The House on Fortune Street

by Margot Livesey

  “Aren’t you going to shout?” Edward said. “Or hit me?”

  She wanted to do both. Instead she stood up, went over to the French windows, drew back the curtains, and flung them open. The cold night air rushed in. Instantly the candles went out.

  “What’s her name?” She stared at the plum tree, trying to decipher its crooked branches. “How long have you been together?”

  “Cordelia. Six years, nearly seven.”

  Cordelia, thought Dara. Perhaps it was fear of saying the wrong name that made him call her “Darling” in bed. “I don’t want to hit you,” she said, “but I do want to know the obvious things. Why would you hurt Cordelia, and hurt me? I was just getting on with my life.”

  “When I fell at your feet.”

  She turned at last, arms tightly folded, wanting him to see her refusal of their oldest joke. Under her stony gaze, he embarked on a story of which she had heard many similar versions from friends and clients. Cordelia was a pianist. They had fallen in love while working together; he had moved in with her. Now the relationship had run its course—they were no longer lovers—but convenience and professional ties made it hard for either to leave. “I meant to tell you that first evening, but I was swept away by the moonlight, Brahms”—he risked a quick glance at her face—“you.”

  “Are you married?” Now that she had discovered the deception she wanted every detail.

  “No. I swear we’re not. Please, shut the door. It’s freezing.”

  His relief at being able to deny the charge was palpable, but there was something, she thought, as she went to latch the doors, something that he was still trying to hide. “I can’t ask the right questions,” she said, returning to the armchair. “I need you to tell me the truth.”

  “Promise not to hate me.”

  “I promise,” she said meaninglessly.

  “We have a daughter. Rachel is nearly two.”

  A tide of bitterness swept over Dara so powerful that she thought it might carry her out of the armchair, across her beautiful, useless room, past the neatly wrapped present and the kitchen brimming with food, through the front door and into the street. In all her imaginings of disaster this had never occurred to her: not only a woman in the attic but a woman and a child. Of course it had been too good to be true that Edward, a man like Edward, loved her and was available. How stupid she had been, how presumptuous, how willfully myopic.

  “I know I should have told you,” he said. “At first I thought you knew, that you must have seen the car seat and the toys when I gave you a lift. But then we had that conversation by the river about your clients lying to you and I realized that you didn’t.”

  “Christ, Edward, it was dark, I was drunk, how was I going to see a car seat?”

  “I know, I know. I’m not trying to defend myself, just explain. I did try to tell you a few weeks ago.”

  “You tried?”

  He shrank back into the sofa. “That day,” he said, “when we had lunch together.”

  A couple of weeks before Christmas he had phoned one morning to say he was near the center; they had met at a busy café. What Dara remembered about the occasion was the shock of seeing Edward by daylight and discovering that his brown hair was threaded with gray and his front teeth faintly stained. Gradually, as they discussed the center’s nondenominational party and the toy, plastic and garish, that Dara had bought her nephew, he had turned back into his good-looking self. There had been nothing that resembled confession, but now she understood that the lunch had been occasioned not by proximity but by her suggesting, yet again, that she come to Edward’s flat.

  “You tried?” she repeated furiously.

  “You were in such a good mood I didn’t have the heart.”

  “Don’t try to pretend that your cowardice was kindness. I think you’d better leave.” She was still sitting on her hands, not now to silence herself but to stop from tipping over the flowers, knocking the candles to the floor.

  “Wait, please. There is an explanation.”

  “Other than that you’re a liar and a coward?”

  This final volley of scorn seemed to revive him. He sat up straighter.

  “Haven’t you ever done something you bitterly regret? Or failed to do something you bitterly regret?”

  While he described his good intentions, his inability to act on them, Dara felt her head clear. She was still enraged but there was no harm in listening. When he paused she said, “It doesn’t matter how it happened. The fact is you have a partner and a child. I can’t go on seeing you.” She looked at her watch. “Where’s Rachel now? Who’s taking care of her?”

