The House on Fortune Street

by Margot Livesey

  “Cameron,” she said, “what are you doing here? Would you like a cup of tea?”

  Inside she put away her duster and filled the kettle. As it came to the boil, she commented that the swallows were back; it was time to plant the peas. But when she went to the fridge, her face crumpled. “There’s no milk,” she exclaimed.

  “You’ve been staying with us, in Edinburgh. Don’t you remember?”

  “We’ll have to have condensed.”

  Tea with condensed milk had been a Sunday treat in childhood. Now, as I sat there in the chilly kitchen drinking the hot, sweet liquid, I remembered how Lionel and I had used to beg my mother for “special tea” and how slowly we had sipped the milky beverage, trying to make it last. When I drove home an hour later, I still had no answer as to why she had abandoned Fergus.

  This incident revealed a side of Fiona previously hidden. One aspect of her optimism had always been a readiness to forgive—everyone was just about to behave better—but now she was adamant: under no circumstances could my mother darken our door again. “I don’t care if she’s confused. No one leaves a four-year-old alone.”

  The children were in bed and we were in the kitchen, making supper. I was peeling carrots and she was rinsing a sieve in which she had washed lentils. “It makes me think,” she went on, shaking the sieve fiercely, “that there’s something wrong with her. I don’t mean physically, I mean morally.”

  I slid the peeler, very carefully, the length of the carrot. “Did you turn on the oven?” I asked.

  AFTER SEVERAL CONVERSATIONS WITH AGNES, AND A CONSULTATION with my mother’s doctor, I took an emergency leave from work and moved in with my mother until other arrangements could be made. Since going to university, I had barely spent a night beneath my parents’ roof. Now, except for my father’s absence, it was as if I had never left. I slept in the same narrow bed in my old room; I would not have been surprised to wake to find my school uniform lying on the chair. When I came downstairs in the morning, my mother had the table set for breakfast: cereal, toast, and marmalade, Nescafé. We read the newspaper and chatted while we ate. Afterward she went shopping. She seemed so much her old self that it did not occur to me to go with her.

  While she was out I worked steadily on getting the house ready to sell. I began in my room, where the cupboard was filled with schoolboy clothes and the bookcase still held the books I had owned between the ages of ten and eighteen. The former I piled unceremoniously in the hall to go to the charity shop. The latter I started to go through, searching for evidence of my younger self. Who had I been before I became a husband and father? I leafed through Swallows and Amazons and set it aside for Dara, pondered a book about Byzantium. On the second or third morning I picked up Alice in Wonderland and read the opening chapter where Alice falls down the rabbit hole and drinks the potion—labeled “Drink Me”—which makes her ten inches high, then eats the cake which makes her grow again.

  I was about to add the book to Dara’s collection when a photograph at the back caught my eye; I found myself looking at an intensely composed little girl with a bold, innocent gaze and bare feet. The photograph accompanied an essay about Charles Dodgson, and the caption explained that this was Alice Liddell, for whom the story was first told and later written down. Glancing through the pages I discovered half a dozen other little girls, staring at the camera or acting out some scene, but never smiling. I turned to the beginning of the essay.

  The main facts of Dodgson’s life were unexceptionally Victorian. He was born in 1832, the third of eleven children, the son of a stern minister father and a gentle mother. He grew up entertaining his brothers and sisters with games, plays, and poems. He built a model railway in the garden and wrote an opera making fun of Bradshaw’s railway guide. At the age of sixteen, he went to Christchurch College in Oxford, where he became a don in mathematics and never left. In the midst of his lectures and social duties he assiduously, and quite publicly, cultivated his many friendships with children and especially with young girls.

  The winter after I met Annabel I had purchased and read Lolita. Never, even for a page, did I identify with Humbert, and if Annabel had demonstrated a mere fraction of Lolita’s precocity I would have stopped my visits immediately. Like every parent, I was filled with disgust and fear by the news stories of kidnappings and child abuse. But now, as I read about Dodgson and his passionate relationships—relationships that seemed to have no destination other than the giving and receiving of playful, rapt attention—I recognized myself. I put the book beside my bed to reread later.

