The House on Fortune Street

by Margot Livesey

In the hall they embraced. As her arms met around her friend, Abigail felt as if she were embracing layer upon layer of empty clothes. “You’re so—”

  But Dara was already pulling away. “Thanks for a lovely evening,” she said. Before Abigail could say more, she had opened the door of her flat and stepped inside.

  NINE MONTHS LATER ABIGAIL WAS IN THE LOBBY OF THE NATIONAL Theater, buying a cup of coffee, when a voice said her name. She turned to find Dara’s father standing beside her. She had not laid eyes on Cameron since the awful day of the funeral and if she had seen him first she would have slipped away. Instead they kissed awkwardly, and when he asked if he could join her, she said yes.

  They chose a table near the window, and for ten minutes they did an excellent job of making conversation. But even as Cameron described his summer in Italy, even as she described the company’s new project, Abigail could feel their real subject inexorably drawing closer. Suddenly, mid-sentence, he fell silent. “I miss her every day,” he said. “And every day I remind myself that, when she was alive, weeks passed without my seeing her.”

  Abigail clutched her coffee cup. She could have said almost the same thing.

  “I tell myself,” he went on, “that guilt is a kind of indulgence, another way of not thinking about her.”

  “Dara,” said Abigail. One night a few weeks after Dara’s death she had awoken to the thought that she would never again use her friend’s name in the same way, to address or summon her. Her vocabulary was, forever, one word smaller.

  “Dara,” Cameron repeated. “She was lucky to have you as a friend.”

  Abigail raised her hands as if to ward off the words. “I wouldn’t say that. At every turn these last couple of years I failed her. I kept her at a distance.”

  “I’m sure that’s not true.” Then he frowned. “I’m sorry. That’s what Louise does: contradicts me, tries to cheer me up. It doesn’t help. Why did you keep her at a distance? You were best friends; she lived in your flat.”

  “I know—I would never have finished university, let alone become an actor, without her—but after she moved to London things got complicated and her living downstairs only made them worse. Actually”—it seemed essential to be scrupulously honest—“they’ve been complicated for years.” She began, as best she could without Dara’s help, to describe the arc of their friendship: how her easy affairs had upset Dara, how she had suffered from the way Dara became so absorbed in her lovers.

  “She used to say that suffering makes you stupid. Maybe that’s what happened to me with her.”

  She asked if Cameron remembered Kevin, and described their breakup, how upset Dara had been. “The point is that I knew how frail she was, but I thought she’d changed. I thought she believed what she told her clients: you won’t always feel this way, take pleasure in small things. The evening she arrived in London, we talked about suicide. She said she’d never do it and I believed her.”

  “I’m sure she believed herself. But why did things get worse when she moved in downstairs? I remember how excited she was about being your neighbor, decorating the flat. It seemed like the ideal arrangement.”

  From the next table came soft laughter. A man and a woman were reading a picture book to a small girl. In the midst of her grief Abigail was grateful for these oblivious bystanders. “You could say I was busy,” she said, “that I couldn’t stand Dara’s devotion to Edward, that I found life with Sean harder than I expected, but the truth is I had a certain idea about myself, and someone—Dara’s stepfather to be precise—took that idea away. And then”—it was a relief to say this aloud—“I started sleeping with Sean’s friend. I didn’t dare tell Dara. It wasn’t just that she’d have disapproved but that it would have changed the whole way she saw me. I wasn’t sure we would still be friends.”

  Did her answer make any sense? She couldn’t tell, but Cameron was listening as if he had taken lessons from Dara, his face intent. “So I began avoiding her. I began not asking about Edward. I began shutting her out. And when I did see her, I was preoccupied with my own problems and with making sure she didn’t guess my secret.”

  For one minute, nearly two, Cameron simply sat there. “I regret to say,” he said at last, “that I know exactly what you mean.”

  Abigail could tell from the sound of his voice how dry his mouth was. She had thought when Dara died that she had nothing more to lose in their relationship, but now she felt the winds of danger blowing. What if Cameron were to reveal something that entirely changed her memories of her friend?

