The House on Fortune Street

by Margot Livesey

  “But maybe”—Dara leaned forward, hands clasped—“the reason you keep everyone at arm’s length is because of him. You never want to be that out of control again. Which is no bad thing, if it doesn’t leave you lonely.”

  She saw Abigail’s pout and laughed. “It’s only a theory, Abigail. As I tell my clients, if the connection works, use it. If not, ignore it. So tell me, what would you be doing this evening if I weren’t here? Who’s the person you’re closest to in London? When can I see your current play?”

  By the time she finished answering, Dara was struggling not to yawn. “You may have to repeat some of that tomorrow,” she said. She kissed Abigail’s cheek and headed off to bed.

  In the empty kitchen Abigail cleared the table and thought about what Dara had said. She had always assumed that the reason the women she knew praised their boyfriends so excessively was that they needed an excuse to have sex, but if Dara was right—she put a baking dish to soak—it was more complicated than that. An almost physiological change occurred. And perhaps, it was remotely possible, the reason that she was immune to this change did have something to do with her father. She pictured him patting his tumor, eating his oysters. How amused he would be to think he still played a role in her life.

  The nearby church clock was chiming midnight as she climbed the stairs. In the silence that followed the last stroke, she paused at the door of the spare room. If she held her own breath, she could just make out the soft sound of Dara’s: her best friend here, in her home.

  MOST NIGHTS FROM THEN ON ABIGAIL LISTENED AT DARA’S door. Dara was usually asleep when she got back from the theater, and gone before she got up in the morning, but they traded notes about food and phone calls, and at weekends went on expeditions. Abigail was fond of her adopted city and she enjoyed showing Dara the sights she hadn’t seen when she lived there with Kevin. They went to Greenwich and Kew Gardens, took a walking tour around St. Paul’s, and visited Southwark Market. And wherever they went, whatever they did, they talked, catching up on the people and events of their years apart. After a few weeks, however, Dara insisted on house hunting. In spite of Abigail’s pleas she was resolute. Being alone in the house, night after night while Abigail worked, was not why she had come to London. I can’t build my life on yours, she said. We’re too different. She decided to look for a room in a shared house, in the hope of broadening her circle of friends. By which, Abigail knew, she meant meeting a man. In bits and pieces she had learned about Dara’s last two relationships and how they had fallen apart. She herself, since Ralph, had returned to her old, casual ways.

  The night Dara moved out, Abigail arrived home at her usual time. As soon as she let herself into the hall, she was aware that something was different. She stood there breathing in the chilly air, trying to figure out the source of the feeling. Had she been burgled? Had a window broken or a pipe burst? But no, what she was sensing was absence, not presence. Everything she could see, everything she could measure, was the same, and yet everything was profoundly altered. She felt, as she never had before, even after Ralph left, alone.

  She was still pondering this feeling a fortnight later when she went to her friend Tyler’s house for Sunday lunch. The tube was slow, and by the time she arrived half a dozen people were seated around the table. A dark-haired man was gesturing toward the thick green stalk of an amaryllis. “Every plant has this point,” he was saying, “where it’s immortal. If it was left on its own, it would grow forever.”

  When they were introduced, Abigail asked if he was a biologist. “Heavens, no,” he said. “I was quoting my O level biology textbook.”

  “Sean’s doing his Ph.D.,” Tyler explained. “On Keats.”

  “With many interruptions. Tyler said you were an actor.”

  As he passed the bread, she saw his gold ring. “So why did you choose Keats?” she said.

  She worried that the question sounded naive, but Sean responded as if the need for explanation were entirely natural. He had always liked Keats’s poetry, and, of course, his amazing letters, but what changed everything was a visit to his house in Hampstead. “When I stepped into the room where he wrote, with its bookcases and its tall windows, I realized that this was what mattered to me, not insurance and making a living.”

  Before Abigail could say that that was exactly how she’d felt when Dara took her to the theater, general conversation claimed them both. As Sean turned away, she caught sight of the blue vein tracing his temple.

