The House on Fortune Street

by Margot Livesey

  The waiter came to clear our plates. I was pondering the word “pederast.” From the Greek, I knew, but not the same root as “pedestrian.” And what was the exact meaning, I was wondering, when Davy asked if I remembered the day we’d butchered Mabel.

  “God, that was awful. I still can’t believe that I hit her. I’d never even held a gun before.”

  “It was all in aid of some daft idea, wasn’t it? Some theory about being an ethical carnivore. But when I wanted to put her out of her misery, you behaved as if I were a murderer.”

  “Stupid sentimentality. As you can see”—I nodded after my departed osso bucco—“I still eat meat.” I didn’t want to mention the rest of what I remembered: our wrestling in the mud, his biting my neck. For nearly two weeks afterward I had worn a polo neck at home, but at school, where all was revealed by the regulation white shirt, I was teased mercilessly. Several boys speculated that Christine Patterson was responsible; she must have heard the rumors because she started blushing when we met.

  “That was a hard time for me,” Davy said. “I’d got it into my head that I was in love with you but you seemed oblivious. What I’d have done if you hadn’t been, I’ve no idea. And then, when you shot Mabel, Dad was furious. He even called the police.”

  “The police? About Mabel?” Both the fact itself, and that I hadn’t known, were startling.

  Davy nodded. “I had to tell him it was partly my fault to stop him from pressing charges.”

  Which was true, I thought, but didn’t say. After he bit me, Davy had staggered to his feet and grabbed the gun. I didn’t see what happened next—he was between me and Mabel—but I heard a single shot followed by a low piteous grunt. When I got up, Mabel’s snout was in the mud and Davy’s face was wild. “Get out of here,” he cried.

  “But the pigs will eat her.” Since Mabel stopped screaming, the other pigs had begun to gather, slowly moving closer from various parts of the field. There seemed no end to the horrifying possibilities of the day.

  “For God’s sake”—Davy lunged toward me—“go away.”

  Now, more than a decade later, I once again apologized. “I’m sorry. I was an idiot. I didn’t know about your father and the police.”

  “How could you? Mabel made delicious bacon. So have you managed to kill anything else?”

  He spoke lightly, with no thought that I might answer yes, and I managed to respond in the same vein. “Nothing edible. The odd mouse, a few wasps. Does your dad know you’re a poofter?”

  “Yes and no. He knows I’m not ‘normal,’ but I haven’t shoved it in his face. It’s hard for both of us. I’m not the son he wants, and sometimes I can’t help wishing I were. My sister’s been great about it. What about you?”

  “Me?”

  “What do you do for sex?” He sat back, watching me, widening his eyes, a parody of flirtation that was also, in its way, a flirtation.

  Just for a moment I imagined telling him that I felt like he used to do—that no acceptable way of life matched my feelings—but the moment passed. Instead I told him about Fiona and that we were planning to get married. “I think you’ll like her,” I said, which turned out to be true.

  SOON AFTER THE WEDDING I MOVED TO A DIFFERENT LABORATORY and Fiona began to assist a man who painted murals in restaurants and shops. In our new flat she had done a mural on the dining room wall, a picture of our first picnic, with bears and lions and monkeys in attendance. Her friend Philip, over for dinner, saw it and one thing led to another. There was a surprising amount of such work around, and she had a gift for luminous skies and cuddly animals.

  Our lives settled into a pleasant routine. We took turns cooking, went out on weekends. Most Thursdays after work we went round to Sheila and Giles’s for supper. Often I came straight from the laboratory and Sheila and I had an hour with the children before the others arrived. It became understood that I would help Annabel with her arithmetic homework and with anything vaguely scientific: a project on hedgehogs, where snow came from, why Rufus, the family dog, had such a long tongue. She was a willful, deeply curious girl who could ask questions for hours. It took me a while to realize that, beneath her voluble exterior, she took everything to heart. One evening I described how there had once been wolves and bears walking down her street but they had all been hunted to extinction. Two days later Sheila phoned to say that Annabel was having nightmares about Rufus being killed.