  “It was like this,” he said. He gazed over her shoulder at a scene far outside this room. “Soon after I first came to London I met a girl called Annabel. She was pretty, sweet-tempered, bright, and when she took my hand, I felt my life had finally begun. She was also eight years old. Her parents were friends of Fiona’s and we used to go round to their house. I would play with her, help her with her homework. Nothing more. Then Fiona and I moved north, and I more or less forgot about Annabel. I was happy in my job, happy with my family.

  “We’d been in Edinburgh for three years when my father died and—I don’t know how else to say this—things started to shift.” He described his mother’s descent into Alzheimer’s, how he’d gone to stay with her and, in his boyhood bedroom, come across a copy of Alice in Wonderland with an essay about Charles Dodgson. “For the first time I knew there was someone else like me, someone else whose desires didn’t fit into any appropriate category. A few months later a family moved into our street, a single mother, Iris, and her two daughters.”

  Sentence by sentence he built the case against himself. Once or twice he turned from the distant horizon to look at Abigail, searching perhaps for judgment or condemnation, but she was too busy listening to do either. This was the story Dara had wanted to hear for more than twenty years; she was listening for both of them.

  “Ingrid and Dara,” he went on, “became best friends. Ingrid was in and out of our house all the time. I was always aware of her, tuned to her frequency, but I was careful not to show it. Or I thought I was. Then Iris invited us to go camping one half-term.”

  “Dara said that was the best holiday of her life, the last good time.”

  Now it was Cameron’s turn to react as if he’d been slapped. He raised his hands to cover his face, and she noticed how small they were for a man of his size, and how clean.

  “This must be more than you want to know,” he said, lowering them.

  “No,” said Abigail. “I want to know everything.”

  “I’ll try to spare you that. What I hadn’t realized was that Ingrid’s older sister, Carol, had an absent-father crush on me. During our first full day at the campsite two things happened: she fell for an Australian guy, and I took a photograph of Ingrid that I shouldn’t have.” He described how in the night Iris had discovered Carol missing and roused him to help look for her. They had found her with Mike on the beach. In the midst of the row, Carol had yelled something about him and Ingrid.

  “Everything might still have been all right if I’d told Fiona what Carol had said, but when she heard about it from Iris, she got suspicious. She stole my film and developed it. For over a decade I’d been the best husband and father I knew how to be; all those days and hours counted for nothing. She threw me out for one moment, one hundred and twenty-fifth of a second, to be precise, the shutter speed I used to take that photograph. We made a deal. She wouldn’t tell anyone and in exchange I’d leave town, let her divorce me, and pay as much alimony as I could afford. She didn’t let me see the children for four years.”

  So Dara had everything back to front, thought Abigail. It was her mother who had sent her father away, kept him from being in her life.

  “I think,” Cameron said, “Dara could have accepted almost anything about me, I mean acceptance was her job. If I’d been gay, or a thief, or an addict, or a masochist, she’d have understood. But whatever I am, it was a step too far. A couple of years ago I took her to an exhibition of Dodgson�
�s photographs. I thought”—he tugged his earlobe—“it might allow us to have a certain kind of conversation. It was a disaster. She couldn’t stop talking about how even if Dodgson didn’t lay a finger on the children, he was still hurting them. I don’t think I hurt Ingrid but I certainly ended up hurting Dara.”

  “She never got over your leaving,” said Abigail simply. “In one of our last conversations she told me about your brother. I forget his name. She was so happy that you’d confided in her. She was sure she finally understood why you’d been so distant, why you’d left.”

  “Poor Lionel,” said Cameron. For the first time in several minutes his eyes met Abigail’s. “Of course I’ve wondered if his death was what changed me, what made me different. I honestly don’t know. As for telling Dara, she was pressing me again about why I’d left Fiona. I couldn’t tell her the truth and I suddenly had the idea that Lionel might help me one more time.”

  “And what about Fiona? Does she still blame you?”