  SEVERAL HOURS LATER SHE WALKED SEAN TO THE BUS STOP. THEY were almost there when the Oxford bus came into view. She expected him to hurry away, but he said he’d catch the next one and continued talking about the summer he was ten; a bear had escaped from a visiting circus and taken refuge in their garden. A moment later, it seemed, another bus appeared. Sean, in the middle of asking if she’d ever acted at the Globe, stepped back from the stop. Abigail said no, though she’d like to. At last—she’d lost count of how many buses had come and gone—he sighed and said he must be going. He held out his hand, the one without the ring.

  “I hope our paths cross again,” he said.

  “I’m sure they will.”

  As the bus disappeared into the traffic, she looked at her watch and discovered that, while they stood talking beside the busy street, more than an hour had passed. When she got home, she phoned Dara. She mentioned a film she wanted to see, and then said she’d met an interesting man. “Interesting how?” said Dara, and Abigail refrained from saying that he made time disappear and instead described Sean’s passion for Keats. As she spoke, she pictured the vein in his temple, the sense of life pulsing just beneath the skin. Surely no accident that the first words she’d heard him speak concerned immortality.

  TEN DAYS LATER SHE HERSELF CAUGHT THE BUS TO OXFORD, ON the pretext of seeing a play, and invited Sean to have a drink. She knew he was married, but what harm could it do to check if that mysterious thing with time happened again? She dressed with studied casualness, her best jeans, boots, a black pullover that set off her hair. In the pub she insisted on buying the first round. She was full of questions about him, and about Keats. What did Sean’s parents do? Did Keats make a living from his poetry? Sean answered enthusiastically. While discussing Endymion, he mentioned needing to see the Elgin Marbles and she said if he wanted company…It was Sean who pointed out that she was about to miss her play.

  By the time they met at the British Museum, Abigail was thinking of writing a play about the Romantics. “It would be a good way to introduce school kids to a wider group of writers.”

  Sean agreed, and told her about his book with Valentine. In a shop on the Charing Cross Road, they found a copy. Abigail held it up beside him. “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the author of—”

  “Coauthor,” Sean corrected.

  So they moved from one cultural pretext to the next. She was careful to conceal her true motives, and how every time they parted she felt as if someone—Sean? fate?—had thrown a pail of cold water over her. She knew that, if he were forced to recognize where they were going, he would flee. Sometimes after he left, though, she would retreat to the bed they had not used and lie there, trying out the words, “I love you.” Had other people been feeling this all along and still managed to go about the world, dressed and productive? But even the word “feeling” was wrong: too small, too common. Meanwhile she noticed that, besides stopping time, Sean had had another strange effect. When she came into a room she no longer noticed who was looking at her. She responded to compliments with an easy, absentminded politeness. Everything, everyone, besides Sean, was irrelevant.

  In February his wife went to a conference. Abigail invited him to dinner. Gaily she made them each a gin and tonic, and lured him into the living room. On the sofa he turned toward her. For Abigail, kissing had always been a doorway to be passed through, often quite briskly, on the way to the main room. Now they explored a few square inches of flesh, and then a few more inches. She looked into Sean’s eyes and said the
words she had rehearsed and he said them back.

  The next day after he left, she phoned Dara to announce that he had stayed the night.

  “Is that a good thing?” Dara said. “Not everyone has your attitude to sex.”

  “This isn’t sex,” said Abigail, and just stopped herself from spouting clichés. Why was it impossible to say anything truthful about the change that had come over her? “People get divorced all the time,” she went on. “Look at our parents.”

  “Four great role models. I wish you luck, but I hate to wish another person harm.”

  “It’s not a question of luck. Sean’s marriage has been over for years.”

