The House on Fortune Street

by Margot Livesey

  “You don’t understand. I can’t live without him.”

  “Of course you can.” She knew she oughtn’t to scold but she couldn’t bear such hyperbole. People couldn’t live without food and air and shelter and money. Romantic love was an extra, nice if it came along, but definitely superfluous to the main requirements of existence. Trying to be more tactful, she added that perhaps Kevin hadn’t meant it. But Dara had disappeared again into a storm of weeping. She was coughing and gasping for breath, and nothing Abigail said seemed to reach her. At last, at her wits’ end, Abigail recalled what Dara had said the students at the counseling center were told to do in emergencies. She got dressed, went out into the hall, and phoned the porter.

  “Stay right there,” he said. “I’ll have someone with you in five minutes to take her to the medical center.”

  She went to Dara’s room and hastily chose a jacket and a pair of shoes. In her own room Dara was still lying on the bed, moaning. She managed to get the shoes on and wrapped her in the jacket. Then the porter appeared and together they maneuvered Dara into the lift, and out to the waiting car. At the center while Dara wept, Abigail told the doctor what had happened. “She won’t stop crying. I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “You did just the right thing,” said the doctor. With his crumpled shirt and bitten nails he looked disturbingly like a student. “Has she taken anything?”

  “Taken anything?’

  “You know, pills, booze.”

  “No, of course not,” said Abigail, appalled.

  “Do me a favor,” he said. “When you go back to her room, have a look. Phone me if you find any empty bottles.”

  Walking back to the hall of residence, Abigail was torn between fury and worry. How could Kevin have done this? Didn’t he know Dara was fragile? And how could Dara be so fragile when Fiona and Alastair were always there? Love was about the people who loved you, which in Abigail’s world meant only her grandparents and Dara. Men were strictly for pleasure and for experimenting with versions of the self. What had made Dara give such a large piece of herself into Kevin’s careless hands? I never want to feel this way, thought Abigail.

  She let herself into Dara’s room and checked the wastepaper basket and the desk. In the former were tissues and an empty coffee cup. On the latter was a crumpled piece of paper: Kevin’s last words. She picked it up, suddenly hopeful. Perhaps this was merely a lovers’ quarrel; she could phone him, get him to phone Dara. But as she read his feeble sentences, any fantasy of reconciliation fled. Dara was wonderful; he’d always think of her as a friend but this was the real thing. Liza worked at the House of Commons, she’d grown up in London and shared his politics and his ambitions. I hope you find someone who suits you as well, he concluded. You deserve it.

  She nearly tore the letter to shreds but it was not hers to destroy. She returned it to the envelope and slipped it into Dara’s copy of Mrs. Dalloway.

  THE NEXT DAY AT THE MEDICAL CENTER SHE FOUND DARA LYING in bed, her face no longer red but rather pale. Her eyes were closed and, standing in the doorway, Abigail noticed, as she had the first day they spoke, the delicate crease of Dara’s lower eyelids, which was part of what made her appreciation of the world seem so wholehearted. She stepped forward and Dara opened her eyes. “Thank you for coming,” she said.

  “How are you?” Hesitantly she sat on the edge of the bed and studied her friend. Overnight the color of Dara’s eyes had darkened and against the pillow her matted hair showed no hint of the reddish highlights that, Abigail had once observed, made her look like Mary, Queen of Scots, in the famous portrait.

  Dara shook her head. “I keep thinking about last summer, how we’d race home to be with each other and talk about our plans. When I graduated we were going to work for a year, travel for a year, then Kevin would go into politics and we’d have a baby. We both liked the name Emma. It’s as if all that meant nothing.”

  A baby, thought Abigail in bewilderment. She began to say that Kevin was a rat, but Dara’s lips quivered. “I brought you some books,” she said hastily. “Ms. Wilson gave a terrific lecture today on Whitman and Ginsberg.”

  “I need to ask you a favor. Please don’t tell Mum. She’d just worry and it wouldn’t help anything.”