  Edward glanced at his own watch. “She’s with Cordelia’s mother.”

  Dara’s despair quickened: a mother too. In some distant corner of her brain she registered this reaction as a sign of secret hope. “And where do they think you are?”

  “The Nutcracker.” He plucked his trousers. “Hence the suit. Please, Dara. Cordelia and I have a platonic relationship, but we both thought it was better for Rachel if we went on living together. We didn’t want her shuttling back and forth as a baby. The question isn’t whether we split up, but when.”

  “So what’s stopping you?”

  He brought his hands together in an attitude of prayer, which was, she knew, one of the several exercises he did every day. “I never had an incentive to leave before. Now I think about it all the time: trying to figure out what I need to do. I’ll have to keep paying half the rent, plus child support, and I’ll have to rent a place nearby so that I can see Rachel regularly. At the moment it’s easy for Cordelia and me to trade child care when last-minute jobs come up. And then”—he folded and unfolded his fingers—“there’s Rachel herself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Question by question, Dara knew, she was ceding the high ground of righteous anger. And Edward, sensing the shift, was sounding less crushed. He described his daughter’s temper. “Some nights she simply won’t go to sleep. She keeps crying and calling out until two in the morning. And she has terrible tantrums.” He held up his bandaged finger. “Yesterday she bit me. That’s why Cordelia’s mother is so crucial. Most babysitters can’t cope.”

  Dara stood up and walked over to the French windows, meaning to draw the curtains. Instead she stared out into the tangled darkness.

  “Tell me what you’re thinking,” said Edward. “What you’re feeling.”

  “I feel stupid. I feel taken for granted. I feel miserable. I feel betrayed.”

  She heard him stand up and take a step toward her. “I made a terrible mistake,” he said.

  “I can’t begin to count how many lies you must have told me.”

  “Because I wanted you.”

  He took another step. Even as the distance between them disappeared, Dara struggled against the feeling, small but robust, that there was something wonderful about having inspired such bad behavior.

  “You should leave,” she said. “This is your problem. Come back when you’re free and we can see what’s possible between us. I can’t be the other woman, the one who breaks up the family.”

  “No, because the family is already broken. I need you, Dara. Perhaps I shouldn’t but I do. Sometimes I think Rachel senses that Cordelia and I don’t love each other; that’s why she’s so volatile.”

  Dara knew what she ought to do. She ought to step away, she ought to open the door and push him out into the street and forget his face and his phone number, every syllable and every gesture that had passed between them. “So you don’t sleep together?” she said.

  “Not since Christmas a year ago.” He was still uttering protestations and denials as he pressed his lips against her neck. After a few seconds—perhaps as many as ten, certainly no more than fifteen—she turned to meet his embrace.

  BY THE TIME EDWARD LEFT THEY HAD A PLAN: A SERIES OF STEPS that needed to be accomplished in order for the two of them to live together. “That’s what I want,” he had said, “more than anythi
ng.” And Dara, in the exhilaration of being needed, was the one to look at the clock and say he must go home. In spite of his forceful looks and square shoulders, Edward was more like her than she had previously understood; he would not cope well if Cordelia ambushed him. Before he left, she gave him the Van Gogh book. Together they looked at several of the illustrations and she added it to her bookshelf. Then he asked for a piece of paper and wrote down his address.

  After the door closed behind him, Dara returned to the sofa and poured one last glass of wine. It was nearly midnight but she felt ready to climb the dome of St. Paul’s, walk to Scotland. Edward’s revelation had unleashed others; she had talked to him in more detail about her father leaving, her dread that intimacy would lead to loss; he had talked about his own insecurities, the pain of being belittled by his parents, how important it had been when he first met Cordelia, who was older and more established, that she admired his musicianship. Later, as they sat up in bed, ravenously eating the smoked salmon that Dara had bought, he had turned to her and said, “This is exactly how I want to feel about another person.” Now she drank the wine and wondered if she had, in some way, known all along that Edward was not free. On the surface it seemed absurd that a person who feared abandonment would seek a person with other commitments, but maybe the fact that the worst had already happened had allowed her to discover her feelings.

