The House on Fortune Street

by Margot Livesey

  “Please,” said Bill, “don’t feel you have to respond. Valerie, have you given her the phone numbers?”

  Mrs. Lyall held out an envelope. “Call any time, day or night. Bill’s operation is scheduled for January. We can’t thank you enough.”

  They shook hands, Bill swaying perilously, and Dara showed them out. Her next appointment was already waiting but for a few seconds she remained standing in the hall, holding the envelope, feeling nothing but envy. What had Claire done to deserve these loving, forgiving parents?

  FOR ALL HER MANY VISITS TO ABIGAIL’S HOUSE, DARA HAD NEVER seen the ground-floor flat. As she bicycled over, she pictured it as similar to the upstairs: light, beautifully proportioned, tastefully decorated. When Abigail unlocked the door and showed her inside she felt a thud of disappointment: the door of that imaginary flat slamming shut.

  “Simon is so untidy,” said Abigail, stooping to pick up a newspaper.

  “The sofa is a little shabby but it’s very comfortable, and the garden used to be gorgeous. There’s a plum tree.”

  Who would paint a low-ceilinged room this shade of muddy red? Who would put down a filthy, garish carpet and line the walls with makeshift bookcases? Who would use bare bulbs for lighting?

  “This is what made me buy the house,” Abigail continued. “If I was broke I knew I could always rent out the upstairs and live here. The kitchen is great, lots of counter space, and the fridge is almost new.”

  Continuing to point out the virtues, she guided Dara through the flat. It consisted of a long double room with a kitchen and dining area at one end, a sitting area at the other, with French doors opening onto the garden. In addition there was a modest bedroom, now strewn with clothing, and a bathroom that they didn’t attempt to enter. Dara didn’t say a word. Forgetting that this was her idea, she raged inwardly. Here was yet more evidence that her best friend regarded her as inferior. Of course these low, dingy rooms were good enough for Dara. And, to add insult to injury, her rent would support Abigail and Sean, swanning around in luxury above her head.

  When a few minutes later Abigail led the way upstairs, the contrast confirmed her anger. Passing the living room, she glimpsed a book and a red cardigan lying on the sofa; a vase of lilies decorated the mantelpiece. The kitchen was warm and smelled of the peppers Abigail was roasting. “Wine? Tea? Gin?” she offered as Dara sat at the table.

  “No, thanks.”

  Abigail bent over the oven and stood up, cheeks flushed, the dish of peppers in her hands. “Forgive my asking,” she said, setting the dish on a trivet, “but do you really want to do this? What about Edward? Wouldn’t it be better to see which way the wind is blowing before you do something radical, like move?”

  “He’s the reason I want to. He never spends the night.” Beneath Abigail’s curious gaze, she explained about his early rehearsals, and how he couldn’t deal with queuing for the bathroom. “Which I can understand. It is the major drawback of communal living.”

  “So why don’t you stay at his place?” Abigail shrugged the skin off a pepper.

  It was the question Dara herself kept asking. Now she said that his flat was too far from work. “And,” she hurried on, “I need to live somewhere he can come and go without worrying about other people. But I hadn’t expected—”

  “The flat to be such a tip,” finished Abigail. “I should have warned you. Because I know how nice it can be, I tend to forget the state it’s actually in.” Knife in hand, she studied Dara. “Suppose you don’t pay rent in January in exchange for painting the place. And maybe you could sand the floors. That would make a huge difference. I’ll try to get Simon to move out by Christmas so you can decorate over the holidays.”

  “That would be terrific.” Then she caught herself. “Are you sure?” For reasons that made perfect sense, given her history, Abigail had always been a complicated mixture of stinginess and generosity. She would show up on the doorstep with a spectacular bunch of flowers, only to insist on meticulously dividing the bill for dinner.

  “Absolutely.” Abigail raised the knife for emphasis. “I hate to see the place getting so squalid, and it’ll be brilliant to have you as a neighbor again. You know what you should do? Get your dad to help. I’m sure he’d be glad to.”

