The House on Fortune Street

by Margot Livesey

  “For heaven’s sake, Dad. That’s another thing I remember from our last few months. You always had a camera between you and whatever was going on. Snap, snap, snap. It was infuriating.”

  “I’m sorry. You looked so pretty with the statue. I am listening.”

  “But not answering.”

  She had moved away from the tree and now stood no longer blinking but gazing at me sternly across a rose bush. I wondered if all along she had planned to bring me here and have this conversation. My temples were throbbing and for a few seconds I thought I might faint as I had, long ago, when the headless hen stepped toward me. Dara gasped and raised her hand to her mouth.

  “What is it?”

  “The rose,” she said, “protecting itself.” She held out her hand, displaying a few bright beads of blood on her index finger.

  “Let’s find somewhere to sit down.”

  We walked across the lawn, past several more flower beds to an avenue of trees. Beyond, the edge of the garden was marked by a beech hedge. Two benches, both empty, gave a view across a field and down to the lake. I chose the nearest bench and Dara, leaving a careful distance, sat beside me. We were entirely alone, or perhaps more accurately all our companions were absent or dead. In the silence I could hear the rustling sounds of Dara arranging her skirt; she didn’t speak. She had asked her question. It was up to me to answer. A couple of sparrows hopped hopefully around our feet.

  “Did you know,” I said, “that I had a brother?”

  “You do?”

  “Did. Losing Lionel was the worst thing that ever happened to me, until the divorce. He was on the rugger team and his neck was broken in a scrum. It was the first time I had been to see him play. I held him as he died. He was fourteen and a half. But then afterward, after the funeral, we never spoke of him. It was how my parents dealt with disaster. You pulled yourself together and went on as if nothing had happened.”

  As I spoke the wind sighed in the trees. Lionel, I thought.

  “What was he like?” said Dara gently.

  “He was great. I mean he was only a boy, but he was so lively and thoughtful and funny. I don’t think you could be with him for ten minutes without sensing that here was someone who liked people—not just other kids but Dad’s bowling pals, Mum’s friends, the neighbors—and people liked him. You knew that he was on your side.”

  “I wish I’d known him.”

  “I do too. It’s hard to explain—I’ve never tried to put this into words before—but Lionel made everything easier for me. When he was around I could connect with other people. My whole life changed when he died.” I stared down at the camera on my lap, the small birds at my feet.

  “What I’ve never told anyone is that I moved his head. I couldn’t bear to see him lying with his face in the mud. Later, much later, I realized that maybe I’d killed him. People can survive a broken neck; he might have been one of them. When I met Fiona, I thought I’d put all that behind me. But then, and please don’t take this the wrong way, something about you and Fergus began to bring it back. As a boy, Fergus was very like Lionel. I had these fears, irrational fears, that I inflicted on our family, especially on your mother. Not that I understood any of this at the time.”

  Beside me Dara stood up. Before I knew what was happening she was bending over, hugging me tightly. Then she began to talk. She said what a familiar story this was. How over and over in her work she saw people who had suffered some terrible event and never come to terms with it. Years later it would surface, destructively, in their lives. The only way to end the cycle, to stop passing the damage down to their children, was to face the event and endure the fear. “When we went to that exhibition in Whitechapel,” she said, “I remember thinking that you had a secret, but I had no idea where to look.”

  As she spoke the sky darkened and the wind began to stir. A couple walked by, two women arm in arm, both white-haired, the taller one wearing plaid trousers, the smaller a colorful skirt. The one in the skirt smiled at us as they passed. In spite of the ominous weather they sat down on the next bench.

  “Thank you,” Dara was saying. “I always assumed that your departure had to do with us, with Fergus and me, that if you’d loved us you’d have stayed. You don’t know how much it means to me to hear that it was the other way round. You left because you loved us, to save us from your limitations.”

  That wasn’t what I’d been saying, not exactly, but maybe it wasn’t so far from the truth. “Would you do something for me?” I said.

  “What?”

  “Would you allow me to ask one of those women to take a photograph of us? I’d like to have a souvenir of today.”