  “I don’t know. I hope she’s forgotten the whole business. Or, if she hasn’t, that she believes Ingrid was a single aberration I put behind me when I married Louise.”

  “Did you?”

  Involuntarily she glanced toward the small girl at the next table. Cameron followed her gaze. “I do my best,” he said, “but, as Alice says, a cat may look at a king. My eyes still function in a certain way. I wish they didn’t.”

  Abigail nodded. There was no question of them forgiving each other. “The one thing I can’t understand,” she said, “is Dara not leaving a note. It seems so unlike her.”

  “She did,” he said confoundingly.

  “She did?”

  “She tore it up. Sean found it and thought we’d be too upset. He sent it to me a couple of weeks after the funeral.”

  Sean found a note and didn’t tell her. For a moment the knowledge of how much he must hate her was overwhelming. Then it was eclipsed by Cameron’s revelation. Over and over she had railed at her friend, never expecting an answer. Now it turned out Dara had spoken one last time. “What did it say?” she said.

  Amazingly, astonishingly, Cameron reached into his pocket, took out his wallet, and produced a folded sheet of paper. “For months I couldn’t bear to look at it but a few weeks ago I pieced it together and typed up copies for myself and Fiona. These were her last words, even if she didn’t want us to have them. There are some blanks where the paper was shredded.” He handed the sheet to Abigail.

  Wednesday, 24th December

  Dear Mum and Dad,

  I realize I’ve never written a letter addressed to both of you before. By the time I was old enough to do so, it was no longer appropriate. I’m glad you’re happy and I want you to know that what I’m doing has nothing to do with either of you. And it isn’t because of a black, or hormones, or Christmas. The only thing that’s kept me going these last four weeks was knowing that there was an end in sight.

  A month ago, on November I woke up and it was such a gorgeous day that I decided to go and meet Edward. I thought we could walk rehearsal. There was a pub at the end of his street with tables outside; I sat at one of them reading the paper. I’d been there for about fifteen minutes when I saw a woman and a small girl walking on the far side of the street. I wasn’t sure which house they’d come out of but I was struck by how much alike they looked, the same curly brown hair and rosy cheeks. The little girl was skipping and they were and laughing. The woman was five or six months’ pregnant. I was thinking maybe she’d have another daughter who looked just like her when a voice called, “Wait for

  I can’t tell you what that moment was like. For two years I believed that Edward and I were a life together. When I got impatient with how long he was taking, I reminded myself that I could never be with a man who abandoned his daughter. But a part of me was always afraid he was lying. Sometimes when alone in my flat I could feel the fear, stalking me. I started avoiding Abigail; her doubts made mine worse.

  What I saw that day was much worse than my worst imaginings. That one glimpse of Cordelia and Rachel made a mockery of every I’d spent with Edward, made a mockery of my existence. By the time I left the pub I knew what I was going to do. I promised myself I’d wait for a month to make sure. Every day I thought about whether there was any alternative. There isn’t. This is the only door I want to open.

  All my love, Dara

  Outside, Cameron led Abigail to a bench facing the river and sat down beside her. Are you all right, he kept asking. When she had stopped shaking, she said no.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have sprung the letter on you. I’ve had time to get used to it. Well, not used to it, but the first shock has passed. I no longer want to smash Edward’s life apart. Or smash my own. However guilty you feel, I suspect I feel worse. You were her friend but I”—he displayed his neat white hands—“held her when she was two minutes old, I comforted her when she had bad dreams and taught her to swim. I tried to explain why people tell lies. I helped her to practice her knots for the Brownies.” He laid his hands gently in his lap, as if he were laying the memories there. “I’m afraid I have to go now. I’m meeting Louise for a concert.”

  He looked at her and, for a few seconds, Abigail saw her friend’s high forehead, her straight dark eyebrows, but not her wide, appreciative eyes. Then Cameron kissed her cheek, and walked away.