  IN THE AFTERNOONS, AFTER A MODEST LUNCH, MY MOTHER AND I usually again went our separate ways. I took walks up Kinnoul Hill, or along the river. Meanwhile she visited her neighbors or, following my example, continued what she thought of as spring cleaning. Her cupboards were again immaculate, and we took more than a dozen loads to the charity shop. A couple of times I caught myself thinking that if I moved back home, she would be fine; she was only fifty-nine. She might have twenty more good years, even remarry. And I would become like Mr. Stevenson, an odd duck who took care of my mum.

  Although I had lived in Perth for my entire childhood, the places I walked were mostly new to me. I took my camera on these expeditions and amused myself by photographing the landscape. One day by the river I came across three girls; they must have been a little older than Dara, maybe nine or ten. The tallest of them had taken off her shoes and jeans and was wading out into the water in her underwear. Her dark hair was flying in the wind and her skin was winter white. The other two girls—one had similar coloring, the other was fair—were urging her on. In their absorption none of them noticed my approach. Before I knew what I was doing I had raised my camera and taken several photographs. Only then did I call out, “Hello. Can I help?”

  For reasons that were not clear the smallest girl’s shoes were in the water. I took off my own shoes, rolled up my jeans, and plunged in. When I returned to the bank, bearing the sodden shoes, the girls crowded around, thanking me. I asked if I could take their picture, and obediently they lined up with their arms around each other. The younger two offered toothy smiles but the oldest gazed at me with a sullen intensity worthy of one of Dodgson’s subjects.

  I HAD BEEN STAYING WITH MY MOTHER FOR NEARLY THREE WEEKS when the doctor rang to say they had secured a place for her in a nursing home that had facilities for coping with her condition. To my relief he suggested that I bring her in so that we could tell her together. At lunchtime, as we ate our scotch broth, I explained that we had to go to the doctor’s that afternoon.

  “Why?” she asked. “Are you ill?”

  Since that first evening, when I had found her cleaning the windows in the garden, neither of us had mentioned the events that had brought me home. Now I said, “Mum, do you remember you were staying with us in Edinburgh?”

  “Would you like some more soup?” She was blinking rapidly.

  “You came to stay with us because you couldn’t manage here on your own. The neighbors kept finding you wandering in the streets.”

  She blew on her broth and took another mouthful.

  “The day you left Edinburgh,” I persisted, “you were meant to be watching Fergus. You left him all alone.”

  She stood up abruptly. “I forgot the salt,” she said.

  The doctor was no older than I was, but he was more accustomed to breaking this kind of news, or at least trying to. Finally, even he was defeated by my mother’s claims that she was fine; what was all this nonsense about moving into a home? He sent her out to wait with his nurse.

  “Does she understand anything?” I said.

  “Who can say? Terrible events are happening. Why would she want to acknowledge them?”

  “She’s only fifty-nine,” I said. “Mightn’t she get better?”

  The doctor tapped his pen. “You’re a scientist, aren’t you, Mr. MacLeod? Let me be frank. Alzheimer’s is destroying her brain; there is no cure. She’s probably had it for a while and the shock o
f losing your father, their routines together, made it worse.”

  “But a lot of the time she is fine. I worry at the home they’ll make her into an invalid.” I remembered how the Victorians had insisted on being buried with a bell in their coffins so that if they woke up, they could ring for help. What if my mother rang and there was no one to hear?

  The doctor stopped his tapping and looked me full in the face. “In an ideal world,” he said, “your mother would be cared for by kind, thoughtful people who had known her before she was ill.”

  He paused, and I knew he was giving me the chance to say she could live with me. I pictured Fiona shaking the sieve and studied my dusty shoes. The doctor went on in brisker tones that the nurses would do their best and of course I would visit. Then he stood up and shook my hand. He was used to family members trying to make him feel bad about the things they ought to feel bad about themselves.

