The House on Fortune Street

by Margot Livesey

  Now Dara drew the willow tree on the far side of the canal with its long, flowing branches; she added a narrow boat, the ducks, and, in the distance, a church spire. She was shading the spire when she heard a soft tearing sound. Two cows, one black and white, one brown, had approached and were grazing nearby. “Hello,” said Dara, but neither raised its head: all those stomachs to feed. Turning back to the canal, she was in time to see a large black dog, like something out of a fairy tale, bounding along the towpath. It passed her without a glance. As the dog disappeared she heard pounding footsteps. Someone in pursuit? No, the man who came into view, wearing dark shorts and a white T-shirt, was just running. From the stile, Dara had an excellent view of his approach, arms and legs pumping steadily. And then, quite suddenly, he was sprawled on the ground at her feet.

  She jumped down to help. “Are you all right?”

  “What the hell?” He struggled into a sitting position, his shirt grazed with dirt. “Where did you come from?”

  “I was sitting on the stile. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “You didn’t. I must have caught my foot on a root, or a stone. That’s the trouble with running in the country. You never know what you’ll find.”

  He uttered this last remark as if, Dara thought, rural irritations might include her. “Is your leg all right?” she said. “Let me help you up.”

  On the second attempt, leaning heavily on her, swearing, he managed to stand and hobble to the stile. As he sat on the bottom stair, the black dog reappeared, still running at top speed. Before it could reach them, the man called out, “Boris, sit,” and it dropped to its haunches. Tongue lolling, the dog watched the man alertly. So did Dara as he bent forward to probe his ankle and flex his foot. His dark hair, which from a distance had looked short, turned out to be tied back in a ponytail. His well-muscled legs and arms were covered with fine dark hair, though not, Dara thought, too much. “Are you all right?” she repeated.

  “Fine,” he said brusquely. But when he pushed himself up off the stile, he gasped and swayed. Involuntarily she moved toward him. For the first time his eyes—they were almost the same shade as the chestnuts that filled her pocket—registered her presence. “Sorry,” he said.

  “I’m staying a few hundred yards away. Do you have time to give me a hand?” His Welsh accent was less pronounced when he wasn’t swearing.

  With Boris trotting ahead, the man—he was six inches taller than Dara—leaning on her shoulder, they made their way slowly down the towpath.

  “It’s going to be a nice day when the mist burns off,” offered Dara.

  After four steps he said, “Yes.”

  “I’m never normally up this early,” she tried again. “I’m visiting some friends who’ve borrowed a house and the quiet woke me.”

  After six more lurching steps he said, “It can do that.”

  No more, thought Dara, but as they continued their unsteady progress the silence began to feel companionable rather than adversarial, and when a pair of swans slid by, scarcely stirring the water, she sensed them both watching appreciatively.

  BACK AT THE HOUSE ABIGAIL WAS WANDERING THE KITCHEN IN her nightgown, a confection of white cotton she had bought in a vintage clothing shop. Dara remembered her holding up the gown in front of a mirror and claiming that it was waiting to be stained with the blood of a virgin. Now she saw that the gown was indeed stained; brown splotches, probably coffee, patterned one sleeve.

  “Where were you?” Abigail asked, holding a cafetiere. “I thought you were still in bed.”

  “I went for a walk by the canal. A tall, dark stranger fell at my feet.” She described the encounter, mentioning her sketching and the house where she had left the man but not his good looks or taciturnity.

  “Like Jane Eyre,” said Abigail. “Remember how she’s sitting on a stile when she hears a horse clattering over the ice and Rochester falls at her feet.”

  “That’s right. He even had a dog like Rochester.”

  Dara was delighted by the comparison but, before she could reflect on it further, Abigail was asking if she wanted porridge or scrambled eggs. Knowing that the day would hold several substantial meals, she chose the former. One of Abigail’s more annoying attributes was her ability to eat astonishing amounts with no visible result. “I have the metabolism of a bird,” she claimed. Whereas Dara, to her chagrin and against her principles, often found herself making complicated calculations of food versus exercise versus happiness.