  As I sat at the kitchen table, coaxing Annabel through her sums or identifying the different kinds of clouds, Sheila would come and go. I could almost hear the thought running through her head: what a good father he’ll make. And mostly, I admit, I basked in her approval. So when Fiona got pregnant I didn’t have a leg to stand on. I did remind her that we’d agreed to wait a few years, but she brushed my doubts aside. “We’ll manage,” she said. “I can always go back to work in an office.” Our daughter, Dara, was born when I was thirty, Fiona was twenty-six, and Annabel was nearly eleven.

  At first we continued our Thursday evenings with Sheila and Giles; Dara was an easygoing baby and could sleep anywhere. But as she grew bigger and Sheila and Giles busier, running their children to music lessons and the houses of friends, our get-togethers grew less frequent. Within six months I had lost my particular closeness with Annabel. She no longer ran to meet me, dragged me off to her bedroom to see her hamster’s new trick. I began to find excuses not to visit. When Dara was three, I was offered a job in Edinburgh and, after lengthy discussions with Fiona about the virtues of living in Scotland, closer to her parents and mine, accepted.

  AT THE TIME WE MOVED NORTH, MY PARENTS WERE IN THEIR LATE fifties and both, seemingly, in good health. They had grown up on the same street in Inverness and married in 1939, the week before my father enlisted in the engineering corps. He had spent the war safely in England. My mother often described the time she had visited him at a base near Manchester. After supper he had proposed a walk up a nearby hill. “I thought we were looking for privacy,” she would say with a coy smile. But as they reached the top, a plane approached. Before she could run for cover my father said, “Watch this.” A column of light sprang up from the base and fastened on the plane; no matter how the pilot looped and banked, the light never lost it. What they were watching, my father explained proudly, was a system called radar.

  He was away for most of the war, but evidence of his visits home exists in the form of first my birth and two years later that of my brother. Even in his pram Lionel was on better terms with life than I was. When my mother took us shopping, people exclaimed over his curly hair and his broad smiles. I have no memory of being jealous. I too was under his spell, and I remember being happy not to have so much of my mother’s attention; I liked being able to play my games unobserved. When my father finally came home from the war, he got a job in a brewery and we moved a hundred miles south to the town of Perth.

  Now I can imagine that this must have been hard for my mother, leaving her parents and friends, but people didn’t think like that then: you just got on with it, a job was a job. As for me, I was still too young to care. I started school, I learned to read and count, I played with my friends. When I came home there was Lionel, eager to do almost anything I wanted, though he got fed up if I made him the prisoner in our games too often. We lived in a council flat until I was ten and then moved into a modest house with a garden where my father grew vegetables and the red roses my mother loved.

  When I was sixteen and Lionel was fourteen he made the school rugby team. It was an honor for a boy of his age, but my parents weren’t pleased; they worried that the practices would interfere with his homework. For as long as I could remember they had made clear that there was no question of either of us leaving school at fifteen. We would go to university, we would have the advantages they’d fought for and missed. Lionel kept assuring them that he could do both; the exercise cleared his head and helped him to study. In the autumn the team played a match every Saturday afternoon, either at home or away. None of us e
ver went to see him play.

  On Saturday, 16 November 1957, he announced to us at lunch that he’d been moved to the forwards for that afternoon. “It should be a good game,” he said.

  My mother said she was baking. My father needed to plant the winter vegetables. It was a bright autumn day, cold but not bitter, and there was a wistful note in Lionel’s voice. “I’ll come,” I said.

  When I cycled over to the playing fields an hour later, I found maybe three dozen spectators, mostly men in anoraks and younger brothers, straggling along the edge of the pitch, watching the teams warm up. Lionel spotted me and waved. He was number 16. After a few more minutes of milling around the game started and the players began to run up and down, following the ball and followed by our gym teacher acting as referee and blowing his whistle. Soon Lionel’s cheeks were red and his legs were streaked with mud. I was standing next to the father of one of his teammates, number 10, and he took it upon himself to explain the game—scrums, penalties, etc.—breaking off periodically to shout encouragement. His enthusiasm was contagious and I echoed his shouts. Lionel was three inches shorter and probably twenty pounds lighter than the other forwards but he was bold and nimble; several times he got hold of the ball and nearly scored.