  ON OUR LAST DAY IN THE HOUSE I FETCHED MY CAMERA AND, IN spite of my mother’s mild protests, insisted on photographing her in her armchair, at the kitchen table, in the garden; I even took a shot of her sitting on the edge of the double bed she had shared with my father. I had taken photographs of her before, snapshots of her with my father and the children, and she had always proved disastrously self-conscious. Now, after her initial demurral, she seemed to forget about the camera. Even as I took the elegiac pictures, I knew they would be among my best.

  That evening she made what had been my father’s favorite meal: lamb chops with mint sauce, potatoes, and peas, followed by rhubarb crumble. I laid the table with proper napkins and the good cruet. Tomorrow at this time, I thought, she would be in a home and I would have my own life back; tomorrow this life would be gone. When we sat down to eat, I was suddenly choked with emotion, but she was in excellent spirits; the lamb had turned out well. As we ate she chatted about how the butcher had lost his lease.

  “He and his wife are planning to move to Glasgow to be near their daughter. I thought I saw Lionel today outside the post office.”

  She held out the jug of mint sauce. I took it. To my knowledge she had not spoken his name in twenty years.

  “I know he’s dead,” she went on, “but I’m always pleased when he visits me around the town. Your father used to say the same thing.”

  So that was why she had taken to wandering the streets. “Does he come here?” I said. “To this house?”

  “Not yet.” She looked over at the chair where Lionel had used to sit.

  “Do you ever see him?”

  “No.” I felt a pang of envy, like a stitch in my side.

  “Maybe it’s because you were there that day? You saw him then so you don’t need to see him now.”

  “It’s the other way round,” I said. “I need him more because I was there.” But, even as I argued, her suggestion made sense. That awful final image of Lionel, facedown in the grass, made it impossible for him to come to me.

  “Well, he looks good,” my mother said. “You know what a bright smile he has.”

  She cleared the plates and, when she returned with the crumble, broached a new topic. “Don’t take this amiss, Cameron,” she said, “but I worry about you. I know you have a lovely family, a good job, a nice home; still I worry there’s something wrong. You often seem a little sad.”

  I looked at her high, unlined forehead, her eyes calm and kind behind her glasses. I could tell her, I thought, about that afternoon with Annabel. What safer confidante than someone who is losing her mind? If she said anything, people would just think she was mad. But I had no words. I was not a pederast, or a pedophile, or a child molester, but I was something close enough to dread the taint of those terms. “I’m a bit fed up at work,” I said. “This crumble is lovely.”

  “It’s a good year for the rhubarb,” she said, and began to talk about her plans to make jam.

  IN SPITE OF THE DOCTOR’S DIAGNOSIS, FIONA CONTINUED TO HOLD A grudge against my mother, and some of that spilled over onto me. It was our first major disagreement. Fergus could have been seriously hurt and she blamed me for being too forgiving. The fact that he wasn’t, and that my mother was ill, seemed to make no difference. Finally we agreed not to discuss the matter, but not before I had glimpsed in her a steeliness that seemed utterly alien to the girl I had met folding origami cranes.

  Dara at this time was, as far as I could judge, an average eight-year-old; she liked gym and running around and her schoolwork was good. She enjoyed spelling and arithmetic, things with right and wrong answers, but her best subject was art. Fiona worked on the preliminary sketches for her murals at home and, maybe from being around her, Dara had an unusual capacity for concentration; she could work on a single picture for an hour. In addition she had two traits that I envied: kindness and emotional transparency. If anyone in the family was ill, Dara would offer juice, handkerchiefs, books, hot water bottles. She would put her small hand on your forehead and say please get well. She was also quite without guile, and found mendacity bewildering. Fiona claimed that she was too volatile, but I was glad that my daughter was, as they say, in touch with her feelings. So often my own emotions were hidden not only from other people, but from myself. Or perhaps it was the other way round: I was hiding from them.