  When the porridge and coffee were on the table, Abigail volunteered that Sean was finally moving his possessions to London the following week. They had borrowed a van to bring them down from Oxford.

  “And what about his wife?” said Dara.

  “She’s got herself a boyfriend. A vet with dogs, kids, well, one kid, the works. So now he can stop worrying that she’ll put her head in the oven if he leaves.”

  “Was that ever a possibility?” Dara paused, coffee cup suspended. The picture she had formed of Sean’s wife, via Abigail, was of some desiccated academic too involved in literature to pay attention to human passions.

  “Who knows?” said Abigail between bites of porridge. “I don’t mean to sound heartless. I mean, who does ever know that sort of thing about another person. Or even oneself. Sometimes people say they want to kill themselves to make sure you understand they’re unhappy. Sometimes they mean it.” She licked her spoon thoughtfully. “Of course I was worried but it wasn’t easy to know what was going on. Sean was all over the place those last few weeks.”

  Dara had been nodding—at the center she and her colleagues often debated the threats of their more despairing clients—but still she bristled a little at Abigail’s last comment. “It’s not easy to end a marriage,” she said. “Poor Sean.”

  “Poor me,” said Abigail, putting her hand on her chest in melodramatic fashion. “I’ve passionately wanted this since the first night we spent together, and I’ve done everything I could to make him want it too. Toward the end I felt like I did when I was looking after my father. Because he had a terminal illness, I couldn’t even have a cold.” She spread her arms, as if to seize the space that had for so long been denied her; the nightdress slipped briefly off one shoulder. “So do you have any interesting clients at the moment?”

  “There is one woman.” Dara had been saving the story. “She’s in her early thirties, has a fancy job in advertising, a devoted husband, and she’s just remembered, with the help of a therapist, that her father molested her when she was fourteen.”

  “Does she have that syndrome: repressed memories, buried memories?”

  “I don’t know if it’s a syndrome, but she certainly buried the memory for many years. She went to a therapist because she started having panic attacks after making love with her husband. At first all she could remember was a happy childhood, she’s the middle of three sisters, a good time at university, a couple of nice boyfriends, working up to her present job which she loves, getting married to her husband whom she loves. But the more she saw the therapist the worse the attacks became. She reached the point she couldn’t even share a bed with her husband. She was talking about divorce when suddenly, in the middle of a session, she remembered her father coming into her room at night.”

  “How awful,” said Abigail. “And did he molest her sisters too?”

  “They were away that summer. Once they returned the visits stopped. She never dared to tell them, or her mother, and the only way not to tell them was to forget.” Dara was describing how Claire and her husband had confronted the parents to no avail when footsteps sounded on the stairs.

  Sean entered, dark hair damp, freshly shaved, wearing a faded green T-shirt and jeans. “Good morning, girls,” he said, bending to kiss first Dara, then Abigail. “You both look radiant. What a perfect day.”

  Standing at the foot of the table, he declaimed:

  “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close-bosom friend of the maturing sun;

  Conspiring
with him how to load—”

  “And bless with fruit,” Dara joined in.

  Occasionally prompting each other, they recited the rest of “To Autumn.” Abigail listened, smiling. “Gorgeous,” she said when they had spoken the last line in unison. Then she was on her feet, urging Sean to sit down. While he and Dara reminisced about the circumstances under which they had learned the poem—for him an attempt to impress a teenage girlfriend; for her a primary school teacher—Abigail fetched him coffee and porridge and refilled Dara’s cup. In her nightgown, with her hair hanging down her back, her feet bare, she looked like a handmaiden or a servant. To his credit Sean protested and tried to help. Dara, however, just sat there, saying please and thank you. She spent so much time taking care of other people; it was nice, even for a day, to have the roles reversed.

