The House on Fortune Street

by Margot Livesey

  They were sitting in the back garden, drinking the sherry she had found under the sink. In the next-door garden the lilacs were in bloom. “Suffering?” said Abigail. “He’s never suffered an hour in his life, until now. Did you ever meet my mother?”

  “A few times in Cornwall. Anyone could see she was losing confidence in George. She wanted someone who could support her. And maybe”—he put his hand on Abigail’s bare knee—“younger pastures suited her better.”

  “Greener,” she said, looking down at his hand until he removed it.

  FOR MONTHS HER FATHER’S DECLINE WAS SO SLOW AS TO BE ALMOST imperceptible. He apologized for taking so long. “It’s not like me,” he said. “I’ve always been good at moving on.” Then, quite suddenly, he was hurtling toward the end. Week by week he ate less, talked less, shat less. Each day it was easier for Abigail to lift him. Soon she would be free to return to America. But one morning she woke on the living room sofa and, like that morning in Brooklyn when she had known she was coming here, knew that she would not go back there. She did not want to be an immigrant, a wanderer. She would make a life here, in London with its many theaters, growing out of a single root. She carried her tea into her father’s room and told him. “It wasn’t even a decision,” she said. “I just knew.”

  “Did Robert change your mind?”

  “I thought we were being so discreet.”

  He gave one of his grimace smiles. “Is it September yet? If it is what I’d like to do is eat oysters. That’s why I moved here, to eat the maximum number of oysters.”

  It was the second day of September. After she had bathed and fed him, she walked into town and bought a bottle of good champagne and two dozen oysters. That evening she and Robert scrubbed and shucked them and carried them in a basin of ice to her father’s bedside. She had arranged various sauces but George was a purist. “Just the sea,” he said. “I want to eat the sea.” He drank two glasses of champagne and discoursed on oysters and the previous occasions on which he had enjoyed them. He ate five, then patted his head, lay back, and closed his eyes, leaving her and Robert to experiment with the remainder. They screwed once before, and once after, eating them. Neither of them noticed a difference.

  TWO DAYS LATER HER FATHER FAILED TO RECOGNIZE YOAV WHEN HE bent over his bed. “Dalmatians,” he said, “bred to have no brains. Nothing but teeth and assholes.”

  Yoav stayed for half an hour, reading aloud from the newspaper. Afterward, in the kitchen, he and Abigail spoke in whispers. “Sometimes,” said Yoav, “he’s his old self. Sometimes he’s someone totally different.” They agreed it was time to call the hospice.

  The people at the hospice didn’t care who George was. To them death was a way station; they helped people to pass through. They tended his body and played him classical music, which he had never liked. Hearing is the last sense to go, they told Abigail. She visited him twice, three times a day. At night she stayed up late, smoking joints with Robert. Every time she came, she wondered if her orgasm had carried her father over to the other side. It seemed plausible that as she rushed over, so might he. In fact she was sitting beside him on a hot September afternoon, reading “The Little Match Girl,” a story her grandparents had read to her often, when something rattled in his throat and his fingers fluttered. She reached for his hand and felt him leave.

  She sat in silence for five minutes. Then she told the nurse on duty and went to the phone.

  “He’s gone, hasn’t he?” said Mary as soon as she heard Abigail’s voice.

  “I usually sleep until eight but I woke up a few minutes ago.”

  Abigail told her how peaceful it had been and promised to call again soon. She left a message on Dara’s phone and went out into the sunlit afternoon. She walked through the streets, down over the pebbly beach to the water’s edge. She had long felt like an orphan, and now she almost was one. Like Little Nell and Oliver Twist and David Copperfield, she thought, and Pip and Estella. She stretched out her arms and twirled around until she was dizzy. Later that evening she sat down and wrote a postcard to her mother telling her that her first husband was dead.

  A YEAR LATER ABIGAIL WAS LIVING IN A CROWDED FLAT IN THE East End of London when she answered the phone and a polite, nasal voice asked if this was Abigail Taylor. Mary had died of a heart attack and left her niece five hundred and eighty thousand dollars.