  “I won’t,” said Abigail, startled to realize that it hadn’t occurred to her to tell Fiona. Despite all the time she’d spent in Dara’s company, she still hadn’t mastered the ways normal people behaved. “Promise, though, that you’ll try to get better. Think of what you tell your clients: remember the people who do love you, the small things you enjoy. Remember how you rescued me that first Christmas. And that boy you helped to pass his exams last term? He’d have failed without you. And”–she was groping, trying to summon memories that wouldn’t upset Dara—“that day we climbed Arthur’s Seat with Fiona.”

  Dara gave the faintest of nods.

  THE FOLLOWING DAY SHE RETURNED TO HER ROOM AND STARTED going to classes again. Abigail tried to make sure she was home every evening; they studied, as they had when they first met, with their doors ajar. If she went out she persuaded Dara to come along. Neither of them mentioned Kevin.

  A fortnight after the letter, Dara worked a shift at the counseling center. That evening, she told Abigail that her own despair had helped her to understand that of other people. “It doesn’t matter how stupid the reasons are, if you’re in the grip of a feeling it isn’t stupid. You can’t imagine it will ever change.” The only thing that did help, she went on, was not being alone. “If you hadn’t been here that night, I don’t know what I’d have done.”

  A year ago, even six months, this acknowledgment of their intimacy would have made Abigail happy. Now she said, “What about your family? Your friends? Your work?”

  “Everything was hidden by his letter.”

  “The doctor asked me if you’d taken pills.” She felt embarrassed by the revelation but Dara seemed unmoved.

  “We’re taught to ask that at the first appropriate occasion,” she said.

  “You need to know if you’re dealing with a medical emergency as well as a psychiatric one.” She did not, as Abigail had hoped, say that she would never do such a thing.

  Later, when she was sure Dara was asleep, Abigail paced back and forth in her small room. For months, while Dara doted on Kevin, she had felt herself being relegated to a smaller and smaller place in her friend’s thoughts, and that feeling had led her to do what would once have been unimaginable: without telling Dara, she had applied to study drama at several universities, including Yale University in America. Now Kevin was gone and Dara needed her again. But for how long? As soon as another man came along, she would be shoved aside. Yet if she hadn’t met Dara in the laundry room she would probably have had to leave St. Andrews. Every turn of the room brought a different, contradictory thought.

  A week later, in an overheated tea room, she finally confessed what she’d done. To her surprise Dara said Yale sounded perfect; they would be mad not to give her a scholarship.

  “But what will you do?” said Abigail.

  And then another surprise, another betrayal; Dara announced that the manager at the counseling center had suggested she apply for a course in counseling at Glasgow; she was thinking about it. Abigail was so upset that she finally brought up Christmas.

  “I thought I’d better make my own plans,” she said, “given—” She waved toward the steamy tea room window behind which lurked the unmentionable Kevin, and, unbeknownst to Dara, her even more unmentionable stepfather.

  “I’m sorry,” said Dara, blinking. “I wasn’t paying attention. God, I feel terrible.”

  She went on and on until Abigail had to comfort her and say it was fine; the hotel was paying her well. Later, alone in her room, she tried to reimagine the conversation: Forget the hotel, said Dara. You have to come to Edinburgh. It won’t be any fun without you. But she kept hearing the words Dara had actually said: “I suppose it’s for the best. I need to catch up on all the work I mis
sed.”

  FROM THE MOMENT THE PLANE LANDED AT KENNEDY AIRPORT AND she stepped out into the sultry heat, Abigail was enthralled. Once again she was the outsider, but this time it was for comprehensible, even desirable reasons. People had no idea how different she really was. After three years at Yale, she moved to New York to share a house in Brooklyn with four other aspiring actors. Life in America stretched before her; she was sleeping with several men she liked, she was getting parts, she had a waitressing job where they let her off for auditions. When the postcard came from her father— the doctor says four months, maybe six —she was rehearsing a new play. She sent back a postcard of the Chrysler building: So sorry, hope you feel better soon. But the morning after the play opened she woke to an image of her father, sitting in the stern of a small boat, smiling as the wind filled the sails. Staring up at the cracked ceiling of her shabby room, Abigail knew she couldn’t ignore what was happening three thousand miles away. This was her last chance to get revenge, before the tumor in her father’s brain beat her to it.