  Dara had a gang of friends—Elspeth, Megan, Kim, Suzanne, Lucy, Evelyn—and they were constantly in and out of one another’s houses: playing games, putting on shows, roller-skating in the park, swimming at the leisure center. As a parent, I did my share of chauffeuring and running after balls, helping with zips and shoelaces, pouring juice and making meals. I learned to remember who couldn’t eat nuts and whose mother got upset if she stayed too long in the pool. Once again I heard the women murmuring approval.

  But something had shaken loose. Since Fiona learned of Lionel’s existence, since my father’s death, my mother’s illness, my encounter with Dodgson’s photographs, I felt increasingly as if I were walking a tightrope: balancing between my good behavior and those occasional moments when I was aware of something else, persistent and persuasive, trying to get my attention. One of the girls would smile or bite her lip or gaze out from behind her hair and I would have to restrain myself, not from doing anything but from thinking, thinking, thinking. I started to second-guess my actions. Should I pick up Elspeth when she fell off her bike? Should I brush Lucy’s hair back into a ponytail so it wouldn’t keep getting in her way? Should I zip up Kim’s jacket? Each time I did the proper, parental thing, but my feelings didn’t always match. I comforted myself that there was an end in sight. In a few years I would be safe. Fergus’s friends were mostly boys.

  On Wednesday, 9 July 1980, at around three P.M., I walked home from work beneath cloudy skies and discovered a moving van in our street. A woman of about my age was watching four men struggle with an upright piano. I stopped and introduced myself.

  “Iris Bailey,” she said, offering her hand. She had thick, curly brown hair down to her shoulders and a warm, direct smile. “My daughters and I are moving into number eight.”

  I asked how old they were, and when she said nine and fifteen, told her that Dara had just turned nine. “If there’s anything you need,” I added, “we’re at number twelve.”

  Over supper Fiona and I discussed our new neighbor. She too had run into Iris on the way home. “Did she mention a Mr. Bailey?” she asked.

  “Not in our two minutes. She was worrying about the piano. She said she had two girls, the younger the same age as Dara. How’s the bank going?”

  A Victorian bank was being turned into a restaurant, and Fiona and her assistant were painting the ceiling with scenes from Robert Burns’s poem “Tam O’Shanter.” We had taken turns reading the poem aloud to each other and enjoyed the tale of Tam’s drunken ride home, pursued by witches and warlocks. Not only was this Fiona’s most ambitious project to date but it was also her last for the foreseeable future. That spring, after volunteering at Dara’s school for months, she had decided she wanted to be a teacher; she would be starting her traini
ng course in August.

  “I was working on the horse today,” she said. “Tam’s stout gray mare. I’m still learning how to paint stuff that high up so that it’ll look okay from below.”

  “I’m sure it’ll look fine,” I said. “Anyway most of the clientele will be following Tam’s example and getting smashed.”

  “Are you suggesting that people need to be drunk to appreciate my painting?” she said, but she was smiling. Then, to my surprise, she added that I’d seemed in low spirits recently. I used the excuse I’d given my mother: I was having a hard time at work. “Twice in the last month I’ve nearly made a serious mistake.”

  “Is there something else you’d like to do?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t have any particular talents. I make good minestrone soup. I like going for walks, playing with Dara and Fergus, pottering in the garden. Nothing I like doing would earn me tuppence ha’penny.”

  “What about photography?” She gestured to the wall behind me, where I’d hung some of my pictures. “People are always asking who did these. Maybe you could photograph children? Even if the parents didn’t pay there’d be the pleasure of using your talents.”

  She gazed at me earnestly. “I’m glad we’re talking about this,” she said. “Sometimes with all the coming and going we forget to talk about ourselves. I want you to be happy. You’ve been so supportive of my work even when I was spending more on paint than I was getting paid. In a couple of years I should have a regular salary, even if it’s not a very large one.”