  “Five hundred and eighty thousand? Are you sure?”

  “Canadian,” said the man.

  As he explained the details by which the money would be transferred, Abigail stopped listening. Instead she pictured herself and her grandfather digging in the sands of the Medway. Without luck, he had said, they would never find anything. Now, once again, that mysterious, scary force had intervened in her life. But when she said that to Dara on the phone ten minutes later, her friend said, “Or alternatively your good deeds are being rewarded. Mary would never have got to know you if you hadn’t nursed your father. What will you do with the money?”

  “I’m going to buy a house,” said Abigail, announcing the news to both of them.

  The next day she went to an estate agent’s and began asking friends about neighborhoods. Four months later she had the keys to a terraced house in Brixton. Built while Queen Victoria was still on the throne, it had been poorly modernized and then neglected, but it was near the tube, had a new roof, and was divided in two, which meant she would always have an income. What had persuaded her to buy the house, though, were none of these sensible reasons but the thought that sprang into her mind at the first sight of the address—41 Fortune Street—that her grandfather would have liked the name. “Straight out of Dickens,” she could hear him say, straw hat rocking. The pleasure of that image more than outweighed her own faint twinge of superstition.

  She moved in with her boyfriend, Ralph, a stage manager, and together they fixed up the garden flat. They were both out of work and Ralph was handy; within a month it was ready for occupation. A couple of friends were interested, but Abigail didn’t trust them to pay rent. How many times had her parents flitted at midnight?

  She consulted the estate agent and he told her to look for a tenant with a respectable job who couldn’t suddenly disappear. He also recommended furnishing the flat, which made it easier to avoid the opposite problem: someone refusing to leave. She bought a bed, a chest of drawers, a table and chairs, a sofa, and an armchair, and rented the flat to a man who was training to be a surveyor, and agreed to pay cash on the first of each month. She and Ralph moved into the upstairs and Ralph started renovating that too. Abigail was working again. When she came home at night, he would show her what he had done that day. “This is fantastic,” she would say. “You’re amazing.”

  He had almost finished the second bathroom—the redecoration had slowed down since he too got a theater job—when one night Abigail went for a drink with another actress. Liz had split up with her boyfriend at Christmas; now he was suing her for half her flat. “At first I thought it was just a threat, another way to make me feel bad, but the papers came yesterday. I bought the flat three years before I met him.”

  “So how can he sue you?” said Abigail.

  Bitterly Liz explained that if you lived with someone for long enough they could claim you had a common-law marriage. The next day Abigail phoned the only solicitor she knew to check whether this could possibly be true. Yes, said Alastair, in some circumstances, but it doesn’t happen overnight.

  “What if you very specifically aren’t married?” said Abigail. “If you’ve both agreed that that’s the last thing you want?”

  “Even then, if a certain amount of time has passed, I think in England it’s seven years, a partner can make legal claims. The law is meant to protect people, usually women, who’ve been paying half the mortgage, sometimes the whole mortgage, for years and suddenly find themselves out on the street, with nothing.”

  She had been living with Ralph for barely two years; still Alastair’s remarks made her blood boil. Who cared if she en
joyed Ralph’s company and found him attractive? The idea that he could one day turn around and take half of her beautiful house was enraging. That Sunday morning she asked him to move out.

  Ralph looked up from the toast he was buttering. “What do you mean, move out?”

  “You know.” She handed him a cup of coffee. “Find somewhere else to live. I need my own space. We can still see each other.” She should have thought this through, not just launched in over a late breakfast, after a morning of sex. Ralph suggested, as he had before, that she use the top bedroom as an office.

  “No, you don’t understand. I don’t want you in the house anymore.”

  “Did I do something wrong?” He set down his half-eaten toast. “I love you.”