  “But I was planning to come over and see you do your stuff on Broadway,” he said when she phoned to announce her visit.

  “I’m not on Broadway, or even off it.”

  After all his wandering, he was living in the seaside town of Whitstable, not far from Chatham, when the headaches started. He had moved there after running into an old friend, an oyster fisherman. The two of them had a scheme for selling bivalves directly to London restaurants. But by the time she arrived in Whitstable, ten days after the phone call, it was clear that her father was no longer going anywhere. For the first time that she could remember, he was preoccupied not with the future but with the past. If she had wondered about getting a second opinion, his detailed account of how his parents left Germany in 1938 would have convinced her that there was no need.

  That her grandparents were Jewish had always struck Abigail as a small oddity, like her grandmother’s hatred of carrots, or her grandfather’s tapping the barometer each time he passed. In every other way, with their tea drinking, their gardening, their churchgoing, they had seemed quintessentially English. But now her sojourn in America had made her more aware of Jewish history. She listened eagerly as her father described their heroic flight from Hamburg. They had walked, ridden in carts, hidden in the coal wagon of a train, and finally crossed the North Sea in a herring boat. Once they were settled in Chatham, his father had returned to Germany to fetch their parents.

  “My earliest memory,” her father said, “is of the night he came back, he and my mother in the kitchen, crying.” His father’s parents had been too frail to travel; they had both died of natural causes in 1940. As for his mother’s parents, that was even sadder. Teachers in a small town, they didn’t think of themselves as Jewish and refused to believe that anyone else would. In 1941 they boarded a train for Belsen.

  “So why didn’t I know any of this?” Abigail said. “I never heard of Hanukkah until I was twenty.”

  “Hanukkah,” her father said dismissively. “When Mama and Papa got off that herring boat all they wanted was to forget this shameful thing that had happened to them, to be like everyone else. That’s why they changed my name, mine and my sister’s, to the most English names they could find: George and Mary. Remember how Mama used to praise your hair and complain if we cut so much as an inch? She believed when the next pogrom came your hair would save us.” He pulled back his lips in the disturbing grimace that was now his smile.

  “You should put that in a play.”

  “I’m not writing a play.” But even as she spoke she was thinking that wasn’t a bad idea. Actors often wrote plays; it would be an occupation for the long days. “Did Mum know about this?”

  “No. She wasn’t interested in the past, her own or anyone else’s. It was one of the things I liked about her. We probably weren’t ideal parents”—he smiled again—“but we did have fun together.”

  “Ideal? You were a nightmare. I never knew where I’d be sleeping, where my next meal was coming from. You haven’t a clue what it was like, being dragged from pillar to post, watching the two of you make a mess of everything.”

  “But look how well you’ve turned out.” He patted his head, as if to quiet the tumor, and shut his eyes.

  He had told her he didn’t sleep anymore but that sometimes it was too much trouble to pay attention. All her efforts to make him acknowledge his wrongdoing foundered on the rocks of his insouciance. At least you got to see the world, he said. Remember the Channel Islands? The beautiful walk down to the sea?

  She remembered the fields of dying daffodils, the empty rooms waiting for guests.

  BUT SHE HAD ALSO FORGOTTEN THINGS, AND ONE WAS HER FATHER’S interest in other people, his enthusiasms on their behalf as well as his own. The nurses, who came daily, urged him not to talk so much. What am I saving myself for, he would say. I hope your mother-in-law liked her birthday cake. Did Eddy pass his French test? He read Abigail’s handful of reviews and was full of questions. Might she make a film soon? Or a commercial? “You’re much prettier than that trollop in the Bacardi ads at the cinema.”

  “It’s awfully hard to get into films. Anyway I’m not sure I’d be any good.”