  She set aside her glass and fetched her sketchbook and pencils. She drew a picture of the two of them, sitting up in bed, giving herself a decorous nightgown. Underneath she wrote Edward’s words and the date: The Feast of Epiphany, January 2003. She laid it on the table beside the piece of paper with his address. Edward Davies, 79 Thornfield Road, London SE 11. The name of the street was dimly familiar. Perhaps a client lived there. Or perhaps it was the contradiction between the two halves of the name—the sharp thorns barring the way to the gentle field—that was familiar.

  THE NEXT MORNING AT THE CENTER, AS SOON AS SHE HAD GREETED her colleagues, Dara sought out Frank. At the sight of her, he stood up and closed his door. “Tell me everything,” he said, reaching for the back of a chair.

  While he bent and stretched, Dara did, including her theory about her own ignorance. “There were so many signs: he always went home at night, he never used his car, we never went to his flat. Surely part of me must have known what was going on?”

  “Maybe, but some people are odd about these things. Vic and I dated for a year, we stayed with his family, we went on holiday together, and he never let me past the threshold of his flat. My theory is that we only suspect people of our own faults, which is to say you’re too honest to suspect Edward of deceit. Don’t scowl. It’s one of your strengths, Dara, that you think the best of everyone.” He reached forward to place his palms on the floor.

  “Not if it makes me stupid. What do you think I should do?”

  Frank asked the standard counseling question: where would you like to be a year from now? She answered unhesitatingly: living with Edward, being a stepmother to Rachel, planning to have a child together.

  “And what do you need to do to bring that about?”

  She described the steps she and Edward had discussed: his finding more pupils, looking for a flat near his present one, talking to Rachel’s doctor. “I know it seems sleazy,” she said, “but he isn’t the kind of person who can extricate himself from this situation alone. Even though living with Cordelia isn’t great, he’d stay indefinitely.”

  “So you’re going to help him?” Frank raised one leg behind him. “I must say I admire you. I don’t have the patience for this kind of crap. Or maybe I’ve never met someone I like enough.”

  “It’s something you can’t imagine until it happens.”

  Frank nodded. “The one piece of advice I’d offer, and you know this already, is that you’re the latecomer to a complicated situation. Despite his best intentions, Edward won’t be able to tell you everything you need to know.”

  IN THE OLD DAYS DARA WOULD AT ONCE HAVE TELEPHONED ABIGAIL to recount these developments, but she was still learning the rules of their new proximity. The evening she moved in, after her father left, she had knocked at Abigail’s door on the pretext of returning a hammer and, as she’d hoped, been invited to supper. The meal had been pleasant—Sean, carefully supervised, had made spaghetti—but she couldn’t help realizing that she was more in need of their company than they of hers. And afterward Abigail had immediately gone back to work; it was Sean who had come downstairs to admire the flat and help her unpack her books.

  It was the first time Dara had been alone with him for any length of time and she was glad to find that they were on easy terms. He had teased her about still having a copy of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, like everyone else who studied English. In the next box he came across Jane Eyre. “This was one of my wife’s favorite books,” he remarked, holding it up so that Dara could see the famous portrait of Charlotte Brontë on the cover. “She wrote an excellent essay about why readers are so willing to believe in Rochester’s unlikely passion for Jane. Her theory was that it had to do with Brontë’s cunning use of autobiographical elements.” As he put the book away an expression had passed over his face so rapidly that Dara wondered if she had imagined it. For a few seconds Sean had looked utterly despairing.