  She saw the faint scar near his eyebrow where he had fallen as a child, the bruise on the back of his hand from when they had moved a table last week, and she almost relented. But the house had to be hers, totally hers. “You may love me,” she said, “but I don’t love you.” Hastily she invented reasons. “We always talk about the same things. We never do anything, except work and go to the pub. You don’t care about my acting.”

  “Abigail, I’ve seen every show you’ve done. I’ve helped you go over your lines until I thought I’d weep with boredom. Then I’ve sat in the theater applauding wildly.”

  All of which was true. She changed tactics and, completely contradicting the activities of the last few hours, insulted their sex life.

  Ralph began to grasp that she was in earnest. “After all the work I’ve done you’re kicking me out? Christ, Abigail, you’d be living in a hovel if it wasn’t for me.”

  Then he asked if she’d met someone else and she said no in a way that suggested the opposite. Better to be a slut than a miser. For several weeks they battled back and forth. Who was this other person, Ralph kept asking. They could work on their relationship. Finally she had refused to discuss the matter, refused to talk to him about anything, refused to touch him. Psychological warfare, he called it, but her chilly silence at last persuaded him of what her arguments had failed to do; he gathered his possessions and left. The next day Abigail changed all the locks, even those of her tenant. It had been a narrow escape but she had learned. So long as she didn’t get married or allow anyone to live with her for more than six years, she was safe.

  “Also if you charge them rent,” Alastair had said, “you’re less vulnerable. You’re establishing a relationship of landlady and tenant, rather than husband and wife.”

  “Fine,” Abigail had said. “From now on, they all pay rent.”

  SINCE HER MOVE TO LONDON, SHE AND DARA ONCE AGAIN SPOKE less often, so as soon as she heard Dara’s voice, at midday on a Tuesday, she knew that something was afoot. “I got the job,” Dara said, and before Abigail could ask what job, poured out the details: she’d applied to work at a women’s center in Peckham; she didn’t think she had a hope of getting it; Abigail had been away when she came down for the interview. I mustn’t get upset, thought Abigail. Lots of things happen in my life that I don’t tell Dara, but not things that immediately affect her. Doing her best to conceal that mixture of anger and hurt which only Dara could engender, she offered fervent congratulations.

  “So we’ll be neighbors again,” said Dara. “You’ll have to show me round.”

  “You’ll stay here, won’t you? I’ve got plenty of room.”

  “That would be wonderful.” Then her voice changed to what Abigail called her counseling voice, calm and overly patient. “But we must have an arrangement.”

  “What sort of arrangement?”

  “Conditions, so you don’t feel like you’re stuck with me forever. If I stay more than a fortnight I should pay rent and I promise not to stay more than, say, two months.”

  “How about three?”

  By the time they hung up she was as delighted as Dara. The news that she was the first person Dara had phoned had gone a long way to assuage her hurt. They had not, she reminded herself, spent more than a few days together in nearly seven years. No wonder if communication was erratic. Now once again their lives would run parallel; they would be best friends.

  THREE WEEKS LATER, WHEN THE TAXI PULLED UP IN FRONT OF the house, Abigail had fastened a sign to the door—Welcome, Dara—and tied a red balloon to the doorknob. They embraced and carried in her suitcases and boxes.

  “This is lovely,” said Dara, looking around the high-ceilinged hall.

  “Show me everything.” They went from room to room and she praised and questioned. Where had Abigail found that mirror? Did she choose the tiles in the bathroom? “Oh,” she exclaimed, as they came into the living room, “you still have that painting of us on the beach.”

  “It’s one of my prized possessions. Axel looked after it while I was in the States.” As Dara studied the painting, Abigail studied her. She was more smartly dressed than she used to be, and her hair was becomingly shorter, but the shadows under her eyes were darker. She looked, Abigail thought, like a woman acquainted with disappointment. For a moment all she wanted was to turn Dara back into the hopeful girl in the painting.