  “As long as it’s all right with Louise. But that is a good plan.” Already the dinginess of the downstairs rooms was receding, being replaced by gleaming possibilities, one of which was that this move would lead to a new intimacy not just with Edward but with her father. Living in a communal house had made her seem like a child. Now with her own front door, her own bathroom, she would become an adult.

  “Did I tell you,” said Abigail, “that I ran into him—your dad—last week at the National Theater? I’d stopped in for coffee and he was there for a matinee. It was so strange. I was looking at this man across the lobby, thinking how solitary he looked. Then I realized it was Cameron. We had a nice conversation.” She spread her hands. “‘There’s no art to find the mind’s conception in the face.’”

  “What’s that from?” said Dara, startled.

  “The Scottish play.” Abigail reached for the blender. “One of Shakespeare’s more chilling insights. After all, we have to judge by appearances, anything else is too complicated, and yet they’re so often misleading. Did you ever find out why he and Fiona split up?”

  At university she and Abigail had speculated endlessly about their respective parents. Now, between bursts of the blender, she said she had asked him, more than once, and he always said, unhelpfully, that he and her mother had run out of steam.

  “So maybe the secret is that there is no secret?”

  “Maybe,” she said reluctantly. “I still think that there’s something he isn’t saying, but most children want to believe that there’s a good reason for their parents’ divorce. It’s just too hard to accept that we’re not at the center of their lives.”

  “Not if you had my parents,” said Abigail, pouting.

  THAT FRIDAY DARA WAS WORKING THE LATE SHIFT WITH JOYCE. Throughout the afternoon the temperature fell and by dusk rain was banging against the windows; twice the lights flickered ominously. Her five o’clock appointment spent most of the hour talking about what to buy her son for Christmas. Then her six o’clock appointment phoned, sounding close to tears, to say she couldn’t make it. Dara urged her to go round to a neighbor’s. “You don’t want to be on your own on a night like this.” As she hung up, the wind moaned in the street outside as if a wolf had escaped from her mother’s Peaceable Kingdom.

  She tried to focus on the report she was writing, but after a few sentences she was again staring out of the window. It was pointless to work in this distracted state, yet what would she do if she were free to leave? She too didn’t want to be alone on such a night; Edward was playing, and Abigail, now that Sean was in residence, was no longer available at short notice. Frank was busy. Other friends seemed to require too much effort. Might she call her father? She could already hear his voice falter at the prospect of her disrupting his cozy evening with Louise. The only thing she could imagine doing with pleasure was sitting in the cinema, her own life suspended in favor of those on the screen. But she couldn’t leave Joyce alone at the center.

  As she walked down the corridor she could see the light spilling out of Joyce’s office door. Joyce herself was seated on the desk, her sweater pulled tentlike over her knees, staring at the window where her dark reflection, and now Dara’s, appeared. “Hi,” she said without turning around. “My six o’clock canceled.”

  “So did mine. I was wondering when you might be ready to go?”

  “Now.” Joyce slid off the desk. “It gives me the willies being here on a night like this. Do you feel like doing something?”

  Arrangements fell into place with unexpected ease. They bought a newspaper, agreed that they wanted to see the French film at the nearby cinema, and were in their seats for the early show. Joyce was an excellent companion, watching the screen attentively.
They both gasped when the older daughter revealed her affair at a family dinner. Afterward, in the Middle Eastern restaurant next door, they ordered meze plates and couscous and debated the film. Dara thought it had been too extreme: the daughters so eager for attention, the father so selfish.

  “Actually,” said Joyce, “he reminded me of my dad.” In the candlelight her small eyes gleamed. “He wasn’t rich and handsome but he had the same knack for tyrannizing his family. Even now, when I haven’t seen him in nearly two decades, I often get depressed around five. He used to come home at five-thirty.”

  “What does he do?” said Dara, abashed to realize that she didn’t know.

  “He checks the filters at a sewage plant. You can imagine the jokes at school, but that was nothing compared to the jokes at home. Savage humor was his specialty, and”—Joyce smiled ruefully—“making kids feel bad.”