  She had listened very, very carefully as he spoke about his wife and she knew this to be true. Everything he said was couched in terms of history and obligation, rather than love and desire. Nonetheless Sean was gone, her bed was empty, and ten interminable days passed before they met again. When he came he could stay only for an hour, and she began to understand that their passion, which she had assumed would immediately, painlessly rearrange their lives, was, for Sean, a source of anguish and confusion.

  “Why doesn’t he leave his wife?” she asked Dara.

  “Maybe he doesn’t want to,” said Dara. In an obvious effort at distraction she described some of her clients at the homeless shelter attached to the center. One woman couldn’t leave her house because of an aversion to doorknobs. Another had been a bank manager until two years ago; now she heard voices and owed thousands of pounds. You should write this down, said Abigail. And Dara said that she was the writer. The play Abigail had attempted about her grandparents had fizzled out, and her plan to write about the Romantics had yielded only the notes she’d typed to show Sean, but now she thought she might be able to make something of these curious and touching stories; after all, she knew about being homeless.

  In the months that followed she interviewed the women, and shaped their answers into a one-woman show. She and Dara met often to discuss the play, and to talk about Sean. Abigail had finally asked him the question she’d asked Dara: why didn’t he leave his wife? At first he had been dumbfounded. His love for Abigail, he said, had nothing to do with his marriage; it existed in an utterly separate sphere. Gradually, however, he seemed to be coming around.

  “I know it’s not much consolation,” Dara said, “but you wouldn’t want to be with someone who could walk away from his wife as if she were a one-night stand.”

  “I suppose,” said Abigail, though in fact that was exactly what she wanted.

  After nearly a year she delivered an ultimatum, and went to Paris. She came back resolved to stop asking Sean to make a choice he was incapable of making. She would settle for being the mistress, and perhaps eventually she’d be able to enjoy taking other lovers; her one attempt in Paris had been disastrous. The day after she returned, Sean showed up with his suitcases.

  “I can’t live without you,” he said.

  She had been hoping to hear him say these words since their third meeting, but for a fleeting moment she heard her younger self retort, with crisp accuracy, Of course you can. Later, in the middle of the night, she woke quite suddenly to feel Sean lying beside her. Somehow, without a word or a gesture, she knew that he was awake, and that what kept him awake was regret, but before she could say anything, stroke his thigh or kiss his shoulder, she was once again, just as suddenly, asleep. In the morning they made time stop, and she told herself she had merely been imagining his dark mood.

  TO CELEBRATE SEAN’S DECISION THEY SPENT A WEEKEND AT TYLER’S house in the country. Dara joined them, and a dark-haired Welshman fell at her feet. Abigail liked Edward immediately and did her best to make sure that he took Dara home from the pub. Back in London the relationship seemed to blossom, although she sensed that Dara was, once again, being overly enthusiastic and that Edward had some reservations. Then it emerged, not long after Dara moved into the downstairs flat, that he was living with his old girlfriend; even worse, they had a child.

  Dara broke the news to Abigail one night while they were making dinner. She seemed to think that the situation was analogous to what Abigail had faced with Sean; to Abigail’s mind, it was entirely different. Edward’s mendacity changed everything, and she found Dara’s response—I’d never have gone out with him if I’d known—bewildering. But the few objections she dared to raise only made Dara cross. Looking at her across the coffee table, Abigail understood that nothing she said could stop Dara, any more than Dara could have stopped her at the height of her feelings for Sean. And then, in the middle of talking about one of her clients, Dara’s lips turned pale as paper.

  Once she had got Dara safely into bed, and returned upstairs, Abigail had what she would later recognize as one of her few presentiments. She sat on the sofa, gazing out of the dark window, and worrying about her friend. Sean had expounded at length on the many military metaphors for love in poetry: the sieges and skirmishes, the swords and arrows, the victories and routs. Now, as she watched the tree moving in the streetlight, she feared that Dara was not strong enough for the battle that lay ahead.