  In the kitchen she opened a bottle of wine, poured them each a glass, and began to peel potatoes. When she said she was making Fiona’s sesame salmon with mashed potatoes and fennel, Dara said that her mother was the one person she minded leaving. She hadn’t told her about the job in advance, and Fiona’s tearful reaction had surprised her. “She didn’t seem to understand how stuck I felt. Everything in my life—my job, my friends, even my paintings—had become so predictable. Of course I couldn’t tell her that I wanted to be close to Dad.”

  Abigail looked up from the potatoes, surprised. After all these years Dara still cherished hopes about her father? But now was not the time to ask. “Fiona will forgive you,” she said. “We must invite her to visit.” Her own relationship with Fiona had been whittled away by time and distance, but she still regarded her as one of the touchstones of her life. The prospect of her coming to stay was deeply pleasing.

  By the time the food was ready, it was almost dark. Abigail lit candles, and the sage green wall Ralph had painted took on a silvery quality. As she opened a second bottle of wine, Dara said, “You drink more than you used to.”

  “I drank before I came to St. Andrews but then I was too scared. There was so much stuff—art, politics, international affairs—that I didn’t have a clue about. I felt like a Martian trying to pass. Drinking made me more likely to slip up.”

  “We didn’t think you were a Martian. We thought you were so sophisticated. I was always trading on your expertise at getting jobs. And your looks.” Dara pushed back her hair, a comment, Abigail knew, on the massively unfair advantage of her own hair, which she still wore long enough to please her grandmother.

  “I was good at getting jobs but really I owe everything to you, and Fiona. You taught me how to be friends, and took me to the theater. She taught me manners and”—she raised her fork—“how to cook. That summer when you were in London, I used to go round every week. It made such a difference, knowing that she believed in me.”

  As she spoke, she had a sudden memory of the evening she’d shown up in her summer dress and found herself alone with Alastair. What was it he had called her? A hot little thing. Surely, after all these years, there would be no harm in telling Dara, but Dara was asking if she still kept in touch with her mysterious benefactor.

  “Mr. MacPherson. No, I should send him a letter. I remember at first I thought it was a miracle: him choosing me. Then I realized your mother was the one who saw what was happening to me—those dreary holiday jobs—and put my name forward.”

  Dara blinked. “I didn’t know that,” she said slowly. “I always envied you the flat. I was so fed up with living at home, having to do chores and phone if I was going to be late, and there you were coming and going as you pleased.”

  Abigail had been sure that Dara too had guessed the secret of her stipend. Now she saw that her friend was upset, either by the news
, or by her ignorance. Any idea of describing her encounter with Alastair vanished. Instead she said she’d been passing Westminster last week and thought of Kevin. Did Dara know what had happened to him?

  “He’s married. Two children so far, according to his Mum’s Christmas card.”

  “What about the politics? Did he get his job in the House of Commons?”

  Dara shook her head. “Advertising.” She speared a sliver of fennel. “Falling in love is so odd,” she went on. “One day you can see that someone is perfectly ordinary and the next the same person is brilliant, unique, amazing. Then, if things don’t work out, they go back to being ordinary and you can’t even remember what made them so special.” She looked at Abigail. “I did like his passion for politics. And he wasn’t serious all the time. When we were alone, he could be quite playful.”

  “You were so distraught when he sent you that letter. I worried you might do something stupid.”

  Dara gave a little downturned smile. “I’m a great argument for not having poison or guns easily available. Of course later I understood that my reaction had as much to do with my father as with Kevin.”

  “But you wouldn’t take poison, would you?”

  “No, of course not.” Her voice was firm, her gaze steady. “I may have the feelings, but I also have enough perspective to know they’ll pass. What about you? You still seem so”—she hesitated, and Abigail wondered what word she’d choose—“so resilient in romantic matters.”

  “Or such a slut. And I suppose you think that has to do with my father too?”

  “The ultimate insult.”

  “Not insult exactly”—though if not why was she bristling?—“just irrelevant. My grandfather was a huge influence but my dad was someone I wanted to get away from, and I did, and then I finally made my peace with him. I’m not looking for anyone to replace him, and I’m not looking for a bank manager either.”