  “What about one of those long-running serials? Though you have to be careful they don’t put you in a coma or”—he patted his head—“give you one of these.”

  WHEN SHE HAD FIRST ARRIVED FROM NEW YORK, WITH A RETURN ticket for three weeks later, she had had a talk with her father, using words like “tumor” and “terminal.” He had joked, feinted, parried, and tried repeatedly to change the subject. “Okay,” he had said at last. “I’m not in great shape. If I could I’d go to the racetrack and fling myself under the winning horse. Or set sail in a small boat for the Azores. Neither of these being feasible, I’d prefer to stay at home for as long as possible. Hospitals are all about rules and you know how bad I am at rules.”

  “So after leaving me to sink or swim for most of my life you want me to stay and fucking nurse you?”

  “Yes. Stay and swear at me and in six months you’ll feel better and I’ll be dead.” He had spread his hands, as if he were offering her an irresistible bargain.

  Abigail had talked to herself, talked to Dara, argued with her father, and at last, for reasons she couldn’t comprehend, agreed to stay. She took over the living room of his modest ground-floor flat and shopped and cooked and answered the occasional phone calls. Her father was a man with many friends, but the friendships depended on his being out and about. Only the nurses and Yoav, the oyster fisherman, visited. Soon after she arrived, Abigail had phoned her mother. Any thoughts she had had that her mother would rush to her first husband’s bedside, or at least commend her daughter for being there, were at once dispelled.

  “Jesus, Abby, if he’s ill he ought to be in hospital. That’s why we pay taxes.”

  “When did you ever pay taxes?” said Abigail and hung up. That her mother, following the divorce, had turned into the stable, law-abiding person she had long wanted her to be, was another cause for rage. When she told Dara about the conversation, Dara said, “You mustn’t feel bad. Some people are afraid of illness.” She was still in Glasgow, but their relationship, which had dwindled to occasional letters while Abigail was in the States, had revived. They talked on the phone several times a week.

  GRADUALLY, ALMOST WITHOUT NOTICING, SHE STOPPED HOPING that her father would make reparation, or that she would achieve revenge. Once or twice she purposely forgot to buy the newspaper or to get a book he wanted from the library, but he was blithely forgiving—he didn’t need to do the crossword, he could read something else—and her small meannesses gave her no pleasure. He was going to die as he had lived: feckless and unrepentant.

  Her conversations with his sister, Mary, in Vancouver, only served to confirm this. Mary had moved to Canada with her husband at the age of twenty-three and come back twice, for her parents’ funerals. Abigail had a dim memory of a woman in a black dress bending over
her on one of those terrible occasions, the sole person present who seemed to understand that Abigail was speechless with grief. Now, despite her own poor health, Mary phoned often. If George’s eyes were closed, she and Abigail would talk.

  “George never did have a handle on reality,” she said. “Even at primary school he had these schemes. Once he told everyone in his class that if they gave him a penny a week he would provide all the sweets they wanted.”

  “What happened?”

  “He was forced to declare bankruptcy and three of the boys beat him up. Now tell me, do you need money? I can’t get on a plane but I can send a check.”

  Three days later Abigail’s bank account had a balance of five thousand pounds, the most money she’d ever had.

  IN A FUNNY WAY, AS SHE TOLD DARA, NURSING HER FATHER WAS almost like returning to her childhood summers with their quiet routines. She worked on her play, a fictionalized account of her grandparents’ flight from Hamburg. She walked on the pebbly beaches, admiring the seascapes and the brightly colored beach huts. She started fucking one of her father’s nurses, Robert, a large, good-looking man with an abundant supply of marijuana. Occasionally she had a drink with her father’s friend Yoav. He was handsome in a dark, Israeli way, but he wore his shirt open a button too low and was right on the edge of being old.

  It was Yoav who suggested that her grandparents’ household, idyllic for her, had been less so for her father. “I know those immigrants and their sons,” he said. “They were pressing him all the time to excel, and at the same time passing on their suffering. George is a remarkable man. He refused to excel and he kept his suffering to himself.”