  “That must have been hard,” said Dara. Joyce’s confidences made it easier to offer her own. After the waiter had refilled their water glasses, she described the Lyalls: how she had believed Claire’s story, then the parents had been so convincing and now, from day to day, she was failing to make good on her promise to talk to the therapist. “Half a dozen times I’ve gone to pick up the phone and ended up watering the plants or checking e-mail instead.”

  “But it was the therapist who recommended her to us, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, but I’m worried she’ll think I’m interfering.”

  “This is a medical emergency,” said Joyce. “You’re going to hate yourself if you don’t try to help. Come on, let’s rehearse. Pretend I’m the therapist.” They went over the dialogue several times. “All you want,” she reminded Dara, “is for her to see the parents.”

  As she allowed herself to be coached and comforted, Dara felt a prickle of remorse; a few weeks ago she had as good as called Joyce a liar. She was still searching for words to thank her, when Joyce announced she must be going and signaled the waiter. They lapsed back into pleasantries until the bill was paid.

  “I hope I didn’t steal you from your beau,” Joyce said as she zipped up her jacket.

  “Beau?”

  “Stupid French word for fellow. I saw him waiting for you one night. He looked nice.”

  “He is,” said Dara. “Edward’s lovely.”

  “Good for you and good luck tomorrow. I’ll be around if you need me.”

  In the back of a mini cab Dara checked her phone and found a message from Glen: was it all right to show her room tomorrow? He and her other housemates had greeted the news of her move with an equanimity that might, in different circumstances, have been disconcerting. As for Edward, he had remarked what fun it would be to have Abigail and Sean for neighbors and begun to talk about one of his pupils. Dara had just enough self-control not to tell him of the role he’d played in her decision. No matter how wonderful what happened between them at night and how it made her feel—and him too, she was certain—as if they had known each other from time immemorial, by daylight, by the calendar, they had met barely three months ago. There were still moments when Edward withdrew to some secret place in himself—some childhood trauma, she guessed—and failed to respond. Privately she called these withdrawals his nonreactions.

  IN THE REMAINING WEEKS BEFORE CHRISTMAS, LIFE AT THE CENTER returned to normal. The day after the storm Dara reached Claire’s therapist. When she explained about Mr. Lyall’s imminent surgery, the therapist said that, in the circumstances, she would talk to him and Valerie. A few days later Halley let slip that she’d withdrawn her application for the job. Joyce said her Bangladeshi group more or less ran itself and volunteered to take back the addiction group. Meanwhile Dara’s clients became their former, grateful selves. The one shadow was Edward’s busyness. They talked on the phone almost daily but his many seasonal engagements—Messiahs, carol concerts, Nutcrackers—made it hard to meet. “January will be quiet as a mausoleum,” he promised. He was going back to Cardiff for Christmas and seemed pleased when Dara announced that she was visiting her mother in Edinburgh. She would stay north for the New Year, he urged, nothing like a Scottish Hogmanay. When she said no, she was coming back to paint the flat, his nonreaction was clearly audible. “Not to worry,” she said. “My father has promised to lend a hand.”

  So it was not until the evening of the sixth of January, Twelfth Night, as Edward remarked on the phone, that they met. They had not discussed gifts and, after some hesitation, she had bought a book about Van Gogh that she set inconspicuously on the dining table; if he didn’t have anything for her, then she would hand it over casually. She spent the day buying groceries, cleaning, running out to buy the extravagant bunches of tulips and daffodils that suddenly were essential. She pictured that moment when he would walk down Fortune Street, knock on her door, and step into her flat. Surely when he saw how nice she’d made it, a bright, harmonious space, he would turn to her with new passion. Only as she made the mulled wine, slicing oranges and counting cloves, did she remember to summon disasters: Edward had had an accident; Edward had met his childhood sweetheart in Cardiff; Edward had realized how plain and ordinary and unmusical she, Dara, was.