  The Thames was at low tide, the river flowing slow and murky toward the sea. In Dickens’s day the mud rakers would have been out, digging for buried treasures, but now the shore, at least the part she could see, was empty save for a flock of gulls. Oh, Dara, she thought. A month wasn’t long enough, not nearly, to know if you would feel this way forever. Edward might have gone back to being an ordinary person. You might even have stopped blaming your father.

  She listened but she heard only the scream of the gulls, the endless sounds of the city. Since Dara’s death she could no longer imagine her friend’s side of their conversations, but she did not need her voice to picture what it must have been like that day, outside the pub, to see Edward with his family, the baby she longed for growing inside another woman. What wretched luck had brought her, one misty September morning, to the canal, and then, a little more than two years later, to the sunlit street? Staring at the muddy water, it occurred to Abigail that she and Dara had each, in her own way, tried to deny the power of luck: Dara by her belief that childhood influences shaped your psyche and your adult life; she by her ambition and her belief that if you worked hard you could control almost everything, including your feelings. But her grandfather had been right: without luck you could dig all day.

  Years ago in St. Andrews they had sat, cross-legged, at opposite ends of Abigail’s bed, and debated the two endings of Great Expectations. Dara had championed the original ending in which Pip and Estella meet briefly in a London street and go their separate ways. But Abigail had sided with the many readers who didn’t want to read a love story where the lovers end up apart.

  “Which would your grandfather have preferred?” said Dara.

  “I don’t know.” Abigail could feel herself pout. “I think he’d have wanted to believe they were reunited but he might not have been able to.”

  “Like me,” said Dara. Her eyes widened, and Abigail could tell that she was pleased with whatever she was about to say. “What Dickens should have done was print both endings side by side, and let us choose for ourselves.”

  Before Abigail could protest that that was cheating, that you couldn’t have two endings, Dara had picked up the book and begun to read aloud the account of Pip’s final meeting with Estella. She stumbled a couple of times—usually it was Abigail who read aloud—but by the last sentence her voice was warm and steady.

  “‘I was very glad afterwards to have had the interview; for in her face and in her voice, and in her touch, she gave me the assurance that suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham’s teaching, and had given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be.’” />
  Later that same day, Abigail recalled, they had made sandwiches, borrowed a thermos for tea, bought cakes and chocolate biscuits and gone down to picnic by the sea. It was Dara who had brought her camera and Abigail who had asked a man walking his dog to take their picture, which later Dara had turned into the painting that now hung in the living room of Abigail’s empty house on Fortune Street. She could no longer bear to call it home; nor could she bear to have anyone, friend or lover, pay her rent.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  In addition to the works mentioned by my characters, I also made generous use of John Keats by Robert Gittings and Keats by Andrew Motion, The Norton Critical Edition of Alice in Wonderland and Lewis Carroll by Morton N. Cohen, The Life of Charlotte Brontë by Mrs. Gaskell, and A Biography of Dickens by Fred Kaplan.

  Rich Sylvester and Chris Forrest introduced me to several of the key locations in the novel. The Roses and the Shorters contributed in many ways, large and small, to the writing of these pages. With them all, and with Eric Garnick, I share many days that I mark with a white stone.

  Roger Sylvester, for more than four decades, has shared with me his love of reading and his encylopedic knowledge of Victorian authors. To him and to Merril Sylvester I owe an inexpressible debt.

  Several dear friends read the novel at various stages and offered brilliant comments and advice. I am profoundly grateful to Andrea Barrett, Susan Brison, Richard Ford, and Camille Smith. Whatever shortcomings remain are entirely mine.

  My gratitude, once again, to the wonderful Amanda Urban. And my deep thanks to Jennifer Barth for entering so fully into the lives of my characters, and for helping them to find a place in the world.

  About the Author

  MARGOT LIVESEY is the acclaimed author of the novels Homework, Criminals, The Missing World, Eva Moves the Furniture, and Banishing Verona. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, and she is the recipient of grants from both the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Born in Scotland, she currently lives in the Boston area and is a writer in residence at Emerson College.