  MOSTLY, THOUGH, SHE DIDN’T HAVE TIME TO WORRY ABOUT DARA, or about anyone else. After the success of her one-woman show she had decided to start a theater company, and suddenly this had gone from being a far-fetched fantasy to something that was actually going to happen. Once again she telephoned Alastair for legal advice. He began to explain tax exemption for nonprofit organizations and then broke off to say that he was coming down to London in a fortnight: could they have lunch?

  “That would be great but I think Dara is working.”

  “Dara?” Then he said, given Abigail’s questions, why not keep lunch just the two of them; he would see if Dara was free for an early supper.

  The address he had given her, his club, turned out to be a tall, cream-colored house near Trafalgar Square. When she stepped into the hall, the first person she saw was Alastair seated in a chair, facing the door, his briefcase on the floor beside him. He was not reading the newspaper, or studying a file, or checking his phone; he was simply watching the door and, for a few seconds, he went on sitting there, watching her as if she were stepping onto a stage. Then he rose to his feet and kissed her on both cheeks.

  “You look lovely. If you’re not ravenous, let’s have a drink before we go into the dining room. The place gets pleasantly quiet after two.”

  He led the way upstairs to a large, elegant room and over to two armchairs beside a window. A few other groups of chairs were occupied but the room seemed to absorb all conversation. “So tell me everything,” said Alastair, after he had ordered them each a glass of wine. “I haven’t seen you since we had supper in America.”

  He and Fiona had been over in New York and Abigail had taken the train down from New Haven to meet them. They had had dinner on the Upper East Side and afterward—it was a warm summer evening—strolled through the city. Alastair had talked, she remembered, about his childhood in the Orkneys: the sea all around him, the beautiful light. Now she briefly summarized what had happened since she bought the house: her acting, the success of her one-woman show, her plan to start a theater.

  “And rumor has it,” said Alastair, “that you’ve come down from Mount Olympus and joined the rest of us with our earthly passions.” His arched eyebrows signaled his meaning.

  “Yes, I’m living with Sean.” She gave a few vital statistics.

  “And does he pay rent?” Alastair smiled.

  “Not at the moment,” said Abigail, taken aback. “He’s a poor scholar.”

  “I used to wonder what kind of man would bring you low.”

  Before she could say that she didn’t think of herself as brought low, a waiter was standing over them: their table was ready. As she rose to her feet, she was aware of the wine she had drunk. I must watch myself, she thought. But Alastair had different ideas. After studying the menu, he insisted they start with oysters and a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé. She told him about her father and his dying feas
t.

  “I can understand that,” said Alastair. “I plan to ask for oysters on my deathbed. I have to say I was surprised you came back to take care of him.”

  “I didn’t mean to. I was worried he’d die without my getting to tell him how badly he’d treated me. And then there was no one else.”

  “Did he apologize?” He handed her another oyster.

  “Not exactly, but I finally understood that his behavior wasn’t”—she savored the smooth saltiness—“malicious. He really did think he was giving me an exciting childhood. By the time he died, my anger was gone.”

  Over the main course they talked about her theater. Alastair was impressed by her organization, the funding she’d got so far, and had several suggestions. She reached for her notebook, but he said they shouldn’t spoil their lunch. He would jot down the main points for her later.

  For coffee they returned to the armchairs by the window. In the street outside dusk was falling and people were going about their normal lives: a man went by on a bicycle, a woman walked a dog. Watching them, Abigail was filled with a sense of how far she had traveled from the marshes of the Medway to this quiet, expensive room.

  “I’m afraid I’ve asked a lot of impertinent questions,” Alastair said, eyeing her over the rim of his cup.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m not like this with anyone else, but I feel entitled with you.”

  “Because you’ve known me for so long,” she suggested.

  “No, or only partly. Because—it’s a little private vanity—I see myself as one of your authors.”

  He too, she realized, was quite drunk. “You and Fiona were very kind to me. I don’t know where I’d be without you.” She spoke both sincerely and automatically.

  “So you didn’t guess?” He set down his cup. “You’re so clever, I was sure you would.”