  “For a wee lad,” said my neighbor, “your brother’s not bad.”

  With fifteen minutes to go, Lionel’s team was two up when the referee called a scrum. Ten or twelve players, including Lionel, put their heads down and began to shove back and forth, slipping and sliding on the wet grass. The referee threw the ball into the middle and blew his whistle. The man beside me cheered; so did I. Presently the ball emerged and the knot of players separated, leaving a figure lying on the ground.

  “Is that not your brother?” said the man.

  I wasn’t worried; several times in the game Lionel had tripped or fallen. It was only when the referee bent down and immediately jumped up, blowing his whistle repeatedly, that I began to run.

  He was still alive when I reached him. I put my hand on his back and felt his faltering breath. The referee yelled at me not to move him. But he was facedown in the dirty grass. “He can’t breathe,” I said. I put my hands on either side of his head, over his ears, and carefully raised his face an inch above the ground. “Lionel,” I said. “Lionel.”

  They let me ride with him in the ambulance to the hospital where one of the doctors phoned my parents to say that Lionel had broken his neck. The funeral was held four days later. That night, at supper, I said that I’d return Lionel’s library books. I had barely uttered his name when my father raised his hand for silence. In the months that followed, Davy’s farm became my refuge. Gradually I learned to act as if I didn’t have a brother.

  FOR SEVERAL YEARS AFTER WE MOVED NORTH I WAS HOPEFUL THAT what I had experienced with Annabel was an isolated occurrence. I had glimpsed some dark, aberrant corner of myself, but there was no need to spend more time there. We don’t have to be defined by our worst impulses. Almost at once coming to Edinburgh seemed like a good decision. We had a four-bedroom house on a quiet street near the university. My job was tolerable; my coworkers pleasant. And Fergus, who was born a few months after we arrived, was, like his sister, a good-tempered baby. Fiona took care of the children and gradually began to find work painting murals, not as much as in London, but enough to keep her busy. We had a circle of friends, couples whom Fiona met through the nursery school, or at the park. Periodically I ran into an old school friend; none stuck, except for Davy.

  One unexpected bonus of our move was that we saw more, rather than less, of him. His parents were still on the farm but increasingly frail, and his visits grew more frequent and often included a stop in Edinburgh. Eight months after Fergus was born, he came to stay the night. He arrived in a taxi, as usual bearing gifts: flowers for Fiona, a set of crayons and a sketch pad for Dara. She lay drawing on the living room floor while we had a drink before dinner. Davy, who had last seen Fergus when he was a few weeks old, bounced him on his knee in a way that made him gurgle and hum.

  “That’s my boy,” said Davy and, turning to me, added, “He looks a little like Lionel.”

  “Who’s Lionel?” said Fiona.

  Quickly, before Davy could respond, I answered. “My younger brother. He died when he was fourteen, in a rugby game.”

  “I thought you were an only child,” she said.

  “Oh, he’s smiling,” Davy exclaimed, hoisting Fergus higher. Tactfully he embarked on a story about one of his fellow passengers on the train.

  In bed that night I tried to explain to Fiona. “I wasn’t keeping it secret,” I said. “It’s something we never, ever talked about, my parents and me. If we’d mentioned that there used to be a fourth person in our house, we’d have had to admit that he was dead.” I pulled the duvet higher. “As long as I was alive,” I added, “I was like everyone else.”

  “As long as he was alive,” Fiona corrected gently. “I’m so, so sorry. I don’t know what I’d do if I lost Leslie.” It was then that she told me she had fallen in love with me that afternoon in the park when she had seen me walking, hand in hand, with Annabel.

  While she drifted off to sleep, I lay beside her, wondering about my slip. Did I think I had died with Lionel? Absolutely not. Already I was more than twice his age, had spent more years without him than with him, had seen and done so many things he had never had the chance to experience. But since I met Annabel, and even before that in some dim way, I had been negotiating between two contradictory theories: on the one hand that if Lionel had lived I would have been like everyone else; on the other that he had died to avoid the shame of knowing my true nature. Several times recently I had caught myself thinking that Fergus resembled Lionel. Now Davy’s comment seemed to signal that my secret hope was true: my children, Dara and Fergus, would save me.

