as he had more pupils. As soon as they’d sorted out the insurance claim on their roof.

  At first I believed her confident pronouncements. But as six months passed, a year, nearly two years, I began to suspect that Edward’s version of events might be rather different. Meanwhile Dara lived like a soothsayer, poring over signs and omens, always, apparently, convinced that he was about to make good on his promises. I was painfully aware that her skills as a counselor did not make her own life easier.

  The autumn of her thirty-second year she suggested that we pay a visit to Sissinghurst. A couple of her friends had been and had enthused about the exquisite gardens. That September we had a spell of glorious weather, and I pictured us wandering among the flowers in brilliant sunshine. But when the chosen day arrived the sky was so overcast that I would have canceled if we hadn’t each taken time off work.

  I arrived at Dara’s flat in Brixton soon after ten and had just knocked at her door when the other door opened and Abigail’s partner, Sean, appeared. He’d been very helpful when Dara was moving in, and I’d thought him a pleasant young man. Today he seemed startled to see me; his pale face was haggard and unshaven. We exchanged greetings and I remarked on the dahlias in the front garden.

  “All Dara’s doing,” he said. He was explaining how his boyhood chores had left him with a hatred of gardening when she appeared.

  “Hi, Dad,” she said. “Come on, Sean. At a certain point we have to stop blaming our parents for everything.” She added that we were on our way to see the gardens at Sissinghurst.

  “I’ve heard they’re beautiful,” he said, his voice suggesting the opposite, and headed down the street.

  “Sean seems a little out of sorts,” I said as we walked toward my car.

  “He’s just overworked,” said Dara. “He has a contract for a book about euthanasia, and Abigail is away a lot, touring. I think he doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going.”

  As we drove out of London, she described our destination. Sissinghurst was famous because of its owners: Harold Nicholson and Vita Sackville-West. He was a diplomat and a writer; she was an aristocrat and a writer. They had bought the fifteenth-century manor house more or less as a ruin in 1930, and gradually restored it and made the famous gardens. Harold and Vita were also famous, she continued, for their open marriage. Vita had had several passionate relationships with women; Harold too had explored the pleasures of his own gender. One of the sons had written a wonderful book about his parents.

  We swooped through a hilly village and the Kentish countryside spread out before us. A few miles later signs led us from the main road into the village of Sissinghurst and out again, down a narrow lane, to the grounds of the house. The gloomy weather had kept people away and the car park was virtually empty. We paid our admission and walked through the main building into the gardens. I was amazed by the orderly profusion. The different areas were divided by hedges and walls; many of the beds were organized by color. “How pretty,” Dara kept exclaiming, bending down to touch or smell the flowers. Her skirt was almost the exact blue of the periwinkles. I took several photographs.

  Only one part of the house was open to the public: the tower. At the bottom the name Vita was spelled out in tiles on a windowsill, and halfway up the winding wooden stair was the room that had been her study. We leaned against the grille that covered the doorway looking at the walls lined with books and the floor with its shabby Oriental rugs. Vases of fresh flowers on the desk and the mantelpiece made the room feel inhabited.

  We continued climbing and stepped onto a flat roof surrounded by a four-foot-high brick wall. Above us fluttered a flag, the ropes rattling against the flagpole. The tower was only fifty, perhaps sixty feet high but we seemed significantly closer to the sky. As far as the eye could see dark clouds were massing. Beyond the garden a small lake ruffled in the wind.

  “Do you remember,” said Dara, she was staring out toward the orchards and the wild garden, “that time we went camping? We went up a tower then, didn’t we?”

  “Yes,” I said. “There was a castle near the campsite and we climbed up to the battlements.” Whenever Dara asked why Fiona and I separated I had taken refuge in vague generalizations about drifting apart. Years ago my therapist had said on no account should I try to tell her and Fergus my version of events. “Normally,” he had added, “I’m in favor of honesty between parent and child. But this would demand too much of your son and daughter.”

  Now I looked at Dara where she stood leaning over the wall and wondered how much she remembered of that weekend. “We were on the battlements,” I went on, “when we saw the men trying to steal stuff from our tents.”

  “And that Australian guy stopped them. Then he disappeared in the night and you left a few weeks later. It was our last family holiday. I used to go over and over those days in my mind, trying to cheer myself up.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She turned around to face me, hands resting on the top of the wall.

  “Why did you leave?” she said, blinking rapidly. “I’ve never understood. You said we could bake Mum a cake for her birthday and then you disappeared. Of course I was only ten, but you and she seemed to get on pretty well.”

  “We did,” I said helplessly. The top of the tower was the size of a small room.

  “I talked about it with Ingrid,” Dara went on. “She was one of the few girls I knew whose parents were divorced. But she just said her dad drank and couldn’t hold down a job and I knew neither was true of you.”

  “Whatever happened to Ingrid? The two of you were inseparable.” I had not had news of her in nearly a quarter of a century.

  “I don’t know. She started going to a different school and suddenly she was into makeup and boys whereas I was playing hockey and learning French. Then a couple of years later Iris got a job in Glasgow and they moved. At one point”—she waved away an insect—“I wondered if you might have had an affair with Iris.”

  “With Iris? Absolutely not.” I was glad to hear the genuine surprise in my voice. “I took the job in London because it paid so much better, and then Fiona and I—”

  My feeble words were interrupted by the clock, a few feet below us in the tower, striking the hour. When it finished, Dara said, “Yes, yes, you drifted apart but it didn’t feel like that. After that holiday Mum was furious with you. Fergus and I learned never to mention you. Then for years we didn’t see you. You even stopped phoning. We thought you must really hate us.”

  The last sentence was s
poken in a voice so small that she could have been ten years old again. So this was the rock and the hard place: allow my daughter to think I didn’t care for her or tell her why her mother had banished me. I ran my hand over the mossy stone. Later I thought how much might have been changed if I had crossed the few feet that separated us, put my arms around her, and told her that I loved her. Wasn’t that all she was asking? But I was too worried about my own plight to register her pain. The sound of approaching footsteps, other visitors to the tower, rescued me. “Let’s go down,” I said.

  Outside we followed a path to the white garden. Dara bent to examine a small, starry flower. “Obviously,” she said, “the situation with Edward has made me think a lot about all this. I would never want to inflict on someone else what I suffered as a child. Part of what I love about Edward is that he would never walk out on his daughter. Anyway this summer when I was up in Edinburgh I asked Mum again what had happened between you two. She said I should ask you.”

  She left the flower and wandered over to a tree, some sort of willow, beneath which stood a statue of a woman. “Stand still,” I said, raising the camera. “Move a little closer.”