  “I’d like that too,” she said.

  As I approached the two women, I heard them talking in some language I didn’t know, but as soon as I said, “Excuse me,” they switched fluently to English. After a brief argument as to who was the better photographer, they both came to take our picture, one each. The first drops of rain fell as they handed back the camera.

  Over lunch at a pub in the village Dara talked about Edward. They finally had a plan that made sense. He was going to see his daughter through her first term of kindergarten, keep everything together for Christmas, and then break the news to his partner as soon as school started again. Meanwhile he and Dara would find a flat to rent, or buy, ideally within walking distance of his present flat so that his daughter could go back and forth easily between the two households. And sometime soon, maybe even next year—she looked down shyly—they were going to try to have a baby.

  “That’s wonderful,” I said. Her tone did not permit a shred of doubt.

  WE SPOKE ON THE PHONE SEVERAL TIMES IN THE NEXT COUPLE of months, but I didn’t see Dara again until she came to the drinks party Louise and I gave in mid-December. She arrived late, a number of guests had already gone home or on to other engagements, and, when I first caught sight of her in the hall, I thought that a bag lady had wandered into our house. It was not just that she was carrying several bulky bags—other guests had arrived similarly burdened—but that she was wearing such ill-assorted clothes: a threadbare Eastern jacket, several clashing scarves, a faded black skirt with a tear in one side and, in spite of the weather, red sandals. When I reached to hug her I smelled an odd, almost chemical odor.

  “Is everything all right?” I said.

  “Fine. Fine. Sorry to be late. Things are hectic at work. We had a review recently and several people are off with colds…”

  Alarm bells should have rung at the way she delivered this speech, much too loudly and quickly, but I was thinking about my precious party. I poured her a glass of wine and said we hoped she’d stay to supper afterward. She’d met a number of our friends on previous occasions, and over the next hour I glimpsed her in conversation with various people; whoever she was talking to seemed to be backing away. Twice I was about to intervene when Louise asked me to pass the hors d’oeuvres or open more wine. And then I looked around our few remaining guests and discovered that Dara was gone. Every other year she had stayed to help us clear up and to eat scrambled eggs. I phoned but reached only her answering machine.

  A week later a card came saying she was, as usual, going to Edinburgh for Christmas. I sent back a card and a check for art supplies. Louise and I were visiting Rome, I wrote. We hoped to see her early in the new year.

  Louise’s Italian family Christmases were always a pleasure, but that year everyone seemed in especially good health and spirits. As I sat at the candlelit table, my daughter-in-law on one side teasing me about my Italian, my oldest granddaughter on the other asking me about a magic trick I’d shown her, I felt blessed. I smiled across the table at Louise and she, in the midst of talking to our other granddaughter, smiled back.

  Two days later I had just returned from a solitary stroll around the Piazza Navona when my daughter-in-law called me to the phone.

  “I don’t know how to tell you this,” said Sean.

  THE ESSAYS I READ ABOUT DODGSON DID
NOT SAY IF HE HAD A counterpart to the days he marked with a white stone, days to be marked with blood and thorns. Certainly he suffered such days. On 27 June 1863, or shortly thereafter, he did something that caused a difficult break with his beloved Alice. The crucial page is missing from his diary.

  I left for London within an hour of hearing the news of Dara’s death. I met Fiona at the hospital. Together we saw our daughter. A soft-spoken woman told us that there would be an autopsy but that an empty container of sleeping pills had been found in her bathroom. Then we took a taxi to her flat. We searched everywhere, hoping to find a note. Fiona remarked on how tidy everything was, how clean. The Christmas cards Dara had received were stacked on the dining room table, unopened. She had told Fiona that she would be spending Christmas with Louise and me.

  I have no memory of her funeral other than the women, the many women, coming up to me one by one, mostly in tears, to say how Dara had helped them, had rescued them, had understood their shortcomings. “She never made you feel bad about yourself,” said one. “However often I messed up,” said another, “she was there.” Her coworkers offered the same story. The director of the center, I recognized her from a photograph Dara and I had seen in an exhibition, told me that Dara was one of the most lovely and selfless people she had ever met. “But we failed her,” she said, her eyes brimming. “Somehow we failed her.” A couple of people remarked that Christmas was a tricky time. I kept searching the congregation for a man who might be Edward. Finally I asked Sean, who told me that he hadn’t been able to get away.