  WHEN BREAKFAST WAS FINALLY OVER THEY DROVE TO THE nearby town and toured the modest art museum. Then they went to the farmers’ market and bought too much food because everything looked so fresh. As she followed Sean and Abigail from stall to stall, Dara’s good mood slipped away. Contrary to her fears at the station, she had enjoyed dinner the night before and later she had overheard their lovemaking with only mild curiosity—Abigail made less noise than she used to—but when she saw Sean holding a sample of local cheese to Abigail’s parted lips, she was suddenly so keenly aware of the shared pleasures of domestic life, from which she was currently excluded, that she had to step over to an adjacent stall and pretend to admire a basket.

  Lunch, both the preparation of it and the eating, helped to restore her equanimity. Afterward they went for a walk along a bridleway and visited the local stately home; it had belonged to a well-known eighteenth-century naturalist. Back at the house they segued from cups of tea to glasses of wine and cooking. Abigail talked about her idea of adapting The Faerie Queene to the stage.

  “An Italian company did this amazing production of Orlando Furioso in an ice rink in Edinburgh,” she said. “When you strip away the folderol these epics tell wonderful stories. That’s why they’re still around.”

  “Folderol.” Sean paused over the pear he was peeling. “I can’t remember when I last heard someone use that word. It would be a good name for, I don’t know, an umbrella. Or maybe flimsy underwear.”

  He described a friend whose job was naming new products; she had recently christened a dessert and was working on a brand of garden furniture. Dara listened, intrigued. She had met Sean several times during the past year but always in the midst of a crisis. Now, as he expounded on the associations of various words—anything rural was positive; blue was good but yellow was risky—she began to understand why Abigail had courted him so relentlessly.

  After dinner Abigail suggested an outing to the local pub. Dara tried to beg off—she was tired, and surely Abigail and Sean wanted to be alone—but Abigail made short work of both excuses. “You can’t be tired,” she said. “All we’ve done is walk and eat. And we wouldn’t have asked you this weekend if we hadn’t wanted your company.”

  When they stepped outside a surprise was waiting. A huge moon hung low over the chestnut trees, so bright that their shadows followed them across the grass. Wasn’t it Gustav Mahler, said Sean, who had painted the moonlight on his lover’s bedroom floor and said we will always have moonlight. Neither Dara nor Abigail had a clue but they ran back and forth doing pretend Isadora Duncan dances, twirling and swooping on the moonlit grass. In the lane they turned in the opposite direction from the one Dara had chosen that morning and were soon at the Waterman’s Arms.

  Dara was at the bar, buying a brandy for Abigail, a pint for Sean, and she wasn’t sure what for herself, when a voice said, “If it isn’t my savior.”

  Standing over her, not quite smiling, was the man who had fallen at her feet. “Edward Davies,” he said, holding out his hand. “Sorry I was so foul-tempered this morning. I definitely owe you a drink.”

  “Dara MacLeod. I’m getting a round for my friends.” She pointed out Abigail and Sean. “How’s the ankle?”

  “Ice, elevation, and an Ace bandage have made it bearable. May I join you?”

  In spite of his limp, he helped carry over the drinks, and Dara performed introductions. As Edward explained the circumstances of their meeting, she saw Abigail’s eyes widen. Dara experienced the antithesis of that morning’s pain at the cheese stall: she was single, anything could happen. Seeing Edward and Sean side by side, she guessed that the two were of an age, but Edward, with his emphatic eyebrows, his bony forehead, and his forceful nose, had an aura of adult gravitas that made him seem appealingly older. Within minutes they had established that they all four lived in London, that they were all four interested in the arts, and that Abigail and Edward were each borrowing houses from friends. “Boris’s owners,” Edward added with a glance at Dara. Then it emerged that he and Abigail had actually crossed paths before. Edward had been a violinist in the orchestra of a musical in which she had had a very minor role. A ghastly show, they agreed. Just as Dara began to be afraid that he too would be unable to resist Abigail, he turned to ask where she was from. When she said Edinburgh, he said he thought he’d caught a Scottish accent. He had been to the Festival, first as a teenager, with his youth orchestra, and then a few years ago, playing for an opera. “I couldn’t get enough of it,” he said. “The city itself, and all the music and theater.”