  Since then she had come home most evenings to see the lights on upstairs, to hear music, either Brazilian or classical, and to smell the fragrance of cooking. Meanwhile in her own flat everything was as she had left it, only a little colder and staler. She had never lived alone before, and she missed the humdrum conversations with her old housemates, their weekly dinners. That missing, combined with Abigail’s busyness—she hadn’t knocked on Dara’s door once—and Sean’s presence, made it hard to get in touch. So she was delighted when, a week after Twelfth Night, Abigail phoned to ask if she was free for supper. At the news that Sean was out, she insisted on playing host.

  Abigail had not been downstairs since the floor was sanded, and she couldn’t stop exclaiming how lovely the flat looked. “You’ve got such good taste,” she said, surveying the living room. “Did Edward put up those shelves?”

  “No, my father. He must have made a dozen trips to the DIY shop and the supermarket. And look what he gave me.” She pointed to the rug at their feet.

  She had opened the door to find him standing there, the rolled-up rug like a sentinel beside him. He had tied a red ribbon around it. “Surprise,” he had said. “You have ten days to change it so please don’t pretend to like it.” But Dara had liked it from the moment they unrolled it to reveal the cream-colored background, patterned with blues and greens, reds and golds. “It’s beautiful,” she had said. Only as she saw his smile did she understand how nervous he had been about her reaction.

  Now Abigail said the rug was perfect. “Here,” she added, “I brought a bottle, and some nuts.” When they were seated on either side of the coffee table, she asked how things were at work.

  “Weirdly peaceful. A month ago Halley was leaving, Joyce was furious, everything was fraught. Now it’s as if none of it ever happened. But there’s something I want to tell you.” Sipping wine, in the company of her oldest friend, she went into far more detail than she had with Frank: her realization that she had made it harder for Edward by putting him on a pedestal, his insecurities about his parents.

  “You know,” said Abigail when she finished, “I do remember thinking it was odd for him to be at the pub alone if he was visiting friends. But if he was there with his family, that makes sense. Cordelia stayed with the baby, and he came out for a drink.”

  Dara kept her gaze on the rug, trying not to show her dismay. It had not occurred to her that, even at their first meeting, Edward had been accompanied.

  “So, what are you going to do?” said Abigail.

  “Follow your excellent example. Help him to leave Cordelia.”

  “Does he know this?”

  “It’s his idea. The relationship has been over for years, but there a
re various practical problems.”

  “Like a child.”

  Quickly, seeing her expression, Abigail continued. “I don’t mean to sound negative. Plenty of people with children split up, but it is more complicated. Sean and his wife ended up at daggers drawn, which was awful for them but no one else. Whereas Edward and Cordelia need to stay on good terms if at all possible.”

  “I know that.”

  She stood up and walked over to the kitchen. She had pictured Abigail greeting her as a comrade in arms, offering to strategize. Instead here she was pointing out problems of which Dara was already only too well aware, and once again confirming her suspicion that Abigail saw her as a poor relation rather than an equal. Of course Sean would leave his wife for Abigail, but who would ever leave his partner for Dara?

  But as she opened the fridge, Abigail was standing beside her. “Don’t be cross,” she said. “I’m just surprised. I knew from the beginning that Sean was married. I was duly warned, and I pursued him anyway. You’ve been going out with Edward for four months and none of us had a clue about his family. You didn’t have a chance to decide whether you were up for this before you fell for him.”

  “He fell for me,” said Dara. “Literally and metaphorically.”

  “Okay, but you can’t expect me to be thrilled that he’s been deceiving you.”

  “Not thrilled.” Dara set a saucepan on the cooker and turned to face Abigail. “But you could try to understand. I hate that he lied to me but I’m not like you. If he had told me immediately, I wouldn’t have gone out with him; I’d never have known what it was like to feel this way. However much I wish he’d move in tomorrow, I couldn’t care for a man who would walk out on his daughter.” In all their years of friendship she had never spoken to Abigail so forcefully. “I need you to understand,” she repeated.

  The next thing she knew Abigail was hugging her. “I do understand. Really, I do.”