  DURING THE WEEKS THAT FOLLOWED I WORKED, I ATE, I SLEPT, I did whatever I was meant to do, but all the time it was as if I were standing in front of a huge black wall. Sometimes, for a few seconds, I would become absorbed in a task, but when I looked up the wall was still there, blocking my view of everything and everyone. A fortnight after the funeral a letter arrived from Sean. It turned out that Dara had written a note and torn it up. In the confusion of finding her, Sean had taken the envelope. “Forgive my presumption,” he wrote. “I thought it would make things worse.” Now he enclosed the fragments. I put them in the drawer where I kept the photographs from Sissinghurst. Dara had not wanted us to read her letter; surely there must be a good reason for that?

  One Saturday afternoon in early March when Louise was out with a friend—she found it hard to be around my despair day after day—Davy phoned and suggested a walk. We met at the British Museum and, with no destination, wandered through Bloomsbury toward the City of London. It was a misty day, not quite raining. Most of the shops were closed for the weekend, and the streets were deserted. Presently we found ourselves in the shadow of St. Paul’s; the front facade was half covered in scaffolding. We crossed the road and headed down the flight of shallow steps to the footbridge across the Thames. Halfway across, Davy stopped to lean on the railing; I joined him. We were facing upstream toward the painted arches of Blackfriars Bridge. The river, swollen with spring rain, flowed swiftly beneath us.

  I don’t know how long passed before Davy began to speak. “A few days before my father died,” he said, “he asked if he was to blame for my being the way I am. I said no, I’d been this way for as long as I could remember. I also told him that I knew my being gay was hard for him but that I felt lucky to have been born at a time when I could live according to my affections without fear, or shame. He didn’t speak but he smiled.”

  On the last phrase his voice cracked. I knew, if I turned to look at him, I would see his eyes watering. It’s not the same, I wanted to say—my affections could never have found a place in the world—but I held my peace. The therapist I had consulted years before was dead; Fiona and I, even in our grief, never ventured beyond polite necessities. Davy was the only one now who knew, and spoke, about that hidden part of my life.

  “Dara was the way she was,” he continued. “Someone else might have had more ballast, might have coped better with your leaving, with whatever drove her to despair. Of course you’re to blame, but you mustn’t be greedy. You have to share the blame with Dara’s friends and colleagues, with her mother and her boyfriend, with her own fragility.”

  A branch floated past, a beer bottle wedged in the fork. Behind us a group of heavy-footed tourists marched by.

  “The day we went to Sissinghurst,” I said, “she said two things I can’t get out of my head. We were chatting on the doorstep with her neighbor Sean, and she told him that at a certain point you have to stop blaming your parents for everything. Then later, in the gardens, she talked about damage and how it surfaces if we don’t deal with it.” I clutched the metal railing of the bridge in my bare hands.

  “You didn’t tell her?” said Davy sharply.

  “No. She did ask again why Fiona and I split up. I finally told her about Lionel and how his death separated me from other people.”

  Almost but not quite, I told Davy the true lie I had told Dara—my fear that I had been Lionel’s unwitting executioner—but even as the words formed I offered them to the river and the wind. Davy already carried enough on my behalf. At last I did turn to look at him. On his face I saw the same marks of age that I saw in the mirror. He was already sixty-three; I would be in a few months. How unimaginable that would have seemed to the two boys who shot Mabel. And how unimaginable the alternative of never being sixty-three.

  Eyes still watering, Davy returned my gaze. “Poor Lionel,” he said, “always coming to your rescue.”