  WE HAD BEEN LIVING IN EDINBURGH FOR ALMOST THREE YEARS when my father died of a heart attack. We had seen him only the week before when he came through to the city for a reunion of his engineering corps and insisted on tidying up our garden. “I’ll just get rid of these dandelions,” he had said.

  Now when my mother phoned to break the news, I kept saying, “What do you mean dead?” He had no history of heart problems and had spent his last day in typically vigorous fashion: washing the car, doing the shopping, and, in the afternoon, going down to the bowling club. At the funeral his friend Hamish told me that he had had his fourth-highest score ever. He collapsed while returning his ball to the rack. I hope it was like the optimists claim—white light, a kindly figure waiting, arms outstretched—though I know that he himself, a firm agnostic, would have been surprised by such a welcome.

  From then on I tried to visit my mother most weeks, with or without Fiona and the children. The first sign of her unraveling came a few months later when she served us tea in cups and saucers that didn’t match. The following week I went to get a glass for Dara’s juice and found a bag of onions in the cupboard. After we moved to Perth, my mother had seldom seen her own mother or her formidable aunts, but she lived her life as if they might drop in at any moment to run a finger along the tops of the picture frames or peer into her cutlery drawer. Once she even told me that a tidy cupboard was a sign of a tidy mind. Now the sugar bowl was in with the glasses, a tin of soup on top of the plates.

  The neighbors began to meet her in the streets at odd hours. She always seemed so purposeful that at first they didn’t give these encounters another thought, but soon everyone realized that she had no purpose, or at least none that could be articulated. When they looked out of their windows and spotted her hurrying down the pavement, heedless of rain or cold, they would head out to engage her in conversation and lead her home. The phone calls started. Her neighbor Agnes, who worked as a receptionist for a dentist, twice retrieved her from the bus station. But her most common destinations were our old flat, where we had lived until Lionel was eight, and the primary school where she had met Lionel and me every afternoon for six years.

&nb
sp; In spite of all this I was slow to understand that she was not herself. When we visited we still arrived to find the table set for tea with freshly baked scones; she admired Dara’s drawings and played with Fergus’s cars. There seemed to be no connection between her sensible scone-making self and her disheveled, wandering self. Then one night when I was brushing my teeth the police rang. She had been picked up loitering on a bridge across the River Tay. “I was admiring the moonlight on the water,” she claimed when I collected her from the station at midnight.

  After this incident I had a long talk with Agnes, who insisted that all my mother needed was a wee holiday. “Couldn’t you say you need help with the children,” she urged, “so that she’d feel she was doing you a favor?”

  My mother agreed to come and stay for a couple of months and, for the first few weeks, everything was remarkably pleasant. She walked Dara to school, she minded Fergus, she cooked and cleaned. Fiona and I no longer had to juggle our schedules. When we arrived home, the house was tidy, supper was in the oven, and the children were playing happily. Fiona got on well with my mother—they shared a sly sense of the ridiculous—and she was pleased that the children would know at least one grandparent; her own parents in Lancashire were too frail to travel. She took on more work, and we even went to the cinema a couple of times. Then one afternoon she came home to find Fergus alone, red-faced and screaming, rattling the front door. Dara, fortunately, was at a friend’s house.

  “I could hear him from the bottom of the street,” Fiona said.

  He was still whimpering half an hour later when I got home and started the search for my mother. Had she been in some kind of accident, hit by a car as she returned from a quick trip to the local shops? I called the police in Edinburgh and Perth; I called the hospitals. Then I set out to drive the nearby streets in ever widening circles, pausing whenever I spotted a woman of similar age and gait. After a couple of fruitless hours, I returned home to find that Agnes had phoned; my mother had shown up at the house and begun cleaning. By the time I reached Perth it was dusk and she was standing in the garden, polishing the windows.