  When he knocked, she took one last look at the living room, the candles burning tall and steady, the white tulips beginning to open, and went to answer. There was his dark, familiar figure. Then he was in her living room, his cheeks red with cold, and his hands, she couldn’t help noticing, empty, save for a bandage on one finger. Oddly, he wore a suit.

  “I smell paint,” he declared, smiling. “And mulled wine.”

  “The latter was meant to conceal the former. You’re looking very smart.” She could hear the curtness in her compliment. Here he was standing in her flat, just as she had imagined for the last ten days as she painted and cleaned and hung pictures and arranged furniture, and he had scarcely glanced at its irresistible beauty. Where were the exclamations of praise? Where were the wine, the flowers, not to mention a Christmas present?

  But Edward still seemed oblivious. He talked about the lunchtime audition he’d had. The room was so cold it made everyone sound out of tune. At last, as she ladled out the wine, he finally seemed to take in his surroundings. “This is lovely,” he said.

  Too little, too late, but showing him around, Dara was once again delighted by the transformation she’d accomplished. She started with the bedroom: the white bed surrounded by soft blues and greens. “The colors are meant to make you feel as if the garden continues inside, or at least they should in summer.”

  In the living room, she had chosen a deep yellow for the kitchen area and, after several experiments, a lavender blue for the wall around the French doors into the garden. The rest of the room was painted a soft white. “The bathroom is where I went wild.”

  “This is amazing.” He stepped into the small room to study the mural that covered two of the walls.

  “Do you recognize it?”

  “Should I?” He leaned closer to the painting.

  “It’s the canal where we met. Here are the narrow boats and the willow trees. This is me sitting on the stile. This is you running, and your friends’ dog.”

  “Oh”—his voice lifted—“you’ve made me so athletic. And look at your lovely hair. You even put in the swans and the church spire.”

  “I had that sketch I did to work from. Do you like it?”

  “You should charge admission,” he said.

  Back in the living room, he settled on the sofa and began to describe the production of Twelfth Night he’d been in at school. “We set it during the sixties, which we thought was the height of sophistication. I played Malvolio wearing a tie-dye T-shirt and strumming a guitar.”

  Dara scarcely heard him. She was holding up her glass so that the light shone dimly through the mulled wine. Her hand, she was pleased to see, was quite steady. In Edinburgh her mother had greeted the news of Edward with enthusiasm. “He sounds very nice,” she had said. But as she asked more questions, urged Dara to phone him on Christmas Eve,
Dara had found herself increasingly evasive. “It’s still early days,” she had cautioned. “We’re taking things one step at a time.” Now the lack of a gift, the inappropriate clothes, brought back the doubts her mother’s questions had prompted. When Edward finished his reminiscences, she said, “I sometimes get this feeling that you have something to hide. Or that you want to hide me. You seem happy enough to meet my friends, but after nearly four months I still haven’t been to your flat or met any of your friends. When I come to hear you play, you always whisk me away afterward. In Edinburgh I wanted to send you a card and I realized I didn’t have your address.”

  “We have a modern relationship. Here’s to the mobile.” His smile was so tight she could have reached over and lifted it off.

  “So what I’d like to do,” she went on, with no idea of where her words were coming from, “is to get in a taxi, right now, and go to your flat. I don’t care about heating or plumbing or guests or mess. I just want to see where you live. Afterward we can come back here and make supper.” She drained her glass, set it on the coffee table, and rose to her feet.

  “Dara.”

  She held out her hand and looked at him steadily, willing herself, as she often did with clients, not to break the silence.

  His eyes spun toward her, and away again. He set his own glass on the table. “Please,” he said. “Sit down.”

  She did, choosing an armchair rather than returning to the sofa. She slid her hands under her thighs, to keep herself from doing, or saying, something untoward.

  “I don’t know how to tell you this. I live with someone.”

  In her scenarios of disaster she had imagined, over and over, old girlfriends reappearing, fellow musicians beckoning. Now she understood how flimsy those imaginings had been compared to the reality. Every night he left her bed and went home to share a bed with someone else, perhaps even to do—with that someone else—the very things he had done with her. So this, not some childhood trauma, was the source of his nonreactions.