  THE DAY AFTER I CAME BACK FROM ITALY THAT SUMMER, I WAS finally able to put up the photographs the two women had taken at Sissinghurst. They are almost identical. In neither is Dara or I smiling. We are sitting side by side on the bench, the leafy hedge behind us, our hands clasped in our laps, our ankles crossed. But in one photograph we aren’t quite ready and the camera has captured on her face an expression of despair and on mine a bewildered frown. In the other, a few seconds earlier or later, we are facing the camera intently, resolutely, ardently. You can see that Dara has my mother’s widow’s peak and Lionel’s eyebrows, which are also mine.

  3

  THE FEAST OF EPIPHANY

  EVEN AS DARA STOOD WATCHING, THE MIST BEGAN TO STEAL AWAY, thinning and dissipating from one minute to the next, revealing the lawn, gray with dew. Standing on the terrace in front of the quiet house, holding a cup of coffee, she looked down and tried to decide whether she minded getting her new shoes, red sandals, wet in a way that would make them irrevocably less new. She had risen early unnerved by the silence of the countryside and the way it rendered the occasional noises—the whine of a power tool, the cry of a bird—so much more intrusive than the endless roar of London. In the strange kitchen she had made coffee and, eager to escape her hosts, decided to go for a walk. As soon as she got off the train the evening before and saw Sean and Abigail waiting on the platform of the little country station, she had worried that this weekend was a mistake; their incandescent happiness would only cast her own solitude into relief.

  A tawny shape emerged from behind a clump of tall grass. A handsome male pheasant glanced at her with red-rimmed eyes and continued, stiff-legged, across the lawn. Dara set her coffee cup on a windowsill and followed. Her momentary concern for her shoes was compensated for by the satisfying chain of dark footprints that appeared behind her in the wet grass. At the gate into the lane she looked in both directions, hoping for something to determine her choice and, seeing nothing, turned left. She found herself walking between two rows of tall, evenly spaced chestnut trees; someone who believed in the future, she thought, must have planted them a century ago. The leaves were fringed with brown and the branches thick with nuts; many had already fallen. By the time Dara reached the road she had gathered a pocketful, choosing not those lying loose but the ones still in their cases that shone so brightly when she released them.

  Again she hesitated, uncertain which way to turn. Then, on the far side of the road, she spotted a small stone church surrounded by trees and beyond it the canal Abigail had mentioned the previous
evening. She crossed the road, skirted the verdant graveyard, and climbed down a short flight of steps to the towpath. While the mist was fleeing in other places, here it almost entirely concealed the dark green waters. Three narrow boats floated in the vaporous clouds, each looking—with chairs, a wineglass half full, a doll in a pink dress, even a book lying on their respective decks—as if the Rapture had occurred in the night. Dara walked by, gazing curiously at the curtained windows.

  Her friendship with Abigail was one of the more unlikely and persistent facts of her life. They had met at university in the laundry room. One day they didn’t know each other; the next they were best friends. At least that was Abigail’s version. Dara’s first memories dated from a few weeks earlier. One rainy afternoon she had seen a girl standing outside the library, wearing a duffle coat, a long red skirt, and Wellington boots, and talking to two men. As Dara approached, the girl burst out laughing with such gaiety, such a seeming lack of reserve, that everyone nearby had smiled. Then the following week in an English seminar she had heard Abigail read a page of Mrs. Dalloway and somehow, although she didn’t appear to be acting, the whole scene was magically present in her voice. When she finished there was a rare moment of silence. “Thank you, Ms. Taylor,” said the lecturer.

  The mist thinned and two ducks with subtle brown plumage swam by. Now that she was past the narrow boats the towpath was bordered by fields; on the other side of the canal willow trees hung low over the water. Dara would have liked to draw the ducks and the trees—before leaving the house she had slipped a sketchbook into her pocket—but there was nowhere to sit. Then, at the end of the second field, she came to a stile. She took off her jacket, spread it on the top step, and sat down.

  After university Abigail had gone to America to study theater and come back to nurse her father. Then she had moved to London and, for several years, with Dara in Glasgow, they had been in touch only intermittently until Dara had got her present job, and moved south. Gradually they had renegotiated their relationship as adults living in the same city, rather than students living side by side. She had helped Abigail to write a one-woman show based on interviews with some of her clients at the women’s center. And Abigail had helped her to feel at home in London.