  The sense that they could have met, walking down the Royal Mile or jostling for drinks at the Traverse bar, seemed to please them both. Abigail chimed in with how the Festival had given her her start in theater and Dara said how brilliant she’d been in that play about the oil rigs. For a while she felt herself to be in excellent form, uttering witty, compound sentences, making a good team with Abigail and even with Sean, but after two more rounds—foolishly she had followed Abigail’s example and was drinking brandy—she lost her footing. Both the conversation and the room started to slide. She pushed aside her glass and made her way to the ladies’. In the stall nearest the window she sat down and put her cold hands to her hot cheeks. How peaceful, she thought. No voices, no demands.

  Someone else came in, did the normal things, and left. Then the door opened again. “Dara, are you all right?”

  She forced herself to emerge from the safe little room and discovered Abigail leaning toward the mirror, applying mascara. After three brandies, her hand was entirely steady; perhaps her birdlike metabolism burned up alcohol as well as food.

  “He seems nice,” she said, running the wand over her lashes. “Did you notice he has the same first name as Mr. Rochester? I almost said something when you introduced him.”

  “So he does,” said Dara, smiling.

  Then Abigail said it was time to go home, and suddenly she worried that she’d ruined everything. What if Edward had gone back into the night as suddenly as he had appeared? But no, he was waiting with Sean, the two of them discussing football; they both approved of Arsenal’s new goalie. “I drove,” he said. “Would you like a very slow lift?”

  “We’ll walk, thank you,” said Abigail, “but maybe you could take Dara? She’s a little tired.” She gave directions to the house, put her arm around Sean, and headed off down the lane.

  Alone with Edward, Dara placed one foot in front of the other, matching her careful gait to his limp as they crossed the car park. “What a lovely night,” he remarked in a tone that did not require an answer. In the car he pressed a button, and music—a piano, violins—flowed out of the speakers. The moon was higher now, smaller and more silvery, gilding the fields on either side of the road. Dara had a sudden image of what the canal must look like. “Too bad we can’t see the swans,” she said.

  “What swans?” He sounded amused. Did he think she was so drunk she was hallucinating? Before she could explain, he was saying he liked her friends, an interesting couple.

  “Finally,” said Dara. “They’ve been seeing each other for a year and Sean’s just decided to leave his wife.”

  “One of those stories
,” said Edward. He was driving, as he’d promised, very slowly. “Do you know this piece? Brahms’s First Piano Trio.”

  While the moonlit fields crept by, he asked if she spoke Gaelic and was she a member of the Scottish National Party. Dara said no to both. She liked the idea of speaking Gaelic, but the only word she knew was “bhideo,” meaning video, which surely didn’t count. When they pulled up outside the house, the music was building toward what even she recognized as a crescendo. She sat there until the last notes. Then, as she turned to thank him, Edward leaned over and kissed her. “I’m too drunk to be much use now,” he said, “but I’m not too drunk to know I’d like to see you in London.” He scrawled his number on a piece of paper and handed it to her.

  ON MONDAY MORNING DARA COULD TELL, EVEN AS SHE STEPPED into the women’s center, that something was amiss. With a staff of seven, the center was a volatile institution given to dramas and crises, mostly revolving around Halley, the director, who had started the organization six years ago, and who remained very much in charge. Halley had come to London from St. Kitts at the age of three and was tall, bisexual, and a keen amateur fencer. Now, as Dara hung up her jacket, she wondered if some controversial memo was making the rounds. Before she could go and investigate, Frank appeared in the doorway of her office. “Have you got a minute?” he said.

  The only man at the center, the cherubic Frank played the role of both peacemaker and gossipmonger. In his spare time he studied ballet, and while he spoke he often adopted flamingo-like poses. This morning Dara knew, by the way he simply sat down, that matters were serious. “You’ll never guess,” he said. “Halley’s applied for a job at City Hall.”